Thrillers

Mind you, Harrelson is one of those actors who frequently upstages his material. His performance as Justin Timberlake’s ferociously gay co-worker is the only thing I can remember about “Friends With Benefits.” In fact, that role deserves special mention in the pantheon of straight actors playing gay, because Harrelson makes no effort to score political points or deliver messages. It’s a Woody Harrelson character, a slouchy, funny, irresistible horndog dude who chases guys rather than girls. When Timberlake’s character awkwardly informs him that he’d be happy to go out drinking but he’s not actually gay, Harrelson shrugs it off with an eager grin: “Means more pipe for me!”

I could go on: “Zombieland,” “Transsiberian,” “North Country,” “She Hate Me” — all movies that have pretty much been erased from my memory, except for the oddly sticky Harrelson moments. “Rampart” is quite a different matter, because Harrelson is in every scene of the film, and indeed almost every shot. Co-written by director Moverman (who also made “The Messenger” with Harrelson) and L.A. noir novelist James Ellroy, this is an ambitious voyage into the heart of darkness, LAPD style, that suggests both Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” and the intense, semi-improvised character studies of John Cassavetes. Some of it’s brilliant and some of it set my teeth on edge, but Harrelson gives a moving, terrifying, titanic performance as the most compelling dirty cop since Denzel Washington in “Training Day.”

If you live in Southern California or have otherwise followed the Los Angeles Police Department’s extensive history of corruption and abuse, you may remember the Rampart scandal of the late ’90s, in which an entire anti-gang squad of 70-some cops was implicated in numerous kinds of misconduct. (Typically, no cops were convicted of anything, and only a handful were fired, but the city wound up paying out more than $125 million in the resulting civil suits.) This movie doesn’t even try to tell that story, but the Rampart Division and the scandal serves as backdrop to the tale of Officer Dave “Date Rape” Brown (Harrelson), an old-school LAPD warrior who enforces a “military occupation” (his term) on the black and brown streets of East L.A.

I won’t explain the origins of Dave’s cop “monicker,” except to say that it isn’t exactly what you’re thinking. (Could be better, could be worse; that’s up to you.) Dave breaks the law every day and doesn’t care, but hews closely to his own private version of the cop code: He’s doing the “people’s dirty work,” and if you’re a bad guy who crosses his path, you had it coming. His home life is a bewildering semi-bohemian mélange involving his current, somewhat estranged wife (Anne Heche), his ex-wife (Cynthia Nixon), who happens to be the first wife’s sister, and two daughters, one of them a righteously pissed-off teen lesbian played by Brie Larson. None of this stops him from randomly hooking up with women in bars, including a steamy liaison with Audra McDonald and an even steamier one with a lying, slutty, drunken lawyer played by Robin Wright. (“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Dave tells her — one, two, three — “in this bar.”)

As you can tell, Moverman has assembled a terrific ensemble (also included are Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Ice Cube and Steve Buscemi), and the intimate, eye-level cinematography of Bobby Bukowski and staccato editing of Jay Rabinowitz create a seductive, threatening atmosphere that pushes right to the edge between realism and total head-trip. But what “Rampart” doesn’t really offer is a story worthy of its tremendous antihero, who almost convinces us of his essential honor, until we notice that he’s actually a sociopath inflicting pain on everyone around him. Dave gets dragged into some kind of murky, sub-”Chinatown” conspiracy, and may be the LAPD brass’ designated fall guy for the entire Rampart snafu, but that’s about all I understand.

But if Dave’s slide into alcohol and drug abuse and worsening criminality seems a bit foreordained, Harrelson remains mind-bendingly magnetic, so much so that you’ll keep rooting for Dave to straighten things out long after that’s become impossible. Harrelson himself, of course, is a noted left-wing activist who would probably despise Dave Brown in real life, but that doesn’t stop him from infusing the guy with unquenchable humanity and his own brand of Sinatra-style doomed dignity. Moverman is an intriguing talent who may yet make a great film; if this isn’t quite it, it’s still a memorable and distinctive showcase for one of our greatest actors.

“Rampart” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, and Feb. 17 in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, with wider release to follow.

