It’s easy to get sidetracked by the juicy A-list gossip, the glamour of the awards shows and their snubs and the unerringly off-the-wall stories and deviance that is reported about Tinseltown and conclude that Hollywood is the American Mecca of bad decisions and quizzical behavior. However, this is a shortsighted and somewhat naïve look at the industry. Hollywood is about one thing: money. This is the only given about Hollywood, more so than even ‘sex sells’. Every so often though, a film comes out that makes me temporarily question this underlying truth. Writer/director David J. Burke’s film Edison Force has four monstrously big box office draws in it, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, LL Cool J and Justin Timberlake (in his acting debut, no less), and yet the film was dumped unceremoniously onto DVD without ever receiving any kind of national theatrical release; it should be noted that the film did close out Toronto’s prestigious film festival and make the rounds on the festival circuit in late ‘05. Regardless of its festival run though, those four names alone should have merited a $20 million opening weekend.
Timberlake stars in Edison Force as Josh Pollack, a rookie journalist working for a weekly paper so middling and limited in scope that its own publisher (Freeman) refers to it as a coupon clipper. Covering a the trial of a reputed drug dealer, Pollack becomes intrigued when he sees the drug dealer thanking the police officer (LL Cool J) who had just testified against him. Pollack begins to dig a little and uncovers a massive case of citywide police corruption and is forced on the run.
A veteran of countless TV crime dramas, Burke seems at home in Edison Force. The movie is quite mediocre, but it’s a mindlessly enjoyable mediocre; the kind of film that would make one stop and watch for twenty minutes upon finding it while flipping through channels. The concept that a young fill-in-the-blank discovers a ring of corruption and is then targeted has been done time and again by everyone from Richard Donner to Antoine Fuqua—John Grisham’s entire career is thanks to this idea—but the formulaic material is handled here by Burke about as well as it can be. As I am quick to point out, formula isn’t bad on its own, it becomes bad when it’s combined with filmmakers who are lacking in vision or originality. And if anything is apparent from Edison Force, it’s that Burke is a masterfully reactive filmmaker.
Timberlake’s acting is not yet as good as his singing (and that’s saying something) and Burke minimizes the negative repercussions of this as much as he can by leaving the more difficult acting to Freeman, Spacey, J and the scene-stealing Dylan McDermott. Since there are few filmgoers who will be surprised by any of the actual plot developments, Burke focuses his energy on presenting the action to audiences in a colorful, glossy, splashy and eye-captivating fashion; his ability to show his cast members inside their cars during the high speed chase sequences should definitely be noted.
I don’t have a lot of opinions about Edison Force—it’s not the most thought provoking project—but the most important sentiment, and one that needs to be repeated, is this: Edison Force is a mediocre movie, but it’s a mindlessly enjoyable mediocre. Think of Point Break minus the surfing and sky-diving. And why this mindlessly enjoyably mediocre product with so many marketable stars wasn’t released to theaters, I’ll never quite understand.
Chris Neumer
yes, it's true: Edison Force was originally titled Edison and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival under the latter name. The title was changed when people began questioning whether Edison was a biopic about Thomas Edison.
