“LOU” My rating: C (Netflix)
107 minutes | MPAA rating: R
As a general policy it’s wise to see every movie in which Allison Janney appears. Even in a small role she can can be the difference between dreck and a watchable experience.
“Lou,” though, pushes that thesis to the edge.
Not that Janney isn’t good. In fact, she is more than effective in what I’m pretty sure is her first attempt to join the ranks of bad-ass action women.
It’s just that the movie around her is pretty sketchy.
Her Lou is a semi-hermit living deep in the woods on an island off the Washington coast. She’s tall and gray-haired and makeup free (this performance is utterly without vanity) and silently misanthropic.
Lou hunts deer with her dog (often out of season…she doesn’t care) and has a survivalist thing going…a freezer full of meat and, we learn, a small fortune in cash buried out behind the house. Not to mention her familiarity with weapons.
Her closest neighbors are Hannah (Jurnee Smollett) and her adorable little girl Vee (Ridley Asha Bateman). They rent a mobile home from Lou, who exhibits little sympathy for the plight of a single working mom. When the rent is due, it’s due. Period.
Vee’s AWOL father, we learn, was a Green Beret who turned to the dark side — going rogue, killing civilians, stealing and extorting. That’s when he wasn’t beating Hannah. He may be dead.
Or not.
“Lou” kicks into gear when Vee is abducted. The perpetrator leaves behind a bomb in Lou’s car; obviously, the kidnapper is the girl’s father, Phillip (Logan Marshall-Green).
But we soon learn that Phillip isn’t the only the government-trained killer in the neighborhood. Lou has skills that could only have been honed in the service of the CIA.
The chase is on.
Director Anna Foerster (among her credits are an “Underworld” feature and episodes of “Outlander”) has turned in a good-looking movie (the lush Northwest forest is hauntingly beautiful) and she delivers a nice action sequence set in a cramped cabin in which Lou goes toe to toe with a couple of Phillip’s nefarious ex-military buddies.
The problem is the screenplay by Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley, which grows increasingly forced and phony. A little over halfway through they drop a big surprise reveal that elicited from me not a gasp but a shrug.
Marshall-Green can’t do much with his cut-and-paste psycho-soldier role. Faring better are Janney and Smollett, who become female action buddies. They’re fun to watch even as the movie falls apart around them.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 