THE WAY BACK (US/Canada - 2020) Directed by Gavin O'Connor. Written by Brad Inglesby. Cast: Ben Affleck, Al Madrigal, Michaela Watkins, Janina Gavankar, Glynn Turman, Brandon Wilson, Jeremy Radin, Will Ropp, Charles Lott Jr., Melvin Gregg, Fernando Luis Vega, Ben Irving, Da'Vinchi, T.K. Carter, John Aylward, Todd Stashwick, Dan Lauria, Jeremy Ratchford, Matthew Glave, Nancy Linehan Charles. (R, 108 mins) 2004's exemplary MIRACLE demonstrated that director Gavin O'Connor--then best known for the 1999 indie TUMBLEWEEDS--had a knack for the inspirational sports drama, while 2011's WARRIOR remains one of the all-time great gut-wrenching man-weepies. He's had a generally well-regarded career as a journeyman with films like 2008's cop drama PRIDE AND GLORY and 2016's autistic assassin thriller THE ACCOUNTANT, with 2016's long-shelved JANE GOT A GUN being his only real misstep thus far, though in his defense, he stepped in at the last minute when Lynne Ramsey quit during pre-production a few major cast members followed suit, leaving O'Connor with an already out-of-control grease fire. O'Connor combines the feel-good underdog spirit of MIRACLE with the emotionally overwhelming haunted-by-the-past drama of WARRIOR in THE WAY BACK, which reunites him with ACCOUNTANT star Ben Affleck. The real story here isn't how it fits into the O'Connor oeuvre, but rather, the uncompromising, soul-baring performance of Affleck, who brings to the table much of his own history as a recovering high-functioning alcoholic who's publicly fallen off the wagon more than once.
Affleck is a longtime tabloid mainstay who's had enough ups and downs over his career to qualify as the John Travolta of his generation. Though only in the current pop culture environment can someone star in superhero movies that grossed between $230-$330 million domestically and still be held partially culpable for their status as "flops," with the added bonus of social media taking a meme-able glee in one's professional stumbles, personal meltdowns, and questionable choice in back tattoos. Yes, THE WAY BACK is a bit too contrived in its writing and it often comes close to being BEN AFFLECK IS SOBER: THE MOVIE, but it has a level of sincerity and authenticity that almost seems therapeutic for him at this point in time. Looking convincingly beaten down by life, Affleck is Jack Cunningham, a construction worker who's isolated himself from friends and family. He's separated from his wife Angela (Janina Gavankar), and every day is the same: he has a beer in the shower, pours some gin in a travel mug on the way to work, stealthily keeps it filled over the course of the day, fills it with a beer after work to hold him over until he gets to the bar, where he usually shuts it down with endless beers and shots, knowing that his elderly friend and bar regular Doc (Glynn Turman) will make sure he gets home. On the occasional nights he stays in, he sits at his kitchen table and works his way through a case of beer, passes out, and does it all again the next day.
An unexpected shot at redemption comes in the form of a job offer from his Catholic high school alma mater: their basketball coach is out indefinitely after a major heart attack and they need a replacement. Jack is a legend at the school, having taken them to victory at the state championship 25 years ago. He's reluctant to take the job since it interferes with his drinking schedule, but something ignites in him and he dives into the task at hand with the help of nice-guy assistant coach and algebra teacher Dan (a good serious performance by comedian and former DAILY SHOW correspondent Al Madrigal)--namely, trying to turn around a ragtag team of undisciplined showboaters who barely have the fundamentals down ("Hey, quit dancing!" Jack yells as the whistle's about to blow at the start of his first game as coach. "You're 1-9, stop acting like you hit the Powerball. It's embarrassing."). They very slowly begin to build camaraderie and momentum and become a better team, and have one legitimately good player in Brandon (Brandon Wilson), who gets no encouragement from his bitter widower father (T.K. Carter sighting!), who questions why Jack is even coaching when he pissed away a full ride and quit playing right after high school. Jack had his reasons for abandoning basketball, and he his reasons for medicating himself just to get through the day, which become clear over the course of the film. The "what" was pretty much spoiled by the trailers, but the "how" is a tragedy that's unbearably sad (like WARRIOR, THE WAY BACK doesn't shy away from picking at the scabs of traumatic family memories) and Jack is still unable to process it and move on. Coaching gives Jack a new focus and he even drastically cuts back on the drinking, until he's blindsided by a reminder from the past that puts him back on an even more destructive downward spiral than before.
Throughout, Jack repeatedly tells his players "it's the little things" that you build on to ensure a victory. It's also the little things Affleck brings to his character that keep THE WAY BACK on track and allow you to more or less speed-bump over its occasional contrivances and sports cliches dating back to HOOSIERS. The team is almost the Bad News Bears of high school hoops, but when Affleck takes Jack through the daily rituals of functional alcoholism, the film is gritty and real because he knows how it is and he wisely never overplays it for cheap awards bait. Watch the way he works through a case of beer over the course of the evening in a montage of repetition, grabbing one out of the fridge, putting in the freezer to replace the one he's taking out, keeping them ice cold and ready for each trip to the kitchen every five or so minutes. Or his wake-up shower beer. Or the cooler he keeps behind the passenger seat of his truck so he has a cold one ready after work for his drive to the bar. There's a type of rigid preparedness that goes into staying drunk. O'Connor utilizes some long takes, with a memorable one being Jack pulling into his usual bar's parking lot and the camera following him out of the truck and all the way into the bar to his seat, where the bartender welcomes one of his regulars and already has his first one waiting. O'Connor doesn't cut away or break the shot until Jack has effortlessly chugged that beer to the last drop without even pausing. A tailor-made, star vehicle for sure, THE WAY BACK isn't a great film on the level of WARRIOR (I rarely get emotional with movies, but Nick Nolte's performance in that just wrecks me), nor is it quite as inspiring as MIRACLE, but it's a solid sports man-weepie and dad movie anchored by Affleck's best work since GONE GIRL.
