On Blu-ray/DVD: ARCTIC (2019), THE HOLE IN THE GROUND (2019) and AMERICAN HANGMAN (2019)

ARCTIC
(US/Iceland - 2019)

A showcase for the always-reliable Danish character actor Mads Mikkelsen, ARCTIC is a cold and punishingly harsh survivalist saga from Brazilian musician-turned-debuting filmmaker Joe Penna. Shot in some desolate locations in Iceland with nothing to see but vast, snow-covered nothingness, the film gets a committed and physically demanding performance from Mikkelsen, and opens in medias res with almost no backstory as his character, Overgard, goes about his daily routine after being stranded somewhere in the Arctic. He sleeps in a crashed plane, but spends his days mapping coordinates, checking various fishing lines, and hand-cranking a small distress beacon. The only sign of life in the area is an occasional sighting of a lone polar bear who invades his camp and steals some fish while he's away. He spots a rescue helicopter that gets caught in a snowy wind gust during a whiteout and crashes. The pilot is killed and the lone passenger, a woman (Maria Thelma), is severely injured and barely conscious. Overgard raids the chopper for food and equipment--including a sled--and takes the woman back to his plane. With no sign of a further rescue attempt and the woman's situation growing more dire by the hour, he makes the decision to embark on a several-day hike, pulling her on a sled over the snowy terrain to where he believes a remote seasonal rescue station might be.

That's really it as far as the story goes. Almost all of ARCTIC's effectiveness comes from Mikkelsen, who has minimal dialogue and lets his weary, exhausted, exposed face say everything. Penna put Mikkelsen and Thelma out in the brutal elements (except for a couple of composited moments that look like post-production reshoots and do somewhat stick out like a sore thumb), and in addition to fighting off a polar bear with a flare (another scene that's dampened by some obvious CGI), there's a long, arduous sequence where Overgard encounters a mountain that wasn't on the map, and tries to haul the woman and the sled over it FITZCARRALDO-style, eventually giving up and opting to go around it, which will add another five days to the trip at a time when every moment counts. Speaking of FITZCARRALDO, one is reminded of Werner Herzog while watching ARCTIC, as Penna isn't afraid to let things unfold in a way that captures the monotony and the hopelessness while never being dull. He tells you next-to-nothing about Overgard or the woman (we briefly see his pilot's license, and we're led to assume the dead chopper pilot was her husband), and we only learn who they are over the course of this journey, as Overgard is a man who's willing to risk his life to save a stranger. We've seen these triumph of the human spirit stories countless times before, and they live or die based on the star. Mikkelsen's work here isn't as showy as James Franco in 127 HOURS nor does he carry the iconic weight of the legendary Robert Redford in ALL IS LOST, but it's a study in low-key persistence and quiet determination. That, and the pervasive sense of isolation are the standouts in ARCTIC, a tough sell that Bleecker Street only got on 268 screens at its widest release, but it's a must see for fans of Mikkelsen and survivalist cinema. (PG-13, 98 mins)



THE HOLE IN THE GROUND
(Ireland/Belgium/Finland - 2019)

Released a week before Nicholas McCarthy's THE PRODIGY, this past spring's other "evil kid" movie, albeit on a much smaller scale (A24 put it on just 24 screens and VOD), THE HOLE IN THE GROUND has a handful of effective moments, but can't stop tripping over its own feet and more importantly, can't settle on what it wants to be. Right from the start, with a high aerial shot of a yellow vehicle driving down a road through a forest, director/co-writer Lee Cronin is letting us know that he's seen THE SHINING, and the entire film ends up feeling like warmed-up leftovers from other horror films, namely THE BABADOOK and HEREDITARY. Living in the outskirts of a rural Irish town, Sarah (Seana Kerslake) works in an antique shop and is a single mom to young Chris (James Quinn Markey). She's evasive about her past and has to style her hair to hide a large scar on her forehead that presumably came from an abusive, estranged husband. One gets the sense that she's fled rather than moved and doesn't want to be found ("I know Dad makes you sad," Chris tells her), and she's on edge enough that the town doc prescribes a mild anxiety medication. Sarah and Chris live in an old, dark house bordered by an expansive forest with a massive sinkhole. Chris wanders off near the sinkhole and from that point on, Sarah feels something is different about him. Her increasing paranoia isn't helped by two near-misses in the middle of a road with local crazy woman Noreen Brady (Kati Outinen), who gets right in Sarah's face and declares "It's not your boy." Noreen's husband Des (the great James Cosmo) apologizes for his wife, but the townies know all about Noreen: years earlier, she became convinced that her own son was replaced by an impostor and she "accidentally" ran him down with her car and has been in a virtually catatonic state since.

Shortly after, Sarah happens upon Noreen's dead body near the side of the road her head buried in the dirt. Chris' behavior grows more erratic, with Sarah finding all the proof she needs when he has no idea what to do during an affectionate game the two have played for years, where they each make a funny face to see who laughs first. There's some intriguing ideas here about motherhood, which is where the BABADOOK parallels are most prevalent (though Markey's Chris isn't grating like the BABADOOK kid), and the panic and dread Sarah feels in looking at Chris and wondering if he's just like his father. That psychological horror gives way to something more, with Chris eating spiders and crawling on the floor like one, and demonstrating enough strength to throw Sarah around the kitchen. Cronin wants to deal in both metaphor and reality, and the story begins working at cross purposes. The atmospheric look turns to murkiness as it goes on, with Cronin indulging in pointless directorial flourishes like a perpetually flickering light in a dark basement and an inevitable journey into the sinkhole, where something even more horrific awaits. A debuting Markey is fine, and the promising Kerslake delivers a strong performance--both stars could've benefited from more focused script instead of what feels like a greatest hits compilation of the last several years of acclaimed indie horrors. Though, to its credit, it does have one late-breaking development that kinda sorta prefigures Jordan Peele's US, which opened a month and a half later. (R, 90 mins)



