Three Films Make A Post: Evil Lives Just Beneath the Surface

Mary (2019): Michael Goi’s movie about a haunted ship that ruins a family should by all rights be much better than it is: a ghost on a ship is doubly creepy, seeing as it adds isolation to a vengeful supernatural force; terrible things happening to perfectly likeable people are my kind of horror; and lastly, the film has Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer, and they don’t look bored. Alas, everything that could be wrong with the film is wrong, starting with the needlessly awkward narrative structure of having Mortimer’s character tell the tale to a cop (cue internal groaning about plot twists at once) instead of the film simply telling the damn story, characterisation that does neither know how to do shorthand (don’t even think about actual depth) nor how to properly utilize the abilities of a great cast.
As for the film’s horror business, Goi – despite a perfectly promising background in TV genre work – seems completely incapable to construct even a single creepy scene properly. The framing of scenes is random and uninvolving, and there’s not a moment of the appropriate atmosphere on display.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014): I must have mentioned my immense dislike for Mark Millar’s brand of industrialised cynicism here before; curiously enough, I don’t hate all adaptations of his crap body of comics work quite as much. Case in point is Matthew Vaughn’s (co-written by Vaughn with the great Jane Goldman) super spy movie at hand. The movie’s humour is acerbic and generally aims a bit low for my tastes, but at least it does tend to aim for the lower parts of the people on top. Why, there’s even a bit of thinking about class in here that seems…honest. The film also has a lot of fun with the whole super spy business, putting imaginative twists on all kinds of standard tropes. The action is generally loud and abrasive but well-structured, and for most of the time, the film’s on the right side of being cynical. It also features Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson in great form.

The final act does become decidedly weaker, though, suffering under the really Millar-ian idea that mass murder is inherently hilarious, at the same time it is trying to milk it for laughs, also trying to use it as the base for suspense. Which, no surprise, doesn’t work out terribly well, but doesn’t end up so bad it ruins what is a surprisingly fun time.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017): Aaaaand, I don’t know what happened here. Same director, same writers, basically the same cast, but the film is a bloated mess, lacking the satiric edge of the first film, landing hardly any joke. It was apparently made under the impression that what this sequel really needed were about a dozen sub-plots, none of which is terribly interesting, and so spends more time tediously juggling all the bits and pieces of what feels like at least half a dozen different scripts in place of having an actual narrative.


It doesn’t help at all that the action sequences follow the way of the plot, becoming more and louder but less interesting, certainly going through the motions of how a contemporary big budget movie action sequence is supposed to look and feel, but never making much of an impact.

Three Films Make A Post: The most corrupt cop you've ever seen on screen.

211 (2018): To be honest, going into a contemporary movie with Nicolas Cage I do tend to hope it provides the great, strange actor with opportunity to do great, strange acting, so when I encounter him in a more bread and butter action thriller like York Alec Shackleton’s 211, I do find myself a little disappointed. However, if you are able to get over that little problem, you may find this to be very decent film. Shackleton’s direction is a bit too network TV like to really thrill me, but the film’s story is clearly told, and clear effort is  put into characterizing everyone involved, certainly putting this above the level of a lot of low budget shoot ‘em ups.

It’s not really the film’s fault I’d rather watch something crazier than this perfectly decent little number.

Coyote Lake (2019): Sara Seligman’s film about a mother-daughter duo (Adriana Barraza and Camila Mendes) who run a bed-and-breakfast practically on the US/Mexican border which they use to murder, rob and drown men working for the cartels, isn’t exactly a crazy film either. But here, the insistence on telling a tale that would usually make for a pretty extreme exploitation movie by avoiding practically all exploitative elements one way or the other, and instead focussing on a pretty horrible mother-daughter relationship, is actually what makes it interesting as well as pretty admirable. Seligman has a good grip on the elements of the material she has chosen to focus on, the actors are doing very good work (which is particularly important in a film that’s not at all focussing on the violence inherent in the material), so things come together nicely, creating an unassumingly effective film about family, freedom and weaponized capitalism.


Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): The second Spider-Man film taking place in the MCU with Tom Holland – and again directed by Jon Watts – is a strange little (huge) film. It is strange in the best way, daring a weird teen comedy vibe, destroying beautiful European cities as seen through US tourist eyes and using well-loved  elements of the Spider-Man myth and the MCU to goof off. Frankly, all of this shouldn’t work at all, and while this is indeed a surprisingly messy film whose structure doesn’t bode well for the MCU-less future of our friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler, it is also a whole lot of fun, suggesting a bit more of a freewheeling approach than typical in this kind of blockbuster realm.

