AIR STRIKE (China - 2018) Directed by Xiao Feng. Written by Chen Ping, Yang Hsin-Yu, Zhang Hongyi, Yushi Wu, Xiaoqi Li and Qiao Wa. Cast: Bruce Willis, Ye Liu, Rumer Willis, Seung-Heon Song, William Chan, Wei Fan, Nicholas Tse, Bingbing Fan, Chen Daoming, Adrien Brody, Lei Jia, Gang Wu, Su Ma, Yongli Che, Yuanzheng Feng, Le Geng, Ning Chang, Simon Yam. (R, 96 mins) Shot in 2015 and initially known as both the prophetically self-fulfilling THE BOMBING and later as the more inspirational UNBREAKABLE SPIRIT, with a price tag reported to be anywhere between $65-$90 million, this mega-budget Chinese government-funded epic has been hacked down by about 25 minutes for its straight-to-VOD US release under the generic, Redbox-ready title AIR STRIKE. Embarrassingly cheap-looking despite being the most expensive Chinese film ever made at the time it went into production (it was also shot in 3-D, but that was scrapped during post), with aerial dogfight sequences and visual effects that recall the kinds of computer animation that looked dated in the 1990s, AIR STRIKE looks like INCHON if remade by The Asylum. The making of the film seems far more interesting than anything that ended up onscreen, a jumbled hodgepodge of characters and events taking place in 1939 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, where Japan launched near-constant bombing raids that decimated Chongqing. There's three different storylines, with characters sometimes intersecting and ending up in places and you have no idea how they got there (the Chinese characters are badly dubbed in English, while the Japanese villains get subtitles). There's former pilot Xue Gangtou (Ye Liu), injured on a mission and reassigned to military intelligence, where he's to ensure that a truck with a secret McGuffin cargo must gets to Chongqing, complete with a half-assed WAGES OF FEAR crossing over a precarious bridge. There's a team of fighter pilots overseen by constipated-looking US military adviser Col. Jack Johnson (top-billed export value Bruce Willis), who barks orders and has to whip them into shape. And there's tons of gratuitous mahjong at a local bar.
The fact that Lionsgate is AIR STRIKE's US distributor might make it a backdoor installment in the studio's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, but he's onscreen quite a bit here and actually takes part in some of the--albeit mostly greenscreen--action sequences. But he finds other ways to make his participation something special and display his utter contempt for what he does for a living, whether it's vacillating between several-day stubble and being clean-shaven in a single scene with no regard for continuity (this happens several times, and what kind of by-the-book US military honcho in 1939 sported trendy stubble?) or, in one scene that has to be seen to be believed, breaking out an anachronistic, open-mic-night-level Christopher Walken impression when the Chinese pilots throw him a surprise birthday party, going off on an obviously improvised monologue about a watch his father gave him. Did Chinese director Xiao Feng even realize his star was amusing himself by dropping a PULP FICTION reference into the middle of a scene? Willis is even visibly smirking while he's doing it. His daughter Rumer gets third billing for a 20-second bit part as a nurse, and she's been unconvincingly dubbed over with a British accent. Oscar-winner Adrien Brody turns up for two brief scenes in the not-even-remotely-pivotal role of "Steve," an American volunteering at a Chongqing orphanage and getting blown up before we even figure out who he is (an entire subplot with his character has been cut for the US release, perhaps as a bizarre tribute to the actor's mostly scrapped work in Terrence Malick's THE THIN RED LINE). Bingbing Fan, the hugely popular actress, model, and pop singer and China's highest-paid superstar, also puts in a few sporadic appearances. Her summer 2018 disappearance and subsequent re-emergence and tax evasion scandal (she's reportedly been fined the equivalent of $130 million by the Chinese government), combined with one-time producer Zhi Jianxiang being a fugitive on the country's most wanted list after fleeing China when he was hit with fraud and money laundering charges related to this project and 2015's IP MAN 3, resulted in the cancellation of the long-shelved film's belated Chinese release just a week before its American debut.
It's worth pointing out that the shots of Bruce Willis
above AND below come from the SAME scene.
Adrian Brody pleading with his
agent to get him in a better movie.
It's hard to imagine AIR STRIKE being good in any incarnation. The original Chinese version reportedly ran 120 minutes, but given its legal issues at home, the truncated, 96-minute American cut, supervised by veteran editor Robert A. Ferretti (TANGO & CASH, DIE HARD 2, UNDER SIEGE) might be the only one available for the foreseeable future. Prior to taking on this massive epic, director Xiao Feng only had one other film to his credit, the 2012 war drama HUSHED ROAR, which was unreleased outside of China. Helping out under the credited guise of "consultant" and creative adviser is the unlikely Mel Gibson, then in one of his periodic Hollywood pariah periods prior to his Oscar-nominated resurgence as a filmmaker with 2016's HACKSAW RIDGE. Ostensibly brought aboard because of his experience in hard-hitting battle scenes, it's possible Gibson had a hand in directing Willis and Brody, as almost all of the combat and action sequences are just a blurred blizzard of atrocious and aggressively unconvincing CGI. Other experienced Hollywood pros were hired by the Chinese producers in an advisory capacity, including cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (PANIC ROOM, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN), credited as "special effects consultant," and the late, great Vilmos Zsigmond as a "cinematography consultant" to the film's own D.P. Shu Yang. An Academy Award-winner for his work on 1977's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and also the renowned cinematographer of MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, DELIVERANCE, and THE DEER HUNTER among many others, Zsigmond was a legend in his field when he died in 2016 at the age of 85. Sadly, AIR STRIKE will go down as his final work, though there's nothing here to indicate that he, Hall, or Gibson were able to help in any way. The kind of movie where six screenwriters are credited and the best any of them can come up with is the one man who knows the contents of the truck's secret cargo's last, dying words being "The truck...is carrying...aaaaggghh..." as he keels over, AIR STRIKE is one of the most bewilderingly awful films of the year. I mean, seriously. What the fuck happened here? What can you say about a movie that's such a garbage fire that 2018 Bruce Willis is one of its positives?
AIR STRIKE director Xiao Feng on the set with "consultant" Mel Gibson.
After blowing up the Russian sub that took out the Tampa Bay, Glass goes rogue himself when the Arkansas discovers the wreckage of a Russian sub as well, with visual evidence that it exploded from the inside. They manage to rescue a handful of survivors, including its commander, Andropov (the late Michael Nyqvist), and secures him as an unlikely ally once he shows him that his sub was sabotaged from within. Glass needs Andropov to guide him through mined waters surrounding the Russian military base, where Beaman and his three-man team have been ordered to extract Zakarin and get him aboard the Arkansas before Durov has him executed and the rest of the world thinks the US started a war with Russia.