THE LAST THING HE WANTED (US/UK - 2020) Directed by Dee Rees. Written by Marco Villalobos and Dee Rees. Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, Willem Dafoe, Toby Jones, Edi Gathegi, Mel Rodriguez, Onata Aprile, Carlos Leal, Ben Chase, Julian Gamble, Rob Sedgwick, Billy Kelly, David Vadim. (R, 115 mins) "You wanna see how a monkey drives? Buckle up. Follow the bananas." That's an actual line of dialogue from the new Netflix Original film THE LAST THING HE WANTED, and relatively speaking, it's one of its better ones. Based on a 1996 novel by Joan Didion, perhaps best known for scripting films like 1971's THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK, 1976's A STAR IS BORN, and 1996's UP CLOSE & PERSONAL, THE LAST THING HE WANTED utilizes much of the florid, purple prose coming directly from the source, which only serves to demonstrate just how Didion's acclaimed novel fails to translate to the screen in every possible way. We're talking unfilmable on a level of Alan Rudolph's catastrophic 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS. Think I'm exaggerating? Then take a spin with this voiceover monologue delivered in a hard-boiled, staccato fashion by Anne Hathaway like a vocal-fried HIS GIRL FRIDAY five minutes into the movie:
"For a while, we thought time was money. Find the time, the money comes with it. Moving fast. Get the suite, the multi-line telephones. Get room service on one, get valet on two, premium service, out by nine, back by one. Download all data, uplink Prague, get some conference calls going. Sell Allied Signal, buy Cyprus Minerals, work the management plays. Plug into the news cycle, get the wires raw, nod out on the noise. Somewhere in the nod, we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod, we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity."
Is that a monologue from a serious geopolitical thriller or a rejected Geoff Tate spoken word section from the most pretentious outtake in the Queensryche songbook? I'm gonna memorize it and just blurt it out at random times to see how people react. Hathaway stars as Elena McMahon, a reporter for the fictional Atlantic Post, and as the film opens in 1982, she's embedded with the FMLN, covering the civil war in El Salvador with her photographer colleague Alma (Rosie Perez). She's getting wind of some secret deals going on with the Contras in Nicaragua that she traces back to D.C. only to get stone-walled by Secretary of State George Shultz (Julian Gamble). That gets her shitlisted in politico circles and when the paper caves to pressure and shuts down their Central American field office, she's reassigned to cover the 1984 Reagan/Bush re-election campaign. At the same time, her shady father Richard (Willem Dafoe, who puts forth some valiant effort in his few scenes) is suffering from the early stages of dementia and ends up in the hospital, at which point he clues her in that she needs to take care of some "business" for him, namely his secret gig as a gunrunner for the Contras.
What follows is an incoherent mishmash of Oliver Stone's SALVADOR and Michelangelo Antonioni's THE PASSENGER, with Elena taking a leave from her job to act in her ailing father's stead, which leads to unintentionally hilarious scenes of her making a gun drop on a Nicaraguan air strip and shouting "Is this the payment?" as guys in Jeeps with guns swarm around her. She travels from Florida to Salvadors El and San, Costa Rica, and eventually Antigua, where she ends up taking a job as a housekeeper for wealthy and flamboyant Paul (Toby Jones), who made his fortune in gay Costa Rican bathhouse getaways for rich, closeted American one-percenters. This somehow gets her close to...whatever it is she's searching for? Ben Affleck, looking alternately catatonic and confused, appears sporadically as Treat Morrison, a sinister Shultz State Department flunky who happens upon a despondent Elena eating chocolate ice cream and a plate full of bacon strips at a St. John's bar before they hop into bed and slog through some painfully arduous post-coital pillow talk (he talks about his dead wife, she quotes poetry). Hathaway is an excellent actress but she's just hopelessly miscast here, mistaking chain-smoking and a gravelly vocal affect for grit and toughness. The awful dialogue doesn't do anyone any favors--Hathaway is completely wrong for the part, but in her defense, how could anyone do anything with nonsensical, sub-James Ellroy word salads like "I covered many interesting things before my desk got froze and I was relegated to following around the circus filing white propaganda about all the elephant shit!" Suddenly, last year's SERENITY isn't looking so bad.
If this review seems all over the place, that's just because it's impossible to really discuss THE LAST THING HE WANTED. It feels like it's either unfinished or huge sections of it have been removed willy-nilly with no thought given to how it would impact the narrative. People appear then disappear before we can find out who they are. Elena just turns up in places with no explanation why she's there. Why does she take a job running errands for the bathhouse guy? Who is Jones (Edi Gathegi), some guy who just shows up after a weapons drop and gets ordered out of a car at gunpoint by Elena, only to turn up again much later and save her during a hotel shootout? There's endless talk about a gunrunning mystery man code-named "Bob Weir," and not only does no one make a Grateful Dead joke, but the ultimate revelation of his identity is tied to a sudden flashback that the film just pulls out of its ass very late in the game in maybe the laziest deus ex machina in recent memory, all leading up to what was clearly intended to be a devastating twist ending that just fails to land or tie together any loose ends because you have no clue what's even led up to it. Somehow, this dumpster fire was directed and co-written by Dee Rees, who earned significant acclaim and an Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for her 2017 Netflix film MUDBOUND, so it's obvious Netflix attached themselves to this sight unseen before filming even began. The buzz at Sundance in early 2020 was utterly toxic, so it's little wonder the streaming giant snuck this one online with little fanfare despite the prestigious cast. THE LAST THING HE WANTED is bound to go down as a cautionary tale of what happens when aggressively unfilmable novels are adapted to the wrong medium. Still think I'm exaggerating? Well, here's the rest of that early Hathaway monologue:
"Weightlessness seemed, at the time, the safer mode. Weightlessness seemed, at the time, the mode in which we could beat the clock and the affect itself. But I see now that it was not. I see now that the clock was ticking. I see now that we were experiencing not weightlessness, but what is interestingly described on page 1513 of the Merck Manual, 15th edition, as a sustained reactive depression, a bereavement reaction to the leaving of familiar environments. I see now that the environment we were leaving was that of feeling rich. I did not see it then."
