Some Hot IR Stuff In "Shadowboxer"

:twisted: In ‘Shadowboxer,’ Murder Runs in the Family (and It’s a Turn-On in a Lover)


By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: July 21, 2006

“Shadowboxer,” a gaudy thriller saturated in sex and violence, is an extravagance that leaves you with your mouth hanging open — partly in admiration of its audacity and partly in disbelief at its preposterousness. Playing one of the most unlikely couples in screen history, Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. are Rose and Mikey, contract killers and lovers living in Philadelphia who happen to be stepmother and stepson. And oh yes, Rose is dying of cancer and eventually exits the world with the kind of bang not seen since Jeanne Moreau’s self-annihilation in “Going Places.”

The directorial debut of Lee Daniels, the producer of “Monster’s Ball,” “Shadowboxer” recycles the same themes that drove its more somber forerunner, this time in a “Pulp Fiction” style, with lush, saturated color and surreal trimmings. As it gleefully smashes boundaries and blurs the line between comedy and melodrama, it dares you to collapse into laughter.

The relationships, especially that of Rose and Mikey, are strictly theoretical constructions. Even Ms. Mirren, one of the world’s great actors, can’t make this couple believable, although she gives herself entirely to her character, a disenchanted political radical turned greedy hit woman. Mr. Gooding trudges through his role with a poker face, exuding an air of embattled nobility that belies his deadly occupation. As a character, Mikey barely exists.

Like “Monster’s Ball,” “Shadowboxer” explores the heavy psychological baggage handed from fathers to sons, in this case a legacy of murder perpetuated by men who grew up admiring their fathers’ skill and confidence with firearms and eventually played copycat. Rose was married to Mikey’s father, who was also a killer for hire. Explaining her past, she tells of having once belonged to a Weathermen-like radical group that accidentally blew itself up.

Rose and Mikey’s relationship strongly recalls the interracial affair in “Monster’s Ball,” in which Billy Bob Thornton’s character, a death-row prison guard from a white racist family, coupled with a condemned killer’s African-American wife (Halle Berry), who didn’t know what her lover did for a living. Although the interracial relationship in “Shadowboxer,” with its May-November twist, is even more far-fetched, it’s not as fraught with potential conflict.

The intensity of Rose and Mikey’s passion goes way beyond conventional Hollywood sex, and the fact that it is interracial and intergenerational (Ms. Mirren is 22 years older than Mr. Gooding) lends it an extra transgressive kick. I haven’t seen a black man and a white woman make love like this in an American movie since Ellen Barkin and Laurence Fishburne tore at each other in “Bad Company” in 1995. Although I suspect that this explicitness will damage the film’s already marginal commercial prospects, I applaud the film (and the actors) for putting it in our faces at a time when Hollywood has turned squeamish. (In fact, “Shadowboxer” is independently produced and released and unencumbered by studio strictures.)

“Shadowboxer” settles right down to business in delivering its jolts. Clayton (Stephen Dorff), a sadistic mob kingpin who lives in a mansion with his pregnant wife, Vickie (Vanessa Ferlito), and a pet zebra that prances on the front lawn, commissions Rose and Mikey to assassinate several of his mob associates and his wife in one fell swoop. Just as Rose is about to dispose of Vickie in her bedroom, Vickie’s water breaks, and she begins to give birth. Rose, perhaps because she’s terminally ill, takes pity, plays midwife and, to Mikey’s displeasure, insists they spirit the mother and baby to safety.

A poorly integrated subplot involves Dr. Don (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the mob physician they summon to check out Vickie after she gives birth, and his drug-addicted girlfriend, Precious (Mo’Nique). The doctor, like all the men in the movie, is a selfish sexual conquistador. But the worst of the lot is Clayton, a sociopath who, when interrupted during rough sex by voices in the next room, rolls off the woman under him, opens the door and shoots his bodyguard in the foot. (This is when Mr. Dorff, in a rare instance of a Hollywood actor baring it all, flashes a glimpse of full-frontal nudity.)

The story leaps ahead as Mikey, Rose, Vickie, and her son live like an anonymous suburban family hidden in the witness protection program. Although they hope Clayton never catches up with them, they don’t seem particularly strict about maintaining their false identities. Of course Clayton shows up and the story ends with a final nasty twist on the family legacy.