Nothing says Thanksgiving like a beat-’em-up written by Sylvester Stallone in which Jason Statham gets to knock the stuffing out of James Franco. If you think that’s a spoiler, you’ve either never seen an audience-pandering movie or the poster for “Homefront,” which shows a snake-eyed Mr. Franco glowering, in what appears to be hell, under an image of the stern-looking Mr. Statham overlaid with an American flag and embracing a child. The movie is as blunt an instrument as the poster, but it’s also crammed with enough moving parts and unexpected distractions (Winona Ryder as a “meth whore”) to make it an indefensibly enjoyable piece of exploitation hackwork.
There’s a lot of plot, some of it nonsensical, and a lot of action, some of it risible. The story opens with Mr. Statham’s character, Phil Broker, in a fright wig and biker clothes, pretending to be a heavy. An undercover drug enforcement agent, Phil is soon waving a gun in a darkly lit, jaggedly patched-together gun battle that pits bikers against the law and ends with his being threatened by a biker kingpin. This is basically a Hells Angels-style version of “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.” It also appears to be what screenwriting gurus like Syd Field call the Inciting Incident. In other words, Something Happens that sets the plot on its nutty way, and the director, Gary Fleder (“Kiss the Girls,” “Runaway Jury”),competently connects the programmatic dots.
There’s another big Plot Point, but this one happens off screen: Phil’s wife conveniently dies, which finds him retiring from the D.E.A. and moving to Louisiana, that land of Spanish moss and filmmaking tax incentives, with his 10-year old, Maddy (Izabela Vidovic).
There, Phil plays mother and father to Maddy, while they settle into a handsome, sprawling house and ride their horses under the atmospherically weeping trees. There’s even a Romantic Interest (Rachelle Lefevre) to suggest that Phil may, you know, one day heal. But then Maddy ends up in a fight with a school bully, whose mother, Cassie (Kate Bosworth), then comes a-howling. It’s unclear whether Maddy’s fight is the first Plot Point or if Phil’s fight with the boy’s father is, but it all leads to the Hero Facing His Problem.
Superficially, this would be the apparently inbred cretins who populate this rural American freak show and are either doing or making meth amphetamine. First among these is Cassie, a hollowed-out harridan who sics her meth-making brother, Gator (Mr. Franco), on Phil.
The men are a ridiculous match in an increasingly preposterous movie — a fine Ms. Ryder plays Sheryl, Gator’s partner in meth and corn-pone accents — but Mr. Franco rolls his eyeballs with just enough commitment in his dinner theater version of the charismatic Southern psycho. All crazies, it seems, lead back to Robert Mitchum in “The Night of the Hunter.” It’s hard not to think that Mr. Franco, an irrepressible sly boots, took this role only so that he could get beaten up by Mr. Statham — well, that and the paycheck.