With the exception of the topical 2011 thriller RED STATE, Kevin Smith's last decade of departures has found the '90s indie icon struggling to find his mojo. Yes, he has his podcast and his various online endeavors that keep his loyal fan base sticking around, but the movies have been garbage. It's little wonder that he finally saw fit to go the "give 'em what they want" route by resurrecting his two biggest fan favorite characters with JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT, but the resulting film wasn't made by the Kevin Smith who gave us CLERKS and MALLRATS. It was made by the Kevin Smith who gave us TUSK and YOGA HOSERS. Smith's been away from the View Askewniverse since 2006's CLERKS II and it's barely five minutes into REBOOT before you're wishing he'd made that sabbatical a little longer. There was some potential here for insightful meta commentary on the state of movies, franchises, fan conventions, or any other target ripe for satire, but the lazy and aggressively unfunny REBOOT is content to settle for a series of references straight from the Friedberg/Seltzer comedy school, where the reference is the joke--references to other movies (Jason Mewes' Jay is doing a SILENCE OF THE LAMBS junk-tuck in the opening scene in a gag recycled from CLERKS II; when Smith's Silent Bob finally opens his mouth, it's to recite Alec Baldwin's GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS speech to attendees at a Klan rally, where the Grand Wizard invokes "Can you dig it?" from THE WARRIORS), callbacks to earlier Smith movies (Ben Affleck shows up for a positively Bruce Willis-ian cameo as his CHASING AMY character, in a scene that's so bad at concealing the fact that he and Mewes weren't there at the same time that its clumsy editing almost has to be intentional), and would-be sick burns on Smith's own movies (COP OUT is a recurring target). But the endless self-deprecation feels less like genuine ribbing at his own expense and more like Smith pre-emptively shrugging "Hey, yeah, I know this whole thing is just stupid bullshit, but whatever." Everyone's default mode here is to mug shamelessly, and as a result, the film makes a lot of noise, but none of that noise is the sound of laughter.
And the sad thing is, old-school Kevin Smith could've done something with the basic idea of JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT. After getting busted for running an illegal weed dispensary inside a fake chicken sandwich joint (called--wait for it--Cock Smoker) inside the old RST Video next to the Quick Stop, Jay and Silent Bob end up in court. It's there that conniving lawyer Brandon St. Randy (Justin Long) gets them to sign over the rights to their names and likenesses to Saban Films (also REBOOT's distributor), who now own the "Bluntman and Chronic" comic book franchise and are rebooting the nearly two-decade-old cult superhero comedy BLUNTMAN AND CHRONIC (as seen in 2001's JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK) as the dark and grim BLUNTMAN V CHRONIC, to be directed by "Hollywood hack" Kevin Smith (playing himself in a dual role). Now, in what's essentially a reboot of STRIKE BACK, REBOOT has the pair heading off to "Chronic Con" in Hollywood to stop Kevin Smith from making the reboot. Along the way, they end up meeting Millennium "Milly" Faulken (Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith), the daughter Jay never knew he had with STRIKE BACK's Justice Faulken (Shannon Elizabeth), taking her and her friends (including Aparna Brielle as a girl in a hijab named "Jihad") along for the trip.
Smith still has a ton of buds in the View Askewniverse, so there's endless cameos, none of them even remotely amusing: Craig Robinson as "Judge Jerry N. Executioner," and Joe Manganiello as his bailiff; Brian O'Halloran as Dante; Jason Lee as Brodie; Joey Lauren Adams as Alyssa; Chris Hemsworth as a hologram of himself; Fred Armisen in the longest set-up possible for a thudding punchline to an unfunny joke about Tater Tots for teenage girls called "Hater Totz"; Keith Coogan, Jason Biggs, and James Van Der Beek as themselves; Rosario Dawson as Justice's wife; Smith's wife Jennifer Schwalbach as a fast-food manager who seduces Silent Bob in the restroom; Chris Jericho as the KKK Grand Wizard; Val Kilmer as the new Bluntman opposite Melissa Benoist as a female Chronic, with Tommy Chong as their butler Alfred; Method Man and Redman as their HOW HIGH characters; and a tired-looking Matt Damon in a pointless appearance as Loki from DOGMA. What? No Johnny Depp as TUSK and YOGA HOSERS' Guy LaPointe? Is there even a point in reviewing something like this? Like Rob Zombie, the attendance is dwindling but the dutiful die-hards will always be there, and like Zombie, Smith has reached the "self-indulgent home movie" phase of his career. And if Saban Films had any faith in REBOOT at all, they would've given it a full-fledged theatrical release instead of relegating it to a two-night Fathom Events screening last fall before sending it to Blu-ray. It's a complete waste of time and talent, but if nothing else, I guess COP OUT's standing just got a little higher in the Smith filmography. (R, 105 mins)
LINE OF DUTY (US/UK/Germany - 2019)
Not to be confused with the recent CROWN VIC, another day-in-the-life cop movie, LINE OF DUTY is an initially intriguing thriller that doesn't take long devolve into an outright howler. Veteran cop Frank Penny (Aaron Eckhart, also one of 32 credited producers) is lounging outside a carryout goofing off with a neighborhood kid when all hell breaks loose over the radio. A sting operation overseen by police chief Tom Volk (Giancarlo Esposito) has gone to shit nearby when the target flees and sends the cops on a frantic chase. Despite orders to stand down and not engage, Penny pursues him on foot in an impressively long sequence that takes up nearly 15 minutes of screen time. Penny is forced to shoot when the perp pulls a gun on him, and only then does he realize why there was an order to stand down: the man he just killed is Max Keller (James Hutchison), who has kidnapped Volk's 11-year-old daughter Claudia (Nishelle Williams) and is the only person who knew where she's being held. Disgraced already and with a rep as a "cowboy" after a past incident where Volk was forced to bust him down from detective to patrolman, Penny isn't about to let a little thing like "turn in your weapon and go straight downtown to IA" deter him from setting things right. And joining him is a sentient compilation of woke hot takes in the form of Ava Brooks (MAD MAX: FURY ROAD's Courtney Eaton), a snarky and incredibly smug vlogger for the online outfit "Media for the People," who spends most of her time saying things like "Whatever goes out is what my camera sees! Unfiltered!" while bitching about corporations and "sheeple." Ava ends up tagging along and livestreaming the entire pursuit after Penny figures out that Claudia is being held in an plexiglass box that will be completely filled with water in 64 minutes, tearing apart Los Angeles (played here by Birmingham, AL) to find her before it's too late.
