Sometimes there are one or two or three things in a movie that seem wholly implausible: For example, characters who, in 2011, don't use or even appear to own cell phones. Depending on the movie -- and the necessity of cell phones to the story -- you might find that one little glitch unforgivable or you might look the other way. But what if a movie has so many glitches, so many careless oversights, that looking the other way only brings on whiplash? The characters in Dito Montiel's The Son of No One use cell phones, all right. But almost nothing else in the movie makes sense. It's as if Montiel, who also wrote the script, came up with a cool idea and then had no idea how to spin it out into an even minimally plausible story.
Channing Tatum stars as Jonathan "Milk" White, a cop who's just taken a new job in Queens, even though it means a two-hour commute that takes him away from his wife (Katie Holmes) and young daughter for the lion's share of the day. Jonathan works in the same precinct where his cop dad, long dead, used to be stationed, and his beat includes the depressed and depressing low-income housing project he grew up in. (He got his nickname by being the only white kid around.) But Jonathan has -- get this -- a secret. It turns out that at a tender age, he shot a junkie in self-defense; later, he was threatened by another local low-life and shot him too. For better or worse, Detective Charles Stanford (Al Pacino, muttering and shuffling and looking an awful lot like the guy who sweeps up the dust at the end of Fractured Fairy Tales), the former partner of Jonathan's late father, is on hand to cover up the deaths by simply refusing to investigate them. Case solved! Until 16 years later, when an aggressive bulldog reporter (Juliet Binoche) at the equivalent of the local Pennysaver starts receiving hand-scrawled letters about the unsolved "murders," which she prints in the paper, seemingly just for kicks. That really pisses off police captain Ray Liotta, causing him to strut about importantly with his mouth in a tight, straight little line. Although come to think of it, that's pretty much all Ray Liotta ever does these days anyway.
You see, someone wants Jonathan to pay for those long-ago deaths. But who? And why? Every neon arrow points to the local simpleton, Jonathan's childhood friend Vincent (played, as an adult, by Tracy Morgan, who's extremely touching in his few brief scenes). It was Vincent who helped Jonathan cover up the killings lo these many years ago. So why, then, is Ray Liotta skulking around with that half-smirk on his face? Might he possibly have something to do with the whole thing? Nah. OK, maybe. Well, all right -- yes. But don't jump to any conclusions, because you may not survive the leaps Montiel asks us to make.
Meanwhile, other questions go unanswered: Why is the character played by Katie Holmes so relentlessly bitchy to her sweet, obviously tortured husband? And how long will we have to wait for the Al Pacino character to come shambling back into the story in an old-man cardigan, ready to redress some long-ago wrong, or defend his not-so-good name, or something? Montiel -- who also made the 2006 A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints -- keeps layering the details, building up to a ludicrous showdown that promises to make sense of everything that came before, only to make things more muddled. He's also guilty of using too much flashy editing to tell a gritty urban story. Even if there were a compelling narrative here to begin with, Montiel's excessive technique would throw you right out of it.
But The Son of No One does have a few moments of grace, and almost all of them come from Channing Tatum. Tatum has previously starred in the Step Up movies. He played a quiet, reserved soldier in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation Dear John and also appeared, again playing a soldier, in Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss.
There's a reason Tatum keeps getting cast as soldiers, police officers and the like: He's dutiful and solid without being particularly exciting. And yet there's something quietly believable about him. As I watched him in a scene with Holmes, I noticed how she kept fluttering and bristling around him -- figuratively if not literally -- while he seemed to stay perfectly still, with every receptor on. Tatum will never be a big star, but I do think he's one of those actors who absorbs stray bits of energy around him and reflects them back with low-key strength. He's a better, more sensitive performer than this dud of a movie deserves, but his composure and his sturdiness go a long way toward making it watchable.
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