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The Way Back

February 16, 2013

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One of the most misunderstood and underrated films of the past couple of years has been The Way Back by Peter Weir. Before it came out, I remember reading an article lamenting how the Hollywood distribution landscape had changed so much over the previous decade that Weir — an Oscar nominated and widely admired filmmaker — could no longer get studio backing and distribution for his latest effort. Just seven years earlier, Twentieth Century Fox put its weight behind the production and distribution of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), which went on to land 10 Academy Award nominations (including two for Weir). But, by the time of The Way Back, Weir’s financiers and distributors consisted of a network of fairly small companies geared for the art-house market. Not that the look and quality of The Way Back suffers, but it’s sad all the same because the absence of heavyweight companies with deep pockets as well as far-reaching distribution and marketing muscle could really have helped this ambitious and deserving film reach a wider audience. As it stands, Weir and his cinema — once A-list sure bets — risk becoming overshadowed by the studios’ desire to back only tentpole franchises engineered for maximum box office.

The Way Back follows a group of prison-camp escapees during WWII as they trek the thousands of miles from Siberia to safe asylum in British-occupied India. This is not an action or a suspense film, though Wier fashions elements of both into his tale. This is not a character study, particularly, since none of the characters — save that of Janusz, a political prisoner played by Jim Sturgess — really assumes fully rounded dimensions. There are two others, a cutthroat ex-criminal played by Colin Farrell and an enigmatic American played by Ed Harris who command our attention with their hard-edged personalities, their jaded world views. Gradually, through their cooperation and grit, we become fond of them, as we do the rest in the group because of their pure and enduring will to live. For the most part, The Way Back is a quiet and reflective experience in which its characters — and we, the audience — weigh constantly whether it isn’t better to just lie down and die. But always these men — and the one young Polish woman who joins them, played by Saoirse Ronan — push onwards, haggard, parched, famished, but driven toward life, escape, a more hopeful future.

Weir’s drama is decidedly low-key and exists largely as one between the individual and the passing landscape. The men distract themselves with conversations about chicken recipes as they subsist on tree bark, trudge on on swollen feet wrapped in rags, and dream of the next sip of water or a bit of real food. The Way Back is like a prison film and a prison escape film in one, because upon escaping the real prison, the group finds itself in another one, extending 4000 miles from end to end. They drop like flies as they go, one by one, their graves indicated by the markers like bread crumbs along the way. And there are surprising decisions too as, for instance, when Farrell’s character realizes that Mother Russia is the only home for him, for better or worse. His fate is a haunting one, visualized in the image of a lone man against the rugged, unforgiving starkness of his homeland, and we can’t help but wonder what lies ahead for him. Whether The Way Back is fiction or not isn’t really important (there are assertions that the story, despite its claim as being based-on-fact, is all fabrication). There are greater concerns in the film, especially the running desire for redemption that inspires Janusz. Even after his betrayal, the man isn’t angry at his wife, he understands the duress under which she had to give him up. His goal now is to tell her he forgives her. Harris’s story too is anchored by the guilt he feels towards his child.

Weir maintains a sure, subtle hand throughout. His one major story flaw is that he doesn’t allow for enough buildup at the prison camp before the men stage their breakout. There isn’t enough of a sense of last-straw desperation or, for that matter, any sense of coordinated planning, things that would’ve added suspense to the breakout once it did happen. As it is, the breakout comes abruptly, too soon, and seems too easy, amounting only to a bunch of men running wildly through the woods as dogs and soldiers pursue. They have only to run hard enough and long enough to secure their chance at survival. Still, in the passages that follow, Weir offers a solid, resonant meditation on survival, on hope, on the value of life in the face of implacable hostility, portrayed memorably by an excellent cast and Weir’s vast, brutal, awe-inspiring landscapes.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Peter Weir
Written by: Keith R. Clarke, Peter Weir
Cast: Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan, Mark Strong, Colin Farrell

Posted in Action & Adventure, Drama, Historical | Leave a Comment »

Flight

November 15, 2012

The first 40 minutes of Flight feature perhaps the boldest filmmaking in the career of director Robert Zemeckis. Not only does it further prove his mastery of suspense, his complete command over the physical elements of action, but we find him pushing his characters to the brink of emotional disaster, far-gone into abusive behavior, and he keeps them there, teetering on the precipice between salvation and certain doom. The fact that we care as much as we do about his protagonist, an alcoholic commercial airline pilot named Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), means that his struggle to face his demons becomes every bit as harrowing an experience as enduring the terror-filled mid-air incident that triggers the entire narrative. After the dust from that expertly directed opening episode settles, though, Flight becomes an awfully familiar melodrama redeemed thankfully by a bracing performance by the world-class Washington.

Whitaker is a powerhouse drunk, the kind of drunk who chugs gallons of vodka like it’s water while behind the wheel. And he’ll snort a few lines to bounce back out of his stupor. When we find him taking the cockpit of his fully loaded plane, Whitaker is coming off a bruising drug and booze-fueled bender. But what should’ve been a short hop from Florida to Georgia ends up being a descent into Hell as Whittaker’s plane loses hydraulics and nosedives. In the ensuing vortex of panic and confusion, Whittaker miraculously lands the plane, saving most of the lives on-board. This entire sequence is worth the price of admission and should be filed among the movies’ greatest air disasters.