Wheatley’s debut feature, “Down Terrace,” was a bizarre, bleak and hilarious blend of genres, starting out as a Mike Leigh-style working-class family drama and ending up as an especially gruesome “Sopranos” episode, transported to the south coast of England. Let me introduce “Kill List,” Wheatley’s highly touted second film, by admitting that I’m infinitesimally disappointed that it’s not as funny as “Down Terrace” (though it definitely has its moments) and also that he’s gone so deep into the tradition of creepazoid British genre movies. (Rather than, you know, making the kind of depressing, no-audience films I like better.) But there’s no disputing the ingenuity and even the brilliance of this mind-bending mashup, which begins as a gritty recession-era marriage drama — the opening scene features a couple arguing about whether they have the money to get the Jacuzzi fixed — and then descends into ominous violence and finally total insanity.

I suppose you could say that the way Wheatley splices incompatible kinds of movies together into one story, like some demented mad scientist, has an Internet-age flavor to it. But that’s not something entirely new, and he actually comes off more as a hardcore fan of British independent and low-budget cinema, who loves the kitchen-sink realism of the ’60s and also loves a bunch of well-known horror movies and thrillers that I’d better not mention right now. Love it or hate it, “Kill List” is a definite widescreen cinematic experience loaded with delicious details, from the hotel clerk who holds a conversation without really listening to the sound of someone getting his brains beaten out against a concrete wall. He’s like a faux-Cockney Quentin Tarantino, passionate about the things he loves and also dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of “taking the piss” — and believe it or not, I mean that as a compliment.

The woman shrieking about the Jacuzzi money in the opening scene is named Shel (MyAnna Buring), the blond-bombshell Swedish wife of Jay (Neil Maskell), an unemployed ex-soldier who’s kicking around their suburban house outside Sheffield, in north central England. Jay at first seems like a hundred other unappealing husbands in British movies of this ilk — he’s a bit of a whiner and a bit of a drinker, he’s put on some weight around the middle, he’s much too hot-tempered and has a laddish London accent that seems halfway affected for a guy who has a Jacuzzi and a garage full of garden chemicals. It takes us a while to figure out that he doesn’t have some vague freelance I.T. gig, as he tells a friend’s visiting girlfriend. He was a private-security Mafioso during the Iraq war and is now a hit man, evidently suffering from the after-effects of a job that went wrong in Kiev a year ago.

Maskell is a well-known presence on British TV, and gives a fearless performance here, in the sense that Jay is the protagonist of “Kill List” and neither the actor, the director nor the screenplay (credited to Wheatley and his partner, Amy Jump, “with contributions by the cast”) ever tries to make him seem even remotely likable. As with “Down Terrace,” how you feel about this is likely to determine whether you can stand this movie or not. As you go deeper into the swirling maelstrom of “Kill List,” you’ll identify more and more with Jay’s struggle to remain afloat amid the bloodshed, madness and general atmosphere of malice. But you’re never going to admire the guy, and you’re always likely to conclude that whatever horrible fate befalls him is one he’s brought upon himself.

After eight months away from the game, Jay and his shaggy Irish partner in crime, Gal (the delicious Michael Smiley, who was also in “Down Terrace”), have received a mysterious commission from a sinister, leathery little man (only identified as The Client, and played by Struan Rodger) who seems to know way too much about what happened in Kiev. From the very beginning, this assignment seems loaded with mysterious significance, and wrapped in a feeling of unspeakable dread. Gal and Jay are sent to assassinate a Catholic priest in his church, and then a “librarian” who curates an especially repellent collection of pornography. What connects these two people — and why do they seem so eager to thank Jay, just before he kills them? And then there’s Gal’s ex-girlfriend, a wide-eyed brunette named Fiona (Emma Fryer), who keeps turning up in unexpected places — and who may not be the clueless corporate drone she appears to be.

Oh crap — I’ve almost told you way too much! But not quite. Here’s the key thing to understand: Every craft element of “Kill List,” from the acting to the cinematography (by Laurie Rose) to the cracked but seemingly inevitable downward progress of the narrative, is absolutely terrific. This movie is yet another testament to the thriving creativity of the British indie-film scene. It’s also the kind of movie designed to mess up your mind, like some unseen Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell picture out of 1981, and it will. As Gal and Jay descend further into mayhem and madness, uncertain whether they’re going crazy or being lured into a dreadful trap, you may want to consider the surprise ending of “Cunning Stunt,” and to get ready for something even worse here.

