‘Ranch’ in middle of nowhere

June 30, 2010|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Have you been waiting for Helen Mirren to run the best little whorehouse in Reno? Have you been waiting for her to do so with a pile of blond hair, married to Joe Pesci, but desperately in love with an Argentine boxer — all in a movie directed by Dame Helen’s husband? Yes? Well, you’re likely to have “Love Ranch,’’ the movie that makes these dreams come true, all to yourself.

Why wonder how this happened? It just has. Mr. Helen Mirren, Taylor Hackford, the director of such so-so entertainments as “Ray,’’ takes his time getting us nowhere in particular. We’re in 1976 Nevada, where prostitution is perfectly legal, and Mirren and Pesci play Grace and Charlie Bontempo. They run the Love Ranch, which appears to be based on the soapy story of the Mustang Ranch, the state’s first licensed brothel. Grace keeps the books. Charlie beds the staff (well, he doesn’t use a bed exactly). He sinks some of their money into Armando Bruza (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), a boxer eager for a rematch against Muhammad Ali. Judging from Bruza’s performance during a terribly staged fight sequence, Ali could simply have phoned in his left hooks from the set of “The Greatest.’’

I suppose Charlie’s mistake is to make Grace Bruza’s manager. The movie’s mistake is to make the attraction obvious after 20 minutes but spend an hour unfurling it. Usually, that’s called restraint. But here, with not much else going on, it’s ridiculous. Peris-Mencheta has a dubious boxing physique but muscular charisma. The movie’s teary, confessional final act does him no favors.

To play the ladies of Love Ranch, the movie rounds up the usual suspects — Gina Gershon, Taryn Manning, Bai Ling — and a few women, like Elise Neal and Scout Taylor-Compton, who seem happy to be here. Presumably, they came for Mirren’s career advice (girls, stick to queens and alcoholic detectives). As it is, they have nothing to do but bicker and look sexy doing very little. Only Manning is really any good.

Hair and clothes provide the movie’s only real sense of history (afros, mustaches, butterfly collars) — and a marquee threatens the arrival of the Captain and Tennille. Otherwise, we could be anywhere on the time-space continuum. Cancer, comas, and craniotomies are used as melodramatic devices, though they do nothing to shrink the movie’s running time.