Butler with Michael Nyqvist (1960-2017)
Except for a few dodgy greenscreen shots above water, HUNTER KILLER is surprisingly good-looking for a film produced by Cannon cover band Millennium and partially shot at their Bulgarian stomping grounds at Sofia's Nu Boyana Studios (some of it was also shot at the more upscale Pinewood Studios in the UK). There's a few dubious-looking CGI explosions, but some look quite believable, and are indicative of Millennium's Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX bringing their A-/B+ game. Things get refreshingly old-school with the use of sub models for the underwater shots, which are usually used fleetingly enough that the facade usually isn't broken, and when it is, it still looks better than a shoddy CGI effect. The plot is pure "America! Fuck Yeah!" hokum, but it's admirably restrained for this sort of thing, especially with its depiction of the mutual respect shown by Glass and Andropov. These two seen-it-all Navy heroes ("This is who we are...this is what we do!" Glass says at one point, because of course he does) are played with an initial mistrust and eventual warm rapport by both Butler (one of 29 credited producers) and the much-missed Swedish character actor Nyqvist (star of the original GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and memorable as the mob boss in JOHN WICK), who succumbed to lung cancer in June 2017 and looks gaunt and visibly ill in most of his scenes. The film is dedicated to both Nyqvist and co-producer John Thompson--a Millennium exec from the early NuImage days and the guy who ran Cannon's Italian branch in the mid '80s--who died in January 2018.
Other than Stephens, who seems to be rehashing a fictionalized version of the real-life SEAL he played in Michael Bay's 13 HOURS, none of the other big names get much of a chance to make an impression. Cardellini stares at a row of monitors in a Bourne-like command center and sees a live shot of Zakarin and wonders aloud, "What are you up to?" Common has little to do aside from looking concerned while getting chewed out by a ranting, overacting Oldman, who probably didn't spend more than a few days on the set for a glorified cameo prior to his Oscar-winning turn in DARKEST HOUR. Directed in a workmanlike fashion by South African journeyman Donovan Marsh, HUNTER KILLER is a fairly solid and undemanding nautical actioner, the kind of harmlessly watchable popcorn movie you'll probably end up stopping on and staying with to the end when you stumble upon it on cable from now until the end of time.
THE NIGHT COMES FOR US (US/Indonesia - 2018) Written and directed by Timo Tjahjanto. Cast: Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Asha Kenyeri Bermudez, Sunny Pang, Salvita Decorte, Abimana Aryasatya, Zack Lee, Dimas Anggara, Julie Estelle, Dian Sastrowardoyo, Hannah Al Rashid, Shareefa Daanish Wibisana, Revaldo. (Unrated, 121 mins)
While writer/director Gareth Evans was busy making APOSTLE, several members of his Indonesian ensemble from the RAID films teamed with HEADSHOT co-director Timo Tjahjanto for THE NIGHT COMES FOR US, which could almost pass as THE RAID 3 if they wanted to try calling it that. Tjahjanto doesn't have quite the chops and the vision of Evans (the two worked together on V/H/S/2, co-directing the "Safe Haven" segment), and THE NIGHT COMES FOR US looks like a somewhat cruder and less polished work. Consequently, Tjahjanto compensates for these shortcomings by going absurdly overboard with a cartoonish level of gore and splatter that turns the film into the martial arts equivalent of a Cannibal Corpse greatest hits album. While the fight choreography is impressive, the endless mutilations, stabbings, slashed throats and carotid arteries, amputations, heads blown off or smashed, disembowelings, castrations, buzz-and/or-table sawings, burnings, box cutters through cheeks, and whatever other ways Tjahjanto devises to maim or kill someone do grow a bit exhausting after a while, no matter how remarkably ferocious it is at times. There's only so many times a bad guy's flunky can stick their arm out and have it snapped to a 90° angle before the novelty starts to wear off.
Indonesian action sensation and RAID franchise star Iko Uwais, recently seen tanking in America co-starring with Mark Wahlberg in the abysmal MILE 22, is onboard here in a key supporting role, but the real star is Joe Taslim, who was featured in the first RAID. Taslim is Ito, a member of Six Seas, a team of elite delegates in the employ of an Asian Triad that runs a drug smuggling and human trafficking operation in the Golden Triangle. When a small fishing village skims a little off the top of their latest payout to the Triad, Ito and his team are dispatched to wipe them out. He suddenly finds his conscience when he looks in the eyes of the lone survivor, a young girl named Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez), and impulsively blows away all of his colleagues and takes a bullet in the process. Ito feels compelled to protect Reina MAN ON FIRE-style and takes her home, much to the shock and dismay of his wife Shinta (Salvita Decorte), who knows the Triad will be coming for them. Ito assembles some close cohorts to keep Reina safe while he tries to gauge how much trouble he's in. In short, it's a lot, as the word is already out that he's betrayed the Triad and he and everyone around him likely won't make it to daybreak alive (yes, this is one of those "survive the night" scenarios). Ito sends Shinta out of town and Triad boss Chien Wu (Sunny Pang) calls in Ito's estranged lifelong friend Arian (Uwais) to track him down and kill him. Chien Wu's Jakarta-wide dragnet gets numerous groups of Triad-hired killers in the mix, including Yohan the Butcher (Revaldo), kinky couple Alma (Dian Sastrowardoyo) and Elena (Hannah Al Rashid), and "The Operator" (Julie Estelle, best known as THE RAID 2's Hammer Girl), who's quickly persuaded to switch sides and help her target take on her bosses.
An early set piece in Yohan's butcher shop comes very close to reaching the levels of gonzo action ecstasy that THE RAID 2 sustained for two and a half hours. It's the best and most inventive sequence in the film, but Tjahjanto too often ditches that kind of creativity and imagination to go for the shock value gross-out. Some of the non-stop splatter is indeed impressive (like when one person calmly tears off what's left of their partially amputated finger and continues fighting) but some of it is so extreme that it takes you out of the moment. THE NIGHT COMES FOR US is a go-for-broke gorefest that's probably the bloodiest film of 2018, but Tjahjanto also spends some time somewhat successfully mimicking the style of Michael Mann in both the very Tangerine Dream-ish score by Fajar Yuskemal and Aria Prayogi and numerous shots of lit-up Asian cityscapes that recall some of the more hypnotic moments of Mann's tragically underappreciated BLACKHAT. Amidst the carnage, the film also displays some occasional humor, like Ito setting three guys on fire in front of a sign that reads "Safety starts with me." Tjahjanto isn't nearly as stylish or gifted a filmmaker as either Mann or Evans, but he does as good a B-grade Mann as he does a B-grade RAID. THE NIGHT COMES FOR US has its share of memorable scenes and offers not one or two, but three pretty badass female assassins (between her work here as The Operator and as the unforgettable Hammer Girl in THE RAID 2, it's time for Julie Estelle to get her own movie), but Tjahjanto could've benefited by taking it down a notch instead of making the DEAD ALIVE of Indonesian action epics.