Directed by Steven C. Miller, who's helmed numerous installments in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, LINE OF DUTY works until it becomes a Penny/Ava buddy movie, where he tries to stay focused on the task at hand while she keeps demonstrating how little she knows about the world--and actual news reporting--usually ending every statement with "Just sayin.'" There's a lot of sanctimonious hectoring from Penny about letting cops do their job and how the media just "spins the truth into whatever sells." It almost turns into BLUE LIVES MATTER: THE MOVIE, as Penny is shown tossing out every section of his morning paper except the sports page, a facile way of showing he doesn't take sides politically, and then we see him talking about basketball with a young black kid, so you know he isn't one of those racist cops. But then the main villain is introduced in the form of Max's meth-head brother Dean (Ben McKenzie), who crashes his SUV in the middle of a busy downtown area and starts mowing down cops HEAT-style in his search for Penny, who the whole city now knows was the cop who pulled the trigger on Max thanks to Ava's borderline irresponsible livestream. LINE OF DUTY is one of those films where a character like Dean can go on a massive rampage of death and destruction and all of the cops in the city seem to vanish into thin air (also, it completely forgets about the "real time" element as all of this goes down in what's only supposed to be an hour). From then on, the already far-fetched film turns unintentionally hilarious, culminating in a ridiculous, horseshit feel-good climax that truly has to be seen to be believed.
Eckhart somehow manages to keep a straight face throughout, but the terribly-written script by Jeremy Drysdale (whose only other feature credit is the 2004 Johnny Knoxville vehicle GRAND THEFT PARSONS) seems to think it's making salient points and blow-the-doors-off revelations about the media and its perception of cops, but it's all trite platitudes and cardboard cutout characterization. Eaton's indescribably grating performance is really hard to take, but there's nothing that anyone could've done when stuck with the kind of cipher she's playing (cue the pop culture references with the discovery of a homemade bomb in Dean's house, when she has time to sigh-quip "Texas Chainsaw MacGyvers!" prompting Penny to call bullshit on her earlier "I don't even own a TV!" posturing). And don't miss Dina Meyer as a local TV news producer strutting around the station's control room emphatically barking orders like "Let's get our Eye in the Sky over there!" Wouldn't she just say "chopper?" It's like a guitarist friend of mine complaining a few years ago about Denis Leary's short-lived series SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL, when Leary's rock star character would refer to his guitar as an "axe," like telling someone "Hand me my axe." "I've been in bands for 30 years," my friend said. "And nobody in a band calls it an 'axe.'" No one in this movie talks like a real person. Eaton's character, in particular, is a hysterically overwrought version of what the "OK, Boomer" crowd imagines a pushy and ambitious young "new media" journalist must be like. Filled with ludicrous dialogue, absurd plot machinations, and the usual bush-league CGI fire and car flips, LINE OF DUTY still isn't the worst Steven C. Miller movie, but it's definitely the funniest. (R, 99 mins)
TRIPLE FRONTIER (US - 2019) Directed by J.C. Chandor. Written by Mark Boal and J.C. Chandor. Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona, Rey Gallegos, Louis Jeovanny, Juan Camilo Castillo, Sheila Vand, Madeline "Maddy" Wary. (R, 125 mins) In various stages of development since 2010, Netflix's drug cartel heist thriller TRIPLE FRONTIER was originally set to be director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal's follow-up to their Oscar-winning THE HURT LOCKER, with stars like Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Channing Tatum, Tom Hardy, Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, and Mark Wahlberg all in talks or attached to make up the ensemble cast at different points along the way. By the time the film went into production in early 2018, only Ben Affleck remained as Bigelow and Boal were out, though both are listed as co-producers, and Boal shares screenwriting credit with eventual director J.C. Chandor, who established himself as a promising new filmmaker with the riveting financial crisis autopsy MARGIN CALL, the Robert Redford-starring ALL IS LOST, and the throwback Sidney Lumet-style NYC crime and corruption of A MOST VIOLENT YEAR. Chandor seems an odd choice for a big-budget actioner like this (and seeing the finished product, it's a little difficult to picture Tom Hanks starring), but it finds its bearings after a shaky opening act that, with dialogue like "That's the price of being a warrior" and needle-drops by Metallica and Pantera, seems dangerously close to venturing down the same path as the meat-headed, barbed-wire-tatted bicep brosploitation of 2014's mouth-breathing SABOTAGE, a fuckin' wicked sick fuckin' work-hard/play-hard fuckin' X-Treme energy drink disguised as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Pope (Oscar Isaac) is ex-Special Forces now earning a living as a military contractor. He's been after South American drug lord Lorea (Rey Gallegos) for several years and has an inside informant with his lover Yovanna (Adria Arjona), who handles Lorea's books. Pope wants to nail Lorea but he has other plans, namely getting his hands on his money, which Lorea keeps at his heavily-guarded Brazilian fortress. Hatching a plan that's dangerous and very off-the-books, Pope recruits four of his former Special Forces badass buddies to go along on a fact-finding recon mission to hopefully talk them into raiding the compound, wiping out Lorea and his army, and making off with his estimated $75 million fortune that's kept somewhere on the premises. There's Redfly (Ben Affleck), now a divorced dad and unsuccessful real estate agent; disgraced pilot Catfish (Pedro Pascal), who's been making ends meet as a coke trafficker; Ironhead (Charlie Hunnam), who's taken his PTSD anger-management issues and found work as a motivational speaker for the newly-enlisted; and Ironhead's nickname-less little brother Ben (Garrett Hedlund), now an MMA fighter with a losing record. None of these guys are happy with the current state of their lives and only feel at home in combat, so of course they'll hesitate at first but eventually agree. Before you know it, they're crossing the border into Brazil to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through the Jungle," without question the most overused classic rock song in commercial cinema today. I don't have scientific evidence, but I watch a shit-ton of movies and I see a lot of montages with a lot of familiar needle-drops, and I can say with certainty that I didn't hear the Fabulous Thunderbirds' "Tuff Enuff" in the mid-1980s as much as I've heard goddamn "Run Through the Jungle" in the latter half of the 2010s.