AMERICAN HANGMAN
(Canada/UK - 2019)

It's not every day that you get a heavy-handed, SAW-inspired courtroom drama, but here's AMERICAN HANGMAN. A hectoring, finger-pointing lecture disguised as a suspense thriller, the film was written and directed by Wilson Coneybeare, a veteran of numerous Canadian kids TV shows in what appears to be a serious step away from his comfort zone in addition to being his first IMDb credit in a decade (back in the mid- '80s, he also wrote for the Don Adams-starring syndicated Canadian import CHECK IT OUT!). AMERICAN HANGMAN opens with two kidnapped men being carried into a concrete bunker of some kind. One is a guy named Ron (Paul Braunstein), who was sitting in his car in a fast-food parking lot, and the other is an elderly man (Donald Sutherland) who was unloading groceries in his driveway. Their captor (Vincent Kartheiser) snips off one of Ron's fingers and gives the two men five minutes to figure out their connection. When they can't come up with one, he shoots Ron in the head. All of this is captured by a dozen cameras in a complex tech set-up, with the captor broadcasting the events live across social media. It's soon picked up by cable news, the cops, and the public. The captor explains his actions: the old man is retired Judge Oliver Straight, who years ago sentenced a convicted child murderer to death. The convicted killer was executed that morning, but the captor, who says he's the victim's uncle, appoints himself "prosecutor," accusing the Judge of murder in sentencing the wrong man to die. Also on trial are the police and the media, who also joined in the mad rush to condemn the wrong man, and the millions of viewers who tune in as the stream goes viral are the judge and jury--"the voice of the people"--voting to sustain or overrule every objection and ultimately decide Judge Straight's fate.

AMERICAN HANGMAN plays like one of those CBS crime procedurals when they try to break from the formula and do something "deeper." It's pompously full of itself, taking rudimentary, fish-in-a-barrel shots at the "breaking news" culture of today's media, represented by ambitious USCN (United States Cable News) reporter Harper Grant (Lucia Walter), while at the same time utilizing every tired, generic trope in the book. The captor's motivation is supposed to be a third-act twist that's obvious from the start, and the wild goose chase he sends the cops on won't fool anyone who's seen THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. And Lt. Roy (Oliver Dennis), the cop put in charge of this as it unfolds over the course of the day, is also busy overseeing a shuttering precinct AND it's his last day before retirement (no word on whether he's "too old for this shit"). Judge Straight is apparently a man of renowned standing in his field, and the murder case in question was national news, but no one watching the stream in its early stages--the cops, the media, the public--recognizes him, and nobody seems to know that this is the day the girl's killer was set to be executed. And when Roy and his cops finally start getting an idea of who the captor is, one announces "He has a record for some sort of endangerment but he got off on a technicality, and get this...he's an IT guy!" like a bad LAW & ORDER: SVU episode, as Coneybeare is so preoccupied with pummeling the audience with messages that he loses any semblance of basic logic and common sense. Kartheiser, sporting dorky glasses and kind of unflattering bowl haircut that no normal, innocent non-creep would willingly have, isn't asked to do much other than yell Coneybeare's talking points, while Sutherland brings some effortless professionalism to a role that has him seated at a makeshift witness stand the entire time and was probably shot in a few days. He's obviously the best thing about AMERICAN HANGMAN, the kind of movie where a supporting character is named "Josh Harkridge" and we're still supposed to take it seriously. (Unrated, 99 mins)

On Blu-ray/DVD: AT ETERNITY'S GATE (2018), THE FRONT RUNNER (2018) and THE BOUNCER (2019)

AT ETERNITY'S GATE
(UK/Switzerland/Ireland/US/France - 2018)

Beautiful and ponderous in equal measures, AT ETERNITY'S GATE does have an Oscar-nominated performance by Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh to carry it most of the way. Dafoe is so good--here and in general--that he successfully manages to overcome the major obstacle of being a 62-year-old actor playing someone who died at the age of 37. Directed by artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel (BASQUIAT, BEFORE NIGHT FALLS, THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY), AT ETERNITY'S GATE focuses on the last few months of Van Gogh's life and his artistic obsession, with a lot of time devoted to his almost sycophantic clinging to his successful contemporary Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac). Financially supported by his younger brother Theo (Rupert Friend), Van Gogh and his work would never be recognized in his lifetime, and while Gauguin sees potential, he feels Van Gogh is too erratic and psychologically unstable to focus and think his painting through ("You're changing things so fast that you can't even see what you've done"). It's at Gauguin's suggestion that Van Gogh leaves Paris to find inspiration in Arles in the south of France, and when Gauguin visits him and has to leave to attend to some sales of paintings back home, a devastated Van Gogh melts down and cuts off his left ear to show his devotion. After a stint in a mental hospital, Van Gogh spends his final days on a furious tear of productivity in Auvers-sur-Oise before meeting a tragic end.

Working from a script co-written with 87-year-old Jean-Claude Carriere, a frequent Luis Bunuel collaborator (DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID, BELLE DE JOUR, THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE) still going strong as he approaches the seventh decade of his screenwriting career, Schnabel often stages his scenes as painterly images, where the screen starts to take on the look and texture of a Van Gogh work, a technique that's reminiscent of but not quite as immersive as Lech Majewski's 2011 film THE MILL AND THE CROSS. Elsewhere, Van Gogh's increasingly fragile mental state is conveyed by the intentional repetition of many lines of dialogue just seconds apart and in a series of distorted camera angles, blurred images, extreme close-ups, and shaky-cam that wouldn't be out of place in a found-footage horror film. Falling on the side of esoteric in comparison to the 1956 Hollywood biopic LUST FOR LIFE, with Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, James Donald as Theo, and an Oscar-winning Anthony Quinn as Gauguin (or even Robert Altman's pre-comeback 1990 film VINCENT & THEO, with Tim Roth as Van Gogh, Paul Rhys as Theo, and Wladimir Yordanoff as Gauguin), but AT ETERNITY'S GATE is sometimes standoffish to a fault, with Schnabel's techniques growing self-indulgent and tedious after a while. Not surprisingly, it works best when he takes a break from the directorial wankery and lets Dafoe work his magic, whether it's a long monologue or in scenes with Isaac, Friend, Mads Mikkelsen as a priest counseling Van Gogh at the mental hospital, and Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, the "Woman from Arles" who inspired Van Gogh's famed series of "L'Arlesienne" paintings. (PG-13, 111 mins)