HALLOWEEN (US - 2018) Directed by David Gordon Green. Written by Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green. Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Haluk Bilginer, Rhian Rees, Jefferson Hall, James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle, Toby Huss, Virginia Gardner, Dylan Arnold, Miles Robbins, Drew Scheid, Jibrail Nantambu, Omar Dorsey, Christopher Nelson, Brien Gregorie, Vince Mattis. (R, 106 mins) For the 40th anniversary of John Carpenter's iconic 1978 classic HALLOWEEN, the franchise retcons itself, wiping away everything that happened from 1981's HALLOWEEN II to 2002's HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION. It picks up in the present day, as Michael Myers (played by original "Shape" Nick Castle in fleeting glimpses before he dons the mask and James Jude Courtney takes over) is visited at an Illinois mental institution by Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall) and Dana Haines (Rhian Rees), a pair of British podcasters specializing in famous killers and cold cases. Dr. Sartain (WINTER SLEEP's Haluk Bilginer, the Turkish Rade Szerbedzija), a protege of the late Dr. Loomis (played in the 1978 original by the great Donald Pleasence, who died in 1995) has taken over Michael's care and reminds them that he hasn't spoken a word in 40 years. They get no reaction out of Michael, even after showing him his old mask. They get a similar response when they visit a standoff-ish Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a self-described "basket case" who's been hobbled by PTSD since that fateful Halloween night 40 years ago, leading to two failed marriages and a fractured relationship with her mostly estranged daughter Karen (Judy Greer), who was taken away at the age of 12 when the state deemed Laurie an unfit mother. Laurie lives in a gated compound on the outskirts of Haddonfield, in a house filled with alarms, locks, and booby-traps and with a heavily-fortified panic room in the basement, accessible by a secret passageway under a kitchen counter. Karen resents the doomsday-prepping memories of her childhood, but Laurie has never been able to shake the feeling that Michael would come for her again one day.
That day inevitably arrives following the most half-assed prison transport in recent memory, as Michael and some other psych patients are moved to another facility and the bus ends up crashing, because of course it does. You'd think with someone as dangerous as Michael Myers onboard, there'd be more than one officer on the bus, and maybe a couple of cruisers from the local sheriff's department might follow along as a precaution, and they might've picked a night other than the day before Halloween, which is the same night he escaped 40 years earlier, but hey, it is what it is. The bus crashes and Michael is loose once again, making his way to Haddonfield in time for Halloween, where he sees the podcasters visiting his sister's grave and then follows them to a gas station and kills them, reclaiming his mask in the process. Michael embarks on a murder spree across Haddonfield, a town where, depending on the scene, has either one cop on duty in Officer Hawkins (Will Patton), who was on duty the same night in 1978, or a ton of guys not really doing much of anything. Everyone is aware of the events of 40 years ago, yet no one really acts with much urgency considering the town's tragic history with this night. That is, other than Hawkins and Laurie, who's been following the calls on a police scanner and can't get in touch with her granddaughter, Karen's daughter Alyson (Andi Matichak), who just left a Halloween bash after dumping her boyfriend Cameron (Dylan Arnold), who threw her phone in a punch bowl. As Michael heads to a fateful meeting with Laurie that seems like destiny, she finally convinces Karen and her husband Ray (Toby Huss) of the danger and they all end up at her secured fortress and wait for Hawkins to track down Alyson.
Directed by indie darling-turned-journeyman David Gordon Green, who co-wrote the script with his buddies Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley (a writer on McBride's HBO series VICE PRINCIPALS), HALLOWEEN tries to position itself as both sequel and remake, with countless references and callbacks to other memorable scenes in the franchise, which reeks of trying to have it both ways by retroactively erasing all of the sequels but still re-staging well-known scenes from them. Remember when teenage Laurie looks out of her classroom window and sees Michael standing across the street looking at her? Green repeats that here with Alyson looking outside and seeing her grandmother. Remember when Loomis shoots Michael and he falls out of the window, landing on the ground and then they look down and he's gone? Repeat that here with Michael throwing Laurie out of a window, then looking down and seeing she's gone. Remember in HALLOWEEN II when Michael walks into a house and sneaks into the kitchen and steals Mrs. Elrod's butcher knife? That happens here, but in a way that emulates the re-edited TV version. Even a mid-film detour where Alyson's friend Vicky (Virginia Gardner) is babysitting a wisecracking kid (Jibrail Nantambu, who turns in the most entertaining performance) before her stoner boyfriend Dave (Miles Robbins) arrives only exists as a wink and a nod to a pair of murders from Carpenter's film. Once everyone ends up at Laurie's compound and she does a room-by-room search, we see she has a roomful of target-practice mannequins and dummies like the ones she's shown shooting out in the woods earlier. Why would she store these in a room in her house? A goddamn roomful of white-faced mannequins has no reason to exist in Laurie's house other than giving a masked Michael a way to camouflage himself among them in the darkness for a cheap, lazy jump scare. And why does she even leave the safety of the underground panic room in the first place? Oh, that's right. Because "I'm gonna finish this!"
Those are hardly the dumbest things in HALLOWEEN. You might ask "How does Michael even find Laurie's house?" and "How does he get past the gate?" and "What does Laurie do for a living, because this Batcave-like complex probably cost at least $1 million?" but nothing will prepare you for one ludicrous whopper of a third act plot twist which was when I just shook my head and muttered "Done" under my breath. For a film that sees fit to do away with the Laurie/Michael family connection established in HALLOWEEN II, which is a hokey development but it's still a movie that many people, myself included, really like, what arises with this reveal is right on par with all the Druid nonsense that came up in HALLOWEENs 5-6, which seemed at the time to be a backdoor way to somehow work in 1982's otherwise unrelated, Michael Myers-less HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (though Dr. Loomis used a story about Druids metaphorically in HALLOWEEN II). It's one thing to ask us to disregard everything that happened in all the sequels--including Laurie being killed off in a passing mention of a car accident in HALLOWEEN 4 and onscreen in HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION--but the big twist in HALLOWEEN from the masters of horror behind YOUR HIGHNESS and EASTBOUND & DOWN is so beyond the pale that it made me dismiss the entire project as egregiously ill-advised Michael Myers fan fiction on the part of Green, McBride, and horror assembly line production company Blumhouse.
That said, there's an undeniable sense of warm, nostalgic sentiment for fans to see Curtis in this role again, and she brings a credibly anguished weariness to a heroine who's been inextricably linked to an unstoppable madman and forever haunted by the events of 40 years ago. Matichak is appealing as her sympathetic granddaughter, though all the sequences with her obnoxious friends with "Dead Meat" stamped on their foreheads seem like superfluous padding (except for Cameron, who, like the kid Vicky's babysitting, just vanishes from the movie). The notion of three generations of Strode women teaming up to take on what's tantamount to a family curse is intriguing, but Green generates no scares, no suspense, and doesn't bring them together until very late in the game, and then blows it by giving the best moment not to Curtis, but to Greer. Don't get me wrong, it's a good moment, and Greer plays it perfectly, but shouldn't it have been Curtis'? After the two Rob Zombie hillbilly horror reboot debacles, I was willing to approach HALLOWEEN 2018 with an open mind, and it gets some things right--Michael's worn, weathered, and craggy-looking mask approximating the aging of a killer who's now 63 years old, John Carpenter returning to write an updated version of his instantly-recognizable theme, an audio recording of Dr. Loomis where the guy doing a dead-on Donald Pleasence impression just nails it, especially Pleasence's inimitable pronunciation of "evil"--but at the end of the day, this is just another HALLOWEEN sequel, and it's not even a very good one, with all the rave reviews and fanboy hype once again offering irrefutable proof that horror scenesters are the easiest lays in genre fandom. John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN is a landmark film that still terrifies and whose impact still resonates after 40 years. Will anyone in 2058 be looking back and wistfully reminiscing about the first time they saw David Gordon Green's HALLOWEEN 40 years ago? Will anyone even remember it 40 days from now?
