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REIGN OVER ME An unlikely companion piece to I Think I Love My Wife, writer-director Mike Binder's Reign Over Me likewise centers on a well-to-do African-American male who's bored by what he perceives as a barren life with no passion or purpose. But whereas Chris Rock's Richard Cooper sought to assuage his funk with (platonic) dalliances with a hot-to-trot temptress, Don Cheadle's Alan Johnson seeks to reconnect with his long-ago college roommate Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler), hoping that having a beer buddy will allow him some measure of freedom away from his responsibilities. But what Alan isn't taking into account is the fact that, five years after 9/11, Charlie is still shell-shocked by the loss of his wife and three daughters, all of whom were killed on that fateful day. Binder (The Upside of Anger) takes a couple of pages from Spike Lee's playbook on how to tackle the thorny subject of 9/11. As with Lee's 25th Hour and Inside Man, this is more about the recovery than the ruin -- the film doesn't beat us over the head with the Sept. 11 specter, but neither does it ever allow us to forget how that tragedy hovers around the everyday actions of New York denizens. Cheadle provides the movie with a sturdy center around which Sandler can orbit with his character's many moods; only a plotline involving a needy nymphomaniac (Saffron Burrows) feels superfluous. Then again, that subplot exemplifies Reign Over Me in a nutshell: messy, demanding, and insatiable in its appetites. ***
SHOOTER Shooter kicks off with a scene in which a young man flashes a picture of his fiancée to his partner, which in movie parlance of course means he won't be around much longer. Shooter also includes a sequence in which our put-upon protagonist reaches his boiling point upon learning the worst news a movie hero can hear: The villains went and shot his faithful dog (big mistake, guys). It's a testament to all concerned that Shooter can include such hoary clichés and not only survive them but also make them fun to watch one more time. Crisply directed by Antoine Fuqua and adapted from Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact, this casts Mark Wahlberg (who portrayed a shooter of an entirely different kind in Boogie Nights) as Bob Lee Swagger, a former Marine sniper who's duped into taking part in a political assassination and then served up as the lone gunman. Refusing to go down easy, he instead uses all his training to get back at the slimy suits who framed him, along the way enlisting the aid of an earnest FBI rookie (Michael Pena). Comparisons to Sylvester Stallone's equally ill-treated combat vet from two decades ago are paper-thin, since this film is anything but a Rambore; instead, it benefits from some taut action sequences, a well-chosen supporting cast (66-year-old Levon Helm, not looking a day over 99, steals the film as a gun enthusiast), a deep cynicism about how this country operates behind closed doors, and the sight of a smoldering Wahlberg already building on that Oscar nod for The Departed. ***
300 Positioned as the Ultimate Fanboy Movie, this adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel is indeed ferocious enough to satisfy basement-dwellers with its gore, violence and chest-pounding machismo while savvy enough to downplay the homoeroticism that will ever-so-subtly cause heretofore unexplained stirrings in the loins of these same armchair warriors. Yet for all its brutality, 300 has as much chance of satisfying a sizable female contingent, since it's ultimately a beefcake calendar posing as a motion picture (interesting, then, that the lockstep online trolls attack anyone who doesn't rave about the film as being like "a girl"). Beyond its demographic-targeting, however, its greatest claim to fame is that it's positioning itself as the next step on the evolutionary CGI ladder, offering (in the words of director and cowriter Zack Snyder) "a true experience unlike anything you've ever seen before." Snyder was responsible for the surprisingly accomplished Dawn of the Dead remake three years ago, but here he seems to have been swallowed up by the enormity of the project, which depersonalizes the major players in the battle between the Spartans and the Persians to such a degree that one ends up feeling more sympathy for the shields that end up receiving the brunt of the sword blows and arrow piercings. 300 contains a handful of staggering images -- and, for once, the color-deprived shooting style fits the tale being spun -- but Sin City, a previous adaptation of a Miller work, offered more variety in its characterizations and, more importantly, in its cutting-edge visual landscape. **1/2
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