That's about 30 minutes in, and honestly, I was getting a little irritated with TRIPLE FRONTIER. Fortunately, it improves quite a bit, particularly with the botched escape from Lorea's fortress, where the money is hidden in the walls, and the eventual issues they have transporting it to their rendezvous point, which requires them to fly over the Andes in a military chopper that can't handle the weight of the cargo since the presumed $75 million is actually closer to $250 million. This forces them to resort to drastic measures--from ditching some of the money to finding alternate modes of transport--that turn TRIPLE FRONTIER into a sort-of FITZCARRALDO reimagined as a heist/survivalist adventure. The characters themselves are rather two-dimensional, though it does go for an unpredictable choice as to who the hair-trigger fuck-up among them will be that causes an already dangerous situation to get exponentially worse. Aside from a dodgy-looking CGI chopper crash, TRIPLE FRONTIER, shot on Oahu and in Colombia, is fairly suspenseful and solid entertainment that's certainly worth a stream, even if runs a tad longish at just past two hours.
LIVE BY NIGHT (US - 2016) Written and directed by Ben Affleck. Cast: Ben Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Elle Fanning, Remo Girone, Robert Glenister, Miguel J. Pimentel, Matthew Maher, Anthony Michael Hall, Clark Gregg, Max Casella, J.D. Evermore, Christian Clemenson, Benjamin Ciaramello, Derek Mears. (R, 130 mins) Ben Affleck made his directing debut with 2007's excellent Dennis Lehane adaptation GONE BABY GONE, and after establishing himself as a solid filmmaker with 2010's THE TOWN and 2012's Best Picture Oscar-winner ARGO, he returns with LIVE BY NIGHT, based on another Lehane novel. Where GONE BABY GONE and THE TOWN (based on a Chuck Hogan novel) were set in contemporary Boston, LIVE BY NIGHT looks at the city in a Prohibition-era setting. While Affleck the director captures the look of late 1920s Boston, his script is all over the place and he's completely miscast in the lead role. Affleck isn't an actor who thrives in period pieces and the film would've been better served had he stayed behind the camera as he did with GONE BABY GONE and cast someone else (co-producer Leonardo DiCaprio, perhaps?). With his Panama hat and oversized suit, he never looks comfortable in the role of Joe Coughlin, a WWI vet and Boston stick-up man-turned-Tampa rum runner. There's simply too much story for a feature film, and here is yet another example of an overstuffed film that would've been better served as a cable miniseries where characters could be fleshed out and events wouldn't be so glossed over. The pacing is choppy and there's reams of sleepy,, mumbly Affleck narration to cover exposition and whole sections of plot that are missing, not to mention Scott Eastwood and Titus Welliver having their entire roles cut out (Welliver is still in the credits, but if he's there, I didn't see him). Robert Richardson's cinematography and Jess Gonchor's production design are top-notch and every now and again, there's a striking image (like a car engulfed in flames sticking out of a shallow lake) or a memorable line of dialogue (the "So what am I talkin' to you for?" bit is great), but the cluttered and muddled LIVE BY NIGHT is otherwise is just too familiar to make its own mark in the gangster genre, borrowing too many ideas from too many movies that came before it to tell a story we've seen countless times before.
Affleck's Coughlin is a small-time Boston hood who happens to be the son of a high-ranking police superintendent (Brendan Gleeson). He's also in love with Emma Gould (Sienna Miller), the moll of powerful Irish mob kingpin Albert White (Robert Glenister). Their plan to run away together is thwarted when she's intimidated into ratting him out to White, who beats him senseless and leaves him in a coma. After he wakes and serves a stint in prison, he's paroled only to find his father has died and Emma was killed by White. Hell-bent on revenge, Coughlin forms an unholy alliance with Italian crime boss Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone) to take over the booze operation in the Tampa enclave of Ybor City and cut White out of the picture. Heading to Tampa with his buddy Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina), Coughlin teams with Cuban gangster Esteban Suarez (singer Miguel, under his full name Miguel J. Pimentel) and falls for his sister and partner Graciella (Zoe Saldana). Coughlin has to deal with all sorts of pressure, from stern police chief Figgis (Chris Cooper) cordially warning him to stay in his territory and they won't have any trouble, to the local chapter of the KKK, led by Figgis' idiot brother-in-law R.D. Pruitt (Matthew Maher), who wants a 60% cut of the business since Joe's club caters to Cubans and blacks and because he's hooked up with Graciella. LIVE BY NIGHT also finds time for a subplot about Figgis' wholesome daughter Loretta (Elle Fanning) heading off to Hollywood to be a movie star but instead falling into drugs and prostitution. She then returns to Ybor City to become a fire-and-brimstone preacher warning the townsfolk about the dangers of gambling and "the demon rum," which stonewalls Pescatore's plans for Coughlin to build a casino.
