In short: You Should Have Left (2020)

Warning: there will be spoilers for those readers named David Koepp or those who have never seen a movie before!

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Because of tensions in their marriage, the married couple of Theo (Kevin Bacon) and Susanna (Amanda Seyfried) are trying to work out some of it by taking their little daughter Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) for a couple of weeks in a rented house in Wales, before successful actress Susanna has to pop off to London for a shoot. Those tension are mostly pretty much what you’d expect: he has anger issues and feels hurt in his manliness by the age difference (which I am apparently bound by law to call “icky” these days, but most certainly won’t), while she is as shallow as she is cute. Also an actress with all the cliché stuff this brings in lazy scriptwriting land (plus cheating on him, as it will turn out, because of course she is). Theo’s anger issues have a somewhat deeper dimension because he was once accused of having killed his first wife but was acquitted in court, and we all know that nobody acquitted of a crime in a movie ever was innocent (unless it’s a courtroom drama).

They have chosen a pretty bad place for their attempt at playing happy family, and soon a lot of mildly spooky stuff happens. You pretty much know the rest.

Which is of course the main problem of David Koepp’s movie: you have seen all of this before, often in visually much more inventive manner, and written with actual verve and insight instead of Koepp’s strictly mechanical interpretation here. And sure, if you simply go by the mechanics, there’s nothing exactly wrong with the way Koepp approaches this story here, but the mechanics of a script are only ever the point in film school.

On this side of the screen, it’s rather more problematic for the psychologically based horror film this is supposed to be how flat and trite the characterisation is. Despite Bacon and Seyfried both being perfectly capable of inhabiting more lively characters, everything about them here is absolutely obvious and simply not terribly interesting, the film never finding a way to explain why exactly one should care about the marriage problems of these cardboard cut-outs. The so-called reveals about the couple the film gets up to in the final act have been bleedingly obvious from the first couple of scenes, and the film’s practically delusional insistence it’s a surprise to the audience that Theo is indeed responsible for the death of his first wife borders on the absurd. None of the plot developments surprise; worse, none of them put anything about the characters into a new or more complex light. It’s just clockwork mechanics pretending to be a movie.


To be fair, there are a couple of decent moments of weirdness in the last third of the film, using irrational shift of space and time to produce hopes of the film going somewhere more interesting for its end, but that fizzles out pretty quickly. Eventually, everything ends exactly as you expected it to end right from the start, without insight, without strangeness, and with an idea of guilt and punishment that’s as old-testament as it is simple-minded and deeply unsatisfying.

The Darkness (2016)

On a visit to the Grand Canyon autistic-to-keep-the- plot-“mysterious”-for-longer youngest of the Taylor family Michael (David Mazouz) picks up some nice little stones which unfortunately free some animal-themed evil spirits once incarcerated by the Anasazi. This sort of thing is really bound for giving a family trouble. So, soon after they come home, the Taylors – also including mother Bronny (Radha Mitchell), father Peter (Kevin Bacon) and sister Stephanie (Lucy Fry) – have to fight off random paranormal phenomena as well as suffer through equally random attacks of Lifetime movie-style melodrama done very badly.

Praise be to The Darkness’s director Greg McLean for making a mainstream horror movie not fixated on jump scares. Alas, that’s the only thing the film has going for it, for everything else here put together forms a practically archetypal concoction of all that is wrong with contemporary mainstream horror - and nothing of what’s right with it.

Worst offender is the terribly sloppy writing. The script keeps things so vague I honestly couldn’t even tell you if the dysfunction presented in the Taylors (of course the usual foursome, because we don’t want to get creative by having a family of three or five) is supposed to be caused by the evil spirits hitchhiking their way from the Grand Canyon (Anasazi spirit prisoner security is kind of lacking, I have to say), if it is made worse by it, or if the writers just put some random family melodrama in here to pad out the running time. The film does throw in a few half sentences suggesting it’s all the spirits’ fault in one of its moments of exposition but there’s nothing in what’s actually shown on screen which would bolster that idea. It probably doesn’t matter anyhow, for the perfunctory checklist style way the film treats plot lines like the daughter’s bulimia makes these parts of the plot pointless in any case. And no, of course The Darkness does put zero effort into establishing any kind of baseline of dysfunction for anyone involved so the audience can't put what’s happening during the course of the film into the context of how the family members usually act, leading to a film whose characters have emotions that just come and go randomly for no particular reason apart from their convenience for the plot (such as it is).

