pdelacorte

Take the plot of "Death Wish," add the plot of "Gran Torino," throw in the score from "Taxi Driver," plus a mail-it-in performance by Michael Caine, and you've got a pretty bad movie. Caine averred in pre-screening remarks at the Toronto Film Festival that his character was not a vigilante because he did what he had to do, not what he wanted to do. Vigilante or not, his character faces off against a nasty bunch of caricatures in seamiest London, and predictably blows them all away. The film could not be more formulaic, from its multi-racial villains to its soft-but-tough policewoman (well played in a losing cause by Emily Mortimer.) This dog has not augmented Caine's distinguished career.

Director Baltasar Kormakur leaves Iceland to make an American movie, except he really doesn't, and that's a large part of the problem. Kormakur actually shot this film in Iceland, and it would take a hyper-credulous viewer to accept these stark landscapes as Minnesota. "Heaven" is a dark tale about insurance fraud. Dark in every sense of the word, as several early scenes are nearly invisible. The plot is murky; the cast's accents are all over the lot, especially Forest Whitaker's. Whitaker's attempts at Minnesotan leave him somewhere between Duluth and Dublin. The ending is intended to be richly ironic, but falls absolutely flat. For a far better experience, see Kormakur's "101 Reykjavik."

Who could possibly sympathize with these two obnoxious protagonists? What's intended to be a light, frothy comedy about neighbor children who can't give up their childhood game of dare even as they age well into adulhood, comes off more as an exercise in cruelty and petulant self-indulgence. As children, the pair are unbearably precocious; as adults they're intolerably immature. It's a bad combination.