In short: The A-Team (2010)

I’m not sure this actually needs to be said, but Joe Carnahan is a weird director. Extremely talented and an able to turn his not inconsiderable budgets into true crowd pleasers (if for a very specific kind of crowd), most of what he does feels as individual and personal as any auteur-style movie you’d care to mention. Stylistically, he always uses state of the art and budget techniques of the Tony Scott school that’ll make many a critic automatically use the word “edgy”. I’d argue that, when Carnahan is on, he’s not “edgy” but a filmmaker whose films actually have an edge acquired by an uncommon mix of the ability to direct actors and use sometimes grating film techniques to often very intelligent effect. When he isn’t on, he’s making Boss Level instead of Narc.

This star-studded (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Sharlto Copley and Patrick Wilson are certainly quite the 2010 cast list, and would still get quite a few behinds in seats ten years later) variation and prequel to many a nerd’s (including this writer’s) foundational action TV show is somewhere between the two. For my taste, the film’s at its best when it provides its cast with opportunities to play their characters outrageously larger than life or when it comes up with the silliest possible set-ups for action sequences (the thing with the flying tank wouldn’t cut realism muster in a Fast & Furious movie even today). It falters, whenever it tries to hitch the bigness or the silliness to moments of more traditional, semi-naturalistic character work, never really managing to connect the two modes properly. Which is a bit strange, since connecting the outrageous with proper, believable and serious character moments is often one of Carnahan’s biggest strengths.

Conceptually, The A-Team suffers a bit from its apparently unquenchable need to turn the strange innocence of the original series cynically violent. So this movie adaptation of a series where nobody ever died from being shot at with automatic weapons has a body count too large to calculate; in an even shittier move, it also feels the need to treat non-violence as something bad in a man that needs to be gotten rid of and disposed of while the score shits out triumphant music, turning the fun pretend violence surrounding it moment pretty sour for this viewer, and really not helping the film as a whole with its tonal difficulties.

Three Films Make A Post: Nobody Runs Forever

Wrath of Man (2021): What do you do if you somehow end up with a plot and characters that’ll at most give you an hour of movie, even though you really need to make one that at least scratches at the two hour door? Guy Ritchie apparently decided to go for a structure full of time jumps and perspective changes, like a cut rate Tarantino without brains or taste. Not that surprisingly, instead of solving the problem of too little plot and flat characters, this exacerbates it by rubbing (really, pressing) the audience’s noses in it, going out of its way to not just show but repeat over and over that there’s nothing at all going on here you haven’t seen before or these actors haven’t done before – often in much better movies that actually had something you’d call pacing, or a script. The film also suffers from some of the worst tough guy dialogue I’ve encountered in a long time (perhaps because Ritchie’s struggling with the LA surroundings?). Particularly the first act is chock full of some of the most idiotic macho dialogue you’ll ever have the misfortune to hear.

Séance (2021): Keeping with films that seem to wildly overestimate their intelligence, how about this pseudo neo giallo by Simon Barrett (co-writer of most of the films of Adam Green). It’s one of those films that seem inexplicably smug about their own intelligence while never actually bothering to put the work into showing said intelligence, pretending stuff that’s obvious from the beginning is a last act surprise, and apparently believing that even the tiniest change in a cliché is something to be praised by an adoring audience.

Worse for a film that so obviously wants to be a giallo is the mediocre sense of style. It’s a professionally made film, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re looking for style as substance (or even just style interesting enough to be worth mentioning), or an ability to create moods via visual storytelling, you’re out of luck. But hey, at least Barrett manages to show us all of Suki Waterhouse’s facial expressions quite extensively – or rather her one facial expression.

The Mule (2018): Leave it to this piece of what at first looks like oldmansploitation with and by the one and only Clint Eastwood to save my mood. It’s a leisurely paced peace of work, pretty episodically structured, yet it is that way because it wants to do a bit more than give Clint a final outing, in the process waving in the direction not only of his serious classics but also of the film star phase of his career when he was perfectly willing to share the stage with an ape. So there’s the expected amount of tear-jerking old age business (the film works for ever single one of your tears, though) about a guy who only learns what’s most important in life when he’s at the end of it, but also a lot of old man swagger, curious humour that charms the way Eastwood’s character is supposed to charm, encounters with the modern world that leave our protagonist bemused, amused and a bit wiser, a tiny bit of action, and a tendency to treat every single character as a complicated human being, be they cops, Mexican cartel soldiers or migrant workers.

