Buddy-51

"Underworld: Blood Wars" is the fifth installment in a franchise that began way back in 2003. Nearly 15 years in, the series has devolved into little more than a rote, by-the-book enactment of all the vampire vs. werewolf silliness that has permeated pop culture in the period since. The only point of interest, while watching the endless battles that flesh out the script, is trying to figure out why a bunch of vampires and werewolves need to rely so heavily on high-tech weaponry and advanced firepower. Kinda defeats the purpose of being a supernatural being, doesn't it?

Kate Beckinsale, Theo James and Lara Pulver take center stage in the drama, while Charles Dance and James Faulkner, two seasoned actors who look and sound as if they should be performing Shakespeare on some London or Broadway stage, really seem to be slumming it here. Hard to resist the pull of an easy paycheck, I guess.

"Inferno" is the third - and least - of the movies derived from Dan Brown's bestselling pseudo-historical puzzle books.

Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon who, in this installment, is frantically searching for a deadly man-made virus that some apocalyptic nutcase, even in death, is threatening to unleash upon an unsuspecting world. This Hanks hopes to accomplish by piecing together a less-than- mind-boggling assortment of clues gleaned from Dante's "Inferno."

Despite a screenplay by David Koepp and direction by Ron Howard, this is a depressingly dull and unimaginative mystery tale, stocked with paper-thin characters and paint-by-numbers plot twists.

The movie's single redeeming feature is the location shooting in Florence and Istanbul. Think of it as a colorful travelogue and you'll have a much better ride.

Whether it's the limitless expanse of the Desert Southwest or the danger-filled streets of Ciudad Juarez as captured by cinematographer Roger Deakins, "Sicario" is a film utterly attuned to the drama of its spaces - especially when, within those spaces, there is occurring an intractable drug war that threatens to lay waste to the land and the people on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.

Directed with brio and style and an unerring instinct for visual impact by Denis Villeneuve, "Sicario" stars Emily Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya as two FBI agents brought in to lend "legitimacy" to a shady CIA operation headed by Josh Brolin. The ostensible goal is to bring the head of a Mexican drug cartel to justice, but could there be another, more personal reason for the mission - and exactly how far should two federal officers, sworn to uphold the law, be willing to go in overlooking some of the questionable means being used to achieve that end?

The screenplay by Taylor Sheridan takes us to a dimly-lit world of bloody cartels and government malfeasance where morality is murky and all sorts of ethical lines are crossed in pursuit of some larger goal - be it "justice" in a cosmic sense or just plain revenge for a wrong done and a personal loss suffered. Sheridan keeps not only Blunt and Kaluuya's characters in the dark much of the time but the audience as well, generating and sustaining an air of mystery and heightening the suspense.

"Sicario" features excellent performances from its cast, with a special shout-out to Benicio del Toro as an enigmatic, shadowy figure whose role in the proceedings is initially unclear but who steps forward, in sometimes shocking ways, as a major player in the series of events as they play themselves out.

"Sicario" is rare among American movies in that it refuses to provide the kind of neatly packaged conclusion we've come to expect from commercial enterprises, choosing instead to show that there are no easy solutions to complex problems and no happy endings for anyone involved in the messy, violent business we euphemistically call "the war on drugs."