What should be a cause for celebration for Whitaker is the beginning of a nightmare as evidence of his blood-alcohol content soon comes to light. And the lawyer representing the pilot’s union (Don Cheedle), along with the union rep (Bruce Greenwood), struggle to keep Whittaker on the straight-and-narrow as they seek to deflect liability away from his drunkenness in preparation for an upcoming NTSB hearing. Hounded by shame, guilt, and anger, however, Whittaker can’t stay away from the bottle. The alcohol is both the source all his anguish — he feels he’s betrayed and abandoned his son and ex-wife due to his drinking — and his only comfort. The comfort, of course, is only an illusion, and it’s that journey towards dispelling the illusion and towards openly admitting (and repenting) his alcoholism that Zemeckis’s movie explores.

Anyone familiar with movie-of-the-week tropes about alcoholism knows the scenes: The drinking binges followed by chastened periods of going clean followed by guilt-fueled relapses followed by the protagonist reluctantly attending AA meetings and so on and so forth until the moment of truth, the moment of utter humility when the alcoholic sees the light. And, yes, we have a fellow traveler on Whittaker’s path too — a heroin addict, Nicole (Kelly Reilly), who’s farther along on the path than Whittaker and who tries to stand him up when he’s down. Anyone who’s seen Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and countless similar dramas, knows their fairly worn-out dynamic.

A shame about Flight is that what’s truly a spectacular (in every sense of the word) first act serves merely as a pretext to a far less interesting and cliche-ridden story about one man’s struggle to find himself. This isn’t to say that the movie isn’t compelling and absorbing: Washington is so wrenching, so heartbreaking — the kind of performance that’s both repulsive and appealing at once — that we forgive most of screenwriter John Gatins and Zemeckis’s lingerings in the familiar. There are some grievous errors that almost sink the whole movie as when John Goodman, playing Whitaker’s Dr. Feelgood, shows up at a critical point and throws the tone of the entire film out of whack. For the duration of his appearance and purpose in the scene, Flight goes from a deadly serious personal drama to some kind of perverse spring-break comedy. How Zemeckis could have miscalculated the nature and tone of his own drama, as evidenced by this scene, is baffling, and it points to a certain disconnect with the material as if he were out of his depth, and he needed to swim to the shallows to liven things up.

The performances are top-drawer across the board, especially Washington’s. He’s an actor supremely adept at playing men puffed up by a misguided sense of themselves only to be humbled by circumstance and deep introspection. Reilly is sweet and committed in a performance that’s largely redundant, while Greenwood and Cheedle hold up the sober end of the ensemble solidly. After Cast Away (2000), Flight is exactly the kind of product you’d by now expect from Zemeckis: Brilliantly crafted and loaded with high-end potential at the outset but which quickly falls into a rather pedestrian tour of monumental themes. As A-list substance-abuse melodramas go, this one lands safely enough.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Written by: John Gatins
Starring: Denzel Washington, Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheedle, Nadine Valazquez, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman

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Skyfall

November 11, 2012

The James Bond franchise celebrates its 50th anniversary with not the most celebratory of Bond movies. Director Sam Mendes and writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan fall back on the heavy-duty psycho-drama and origin-story psychoanalysis — elements better and more suitably employed in Casino Royale (2006) — to fuel the latest Bond go-around, Skyfall. What ends up happening, though, is that Mendes and company get so lost in the murk of the drama, in the leaden themes of betrayal, guilt, and vindication and in the theatrics involved with all the above that they completely miss the point that Bond is supposed to be fun.

The plot concerns the theft of top-secret computer files that contained the names of all MI6 agents working undercover in terrorist organizations around the world. By exposing their names, the culprit not only puts the agents’ lives in danger, but also the credibility of MI6, the super-secret spy organization headed up by M (Judi Dench). Bond’s pursuit of the criminal mastermind ends at the headquarters of an embittered former MI6 agent, Silva (Javier Bardem), who was once betrayed by M and who now harbors a smoldering desire for revenge against her and her organization. Bond’s capture of Silva is only the beginning in the latter’s ploy to find satisfaction, leading to an explosion-filled showdown at Bond’s titular childhood estate where he and M are holed up.

Daniel Craig is among the more captivating Bonds ever to be cast. He’s up there with Connery in his no-nonsense and amoral pursuit of mission objectives. But the dire mistake that the current crop of Bond producers, writers, and directors make is to overplay Craig’s penchant for brooding self-absorption. At one point in the story, when Bond is given up for dead, he spends his time getting drunk and chugging pain pills, and we see in him a vulnerability we rarely glimpse. Later, in a face-to-face with Silva, as the latter is running down a checklist of Bond’s flaws (including his substance abuse and childhood trauma), and, again, in a third-act revelation about his parents’ deaths when he was child, we get occasions for digging into Bond’s past and for understanding his state of mind. But all this, especially because Casino Royale went over this ground already, is just redundant character-building. It’s as if Mendes couldn’t be bothered with crafting an exciting, fast-paced spy thriller — or didn’t know how to make one — and so retreated into the territory in which he felt comfortable.

