A Warner Bros. release. Morgan Creek Prods. And Franchise Pictures Present a Franchise Pictures and Canton Company Production. Produced by Mark Canton, Elie Samaha, Neil Canton; Executive produced by Andrew Stevens, Don Carmody, Billy Gerber, Ashok Amritraj, Steve Bing, Arthur Silver; Co-produced by Dawn Miller, James Holt, John Goldstone; Written by David McKenna based on the novel Jack?s Return by Ted Lewis; Directed by Stephen Kay.
Opens October 6, 2000
His initials are, J.C., and he?s got a savior-complex, that?s the central character, Jack Carter in Get Carter, a re-calibrated revenge movie starring Sylvester Stallone. Colossally dunderheaded and thematically cretin-ish, Get Carter could be used as fodder for any candidate wanting to plug ?big Hollywood? for its sewer-level, cinematic shootings.
In this slick and sick offering, Stallone gets gussied up as a strong arm for a Las Vegas scumwad. A hotheaded loner (except when he?s tossing his boss? trophy wife), Carter is a merciless killer with no family ties or close bonds. Yet, when his brother back in Seattle (whom he hasn?t seen or communicated with in five years) meets his death in a mysterious car accident, deemed drunk driving, Carter gets a bug up his goatee and heads smack dab back to the Rainy City to get to the bottom of things. The bottom of things is usually where this sewer rat dwells, but neither his sister-in-law nor his sullen niece wants him to drag up old wounds. After all, as his weary sister-in-law says, Carter doesn?t solve things, he only makes things worse.
Overall, it?s nearly impossible to be pulled in on any dramatic level, especially since the ex-wife seems to be glad to be done with the dead guy anyway (he was playing around with a druggie club-girl). No one cares if this guy?s death is avenged except for the bozo from Las Vegas who, it becomes increasingly clear, is an out-of-control knucklehead with a penchant for screwing things up.
As an investigator and people person, suffice it to say that while in Vegas, Carter never picked up enough charm to even qualify for the Frank Sinatra Press Relations Award. His mono-syllabic utterances are, invariably, hostile and often punctuated with the cracking of bones. Sartorially speaking, he?s straight out of the Jilly Rizzo line: With his custom-fit suits, silken ties, starched shirts, and gaudy cufflinks, Carter looks like he stepped straight of a window 1950s window display. While the filmmakers have quite sagely outfitted Stallone in the proper goombah-ware, in transposing this Brit film, they?ve gussied it up with a lot of art-house, neo-Euro accoutrements, including, most hilariously, Stallone?s goatee.
With his scraggly chin hair and his retro-plastic sunglasses on top of his Vegas duds, Stallone comes across more as a Marseilles pimp than a Vegas strong-arm. It?s an utterly ridiculous and preposterous combination, but, at least, it?s distracting from the simian-level of storytelling here and invests the film with a perverse sort of hapless charm. Someone must have told him the goatee would make him DeNiro-esque.
In any event, it makes for the odd incongruities that bounce around in this Mark Canton/Elie Samaha/Neil Canton-produced bruiser, which could surely vie for a Scummiest Movie Produced in the New Millennium honor
Since it?s so limp conceptually, one must seek out ways to find interest in the thing and, luckily, there are many striking moments and components that draw one?s interest: For instance, when Stallone confronts Mickey Rourke, who is also wearing plastic shades (green) and also preens with bare, muscle-veined shoulders. Usually, one must attend a cock fight in East L.A. to see such peckings. However, that would be a slight to the chickens who would like have more developed and pleasing personalities than the pec-head characters here.
It?s hard not to mention the dialogue dredged up by screenwriter