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Health & Fitness

Movie Review - The Place Beyond the Pines

Movie Review - The Place Beyond the Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines **½ (R) This ambitious, lengthy drama tries for essentially a trilogy of overlapping tales, as the action shifts from one principal and time to another. Ryan Gosling opens as a motorcycle stunt rider on the carnival circuit. On one stop he sees a local lass he boinked (Eva Mendes) on last year’s visit, and learns a son resulted. He tries to do the right thing, even though she has another man in her life. He quits the carny and scrambles for whatever work he can find.  Unfortunately, crime becomes his only apparent way to make enough to convince Mendes he deserves to be part of their lives. That runs him afoul of the police - especially one ambitious young officer (Bradley Cooper).

The action shifts to Cooper’s problems within his own department, embodied by Ray Liotta’s role, which adds yet another dirty cop to his cinematic resume of bad guys. Cooper has a young son, too. That sets up Act Three, focusing on the boys 15 years later.

The first two segments are suspenseful and intriguing, with fine writing and acting behind the tale’s moral ambiguities. That’s what makes the next-generation story such a letdown. It’s founded on unlikely coincidence, and meanders from there.  After such a strong pair of setup episodes, the script for TNG should have been more plausible, or at least more coherent. Meatloaf famously sang years ago that two out of three ain’t bad. But it’s not always good enough, either. (4/12/13)

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