Whew…it must be tough getting to a point where the once-hot offers are no longer coming in and you’ve got to star in whatever comes along. Well that’s the case for Frontera star Ed Harris, and especially Drive Hard star John Cusack, whose project doesn’t even have a false sense of substance…
Frontera…Although it looks more profound than it really is compared to “Drive Hard,” this film is pretty bad, and I have to blame a lot of that on the pedestrian direction since the actual script seems somewhat decent. It’s about a rancher (Ed Harris, in full-on crusty-but-honest mode) whose sympathetic-to-illegals wife gets killed by some wannabe border vigilantes, but it wrongly looks like Michael Pena’s laborer is to blame. There’s also a plot about Pena’s wife (Eva Longoria) being taken advantage of by the coyotes who sneak her across the border. Now a film mostly about that could have played like a riveting journey-through-hell, but Frontera’s main plot is aimless and never really gets off the ground. Grade: C
Drive Hard…John Cusack plays a shady guy who forces Thomas Jane’s former race car driver-turned-driving instructor to drive him around after a bank robbery. Cusack really phones it in with a performance where he almost never even takes off his sunglasses, but even here he’s feisty and spirited. You can tell he put some fingerprints on the script since there’s a convoluted plot about how an investment bank is used by mobsters and private bank guards are going to kill them and something about an executive at said bank is a new school kingpin…I could barely follow any of that, and that’s okay since the movie is only really powered by the goofy-but-likable chemistry between Jane and Cusack. In fact, it’s a much stronger buddy picture than a chase movie, and the action sequences seem badly under-funded, especially the climax. It’s a ridiculous but watchable hour and a half. Grade: C-