Cleaner (2007)

Former cop Tom Cutler (Samuel L. Harris) has retired into owning his own business, a small cleaning company specializing in crime scene and general biohazard clean-up. He’s taking care of his daughter Rose (Keke Palmer) by himself, for his wife was murdered when he was still a cop. The killer was himself murdered in prison, and Tom and his partner and close friend Eddie Lorenzo (Ed Harris) only escaped jail time of their own for organizing the murder because Tom made a deal with one Vaughn, the godfather of the city’s corrupt cops, though Eddie doesn’t appear to no that part of the deal.

It’s clear that this past is something Tom dearly wants to bury under meticulous cleanliness, avoidance of all his old cop buddies including Eddie and, the good old medicine of pretending the bad shit didn’t really happen. The time for pretending is quickly coming to an end, though, when Tom is called into cleaning up a crime scene that will turn out not to have been an official one afterwards. Worse, Tom hasn’t just cleaned up the remnants of a crime, the victim’s a guy who turned witness against Vaughn. At first, Tom hopes if he continues his well-worn technique of ignoring the situation and hoping it will go away, nothing will happen, but neither this little problem nor his past will quite so easily stay buried.

The 21st Century parts of director Renny Harlin’s career are full of surprises, unless you share the distaste for the man’s body of work most mainstream film critics seem to have quite independent of the actual quality of any given film he turns out. Probably because pretending only tasteful middle brow directors making tasteful middle brow films are worthwhile is still a rather big thing in those circles, a gospel given unto them by the sainted Roger Ebert. If your background is in exploitation and cult cinema like mine, automatically disliking Harlin’s usually interesting, sometimes ridiculous and nearly always (that nearly is obviously important) worthwhile body of work after his time as Hollywood’s second greatest action cinema director seems somewhere between insane and hypocritical.

For its first two acts, Cleaner is very typical of this phase of Harlin’s career by not being typical whatsoever. Instead of the slam bang action he would have made out of this material in the 90s, the film at hand is a stylishly (but not so stylish it becomes distracting), slick, and calm (some may say slow) movie that’s much more focussed on its actors doing proper grown-up acting, with Harlin doing his utmost to step out of their way. Given that this is mainly Jackson’s and Harris’s show – with some very effective help from Luis Guzmán, Palmer, and even Eva Mendes – and these guys could obviously be involving and interesting when shot by an idiot on a phone or Stephen Soderbergh, this is certainly the right approach to the material, also providing the film with a human grit it needs to counteract the visual slickness a little.

This works well for the film, until the third act starts, and the whole film breaks down a little. It’s not just that the revelation of what’s going on is more than a little clichéd, it is also obvious from pretty early on. The way to that “revelation” is rather too messy, also, so messy, in fact, that even Jackson and Harris have a hard time actually selling the whole affair in the end. It’s also deeply unsatisfying in how little the film seems to realize how cynical its ending, where the only crime that’s actually punished is the one committed out of love and where all corrupt cops can merrily ride into the sunset, actually is, and how much it actually undercuts the whole “family first” shtick it is apparently trying to sell.


But then, the first two acts really are rather good.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

A couple of years ago, Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) was found with amnesia. Today, she’s a mild-mannered school teacher, a suburban wife and mother, and seems very happy with her lot.

Alas, a couple of things happening at now put a stop to her happiness. Her old personality starts to surface after she gets a good hit on her head in an accident, and her old self clearly wasn’t a very nice person, trained in all the arts of the movie spy assassin. Which turns out to have been exactly what she was when her old associates start trying to kill her after having seen her on TV in a small town Christmas parade (as you know, all Shane Black films are bound by law to take place around Christmas). At the same time, the last private detective Samantha hired to find out who she was before her amnesia, the decidedly shady Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson), finds some actual clues to her past. After Samantha, who is in truth called Charly, has fought off a first assassination attempt, she and Mitch go on a road trip together that will culminate in a lot of violence but will make clear who Samantha really was.