One evidence of this can be found in the chase sequence at the movie’s outset. Everything’s rolling along fine until the writers find themselves stuck on a train, with Bond ducking a hail of gunfire from his opponent. Rather than keep things elemental and physical (as Casino Royale did in its smart, riveting, vertiginous opening), the writers get the idea of putting a shovel tractor on the bed of the train. Its presence on the train is baffling, but it’s convenient and provides a clever device for a “sensational” moment that Bond gets to impress his audience with as he goes to work manipulating the tractor. For me, it’s a clunky, graceless moment in a film filled with unremarkable action set pieces — all of which are loud, expensive, and arbitrary. The two worst include a subterranean chase that involves a train careering through a blown-apart hole, and straight into Bond’s path: It all looks neat but does nothing but make noise. The other set piece, the movie’s capper, involves the siege that Silva lays to Bond’s estate — a setting that bafflingly recalls the moors in dreary Victorian gothic novels. Crass with explosions, firepower, and machine-gun bullets traded back and forth, this finale is a disappointing dog; again, it’s as if Mendes and company are more interested in the thematic and symbolic underpinnings of the action than the pace, wit, and originality of the action itself.

Who pays the price for Skyfall? Bond fans do, of course. But so does Daniel Craig. He’s not going to be around forever — not in this shape, anyway — so it’s this reviewer’s hope that, next time around, they give Craig an opportunity to be Fleming’s Bond, the Bond of Connery, instead of this neo-Victorian creation, a broken-down Heathcliff whose past bereavements must be continually paraded out every time he confronts a new mission. Craig gets almost no opportunity, apart from a few scenes, to be Bond — self-reliant, hyper-competent, and resourceful in spite of the odds. M is also wasted. In fact, this is the first time I grew truly annoyed by Judi Dench, not exactly the actress but her character: principled, yes, and headstrong, but here she commandeers an entire Bond film through her sheer ineptitudes, past and present. Lastly, what a waste of a potentially superb Bond villain. Bardem has two terrific scenes: His first, opposite Craig, sends chills as he fops and capers, trying to tease and belittle Bond with a just-right homoerotic edge; here, I thought, is a Bond villain who creeps people out but also seduces us. The other, opposite M, in which Silva is in his transparent holding cell, is a showstopper. Bardem makes Silva’s damaged humanity, deranged mind, and thirst for vengeance fully palpable and relatable. But, ultimately, the actor’s brilliant portrayal is squandered in a series of standard-issue chases, fights, and a couple of cliché-ridden moments that recall the dullest of action-movie conventions: The villain getting cold feet before he can finish the job. Yes, that happens.

Apart from select moments of character interplay, Skyfall is more or less a bust as a Bond movie. In fact, this isn’t a Bond movie, except in name. This is an approximation, a posturing of a Bond movie. The movie you get when the director and the writers — really, anyone in any prime creative or executive role on the project — have zero grasp of what has made Bond such a magnetic draw for 50 years. Gone is the man of action, replaced by a vexed and agitated neurotic. Gone is the pure sense of fun, adventure, the unexpected. Bond movies only come around every few years, and we can hope Craig’s Bond finds again the script and director he deserves. As for Skyfall, it’s a wasted opportunity.

If you’ve read this far: One final carp. Except for Adele’s excellent title song, the score in Skyfall by Thomas Newman is a dreadful bore. The lack of memorable Bond music since John Barry is a cause for concern as is the near-absence of Bond’s signature theme in these latest offerings. Why have the franchise executives turned their backs on the classic Bond template, its classic sense of style and attitude? The fact that the opening gun-barrel sequence is now relegated to the pre end-credit roll is also troubling and shows a baffling disregard for form; for decades, Bond movies opened with the gun-barrel sequence at the beginning — it’s Bond’s signature, a graphic choice that sets the brand apart from a crowded field of pretenders and competitors. This desperate desire to re-shuffle the template, to ditch elements that helped define the brand, is a worrisome trend. Perhaps what Bond needs is less of a re-boot and more of a celebration of what made the brand great to begin with.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Sam Mendes
Written by: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan
Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Bérénice Marlohe, Albert Finney

Posted in Action & Adventure, Thriller | 34 Comments »

Looper

November 2, 2012

Looper is among the cleverest, most skillfully crafted and entertaining sci-fi thrillers of the past 20 years. Writer-director Rian Johnson, who made the smart, savvy high-school-set noir Brick in 2005, opts for a cat-and-mouse action-movie with not the easiest gimmicks driving it: Time travel. Often raising more questions of narrative logic than the filmmakers’ originally intended — and which detract from the movie’s ultimate enjoyment — the time-travel gimmick can become more trouble than is worth for all concerned. But with its swift, sure-footed pacing, Johnson’s shrewd staging and framing, and pitch-perfect performances, Looper is so winning and absorbing that any plot holes and time-travel gaffes are easily overlooked.

