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Defendor

APPARENTLY timed to hit DVD stores simultaneously with the theatrical release of Kick-Ass, this Canadian movie stars Woody Harrelson as an un-super superhero in way over his head as he takes on the bad guys.

Both Defendor and Kick-Ass were shot in Toronto and Hamilton locations, but Defendor is so lo-fi, it’s practically no-fi. With an atrocious synthesized-orchestral score and production values that hearken back to the days of the Canadian tax-shelter movie, it is, visually and aurally, strictly dollar store.

Harrelson plays Arthur Poppington, a mentally challenged loner whose day job on a road construction crew provides a cover for his nocturnal activities. Arthur puts a duct-tape "D" on his chest, paints a mask on his face and fights perceived evil-doers with homemade weapons including marbles, lime juice and jars of angry wasps.

Unfortunately for Arthur, the bad guys pack deadlier weaponry. But Arthur is just deluded enough to believe he can survive anything as he tracks his nemesis, "Captain Industry," the imaginary figure he holds responsible for the drug-related death of his prostitute mother decades earlier. His pursuit leads him to a crack-smoking teen hooker named Kat (Kat Dennings) and her pimp, the sleazy crooked cop Dooney (Elias Koteas).

Writer-director Peter Stebbings is also an actor and that may be the reason he managed to cobble together a script that managed to appeal to Harrelson’s vanity.

But Stebbings isn’t a good enough director to get a decent performance out of Harrelson, who wrings out buckets of kicked-puppy pathos with nary a true moment in the film’s 111-minute running time. In all the cast, only Koteas possess sufficient thespian superpowers to soar above the material, especially in a scene in which Defendor squirts lime juice at Dooney to extract information: "Oh, no, not the lime juice!" 2 stars

 

Pirate Radio

IF Woody Harrelson plays it too cute in Defendor, everybody is too cute in this mid-’60s-set comedy from cute-aholic writer-director Richard Curtis (Love Actually).

Curtis does at least produce a nifty premise: Apparently, the term "the British Invasion," used to describe the wave of shaggy-headed musical groups storming the American pop charts, applied equally well to the Brits’ own shores. During the height of that rock ‘n’ roll renaissance, the BBC (which ruled the airwaves with an iron hand) mandated such raucous boogie-woogie would only get an hour of play per day, a policy utterly out of step with the appetites of the populace (as Curtis demonstrates with frequent montages of regular folk compelled to aural ecstasy by the likes of Cream and the Rolling Stones).

The government’s intransigence necessitated pirate radio stations operating out of ships anchored in the Atlantic.

On one such ship, the hip aristocratic station owner Quentin (Bill Nighy) takes on impressionable trainee Carl (Thomas Sturridge), though the ship is filled with bad influences, including the rogue American DJ known as The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the mystifyingly successful playboy Dave (Nick Frost) and the not-so-mystifying successful playboy Gavin (Rhys Ifans).

Unfortunately, a boat filled with men and a single lesbian cook is not the best place for Carl to lose his despised virginity, but it is a good place to bear witness to lots and lots of Richard Curtis quips uttered by actors who rarely get a chance to play such darling blokes.

But the comedy here feels laboured after a few minutes, especially when the only respite we get from the lads is a parallel plot wherein a repressed/repressive government minister (Kenneth Branagh) attempts to shut down all pirate radio stations to make the world safe for Mantovani and Des O’Connor.

With that broadly stroked character, Curtis seems to be channelling the cheeky sense of rebellion found in Richard Lester’s Beatles movies of that era. Alas, his movie is just McCartney-sweet, without the mitigating pepper of a John Lennon. 2 stars

 

Top DVD Rentals

1. Sherlock Holmes

2. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

3. The Blind Side

4. Brothers

5. The Men Who Stare at Goats

6. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

7. Up in the Air

8. Old Dogs

9. Did You Hear About the Morgans?

10. 2012

— Rogers Video, week ending April 11