Moneyball

PCMR Verdict: A solid, blue-chip Hollywood product, that somehow never quite reaches the sum of its parts.

PCMR Rating: 6.5/10

Police procedurals are a well-trodden path for movie writers, with some of PCMR's favourite movies unashamedly in the genre. The French Connection, Fargo, L.A. Confidential and Zodiac all earn credibility from their portrayal of policemen at work, and all would be seriously diminished without it. But procedural dramas aren't limited to the cops and the detectives, oh my no. Audiences like watching lawyers too, and politicians and the military, especially once they're played by Hollywood actors with craggy faces and zippy lines, or their veneers and their boobs and their sexy uniforms.. (Steady! - Ed)

Aaron Sorkin is a grand-master of the sexy procedural drama, essentially getting under the covers of a profession for a story, populating it with attractive characters, and penning fizzy, dialogue-driven scenes between them, generally involving dense professional discussions loaded with innuendo and doublespeak. 'The West Wing' should need no introduction (sexy politicians), but also on his CV is 'A Few Good Men' (sexy lawyers, sexy military), the ill-fated-but-very-good 'Studio 60' (sexy TV producers) and most recently 'The Social Network' (sexy, er, programmers?).

As Mark Kermode put it in his typically succinct terms, 'The Social Network' was about as entertaining as a movie about a bunch of men in offices arguing about copyright could be. Harsh perhaps, as the Social Network was a very good movie, but Kermode nailed the fact that when he took on 'The Social Network', Sorkin took the procedural drama to precarious places, and wrote a Business Procedural. He came out the other side of that unscathed, but the question with 'Moneyball' is: can Sorkin make the world of baseball interesting and sexy, and resist falling into cliché?

Well, no book is unfilmable, but Moneyball must have been a real challenge, even for Sorkon. Adapted from the Michael Lewis's book, it tells the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics baseball franchise, and how they introduced statistical analysis to baseball in 2002, in order to better evaluate players... and Brad Pitt's in it! (Phew, nearly lost me there! - Ed)

The interest in a story like this lies in the fact that Beane achieved amazing success against the odds on a shoestring, and radically changed the sport he loved in the space of a single season, by taking a big chance on using these statistical techniques pioneered by Yale graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). You don't necessarily need to love baseball - or statistics - to enjoy watching this story unfold, in what is an extremely solid package of a movie.

On the package: director Bennett Miller is formerly responsible for Capote, Stephen Zaillian also worked on the script with Sorkin, and his last gig was American Gangster. Brad Pitt - looking more like Robert Redford every day - is good in the lead, ably supported by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright and Jonah Hill, and the Cinematography is by a certain Wally Pfister. Now this last detail might not seem that important, but let me tell you: this movie looks beautiful, and Pfister takes a lot of the credit for that, just as he did for much of the look of Chris Nolan's Batman movies.

Unfortunately, despite the presence of all these heavyweights, Moneyball never really enters the stratosphere for me. It's entertaining, sure, and the story is great. Pitt is very solid in the lead, and delivers his acres of dialogue capably enough, as we know he can. In particular his scenes with his young daughter, and with the unrecognisable team manager Hoffman, are good, but Jonah Hill was a little wooden for me. The story is the real star, but the movie also looks just amazing, so it is never a chore to watch.

At just over two hours, it's quite long, but the time never really drags. It would be harsh to describe it as 'about as entertaining as a movie about men introducing statistics to baseball can be', but I'm afraid some element of that is true. To its credit, it never lags into lazy sporting cliché, but does suffer from being a little, well, dull.

If you're a fan of baseball, or lived through the story and watched it happen, you'll probably love Moneyball. If on the other hand, like me, you're a fan of sport, or management, you'll probably just like it, maybe even a lot. If this had been a similar story, but set against the backdrop of the football world cup of 2002 for example ('Saipan - The Movie!' Yes! - Ed), I might have been a bit more invested, but it just didn't grab me. Dunphy would say "no, Bill, no, it's a good movie, not a great one."