It’s 2044, and there’s a new breed of criminal thriving in the mercenary underground: Loopers. These are killers hired to assassinate individuals from the future, sent back 30 years — from a time when time-travel has been invented and immediately banned — by a criminal syndicate commissioned to eliminate them. Apparently, disposing of dead bodies in the future is a tricky ordeal, so it’s a better bet to ship those you want to kill back in time and have the loopers do it for you.

Enter Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a looper who’s made a killing — pun intended — at his profession who works for Abe (Jeff Daniels), a kingpin in the time-travel assassination business. Business is brisk, but a wrinkle appears when the loopers discover that more and more of their targets are older versions of themselves, shunted back 30 years from the future. It turns out that a nefarious figure, dubbed The Rainmaker, is tyrannizing the future, bringing governments to their knees, and one of The Rainmaker’s decrees is to eliminate every ex-looper still living.

It’s not long before Joe finds himself face-to-face with his future self, played by Bruce Willis — at his chiseled action-hero best. Unlike his previous targets, Willis isn’t going to go so easily; he escapes his assassination and sets off on a mission to hunt down and kill The Rainmaker — the sole cause of all his grievances, including the death of his future wife. Willis narrows down his targets to one of three possible suspects — all young boys — and, it’s at the home of one of them that Gordon-Levitt arrives, anticipating that Willis will soon show up. Watched over by a tough-as-nails, protective mother — played by the always-captivating Emily Blunt — the young boy (Pierce Gagnon) is alert, observant, and he possesses seismic telekinetic powers, enough to tip anyone off that he’s the boy Willis is after. The dramatic tension between Gordon-Levitt and Blunt earn the romantic sparks that ensue while the former’s growing bond with Blunt’s son is also richly layered with close scenes of the two. With Gordon-Levitt, determined to save his charge, and Willis, bent on erasing the evils of his past, on a collision course, the final third of Looper becomes a riveting example of how shrewd storytelling can hold audience sympathies with both its lead characters, despite their being in direct opposition with each other.

Gordon-Levitt and Willis play two versions of the same character, that is to say, Gordon-Levitt does an impression of Willis. And, as impressions go, it’s an incredible one, channeling Willis’s tics and mannerisms to a tee. But it’s also performance that stands on its own — Joe is a tough, business-as-usual killer with a deference to his employers and with a cocky, assured sense of his future. All of that comes crashing to pieces when he slowly, surely falls for Blunt and vows to protect her son at all costs. Willis is commanding as always but now, showing his age and his wear-and-tear, he’s becoming our next Eastwood, especially since his on-screen persona — laconic, morally clear, and purposeful — is in line with Eastwood’s Man with No Name and Dirty Harry.

If Looper has a fault, it’s that it has too many moving parts, too many plot lines weaving together motives and counter-motives to keep track of. For plot-driven sci-fi thrillers, this is an occupational hazard and as clean as Johnson’s script is, it’s too busy — especially once Daniels and his minions go hunting for both Gordon-Levitt and Willis — to allow for a full immersion into the story’s wonderfully drawn characters. That frenetic quality also rules out any chance for Looper to achieve its potential for exploring those themes it openly invites — the meaning and purpose of life, the ethics of altering the future, and of sacrificing oneself for the good of humanity. It’s all there, touched upon, but Johnson could’ve slowed or simplified his plot for these themes to breathe and permeate our experience of his otherwise excellent storytelling.

Grade: A

Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Pierce Gagnon, Quing Xu, Tracie Thomas, Garret Dillahunt

Posted in Action & Adventure, Best of 2012, Crime, Thriller | 1 Comment »

Mr. Arkadin

May 31, 2012

An exasperating movie whose beauties need to be extracted from the mire of its bungling weaknesses. Mr. Arkadin is the cinema equivalent of a down-and-out scamp with an irresistible personality, a movie whose topsy-turvy production history is typically Wellesian: Shot in 1954 as a Spanish-French collaboration, Welles fiddled with editing Arkadin for months before his producer wrested it away and edited it as a conventional, chronologically linear story (contrary to Welles’s more intricate, Citizen Kane-like vision of it) and called it Confidential Report. That was, more or less, the release version of “Mr. Arkadin” until the Criterion Collection helped assemble what it calls The Comprehensive Version, that is, a version of the film as close to Welles’s vision as possible. The Comprehensive Version stays true to the flashback structure that Welles had in mind and posits about 15 additional minutes of footage in conformance with his original script. So, if you’re going to watch Mr. Arkadin, Criterion’s Comprehensive Version is probably the one best in line with what Welles would want you to see.

Welles himself dons the beard and opera cape of the titular Arkadin, an eccentric, pompous, egotistical billionaire (a variation on the kind of roles that Welles excelled at playing, beginning with the equally tragic, equally imposing Charles Foster Kane). Claiming amnesia, Arkadin enlists the services of Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), an American ex-pat in post-War Europe, a black-market smuggler, to investigate his origins. Van Stratten’s job is to find out how Arkadin came to become Arkadin; that is, how a poor refugee from Poland rose from the ranks to become one of the world’s most legendary industrialists. It’s only as Van Stratten becomes aware of the trail of bodies lying in the wake of his investigation that he suspects that Arkadin has more up his ample sleeves than he bargained for, and that he himself is in line to be one of Arkadin’s victims or his fall guy. What links Van Stratten to Arkadin is the latter’s daughter, Raina (Paola Mori). Van Stratten is in love with Raina while Arkadin wants to shield his daughter from anyone with knowledge of his less-than-squeaky-clean past.

