Shannon's a hoot in everything....he internalizes seething rage and then lets it radiate out of him. No current actor equals him this regard. He can turn on the barely controlled malice and practically make himself glow in the dark with it.... you view him anxiously, never sure what he's going to do next. Nominated several times, this guy has an Academy Award in his future.
"99 Homes" a hellish, you-are-there tour through the housing market collapse and its collateral human damage, provides Shannon with another spectacular villain to portray. As Rick Carver, a predatory Orlando real estate broker, he swoops down on the poor middle class souls who've defaulted on their mortgages. With the help of two cops and crew of handymen, Carver orchestrates and supervises the crushing humiliation of throwing families and their belongings out their houses and on to the street. The movie unflinchingly depicts these public foreclosures in every embarrassing detail.
As Steve Carver, Shannon invokes far more fear and loathing than he ever did when he played General Zod in "Man Of Steel" He doesn't have to waste time hurling superheroes into buildings here.....in this movie, he owns the buildings. And he's an equal opportunity scumbag - Carver shafts the government worse than the homeowners whose lives he destroys, charging Fannie Mae to restock the homes with appliances he's already stolen.
Such a perfect Devil should have a poor sucker to play Carver's Faust, and the movie finds him one in Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield, now looking and sounding like a grown-up after duly serving out his two film sentence as Spider-Man). Nash, a unemployed construction worker whom Carver foreclosed on, figuratively signs his name in blood and accepts contracting work from Carver. Desperate for money and eager to reclaim his house, Nash ends up as Carver's foreclosing minion, conducting the same soul-crushing public shaming of defaulting homeowners that he himself endured. And that job from hell also includes being complicit in Carver's government-bilking scams.
Both compelling and infuriating, the film's like watching a series of horrible traffic accidents where you know who's at fault. Garfield does have the tougher role here, playing a fundamentally decent man whose moral compass has been thrown off course by his seduction into evil. But it's Michael Shannon you never take your eyes off of........he's not just a bad guy, he 's a walking talking abyss of greed, driven only by money. (You could say we're all living in this movie now, having placed a Steve Carver in the White House....)
After the docu-drama-like re-enactments of hapless people losing their homes, the movie loses some of its immediacy in its need to dramatically wrap up the Devil-Faust storyline between Carver and Nash. It's satisfactory for an audience, we suppose, but it smacks of contrived screenwriting 101 in its inevitability.
But don't let that keep you from the film.....it's still a gripper from first minute to last and any movie that allows the Shannon-ator to wreak havoc is okey-doke with us. So the BQ will sign the settlement papers for "99 Homes" with 4 stars. (****) We're sold.
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