Word: evens
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Ogden Marsh, Iowa, is one of those remote towns even the flyovers don't fly over. But for decades its citizens' decency has matched the town's anonymity. Dr. Judy Dutton (Radha Mitchell) takes care of the births and the ordinary illnesses; her husband David (Timothy Olyphant), the local Sheriff, keeps the peace with the aid of his Deputy, Russell Clank (Joe Anderson). Nice town, y'know what I mean? Until that day during a school baseball game when Rory Hamill strode out of center field carrying a shotgun he wouldn't put down, and David had to shoot...
...screwing up another cop-pair's drug bust, Jimmy and Paul have been suspended without pay. Worse, Paul suspects his lovely wife (Rashida Jones) of cheating on him. Worst, Jimmy's daughter is getting married and he needs to produce $48,000 for the wedding. Even worster, a thief (mouthy Seann William Scott) has swiped the one precious item Jimmy owns - a 1952 Andy Pafko baseball card - whose sale was going to finance the wedding. The theft leads Jimmy and Paul to the drug lord Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz, who's good within the narrow guidelines) and his kidnap victim...
...Cullen, who've done a lot of TV series work (Heist, Lucky, Las Vegas). Smith has acknowledged he took this gig for the money and because he likes the genre. The first impulse is more evident here than the second. His strength has always been less in camerabatics, or even directorial competence, than in the creation of wayward characters with a little heart and filthy-funny mouths. He can't do that with a rote screenplay by other people. Blindfold any film fan during the closing credits, and he'd never know that the director was the auteur of Clerks...
...innocent viewer would guess is that the people making the movie like making jokes about other movies; Smith does that, and so do too many other directors. Early on, there's a scene - even if you haven't seen the movie, you've seen the clip a dozen times - where Paul interrogates a suspect using tough-guy lines from other movies: Heat, Training Day, Jaws, Schindler's List, The Color Purple and finally Willis's own Die Hard. (Willis says, "I've never seen that one.") If the riff is Smith's contribution, it's both a testing...
...message, but she can't keep it. In fact, the message is never actually sent to her phone; it's stored on TigerText's servers. After the politician's specified time span has elapsed - anywhere from one minute to five days - the message ceases to exist. There's even a "delete on read" setting, which counts down from 60 after a message is opened and erases its text at zero. (See the top iPhone applications...