Whether the shocker final scene of “Kill List” has been earned — and whether it can survive a logical interrogation — is a conversation we’ll have to have after you’ve seen the film. I have my own questions about that matter, but to think in fatalistic terms, Jay’s odyssey can only end badly, and without question there’s a terrible karmic justice to what happens. This is the kind of movie you’ll want to work over with friends after you see it, unless you want to go straight to bed and vow never to take my recommendations ever again. I halfway want to get Ben Wheatley on the horn and have him explain the ending, and halfway suspect that it’s supposed to stem from an evil logic so deeply rooted in human society that it defies all explanation.

“Kill List” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York and the Cinefamily in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

But I digress. Trying her best to act demure and ladylike — and it’s not too convincing — Mallory tells Frenchie she doesn’t want to see his famous outdoor maze. She’s drunk, she’s tired, she gets claustrophobic. “Oh, no,” says Kassovitz, giving her his best non-reassuring cat grin. “The whole point is to relax and lose yourself.” That’s a Soderberghian meta-statement, for sure (the script for “Haywire” is by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote “The Limey,” Soderbergh’s awesome actioner from 2001), and it’s extremely good advice when it comes to appreciating this supremely economical, pulse-pounding and undeniably bewildering thriller, which plays like a blend of mid-’90s Hong Kong action flick and mid-’70s European crime drama. Arguably this movie amounts to less than the sum of its parts — but hot damn, those are some parts.

There’s no question that Soderbergh is a supremely talented craftsman of cinema. Just to cite one element, his use of ambient sound in this picture to heighten drama and tension and comedy is superlative, from an overly loud cash register to the beep-beep-beep of a Dublin crosswalk indicator to the sudden fwump of a deer coming through the back window of an economy car. Yes, I said “back window” and “economy car”; this movie’s big motor-vehicle chase occurs in reverse, through the snow of upstate New York, in a carjacked Mazda. And he’s always better off when he’s not trying to make deep or meaningful works of art. He views his characters from a cold distance under any circumstances — the hero of his last thriller, “Contagion,” was arguably the killer virus — and seen through that perspective casting a purely physical performer like Carano in a shameless genre exercise is a brilliant choice.

“You shouldn’t think of her as a woman,” purrs Mallory’s treacherous boss and former lover (Ewan McGregor), late in the film. “That’d be a mistake.” I really didn’t mind Carano’s acting in this movie; her line readings are acceptably laconic (some reports have suggested her voice was digitally altered) and despite her protests to the contrary, she can certainly wear a dress. But she’s undeniably more like a cyborg than a human being, from her slightly plasticky centerfold good looks to her phenomenal aptitude for fight choreography. (Needless to say, if I ever meet her in person I will deny writing any of this.) We’ve had a rash of female action heroes lately (“Sucker Punch,” “Hanna,” etc.), but Mallory is without any doubt the most fearsome of all.

If you’ve seen the dynamite first five minutes of “Haywire” (available on Hulu and embedded below) you get the drift: Soderbergh literally drops us into the middle of the action, as Mallory and an unexplained acquaintance named Aaron (Channing Tatum) engage in a bone-crunching, glass-breaking throwdown in a rural New York diner. For trying to intervene in chivalrous fashion, a local teenager named Scott (Michael Angarano) gets dragged into a high-speed chase with Mallory, and gets to hear the story of exactly why she had to beat Aaron to a pulp, despite the hot sex they had after their supposedly successful mission in Barcelona. Then there was the subsequent mission in Dublin, alongside a too-sexy British superspy played by Michael Fassbender, the one where she didn’t go into Kassovitz’s maze. That one didn’t go nearly as well, and that’s when she found out that her shadowy employers were a pack of corrupt sleazebags who were trying to bump her off.

