In short: The Owners (2020)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers, but you have seen a movie before, haven’t you?

Country numbskulls in cliché chav garb Nathan (Ian Kenny) and Terry (Andrew Ellis) team up with their equally ridiculous pro small time criminal Gaz (Jake Curran) to rob the huge mansion of their town’s – one hopes retired – physician, Doctor Huggins (Sylvester McCoy). It isn’t exactly difficult finding a time when the Doctor (tee-hee) and his dementia-plagued wife Ellen (Rita Tushingham) aren’t home.

However, because these people are risible idiots, they accidentally drag Nathan’s girlfriend Mary (Maisie Williams) into the affair, or at least the mansion. Things don’t improve when the supposedly full safe Terry has been talking about turns out to be mechanical instead of the electronic kind Gaz would supposedly be able to crack (given the lack of criminal effectiveness on display, I’m sceptical). So, the idiots decide to turn the break-in into a home invasion, against Mary’s half-hearted protests, and get the safe’s code out of the doctor by force. Needless to say, they have problems realizing this goal; and because this is a horror film, the elderly gentleman and his wife are of course serial killers, among other things.

French director Julius Berg’s The Owners is a bit of a mess, mostly because the script by Berg, Mathieu Gompel and Geoff Cox can’t find another way to drive their narrative forward apart from making every single character outrageously stupid. Sure, for one of them, there will be a plot twist-y reason to not act effectively towards the criminal goal, but that just opens a different can of him being stupid in a different way, and really makes little sense when you, apparently unlike the writers, spend more than five minutes to think about the mechanics of his specific betrayal. And the film’s really not so exciting that a viewer won’t find any time pondering these things as a viewer.

The script also has its problems with effective characterisation. At first it introduces its protagonists (such as they are) as risible clichés of poor people who don’t seem to have a single trait that seems to connect them to human beings as you can encounter them outside of bad comedy. Then, pretty suddenly, the audience is expected to care for them as if they were actual well-rounded characters with recognizable character traits; in the next scene, everyone’s made out of cardboard again, and back and forth, and so on.

Tonally, the film tries its hardest to be some kind of black comedy horror thriller, something it actually succeeds at once it becomes a film about Mary versus the crazy elderly, and can fall back on mild grotesquery and classic suspense techniques, as well as a trio of actors in Williams, the delightful McCoy, and Tushingham, who do their very best to elevate the material to something that’s actually fun and entertaining to watch, even when it is lacking in depth.

Really, it’s one third of a good – in the sense of “entertaining” – movie, grafted onto two thirds of outright nonsense.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,french movies,in short,horror,comedy,julius berg,maisie williams,sylvester mccoy,rita tushingham

The New Mutants (2020)

After a catastrophic event which apparently destroyed her whole township with her family within it, Dani Moonstar (Blue Hunt) finds herself in the clinic of one Dr Reyes (Alice Braga). It’s a bit of a strange place, with Reyes alone taking care of only a handful of patients. Apart from Dani, there are Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams), Ilyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton), and Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga). All of them are mutants whose lack of control over their powers has cost loved ones (or in Ilyana’s and Rahne’s case, not so loved ones) their lives.

As Reyes tells it, she is supposed to help the kids achieve control over their powers so they can take the next step her mysterious superiors have chosen for them. Not surprisingly given this language, the place is also a cage, surrounded by an indestructible force field, and Reyes changes tack between helpful counsellor and prison warden with disturbing ease.

Ever since Dani has arrived, the clinic seems to have become haunted, too, and the young mutants will have to confront their greatest fears, learn to work together, and uncover the true goals of Reyes. Well, a bit of smooching is also involved, because that’s what future X-Men are supposed to do in their downtime, just ask Chris Claremont.

After it has been shuffled through release dates for years for no fault of its own, Josh Boone’s The New Mutants has turned into the last of the Fox style X-Men movies, a state of affairs that has not helped the reception of the film much, I believe. Then there are also the expectations of the first adaptation of a particularly beloved comic to cope with. These expectations, a film can only survive if it is an absolute masterpiece, which the film at hand isn’t. So it’s no surprise that New Mutants hasn’t been a smashing success even with the nerd press or those parts of the mainstream who don’t automatically rant nonsense about the end of cinema through superhero movies.

However, while not a masterpiece, Boone’s film isn’t a bad one at all. At the very least, even if one is unkind towards it, the it is made pretty interesting by the decision to replace some standard superhero movie tropes with (light) horror touches (and a lot of nods towards the third Nightmare on Elm Street). After all, the backgrounds of troubled teenagers in the real world are only one step away from being a horror movie anyway, mutant powers only sharpening the metaphor, as is right and proper for the franchise as well as the specific comics this adapts. The realization of the horror sequences shows rather clearly why the film is only a good movie instead of a great one in my book, though. They are just not that creepy, Boone never quite finding a visual language that makes the weight of horror the protagonists feel towards them completely believable. In part, that’s really a problem of visual choices by the director, in part it’s the film’s very middling effects as well as the less than creative design work done to bring elements of the comics on screen. It’s not Shazam level terrible, but it does weaken the film’s emotional heft considerably.

On the other hand, the film’s narrative (script by Boone and Knate Lee) does have a pleasantly clear idea of what it wants to be about and the ways it believes teenagers can overcome heavy emotional loads (and horror movie scares) through the power of diverse families of choice. There’s an obvious reason why the kids are repeatedly shown watching Whedon’s “Buffy”, and while this sort of thing is obviously a simplification of how we get through life, it does speak to some things I at least believe to be true and important, while treating its characters and their concerns with respect and love.

There is little in the film that doesn’t directly speak to its thematic concerns, leading to a very focused and low key movie that only fulfils the expectations on the amount of action and loudness a modern superhero movie has to show as much as it needs to if it actually wants to get a budget. Though the climactic action scene really not being that great a catharsis it should narratively and thematically be seems to have a lot to do with that budget not being high enough.

Yet still, The New Mutants is a very interesting, and often also a very entertaining, film, ending the Fox X-Men movies on an unexpected yet fitting note.