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HARD CANDY Moviegoers will exhaust themselves trying to determine whether this is an exploitation flick, a feminist empowerment drama or a particularly feisty coming-of-age yarn with a diabolical twist. It immediately puts the audience at unease by exploring the burgeoning relationship between 32-year-old Jeff (Patrick Wilson) and 14-year-old Hayley (Ellen Page). But just as we fear that Hayley will become another victim of an Internet predator, the tables are turned in dramatic fashion, with Jeff's luscious Lolita morphing into an avenging angel. Wilson is excellent, yet the real discovery is Page, who never shies away from the implication that Hayley might be deeply disturbed by her own set of demons. Eventually, we realize that Hard Candy isn't necessarily a movie about lost innocence. In a modern world ruled by technology that allows 14-year-old girls and 32-year-old men to easily hook up, it's possible that this innocence never had a chance to flourish in the first place. ***
LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN The latest hollow exercise in hipster chic is the sort of convoluted, twist-packed yarn that strains to be unpredictable but is actually even easier to figure out than those Jumble puzzles that appear in the dailies. Josh Hartnett, cinema's favorite lightweight, plays Slevin, a seemingly guileless guy who finds himself caught in a power struggle between two rival crime lords (Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley). Bruce Willis is on hand as, natch, the taciturn hitman who turns out to be more involved than he initially appears. Hartnett would seem hard-pressed to carry a basket of laundry, let alone carry a motion picture, while the three reliable vets seem almost bored trying to keep up with the plot's changes of direction. The movie's saving grace is Lucy Liu: Cast as a chatty neighbor who helps Slevin piece together the mystery, she's a breath of fresh air in a genre that too often suffocates on its own fumes of pungent testosterone. **
THE SENTINEL Michael Douglas plays Harrison Ford and Kiefer Sutherland costars as Tommy Lee Jones in The Sentinel, the latest thriller that tries to put one over on the audience but ends up only fooling itself. Yet while it's clearly no match for The Fugitive, this "innocent man on the lam" yarn gets some mileage (well, yardage) out of a fairly taut first act and an appropriately constipated Michael Douglas performance. Douglas is cast as Pete Garrison, a career Secret Service agent ballsy enough to carry on an affair with the first lady (Kim Basinger). But evidence soon surfaces that an inside man is helping a foreign outfit plot to assassinate the President (David Rasche), and agent David Breckinridge (Sutherland) becomes convinced that Garrison, his former mentor, is the traitors. Director Clark Johnson doubtless planned to deliver a hand-wringing thriller filled with unexpected twists and turns, but when the results are this obvious, even good intentions can find themselves caught in the line of fire. **
SLITHER If nothing else, this deserves credit for offering a break from the current trend of nihilistic horror flicks whose sole purpose is to devise groovy new ways to kill people. Make no mistake: Slither offers gore by the bucketful, but the movie's in the spirit of those enjoyable, us-against-them monster yarns that ran rampant in decades past. Starting out as an alien invasion opus before switching gears to become a quasi-zombie flick, the film involves a gelatinous E.T. whose master plan employs hundreds of slugs that take over humans' bodies by entering through the mouths; naturally, the entire planet is doomed unless an amiable sheriff (Nathan Fillion) and a concerned housewife (Elizabeth Banks) can figure out a way to shut down the otherworldly operation. Slither takes its time getting started, but once it does, it never lets up, throwing the blood, slime and one-liners (some woeful, most witty) at the screen with feverish abandon. ***
TAKE THE LEAD Inspired by a true story, this centers on the efforts of ballroom dance instructor Pierre Dulaine (Antonio Banderas) to teach his elegant craft to a high school class of rowdy inner-city youths. Initially resistant to his efforts, the kids eventually come around once Pierre agrees to mesh his moves with their hip-hop music. The issue of whether the best way to reach troubled kids is by diluting what they should learn with components of what they like is an interesting one -- it would take a more courageous movie than this one to even attempt to answer that, but for its part, this allows both sides to weigh in on the argument. The climactic dance competition is clumsily presented, and I could have done without the heavy-handed "villains" of the piece. Still, Banderas and his young co-stars are appealing, and the subplots involving the students' troubled home lives carry more currency than one might expect. **1/2