Put two lovers of excess in cinema like director Renny Harlin and writer Shane Black together, and you do indeed get a pretty excessive film. There’s violence I was really surprised a mainstream action film in the mid-90s got away with, there are explosions, there are so many people killed by our protagonist it’s difficult to describe this aspect of the film as anything but cartoonish. However, all this excess is based on what is to my mind probably Black’s most interesting script. It does of course contain his usual shtick about how horrible life and people are, but he’s exploring these ideas through an at first and outside of the action scenes very noir-ish and clever set-up that also concerns not just Samantha’s search for identity but also asks questions about what “identity” might even mean, and how fluent what we call our personalities are even when amnesia doesn’t come into play. Where did “Samantha”’s ethics come from exactly when she was birthed from the brain of a ruthless killer? This intersection of identity and ethics is also of interest to the film when it comes to Henessey, a guy who is as much of a con-artist as he is a private eye now, but who finds himself drifting back towards the better man he once was at the same time Samantha is going back towards the worse woman she was.

That exploring this through a big loud American action movie with conspiracy elements actually works as well as it does is a little wonder. But then, it also happens to be a fun and highly accomplished big loud American action movie delivered with all the excessive panache Renny Harlin (at this time still the second-best Hollywood mainstream action movie director after John McTiernan) is best at. But, perhaps because Harlin happened to be married to Davis at the time and really wanted to let her show off her considerable abilities after their curious pirate movie flop together, and clearly respected Jackson’s perfect rendition of the struggling private dick, he’s also giving the actors ample space to shine even when they are not murdering anyone. Add the horde of well-known faces and character actors (honestly too many to count) and you have yourself quite a bit of substance beside the explosions.


Really, my only actual caveat when it comes to The Long Kiss Goodbye is the set-up of a couple of its final action scenes where the wheels of the plot mechanics become so visible, it’s impossible not use the word “lazy” to describe the construction there. Fortunately, you’re not going to be able to hear me complain over the sound of stuff exploding.

In short: Glass (2018)

Warning: I’ll spoil some elements of the film; I’d argue there’s not much to actually spoil here, though, for the idea of spoilers does suggest the existence of dramatic tension to be spoiled.

After the nearly good Split, I, the eternal optimist, was hoping its sequel, Glass, might just be that curious beast – a second M. Night Shyamalan movie making good on the great genre director The Sixth Sense had once promised.

What I then watched was pretty much the opposite: a slow and tedious crawl playing out like a bad bottle episode of a TV show that takes more than two hours to get through what’s at best a thirty minute plot (which often seems barely to exist at all anyway). You’d hope the film would at least enhance this non-experience via the mysterious arts of characterisation and mood-building, but the little personality anyone on screen shows belongs to a cast just a little too good to feel quite as empty as they are written. Why you’d cast Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bruce Willis and then have them proceed to basically do no acting whatsoever, or why you’d let James McAvoy double down on his obnoxious performance in the first movie is anyone’s guess. But then, this one was written by someone (cough) who seems to believe he is - in a superhero movie in 2018 - doing something cleverly deconstructive by pointing out tropes the audience by now knows quite well from film where things are actually happening to keep them from falling asleep, and by doing a plot twist (that’s barely even a twitch) that consists of the film saying “Gotcha! You thought it was this standard ending trope! Instead I’m using this different yet even more standard ending trope! And I’m doing it as slowly and dramatically awkward as possible”!


Dramatically awkward is the watchword for the whole film. Glass is full of scenes that are slow (so slow) while having no apparent function in the narrative at all, going on for what feels like an eternity, pretending to do something immensely deep and clever the audience needs time to grasp while actually presenting not much at all. It doesn’t help here that Shyamalan seems to have lost every bit of dramatic instinct he once had. Take the triple “tragic” death scene before the end that gives two of the main characters and about a hundred of McAvoy’s personalities and their respective supporting characters way too much time to die (oh so slowly), drawing things out until even the last possibility of reacting to this nonsense with anything but laughter or eye-rolling disappears. I honestly have no idea what the filmmaker was thinking with these scenes. But then, I have no idea what he was thinking with the rest of the movie either.

Three Films Make A Post: You can change the cards you're dealt.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995): And with the third attempt, the magic disappears completely from the Die Hard movies. Willis’s John McClane is now pretty much like every other action hero thanks to the shunting away of his wife and the non-generic parts of his character. The moments of surprising veracity from the last films are gone, too, and the less said about the film’s attempt to make gestures of tackling racism via its buddy movie plot line with a Samuel L. Jackson who gives the only fun performance in the whole movie the better. The thing additionally suffers from a limp script that doesn’t seem to have much of a clue how to turn a series of action sequences into a movie.

