Sneakers (1992)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Bishop (Robert Redford), a computer and security expert still nominally on the run from the government for non-sins committed in the 60s, leads a group of freelance weirdos doing the early 90s offline – and a little online – white hat hacking, with a clear Robin Hood streak. The rest of the team are former CIA man Crease (Sidney Poitier), the grown-up of the gang, blind man with excellent ears Whistler (David Strathairn), Forteana and conspiracy nut Mother (Dan Aykroyd, really going out of his comfort zone there), and young guy Carl (River Phoenix). When she and Bishop were still an item, ultra-straight Liz (Mary McDonnell) was also part of the group, but she’s still on good enough terms to help out when asked nicely.

Asking nicely isn’t the strength of the NSA, apparently. Instead, the agency is pressing our heroes into their service to steal a mysterious black box via the magic of not so veiled threats and money. At least our protagonists do have a challenging, and therefore interesting, job in acquiring it.

Unfortunately, once the heist is over, things get dangerous: the box itself is capable of cracking any kind of code and encryption used in the US; worse still, the NSA people aren’t actually working for the NSA but are private service bad guys in the service of one Cosmo (Ben Kingsley). And Cosmo just happens to be part of Bishop’s major past trauma. In any case, an object like the magical box belongs neither in his hand nor in that of the government, so a second heist will have to occur.

And make no mistake, Phil Alden Robinson’s Sneakers is, its outer appearance made out of badly understood and dramatized 90s hi-tech notwithstanding, in many regards a very traditional heist movie, belonging right next to films about sympathetic con-men sticking it to the Man in various forms in the less greed-minded side-arm of the genre.

As is typical, and perfectly fine, for the genre, Sneakers mostly throws plausibility out of the window for its version of the Rule of Cool, safe in the assumption an audience will let implausibilities slide in this context, if you just present them with enough charm. It’s absolutely the right choice, too, and if one hasn’t taken one’s monthly dose of ridiculous but fun plans nearly thwarted by silly problems, and perhaps hasn’t re-watched this in quite some time, Sneakers is a fine way to get one’s hit of these specific genre tropes.

Particularly because its cast is quite as fine as it is, with Redford, Poitier, Strathairn and the rest all providing some great middle-aged star power with performances that not just manage to create perfectly likeable two-note characters but also do the heavy work when it comes to balance the film’s considerable number of – often genuinely funny – jokes, quips and mildly silly situations with the more serious elements of the plot. It does help that most of these guys and the lady are all well versed in the serious as well as the funny stuff, and can shift from one acting stance to the other at a moment’s notice while keeping their characters whole. Well, I’m not terribly happy with Kingsley’s performance, I have to admit, because he falls into his rather typical trap of being all tics, bad accent and far-fetched body language when everyone around him is relaxed and giving the impression of the naturalistic even when portraying an implausible character type. One cannot blame the man for not putting any effort in, though.

On the direction side, things are a bit conservative, certainly never flashy and not exactly inspired. Which seems rather typical of a director whose handful of other films also never suggest much of a directorial personality beyond the ability to hold things together professionally and trust in his actors. While that’s not an approach to direction that’ll ever win many deserved prizes or just critical praise (yes, I know, he directed the curiously beloved by many Field of Dreams, but that thing’s terrible as well as terribly overrated), it works out very well indeed for Sneakers, whose actors are clearly happy to shoulder the main load of the film, and do so with a pleasant lack of vanity.

Three Films Make A Post: One hell of a rodeo.

Lasso (2017): If you can’t beat the competition in the backwoods slasher space with your movie’s quality, there’s always the time honoured use of the gimmick. So, as the title promises/threatens, Evan Cecil’s Lasso is indeed a backwoods slasher movie with rodeo and cowboy themed kills. Some of them are even pretty fun in an at once pleasantly nasty and ridiculous way. But alas, that’s all the film has to offer, for the characters are as bland and generic as you’d expect – having one arm isn’t a character trait, you know –, the plotting is by the numbers at best and stretches out nothing to great lengths at its worst, while actual suspense is absent.

Still, this one could have been much, much worse.