THE FRONT RUNNER
(US/Canada - 2018)

Hitting a handful of theaters on Election Day 2018, THE FRONT RUNNER didn't really catch on and only got a half-hearted, 800-screen rollout from Sony over the next couple of weeks, its gross stalling at $2 million and the film completely forgotten by December. A chronicle of the three weeks leading up to Colorado senator Gary Hart's withdrawal from the 1988 Presidential campaign over allegations of an affair with Donna Rice, THE FRONT RUNNER isn't very subtle about making connections to present-day issues, particularly in an embarrassingly heavy-handed scene late in the film between two Washington Post reporters. Hart, played here by Hugh Jackman, doesn't think the public cares about allegations and politicians' private lives, but as his campaign manager Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons, cast radically against type as "J.K. Simmons") tells him, "It's not '72." In the Senate for 15 years and losing the 1984 Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale, Hart's political star was on the rise, and going into 1988, he was posited as the front runner until a Washington Post reporter (Mamoudou Athie) brings up a brief separation from his wife Lee (Vera Farmiga) several years earlier. Already whispered about in political circles as a womanizer, Hart doesn't even mask his indignation and invites the press to "follow me around, put a tail on me...they'll be very bored." Following an anonymous tip, a pair of Miami Herald reporters, Tom Fiedler (Steve Zissis) and Jim Savage (BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD creator Mike Judge) do just that and see Rice (Sara Paxton) visiting Hart at his D.C. townhouse. The senator insists she was there for a job interview, though it soon surfaces that they met a short time earlier in Miami on a crowded booze cruise arranged by Hart's lobbyist friend Billy Broadhurst (Toby Huss), on a yacht prophetically christened "Monkey Business."

A relatively tame preview of the media circus that was the Clinton era, the Gary Hart scandal is generally considered ground zero of tabloid journalism working its way into present-day politics. Director/co-writer Jason Reitman (JUNO, UP IN THE AIR) wants to fashion THE FRONT RUNNER as a rallying cry against the 24/7 cable news coverage that was on the horizon, but the end result is superficial and strangely aloof. It takes neither a methodical, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN approach nor one of satire along the lines of VICE. It's just...there. It gets off to a clunky, plodding start and takes a while to recover and find its footing (it doesn't help that every other character seems to be named "Bill" or "Bob"), and keeps everyone at a distance, never really getting into the heads of Hart or his family, with everything reduced to melodramatic proclamations like "The public doesn't care about this!" from Hart and "I told you to never embarrass me!" from Lee. Jackman does what he can with the shallow script (he's very good in a scene where Hart talks a nervous young journalist through some mid-flight turbulence), Alfred Molina is badly miscast as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and Paxton has some good moments with Hart's sympathetic top female campaign staffer (Molly Ephraim) who's quietly resentful that Hart is abandoning her to a media that paints her as a bimbo. But much of this ultimately rings hollow if you're aware that Ephraim's character, like the Post reporter played by Athie along with several others, is a composite or an outright fictional creation. There's a few worthwhile bits early on, like Hart and Rice's first meeting during the loud and rambunctious booze cruise, with their conversation barely audible and being drowned out by Boston's "Long Time" (watch Jackson's face when Hart first sees her and immediately turns on the charm), but THE FRONT RUNNER plays like a forgettable HBO biopic, offering about as much insight into the scandal and its impact on future political news coverage as Gary Hart's Wikipedia entry. (R, 113 mins)



THE BOUNCER
(France/Belgium - 2018; US release 2019)

Released in Europe last summer as LUKAS, THE BOUNCER finds Jean-Claude Van Damme in the kind of serious actor mode he's generally avoided since his 2008 meta arthouse confessional JCVD. It comes at the right time, as he's really been skidding in his headlining action vehicles of late, littered with forgettable duds like POUND OF FLESH, KILL 'EM ALL and BLACK WATER in between the rebooted KICKBOXER nostalgia trips. Dumped on US VOD in early January, the French-Belgian co-production THE BOUNCER is a bit different from the film's LUKAS cut in that it's shortened by several minutes and all of the characters have been dubbed into English, where LUKAS had a mix of English, French, and Flemish. Van Damme is speaking both English and French in the overseas LUKAS trailer, but it's all English in THE BOUNCER, and while he's dubbing himself, the obvious revoicing of the French-speaking actors does this version a bit of a disservice. That hiccup aside, THE BOUNCER is Van Damme's best film in years, a surprising departure in a grim, gritty, somber character piece with shocking bursts of violence and some Alfonso Cuaron-inspired tracking shots and unbroken takes by director Julian Leclercq (CHRYSALIS). In Brussels, Lukas (Van Damme) is a bouncer in a club that looks like a Gaspar Noe wet dream. He's tossing out an unruly patron for roughing up a waitress, and a scuffle ensues when the kid plays the "Do you know who I am?" card, ending up with a serious head injury after taking a swing at Lukas, and even though he was defending himself, Lukas still gets fired. He's a widower and single dad with a vague past as a bodyguard in South Africa, struggling to get by and raise his eight-year-old daughter Sarah (Alice Verset). Though he's a loving and doting father, he has no job skills other than beating the shit out of people, and as a result, he ends up looking for work as a bouncer at a strip joint where the job interview consists of six guys locked in a dimly-lit, Tyler Durden-esque basement and the last man standing gets the job. Of course, Lukas gets the job.

