Film Review: Edison (dir by David J. Burke)

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the town of Edison, a reporter named Pollack (Justin Timberlake) is convinced that he’s uncovered evidence of massive police corruption. His editor, Moses Ashford (Morgan Freeman), responds by firing Pollack but then rehires him on the condition that he actually do the work and interview everyone involved. Pollack is confused until he sees that Ashford has a Pulitzer Prize in his Edison bachelor pad.

FRAT stands for First Response Assault and Tactical. Led by Captian Tilman (John Heard) and protected by duplicitous politician Jack Reigert (Cary Elwes), FRAT has made Edison safe but at what cost? The constitution is regularly trampled. Drug dealers are summarily executed. Sgt. Lazaerov (Dylan McDermott) confiscates and uses the drugs himself while the newest recruit, Detective Deeds (LL Cool J), worries that he’ll be executed when he declines to lie in court. Deeds has reason to be worried because he witnesses the attempted assassination of both Pollack and his girlfriend (Piper Perabo).

Teaming up with Detective Leon Wallace (Kevin Spacey), Pollack and Ashford try to get Deeds to turn on FRAT and expose the trouble in Edison.

First released in 2005, Edison was produced by Randall Emmett, who is today best-known for producing (and occasionally directing) Bruce Willis’s final films. Emmett specializes in getting name actors to play small roles in what are otherwise B-movies. In an Emmett film, De Niro, Stallone, Travolta, or Nicolas Cage might get top billing but usually, they only have a few minutes of screentime. Edison is unique in that Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey (who was still considered to be a big name back in 2005) both actually have fairly large roles. Though LL Cool J and Justin Timberlake are the stars of the film, it still appears that it probably took Freeman and Spacey longer than a day to shoot their scenes and that truly does set this film apart from other Emmett productions. I should also note that Spacey wears an incredibly tacky hairpiece while Freeman gets an extended dance scene set to Time Has Come Today by The Chambers Brothers.

Is the film itself any good? Eh, not really. It’s a bit disjointed. John Heard was a good actor but this movie was made when he was at the height of his “9-11 was an inside job” nuttiness and he gives a cartoonish performance as the main bad guy. Cary Elwes is entertaining as the crooked politician but it’s hard not to feel that the film would have been more interesting if he and Kevin Spacey had switched roles. LL Cool J is not particularly convincing as a cop so naive that he’s shocked to discover that there’s corruption on the force. As for Justin Timberlake, this was actually his debut as an actor. Timberlake is always at his best playing morally shady characters, like in Alpha Dog or The Social Network. In this film, he has to play earnest and outraged and he’s never particularly convincing. If anything, he comes across as being a little whiny.

That said, the idea behind Edison is at least interesting. FRAT — like countless other special police units in the country — has become untouchable by actually doing its job. The streets are safer, as long as you don’t get on FRAT’s bad side. Who watches the watchmen? Edison asked this now common question in 2005, when America was still embracing the survelliance state. Flaws and all, Edison was ahead of its time.

Guilty Pleasure No. 77: Captain Ron (dir by Thom Eberhardt)

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1992’s Captain Ron opens with Martin Harvey (Martin Short) suffering through another day as a corporate drone in Chicago. What is Martin’s job like? It’s the type of job where there’s broken glass on the sidewalk because someone jumped out a window. Martin is ready for an escape and he gets it when he’s informed that his deceased uncle has left him a yacht that once belonged to Clark Gable. The only catch is that the yacht is on a Caribbean island and Martin will need to sail it to Miami if he wants to sell it. Martin decides this will be a great opportunity get away from cold Chicago with his wife (Mary Kay Place), daughter (Meadow Sisto), and son (Benjamin Salisbury).

It turns out that the yacht is in terrible shape. And so, for that matter, is the sailor who has been assigned to help the Harveys set sail. Ron “Everyone calls me Captain Ron” Rico (Kurt Russell) is a somewhat slovenly drunk who wears sunglasses over his eyepatch and who is in debt to some dangerous people. It also turns out that, despite talking a big game, Captain Ron is fairly incompetent as a navigator. He knows how the boat works. He knows how to keep the engine from overheating. He knows how to borrow Martin’s video camera so he can film Marin’s wife and daughter while they walk around top deck. What Captain Ron can’t do is actually get the boat to where it needs to go. Instead, Captain Ron takes the family to a number of islands, gets them into trouble with pirates, and also becomes the surrogate father-figure that the family needs.

There’s a lot to criticize about Captain Ron. The script cannot quite decide just who exactly it wants these characters to be. Moments of sentimental family comedy are mixed with scenes of Captain Ron leering at Martin’s wife and daughter. Martin and his wife get stuck in the boat’s shower and I’ll admit that I laughed at the scene because something similar happened to me in college but it still felt as if it was included solely to get the movie up to a PG-13. The film has the making of being a wild comedy but it never quite goes as far as it could. Martin gets upset but he never gets truly frantic, which is a waste of Martin Short’s talents. Ron has the makings to be a true force of chaos but the film instead just makes him incompetent. There’s an odd scene where Martin considers shooting Captain Ron with a flare gun. It comes out of nowhere and it’s not ever mentioned again. It hints at a film that could have been a lot more subversive than it turned out to be.

That said, I did enjoy Captain Ron. The island scenery is lovely. The shots of that dilapidated yacht on the ocean do, almost despite themselves, achieve a sort of grandeur. And then you’ve got Kurt Russell, wearing a red speedo and apparently having the time of his life as the incompetent yet rather cocky Captain Ron. It’s a fun performance, even if the film sometimes doesn’t seem to be sure what to do with it. That the film remains watchable is a testament to the charm of Kurt Russell. Much like the title character, Captain Ron is a film that’s likable even when it shouldn’t be.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Trailer: Act of Valor

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Arleigh

Act of Valor is a film that I’ve been following for quite a bit now. For those who haven’t already heard about this film the premise is quite simple. It’s a film about a team of Navy SEALs who undergo a mission to stop a terrorist plot against the U.S. It’s a plot that has been done countless of time and not just with Navy SEALs as the protagonists. But with the Navy’s elite special-operations team having been involved in several well-documented events this past year (mainly the operation to find Osama bin Laden and his subsequent killing) they’ve become the go-to special-ops team Hollywood has latched onto.

What separates Act of Valor from other war action-thrillers of the past, present and future is the nature of it’s cast. While the film does have professional actors such as Roselyn Sanchez, Emilio Rivera and Nestor Serrano the ones who make up the SEAL team in the film are actual active duty members of the Navy SEALs. The film also uses actual SEAL team missions which the writer, Kurt Johnstad, had been given access to in order to create the screenplay for the film.

The trailer makes mention that the SEAL team members are real SEALs and they’re also using up-to-date tactics and equipment which every action filmmaker from Kathryn Bigelow to Michael Bay must be drooling to get their hands on. There is one question that will pop up as more and more people are exposed to this film leading up to it’s release.

Will the active duty SEALs be up to the task of actually emoting for the camera when not conducting the very operations in the film they’ve trained for years to perfect?

I guess we will have to wait until the film’s release date on February 17, 2012 to find the answer to that question.