Even worse, returning John McTiernan is at his worst here, directing action scenes that are basically competent but never fun, interesting, or exciting. I understand why everyone involved thought removing the constraints of locality of the first films to be a good idea, but replacing their tight, increasingly outrageous action sequences with Willis and Jackson racing all over New York solving stupid riddles while random stuff breaks isn’t an entertaining replacement. And don’t even get me started on Jeremy Irons’s performance that is exactly the wrong kind of cartoonish.

Another WolfCop (2017): I don’t think I exactly needed a sequel to WolfCop in my life, even if it is by returning director/writer Lowell Dean again. I especially did not need one where half the jokes are slight variations on ones from the first film. However, its (sometimes too) self-conscious charms, its goofy-gory humour and its general Canadian-ness might not quite add up to the outrageous gore and giggle-fest its (awesome) poster and its brilliant tagline (“Sequels are a disease. Meet the cure.”) promise but Another WolfCop is as good-natured and likeable as a meta-humorous pseudo-grindhouse film can get, and that’s worth something in my book.


Mara (2013): Over in Scandinavia it apparently takes three directors to make this – sometimes very pretty to look at – film about young people in a house in the woods – etc, etc. For a time, the whole affair looks and feels like your typical low budget slasher (including quite a bit of gratuitous nudity), perhaps artier shot, then it turns out to be a double-twist thriller that at least tries to play with the audience expectations towards plot twists. While I like the idea, and find the film more than competently shot, I don’t think the plot comes together well enough for the film to be interesting. Even with the twists, it’s just not very interesting, or exciting, or even fun to watch.

Three Films Make A Post: Every house has a history. This one has a legend.

The Black Hole (1979): I’m usually a sucker for Disney in their dark/weird phase, but Gary Nelson’s leadenly directed science fiction feels like an overpriced TV movie, and not a good one at that. Perhaps it’s the cast of tired looking veterans (some of whom I usually love) that gives this impression, or dialogue so leaden it’ll give US SF cinema of the 50s a run for its money, or the script that randomly cobbles together elements of Star Wars, the pulp SF that influenced that film (but without George Lucas’s understanding of the form), 2001 and any old crap the writers could come up with.

In any case, the handful of good, dark and interesting ideas here and the sometimes brilliant production design can’t make up for characters whose actions don’t even make sense if you interpret them as walking talking clichés, desperately lame action sequences (the worst actually a laser gun fight between our heroes and a bunch of robots standing unmoving in one line), and the film’s complete failure to create a coherent tone.

Mayhem (2017): Joe Lynch’s horror comedy about a corporate lawyer (Steven Yeun) and a woman with foreclosure troubles (Samara Weaving) using the automatic get out of jail free card of an outbreak of a rage-inducing virus to murder their way up to the executive floor of his company on the other hand does know exactly what tone it is going for. It’s mildly cynical carnage, pretty people bathing in the blood of their enemies and some very obvious satire of the evils of capitalism (as embodied by Steven Brand and his underlings). It’s a pretty fun time, if you’re okay with a bit of slaughter (and who isn’t). It is well paced, sometimes funny enough for a series of guffaws, and certainly acted with full involvement by everyone on screen. I do wish its capitalism critique were a bit more nuanced/interesting/unobvious, though I am not completely certain the sort of angry, bloody slapstick this is going for could actually carry more depth.

Eve’s Bayou (1997): Last but pretty much the opposite of least, there’s Kasi Lemmons’s brilliant black southern gothic movie that camouflages as magical realism for the the mainstream viewer. It’s a sumptuously (but never the kind that’s just for show) styled tale of a black upper middle-class family in the Bayous of Louisiana, of the way secrets and lies are as much part of what forms a family as is love and understanding, of the ways we construct memory regardless of what’s the factual truth about things and persons and perhaps even about the things we did or were done to us. It’s heady stuff, told with great assuredness, and full of small and large complexities and ambiguities in the ways its characters behave and relate that feel truthful to the way actual human beings are.


