![]() There are few if any pleasures in movies today as reliable as watching Statham lay waste to a succession of toothless in-breds and other unworthy suitors with a few swift punches and well-timed kicks - and “Homefront” offers no such shortage, including one particularly artful instance of death by pitchfork. And with the ineffectual local sheriff (Clancy Brown) on the take, it falls to Broker to fend for himself. With a little help from his barmaid girlfriend (Winona Ryder), he reaches out to Broker’s old biker foe, Danny T (Chuck Zito), and proposes a trade: Broker’s whereabouts in exchange for access to Danny T’s statewide meth distribution network. Soon, Gator is playing his menacing pranks on Broker’s homestead, but when he stumbles onto the ex-lawman’s true identity, he decides to up the ante. That’s when mama Klum (Kate Bosworth) steps in and asks her brother, small-time meth dealer Gator (James Franco), for a favor: “Mess with their heads like you do everyone else.” And Franco, who’s had an even busier year than Stallone (acting in eight movies and directing three), gets a grand entrance here - taking a baseball bat to a house full of tweaked-out squatters - that raises one’s hopes for what this always-inventive actor might do with such a role. And things only get worse when an after-school parent conference with the offended Klum family ends with Broker giving the bully’s belligerent dad (Marcus Hester) a beatdown of his own. But if Broker is a master of many elite skills, camouflage isn’t one of them - not in this good-ol’-boy bayou backwater, and especially not after 10-year-old chip-off-the-old-block Maddy (newcomer Izabela Vidovic) flattens a bully on the school playground. We then flash forward two years to find Broker, now a widower and single dad, having hung up his badge (and wig) and relocated to sleepy Rayville, La., travel beyond state lines evidently prohibited by the movie’s tax-credit financing. ![]() (In a wry play on Statham’s trademark shaven-headed appearance, the undercover Broker sports a long, straggly mane of ’80s-style rocker hair.) When we first meet him, Broker is an undercover DEA agent (by way of Interpol, so as to allow for the actor’s Brit accent) about to snag a gang of meth-running Louisiana bikers, an op that ends with Broker’s cover (and several square blocks of Shreveport) blown sky-high, and the son of the gang honcho riddled with bullets. The ever-prolific Stallone (who has “Escape Plan” still in theaters and “Grudge Match” due at year’s end) adapted “Homefront” from a novel by crime writer Chuck Logan - one in a series featuring the character of ex-Minnesota cop Phil Broker - originally envisioning the project as a starring vehicle for himself before passing the torch to Statham, who ably fills the character’s ass-kicking shoes.
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