Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Shadowboxer (2005)

So, this one was on tv and not so much an active decision as an "ok this is on and seems odd and there's not much else on this time of night so . . . " Fair warning: I'm just going to give away the whole plot on this one.

Cuba Gooding Jr. is the son of a real bad dude who beats and kills Gooding's mother. Helen Mirren dated Gooding's dad and then killed him when he went to beat Gooding for crying over his dead mother (Gooding shot the image of his father in a mirror after his father beat his mother once). The twist is that Mirren and Gooding then become lovers. Right. So that's not the oddest thing about this one. Mirren has some sort of terminal cancer--I don't think we're told what sort but it's nasty but she can operate pretty much normally when not having to be in an "oh my god I have cancer and so I have to double over to show that I'm in pain and therefore dying" scene. Mirren and Gooding are contract killers. That's right. And that's not the oddest thing either. So Mirren and Gooding are hired by big bad mobster Stephen Dorff to kill a whole slew of his men and his wife (because she was presumably having an affair) who is dum dum dum pregnant (they try to hide that fact by keeping her in bed until she stands and about to be killed by Mirren--it doesn't so much work). Gooding and Mirren kill the bunch of lackeys and she is about to kill the wife when TA DA! she's pregnant so Mirren can't kill her. Gooding is not happy with this. He's the colder-blooded of the two apparently while Mirren has a maternal streak. And then, DRAMA!, the mobster's wife goes into labor and Mirren miraculously knows how to birth a child. So the kid is born--it's a boy (foreshadowing, shhhhh! don't tell)--and M&G take the wife and kid to a hotel. Joseph Gordon-Levitt then shows up as a doctor who will do "anything for Rose[Mirren]" but we're not sure why (maybe he's her son but that's never explained). Anyway, he shows up with Mo'Nique who is his bossy crack-whore girlfriend, he doctors the wife and baby and leaves. M&G take wife and baby to their home. Mirren mothers her--changing her hair, buying a crib, etc--while Gooding is moody and less than thrilled over the human aspect of the kill gone wrong. Mirren then decides they have to move to the country where she and wife take care of baby while Gooding still kills people and tries not to be involved in the family. Mirren makes it to the kid's first birthday (I would have thought she would have died if her cancer was so terrible since there was little evidence of therapy besides pain pills, booze, and whole ton of cigarettes) but then she apparently decides it's time to end it. In what looked like a dream sequence to me--it went all technicolor--Gooding and Mirren have sex in nature and as they climax, he shoots her in the head. Then he, in the nude, buries her and goes back to wife and baby. Mirren made him promise to do whatever wife says. Wife, kid, and Gooding then move to the suburbs where she is to go back to school to do something in the psychology field and G can still be a contract killer. Right. The kid loves Gooding who teaches him to shadowbox (oh, right--G trains in boxing although there was no evidence he actually boxed) and makes him breakfast. The sexual tension mounts--they make sure we know this by showing Gooding in the shower and wife day-dreaming about masturbating while watching him in the shower (the door was wide open and the shower door clear, of course). Right. So then the suburban fairy tale has to end, of course. Wife tells G that it's time to leave after he cleans a gun with the door open and she sees the kid watching him. G says "whatever you say" and goes on a kill to give her some money to live on. Then he suddenly shows us he's grown a conscious because after he kills the guy he sees that the guy was a dad and that makes him sad. So sad he cries on wife's shoulder and he says he wants to stay and they have sex and she says he can stay. Ok. Meanwhile, cracked out Mo'Nique catches Joseph Gordon Levitt performing oral sex on a woman on whom he should be performing a pap smear. Mo'Nique freaks out, causes more of a scene than there already was, and then goes to tell bad mobster husband guy that his wife isn't dead and that she's living with the contract killer. Bad husband guy then kills Mo'Nique and JGL for their efforts. So then Gooding goes to get info for another kill and it's photos of him, wife, and kid in their suburban bliss. He tries to call home but the phone rings a lot and then when wife wakes up from her nap to answer the phone a bad mob guy answers. Oh no. So the contract killer knows that there is at least one bad guy with a gun in his house (but probably multiple bad guys), he knows the bad guys are after his wife and kid, he knows the layout of his house, he's a trained killer and boxer, and yet, somehow, he ends up chained to a chair in his basement. Right. So wife pleads with former husband bad guy not to kill the kid because the kid is really his. Kid pleads with Gooding, "you're my daddy, right?" Bad former husband guy snips of one of Goodings fingers with hedge trimmers and then Gooding breaks from his restraints as the bad former husband guy goes after wife and kid. Bad former husband guy and Gooding fight and the bad former husband guy is shot . . . .dum, dum dum, the kid shot him mirroring the mirror-shooting scene with Gooding earlier (yay! for bookends). So Gooding shoots the rest of the bad guys (but not before asking bad former husband guy if he's proud of the kid) and then joins wife and kid in the car where they were told to wait. The speed off and Gooding says they'll have to be careful because there might be more bad guys. The kid says they'll just have to kill them and Gooding tears up. Sniff. And that's all in just 93 minutes.

Ugh. It's definitely a thing. I'm just not sure it's worth watching.

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