With its hectic, lurching pace, uneven (if not downright awful) performances and a hodgepodge of a script riddled with scenes that barely make dramatic sense, Mr. Arkadin wears all the battle scars of a movie hobbled by budget and a slapdash production (and post-production) made all the more tenuous by Welles’s capricious working methods. That his vision for Arkadin was never fully realized is less a surprise than Criterion being able to piece together the Comprehensive Version, thanks to meticulous scholarship and research.

As pulp noir, Mr. Arkadin is not particularly successful because it’s haphazard elements prevent any coherent sense of story and suspense. Van Stratten, as a character, is never very appealing; he never projects the authentic desperation and contained poise of a noir anti-hero, a fugitive in search of redemption, and there’s nothing romantic about his persona at all. What Welles needed was a strong, silent Robert Mitchum or Sterling Hayden type. What he got was someone closer to William Bendix by way of Andy Devine, garrulous and irritable.

Granted, Arden’s performance speaks less of his talent and more of Welles’s ill-thought-out direction of it. Indeed, weak or slapdash performances abound in Arkadin: Mori as Van Stratten’s love interest is neither particularly sexy nor charming, and she comes off as just a rich girl wearing the costume of a grown-up sophisticate; Patricia Medina as Mily, who also wants the goods on Arkadin, is so temperamentally all over the place, we can’t be sure if she’s a sly gold-digger or an innocent naif in a bad situation. In any case, Welles’s preoccupation seems to have been with his own role. Welles plays Arkadin with his always-amusing blend of kitschy, charismatic bravado; he’s a commanding presence eliciting either delighted chuckles from fans of his larger-than-life stagecraft or groans from those who’ve had enough.

Still, for all its flaws, Mr. Arkadin is a mesmerizing experience, a schizoid crime caper that’s half-potboiler and half-reverie. While the script threatens to implode with its incoherence, the acting can be awful and the pacing erratic, there are also scenes of pure cinematic bliss. And the last is why we come to Welles anyway. The scenes, for example, in Arkadin’s Spanish castle draw from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in their expressive, geometric use of interiors and of the vast landscapes. The sequences in Munich, Mexico, North Africa and a terrifically oddball one inside Arkadin’s storm-tossed ship are all hallmarks of kooky expressionism (a la Carol Reed’s The Third Man) melded with a chic, ultra-modern visual posturing that presages Fellini and Antonioni.

A personal favorite is the scene in which Arkadin asks Van Stratten to investigate his past. The exchange takes place in what is presumably a secretary’s office, littered with filing cabinets, but, in the spell of the movie’s imagery and setting, this office becomes an obscure catacomb in some bizarre alternate reality. Watching this scene, I always wonder what secrets those filing cabinets contain, why there are no windows in this “office,” and ponder the room’s stuffy, claustrophobic atmosphere. Knowing that Welles shot the movie in scattershot fashion, the scene and space have a hit-and-run, spit-and-glue quality about them. It’s a scene in which we really have to play “pretend,” because Welles insists we do and the fact that we don’t fully buy what’s being sold on-screen only pulls us more insistently into the story.

I suppose that these details — some deliberate, some incidental, some subjective — are what set Mr. Arkadin apart. Details packed into moments that combine to make Arkadin less a movie than a dream of a movie you thought you once watched. It’s that dream-like quality that makes this an eternal, ethereal experience, something that’s rarely felt at the movies. And only when the movies in question are conjured by the most wizardly of filmmakers.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Orson Welles
Written by: Orson Welles
Cast: Robert Arden, Orson Welles, Michael Redgrave, Patricia Medina, Akim Tamiroff, Paola Mori, Katina Paxinou, Gregoire Aslan, Peter van Eyck

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Classics, Crime, Genres, Noir, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

Chronicle

February 13, 2012

Three high schoolers stumble onto a sinkhole in the middle of a field. They descend into it and encounter a mysterious, supposedly alien force that imparts each of them with superpowers in director Josh Trank’s debut feature, Chronicle. Employing the by-now familiar, low-budget artifice of “home video” footage (made famous by The Blair Witch Project on through Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity series, to name a few), Trank follows the boys’ exhilarating discovery of their telekinetic abilities, beginning with the playing of harmless pranks and culminating in the near-destruction of Seattle.

Chronicle is positioned as a superhero origin story as the teenagers — happy-go-lucky jock Steve (Michael B. Jordan), charming misfit Matt (Alex Garetty) and disturbed loner Andrew (Dane DeHaan) — must contend with whether and how to use their powers. While Steve and Matt are content to limit the use of their abilities for the mere pursuit of fun, Andrew veers off-course and begins a downward spiral into criminality. Andrew’s choice isn’t surprising; as a victim of abuse, a son of an alcoholic father and an ailing mother, it’s only natural that his mind would steer towards revenge and mayhem. That forces the iconoclast Matt into the role of superhero, something he wants nothing to do with, but he’s all that the world has in terms of a defense against Andrew’s armageddon-scale abilities. So, in that sense, we have the creation of the classic Marvel Comics dynamic of the unwilling superhero (in the Peter Parker/Spider-Man mold) against the psychologically damaged arch-villain).

