Word: stolid
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...Taken could have been a real movie, and a good one. It spices its torture-porn premise - a man trying to save his daughter from being peddled as the tender meat in a white-slave ring - with Neeson's stolid, solid presence. But the film promises so much more than it delivers that by the end, I felt like registering a complaint with the Obama Administration's consumer-protection squad...
...stolid face and solid musculature, which we know because he goes topless more than his leading ladies do. He has vigorous skirmishes on roofs, in cars and in hotel rooms. He takes as severe a beating--and shows as much emotion--as a crash-test dummy. He's a government spy whom his government wants dead, and he's mourning the violent death of his girlfriend. He so resembles another famous agent that you half-expect him to say, "The name is Bourne. Jason Bourne...
...movie suffers from the absence, even in flashbacks, of seraphic-satanic Eva Green, who played Vesper in Casino. But Kurylenko, a lovely Russian-Ukrainian hybrid who is oddly duskied up to look vaguely Latina, is a whiz at raising Quantum's temperature and gradually luring Bond out of his stolid shell. It's a pleasure to watch this model-turned-actress, also seen briefly illuminating Max Payne, turn into a model actress. Here's one Bond girl who's a richly appealing woman, with or without Bond...
...same deal in this summer's Death Race, where the Jason Statham character also loses his wife and baby, and endures the same frustrating near-miss of spotting the killer. But Statham channeled his mourning into a manly, stoic rage. Wahlberg's Max mostly broods; he's stolid, anomic, the walking (or, at the beginning and end of the film, swimming) dead...
Uncharacteristically tentative and nervous, and sometimes spoke too fast. At times he appeared drained of the passion that animated his strongest debates as a presidential candidate. Grew more intense near the end, but without much personality or fire. Still, reassuringly stolid and tough...