At the same time as she’s being honest about people, Lemmons gives the film’s gothic melodrama quite a bit of oomph, using her brilliant ensemble cast (of exclusively African American actors, but the film doesn’t make a big thing out of that, as it shouldn’t need to) for gestures grand and small.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017)

Belarus – please don’t ask me why they didn’t use a made up country here - dictator Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary “The Russian” Oldman) is standing trial for various counts of mass murder and all that other stuff dictators tend to get up to. Alas, it looks as if he’ll go free to return to his reign of terror, for the eyewitness accounts of his victims are dismissed as “hearsay” (that’s action movie law for you), while other witnesses “mysteriously” disappear or are outright killed by gangs of heavily armed men who totally aren’t working for Dukhovich. Ironically, the only chance of seeing justice done could be the statement of imprisoned professional killer Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson, motherfuckers), who is obviously much more believable a witness (he wrote, not at all sarcastically).

Kincaid is willing to play ball in exchange for the freedom of his also imprisoned wife Sonia (Salma Hayek in a pretty funny cameo role). Unfortunately, there’s a mole (you’ll never guess who, cough) in Interpol, so the transport supposed to cart Kincaid from England where he is jailed to The Hague is ambushed. Only Interpol agent Amelia Roussel (Elektra, ahem, Elodie Yung) and Kincaid manage to escape and hole up in a safe house. Roussel is no dummy and knows someone inside of her organization has sold them out, so she sees only one choice to get Kincaid where he’s supposed to go: rope in her ex-boyfriend Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds and all three of his facial expressions). Until an unfortunate incident for whom he makes her responsible for no good reason, Michael was one of the best professional bodyguards in the world, and he’s certainly not corrupt, so he’s Roussel’s best bet of protecting Kincaid.

Surely, the bodyguard and the hitman who attempted to kill twenty or so of his clients will hit it off sooner or later, or after a lot of bickering and sniggering at each other.

The reluctant buddy action comedy is alive and well, apparently. At least, Patrick Hughes’s film is a perfectly fun time if you’re willing to go with a film who puts no thought or work at all into improving on any of the weaknesses of the formula. So its villain is a bizarre, mildly racist caricature (though one played with vigour and enthusiasm by Oldman, who is not one of the type of actors phoning his stuff in just because the film he’s in is rather silly), the plot only makes the vaguest bit of logical sense, the villain’s plan is even worse, and women aren’t even allowed to beat their old, slightly overweight boss  without male help (which also gives one a bit of mental whiplash if one has seen Yung’s performance as Elektra in Netflix’s Daredevil).

Of course, the first three flaws are also parts of the charm of the genre, so I’m not exactly complaining too loudly here, specifically not in a film that features such a funny central performance by Jackson. Why, it’s a performance popping off the screen so well, I hardly even noticed Reynolds and his tendency to just rotate through his book, well pamphlet, well one-sheet, well, tiny little slip, of facial expressions.


I am sounding rather more cynical towards the film than I actually feel about it: this is a slick, wickedly funny, well paced despite its considerable length (for the kind of thing it is), piece of filmmaking featuring increasingly great – and wilfully absurd – action sequences, as well as Samuel L. Jackson in what feels like an excellent mood, calling people motherfuckers left and right. Why, the film even has a heart.

Three Films Make A Post: What was once in the deep is now in the shallows

Terra Formars (2016): When he isn’t making fantastic remakes of classic samurai films, or doing some really off-beat movie that harkens back to his really wild times as a director, Takashi Miike somehow finds time in his insane schedule to direct stuff like this big budget adaptation of a popular anime and manga series. Because this is Miike, the thing absolutely feels like a live action manga, so except acting so broad you could fit Gamera through it, absurd hair, special effects that really don’t care if they look “realistic” or not, a plot that manages to be straightforward and linear yet also difficult to parse to anyone who has no idea what this Terra Formars business is about (like me), insane moments of gore, kitsch, a Kane Kosugi cameo, Rinko Kikuchi, insect super powers, and a tone so chipper it becomes absurd. It all comes together – as far as this stuff even can come together – into the sort of film I can  joyfully let wash over me, be pleasantly entertained and only mildly freaked out, and love Miike for making this sort of pop art nonsense in between more serious, and (even) more weird and personal stuff, treating all these different types of filmmaking with the same vigour.

Hard Eight (1996): Paul Thomas Anderson’s Reno-set debut feature length film is a gambling movie, a film about guilt, a film about lies, a film about people who are all a lot more dysfunctional than they seem at first look, and a film about people trying to live in the backwaters of Americana,so it’s basically laying the foundation for every film Anderson made after. This one’s a comparatively small movie, concentrating on a handful of characters – played wonderfully by Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, and a few moments in their lives. While he knows how to organize large swathes of characters, Anderson has always been just as good at more intimate portrays of the lost and the lonely, so there’s great richness, depth and texture to these characters and their relations as well as to the unglamorous (Reno is basically Las Vegas without the pretence of class, right?) places they inhabit.