In short: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

If you’re looking for a counter-argument to the idea that the big commercial movie universes suppress all individual directorial expression, the Guardians movies are your most obvious starting point, seeing as their tone and style fit exactly into the oeuvre of James Gunn. Witness the way crude and blunt humour sometimes hide the rather more clever jokes the film makes; or just watch how cynical little asides so often glide into moments of actual human emotion that are just as important for the film as the big set pieces and explosions are. And these are pretty damn important to the film, it’s just that Gunn clearly sees no qualitative difference between the loud and the quiet, the goofy and the clever. Blockbuster cinema here means a film that sets out to fulfil all kinds of different expectations, not to be all things to all people, but because being a bit messy and complicated and rich is what this sort of filmmaking should be about.

One might argue that the film’s thematic concerns about families of choice, of blood and of chance are not the most original ones but I suspect very much most members of the film’s audience will have found themselves involved in one or more of these kinds of families, and can certainly connect to some of what’s going on under the loud, beautiful and bonkers surface; which is more than I can say about these “universal”, important films beloved by mid-brow criticism that are inevitably about the sex life of rich people or academics. Plus, Gunn really doubles down when he uses well-worn tropes – one just has to look at the shape, form and dimension the standard “killing of the father” takes on in this film. It’s big in the best way.


But what really does make this such a wonderful film is how much care Gunn takes with the small things. It’s not just the nearly absurd number of throwaway gags going on in the background (and certainly not stopping with the end credits), it’s how tiny dialogue moments from the first Guardians are given greater meaning (and ambiguity) through just as tiny throw-away lines here, how there’s always a little more going on in every scene than the most direct reading of it suggests.

Three Films Make A Post: Heavy metal goes medieval

Iron Man 3 (2013): If someone had told me ten years ago that a few years later, some of the best non-stupid blockbuster movies around would be a series of interlocked Marvel superhero movies produced by Disney, I'd laughed him off, but there you have it. Shane Black's Iron Man 3 is a very fine example of its species, hitting all the mandatory Hollywood blockbuster beats with relish and talent, but adding some intelligent twists to certain parts of the formula without trying to completely deconstruct it. It's a film absolutely impossible for me to dislike, seeing as it - as most of the other Marvel movies - is the kind of pop high budget cinema the blockbuster concept should be ideal for; of course, far too often, we get Michael Bay movies or whatever that Green Lantern thing was even supposed to be instead. Happily, there's a difference between "far too often", and "always".

The Midnight Meat Train (2008): With hindsight, you can see this Clive Barker adaptation as director Ryuhei Kitamura's first step away from his old show-off direction ways towards tighter and moodier approaches to filmmaking. About half of Midnight Meat Train is a pretty swell tale of big city paranoia told in ways that often remind me more of 70s horror cinema than of video clips. The film's second half is a bit of a mess, though. Particularly the murders see Kitamura fall into his old direction pattern featuring too much CGI and braggart editing and camerawork distracting from what should be gritty and unpleasant. The film also suffers from a script that doesn't quite seem to know how to sell the film's supernatural aspect, nor how to make Bradley Cooper's increasing obsession with the true heart of the City believable. Neither Kitamura, never much one for actual humans on screen, nor Cooper himself seem to know either.

In fact, in true Kitamura style, most of the performances (except Leslie Bibb's lamely doomed girlfriend Maya) are rather drab, leaving as Midnight Meat Train a film lacking an emotional core.

Sleeping Dogs (1977): Believe it or not, before Roger Donaldson went to Hollywood, he made some fine movies in his native New Zealand. Case in point is this pretty bitter, very 70s sort-of thriller about Sam Neill trying his best not to get involved in or against a new and improved fascist New Zealand but ending crushed by the wheels of history anyway. The film does avoid heroic, mostly even defiant gestures like the plague and instead shows flawed incompetents like you or me as they stumble through a world that suddenly has turned nasty on them, with no way out and no control at all regarding their own fates. Not even violence does change much.

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