EW review: Stay away from 'Turistas'

By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- Would you believe it if I said that the fearsome homicidal baddie in "Turistas" is the most humane and morally responsible person in the movie?

Stranded by a bus accident during a humdinger of a party-hearty vacation in Brazil, a group of young revelers, played by pretty ciphers like Josh Duhamel and Melissa George in the usual wisps of clothing, find a bar on a beach, where they drink, dance, and wake up to discover they've been drugged and robbed. What they don't realize is that they're the prey of Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), a surgeon in a righteous huff over the parasitical underground market for vital organs in countries like his own.

Once the fresh-meat tourists have been lured to his rain-forest lair, he decides on a cornrowed Aussie baby doll and, as she lies naked, removes her liver. As he explains during the procedure, he plans to ship the organ to a hospital in Rio, where, for once, it can be transplanted into the body of a needy, impoverished Brazilian.

This guy, in other words, is Leatherface meets Doctors Without Borders.

The movie, with the exception of that lone squirmy surgery scene, is "Hostel" without sadism, thrills, or funky severed-limb F/X. It quickly turns into a very dull escape thriller. "Turistas" actually has a talented director, John Stockwell, who made "Blue Crush" and "crazy/beautiful," but his attempt to humanize a genre that was long ago taken over by sniveling gore geeks results in a film that thinks it's doing something it's not: giving kids a "message." The only message they'll receive is, Skip this one.

EW Grade: C-

'10 Items or Less'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Who doesn't love Morgan Freeman -- the slow-cooked, grizzled sexiness, the honeyed vocal cadences that coat stories about convicts and penguins and boxers with equal glazes of gravitas? Yes, yes, we love him, but the slight and persistently condescending odd-couple indie drama "10 Items or Less" relies far too smugly on his statesmanlike charms in a movie that assumes an insatiable appetite for irresistible Freemanitude.

With freckles and dignity so recognizable that the character is called, simply and coyly, Him, the star plays someone an awful lot like Morgan Freeman -- or at least like a famous and well-respected veteran actor who once starred in a crappy movie with Ashley Judd and is now researching a role in an indie pic.

Wandering into a downmarket L.A. grocery store where he intends to study the manager, Him instead becomes captivated by the spirited cash-register clerk working the express lane: She goes by the unlikely name of Scarlet, and she's played by Andalusia-born Paz Vega, surely the unlikeliest European hire, among plentiful local applicants for L.A. grocery-clerk positions, since Vega played L.A.'s unlikeliest "Mexican" maid in the awful Spanglish. (Like her compatriot Penelope Cruz, the star of Julio Medem's "Sex and Lucia" has so far been ill-used by Hollywood.)

Naturally, Him and Scarlet strike up a warm, temporary friendship, during which he gives her actorly tips to boost her absurdly low self-confidence at an upcoming job interview, and she gives him advice on how to live life with Spanish gusto. Along the way, he helpfully buys her a low-cut blouse at Target, a particularly class-crass episode during which the alleged pampered celebrity marvels at the store's common-folk bargains and chats up fat "regular" shoppers.

I don't know if it's ickier to assume that writer-director Brad Silberling ("Moonlight Mile") thinks the culture-clash jokes he pushes in "10 Items or Less" are charming because they're earnest, or because they're tongue-in-cheek. Either way, this sale is void.

EW Grade: D+

'Our Daily Bread'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

What the activist drama "Fast Food Nation" does with talk and the aid of movie stars, "Our Daily Bread," a riveting documentary by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, does even better, with no voice-over and barely a word spoken by the unidentified workers involved in matter-of-fact killing and harvesting.

The camera simply looks, with unflinching interest, as plants and animals are processed (in European industrial settings) into the food we eat. It's up to the viewer to distinguish tastes of horror, compassion, and awe at the efficiency involved in such matters of death and life.

EW Grade: A-

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