As always in the case of first-person, home video-style movies, the artifice gets in the way of the action. That characters would tote along a camera and have the presence of mind to shoot video while in the midst of wildly traumatic or ecstatic events (whether being chased through the woods by a witch, intruded upon in the middle of the night by a demon, invaded by an alien monster or, in the case of Chronicle, discovering that you have the ability to fly) is simply ridiculous. It’s an artifice that appeals because of its approximation to cable news, YouTube and home videos — things that are as much a part of our lives as the laptop I’m writing on or the tea I’m drinking. The merging of the familiar with the supernatural or the uncanny is what viewers find so irresistible (including me). But when the action ramps up, the artifice reveals itself to be the clumsy gimmick that it is. And it doesn’t fare any better here than it did in the case of its predecessors. While we’re on the subject, Chronicle breaks its own rule by frequently shifting to a smoother, objective visual style when the need arises, thereby wanting the best of both worlds. We only see it, though, as cheating.

That said, Chronicle is an enjoyable spin through the tropes of the superhero origin story. And it takes time to develop its characters richly, Andrew in particular. DeHaan nicely modulates Andrew’s sweet, soft-hearted interior in the movie’s first half with the hardening, monstrous anger that takes over in the second half. And while Russell’s Matt is a somewhat hazier, less sure-footed characterization, we can get behind any character with a dimpled smile who can quote Jung and use the word “hubris” in conversation.

Predictably, Chronicle unravels into forgettable mayhem in its third act as Andrew takes out his pent-up rage on Seattle leading to an Andrew-Matt showdown. Yet the movie’s first half contain enough unique moments to prove that Trank and screenwriter Max Landis have more than spectacle in mind. The scenes in which the boys first try out their powers come off best. Trank maintains a low-key, open-eyed curiosity throughout these scenes and a childlike sense of wonder prevails, most memorably in the “I-can-fly” sequence, which unlocks a primal sort of exhilaration in the viewer to match that of the characters. Moments like these demonstrate perhaps the most effective use of the home video style since “The Blair Witch Project,” anchoring their characters’ (and our) shock and surprise at the supernatural in the background of the familiar.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Josh Trank
Written by: Max Landis
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly, Ashley Hinshaw, Anna Wood, Bo Petersen

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Posted in Action & Adventure, Fantasy, Genres, Science Fiction | Leave a Comment »

The Grey

February 13, 2012

Leave it to the bleakest of movies to be about Faith. The meaning and purpose of Faith in a higher power to deliver one from suffering comes up often in director Joe Carnahan’s absorbing wilderness thriller The Grey as its beleaguered plane-crash survivors must fend off a pack of arctic wolves hell-bent on picking off them off one by one. Principally, Faith is on the mind of Ottway (Liam Neeson), a marksman hired by an oil rigging outfit in the snowbound wilderness and a loner patterned after the classic noir mold — that is, self-reliant and goaded on through life by his own private agenda.

Ottway is haunted by thoughts of a woman he still loves and with whom he has no hope of reuniting. He wanders his territory, rifle in hand, protecting the oil riggers from predator wolves who’ve encroached onto the company’s land. But after the plane ferrying Ottway and his fellow ragtag crew of bedraggled oil workers crashes on a desolate plain, it’s the humans who now find themselves the trespassers in the wolves’ domain. With no help forthcoming, the survivors must trudge the indefinite distance from the crash site to civilization, across forbidding, wind-blasted expanse and wilderness forest, all the while falling prey to wolves with a newfound taste for human flesh.

Ottway assumes the role of the group’s leader. He’s no more familiar with the terrain than the others, but he is the closest the men have to a wilderness expert. That’s not to say there isn’t dissent in the ranks: The ex-con Diaz (Frank Grillo) mocks Ottway’s attempts to find safety and even the very idea that the group has any chance of making it out of their predicament alive. A little of Diaz goes a long way though — Carnahan and co-writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (on whose short story The Grey is based) err in packing in too much of Diaz’s generally cliched shows of grandstanding at the expense of developing a more nuanced chemistry among the men. As a result, the men — among them the sensitive Hendricks (Dallas Roberts), the companionable Talget (Dermot Mulroney), the gentle giant and token minority Burke (Nonso Anozie) and the young punk Flannery (Joe Anderson) — are little more than pieces in the screenplay’s easy-to-fit puzzle box of character dynamics. In various tense conversations and campfire monologues, they reveal just enough to humanize themselves before each meets his grisly end in the next man vs. wolf standoff. Here is where The Grey cannot measure up to superior survivalist adventures like Flight of the Phoenix, The Great Escape, The Wages of Fear, Le Trou and so forth; the latter films benefitted from finely tuned and differentiated supporting characters, each one adding color and depth to the ensemble, making our investment in their go-for-broke scenarios that much deeper.

