Shadow in the Cloud (2020)

Warning: I’m going to spoil one of the very last scenes, because only a saint could not!

It looks like just another mission of mortal danger for the crew of a B-17 during World War II. However, once a last minute guest calling herself Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz), coming complete with a British accent and carrying a mysterious package, arrives, things become rather wild, and not just because all the men on board a rampant misogynists whose mouths most guys I know would probably apply bleach to. Our somewhat mysterious protagonist is accidentally locked into a gun emplacement for a while, where she discovers the plane isn’t just in danger from Japanese airplanes, but also from an actual, plane-munching Gremlin.

After that, a series of increasingly idiotic plot twists begins, heroic action heroine deeds are committed, and nothing makes much sense.

For its first fifteen minutes or so, Roseanne Liang’s Shadow in the Cloud actually seems to be a neatly filmed, low-scale tale of individual horror, but things soon explode into a series of plot twists so increasingly outlandish, nobody involved can have meant most of the script seriously. It’s Liang’s own fault too, for she co-wrote with the never subtle and usually underwhelming Max Landis.

So it’s really important to go into this one with the right mind-set, perhaps a little (or a lot) drunk, accepting this as the kind of preposterous low budget action movie with horror elements it’s clearly meant to be. Once I got into the proper mindset (and had recovered from the whiplash), I actually rather enjoyed myself a lot here. Liang uses her series of improbable but neatly conceived set pieces in combination with middling special effects for the kind of loud and kinetic effect you know and love (or if you’re one of those people, loathe), from things like the Fast and Furious films. The film’s really hitting the spot for preposterous nonsense action.

Moretz seems to enjoy playing the improbable badass a lot, too, throwing herself into the job physically, while always pretending the emotional beats make any actual sense (they don’t). If ever everything unfortunate happens to that woman’s mainstream movie career, she’ll have no problem dominating direct to home video action movies.

Shadow in the Cloud also is an explicitly feminist movie, in a way that doesn’t work well as any kind of reasonable argument for equality (which would be absurd in the context of the plot), but is really a series of “fuck yeah, women” asides that are at once deeply silly and deeply likeable, perfectly keeping in the action movie tradition the director is working in. So this is indeed a film in which what amounts to the male main character (calling him a “lead” would really go much too far) spends most of his on-screen time doing little except for holding a baby (don’t ask) while the female lead (or really, only actual lead character that isn’t a gremlin) gets to do all the cool stuff.

This all culminates in a climax in which Moretz has an escalating melee fight with the (bad) CGI gremlin, and, after winning, swaggers towards the surviving cast, and proceeds to grab the baby and breastfeed it on screen. You really got to see it to believe it, but if you’re like me, that’s the sort of absurd directorial posturing you’ll actually enjoy seeing.

As any kind of argument for feminism, this sort of stuff (and really anything else the film has to say about the matter) is of course completely useless, and probably counter-productive towards convincing the needlessly serious who somehow still haven’t been convinced. Fortunately, I don’t believe the film is trying to make some serious argument meant to convince anybody of the merits of feminism. There should, after all, really be no need for any convincing there anymore, that train having taken everyone on board worth talking to already, one suspects, and so Shadow in the Cloud proceeds to let is action heroine do what the male versions of that type have done for decades: do preposterous, fun things in an absurd yet awesome manner.

Three Films Make A Post: See these incredible scenes before your unbelieving eyes!

November Criminals (2017): Sometimes, one really wonders why certain films don’t come together as well as they should. This one clearly has a decent enough budget, features a good cast with Ansel Elgort, Chloe Grace Moretz as well as Catherine Keener and David Strathairn in the unthankful parent roles, the script is written by well-known professionals, and Sacha Gervasi’s direction does not suggest a lack of talent. Still, what all the talent before and behind the camera adds up to is a film that seemingly can’t decide what kind of movie it is, what it is actually about, if it has a point, or what that point might be. There are a few intriguing, or at least interesting subjects broached, but the film never really hones in on one (or just a couple), instead wandering from one idea to the next with all the focus of a toddler distracted by the next shiny thing. There’s so much less substance in here than you’d expect, it becomes rather annoying right quick.

Hellstone (2016): In comparison, this little German microbudget horror movie about a guy stumbling through a patch of woods fighting off demons directed by Andreas Tom seems laser-focused. It is clearly inspired by spirit and body of the original Evil Dead (as is only right and proper) but does feature a couple or three ideas of its own. The film nicely concentrates on the things it’s got going for itself – a claustrophobic cabin (set), woods, one and a half actors who are decent, a handful of pretty great practical effects, and people behind the camera who do know what they are doing – using them with a complete lack of pretension but a degree of style and what feels like quite a bit of enthusiasm. It’s not the sort of film that’ll have anyone re-writing the history of horror, but it’s fun and suggests a degree of care from its makers; not something I’d say about many German microbudget films.