2015's UNFRIENDED had some problems (like teenagers who looked to be in their mid-20s, and a late-film collapse into cheap jump scares and tilted BLAIR WITCH camera angles), but the real-time, Skype-set fright flick was more compelling than it had any business being. Unfolding entirely on a computer screen, the inevitable sequel UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB tells a different story with a similar set-up, jettisoning the supernatural angle of its predecessor to focus on an online game night that goes horrifically off the rails. Acquiring a laptop through the dubious means of grabbing it after it was left behind at a coffee shop, Matias (John Mayer lookalike Colin Woodell) plans on joining some college friends on Skype for Cards Against Humanity. At the same time, he's trying to smooth things over with his deaf girlfriend Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras), who's tired of his lax efforts in learning to sign. The laptop, which he tells everyone he got on Craigslist, repeatedly glitches out and messages keep coming through for its rightful owner. Things escalate in a gradual fashion, with Matias finding some truly disturbing videos on the laptop as he's getting some increasingly hostile instant messages from the laptop's owner, the apparent culprit behind an abduction seen in one of the videos of a missing girl who's currently all over the local news.
UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB is grounded in relative reality, even if it glosses over the more intricate aspects of its technological capabilities and doesn't really have anything to do with social media. Without divulging spoilers, Matias and his friends--paranoid conspiracy theorist AJ (Connor Del Rio), aspiring DJ Lexx (Savira Windyani), just-engaged couple Serena (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Nari (Blumhouse regular Betty Gabriel), and London-based Damon (Andrew Lees)--soon get in way over their heads with a cabal of superhackers intent on making them--and Amaya--pay for Matias' bad judgment. There's some forced humor and a little of Del Rio's grating AJ goes a long way, but some sly jokes land, like writer and debuting director Stephen Susco (whose past scripts include THE GRUDGE, TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D, and BEYOND THE REACH) opening with a static shot of what we soon realize are Matias' failed login attempts to his ill-gotten gain, starting with passwords like "password" and "login," and ending with desperation Hail Marys like "FeelTheBern" and "Covfefe." Like a lot of films of this sort, UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB probably only works once, but it succeeds on a base, visceral level, especially once the stakes get serious and almost inconceivably cruel, leading to a late reveal reminiscent of a great late '90s paranoia thriller that's never really gotten the respect it deserves. Four endings were shot, and some different ones apparently played in various theaters around the country. Three are presented on the Blu-ray as alternate endings, and only one is even remotely uplifting. By no means is this some modern horror classic, but co-producer Timur Bekmambetov has a knack for shepherding these kinds of things where others (like Nacho Vigalondo's OPEN WINDOWS, which couldn't wait to ditch its core premise) have fallen short. Bekmambetov would finally perfect this online scare formula with the late summer sleeper hit SEARCHING, but like UNFRIENDED, this mean and uncompromising sequel surpasses expectations. (R, 92 mins)
DOWN A DARK HALL (Spain/US - 2018)
Based on a 1974 YA novel by Lois Duncan (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Hotel for Dogs), DOWN A DARK HALL has some intriguing ideas but the story never comes together, getting bogged down in sentimentality and shot in such a murky, dimly-lit way that it's often impossible to tell what's going on. Updated to the present day with era-appropriate can't-even and "#whatever" 'tude, troubled teen Katherine "Kit" Gordy (AnnaSophia Robb) has been suspended from school, had a misdemeanor arrest, is facing an arson charge, and, as the school psychologist points out, is so disengaged from school that she got an F in gym. Kit's never gotten over the death of her beloved father when she was nine, and her mom (Kirsty Mitchell) and stepdad (Jim Sturgeon) are at a loss as to what to do with her. Dr. Sinclair (Jodhi May) recommends she be sent to the remote, isolated, and ominously gothic-looking Blackwood Boarding School, run by Madame Duret (Uma Thurman, apparently entering the "sinister boarding school headmistress" phase of her career). There's only four other students--Izzy (ORPHAN's Isabelle Fuhrman), Sierra (Rosie Day), Ashley (Taylor Russell), and pyromaniac mean girl Veronica (Victoria Moroles)--all with behavioral and psychological issues, though Madame Duret is certain she can find the artistic, creative young women within. It isn't long before aspiring painter Sierra is crafting brilliant, ambitious canvases, brainy Izzy is solving impossible mathematical equations, and Kit, who long ago abandoned her interest in music, is playing emotionally-draining and difficult pieces on the piano, almost as if a spirit has possessed each of them them and is bleeding the art out of them. And of course, they start seeing ghosts in the hallways along with other supernatural happenings, all of which are written off by the clearly up-to-something Madame Duret.
Directed by Rodrigo Cortes (BURIED, RED LIGHTS) and co-written by Chris Sparling (BURIED, ATM, THE SEA OF TREES), DOWN A DARK HALL benefits from some well-crafted, Guillermo del Toro-esque production design in the long corridors of Blackwood, but once the horror kicks in, too much of the film is spent trying to watch Kit wander around in almost total darkness until an occasional spectral jump scare appears in the frame. Robb (SOUL SURFER) is convincingly angry without coming across as too obnoxiously bratty, and Thurman has some fun with a freewheeling, all-purpose Euro accent as Madame Duret, but DOWN A DARK HALL has too many tedious stretches, and once its ghostly goings-on are explained, it doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny even by horror genre standards, especially considering that the recruitment of these "gifted" girls has been going on undetected for quite some time. It looks great when you can see what's going on, and the setting, the characters, and the climax definitely have some enjoyable shout-outs to SUSPIRIA, but even with the easy box office of YA-based horror, it's not really a mystery why Summit and Lionsgate relegated this misfire to VOD this past summer with its 2016 copyright still displayed in the credits. (PG-13, 96 mins)
BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE (US - 2018) Written and directed by Drew Goddard. Cast: Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Chris Hemsworth, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman, Nick Offerman, Xavier Dolan, Shea Whigham, Mark O'Brien, Jim O'Heir, Charles Halford, Manny Jacinto, Tally Rodin, William B. Davis, Katharine Isabelle. (R, 141 mins) A cursory glance at the trailer for BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE would suggest a throwback to the kinds of winking, referential neo-noirs that were commonplace in the post-Tarantino craze of two decades ago (THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD, 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY, etc). It's actually more in line with the later phase of Tarantino's career that gave us a motor-mouthed chamber piece like THE HATEFUL EIGHT, but even that isn't a completely accurate assessment since it's not nearly as self-indulgent. Written and directed by J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon protege Drew Goddard (screenwriter of CLOVERFIELD and THE MARTIAN), EL ROYALE shares many themes and motifs as his previous directing effort, the meta genre deconstruction THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, so much so that as the story begins to play out and the sense of paranoia kicks in, you almost wouldn't be shocked to find Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford observing the goings-on from a secret installation at an undisclosed location and placing bets on who makes it to the end. Goddard also blatantly patterns the structure on vintage Tarantino by dividing the film into chapters and frequently going backwards in the narrative to fill in what was going in at the same time other events have happened, but for the most part, EL ROYALE manages to be its own unique work despite Tarantino's unavoidable influence. It's got a clever, twisty structure with a ton of genuine surprises, a dark sense of humor, shocking bursts of violence, and a game cast, but at nearly two and a half hours, it starts to run on fumes by the end, and the payoff ultimately isn't on the same level as the intricately constructed, densely-plotted build-up.