Spy Game (2001): For a Tony Scott movie, this spy affair with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt (two guys who managed to get impressive careers out of pretty faces, an understanding of how to best utilize their limited ranges as actors, and clever choice of roles) is downright sedate. It’s clear that Scott at times tries to emulate the style of classic 70s spy films with early 2000s technology, but he’s still not a terribly great choice for a spy film that isn’t going bigger than James Bond all of the time. Scott’s too showy a director to provide the subtlety a good espionage movie needs, even the sort that’s a third of an action movie, and simply not thoughtful (as a Scott detractor, I’m tempted to say not intelligent, but I didn’t know the guy, so…) enough to get into the questions of personal ethics, political expediency and morals the best of these movies explore. Though he is clearly trying, and not vomiting stupid camera tricks into my eyes for most of the film’s running time, so that’s a plus.

(Tyler Rake) Extraction (2020): I’m actually rather happy that Netflix is putting money into higher budget action movie fare like this, but Sam Hargrave’s Extraction doesn’t really scratch the action itch like Netflix’s Indonesian and Filipino examples of the last few years do for me. It is clearly trying to go as all out as these films, but there’s a strangely bland quality to the action, rather as if you were watching drafts for a nasty, bloody action movie than the actual thing.


The by-the-numbers script by Joe Russo (who has done much, much better in the in theory much more restrictive superhero genre) certainly doesn’t help, nor does Chris Hemsworth’s not exactly exciting lead performance. And at this point, Hemsworth is good when he has the right script to work from, but can’t make a film look better than it actually is.

Three Films Make A Post: Same Day, New Killer

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): Even though nobody would ever call the first Jurassic Park intelligent, how we got from there to this thing, also directed by Spielberg and written by David Koepp, I have no idea. Surely, Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn versus dinosaurs should be kind of a sure thing, but the script has everyone acting even more stupid than in the first film, with little happening here making any sense even by the rules of the universe Jurassic Park was set in, and no visible attempts by the director to jump over the giant holes where a script was supposed to be through his usual magic touch with suspense and thrilling fun. It’s a film made by highly capable professionals in front and behind the camera who all act like they suddenly have no clue about making movies anymore.

To add insult to injury (that is, wasted time), the film also never seems to actually want to end, finally petering out after the worst King Kong rip-off imaginable has gone on and on where every other film this shitty would at least have had the decency to end after ninety minutes.

The Sting (1973): Fortunately, to the rescue of my mood comes the classic George Roy Hill period caper movie that manages to make the depression era look sexy without pretending it isn’t the depression era. This, despite by far not being the first comedic heist film at all, is of course the caper movie most later entries into the sub-genre want to be. Who, after all, would not be captured by the magic of a clever, twisty script that is light and light in touch but never one to pretend depths don’t exist (there is in fact a lot of sadness in this comedy, and quite a few moments that acknowledge bitter truths about the US and life in general, it has just decided not to fall into them), direction that somehow manages to make things that should by all rights be grimy and gritty look slick, cool and elegant without shaving off all the hard edges, the power of Robert Redford and Paul Newman at the height of their stardom, and a supporting cast that’s to die for?


Sky High (2005): If nothing else, this superhero teen comedy directed by Mike Mitchell (who otherwise has a perfectly horrible filmography) is a perfect example of how a film can be utterly generic, and follow the genre structures of teen comedy and pre-Nolan Batman (really, more pre-Raimi Spider-Man, even if the chronology would suggest otherwise) superhero movies slavishly, yet still be charming as heck. Mostly that’s thanks to the lovely cast featuring people like Kurt Russell, Bruce Campbell, Lynda Carter and Kelly Preston as well as young Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Danielle Panabaker selling the clichés with charm and conviction, as well as to a script that may only ever aim at the low hanging fruits of humour and humanity but hits those every single time. It’s not terribly deep (it’s a 2005 Disney teen comedy, after all), but so likeable I’m perfectly okay with that. Plus, who wouldn’t like a film featuring Ron Wilson, Bus Driver?

In short: The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) may be elderly, but he’s also the brains behind the operations of a triple old man bank robber gang (also consisting of characters played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, so they’re pretty awesome). Because they are keeping a low profile with non-violent, polite heists on small banks in different states where typically nobody but one teller does even realize what’s happening before Forrest (who is also the face of the operation) is gone, nobody has connected the dots about these robberies being perpetrated by the same men yet. Until, that is, police detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck) doesn’t notice a thing about a bank he is in with his daughter getting robbed. This bugs him enough he starts to investigate further, and finally puts two and two together until it adds up to “elderly bank robbers with style”.