American Gangster

The verdict: Thoroughly enjoyable. 'Serpico' meets 'Blow', with Ridley Scott directing Denzel as a bad guy. At 150 minutes, perhaps a little long for some, but not for me.

The rating: 7/10

American Gangster... now here's a genre that's been done before. Da Palma's 'Scarface' charted the ultra-violent rise of a disenfranchised immigrant to 1970's American drug overlord with hees leetle friend. Michael Mann's 'Heat' was a cop and robber character study, toying with the audience's desire to root for the good guy. Sidney Lumet's 'Serpico' was also set in the 70's, and focussed just on the cops, with Pacino this time surrounded by corrupt cops, and very definitely the one to root for. However, the gangster genre was arguably defined immutably by Coppola's 'Godfather' trilogy, and rubber-stamped for good measure by Scorcese with 'Goodfellas'. (Jeez, Al Pacino's made some good movies! - Ed)

So where do you go from there? What can even Ridley Scott bring to the table that we haven't already seen before? Well, casting Denzel Washington as the ganster is an excellent start, and pitting Russell Crowe against him as the embattled moral crusader surrounded by dirty cops is another plus, but when the story is based on fact, well, that adds even further to the mystique.

Set in 1970's New York, the drug enforcement agency is riddled with corruption, and heroin is the drug of choice on the streets. The good guys are far from clean, with institutional payoffs the order of the day, from beat cops to judges. Detective Richie Roberts (Crowe) makes a name for himself in the force as a bit of a Serpico when he and his partner turn in a million dollars in drug money, rather than distributing it around 'the guys'. As a result, he becomes a pariah, and is eventually recruited for a special task force to tackle the drug problem, without involving dirty cops.

Meanwhile, Lucas (Washington) is importing heroin directly from Vietnam, and is bringing heroin to the streets of New York that is purer than his competitors and at a lower price. Interestingly, Lucas dissociates himself from the evil that he purveys with the conviction and eloquently persuasive language of the successful businessman. He is giving his customers the product they demand, at higher quality, and at the right price. They don't care who he is, any more than he cares who is in charge of the national dairy board, right?

The inevitable rise of Lucas to crown prince of Harlem is charted alongside Det. Roberts travails to find the man behind this new heroin product spreading like wildfire on American streets, known as 'blue magic'. Lucas proves hard to catch however, as he spurns does the ostentatious pimp stylings of many of his competitors, and leads a relatively austere existence, albeit with more of the trappings of wealth than De Niro's character in Heat, for example.

This involving story trundles along at a nice pace, and we're in the hands of Ridley Scott here for god's sake, so the length of the movie (two and a half hours) wasn't really an issue for me. The only issue I had with 'American Gangster' was the scope. It is attempting to be an expansive epic in the same vein as 'Goodfellas', but is not quite as tight. The twin track of the stories means that two central characters require equal, and separate development for the story to work, and essentially each character story could have been the lead in a movie of his own. Frank Lucas' story would work in the same way as 'Blow', which was a very similar story of a man named George Jung, the guy credited with the rise of Cocaine in New York in the 1970's. Meanwhile, alongside this, as I've said, Roberts' story is similar to that of Pacino's character in 'Serpico'.

Putting all this aside for a moment, 'American Gangster' is a very enjoyable movie in it's own right. Denzel is excellent as the nuanced bad guy, and should definitely experiment a little more with this type of character. Russell Crowe is also in his area of expertise here, as the troubled good guy, and reminded me of how great he was in 'The Insider'. The setting is excellently rendered on screen, and I wouldn't want to have lived in the projects or anything, but 1970's harlem is a great backdrop for a movie like this.

As a footnote, Cuba Gooding Jr. is in this movie, and he doesn't suck! Unbelievable though it may seem, readers, I shit you not!

This streak of originality aside, although American Gangster is a very enjoyable movie, and will be in most critics 'top 10' lists of the year, it's unfortunaely not imbued with enough originality or style of its own to topple any of the existing giants of the genre.