McCannick
Starring David Morse, Cory Monteith, Mike Vogel, Ciaran Hinds and Tracie Thoms
Directed by Josh C. Waller
McCanick is Morse’s great stab at a character study, the movie and actor introducing himself working on a punching bag, as a man with bottled up emotions. It starts out quiet as the titular detective McCanick goes to work on his birthday, gets informsation about criminals whose time in prison are up, and does their patrols with his reluctant, younger partner. But chases through dingy hotel stairs begin, shots get fired and the movie portraying these events goes berserk. The almost absent score turns into an undercurrent turns into a torrent of sound. The sun goes out, McCanick relying on neon green or red to help him stagger through hallways or the dirty streets of Philadelphia.
A curious thing about this movie is that it is one of the last of Monteith’s appearances on the big screen. He gets to play two characters here. There was something missing in his performance as the post-jail Simon, and it makes me think of what could have been done. Maybe those involved in creating this character could have added more mystery to him. But we still have pre-jail Simon during the flashbacks, who is more interesting. Monteith somehow incorporates an animalistic spirit of a person surviving the streets (the long hair and dirty clothes helped immensely to bring forth this impression). His performance captures the courage and the craziness that the movie delicately escalates to.
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