Les glaneurs et la glaneuse aka The Gleaners and I (2000): It is educational to compare great Nouvelle Vague director Agnès Varda’s late career documentaries with those of her lesser peer (sorry, Godard admirers, I’m half joking) Jean Luc Godard. Where Godard’s documentary work is formal and abstract, Varda’s philosophical approach concentrates on the personal and the concrete, treating ideas through their connection to people and seeking truth(s) about the large in the small. Consequently, this digitally shot – often playful in the best of ways - documentary about gleaners and gleaning (very much in the sense of people who pick what is left), their connection to art and the role of the artist – particularly Varda - as gleaner is full of a warm interest for the experience of people – particularly the poor, the destitute and the somewhat damaged who aren’t usually allowed to speak for themselves (even the people honestly fighting for their rights prefer to speak about them and rather prefer to treat them as abstracts).

In short: Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Apparently, Legendary is one of the major Hollywood studios who have their heads on screwed straight when it comes to creating the now mandatory blockbuster universe. At least in so far as the studio seems to realize that one of these shared universe films really needs to be a satisfying film all of its own, with the universe building a secondary element (see also the way Marvel operates). Narrative pay-offs of shared universes, if a company even cares, should really come in later films, and not be the aim of all of them.

As big damn effects cinema, Skull Island stands directly in the shoes of the original 1933 King Kong, which to my eyes always played as an effects extravaganza first and foremost. So this Kong delights with as many moments of various CGI giants slugging it out as can sensibly be packed into a two hour running time – yes, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts even manages to keep the runtime creep in check while also finding the time for some moments of awe and wonder. Given the budget, these scenes are expectedly sexy to look at, but they are also dynamically and excitingly directed. Why, even the action scenes including human beings just work.

Speaking of human beings, while the film clearly comes down on the side of the – in about ninety percent of all cases perfectly accurate - opinion that the audience of a film about giant monsters wants to see said giant monsters first and foremost, the classic pulp adventure business happening with the human beings is actually rather enjoyable too, and while characters and plot are broad and a bit silly (as is perfectly logical and appropriate for the tradition the film stands in), it’s the right kind of broadness, with larger than life characters doing larger than life things.


Samuel L. Jackson is obviously perfect for being Kong’s Captain Ahab, seeing how expert he has become at the right kind of scenery chewing for this sort of big budget monster movie, but there’s also some highly enjoyable work by John Goodman (who even gets a few monologues that suggest Legendary’s giant monster movie Earth is a rather Lovecraftian place) and John C. Reilly, as well as by Brie Larson (who gets more to do than I expected/feared and to whose outing as Captain Marvel I now look rather forward) and Tom Hiddleston. Of course, I am not one of those movie buffs who love to whine about how the blockbuster universes “cost us” incredible movie actors, because it’s not as if playing in this sort of film were easy (just look at how embarrassing otherwise good actors like Morgan Freeman can be in them) or would make it impossible to appear in smaller movies; it’s not as if there weren’t other actors around either. Instead, I’m happy about how even in the most technocratic of surroundings, a good cast still makes a difference.

In short: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

I’ve never shared the growing annoyance of certain parts of the critical classes with the way Tim Burton’s personal obsessions took over his films, despite some moments in his later films where even I wanted to grab the guy by his shoulders and tell him to just calm the fuck down for scene or two.

But if you’ve suffered from that particular illness worse than I did, it might just be worth it to return to Burton for this one. Turns out replacing Johnny Depp with house favourites Eva Green and/or Samuel L. Jackson has calmed Burton down enough to put a bit more effort into shaping the film into an actual narrative instead of a series of moments of whacky strangeness. The book this is based on and Jane Goldman’s script might have helped there, too.

There are of course still a lot of Burton’s visual trademarks on display, his patented eye for the lightly macabre, and so on and so forth. But even here, the director seems to attempt to get out of his standard approach, using actual locations beside the still excellently artificial sets, and managing to fuse the expected Tim Burton-ness with the demands of the family adventure world he is operating in.