In a prologue, a man (Nick Offerman) rents a room, pries up the floorboards and stashes a bag full of money before being blown away by an unknown assailant. Cut ahead ten years and it's 1969, and a group of strangers arrive one by one at the El Royale, a dilapidated Lake Tahoe motor lodge that literally straddles the state line, its lobby split down the middle between California and Nevada. There's aspiring singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), who's on her way to Reno for a low-paying gig; aging priest Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who says he's visiting his brother in Oakland; obnoxious, good ol' boy vacuum cleaner salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm); and Emily Summerspring (Dakota Johnson), a hippie with a bad attitude who signs the check-in registry with a "Fuck You." The El Royale has seen better days, having lost its gambling license a year earlier, and there only seems to be one employee running the place in frazzled desk clerk Miles Miller (Lewis Pullman), who frequently goes MIA and ignores the bell, leaving the guests to serve themselves coffee and drinks from the bar. Once in their rooms, it's clear that all of them have something to hide and aren't who they claim to be. Sullivan drops the overbaked Southern accent and makes a phone call before locating and dismantling dozens of bugging devices from everywhere in his room. He finds Miles passed out with a needle in his arm, and in a long, single-take sequence, ventures down a secret corridor behind the office, where he's able to see into each room through a one-way mirror. Darlene is singing, Father Flynn--clearly not a real priest--is tearing up the floorboards, and Emily is dragging a bound and gagged young woman (Cailee Spaeny) in from the trunk of her car. Sullivan goes to a nearby pay phone and calls the FBI. He mentions the apparent kidnapping and is told that "Mr. Hoover" wants him to disregard it, stick to his assignment, make sure no one leaves, and retrieve what he's there to find.
Shot on actual film and with a Michael Giacchino score that often sounds affectionately reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann, BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE is often just as indebted to Hitchcock as it is Tarantino, particularly PSYCHO with its motel setting and the character getting the most screen time in the early going being unexpectedly killed off before the midway point. Others will find the secret corridor and see things they aren't supposed to see, which seems to be the entire purpose of the El Royale's continued existence, a place where bad things go down and equipment is in place to record it all. A classic MacGuffin comes into play in the form of a stag film shot from behind the one-way-mirror looking into one of the rooms, dating back several years and featuring someone both prominent and dead. BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE keeps piling on the twists and turns and is an absolute blast until Goddard loses his way with the third-act, dark-and-stormy-night introduction of Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth), a charismatic, Manson-like cult leader who arrives with murderous goons in tow to find one of his flock who got away from him and is keen to stick around once he sees there's a bag of loot and a potential blackmail reel involved. It's no fault of Hemsworth, who attacks the role with amused gusto, but Billy Lee is a two-dimensional villain with too little screen time to make an impact. So instead of creating a fully-developed character like the ones we've been able to get to know, Goddard lets Hemsworth ham it up and show off by smirking and strutting to Deep Purple's "Hush," while he holds everyone captive and plays roulette with their lives as the film turns into a rote, generic "terrorizing the hostages" scenario.
It's a shame Goddard couldn't figure out a way to give keep the same level of intensity and bring the story to a conclusion worthy of its set-up, but the first 2/3 of the film is so good that the less-inspired and comparatively weak final third can't help but end with a fizzled shrug. It isn't a complete deal-breaker and it's still recommended, but part of the problem is that there's simply no reason for this film to be as long as it is. But it's beautifully shot, has some wonderful production design, and the cast is terrific, particularly Erivo (a Tony-winner for 2015's Broadway musical version of THE COLOR PURPLE) and national treasure Bridges, who lends a convincing weariness to a bad guy who maybe has some redeeming qualities after all. In the end, BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE averages out to a film that's quite good, but for an hour and a half, it flirts with being a great one.
APOSTLE (US/UK - 2018) Written and directed by Gareth Evans. Cast: Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, Lucy Boynton, Mark Lewis Jones, Bill Milner, Kristine Froseth, Paul Higgins, Elen Rhys, Sharon Morgan, Sebastian McCheyne, John Weldon, Richard Elfyn, Ross O'Hennessy. (Unrated, 129 mins) Welsh-born writer/director Gareth Evans is best known for his Indonesian action extravaganzas with Iko Uwais (MERENTAU and the two RAID films), but he's explored the horror genre as well with his little-seen 2006 debut FOOTSTEPS and the "Safe Haven" segment of 2013's V/H/S/2. "Safe Haven" was set in the present-day and centered on an Indonesia-based religious cult, a topic Evans explores in a different time and place with his latest film, the Netflix Original APOSTLE. In the early 1900s, Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), the black sheep of a wealthy British family, is summoned home after years away by his near-catatonic father's attorney. Presumed dead for reasons the film specifies later and looking perilously close to feral amidst his upper-class surroundings, Thomas' return is an absolute last resort: his younger sister Jennifer (Elen Rhys) has been abducted and whisked away to a distant island, where a religious cult led by the Prophet Malcolm (Michael Sheen) has fled England and established a community called Erisden. She didn't join the cult--she was taken for ransom and they want it delivered personally. Thomas must infiltrate Erisden, blend in, and bring Jennifer home. His doing so ends up costing an innocent man his life when Thomas switches out his marked invitation, indicating that Malcolm and his right-hand men Quinn (Mark Lewis Jones) and Frank (Paul Higgins) have no intention of letting Jennifer or her rescuer off the island alive.
The obvious point of comparison in the early going is the 1973 classic THE WICKER MAN, which was already ripped off by Ben Wheatley with 2011's wildly overpraised KILL LIST. But THE WICKER MAN is just a launch pad for APOSTLE, as Evans has more metaphorically loaded ideas in mind. He doles out just enough details--about Erisden, Malcolm, and especially Thomas--to methodically tighten the screws and drive up the tension (abetted significantly by a nerve-jangling soundtrack that vacillates between folkish instruments and screeching violins). As Malcolm's rebellious (conveyed in a rather facile fashion by her fiery red hair) daughter Andrea (Lucy Boynton) says to Thomas, "Your eyes...they've seen things." But she hasn't seen the scars and burns on his back, part of a backstory that will make things much clearer as the film goes on. Unlike most self-appointed prophets of this sort, Malcolm is initially practical, save for the requirement that the new arrivals on Erisden must leave a small jar of their blood outside their quarters every night. The crops have failed, but Jennifer hasn't been taken to Erisden as a sacrifice to their version of a wicker man, but rather, because they need money and goods brought from the mainland and kidnapping an heiress for a hefty ransom is a last-ditch act of desperation. Malcolm brought his flock to Erisden but reality seems to have given them a swift kick in the ass. This is also represented by the blossoming (and secret) relationship between Frank's son Jeremy (Bill Milner) and Quinn's daughter Ffion (Kristine Froseth), which sets off a chain reaction of tragedy and terror that takes APOSTLE into genuinely horrific, Stephen King-by-way-of-Neil Gaiman territory in the second hour.