The club is owned by Jan Dekkers (Sam Louwyck of EX-DRUMMER), who's known in the Brussels underworld as "The Dutchman" and is running a counterfeiting ring. This puts Lukas in the sights of ambitious cop Maxim Zeroual (Sami Bouajila), who offers to take care of the pending assault charges from his last job if he works as an informant supplying information about The Dutchman and his chief henchman Geert (Kevin Janssens of REVENGE). Story-wise, THE BOUNCER doesn't really bring anything new to the table, but director Leclercq succeeds in creating a bleak and oppressive atmosphere as Lukas gets in too deep, with Van Damme turning in an effective and very internalized performance and using every line and wrinkle in his aged, weathered face to convey just how weary and tired and beaten-down-by-life Lukas has become. During the '00s when he was cranking out some quality DTV actioners and nobody was paying any attention, Van Damme very quietly became a character actor disguised as an action star. Lately, he's been coasting, but THE BOUNCER is a welcome look at the direction his career should've taken after JCVD. That's why it's too bad the only version that's available stateside has all of his scenes with Bouajila and young Verset dubbed into English (quite badly in Bouajila's case) when they were in French in the LUKAS cut. Still, THE BOUNCER is a must-see for JCVD fans interested in seeing him stretch beyond the confines of his usual Redbox fare. He's a much better actor than he's ever gotten credit for being. (R, 87 mins)

On Netflix: POLAR (2019)

POLAR
(Germany/US - 2019)

Directed by Jonas Akerlund. Written by Jayson Rothwell. Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Vanessa Hudgens, Katheryn Winnick, Matt Lucas, Richard Dreyfuss, Johnny Knoxville, Ruby O. Fee, Fei Ren, Anthony Grant, Josh Cruddas, Robert Maillet, Julian Richings, Lovina Yavari, Ayisha Issa, Anastasia Marinina, Pedro Miguel Arce, Ken Hall. (Unrated, 118 mins)

Based on Victor Santos' Dark Horse graphic novel Polar: Came in From the Cold, the Netflix Original POLAR is garish, grotesque, highly-stylized, and absurdly over-the-top, which is pretty much the methodology of veteran music video director and occasional filmmaker Jonas Akerlund. Best known for his work with a variety of artists including Roxette, Madonna, Prodigy (he directed the video for their controversial hit "Smack My Bitch Up"), U2, Maroon 5, Beyonce, the Rolling Stones, Rammstein, Metallica, and Taylor Swift among many others, Akerlund has sporadically dabbled in film going back to 2003's meth addiction black comedy SPUN. POLAR is the first of two movies he has coming out in early 2019--the long-delayed Norwegian black metal saga LORDS OF CHAOS is due out in February but was shot back in 2016. Akerlund's approach to POLAR is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Some of it does, but it generally feels like an even more cartoonish JOHN WICK fused with elements of PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, and John Waters. It's the kind of film where nearly every scene ends with someone getting their brains blown out. It's the kind of film where a guy gets shot in the balls with a nail gun and then takes a drill to the head. It's the kind of film where the corpulent, cackling villain has a skin condition that requires repeated shots of him being slathered with thick, gooey lotion. It's the kind of film where a farting 500 lb guy is tortured and then shot to pieces, with wet, chunky bits of flesh and fat splattering all over the room and everyone in it, accompanied, for some reason, by the 1983 Kenny Rogers/Dolly Parton hit "Islands in the Stream."

When just-retired assassin Michael Green (Johnny Knoxville) is killed by a team of hired guns in Chile, his about-to-retire colleague Duncan Vizla, aka "The Black Kaiser" (Mads Mikkelsen), is assigned by his handler Vivian (Katheryn Winnick) to find and eliminate the culprits. Vizla isn't interested--he's tired of the life and he just wants out. But he works for Damocles, a DC-based black ops outfit run by the nefarious Mr. Blut (Matt Lucas), and they have a rather ruthless clause in their contract: all assassins are forced into retirement at age 50, and if they die--either in the line of duty or by another unfortunate "accident"--and are without a next of kin, their pensions (Vizla has managed to save up $8 million) are reabsorbed by the Damocles Corporation. Mr. Blut drives up his profits by having his retiring assassins whacked, and when Vivian sends Vizla to Belarus to kill the guys who offed Green, he discovers that Green's killers worked for Blut and it's all a set-up to take him out. Of course, he manages to escape and tries to go off the grid in his secret hideaway, a cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana. But Blut and his crew of killers relentlessly pursue him, eventually finding him and kidnapping the one friend he's made--emotionally troubled, withdrawn neighbor Camille (Vanessa Hudgens)--which inevitably turns Vizla into a one-man wrecking crew of vengeance.

Do any new hires at Damocles read their contract? Blut has these young assassins going after Vizla, but don't they know that if they stick around long enough, they'll be killed when they turn 50? Logic really isn't the priority here, but for a while, POLAR is reasonably entertaining in a trashy way. The gore and nonstop violent mayhem are almost comical in their excess (the scene where Vizla wipes out an entire army of Blut henchman with a pair of laser gloves linked to a pair of hidden machine guns is pretty impressive), and there's some gratuitous nudity and sex (including Mikkelsen ambushed and running around in the buff in a blizzard after an extremely vigorous seduction by a sultry assassin sent to kill him). There's also plenty of oddball humor, like Vizla having a piece of pie with an avuncular doctor (Ken Hall) who just gave him a rectal exam, or Camille talking Vizla into speaking to local schoolkids about his many travels around the world, which leads to him demonstrating ways to sever someone's arteries and asking the kids "Have any of you ever seen a dead body that's been in the sun for three weeks?" and passing a picture around.