I wouldn’t waste too much time trying to sort out who’s good and who’s evil (hint: nobody and everybody, respectively) or what all the skeevy intelligence bureaucracies and even skeevier private contractors have to do with each other. “Haywire” is about enjoying the relentless and elegant action sequences, which culminate with an extended hand-to-hand fight scene in which Carano and Fassbender completely destroy a luxury suite in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. The film’s interstices are mostly filled by clipped dialogue delivered by a fabulous list of male costars: McGregor, in an unflattering Marine Corps-veteran haircut, as Mallory’s private-sector boss; Michael Douglas oozing retirement-age grumble as their CIA contact; Antonio Banderas is a bearded State Department functionary who seems entirely composed, down to the molecular level, of expensive rum, Cohiba cigars and Viagra.

I’m tempted to say that “Haywire” is a summer movie exiled to the middle of winter, except that generally speaking the off-season months are when we see the most interesting action movies anyway. (Last year, for example: “Unknown,” “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Source Code,” “Kill the Irishman.”) With a budget of $25 million and a cast loaded with A-minus stars, this doesn’t feel much like an indie, but “Haywire” is a lean, clean production, shot and edited by Soderbergh himself and utterly free of the incoherent action sequences and overcooked special effects that plague similarly scaled Hollywood pictures. I’m not going to argue with you about the ethics or morality of this movie (since it doesn’t have any). But it’s ingenious, old-school, thrill-a-minute movie entertainment, effervescent eye candy for guys and gals alike.

I heard one prominent critic complaining after the Cannes premiere of “Miss Bala” that some of Naranjo’s plot twists were implausible, to which I say: Give me a break. First of all, while “Miss Bala” strives for a naturalistic feeling and pulls facts from some recent headlines on some recent criminal history, it’s a bullet-riddled downhill thrill ride about a would-be beauty queen and a drug lord, not “The Bicycle Thief.” Second of all, Naranjo’s point is that almost nothing is implausible in the upside-down borderlands of Tijuana, where Mexican sovereignty is almost meaningless and it’s impossible to identify a clear line between cops and criminals.

A canny and stylish director who was trained in the United States and has worked on both sides of the border, Naranjo has already made a couple of film-festival favorites (“DramaMex” and “I’m Gonna Explode”) and is likely to reach international fame with “Miss Bala.” (Hardcore indie-film aficionados may also know him as the depressed, Chaplin-esque costar of Azazel Jacobs’ “The GoodTimesKid.”) This is the odyssey of leggy, likable Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a naive 23-year-old with dreams of stardom who leaves her home on the outskirts of Tijuana one day in hopes of auditioning for the Miss Baja pageant. (The film’s title is a play on words; “bala” is Spanish for bullet.) By the end of the film she actually makes it to the pageant stage, in a heartbreaking, tour-de-force scene that sums up all the points Naranjo is trying to make about the tragic dysfunction of Mexican society and is technically brilliant to boot.

“Miss Bala” belongs to that subset of film noir where a normal person takes one step off the straight and narrow path and winds up on the highway to hell. Simply by walking into the wrong nightclub, Laura comes face to face with a notorious narcotraficante named Lino (Noe Hernández) in a situation where he’s already killed a crapload of other people and could easily decide to kill her. He doesn’t, maybe because she’s cute and maybe because she could be useful, but mostly for the hell of it, and then we’re off to the races. If Sigman’s Laura remains an overly innocent cipher throughout, purely focused on survival, Lino is deftly handled; Hernández plays him as a working-class guy made good, with a sentimental streak and a sense of humor, whose business success involves lots and lots of murders.

Over the next few days Laura witnesses numerous bloody shootouts between Lino’s gang and various Mexican and American law enforcement agencies, smuggles guns and weapons across the border, seduces a police commander and tries on several expensive dresses. She tries to get away from Lino periodically, but maybe not as hard as she might — her father and little brother are in danger, and after all there’s a beauty pageant to compete in. Terrifically choreographed, violent and amoral, but never wantonly cruel, “Miss Bala” is a knockout. While Naranjo invites Mexicans to take a long, hard look in the mirror when it comes to assigning blame for their screwed-up society, he also makes clear that without the Yankee appetite for cheap drugs and cheap labor, none of this would be happening.

“Miss Bala” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, and opens Jan. 27 in Boston, Houston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, with more cities to follow.