To divulge more plot is difficult without going into spoilers, but while it only briefly detours into the bone-crushing action choreography that's synonymous with Evans, APOSTLE is his most conceptually ambitious work yet. That's not just in the unforeseen roads the story travels, but also in its multi-dimensional characters, even finding some sense of morality in the lunacy of Malcolm and his ideas. He's not even the most dangerous person--or thing--on Erisden, which becomes painfully clear to him when things spiral out of his control. There's also a harsh lesson to be learned for those on Erisden who commit heinous acts in the name of their god or their religion. When one character exacts his personal revenge on another, triumphantly declaring "I've wanted this," it's proof positive that Erisden has lost its way and its people are doing things not out of religious conviction but rather, control and power. There are those on Erisden who are complicit in the worst things happening and hide behind their religion, increasingly divorced from what they purport to stand for and believe, thereby offending a god who sees fit to poison the crops and make the land toxic. These notions make parts of APOSTLE a blistering indictment of rampant religious hypocrisy, but despite its grievances, the film is ultimately a spiritual one that falls on the side of faith. Evans also doesn't forget he's making a Gareth Evans joint, coming up with some innovative torture devices and increasingly painful ways for people to be killed, particularly one nightmarish mechanism that serves as a rustic tribute to the legendary drill scene in Lucio Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. And don't be surprised when cosplay versions of "Her" and "The Grinder" start appearing at fan conventions.
22 JULY (US - 2018) Written and directed by Paul Greengrass. Cast: Jonas Strand Gravli, Anders Danielsen Lie, Jon Oigarden, Maria Bock, Thorbjorn Harr, Seda Witt, Isak Bakli Aglen, Ola G. Furuseth, Monica Borg Fure, Matthias Eckhoff, Hilde Olausson, Lena Kristin Ellingsen, Tone Danielson, Tomas Gudbjartsson. (R, 143 mins) After returning to the BOURNE franchise with 2016's decent but generally forgettable JASON BOURNE, British filmmaker Paul Greengrass revisits the harrowing, you-are-there immediacy of 2002's BLOODY SUNDAY, 2006's UNITED 93, and 2013's CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, with the Netflix Original film 22 JULY, chronicling the July 22, 2011 terror attacks in Oslo, Norway. Orchestrated by far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik (played here by Anders Danielsen Lie), the attacks began with an Oklahoma City-like truck bombing with fertilizer and aluminum nitrate in the Oslo business district near the office of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (Ola G. Furuseth), and continued when a fleeing Breivik, wearing a police uniform, took a ferry to the island of Utoya and committed a mass shooting at a leadership camp for Norwegian teenagers. Between the Oslo bombing and the Utoya massacre, 77 were killed and 200 injured, the purpose of which is detailed in Breivik's 1500-page manifesto decrying what he sees as Norway's lenient immigration policies and the spread of Islam through Europe, with the Utoya camp being targeted to stop the next generation of "Marxists, liberals, and elites."
The opening 30 minutes are riveting, visceral, and horrifying. The cold, dead glare in Lie's eyes as Breivik methodically prepares to set the truck bomb and calmly talks his way onto the ferry to Utoya before mowing down scores of screaming teens is absolutely chilling and this extended sequence represents Greengrass at his strongest and most unflinching. But once Breivik is in custody, 22 JULY turns more formulaic, to its detriment. Greengrass cuts back and forth between Breivik and his reluctant defense attorney Geir Lippestad (Jon Oigarden, a dead ringer for Uwe Boll), chosen because he successfully defended a neo-Nazi in a case a decade earlier, and Utoya survivor Viljar Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli), who was shot five times, once in the head with an exploding bullet leaving fragments in his skull that surgeons were unable to completely remove. We're shown Hanssen's grueling road to recovery, which includes intense physical therapy and a significant case of PTSD. Gravli is fine in these scenes, but the more they go on, the more 22 JULY gets bogged down in melodrama, which doesn't play to Greengrass' strengths as a director. That's not to say Greengrass isn't capable of handling gut-wrenching drama (Tom Hanks does the best acting of his career in that final scene of CAPTAIN PHILLIPS) or that Hanssen's story isn't worth telling, but the arc he undergoes is something we've seen numerous times before, from the mood swings, to the self-destructive lashing out, to the simmering resentment of his younger brother (Isak Bakli Aglen), who made it off Utoya without being physically harmed, but whose own psychological trauma has become a distant second priority with their parents (Maria Bock, Thorbjorn Harr). That same predictable story arc goes for Oigarden's Lippestad as well. He's disgusted by Brievik and his reprehensible views, and doesn't want to defend him, but it's his job, and you know it's only a matter of time before he's getting late-night phone calls threatening his family.
Gravli delivers a committed performance, but one can't help noting Greengrass' missed opportunity in not focusing his attention on Brievik, terrifyingly underplayed by Lie with a narcissistic sociopath's level of non-emotion. When he's being interrogated, he's munching on pizza and asks to pause the questioning to get a Band-Aid for a small cut on his thumb that he got when it was scratched by a piece of someone's shattering skull ("I'm worried it might get infected," he says, barely stifling a smirk). There's a stomach-in-knots urgency to the early scenes of 22 JULY that dissipates after the attacks, leaving the remainder of the film a sometimes laborious slog clocking in at a bloated 143 minutes. Netflix obviously gave Greengrass the freedom to make the film he wanted to make, and it's helpful that the Norwegian cast (speaking English, which isn't a dealbreaker) is almost completely unknown to American audiences (though Kristen Stewart fans might recognize Lie from Olivier Assayas' acclaimed PERSONAL SHOPPER), but wouldn't it be a better film if it was a ZODIAC-like procedural or an almost real-time chronicle like UNITED 93? There's a couple of throwaway mentions of Norwegian authorities being lax in their duties and no one noticing any red flags when Breivik purchased a massive amount of fertilizer and other chemicals seven months before the attack. Wouldn't that have been a good starting point for an examination of this horrific event? It doesn't yet have a US distributor, but there's a competing Norwegian film that opened in Europe several months ago titled U - 22 JULY, depicting the 72-minute Utoya massacre and its immediate aftermath in real time. That's the kind of film you'd think Greengrass would've made. He did for the first 30 minutes, but the rest of the movie feels like it could've been made by anyone.
MALEVOLENT (UK - 2018) Directed by Olaf de Fleur. Written by Ben Ketai and Eva Konstantopoulos. Cast: Florence Pugh, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Celia Imrie, James Cosmo, Scott Chambers, Georgina Bevan, Niall Greig Fulton, Nicola Grier, Stephen McCole, Daisy Mathewson, Charlotte Allen, Shelley Conn, Ian Milne. (Unrated, 88 mins) A British import acquired by Netflix, MALEVOLENT doesn't break any new ground as far as ghost stories go, but Icelandic director Olaf de Fleur and rising star Florence Pugh (who won significant acclaim with 2017's LADY MACBETH) make sure to hit all the right notes in a first hour that holds your attention and has a few effective jump scares. But then MALEVOLENT shits the bed in a way we haven't seen since DON'T BREATHE broke out the turkey baster, with a shift in style and tone that's so jarring that you might think the last 30 minutes came from a different movie that was just thawed after being frozen in ice since 2007. Co-written by Ben Ketai (THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT), and set in Glasgow (in 1986, for no particular reason), MALEVOLENT focuses on two American siblings--college student Angela Sayers (Pugh) and her older brother Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Holmes)--who run a ghostbusting con act with Jackson's girlfriend Beth (Georgina Bevan) and nerdy tech guy Elliott (Scott Chambers), who can barely conceal his unrequited crush on Angela. With prerecorded sound effects, they pretend Angela has an ability to communicate with ghosts left behind, convincing them to leave the house. It's a scam they learned from their late mother (Nicola Grier), an unstable sort who committed suicide after clawing her eyes out. With their American father out of the picture, the Sayers' only family is their irascible Scottish grandfather (the great James Cosmo), who knows Jackson is a fraud just like his mother. D-bag Jackson's also heavily in debt to ruthless loan shark Craig (Ian Milne) and needs a lucrative supernatural hustle to settle a debt.