But after a while, POLAR takes an ugly turn and stops being mindless fun. Vizla is found and taken in by Blut's goons, who then kidnap Camille and get her hooked on heroin like Gene Hackman in FRENCH CONNECTION II, while Blut spends four days torturing a shackled Vizla, slicing, dicing, snipping off pieces of flesh, gouging out his eye, etc. Mikkelsen is appropriately badass as the situation demands, Winnick has a definite femme fatale flair as the duplicitous Vivian, and Richard Dreyfuss drops by for an amusing cameo as Porter, an aging Damocles retiree who successfully managed to get away and now spends his days disheveled and shitfaced in a Detroit karaoke bar. Hudgens, looking a lot like a young Meg Tilly here, does what she can with a rather thinly-drawn character who, of course, has a dark secret that she's hiding, and Lucas, who previously worked with Akerlund in the barely-released 2013 dud SMALL APARTMENTS, dials it up to 11 as the world's least convincing megalomaniacal black ops mastermind, whether he's haplessly shouting "Guards!" when there aren't any around or standing helplessly as Vizla storms his compound and his security team says peace out and just leaves him on his own. But Akerlund also doesn't know when enough is enough. Watching Lucas squirt lotion and slather it all over himself isn't funny once, let alone ten times, and Akerlund spends entirely too much time with the obnoxious antics of the grating team of assassins sent to kill Vizla. At just under two hours, POLAR is bloated and overlong, and its go-for-broke attitude eventually grows exhausting. Akerlund even has the balls to re-stage the OLDBOY hallway scene, already several years past its sell-by date when REPO MEN did it nearly ten years ago, this time utilizing the editing skills of the dubious Doobie White, last seen hyper-cutting the most recent RESIDENT EVIL outing into headache-inducing incoherence.

In Theaters: ROGUE ONE (2016)

ROGUE ONE
(US - 2016)

Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Riz Ahmed, Jimmy Smits, Genevieve O'Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Fares Fares, Valene King, Anthony Daniels, Spencer Wilding, Daniel Naprous, Guy Henry, Paul Kasey, Warwick Davis, Ingvild Deila, Ian McIlhinney, Michael Smiley, Angus MacInnes, Drewe Henley, voices of James Earl Jones, Stephen Stanton. (PG-13, 134 mins)

The first standalone STAR WARS film chronicles the events leading up to Princess Leia getting the plans for the Death Star at the beginning of A NEW HOPE back in 1977. ROGUE ONE had a notoriously troubled production, with a major script overhaul by BOURNE series screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who was also rumored to have supervised extensive reshoots, with a particular focus on the last 30 minutes, after no one was satisfied with director Gareth Edwards' rough cut. Indeed, many shots and some dialogue ("I rebel") from the first teaser trailer are nowhere to be seen and heard in the finished film, and with three credited editors along with an "additional editing" credit for veteran Stuart Baird, who's long had a reputation as Hollywood's go-to guy to work his magic in salvaging a wreckage, it's obvious to anyone schooled in today's cinema that the making of ROGUE ONE was far from smooth sailing (post-production ended on November 28, 2016, 18 days before the film's release date). Edwards, whose MONSTERS was a monster movie with very little in the way of monsters, and whose GODZILLA relegated Godzilla to little more than a cameo, is a director who takes unpredictability to a detrimental extreme. He seems to go out of his way to avoid giving the audience what they came to see, and for some reason, this has earned him accolades. Right from the start, it's apparent that Edwards is attempting to make ROGUE ONE his own by not including the iconic opening crawl that's been a staple of the STAR WARS canon for nearly 40 years.

The film gets off to the clunkiest start this side of RULES DON'T APPLY, jumping from location to location until the pieces are in place and the plot finally set in motion. Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is a scientist involved in the creation of the Death Star, the Imperial Forces' "planet destroyer" and a project with which he morally disagrees but worked on it since it was going to be built with or without him. Erso's wife is killed and he's taken prisoner by Imperial weapons director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), while his young daughter Jyn is taken in by Rebel leader Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). 15 years later, the grown Jyn (Felicity Jones) is a prisoner given a shot at freedom if she agrees to accompany Rebel spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on a mission to find her father. Believing Erso is working with Krennic and Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry, whose face has been replaced by a CGI recreation of the late Peter Cushing, who played Tarkin in STAR WARS and died in 1994), Andor's actual orders, unbeknownst to Jyn, are to kill Erso. Assembling a ragtag motley crew of outcasts and miscreants--reconditioned droid K-2SO (motion-captured by Alan Tudyk), Zatoichi-like blind warrior Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), mercenary Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and defector Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed)--they embark on their search for Galen Erso, with Andor having a change of heart once it's known that yes, Erso took a major role in designing the Death Star, but he included a flaw in its exhaust system to give it a major weakness and render it ultimately ineffective.

ROGUE ONE has a lot of shout-outs and callbacks to the rest of the franchise, whether it's appearances by Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits) or Dr. Evazan (played here by Michael Smiley), who was famously bounced from the Mos Eisley Cantina in the 1977 film, or the decision to use outtake footage of actors Angus MacInnes and Drewe Henley (who died in early 2016), who played the Gold and Red leaders, respectively, in A NEW HOPE. Darth Vader (played by both Spencer Wilding and Daniel Naprous, and again voiced by James Earl Jones) appears, and there's a very brief walk-on for C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2. The epic battle between the Imperial Forces and the Rebel Alliance fleet recalls some of the best moments from the original film and Edwards and cinematographer Greig Fraser (ZERO DARK THIRTY) put forth a concerted effort to match the look and style of the nearly 40-year-old franchise kickoff. But Vader's intro is weak, and 85-year-old Jones' legendary voice just doesn't have the rumbling power that it possessed in his younger years. Vader's big scene at the end is most likely a reshoot (perhaps that explains why two actors are credited with the role when the character only has two scenes), and I'd be willing to bet that the most crowd-pleasing elements of what's on display here were the work of Gilroy rather than Edwards--things that were added after it was determined that what Edwards was doing simply wasn't working (it's also worth noting that one of the credited editors is Tony Gilroy's brother John).