The Dark Tower (2017): But back to the bad stuff, or really, the completely puzzling stuff. I don’t understand why anyone would buy the rights to Stephen King’s Dark Tower cycle and then turn its first part into a painfully generic bit of YA fantasy in which the supposedly central Gunslinger Roland (a wasted Idris Elba) becomes a side-character in the yawn-inducing story of some kid (Tom Taylor) the film never bothers to give me any reason to care about discovering how very special he is.

Now, if it were a good YA movie, I’d still be puzzled but at least feel entertained, but standing between entertainment and me are a near complete lack of dramatic tension, the usual dependence on the Hero’s Journey trope even if it makes no sense in context, lackluster production design, a mechanically creaky script and Matthew McConaughey playing the villain Walter/The Man in Black as if he were the bad guy in a kid’s TV show.


Honestly, I have no idea what this is supposed to be, for whom it was made, or why anyone should watch it.

Two Men of Violence: A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) & The Equalizer (2014)

I was all prepped up to file A Walk Among the Tombstones, a Lawrence Block adaptation by Scott Frank, under “another film where Liam Neeson plays an aging Man of Violence™ who has to get back to his old ways again”, in other words, as something that’ll probably be decently entertaining but also something that I’ve seen before a few times too often. And sure, A Walk does belong into this particular genre of crime films but this one feels special and weighty all the way through, with the clichés feeling close again to the truths that once built these clichés.

The superiority of Scott Frank’s film becomes particularly clear in comparison with the same year’s Denzel Washington version of The Equalizer directed by Antoine Fuqua. Whereas the Equalizer makes a lot of gestures towards the horrificness of violence and the toll it takes on those performing it (not much about the victims, nor about the fact the borders between the role of victim and perpetrator might get rather fluid sometimes, though), by the end, it’s basically fist-pumping Washington’s character (a guy who stops the time he needs to kill a bunch of people on his watch), spouting all the usual vigilante movie crap, and simply ignoring much of what it has set up, A Walk is all made out of one piece, not turning away from the violence yet also never simply condoning it. In fact, there’s nothing simple in this film’s moral world except perhaps simple human compassion. Again, compare the way the Equalizer uses the compassionate acts of its hero as a basis to then cheer on his acts of horrible violence, where A Walk treats both things as standing in opposition to each other even when some of Scudder’s violence really – perversely - is a product of that compassion. The difference is that A Walk heads for the grey moral zones this sort of thing causes with open eyes and a headful of thoughts where The Equalizer is shouting “FUCK YEAH!” way too loud to have time for thoughts, particular once the film has reached its second half, when all promising suggestions the people involved might actually have realized that McCall isn’t an awesome badass but both an awesome badass and a monster, and that there just might be a problem with that, fly out the window.

Of course, Antoine Fuqua’s unpleasantly showy direction doesn’t help The Equalizer’s case much either, always using the wrong kinds of gestures, and always in a way that suggests it doesn’t really want to think about the nature of its protagonist despite having brought it up during its first hour (of more than two, which also makes a simple plot unnecessarily bloated) itself. A Walk’s Scott Frank, on the other hand, has a clear, calm, and controlled approach to direction that looks much simpler than Fuqua’s but really brings out much more subtlety, eschewing to hammer ever point it makes home, and building up a sense of place and atmosphere.

Now, I wasn’t really planning to come down quite as hard on The Equalizer just after I watched it, because I had a decent – if not un-annoyed - time with it, it’s just that I saw A Walk Among the Tombstones right the next evening, and really couldn’t help but notice how much better Frank’s film is, and how much worse the Fuqua outing becomes in direct comparison, not so much for reasons of it being catastrophically bad, but because it is a barely decent film compared to one I expect to return to again and again, and its thoughtlessness truly becomes clear in the contrast.

What’s undeniably good in both films is the acting, and in this regard, I’d probably even argue The Equalizer to be slightly superior: for where Liam Neeson et al actually have interesting and not unsubtle characterisation and focused direction to work from, Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz and so on do their best to make something out of a film that just doesn’t seem to know what it actually thinks about its main character and that surely doesn’t want to face any unpleasant implications of the way he acts when it comes down to it, because fuck yeah, slowly walking away from an explosion. So where Neeson gives a performance that gains a part of its considerable strength and authority from the possibilities the work around and behind him provides it with, every bit of Washington’s success is one all of his own. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure all the coherence McCall has as a character belongs to Washington and the way he and Moretz play off of each other in their scenes, the bizarre tacked on happy ending notwithstanding.

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