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Released by: Anchor Bay
Released on: February 21, 2012.
Cast: Channing Tatum, Katie Holmes, Al Pacino
Year: 2011
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The Movie:
What do you a call a movie with a pretty impressive ensemble cast (Ray Liotta, Al Pacino, a serious Tracy Morgan, Channing Tatum, Katie Holmes and Juliette Binoche) where you have absolutely no concern for any of the characters? There's gotta be a term for that and, by way of example, you have a film like The Son of No One, a directionless, passion-less morass of a story trying to put the spin of the personal-as-political on a broader scale but falling emotionally flat.
The story here focuses on Jonathan “Milky†White (Tatum), a kid who grew up almost alone in the Queensboro projects in Queens, NYC. The film opens with him defending himself against a raging, dangerous junkie whom young White shoots and kills. Cut to 16 years later, it's 2002 and White's now a beat cop, getting stationed back from Long Island, where he shares a home with his wife (Holmes) and young daughter, to his old neighborhood in Queens. Sporting a horrible mustache and clearly more haunted by his past now that he's returned to his old grounds, he's soon even more anxious as someone is sending notices to the local rag about some unsolved murders in those projects back in the day. The film then cuts back and forth between 1986 and 2002 and watches the events slowly unfold, as we learn more of what happened to both White and his good friend, Vinnie (older version played straight by a serious Tracy Morgan). Another murder tied to the initial murder occurs and both friends escape in a way but Vinnie gets sent to a mental institution, for some reason, and becomes a bit of a gibbering idiot. White is looked out for by his deceased father's old partner, Stanford (Pacino), who figures out what happened but, being that the murdered bodies were no-account junkies, gets young White off the hook and on to a better life.
That cover-up and the exposing of it drives the modern-day story, set against the timeframe a bit after the events of 9/11 and how the police were not everyone's favorite any longer. There's an attempt at some type of political message here but it's so muddled and overwhelmed by the story that the filmmakers just abandon it outright pretty early on. White's chief, Mathers (Liotta), assigns him and his partner to get the local rag's editor (Binoche) to put this story to rest but she's fired up about it and refuses. White tries to good-guy her but continually refuses to come clean about what happened to anyone that could possibly be sympathetic - her, his wife - and so makes the situation much worse. Creepy phone calls and text messages asking him to confess accompany the threatening letters sent to that newspaper - although, again, frustratingly incomplete is any explanation as to who is doing this stalking: Mathers wants it cleared up so as to not put a bad face on the department but, if that's true, why is he so sneaky? He knows what White did and White knows that Mathers is aware, so why don't they just have that conversation? In any event, things escalate to the point of Stanford and Mathers trying to pin the old murders on Vinnie, with all of them on a rooftop at mid-day with guns drawn. It's as goofy a setting for a showdown as it sounds and provides a hollow ending for a hollow story.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The filmmakers feature some great aerial shots of the projects looking more idyllic than they actually are and the widescreen 2:35:1 shows this off quite nicely. Since a theme of the film is light-vs.-dark the 1080p production on this disc handles the varying lighting on scenes quite well, actually, and is a commendable aspect of this presentation from Anchor Bay. The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack works alright although some dialog scenes with Tatum just sound muffled, for some reason, and I don't know if it's his performance or that bad mustache he wears getting in the way. But the soundtrack does alright otherwise and having subtitles in English (SDH) and Spanish helps alleviate any confusion there.
Deleted scenes are included but they play all consecutively so you have to sit through all six of them rather than selecting any individually. The commentary track comes from director Dito Monteil and producer Jake Pushinsky and it's hardly a revelation here - some but not much in the way of anecdotal stories, it sounds more like to “bro's†narrating the film and offering very, very little insight into the film's themes.
Summary:
Again, if you're going to build a suspense-drama story with a big cast you should probably have at least a single character that the audience can sympathize with. That doesn't happen here with The Son of No One and so, really, it should be watched by No One.
