New to DVD: 'The Bank Job,' 'College Road Trip,' 'Saving Grace'

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Jack English

Jason Straham is Terry Leather in "The Bank Job."

'The Bank Job'

3 1/2 stars = Very good
Ratings explained

"The Bank Job" never got the play it deserved in theaters earlier this year, though it attracted respectable reviews. Based on the true story of a notorious London bank robbery, "The Bank Job" is an intelligent throwback to an era of plot-driven movie making. If you've ever wondered what the criminal world around London looked like circa 1970, this is your film.

Jason Statham is Terry Leather, a genial but disciplined minor criminal who leads a gang of equally small-time crooks in an unlikely plot to tunnel into and rob what should have been an impenetrable London bank. Terry himself has been recruited by Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), a friend from the old neighborhood who has her own reasons for wanting to get a look at the safety deposit boxes of the Baker Street Bank of London.

Together, Terry, Martine and their colleagues hatch a plan that is particularly audacious and amazing because it really happened, though the details and personalities of the robbers involved can only be speculated about. The crime has never officially been solved, giving director Roger Donaldson plenty of wiggle room to concoct characters that are recognizable tropes of caper movies without being total cliches.

In Donaldson's version of the robbery, MI 5, the royal family, a black revolutionary group and the upper echelons of London's criminal world all have a stake in Terry's heist. There is manipulation behind the scenes that the robbers aren't aware of until it is too late. The relatively light tone of the movie shifts dramatically in the third act when a prominent character is murdered. It almost throws the film out of synch, but not quite. The ending is a bit too neat given the complexity that preceded it, but it has the virtue of being emotionally satisfying on some level.

The DVD includes "The Baker Street Bank Raid" and a behind-the-scenes reel that show how closely Donaldson stuck to the details of that era. The deleted and extended scenes don't amount to much, though.

-- Tony Norman, Post-Gazette staff writer

'College Road Trip'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

In this G-rated family comedy from Disney, Raven-Symone plays a top-notch senior and an aspiring lawyer who can't wait for the good-time rite of passage she has truly earned: a girls-only road trip to check out prospective colleges. Nothing could spoil it -- except daddy dearest.

That would be Martin Lawrence, a suburban Chicago police chief and doting father who insists on crashing the "College Road Trip" of her dreams. The Chief is accident-prone, not to mention slapstick-prone, so things don't go as planned. On top of that, Melanie's excess baggage also includes her brother and pet pig.

This is, after all, a quasi-road comedy -- shades of "RV" and "Wild Hogs" -- in which the humor is hardly sophisticated. But at least Lawrence plays a relatively normal, semi-believable guy here. Best of all, in a completely ridiculous way, is Donny Osmond as a Good Samaritan who assists our heroes on the road.

DVD extras include an alternate opening and alternate endings, deleted scenes and director commentary, plus a music video and video diary from Raven-Symone.

-- Barry Paris, Post-Gazette film critic

'Saving Grace: Season One'

2 1/2 stars = Average
Ratings explained

There is a whole lot of grace in this TV show.

Waves of God's grace flow toward Grace Hanadarko (Holly Hunter), a fortysomething police detective, in "Saving Grace: Season One" ($49.98, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment). Her life is a merry-go-round of solving crimes, spewing profanity, drinking too much, chain-smoking, having sex and wrestling with God via a tobacco-spitting angel.

The drama takes place in Oklahoma City, the site of the 1995 Alfred P. Murrah Building explosion that killed 168 people, including Hanadarko's sister. Grace, the black sheep pseudo-atheist, comes from a family of committed Catholics.

Grace's murky life is paraded before viewers: Her explicit trysts with her married partner and others; her personal hypocrisy upon hearing that her favorite aunt had a long-term affair with her father; her willingness to do anything to get a conviction; her incessant lying.

If you can wade through creator Nancy Miller's forays into the philosophy that being human means living a depraved life, and if you can stomach the raw sex scenes, and if you can accept the smorgasbord view of religion, the saving grace of "Saving Grace" is that it studies what can happen inside a person given over to depravity when confronted by Someone who says she wasn't made for that.

-- Monessa Tinsley-Crabb, Post-Gazette staff writer

Also new this week

"Penelope"

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

Modern-day fairy tale about love and self-acceptance, starring Christina Ricci as the daughter of wealthy socialites who is afflicted with the nose and ears of a pig. It can be broken only when she is "loved by one of her own kind." "Penelope" is like an extended bedtime story for tweens and up, with a message that's a cross between "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and "The Wizard of Oz." It's very slight, but it's puffed up with a quirky cast, London locales and a production design that allows the film to cast a fairy-tale spell.

"Step Up 2 the Streets"

2 stars = Mediocre
Ratings explained

Sequel to "Step Up," the 2006 movie about a poor boy and privileged girl who are a match made in Maryland School of the Arts heaven. The school setting is the same this time, but the boy, Chase (Robert Hoffman), is the wealthy one and Andie (Briana Evigan) the streetwise dancer. The characters are drawn like cardboard cutouts, and you can predict the outcome from the get-go, but the dancing is as energetic as the movie's soundtrack mix of rap, hip-hop and R&B. The DVD comes with deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes segments and five music videos.

"The Year My Parents Went on Vacation"

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

Set against World Cup fever and a crackdown on demonstrators in Brazil, this is a coming-of-age tale about a boy who learns about exile, sacrifice, friendship, flirtation and how to care for himself and others, along with victory and loss.

"Shutter"