One thing that doesn't work in ROGUE ONE is the CGI recreation of Peter Cushing, done with the blessing of a trust overseen by his secretary and personal assistant. The face is convincingly done on a technical level, but the ruse is up the moment Tarkin starts talking and moving and it just doesn't look quite right. It's not a matter of it being done out of necessity, like when Oliver Reed died during the filming of GLADIATOR and Ridley Scott used outtakes to have his face CGI'd onto a double's body to finish a handful of remaining shots. 2004's SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW infamously used digitally manipulated footage of a young Laurence Oliver, who died in 1989, to function as the film's villain and it wasn't met with a favorable response then, so it's a mystery as to why a full-on CGI version of a long-deceased actor is being done here, unless the goal was just seeing if it could be done. Like almost all CGI, it comes close at times but generally misses the mark, primarily because we see too much of it. Tarkin doesn't have a lot of screen time, but the digital Cushing is seen enough that it's a distraction. We also get a CGI version of young Carrie Fisher for one scene as Princess Leia (played on set by Ingvild Deila), but at least it's brief enough to serve its purpose without becoming completely off-putting. At 134 minutes, ROGUE ONE is occasionally sluggish and could use some tightening, but it comes alive in the second half with the action and battle scenes. However, other than Jyn Erso, the characters aren't very fleshed out and we never feel the closeness to them that we did with Leia, Luke Skywalker, or Han Solo back in the day (I didn't even know Wen's character was named "Baze Malbus" until the closing credits). It does earn some points for ending on the most grim and downbeat note for the STAR WARS universe since THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, but that sense of fatalism--this can't end any other way--was a given considering the circumstances under which Leia gets the Death Star plans. In the end, ROGUE ONE has its moments, but won't go down as anyone's favorite STAR WARS film, and while I like the idea of standalone STAR WARS films, this never manages to feel like much more than big-budget fan fiction.

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE SALVATION (2015); INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE (2015); and CHILD 44 (2015)

THE SALVATION
(Denmark/UK/South Africa - 2014; US release 2015)

Produced by Lars von Trier's Zentropa Entertainments, THE SALVATION is a dark, brutal western that will please fans of films like THE PROPOSITION and the more recent THE HOMESMAN. Shot in some desolate regions of South Africa that stand in for an almost otherworldly, apocalyptic version of the 1870s Old West, the film centers on Jon Jensen (Mads Mikkelsen), a Danish immigrant and war veteran who settled in America seven years earlier with his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt). Jon has finally achieved enough success and financial security that he can afford to bring over his wife Marie (Nanna Oland Fabricius) and Kresten (Toke Lars Bjarke), his son who was just an infant when he left for America. When fate has them sharing a coach ride to town with two drunken louts, the Jensen family's American dream quickly goes south: the drunks attempt to rape Marie and hold a knife to Kresten's throat before throwing Jon from the coach. By the time Jon catches up to them, he finds the dead bodies of his wife and son in the road and the two men still in the coach, sleeping it off. Jon kills both men and he and Peter bury Marie and Kresten. It turns out one of the drunks was the younger brother of Henry Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the ruthless, cold-blooded enforcer for an oil baron looking to buy up the town and run everyone out. Delarue gives the mayor (Jonathan Pryce) and the sheriff (Douglas Henshall) two hours to find his brother's killer or they have to pick two of their own residents to sacrifice. It says a lot about this town that they don't even bother investigating and instead spend the two hours deciding which two people they'll give Delarue before settling on an old woman and a paraplegic. It doesn't take long for everyone to realize Jon is the killer, and even though they know and like Jon and know the men killed his family, they're only too eager to turn him and Peter over to Delarue, who makes the mistake of underestimating the resourcefulness and the resolve of the Jensen brothers.

Directed and co-written by von Trier's Dogme 95 colleague Kristian Levring, THE SALVATION is an absolutely riveting western that could've been a hit if it had gotten a wide release. One of the most commercially accessible films to come out of the von Trier camp--and a complete break from Dogme 95 for Levring--THE SALVATION presents one of the most dour and hellish looks at the west this side of HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, and the town is populated by what may very well be the western genre's most shameless cowards--the mayor (who's also the undertaker) and the sheriff (who's also the minister) not only sacrifice a frail, elderly woman and a disabled man ("I don't bother anybody! I don't want to die!" the legless man cries) rather than do their jobs, but when Jon sells his land back to the mayor for a measly $150, the mayor tells him to keep the money in his boots strictly so he'll know where to recover his $150 when Delarue strings Jon up and lets him bake in the sun later on. And in an infuriating display of tone-deafness, the old woman's grandson (Alexander Arnold) actually calls Peter a coward for not stepping up to stop Delarue's reign of terror. Mikkelsen and Morgan make outstanding adversaries, and even playing mute doesn't make Eva Green tone down her usual crazy-eyes routine that Eva Greeniacs have come to know and love in her performance as "The Princess," the silent widow of Delarue's younger brother. She had her tongue cut out by "savages" as a little girl and has a strange relationship with Delarue where she's both co-conspirator and captive. As is the case with so many movies these days, it's some dodgy CGI late in the game (some really unconvincing fire) that takes you out of the film, but subtracting that, THE SALVATION is a must-see for western fans, a film that very effectively invokes nihilistic memories of classic spaghetti westerns--right down to its Kaspar Winding score that emulates the more somber, reflective side of Ennio Morricone--without becoming winking or self-conscious in any way. This one's a small masterpiece that's going to find a strong cult following very quickly. (R, 92 mins)


INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE
(US - 2015)