He gets his wish when they're contacted by widowed Mrs. Green (Celia Imrie), who was once the headmistress at a foster home for orphaned girls until her maniac son Herman (Niall Greig Fulton) killed six of them after torturing them and sewing their mouths shut. Mrs. Green lives alone on the massive property in the middle of nowhere, and she insists it's haunted by the constant cries of her son's victims. Figuring she's a crazy old woman, Jackson sees some easy money and Angela reluctantly goes along. This immediately proves to be a different gig, as Angela actually sees one of the dead girls walking around, even leading her to a hidden basement room where tattered wallpaper covers up disturbing drawings and messages left by the girls before they were murdered. So far, so good. There's nothing here that's original (J.A. Bayona's THE ORPHANAGE comes to mind more than once), but an excellent performance from Pugh (though she and Lloyd-Holmes do both occasionally let their American accents slip) and de Fleur establishing an ominous, foreboding atmosphere--eerie, droning sounds, hissed whispers of "Angela!" and garbled voices heard on walkie-talkies--give it some unexpected cred. But then there's a twist and someone is revealed to not be what they claim to be, and what was a serious and reasonably compelling supernatural horror film turns into an over-the-top, blood-splattered torture-porn throwback, more or less kicking Pugh's performance to the curb and becoming the trashiest horror film to feature the distinguished BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL co-star Imrie since one of her earliest roles from the beginning of her career in Pete Walker's HOUSE OF WHIPCORD. For about an hour, MALEVOLENT seems well on its way to being not a classic, but a pretty good sleeper scare for the season. But when it abruptly crashes and burns in the last 30 minutes, it's haunted not by the vengeful spirits of the dead orphaned girls but by the long-forgotten ghosts of played-out horror subgenres still sticking around a decade past their sell-by date.
A longtime pet project of John Travolta's (and we know those always turn out great), the dismal GOTTI was set to be released directly to VOD in December 2017 until Lionsgate abruptly whacked it and sold it back to the producers, who were hoping for a wide release with another distributor. It didn't quite pan out that way, with Vertical Entertainment and MoviePass teaming up to get it on 500 screens, with 40% of the people who saw it theatrically being MoviePass subscribers. Couple that with some obvious juicing of the moviegoer ratings and reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (where a suspicious number of glowing GOTTI reviews were written by people who just joined the site and reviewed nothing but GOTTI), and one might assume GOTTI is not very good. And they'd be right. It's quite terrible, actually, and you know from the start that it'll be something special when two consecutively-placed credits read "Emmett Furla Oasis Films" and "Emmet (sic) Furla Oasis Films." Travolta, one of 57 (!) credited producers, spent years getting this project off the ground, but it looks just like any other straight-to-VOD, Redbox-ready clunker, with NYC mostly unconvincingly played by Cincinnati. GOTTI, a film that makes KILL THE IRISHMAN look like GOODFELLAS, isn't very interested in telling a story as much as it is fashioning a John Gotti hagiography, being quite open in its admiration of "The Teflon Don" and his family, as if they were just hardworking, everyday folks getting a bum rap from the government. It plays like a long "Previously on..." recap from a mercifully non-existent TV series, with no drive or momentum to its narrative and instead going for a Cliffs Notes recap of major events in Gotti's life, with constant mentions of rats, respect, and "fuckin' cocksuckas!" It actually opens with Travolta in full Gotti makeup, breaking the fourth wall, standing with his back to the NYC skyline and addressing the viewer from beyond the grave like he's hosting a TV special: "This is New York City...MY fuckin' city!"
Somehow, it gets worse. A framing device of a terminally ill Gotti (Travolta plays these scenes sans wig) being visited in prison by his son John A. Gotti, aka "Junior" (Spencer Lofranco) comes back around only sporadically. Gotti's rise in the ranks of the Gambino crime family, mentored by underboss Neil Dellacroce (Stacy Keach), is represented by one hit in an empty bar and Carlo Gambino (Michael Cipiti) is never seen or mentioned again; there's a lot of talk about dissension in the ranks that results in the infamous Gotti-ordered 1985 assassination of boss Paul Castellano (Donald Volpenhein) outside a Manhattan steakhouse, but Castellano is seen on one or two occasions and has no dialogue, so we're never really sure what the beef is. The relationship between Gotti and his right-hand man Sammy "The Bull" Gravano (William DeMeo) is so glossed over that when Gravano eventually rats on him, the dramatic tension fails to resonate in any way. Most of the scenes of Gotti's home life involve him yelling at wife Victoria (Travolta's wife Kelly Preston) to get out of bed, as she's fallen into a deep depression after the 1980 death of their son Frankie when a neighbor accidentally hit him with his car. Like the script for GOTTI, that neighbor soon vanished and was never seen again. Given the loss of their own son Jett in 2009, there is some undeniably raw emotion in the way Preston and Travolta play the initial reaction to Frankie Gotti's death, and it's maybe the only moment in GOTTI that comes across as genuine and real.