The Grey is a lesser achievement and might have been standard-issue B-movie fare were it not for Liam Neeson, who’s towering presence and gravitas turn the movie into a worthy study of heartbreak, courage and mortality. As resourceful and commanding as Ottway is, he is also a broken, desperate man with the barest wisp of regard for God. And, in one of the movie’s most nakedly honest and wrenching scenes — he rails at the heavens, daring God to intervene in his plight. Most startling in this scene isn’t Neeson’s acting chops — they’re considerable — but Carnahan’s choice to insert a reverse shot of a blank, impassive sky. He could have shot this moment entirely as a close-up on Ottoway, a statement of his encroaching madness, but he stages it as a two-character exchange, albeit with a second character remaining mute, a mystery. The result is a powerful, intimate spiritual plea, something we rarely see in this — or any — Hollywood genre nowadays.

Indeed, The Grey is a rarity in important ways. For one, this is a decidedly bleak film, damn bleak — one that goes against the grain of the dominant Hollywood instinct for last-minute rescues, miracles and uplift. It’s not nihilistic exactly, but it’s not feel-good either. The film maintains a brave existential detachment in tone, a kind of Camus-esque acceptance of the brutality of fate as demonstrated in one scene in which the camera simply holds on a character over a single take, one that lasts for what feels like an eternity, as he resigns himself to death.

From what I just said, The Grey might seem like too much of a downer. But it has ample rewards too. Aside from Neeson’s top-caliber performance (one that’s on par with or surpasses the best performances in any given year), the movie’s got several excellent set pieces, from the solidly terrifying plane crash (though, eliciting terror from turbulence is among the suspense genre’s more delightfully simple tricks) to the series of deadly ambushes by the wolves and one white-knuckle, high-altitude scene of characters clambering across a gorge on a tenuous rope. And, while silver linings are in short supply here, what The Grey ultimately offers is something far richer — it offers a chance to become involved with one man’s search for inner strength. How rewarding you find that will depend perhaps on your own search for the same.

Grade: B

Directed by: Joe Carnahan
Written by: Joe Carnahan, Ian Mackenzie Jeffers
Cast: Liam Neeson, Dallas Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, Joe Anderson, Anne Openshaw, Ben Bray, Nonso Anozie

Posted in Action & Adventure, Genres, Horror, Thriller | 1 Comment »

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

January 24, 2012

In 2003, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski shanghaied Disney’s ride into a madly popular swashbuckler. The movie made a boatload of booty, and made Johnny Depp a bona fide movie star. Its sequel, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” takes all that was so charming about the first “Pirates” — its resurrection of a classic Hollywood genre, pirate-talk humor and Depp’s fey mincing as Capt. Jack Sparrow — and amps it up to the wattage of a Looney Tunes cartoon. “Dead Man’s Chest” hails from the “Bigger Is Better” school of filmmaking, whose dean is Jerry Bruckheimer. By “bigger,” I mean in all its dimensions: the movie is the original’s louder, faster, more effects-crazy twin brother. It’s also snottier and more spoiled — a Bruckheimer spawn, after all. What did you expect?

Once again, scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio shunt Sparrow and the ever-hapless lovers Will (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) through another treasure-hunt storyline, and tangling with yet another crew of preternatural villains. The latter are captained by the squid-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) who, after a thwarted romance, secrets his broken heart into the titular chest and commences to terrorize the high seas. Because Jones and his shipmates’ fates are entwined with the seas’, they’ve anthropomorphized into various icky-looking sea creatures. What’s more, Jones’ possession of the chest also lends him the power to summon the Kraken, that ship-destroying sea monster of ancient Norse fables. Who let him in here is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, when news of the chest reaches tight-assed seaman Culter Beckett (Tom Hollander), he blackmails Will into recovering it, holding his spunky lass Elisabeth as ransom. For help, Will seeks out pirate-at-large Jack Sparrow. Sparrow’s got the dirt on Jones’s curse; he’s himself condemned to share in Jones’s fate if he doesn’t figure a way to break it. Elizabeth escapes Cutler’s custody, and, in her wedding gown, hotfoots it in pursuit of Will. By now, Elliott and Rossio’s script resembles a big-budget clusterfuck, crashing towards the inevitable throwdown with Davy and the Kraken. A superfluous plot detour on a cannibal island is but a clumsily staged send-up of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” complete with Sparrow outrunning large rolling objects and hungry natives. “Dead Man’s Chest’s” climax involves yet another instance of antics atop and inside rolling objects, proving the old adage: Why settle for one when you can have two for twice the cost?

“Dead Man’s Chest” taps into our need for air-conditioned escapism, and, to be fair, it’s effects are a marvel of digital realism. But Bruckheimer’s effects-makers go to gratuitous lengths to force a gee whiz out of their audience, especially in the case of Jones and his gnarly crew, whose slimy deformities don’t so much amaze as repel, and expensively so. This leaves Depp and his cohorts to mug, pose, and caper through Verbinski’s frenetic telling. Depp, rather than stretching his characterization of Sparrow, is sadly limited to playing up his cartoonishness; more than once, Sparrow’s panicked face is the punchline to another in a minefield of effects-rigged comic setups. Right from the get-go, there’s an unsettling immodesty about “Dead Man’s Chest,” a presumption of its own charm and popularity without bothering with anything as unsexy as story craft, character development, or a cleanly defined narrative arc. No, it pummels us into submission. And if you’re going to mutiny, matey, then you can just walk the plank.