“Contraband” marks the latest depressing venture into Hollywood by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who has made some agreeably weird films in Europe but seems to be magically transformed into a maroon through contact with large amounts of United States currency. (His previous English-language films are “Inhale” and “A Little Trip to Heaven,” and if you’ve seen either of those, I’m genuinely sorry.) All you can say about this movie is that some of it is OK — the gritty, downscale settings in the Big Easy or the back-street barrios of Panama City, the satisfying if highly generic action scenes, Wahlberg’s agreeable performance as the family man who thinks he’s left his criminal past behind — and that, for a minute or so at a time, it can even seem pretty good. Giovanni Ribisi plays a scum-sucking New Orleans criminal with dubious facial hair, who enjoys terrorizing women and children but is constantly getting his ass kicked by Wahlberg. It’s like the ur-Giovanni Ribisi character! There’s also Ben Foster with his head shaved tight, playing a supposedly good guy who is backsliding into alcoholism and associated depravity of all kinds.

But while Kormákur occasionally conveys the impression that this might be an enjoyably mindless entertainment, it’s much more like a cynical hash job, whose faux-realistic manner can’t hide all the hackneyed crime-movie situations. Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a supposedly legendary New Orleans smuggler who has gone straight but gets dragged back into dirty business when his stringy-haired brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) winds up owing 700 G’s to Ribisi’s character, who sits around all day in dive bars drinking tall boys and referring to muscular, meathead-type fellows as “bitches.” Now, of course you can get away with a setup this familiar if you’re going to deliver an archetypal or classic crime movie, but this one’s an exhausting muddle. In fact, I get a strong whiff of condescension off “Contraband,” as if Kormákur and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (adapting the 2008 film “Reykjavik-Rotterdam,” which Kormákur produced) believe they’re giving the masses what they want: tough dudes talkin’ tough, bustin’ heads, crashin’ cars and droppin’ their terminal G’s, pseudo-gangsta white-boy style.

So Chris and his buddy Danny (Lukas Haas) sign onto a freighter crew presided over by the always-enjoyable J.K. Simmons, as the irascible and corrupt captain, in order to smuggle a bunch of counterfeit money back from Panama to pay off his brother-in-law’s debt. It all goes ludicrously wrong: The ship crashes into the docks in Panama City, the counterfeit bills are no good, the Panamanian crime lord played by Diego Luna turns out to be both nutso and bloodthirsty (now there’s a twist), and somehow Danny and Chris wind up in the middle of an armored-car heist that involves the entire population of Panama City getting killed except for them. (As you know if you have seen enough movies, white dudes are invulnerable to bullets, although ugly facial hair, smallness of stature or uncertain sexual orientations have been known to counteract this.)

Back in New Orleans, Ribisi’s character is stalking Chris’ wife and kids — and let me say a word on behalf of Kate Beckinsale, who has to play the most retrograde, whiny, picked-on and permanently victimized wife character in the history of the movies. The word is: Kate, you’re still looking good, and please give your agent a stern talking-to about this one. I realize the “Underworld” franchise has gotten pretty stale, but sometimes taking a role just for the heck of it is not the right move. And then there’s Foster as Chris’ red-eyed, stubble-headed old buddy Sebastian, whose A.A. attendance is slipping and who’s making all kinds of sinister, Judas-flavored phone calls. See, there’s a whole bunch of arcane plot to “Contraband,” it’s just that none of it is in any way interesting or surprising.

I spent much of December complaining about the onslaught of sober-sided prestige movies and halfway looking forward to the flotsam and jetsam of the new year. I was forgetting how bad Hollywood’s January output can actually be, and I would now officially like to walk that back. You definitely ought to be able to make an agreeable thriller out of this cast, these settings and this basic story, and the fact that Kormákur doesn’t is a powerful negative endorsement. Watching “Contraband,” you feel like a cascade of bad decisions were made all along the line, from the cut-and-paste dialogue to the muddled editing to the fact that we spend lots of time watching the process of smuggling — basically, people hiding stuff in dark places — while the characterization and storytelling feel like afterthoughts. Wahlberg, who also produced this fiasco, is a canny star who generally makes good decisions, but he needs to boot this director back to the Althing.