Great actors playing below their abilities

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

Nothing much to recommend this week.

Drillbit Taylor
Owen Wilson deserves better than this. “Drillbit Taylor” is so predictable, so mediocre and so old-fashioned that it hardly exists at all. He plays a resourceful homeless guy who’s hired to be the bodyguard for a tormented trio of high school nerds (they very much resemble the protagonists of “Superbad,” only without the insight and wit). Wilson is a likeable actor, and he’s been expertly cast here, but the script leaves him stranded in a sitcom plot and gives him nothing interesting or funny to do. “Drillbit Taylor” is so banal that you’ll have forgotten all about it before it’s even over.
Grade: C

My Blueberry Nights
They say that in order for a narrative to be effective, the protagonist must undergo some kind of change from the beginning of the story to the end. “My Blueberry Nights” ignores that basic rule, and it leaves us stranded on the same emotional plain from start to finish. It stars singer-songwriter Norah Jones as a young woman who leaves her life in New York City behind, wandering the countryside and encountering various sadsacks and outcasts before she finally returns home again, completely unchanged by her experiences. The film is a bare clothesline that desperately needs something of substance to be hung upon it. Jones herself isn’t much of an actress, and she’s surrounded by various Oscar winners and nominees—Jude Law, David Straithairn, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz—whose performances aren’t particularly indicative of their talents. “My Blueberry Nights” is directed by the Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar Wai (“In the Mood for Love,” “Chungking Express”), who is making his English-language debut here. It’s possible that something was lost in translation—his earlier films were so passionate and brimming with personality, and this one is hollow at its core. Watching it is like taking a long walk through a very pretty, mostly empty forest, only to discover at the end of your journey that you’ve traveled in one big circle.
Grade: C

Vantage Point
“Vantage Point” is not so much an action movie as it is an exercise in contrived cliffhangers and plot twists. The film is set on a single day in Salamanca, Spain, where the President of the United States is hosting an anti-terrorism summit. When the President is shot and a bomb is detonated in the city square, we see the events over and over again but from a different perspective each time. Who has the best vantage point: The President’s bodyguards, the American tourist with a video camera, the television news producer or the Spanish police officer? There are a lot of manufactured surprises, none of which have any plausibility, and when you finally discover the identity of the assassin, you’ll wish you’d rented “Rashomon” instead.
Grade: C-