Grade: C

Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Written by: Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio
Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Comedy, Genres | Leave a Comment »

Open Water

January 24, 2012

Susan and Daniel (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) are your typical work-obsessed couple drifting apart in the American suburbs. But, when left to fend for themselves in tropical, shark-infested waters, they cling to each other so desperately, it’s almost sad and touching. That is, until those fins break the surface again, triggering panic on the screen and setting our nerves on edge. “Open Water” is a textbook example for how to build and sustain tension, develop character and even sneak in wry social commentary over a tightly wound eighty minutes.

Gutsily made by husband-and-wife filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, “Open Water” disarms the viewer (à la “The Blair Witch Project”) with its no-frills, home-video ethos, but, make no mistake, this is shrewdly calculative filmmaking. The story is straightforward, opening in Susan and Daniel’s leafy, SUV-appointed home as the cell phone-toting couple pack up for an island vacation, wondering if they’ll still get email where they’re going. In a few deft strokes, the filmmakers establish their couple and whisk them off to their tropical getaway.

Kentis and Lau assuredly develop the couple’s close-knit but none-too-romantic routine, intimately conveyed by actors Ryan and Travis. To soothe away workaday stress, they embark on a deep-sea dive. From the movie’s premise, we know that this is an ill-fated outing, that the couple will be left behind by a bungling boat crew. But we watch anyway, uneasily but riveted, as the movie puts its pieces into place. Then, from their initial petulance at finding themselves abandoned, through their spasms of antagonism, their attempts to cope and overcome and, finally, their realization that all is futile against a menace largely unseen, “Open Water” becomes an expertly modulated horror movie.

Perhaps the greatest irony in “Open Water” is the claustrophobia of its setting. The sea that looks so limitless and wide-open eventually feels so confining, availing the characters with the barest hopes for survival, not least of which is that its predators simply stay away. The water’s lapping and splashing sickens us as much as it does Susan and Daniel, and the predators most definitely do not stay away. Kentis and Lau know that horror can never be fully realized till the lights are out, and they gain maximum fright wattage out of the all-enveloping darkness of night with only flashes of lightning to orient us. At this point, the filmmakers teasingly cross-cut to scenes of island revelry, but the festive music is muted, faraway, thereby punctuating the ever-growing distance between Susan and Daniel and the lives they’ve left behind. It is here that the absolute meaninglessness of the material world, one of comfortable jobs, SUVs and cell phones, is most keenly felt, pitted against the cunning and merciless forces of nature.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Chris Kentis
Cast: Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Genres, Horror, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

Kontroll

January 24, 2012

A killer is terrorizing the subway stations beneath Budapest. Like the Angel of Death, he stalks the tunnels and platforms in a black hood, sneaking up behind late-night commuters and shoving them into the path of oncoming trains. It’s into this Langian netherworld that Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi), the roguish young hero of writer-director Nimród Antal’s debut feature, “Kontroll,” has exiled himself from life on the surface.

When he isn’t curled up on a desolate platform, Bulcsú is riding the rails as a ticket control officer for the metro. Alongside his ragtag crew, he patrols the subways, making sure they’re free of freeloaders. Judging from Antal’s depiction, it’s a hellish gig, prone to frequent scuffles with authorities, fellow inspectors, not to mention the host of belligerent, ticketless commuters, each itching for a fight, a chase or both.

“Kontroll” finds its footing not upon the rungs of plot, but through a succession of vignettes depicting the inspectors’ workaday grind. Antal gets the textures right, all urban grime and pallid lighting that gets under your skin, but there’s a jokiness to these sequences, a gimmickry in the cutting and the theatrics, that points to the filmmaker’s background in commercials and music videos And for a movie about a killer on the loose, there is scant dread and paranoia at work here: Neither the ticket inspectors nor commuters seem terribly concerned, and there’s none of the morbid sense of inquiry behind the killer’s motives, both ingredients with which thrillers achieve their credibility. The movie, instead, settles in on Bulcsú as he tangles with rival inspectors, falls for Sofie (Eszter Balla), the lovely, self-assured daughter of an aging metro driver, before he finds himself the lead suspect in the subway killings. You can see the final showdown between Bulcsú and the killer coming as clearly as the headlights of the next train. It’s not the destination that counts in “Kontroll,” however, but the visceral delights to be had in getting there.

Above all, “Kontroll” is a gleeful demonstration of Antal’s flair for the medium. He is clearly a natural, as comfortable with the classical fundamentals of craft as with the hyperkinetic attitude of the modern action movie. Propelled by a dance-fevered soundtrack, Antal has fashioned an enticing allegory about lives suspended in self-imposed purgatory and seeking to rise again into the light of the real world.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Nimród Antal
Written by: Jim Adler, Nimród Antal
Cast: Sándor Csányi, Eszter Balla, Csaba Pindroch, Zsolt Nagy

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Crime, Genres, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

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