All this adds up to a film I’d have a hard time finding reasons to dislike: the cast – including young (but not as young as their characters) leads Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell and a horde of well-loved faces – is in fine form, the plot is fun for the whole family (unless one’s family is really boring, obviously), the film’s very nice to look at, and there’s nary a scene that doesn’t contain at least one charming, imaginative detail.

In short: The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

I appreciate that it’s rather difficult to attempt to update Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp stalwart Tarzan to modern times, seeing that there are quite a few things central to the character that many people today would call “problematic” (many of them even for good reason). As a pulp reader, I’m perfectly fine with a film making heavy changes to these characters if that’s needed to keep them palatable to a non-specialist audience – it’s not as if the process would make the original stories disappear, nor will I be sad to see their racist, sexist etc elements go.

So it’s not in its attempts at updating Tarzan that David Yates’s film fails for me, it’s in the way it fails to update the character to anything interesting. Because this is a major mainstream production, its courage fails the film regularly. While I certainly like the whole “colonialism bad” approach, choosing the Belgian Congo for the plot is ill-advised, because the film really can’t go into the true atrocities committed at that time and place without exchanging being an adventure movie for something much darker, and certainly not anything Tarzan belongs in. Consequently, Legend awkwardly stops somewhere halfway between pulp adventure and horrible truths - shoehorning Opar in for good measure - and just sort of shuffles its feet. And don’t even let me get started about a film that makes various gestures towards giving Jane (Margot Robbie) some agency of her own, only to then let her kidnapping be Tarzan’s main motivating factor.

For Alexander Skarsgard’s Tarzan, you see, is that least interesting kind of hero, a reluctant one who spends much of the first half hour throwing around tragically bored looks. Which is pretty much what I felt during that part of the film, too, what with there about five minutes of something of interest or relevance happening in it. Turns out, stuff actually happening is rather important in an adventure movie. Who knew? Most probably not David Yates, going by the blandly polite, generally uninvolving way he directs action sequences that show little creativity or sense of fun, the truly embarrassing CGI vine-swinging, and the ponderous pacing he gives a film that doesn’t have actually all that much to ponder, and which could use a good kick in the arse.

Keeping to that form, Skarsgard’s Tarzan and Christoph Waltz’s big bad Leon Rom mostly seem vaguely bored, going through the motions but leaving charisma – and seemingly interest in entertaining their audience – somewhere in a different movie. The only actors on screen actually alive are Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (or George Washington Williams, as the film curiously calls him) and Margot Robbie, but of course, the film doesn’t deign to give them much to do. I could go on here, complaining about a Tarzan film that seems embarrassed about the hero’s traditional dress, his comic relief chimp, and so on, but that would be nearly as tiresome as the film itself is.

The Legend of Tarzan is a mostly tedious slog that really demonstrates how good many of the low budget Tarzan movies were, what with them actually containing scenes of Tarzan having adventures.

In short: Cell (2016)

You know what, says one Hollywood producer to another, why not adapt Stephen King’s very worst book? Yup, the luddite one with the cellphone zombies. The kids love ‘em zombies, and they sure will dig the whole thing about technology being evil, right?

And don’t you think the book’s ending is just not bad enough? I’m sure we’ll be able to stitch something together that’s even worse! Quick, now tell me the director of a bad but commercially very successful horror film? James Wan? Nah, to stylish. How about Tod Williams? You know, Paranormal Activity 2? I’m sure his experience with nailed down cameras will be a great asset here.

Now we only need a star or two. How about Samuel L. Jackson? He’s willing to be in anything as long as he gets paid, and we don’t have to be afraid he’ll believe anything below his dignity. The white guy we need, hmm, big ego, big talent he’s never actually using, career declining painfully… That has John Cusack written all over it! And what if he looks so bored with what he’s doing he might as well be talking in his sleep? And while we’re at it, why not hire a young actress (Isabelle Fuhrman) who’ll actually put effort into our crap like an actual professional, and whose character will die an hour in to add insult to injury?

I’m pretty sure that is exactly what went through various producers’ heads when Cell was greenlit. There’s no explanation how bad this thing is that makes any other sense, no reason for this to be quite as offensively bad as it turned out to be. Apart from Cusack’s sleepwalking and Jackson’s (whom I love, but honestly…) whatever performance, you get direction that – particularly in the first half of the film – goes all out on the lazy director’s favourite methods to produce “tension”: shaky cam and fast inconsistent edits, which also just happens to be the ideal way to avoid having to think about the actual framing of scenes. In this context, it’s hardly a surprise Cell also has the usual bleached out colour scheme going on, nor that Williams manages to waste some choice opportunities to add some weirdness and creepiness it desperately needs to the film, wasting the Kaufman-bodysnatcher with digital noises tendencies of his monsters on scenes that always manage to sell as ridiculous what should be nightmarish.