There's also double-crosses against Coughlin by the increasingly greedy Pescatore, who wants his moron son Digger (Max Casella) to take over the Ybor City operation, a sudden reappearance by a character presumed dead for no discernible reason, and about four endings before the credits finally roll. People are introduced and things happen so quickly and at times randomly that it's sometimes difficult to process who's who and how they figure into the story. LIVE BY NIGHT is always nice to look at and Affleck has an undeniable flair with set pieces (including an intense early card game stick-up that he does in a single take), but it's lacking everywhere else. He tries to cover it up with all the narration, but the seams don't take long to show. Affleck's performance is curiously bland throughout, never seeming like a 1920s gangster but always like a modern actor playing gangster dress-up (and for a smart guy, Coughlin is pretty brazenly stupid about being seen in public with Emma). Graciella's character arc makes no sense, bemoaning her husband's (yeah, she and Coughlin get married offscreen and then it's casually mentioned several scenes later) dangerous career, seemingly forgetting that they met because she's a partner in a major Cuban crime organization. Gleeson and Miller have nothing to do, and Cooper's character never makes consistent sense from scene to scene. Veteran Italian character actor Girone (in his first American film in a career going back to 1974) and an outstanding Fanning fare best, even if her Loretta ends up being another underdeveloped plot tangent that briefly turns the film into an Eli Sunday sermon from THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Affleck tries to go for a MILLER'S CROSSING feel, but ends up with a rushed, lesser BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and his own lackluster performance never inspires you to care much about Coughlin. By the third or fourth ending, the relaxed pace starts to lend a second-tier Clint Eastwood feeling to the proceedings, further demonstrating the uneven tone of the entire project. LIVE BY NIGHT might've had potential, and perhaps a longer director's cut would help, but in the end, it's a formulaic, cliche-laden misfire from Affleck.
THE ACCOUNTANT (US - 2016) Directed by Gavin O'Connor. Written by Bill Dubuque. Cast: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, John Lithgow, Jeffrey Tambor, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Jean Smart, Alison Wright, Andy Umberger, Jason Davis, Robert C. Treveiler, Ron Yuan, Seth Lee, Gary Basaraba, Mary Kraft. (R, 128 mins)
An absurdly convoluted fusion of Jason Bourne, GOOD WILL HUNTING, and RAIN MAN, THE ACCOUNTANT is certain to be one of the most ludicrous movies of the year, but it works quite well as check-your-brain-at-the-door entertainment. Ben Affleck is Christian Wolff, a mild-mannered, standoffish accountant with a small practice in a strip mall. He's also amassed a fortune under various aliases, a genius mathematician cooking the books for some of the world's most dangerous terrorists, drug dealers, and all around bad guys. Oh, and he's a master of martial arts who's also a global super-assassin-for-hire. And he's autistic. Still with me? He lives off the grid in a non-descript house in a normal neighborhood, going about his routine with absolute rigidity, periodically escaping to a storage unit that houses his trailer, which is filled with money, passports, guns, and priceless works of art. Soon-to-be-retired Treasury agent Raymond King (J.K. Simmons) wants to know the true identity of the man he calls "The Accountant," and blackmails low-level analyst Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who's great at her job but neglected to include a long-sealed assault conviction on her application, with the promise of prison if she doesn't deliver.
Wolff is hired by Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow), the CEO of a powerful robotics corporation, to investigate a $63 million discrepancy uncovered by Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), one of the company's internal auditors. Meanwhile, freelance assassin Braxton (Jon Bernthal) tallies a body count as he offs various people skimming from profitable businesses. One victim is Ed Chilton (Andy Umberger), Blackburn's diabetic second-in-command, who's given a choice between being murdered or intentionally overdosing on insulin. The person who hired Braxton also sends killers for Wolff who, of course, disposes of them but in the process discovers Dana is next on the hit list. Naturally, the two go on the run, Wolff gradually warms up to the idea of normal human interaction as the talkative and sometimes awkward Dana brings him out of his shell (and despite his inability to read social cues and relate to others, he occasionally connects with people the best way he can, as evidenced when he finds ways to help a strapped couple find additional tax deductions). King and Medina are in hot pursuit, and so is Braxton as all interested parties predictably converge in the final act.
It's not every day a major studio delivers a violent action thriller about a special needs assassin, and in no way is THE ACCOUNTANT meant to be taken seriously for a moment. That said, it doesn't demean its autistic subject or mine him for cheap, insensitive, "edgy" laughs, though there are a lot of funny moments throughout (none more so than an Affleck "..so, anyway" hand motion and shrug after folksy and shocked husband-and-wife tax clients observe him brutally slaughtering some bad guys). The script by Bill Dubuque (THE JUDGE) crescendos to a series of contrivances and coincidences in the late-going, starting with Simmons' King delivering one of the biggest and most labyrinthine info dumps this side of Donald Sutherland in JFK. There's also a series of flashbacks to Wolff's childhood, with his harried mother bolting, leaving his military dad (Robert C. Treveiler) and younger brother to deal with the autistic boy after stern Dad decides Christian needs tough love rather than coddling and therapy (Dad being stationed in Thailand leads to Christian and his brother being taught the art of Pencak Silat). You'll spot the true identity of one major character long before that major character does, and the film seems to forget about Kendrick for most of the third act, but director Gavin O'Connor (PRIDE AND GLORY, WARRIOR) keeps things moving briskly, getting solid performances from actors who play their parts at just the right tone to prevent THE ACCOUNTANT from boiling over into laugh-riot territory. Call it dumb fun or a guilty pleasure, but it's undeniably entertaining. Perhaps Lithgow's exasperated Blackburn sums it up best when he surveys the silliness unfolding around him and shouts "What is this?!"
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (US - 2016) Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer. Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Tao Okamoto, Callan Mulvey, Harry Lennix, Christina Wren, Kevin Costner, Michael Shannon, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, Ralph Lister, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, Ray Fisher, Michael Cassidy, voice of Patrick Wilson. (PG-13, 151 mins) There's no getting around the fact that the awkwardly-titled BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE is a disjointed, bloated mess that still feels incomplete even at two and a half hours (a three-hour, R-rated version will be released on Blu-ray in July, though I can't imagine that being much help). The reviews have been devastating and the toxic response from critics would lead some to believe that the film is some kind of cinematic Ebola. I'm not especially keen to engage in a round of "reviewing the reviewers," and some of the vicious reviews make their points in a professional, even-handed manner but it's obvious that a lot of the critics had their reviews pretty much written before they even saw the film. As if workshopping jokes for a Comedy Central roast of director Zack Snyder, many no doubt jotted down their snarky comments and nit-picky complaints and pithy zingers and constructed their reviews around them to fit the narrative that was constructed the moment the project was announced.