At the same time, Forrest starts a romance with horse rancher Jewel (Sissy Spacek) who just might be the person that could finally make him grow up into the “proper” life of normal people and retire.

I admit I didn’t really get along with director David Lowery’s much praised A Ghost Story; that one just stepped over my line where a film turns from slow to glacial. Nobody would confuse The Old Man & the Gun with an action movie either, and even though this one even has a kinda-sorta car chase, it is very much another slow-paced exploration of character much more than of plot. However, The Old Man seems appropriately slow, not just for the age of its main characters, taking its time but taking exactly as much time as it needs.

A part of the film is clearly an homage to 70s cinema, a natural road to go for a film starring Redford and Spacek, but it’s never an attempt at empty nostalgia. There is a melancholy quality to the film, for sure, but it’s not a nostalgic one but one belonging to a film looking at the final act of someone’s life and casting actors in the final stretches of their careers. There’s a clear love for his leads and the movie world they come from in Lowery’s visual language, and while he’s never quite being so boring as to just copy the visual style of 70s movies, he manages to achieve the same feel this period of cinema had in a slightly more contemporary way.


The film’s main thematic drive examines another very 70s idea: the meaning of freedom, as embodied in the happy, smiling Tucker who has turned his life into a series of escapes and never stopped to become a proper grown-up, not even for love, and Affleck’s Hunt who has done so, and is now, despite a family he clearly loves deeply, bored and a bit sad and decidedly grumpy. Lowery doesn’t really attempt to show up any of these character’s lifestyles; rather he seems more interested in exploring the space between them, the strange intimacy between the hunter and the hunted (even when the hunt like here is a rather sedate one), and the ways Forrest and Hunt are more alike than it might first appear, both looking at each other with the wistfulness of looking at the road not taken.

Three Spectacular Films Make a Post: Dive Beneath The Surface

The Lure aka Córki dangingu (2015): Apart from the bare facts, Agnieszka Smoczynska’s film is one of those films which should be watched rather than written up. Fortunately, the basic facts should make this one enticing to exactly the sort of people who will enjoy it. So let’s just say this is a modern Polish retelling of the tale of the little mermaid as a musical taking place in a sleazy nightclub, with some fantastic musical numbers, eye-popping and often deep production design, some gore, nudity both sexy and grotesque, incredible acting particularly by mermaids Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olsuanska, one eye for the tragic and the other eye for the comical, feminist undertones carried by a director who somehow makes this stuff look like an aesthetic whole. If that sounds like the sort of thing you like, this is going to be a thing you adore. I, at least, found myself like that living cliché – the viewer glued to the screen.

The Love Witch (2016): Anna Biller’s rather more obviously feminist film using the perfectly emulated and enhanced ideal of late 60s/early 70s exploitation movies to explore concepts of love, desire, the male and female gaze in practice, and the pressures of societal expectations on women via the murderous adventures of one Elaine (Samantha Robinson) and her habit to first magically seduce and then murder men when they can’t live up to her (or really, her society’s) ideals of love or manliness would probably make a fantastic double feature, seeing as it shares The Lure’s deep aesthetic unity, though its aesthetics are very different ones. Both films also share the fact that they’re pretty incredible in a every respect.

I say the film emulates and enhances the ideal of the exploitation movies whose model it uses, but really, no actual exploitation movie ever looked this consciously constructed, seldom this intense in their use of colours, this intoxicatingly beautiful. Nor did these films usually use their slightly off acting styles as intelligent as lead Samantha Robinson and the rest of the cast do here. If that (and some of the reception) make the film sound insufferably camp – it isn’t insufferable all. There’s irony, there’s distance, but this is a film that is serious about its aesthetics and its message even though it also can see the joke in the former; it’s just not actually joking about it.

All the President’s Men (1976): Saying that the most famous film of Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia trilogy is a timely film to watch is so obvious I’m a bit embarrassed to even have mentioned it. However, it stands to mention how downright optimistic the film looks from today, seeing as it does suggest people in power will actually eventually be held accountable one way or the other, and features at least parts of the free press actually interested in truth more than access to the political feedings trough.


On the filmmaking side, it’s a brilliant film, calmly told, with an undertone of dread under the surface of an investigative tale that meets its audience at eye level and clearly has no doubt viewers will be able to follow it, without feeling the need to exposit or over-explain, or to add much overt drama to the proceedings, because all that’s in the story if you care to look closely. Add performances of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (who wins at reaction shots) in their prime and a delightful turn by Jason Robards and you have a pretty damn perfect film.

