JASON STATHAM, JAMES FRANCO AND WINONA RYDER IN HOMEFRONT

Statham joined by Winona and James for an actioner without much style or depth

Gary Fleder's violent and mindless Homefront, like Scott Cooper's new movie Out of the Furnace, has as central plot elements a redneck meth lab and locals bent on revenge. But there are striking differences in aim and quality between these two features. Out of the Furnace is conspicuously focused both on good acting, with the in-depth character development that brings, and on filling in a richly atmospheric locale and setting a definite mood. To this end Cooper assembled a fine and dedicated cast and shot in Braddock, Pennsylvania , concentrated on a steel-working family, on the steel mill, and on the decaying little town. Homefront is primarily concerned with thriller action. If Out of the Furnace had some shortcomings, Homefront has many. Forswearing credibility or depth of story, it relies chiefly on menace, violence, cruelty, and the brazen use of a ten-year-old girl in danger to arouse audience anguish. If that sounds good to you, be my guest. Otherwise, avoid.

Written by Sly Stallone, Homefront stars Jason Statham, who specializes in playing violent, invincible men. When Statham's character Phil Broker has been captured and tied up and is being beaten brutally and water boarded (a relentlessly violent scene), he can still break away and beat his opponents to submission. In fact even his ten-year-old daughter Maddy (Izabela Vidovic) beats a male schoolyard bully to submission -- an act that starts the Appalachian-style locals on a feud with Broker. Fleder, who in seven pictures has only once veered into the Metacritic green zone, keeps thing fast, tense, and violent, eschewing other qualities.

Homefront apparently had a lower production budget than Furnace, but attempts what you'd think is a big-budget thing: two sets of big explosions and fires -- doubtless tempting scene-stealers when meth labs are involved; in real life they do often explode. We start out with one of these two years earlier, combined with a shootout. It's one of those fast, violent openings that sets a high stress and action level that's hard to maintain later without having the movie sag midway. This pre-title sequence also throws a back story at us that's so quick and fast it's blurred and hard to follow -- and this is one of those movies that doesn't show its fights clearly, preferring editing that chops them up and makes them incomprehensible. We wind up spending the first part of the movie trying to figure out what wen down at that DEA meth lab battle and in particular who exactly is so angry at Broker and why. This is not so much hard to figure out as it is implausible. Turns out Broker, an undercover Interpol agent who touched off this law enforcement massacre, killed the son of Danny T (Chuck Zito), the now imprisoned leader of a meth-producing biker gang called The Outcasts.

But what's really peculiar is that Broker, an ace law enforcement officer, has wound up, as the film begins two years later, chilling out, resettled with a new identity, caring for his little girl, a plantation, and a stable of horses, in an Appalachia-like region of Louisiana where Outcast allies roam. (Out of the Furnace shares with Homefront the weakness of fudging Appalachian-like regions that aren't in Appalachia.) By giving the bully a bloody nose, Maddy arouses the ire of his meth-head mom, Cassie (Kate Bosworth), who turns out to be the sister of none other than Morgan 'Gator' Bodine (James Franco), who runs the local meth lab, and when he somehow gets a full report on Broker's real identity, he sends former girlfriend Sheryl Marie Mott (Winona Ryder) to offer up Broker to Danny T and his gang on a platter in exchange for, Gator hopes, having the Outcasts distribute their product more widely to go with his improved lab.

Well, none of this matters so much. It's all mainly detecting signs of menace -- slashed tires, a torn toy bear, the daughter's vanished cat -- chasing around in a boat and in pickup trucks, and a big gunfight. When we see Broker pull a big case filled with assorted weapons out from under the bed, we breathe a sign of relief knowing the gunfight is coming and he'll be well prepared. It's also good to see Danny T's chief henchman on the outside, Cyrus Hanks, is played by the reliable Frank Grillo. But none of this has anything to do with real people or real life. We don't really care about anybody, and that's why the movie has to throw poor Maddy into mortal danger to force us to care. It doesn't really work. Nor are Winona Ryder and James Franco good bets as frontliners. It feels like they're just waiting to pick up their paychecks -- in Franco's case, presumably to finance his next vanity project. Franco, that smiling California boy, seems gravely miscast as a crafty southern drug manufacturer. Statham does not generally seek roles with much depth, but he played a more interesting action hero in Taylor Hackford's Feb. 2013 release, Parker. When interviewed for MPR though, the writer Chuck Logan didn't complain about Stallone's liberties in adapting his book, Homeland, for this movie. He says he was "dead in the water" and the name adaptation now gives him "some options." This looks like it wants to have a sequel, and there are more Broker books. So this Minnesota writer feels blessed. There's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

Homefront, 100 mins., debuted 27 Nov. in many countries; 6th Dec. in the UK. It will probably pay back its costs more successfully than Out of the Furnace, once again showing that there is no justice.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.