This is a recurring issue with the films of the much-maligned Snyder, a guy nobody had a problem with when his surprisingly solid 2004 remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD got good reviews and 2007's influential--for better or worse--300 became a surprise blockbuster. Then around the time he directed 2009's WATCHMEN, critics and internet fanboys decided it was time for him to pay because that was a treasured property that frankly, nobody could've done in a way that would've satisfied its most obsessive fans. 2011's SUCKER PUNCH, one of the strangest and most original major-studio, big-budget movies of the last decade, got eviscerated and Superman fans took it as a personal attack that he was chosen to helm 2013's MAN OF STEEL. The response to BVS is indicative of a recurring problem in today's film criticism: the pile-on. A Hitfix article listing 20 "baffling questions" that BVS "refused to answer" gets several of the details completely wrong. Did the author of that article watch the movie or were they watching how the Rotten Tomatoes percentage was dropping? Does the author know that an unanswered question isn't necessarily a "plot hole"? Is BVS a good movie? Eh, it has its moments, but it's OK at best. There's plenty of legitimate beefs with a lot of what's here. But is it as offensively godawful as you've been led to believe? Not even close. Nevertheless, the pile-on is the most intense since Ridley Scott's THE COUNSELOR, a film so unjustifiably lambasted ("Meet the worst movie ever made," crowed one particularly smug review) that its reputation improved and a cult following had formed before it even left theaters. So here's BVS, and like the villagers storming Castle Frankenstein, here's critics, fanboys, and message board mouth-breathers victoriously celebrating an imagined defeat--this had a $166 million opening, so it's not as if a movie like this depends on good reviews--with the tone being set by the "Sad Ben Affleck" viral sensation over the weekend.
Essentially a feature-length prologue to Warner Bros' DC Extended Universe franchise, BVS also functions as a reboot of the Christopher Nolan DARK KNIGHT trilogy and as a sequel to MAN OF STEEL (Nolan gets an exec producer credit here). It bites off more than it can chew taking on too many responsibilities, and it shows in the choppiness (Jena Malone was completely cut from this version of the film) and the frequently confusing developments. Opening with yet another replay of young Bruce Wayne witnessing the murder of his parents (Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan), the action cuts to MAN OF STEEL's climactic battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and Zod (Michael Shannon) and the destruction of Metropolis (played by Detroit, MI) witnessed on the street by Bruce Wayne (Affleck), who sees a Wayne Enterprise building collapse in yet more of the standard-issue 9/11 imagery. Blaming Superman for the mayhem, Wayne vows to bring down the Man of Steel with help from his faithful butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons). There's a lot of plot, usually involving a globe-trotting Lois Lane (Amy Adams) constantly getting into trouble and Superman bailing her out, and the evil plot of Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, more on that shortly) to, well, get some Kryptonite from the bottom of the Indian Ocean and do something to revive Zod and take on Superman. It's never really clear why Luthor hates Superman, but he actually gets the edge on the Man of Steel when he kidnaps and threatens to kill Martha Kent (Diane Lane) if he doesn't kill Batman, which leads to the brief title showdown, followed by about 17 endings.
There's also Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, and it's hardly a spoiler at this point to mention she's Wonder Woman. First seen looking sleek and mysterious and crossing paths with Wayne at a Luthor fundraiser, Diana doesn't figure much into the story until Bruce figures out her long-buried secret and she ends up helping Batman and Superman take on a late-arriving, Luthor-generated villain in the climax. Gadot's first appearance as Wonder Woman doesn't take place until after the two-hour mark, but it's a highlight of the movie and she gets what's by far the biggest response from the audience, but the way she's shoehorned in is clunky. Speaking of clunky, Gadot is also integral to one of the film's clumsiest scenes, where she opens an e-mail with video files of future JUSTICE LEAGUE franchise players Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) in a five-minute sequence that stops the movie cold and cumbersomely plays like Gal Gadot watching movie trailers on her laptop. Cavill looks the part and doesn't really do anything wrong as Superman, Adams is too smart an actress to play someone so perpetually helpless, and Affleck is an ineffectual Bruce Wayne/Batman, speaking in a dour monotone and mumbling a good chunk of the time. He's trying to go for that Christian Bale intensity but he honestly just looks bored. Others appear throughout: Irons as the most cynical and tech-savvy incarnation of Alfred yet to be seen (he functions more like Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox from the Nolan trilogy), Laurence Fishburne as a blustering Perry White, and Holly Hunter as the head of a Senate panel investigating Superman (another underdeveloped subplot that doesn't make much sense) as well as standing in the way of Luthor's master plan, but they don't really get to make an impression. Oh, and for some reason, Jimmy Olsen (Michael Cassidy) is now a covert CIA agent posing as a Daily Planet photographer. He's killed off early when he's made by terrorists, the first tip-off probably being that he was still using a camera with film in the year 2016.
