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It’s Friday afternoon. You promised your girlfriend you’d take her out to dinner and a movie, but there’s also a party you really want to get to. Let us say dinner takes an hour and a half and you’re going to a two hour movie. Depending on what time your movie starts, that could take up your whole evening. Wouldn’t it be great if you could kill two birds with one stone and get your dinner and movie out of the way at the same time? This is, essentially, the idea behind Cinebarre, Mt. Pleasant’s newest movie theater, housed in the Houston-Northcutt Boulevard location previously occupied by Regal Mt. Pleasant Stadium 12.

As a movie theater, Cinebarre’s ticket prices are a bit high, at $9 for adults, but are pretty reasonable if you use your college ID for a student discount ($7). Inside, the lobby of the theater has the appearance of a very open, but pretty cool bar, complete with two pool tables. They offer 12 beers on tap, with some decent selections like Stella Artois and Highland Gaelic Ale, as well as a quality list of bottles. The actual theaters themselves are unique. They have removed every other row of seating and replaced it with a counter for food, leaving the theater with only six rows and 60 seats total. Once seated, your server approaches and breaks things down. You place your order during previews while the lights are up and if you have any additional requests during the movie you simply write what you want on one of the provided white cards which the servers make periodic checks for during the film.

The menu fits as pretty standard bar food, with a heavy emphasis on fried items. Appetizers include staples like mozzarella sticks and hot wings. Your entree choices come in either pizza or sandwich form and range from $8-10.

For the entertainment side of our evening, we decided to watch Don Cheadle‘s latest, the war-on-terrorism themed spy film, Traitor (MetaCritic Score: 60). I’m a big fan of Cheadle’s work and Traitor‘s ads cited a review claming it was a 2008 equivalent of last year’s critically acclaimed Bourne Ultimatum, a bold statement that definitely grabbed my attention. While this claim drew me into the theater, it also established some pretty high expectations.

We decided to go with potato skins ($7) and fried pickle spears ($6) for our appetizers and they arrived about 15 minutes into the film. After waiting about 10 minutes for our food to reach a less than tongue melting temperature, we were able to try them out. The fried pickles were a first for me and the flavor was pretty unique. The combination of dill and ranch worked well together, but they were more than a little difficult to eat because the pickle kept escaping from its battered exterior. While they do give you a surface to eat on, it’s quite awkward trying to sit up and use it. We found ourselves holding our plates in our laps, using paper towels as placemats, and struggling to keep ourselves clean while still paying attention to the movie. The messiness of this dish ended up being representative of our dining experience as a whole. As a quick side note, I highly recommend avoiding movies with any subtitles at Cinebarre; we missed a fair share of lines while we navigated through our meal.

As we progressed further into the film, I began to feel like “messy” and “confusing” were going to be the major themes of the evening. Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s film has an interesting premise, a deep cover US operative infiltrating an Islamic terrorist organization, but the execution left much to be desired. Rather than tight and intriguing, Traitor‘s story came off as simply muddled. It takes about 40 minutes for Cheadle’s character, Samir, to show that he is any different from the terrorists he’s supposed to be spying on. In addition, some of the elements that they played up in the previews, mainly Jeff Daniels role as Cheadle’s boss, were minimized during the actual movie. If the studio really wanted to make this concept work, they should have broken the story into two movies and spent one of them giving us more of the story of how Samir became the character that he is at the start of the film. As it stands now, we are largely left to make our own assumptions and it detracts from Traitor‘s overall effectiveness.

About 30 minutes into the film we received our entrees. I went with the “Blue Velvet” burger ($8.50). It came topped with bleu cheese, buffalo hot sauce, and chipotle mayo and was served with thin hand cut fries. It seemed like the buffalo sauce may have been used a bit liberally, as it became the dominate flavor. I enjoyed the burger, but it wasn’t terribly impressive. The fries, on the other hand, were delicious. I love thin shoestring style fries and when they’re fresh cut it’s all the better. My partner was disappointed with the fried green tomato sandwich ($8). She thought the breading on the tomato was too thick and the lemon caper aioli that sounded so appealing on the menu was rather bland. On the positive side, she did really enjoy Cinebarre’s house made potato chips. If I go again, I’m planning to break up the heavy fried stuff with one of their 10″ specialty pizzas. The one that most caught my eye was the “Braveheart” ($10) which comes covered with spinach, a four cheese blend, sun dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, roasted garlic, goat cheese, and olive oil.

Around the same time our entrees arrived, we received our drinks from the bar. I ordered their “famous” caramel porter float, a scoop of vanilla ice cream served in a pint glass with Saranac caramel porter. I was a bit skeptical of the idea of a beer float, but the result was an overwhelming success. The sweet caramel flavor of the beer blended wonderfully with the cool vanilla. This is something that I fully intend to try to recreate at home. My partner chose the sangria ($5) and claimed that it was far and away her favorite part of the evening.

As we finished our entrees, Traitor finally started to pick up. Cheadle is a tremendous actor and even in a poorly organized mess of a movie, his talent manages to shine through. He isn’t given a lot to work with, but he does milk the most that he can out of a largely flat script. The film does also manage to build some suspense as it draws near the conclusion. Samir is faced with some extremely difficult decisions as he walks the line between his need to participate enough to blend in with the terrorists and his moral obligation to not harm innocent people. The tension comes to a head as the real terrorists ask him to plan a major attack on American soil. Despite Traitor‘s flaws, I will give Nachmanoff credit for giving Traitor an inventive and totally unexpected ending that, in my opinion, saved the film from a failing grade.

We concluded our meal with Cinebarre’s only dessert selection, a wonderful hot fudge cake ($6) topped with chocolate icing, walnuts, whipped cream, and drizzled with caramel. It is incredibly rich and decadent, but not to the point of being overwhelming. It’s not something that you’d want to eat every night, but it’s definitely a great way to treat yourself.

Overall, both Cinebarre’s food and Traitor fall into the category simply described as, “meh.” They both had strengths, but were brought back to mediocrity by their equal weaknesses. I do feel that Cinebarre has a place in this world, though it isn’t what I initially imagined. Next time there is a big blockbuster movie hitting theaters, round up a bunch of guys, order a few beers, munch on some solid, greasy bar food and enjoy this tribute to American excess. Similarly, Traitor, isn’t the type of film that I’d recommend shelling out money to see in a theater. It simply isn’t the Bourne quality thriller that I was expecting and hoping for. That being said, if you’re a big fan of spy movies and love Don Cheadle, it’s probably worth renting once it’s released to DVD.

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