Of course, given how desperately the script (co-written by King himself, which is usually a very bad sign) tries to push as many elements of the book into a hundred minute running time as possible, the poor guy really doesn’t have the time to prepare any of the more interesting set pieces properly. After all, we need to rush to the next bit of the book, leaving the narrative a tattered series of barely connected episodes that lack any kind of coherence, weight and even the most basic thematic throughline. And then there’s that ending, a thing so misguided, vague and unparsable, even John Cusack’s Nic Cage on a very bad day style cell phone zombie face can’t make it worse than it already is.

I honestly can’t understand how this project could end up being quite as bad as it is – it makes World War Z look downright decent by comparison.

Kite (2014)

In a near future South Africa dominated by gangs and a corrupt police force after some sort of economic collapse. A young woman named Sawa (India Eisley) hunts a mysterious slaver and trafficker in kids only known as The Emir, the man responsible for the murder of her policeman father. To keep her trauma at bay, Sawa is taking the drug Amp that not only makes the psychological pain go away but also erases parts of her memory and increases her combat reflexes, though I’m not sure her killing machine style really needs much improvement. Her only friend is Karl (Samuel L. Jackson), her father’s former partner who keeps her in weapons, drugs and information and tries to erase as many of her traces as he can, which gets increasingly more difficult the closer she gets to the Emir and the higher her body count becomes.

Of course, taking a drug that destroys one’s memory isn’t necessarily a good thing to do because you just might lose your personality, or the actual reason for doing the things that you do, with it, and consequently, Sawa might have forgotten some rather important facts. Like how she is connected to the young guy (Callan McAulifee) who seems to be following her, helping her out (or at least trying to) and who says they know each other well.

What we have with Ralph Ziman’s Kite is a US/Mexican/South African co-production of the adaptation of a Japanese anime I haven’t seen but which is supposedly much, much smuttier. The whole international she-bang was filmed in South Africa, giving the film more of the feel of one of Luc Besson’s more obscure productions than of your typical US SF/action movie.

In fact, on an aesthetic level, Kite doesn’t so much remind me of its own anime roots as of a live action version of a francophone comic crossed with the 2010s interpretation of an old Duran Duran video clip. Which, if you ask me, is a good thing, and certainly an aesthetic that gives the film an individual feel, particularly in connection with the use it makes of its South African locations (only the most ugly and run-down, of course, because this is a post-economical apocalypse movie and not a tourist video) and minor role actors. It’s an interesting mix to say the least, and while Kite’s plot isn’t anything I haven’t seen a dozen times before (including the idea that vengeance probably-maybe doesn’t solve everything or makes you whole again), the rather more lived in world it takes place in gives it a bit of originality – at least inside the genre borders of post-economical collapse SF action. Which yes, is a thing now.

The film’s action is pretty great too, with a variety of increasingly tense and bloody fights that actually manage to sell the not exactly threateningly built Eisley as a frightening killing machine through clever choreography, fast-but-not-too-fast editing, and Eisley’s surprising ability to go from controlled childlike to fierce through poise and facial expressions. Sure, she probably couldn’t take most of the guys she makes mincemeat out of here in real life but she sure has the eyes of somebody who could, and that’s what counts in movies. On the other hand, the film also doesn’t make the mistake of never letting her lose a fight; as all good action heroes, one of her qualities is not that she’s never going down but the way she gets up again.

The plot, as I said, isn’t very original, but the film is well enough paced and doesn’t just go from one action sequence to the next. At the very least, Kite possesses an actual story, as well as characters that make sense in their comic book-y way, and while it isn’t exploring questions of trauma, memory and identity deeply, it’s not a thoughtless movie either. In particular when it comes to a style of worldbuilding that suggests more than it explains about its specific post-collapse world but which does intimate things that feel to belong together and form the place in which these characters attempt to survive.

And that’s really the part that makes Kite work for me the most, the feeling that its crazy, a little sad, and a little silly plot takes place in a world appropriate to it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,mexican movies,reviews,sf,action,ralph ziman,india eisley,samuel l. jackson,callan mcauliffe

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