Years jump by and back again (yet through it all, Lofranco looks exactly the same, with no effort to make him look 15-20 years older in the later scenes), and as a result, director Kevin Connolly (best known from his days co-starring on ENTOURAGE) basically comes off as Dipshit Scorsese. He never gets any kind of pacing or rhythm going, and seems more interested in what songs he can get on the soundtrack, whether it's some incongruously contemporary songs by Pitbull, or ridiculously irrelevant needle-drops, like the theme from SHAFT when Gotti whacks someone in the early '70s, the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" when he's strutting out of the courthouse, the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" when Gotti underling Frank DeCicco (Chris Mulkey) is blown up in his car (why is that song in that scene?), Duran Duran's "Come Undone" when Junior's house is raided and the Feds bring him in, or The Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" during archival footage of the real Gotti's funeral, as if Scorsese's CASINO never happened. The screenplay is credited to occasional Steven Soderbergh collaborator Lem Dobbs (KAFKA, THE LIMEY, HAYWIRE) and co-star Leo Rossi, though there's little evidence that any of it was used in the finished product. GOTTI doles out its exposition in casual asides (with no previous mention of the brain cancer that would ultimately kill him, Dellacroce stops in mid-sentence, rubs his forehead and mutters "Oh, this cancer!" and goes back to what he was saying) and info dumps treat both the characters and the audience like idiots. The worst example of this comes after Gotti tells Dellacroce of his planned power play to take control of the families, and Stacy Keach, a professional actor with over 50 years in the business, is actually required to say "But only if you have the support of the other Five Boroughs...Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx." Are we really supposed to believe that middle-aged, lifelong New Yorker John Gotti doesn't know what the Five Boroughs are and needs to have them specifically spelled out for him? (R, 104 mins) DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY (US - 2018)
The long-delayed fourth entry in the DEATH RACE franchise was shot two years ago and shelved while Universal instead opted to first release the offshoot DEATH RACE 2050, a direct sequel to 1975's DEATH RACE 2000. Whether or not there's two competing DEATH RACE franchises remains to be seen, but Paul W.S. Anderson's big-screen DEATH RACE with Jason Statham in 2008 gave way to a surprisingly decent pair of DTV sequels, both well-directed by Roel Reine, who succeeded in accomplishing much with drastically reduced budgets and has consistently displayed a knack for making his DTV sequel assignments (he's also directed THE SCORPION KING 3, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS 2, and HARD TARGET 2) look much more polished and professional than most of their ilk. Reine is out for DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY, and in his place is another DTV sequel specialist in Don Michael Paul, whose credits include JARHEAD 2, KINDERGARTEN COP 2, a fourth LAKE PLACID, a fifth and sixth TREMORS, and a fifth and sixth SNIPER. BEYOND ANARCHY is less a sequel to its three predecessors and more a response to MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, as the hero driver "Frankenstein" is now a faceless villain who hides behind a mask (played by stuntman Velislav Pavlov and voiced by Nolan North). He essentially serves as the film's Immortan Joe, a ruthless driver in the now-illegal Death Race, which is still held inside a walled city called The Sprawl that serves as America's prison, a concept in no way reminiscent of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. Frankenstein finds new competition in Snake Plis--er, I mean, Connor Gibson (Zach McGowan), a new convict who falls in with Baltimore Bob (Danny Glover) and the ubiquitous Lists (series mainstay Fred Koehler), who's basically the Joe Patroni of the DEATH RACE franchise. Bob and Lists are running Death Race, broadcasting to 54 million viewers on the dark web (some "dark web"), and after an hour of fight-to-the-death battles, Gibson passes his tests and gets in the final race, teamed with tough-as-nails navigator Bexie (Cassie Clare), and it's pretty much business as usual.
Shooting in Bulgaria, Paul makes effective use of abandoned warehouses and factories to help establish The Sprawl as an apocalyptic hellhole, but the action sequences are done in a headache-inducing, quick-cut, shaky-zoom style, there's too many annoying supporting characters (like Lucy Aarden's Carley, Frankenstein's porn star girlfriend and de facto Grace Pander by way of TMZ, a clever idea that falls flat), there's too much dated, blaring, aggro nu-metal (including too many appearances by what looks like a Bulgarian knockoff of Coal Chamber, obviously riffing on FURY ROAD's beloved Doof Warrior), and it's entirely too long at an exhausting 111 minutes. Danny Trejo returns from the second and third installments as Goldberg, who's now running a gambling den in Mexico and watching Death Race on TV, obviously knocking out his scenes in a day and never interacting with any of the other cast members. TV vet McGowan (THE 100, BLACK SAILS, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., THE WALKING DEAD) is a dull hero (he and Paul reteamed for the upcoming fifth SCORPION KING), Glover is collecting a paycheck, and Koehler is apparently waiting around in hopes that someone will write him a Lists origin story prequel. DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY is by far the goriest of the bunch and has a surprising amount of skin, but despite the set-up for yet another sequel, this series is starting to run on fumes. (Unrated, 111 mins) TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 (US - 2018)
A belated DTV sequel to the 1995 cult horror anthology, TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 is occasionally heavy-handed, cheaply made, and could use some more polished actors, but it gets a big boost from the return of the core creative personnel--the writing/directing team of Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott, and producer Spike Lee--which helps make it more than a mere nostalgic, brand-name cash-in. With bona fides in horror (Scott produced 1987's THE OFFSPRING and 1989's STEPFATHER II) and as important black filmmakers in the early '90s (Scott produced The Hughes Brothers' MENACE II SOCIETY, while Cundieff was a protege of Lee's who co-starred in SCHOOL DAZE and wrote and directed the hip-hop mockumentary FEAR OF A BLACK HAT), Cundieff and Scott have picked the right time for a TALES FROM THE HOOD sequel, with at least two of the segments being overt responses to the Age of Trump, and another that couldn't possibly be any more timely, right down to a powerful conservative declaring "Boys will be boys" and sympathizing with a pair of male sexual predators after they're given a grisly comeuppance. A mix of humor and horror, TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 has some serious statements to make and there are times when it's a little too goofy and thus softens the blow somewhat, but it's better than it has any business being, closing big with a segment that's bold in concept and incendiary in execution.
The hokey wraparound segment, "Robo Hell" has storyteller Diomedes Simms (the great Keith David, stepping in for Clarence Williams III's Portifoy Simms) meeting with ultra-conservative weapons manufacturer, private prison magnate, and aspiring politico Dumass Beach (Bill Martin Williams as Robert John Burke as Mike Pence). Overtly racist ("Your brothers and sisters make up a lot of my profits," he sneers to Simms) and constantly groping his female assistant, Beach has overseen the development of a security robot called RoboPatriot, and needs to fill its database with stories and tales to aid in its ability to perceive and judge threats and criminal acts...from a black perspective because, of course, he thinks they're all criminals. The first segment is "Good Golly," where two clueless college girls visit a roadside "Museum of Negrosity" because one collects golliwogs and gets offended when the angry owner doesn't think they appreciate the gravity of the slave experience. The second and most comedic is "The Medium," where a reformed pimp-turned-community activist is confronted by former gang cohorts over the location of a stash of money. When he's accidentally killed before they get the information, they invade the home of a phony TV psychic (Bryan Batt) and force him to channel his spirit. "Date Night" doesn't really fit the "hood" motif, but is instead a Tinder hookup gone awry, as two dudebros meet a pair of sexy young ladies and decide to roofie their drinks and film their exploits once they're unconscious ("They probably like what we're about to do to them!" one says) only to get the tables turned on them in a way they never saw coming. The fourth and final segment, "The Sacrifice," is the standout and the only one that's played completely straight. Kendrick Cross stars as Henry Bradley, a black Republican who's the campaign manager for a white, race-baiting, "Take Mississippi back" far-right gubernatorial candidate. Henry's white, pregnant wife (Jillian Batherson) fears that some angry supernatural presence is affecting their unborn child. That presence soon reveals itself to be the ghost of 1950s teenage lynching victim Emmitt Till (Christopher Paul Horne), retconning Henry's life of oblivious privilege among wealthy white Southerners (he lives in a old, restored mansion that was once a notorious slave plantation) and making him experience the racism and violence that cost him his life and the lives of others like MLK, Medgar Evers, and the Four Little Girls. Horror anthologies have to end big, and "The Sacrifice," compared to the relative silliness of the rest, packs as sobering, audacious, and thought-provoking a punch as any top-tier BLACK MIRROR episode. Genre vet David (THE THING, THEY LIVE) has fun chewing the scenery, and Cross turns in a solid performance, and while TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 could use some better--or at least, better-known--actors, it's surprisingly decent as far as extremely tardy DTV sequels go. (R, 110 mins)