An initially OK throwback to the kind of nature-run-amok horror movie that followed in the wake of JAWS in the late '70s and early '80s, INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE, a loose remake of 1976's GRIZZLY, devolves into a laughable mess of crummy CGI and bad editing. The cutaways to the titular beast often look like haphazardly-inserted stock footage of Bart the Bear, and it's a rare occurrence where you get the feeling that the rampaging grizzly is actually in the same vicinity as the cast. By the very end, director David Hackl (SAW V) is resorting to a totally CGI'd bear and some CGI fire that would have the digital effects team at the Asylum looking away in embarrassment. This doesn't help make the case for the long-delayed INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE, which was completed in 2012, is on its second distributor (Open Road acquired it and sat on it for a year and a half before selling it to Indomitable Entertainment), and its third retitling after being known as RED MACHINE, ENDANGERED, and GRIZZLY. A movie about a bear chasing people through a forest shouldn't have this much behind-the-scenes strife. Fittingly, the film went straight to VOD, since its climax would probably get it laughed off the screen in wide release. There's ample evidence to suggest that INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE knows that it's garbage--no one's going to argue that a mauled-and-presumed dead Billy Bob Thornton reappearing with the left side of his face hanging off as he takes aim at the grizzly isn't entertaining as hell, or another character sinking into a rotting, maggot-infested deer carcass like it's quicksand doesn't deliver the gory goods, but INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE keeps stumbling every time it gets some goofy momentum going.

The script, co-written by BUNRAKU director Guy Moshe, works in entirely too much family squabbling between estranged brothers Rowan (James Marsden who, between this, THE LOFT, and ACCIDENTAL LOVE, has become the Patron Saint of Shelved Cinema) and Beckett (Thomas Jane). Rowan is an ex-con just paroled after a seven-year stretch for manslaughter, and Beckett is the deputy sheriff in their small Alaskan hometown. Rowan is back to look for local guide Johnny (Adam Beach), who's been missing with two hunters in the "Grizzly Maze" for nearly two weeks. There's evidence that a rampaging, rogue bear is on the loose, but nature-minded Beckett, who's tagged and collared numerous bears in the forest in order to protect them from being hunted, doesn't want Sheriff Sully (Scott Glenn) or eccentric local bear expert Douglass (Thornton, functioning as the "Jon Voight-in-ANACONDA" or "Henry Silva-in-ALLIGATOR" asshole) to just go in and kill it. There's some attempt at statement-making with Douglass, a Grizzly Whisperer if you will, incessantly talking about how man has upset the balance of nature and the bear is pissed off and ready to eat anything that gets in its way to restore that balance ("He's a machine. He doesn't give a shit. You all taste the same to him!"). Beckett, Rowan, and local medic Kaley (Michaela McManus) end up joining forces, both to find the bear and to locate Beckett's deaf wife Michelle (Piper Perabo), a nature photographer and conservationist who went exploring the forest to take shots for a new project, because sure, a deaf person in a forest ruled by potentially pissed-off bears who have had it with poachers and loggers is a great idea (SPOILER ALERT: the bear sneaks up behind her multiple times). Until Hackl gets way too comfortable resorting to unconvincing CGI, INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE is an intermittently fun B-movie throwback. There's a good amount of stuff to like about it: Thornton knows what kind of movie he's in and is clearly enjoying himself as the hectoring, antagonizing Douglass, who ventures into the maze on his own solo mission to exterminate the bear and keeps taunting Rowan and Beckett when they periodically cross paths, and the location shooting in Utah and in Vancouver is often breathtakingly beautiful. But there's just too much needless backstory on everyone, from Rowan and Beckett's tortured dad and cancer-stricken mom to their dad and Douglass having some falling out years earlier, to the real reasons behind Rowan's incarceration, and Sully allowing poachers into the forest because he's about to retire and needs a cushier nest egg. It's a movie about a killer grizzly...no one gives a shit about Sully's pension. The ending flies off the rails in a way that will amuse followers of bad movies, but it didn't need to be that way. Clumsy editing, subpar special effects, reshoots, and a plethora of post-production and "additional editing" credits show the tell-tale signs of a project in which no one was really sure what they wanted. You'd think it would be hard to screw up a B-horror movie about a killer bear, but INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE too often manages to do it. (R, 90 mins)


CHILD 44
(US - 2015)

Up until a week or so before its release, CHILD 44 was scheduled to bow on 2500 screens. At the eleventh hour, Summit abruptly came to its senses and downgraded it to a limited release, instead rolling it out on just 510 screens in a valiant attempt to contain the fallout. Landing in 17th place and grossing a paltry $600,000 in its opening weekend, the $50 million CHILD 44 was one of the biggest box office bombs of the year (a legit bomb--not one of those "It only grossed $80 million its opening weekend, so it's a flop" bombs that you read about every Sunday evening on Variety's web site), though it would've been even more catastrophic on five times as many screens. Produced by Ridley Scott and based on Tim Rob Smith's 2008 bestseller, CHILD 44 has a top-notch screenwriter (Richard Price, who scripted THE COLOR OF MONEY, SEA OF LOVE, and CLOCKERS among others), a solid director (Swedish filmmaker Daniel Espinosa, best known for SAFE HOUSE), and a terrific cast, but it's just lugubrious misfire from the start. The pace is mind-numbingly slow, the film absurdly overlong at 137 minutes (and it still feels like whole sections of story are missing), the cast of British and Swedish actors pays loving homage to Yakov Smirnoff with their cartoonish Boris & Natasha accents, and it takes a ridiculous 75 minutes for the main plot to even kick into gear. In the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, MGB (later known as the KGB) officials are busy burying evidence of a string of murders where the victims, all young boys, are found naked. Calling murder "a capitalist disease," the officials instead chalk all of the killings up to "train accidents," which doesn't rest well with MGB officer Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy). He's already butting heads with colleague Vasili (Joel Kinnamon), who starts a rumor that Demidov's wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) is a traitor. This gets the Demidovs demoted to Volsk where, months later, a similar murder catches Leo's attention and gets him in hot water with his superior General Nesterov (Gary Oldman), a company man happy to look the other way when it's obvious there's a serial killer at work. Price and Espinosa throw in a number of subplots that feel like superfluous padding, and while the period detail is excellent, there's little context in terms of where the story fits into Soviet history other than having barking officers barging through a door to find starving people in tattered clothing, huddled together as they cry and scream, which seems to happen every few minutes. There's such a lack of focus that the story becomes increasingly difficult to follow, there's a few fight scenes that are completely incoherent, and the cast of proven but defeated actors are terrible across the board. Did Espinosa spend all of his energies focusing on the production design at the expense of everything else? Aside from the gray, dreary look of the film, absolutely nothing in the miserable CHILD 44 works. One of the most oppressive film experiences of 2015. (R, running time: endless)