Which, come to think of it, is the same feeling I get from the supernatural scenes as well: random crap that lacks any coherence and weight – what’s a “theme”? – and is only in the movie because the three screenwriters didn’t have anything as avantgardistic as a plan what the film is supposed to be and do apart from providing a best of (but worse) of every damn cliché about haunted families you’ve seen in a horror movie in the last ten years. The whole mess of the script also includes sure signs of total disinterest by everyone involved like repeating exposition about its random core haunting two and a half times (to help out those in the audience with a damaged short term memory, one supposes), and a finale that is about as much a culmination of everything the characters experienced and learned before as I am an alien invader from Yuggoth.

The whole of The Darkness feels terribly underdeveloped, not like a proper finished movie made by seasoned professionals, but like the first draft of something that might have become a decent if unspectacular horror movie if anyone had cared enough about it (or its suffering audience) to put the work in.

In short: X-Men: First Class (2011)

After the insults to my beloved X-Men that were Brett Rattner's third X-Men "film" and whatever that Wolverine abomination was supposed to be, I had a hard time giving anything this particular studio would do with one of my favourite universes in pop culture the benefit of the doubt, and dithered about seeing this prequel pretty long and hard.

So it did come as a bit of a surprise to myself that I loved pretty much everything about First Class (with its particularly bland version of Emma Frost as the major exception, but Bryan Singer's X-Men films had a particularly bland Storm, and were still pretty darn great), even the self-conscious winking in the direction of its predecessors and the comics, and John Dykstra's sometimes surprisingly weak special effects.

What makes me a very happy X-Men fanboy about the film is that Matthew Vaughn and/or the script actually got what - at least Chris Claremont's X-Men - are all about (hint for Brett Rattner: it's not being shit), and kept the many changes he made to the film's characters and relations well inside the emotional and ideological parameters of the comics.

I was particularly delighted by Michael Fassbender's Magneto, who is allowed all the complexity, bad-assery and fragility he had at the height of Claremont's run on the comic. Vaughn plays fair with Magneto's and Xavier's respective positions, too, which adds an actual moral tension below the comic book ones.

Of course, there might be a bit too much blockbuster characterization shorthand as shown in the somewhat broad way the film treats most of the rest of its characters for some viewers, and some of the film's big speeches might sound a bit mechanical to the same people, but I found myself experiencing these elements of the film as tonally appropriately close to the comics I still love and pretty entertainingly old-fashioned in a mainstream cinema world where one-liners rule.

For me, First Class is a movie fun and dumb and clever and playful enough to nearly make up for what Fox did to the Phoenix Saga, the sort of film that made me run, not walk to my Essential X-Men books (who can afford colour reprints or singles?), smiling happily.

 

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In short: Super (2010)

Diner cook Frank (Rainn Wilson) loses his wife Sarah (Liv Tyler), a recovering drug addict, to the minor local drug lord Jacques (Kevin Bacon). Frank's clumsy attempts at getting her back lead nowhere, until his house's ceiling opens, God's tentacles open up Frank's brain pan, and God's finger touches his brain. Frank has a vision of Christian fundamentalist superhero the Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion), and is inspired by him - and his local comic shop - to become a superhero himself.

Calling himself the Crimson Bolt, Frank first tries to wait for crime, then - after an informative visit to his local library - seeks it out himself, and hits real or imagined evildoers - or just people who don't think standing in the back of a line applies to them - with his trusty wrench, following the logical catchphrase "Shut up, crime!"

But even in his new improved Crimson Bolt persona, Frank is no match for Jacques and his men, who are after all actual gangsters using actual guns. When he gets shot in the leg, Frank seeks shelter with comic shop employee Libby (Ellen Page), who had already identified him as the mysterious madmen/hero with the wrench. Soon enough, Libby turns into Frank's overenthusiastically violent "kid" sidekick Bolty. I'm sure crime will shut up now.

By all rights, I shouldn't like James Gunn's Super at all, seeing as the film belongs to the type of comedy selling itself through transgressive violence and randomness. But I found - quite to my surprise - Super to be pretty darn great.

The reason for that is not just the fact that the film's use of randomness and violence is often actually funny, but that there's an actual heart beating below the film's often cynical surface. Where your typical superhero satire of this type would be satisfied (and way too satisfied with itself for it) with pointing at its hero and sneering, Gunn's film does its outmost to also humanize him. While Frank is the butt of many a joke (as well as a violent psychopath), he's just as often treated with actual compassion and sympathy, especially in the flashbacks to his short relationship with Sarah. Impressively, most of the groundwork for said sympathetic characterization happens in the most random seeming scenes of the film. Often, Gunn manages to make his scenes at once awkward, funny, and touching.

At the same time, Super can be as tasteless and crude as anything coming from US transgressive comedies of the last few decades (or the Troma bubble Gunn started out in), with jokes about bodily fluids aplenty.

It's as if Gunn had read Mark Millar's Kick-Ass, and decided to turn it into something that's more than just an entertaining excuse for masturbatory cynicism.

 

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