Capsule reviews for Dec. 14

Backtrace

The biggest problem with this absurdly incoherent crime thriller is that it’s played with a straight face. After all, how seriously can you take a story involving a bank robber (Matthew Modine) suffering from amnesia after taking a bullet to the head, and a fellow prison inmate (Ryan Guzman) who injects him with a spinal serum to coerce him to remember where he hid some cash? Adding to the amusement, Sylvester Stallone plays the detective trying to make sense of it all. That’s a pretty pointless exercise, because behind the shootouts and chase sequences, there’s no rationale — pharmaceuticals aside — for emotional investment in the outcome. (Rated R, 87 minutes).

The House That Jack Built

It’s less about a house built by Jack and more about the checkered artistic legacy constructed by Danish provocateur Lars von Trier (Dogville), whose ardent fan base might best appreciate this polarizing and introspective peek inside a tortured soul. Others will be turned off either by the gratuitously graphic violence or the rambling and tedious dialogue. At any rate, Jack (Matt Dillon) is a 1970s American serial killer and proud misogynist who rationalizes his grisly crimes as a sort of artful revenge against society. The film is designed for shock value, first and foremost, yet might not elicit the extreme reaction its filmmaker ultimately desires. (Rated R, 152 minutes).

The Quake

A common complaint for disaster movies is that they’re overwhelmed by special effects at the expense of character development. This follow-up to the Norwegian thriller The Wave has the opposite problem, namely that it’s more than an hour before we witness any meaningful ground shaking in Oslo, where an emotionally troubled geologist (Kristoffer Joner) happens to be stuck in an elevator with his ex-wife (Ane Dahl Torp) inside a crumbling high-rise hotel. The final act generates some genuine white-knuckle tension to compensate for the tedious conspiracy theories and personal bickering. For fans of the first film, this is more of the same, for better and worse. (Rated PG-13, 106 minutes).