On DVD/Blu-ray: AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS (2013) and THE HUNT (2013)

AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS
(US - 2013)

There's some serious Terrence Malick/Robert Altman hero worship on the part of writer/director David Lowery with AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS, an artfully-shot but dreary and dull '70s-set mood piece.  Young lovers Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara) are wrapping up a crime spree when they're cornered by police, an accomplice is killed, and Ruth fires a shot that injures young cop Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster).  Ruth is pregnant, and for the sake of her and their baby, Bob surrenders to the police, takes the blame for the shooting, and says he acted alone.  Four years later, Ruth has stayed out of trouble and is a single mother looked after by Skerritt (Keith Carradine), the father of their dead friend and a dangerous man with criminal ties.  Patrick and Ruth have a tentative friendship that's leaning towards a relationship when he gets word that Bob has busted out of the joint and with the authorities and three killers hired by Skerritt on his tail, is headed straight back to town to pick up Ruth and their daughter and live life on the lam. 

On paper, AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS sounds like a solid drama.  But Lowery is more interested in the aesthetic element, which would be fine if the film wasn't so dark and drably shot.  Sure, there's some shots that have an almost still photo quality and Lowery's obviously a disciple of Malick's every stylistic move (I'm talking early, BADLANDS-era Malick when he still bothered with trivialities like narrative construction), but shouldn't there be more than that?  Lowery also seems to paying special tribute to Altman's 1974 film THIEVES LIKE US, which had a similar "young couple on the run and she's pregnant" element and starred Carradine and featured Tom Skerritt in a supporting role, very likely the source of Carradine's character name.  SAINTS boasts a strong and internalized performance by Foster and an excellent one by Carradine, in what's probably his best role in years and the film's most interesting character (Lowery even lets him sing the closing credits song and his voice hasn't lost a bit of that "I'm Easy" magic), but the film can't overcome its stale plot, sluggish pacing, and a pair of ineffectual performances by Affleck and Mara.  Affleck's naturally mumbly delivery has worked in his favor before, particularly in his Oscar-nominated turn in 2007's THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD and the recent OUT OF THE FURNACE, but here he underplays to the point of catatonia.  He and Mara both sound like they might doze off in mid-sentence every time they open their mouth.  By the time it's over, you may find that the film's high points are the performances of Foster and especially Carradine, who obviously has a huge fan in Lowery.  Now that he's got a fake Malick film out of his system, maybe next time Lowery should write a script specifically tailored for Carradine.  That sounds like a winner.  (R, 96 mins)


THE HUNT
(Denmark/Sweden/Belgium - 2012/2013 US release)

Ghost-produced by Lars von Trier, THE HUNT is one of the top feel-bad movies of the year.  Directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg (THE CELEBRATION), the film stars Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas, a mild-mannered nice guy who's divorced and has a teenage son who's thinking about moving in with him permanently.  A teacher by profession, Lucas was laid off after the school closed, but now he's helping out at a pre-school in the small town where he lives.  He works, hangs out with his buddies, and leads a generally quiet life, and things are starting to progress romantically with co-worker Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport).  All that goes to shit when he's accused of sexually abusing young Klara (a remarkable performance by Annika Wedderkopp in a very difficult role).  Klara is the daughter of Lucas' best friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen) and trusted family friend Lucas frequently walks her to school.  Klara develops a harmless crush on Lucas and in one of those awkward moments where kids imitate adults, kisses him on the lips when he's horsing around in the school playroom with some of the boys.  Lucas handles the issue in a way that's sensitive to Klara, but she's embarrassed and makes up a story using verbiage she overheard her older brother and his friend using when they were looking at a porno mag.  Lucas' boss Grethe (Susse Wold) handles the matter in the most overzealous manner possible, properly notifying the police but then immediately telling all the parents and even calling Lucas' ex-wife, who lives out of town with their son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom).  The cops questioning little Klara practically put the words in her mouth and before he even realizes what's happening, Lucas is the town pariah, ostracized by everyone, banned from all business establishments, and Theo and his wife Agnes (Anne Louise Hassing) want nothing more to do with him, even after Klara confesses that nothing happened and she made it up.  The damage is done and a mob mentality forms throughout the town, with more parents coming forward with allegations that Lucas molested their children as well. 

THE HUNT mellows out as it goes along, but for a while, it's a harrowing experience.  The tension mounts as Lucas grows increasingly panicked over the situation and can't get a straight answer out of anyone, and it's hard not getting angry at the "villages storming Castle Frankenstein" reaction of his friends and acquaintances as the situation quickly and plausibly spirals out of control. The resolution probably wouldn't work if this got an American remake, which seems likely.  A mainstream take on this would've turned Lucas' plight into a STRAW DOGS-style siege situation leading to a vengeance saga.  There is an element of that here, and in the fate of one individual, but Vinterberg doesn't proceed in that direction, instead going for that arthouse ambiguity in an ending that doesn't provide closure, which is probably the whole point.  THE HUNT is a top-notch suspense drama with an outstanding performance by Mikkelsen, who took home the Best Actor prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival for his brilliant work here.  (R, 116 mins)