In short: The Hot Rock (1972)

At the time this was made, director Peter Yates was on something of a roll with various types of crime films, all rather great in one way or the other, and all absolutely typical of 70s filmmaking in all the best ways. The Hot Rock is an adaptation of one of Donald E. Westlakes’s comedic crime novels about the perpetually unlucky thief Dortmunder (here played by Robert Redford who, whatever you may think of the casting for this particular character is a really great actor for this kind of comedic heist/caper movie), who is basically Westlake’s Stark without the murderous intentions and the sociopathy. Here, Dortmunder and co (George Segal, Ron Leibman, Paul Sand) are attempting to steal a very special diamond for the UN representative of an African nation (done with perfect deadpan by Moses Gunn), and then have to steal it again, and again, and etc, while double-crosses and various inopportune events destroy their best laid plans. Repeatedly.

While the film becomes increasingly funny and bizarre in excellent style, Yates also gets at the other core of many of Westlake’s comedic novels: these are books – and a film - about characters stumbling through a universe as set against – or at best uncaring of - humanity as that of Lovecraft’s stories or the Parker novels, just that this particular uncaring or cruel universe doesn’t crush its victims but instead prefers to play cruel jokes on them, and that in the Dortmunder universe, some of the characters have the ability to play the tricks right back.

Of course, it’s not all the universe’s fault here, for the characters here, comedy or not, are quite fine with doing unpleasant things to one another quite without help and don’t exactly need it to ruin their respective days; it’s just funnier when their bad intentions and those of the universe meet.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,crime,comedy,peter yates,robert redford,george segal,ron leibman,paul sand,moses gunn

In short: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

By now, I’m actually going into Marvel productions banking on them being at least entertaining and generally non-stupid, but I think I’m going to adjust my attitude and will from now on bank on them being really good, and can still be positively surprised when they turn out like The Winter Soldier, which is to say pretty darn great.

Of course, seeing that it’s highly influenced by Ed Brubaker’s excellent run on the comics, the last decade or so of mainstream-yet-intelligent spy movies like the first three Bourne films and the Daniel Craig James Bonds, 70s conspiracy thrillers, and – quite obviously if you look at the fights – martial arts and action cinema from all around the world (The Raid quite heavily comes to mind), and does all the right things with a character that should by all rights be a horrible jingoistic mess but nearly never becomes one, Winter Soldier seems a bit made for me. Particularly because it uses the synergy of the already established Marvel movie universe very well without running into the trap of thinking this synergy replaces the actual plotting, and knows that Captain America in this century is very much a character belonging into an ensemble. By all rights, this should be called “Captain America, Black Widow & The Falcon: The Winter Soldier”, but then, that’d be a really unwieldy title. The film really does a lot of cool and interesting things with Natasha and Sam, thanks to a script that knows how to write the personal stuff into the explosions, and actors in Scarlett Johansson and Anthony Mackie who have proven themselves highly adept at the particular acting style you need to apply in blockbuster cinema.

As a pinko commie, I’m also quite happy with the film’s politics, not because I perfectly agree with them (I’m not the kind of pinko commie who needs that to appreciate a film, fortunately), but because they are as coherent as can be expected in a film genre that can do subtlety only to a degree, and are a perfect fit for a Captain America film in 2014 that wants to stay true to the character’s origins of Hitler-punching and taking the promise of America by its word.

All these elements, as well as Chris Evans’s still note-perfect performance and many a nice nod to established comic characters, I mostly expected (or at least would have bet minor amounts of money on). What I didn’t expect is that Anthony and Joe Russo, both directors with mainly experience in sitcoms (even though one of them is the sainted and seemingly indestructible Community), were this great as action directors, with so many propulsive action sequences that also just happen to be often really cleverly and beautifully choreographed there should by all rights be not enough breath in anyone watching left to complain about them as “empty spectacle”. Which of course they aren’t – as in all good action movies, these action scenes are actually saying a lot of things about the characters the dialogue scenes don’t, all the time not just working to drive the film forward, but working as a physical connection between theme, characters and plot.

Needless to say, I’m very, very happy with the resulting movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,anthony russo,joe russo,action,superheroes,sf,spies,chris evans,scarlett johansson,anthony mackie,robert redford,samuel l. jackson