For all its flaws--the messy structure, the inconsistent performances, the frequently ugly and smudgy look of the whole thing (closeups look really bad)--BVS is never dull and there are some spectacular action sequences and somewhat better CGI than the destruction porn that dominated the botched second half of MAN OF STEEL. The film's biggest obstacle, and one thing about which critics have been completely right, is the truly mind-bogglingly awful performance by Eisenberg, who plays Lex Luthor as an obnoxious, insufferable trust-fund brat. Eisenberg's whole approach to Luthor seems to have been to study Heath Ledger's Joker and filter it through his Mark Zuckerberg repertoire. He flails his arms, twitches, smirks, preens, poses, and breaks up and punctuates his sentences with "hmm"s like Deltoid in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. It's a grating, appalling, Razzie-ready spaz attack of a performance, one of the most off-putting and abrasively unpleasant in recent memory. Eisenberg is never convincing and never threatening, never coming off like a feared megalomaniacal villain but rather, an attention-seeking, spoiled little shit in dire need of a time-out.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, has been universally panned but everybody's still going to see it. The sizable crowd with whom I saw it didn't seem to hate it. They loved Wonder Woman. They laughed at the very few intentionally funny lines. There's the oft-mentioned disconnect between critics and audiences, and while it's got a surplus of flaws and dubious decision-making, it never succeeded in pissing me off at any point, and I can't say the same about MAN OF STEEL and its second-half implosion. Let's face it, whether it was the casting of Affleck or the decision to bring back Snyder or the various ways it deviates from the comic books (I've never been into comic books, so these filmmakers can do whatever they want with the material, I don't care), the trolls and the haters were never going to give this a chance. Going back to Tim Burton's BATMAN in 1989, has there ever been an initially positive response to any announcement of who's playing Batman? Do comic book fans ever not have a hissy fit and react to these kinds of things in a way that makes THE SIMPSONS' Comic Book Guy the most accurate. Representation. Ever? Critics don't need to sink to that level. The trolls and the haters will always be there because what else do they have? But they shouldn't be the ones making a living as objective reviewers resorting to clickbait tactics in a dying field whose continued relevance is constantly being questioned. Maybe it's lowered expectations, but this movie isn't that fucking bad, and if film criticism is going to continue to be a thing, everyone--from career reviewers to hobbyist bloggers--needs to step up their game. Leave the irrational pile-on to the IMDb message board denizens.
GONE GIRL (US - 2014) Directed by David Fincher. Written by Gillian Flynn. Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Scoot McNairy, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Emily Ratajkowski, Boyd Holbrook, Lola Kirke, Casey Wilson, Sela A. Ward, Missi Pyle, Jamie McShane. (R, 149 mins)
"You only hurt the one you love" is a saying that's appropriate for David Fincher's version of Gillian Flynn's bestselling 2012 novel. Flynn scripted the adaptation herself, but the end result is very much in line with Fincher's cynical worldview. Over the last 20 years, Fincher has built a reputation as an auteur's auteur, and comparisons to cinema giants like Stanley Kubrick have been made for quite some time. There's no doubt that some of those comparisons are justified, especially in Fincher's mercurial nature and his methodical, meticulous, and sometimes fussy style. He's been known to do an exorbitant amount of takes like Kubrick did, and both display signature styles to ensure their films feel like no one else's. This has been especially the case with Fincher over the last few years, as GONE GIRL marks his third consecutive teaming with score composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, and the fourth overall with Cronenweth, who also shot Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (1999). Over the course of THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011), and now GONE GIRL, Fincher and that team have forged a unique style in cold, clinical detachment, and perhaps that's where the Kubrick analogies really started to gain traction, though if any comparisons are to be made, he's more in line with the non-fantasy side of David Cronenberg.
While the mere mention of Fincher's name is enough to elevate expectations and get cineastes salivating, his pursuits are generally more commercial than either of those legendary filmmakers, and they exist in different eras that make comparisons a moot point: while Kubrick and Cronenberg also made film versions of wildly popular, bestselling novels (THE SHINING and THE DEAD ZONE, respectively), Kubrick never would've made a film about Facebook. And even as an auteur who's probably given more wiggle room than most of his contemporaries, Fincher still has people he reports to, and with today's "$50 million opening weekend or it's a flop" mindset, there's no way a major Hollywood studio would give Kubrick complete autonomy and a blank check to make whatever he wanted and then leave him unsupervised to take all the time he needed to do it. And Kubrick, while possessing a cynical outlook, pointed his finger mostly at established power structures (the military in PATHS OF GLORY and FULL METAL JACKET, the government in DR. STRANGELOVE, the aristocracy in BARRY LYNDON, the supernatural in THE SHINING, the perverse upper class in EYES WIDE SHUT) and their cruel and frequently dehumanizing nature. Kubrick wasn't quite the misanthrope that Fincher is. Fincher doesn't like people, he doesn't trust people, and in his world, they're largely inherently unhappy and looking for a way out, and no matter how successful they are and what they achieve, happiness is perpetually elusive. Matt Singer pointed in a pre-release Dissolve piece on GONE GIRL that it's the first Fincher film to put the impossibility of romantic relationships front and center. While GONE GIRL may form a loose stylistic trilogy with the two Fincher films that precede it, it's really not some thinkpiece-worthy truth bomb blowing the doors off the psychology of relationships, misogyny, feminism, and the state of marriage in America. Anyone who was a child of divorce, saw their parents have a huge argument, has gotten divorced or been around when married friends have a meltdown in a social setting or been in any kind of romantic relationship at all knows that marriage and relationships can be ugly. How many single people have had a married friend tell them "Don't ever get married"? There's certainly room for discussion over its conclusion and the decisions and compromises that certain characters make and the ways they manipulate those around them, but for the bulk of its sometimes bloated two and a half hours, GONE GIRL is a riveting, top-notch thriller by a director at the top of his game. Fincher isn't the second coming of Kubrick. He's a more stylized, high-end Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack. And that's still pretty great.
Flynn's novel utilized dual unreliable narrators in Nick and Amy Dunne. Flynn keeps structure here but in ways that obviously need to be made cinematic, along with other incidental changes to suit the medium. On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears and her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) comes home to find their house a shambles, with signs that a struggle ensued. Fincher repeatedly cuts between present, anchored by Affleck, and past, represented in flashbacks with narration by Pike from Amy's journal. She's the daughter of famous children's book authors (David Clennon, Lisa Banes) who based their beloved Amazing Amy character on Amy herself, with Amy constantly feeling like the let-down version of a fictional character who never disappointed her parents and got all the things Actual Amy wanted. In Nick, she finds the first person who understands and accepts her and doesn't want Amazing Amy. But domestic bliss slowly begins to unravel: Nick and Amy lose their jobs in the recession, Nick's mother is diagnosed with cancer and his father with Alzheimer's, the bills aren't getting paid, and Amy's parents get dropped by their publisher and need to use Amy's trust fund to get out of debt. Nick and Amy move from NYC to his childhood Missouri suburb where Amy feels adrift and left out when it comes to Nick and the bond he has with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Tensions escalate in Amy's journal, and in the present, evidence mounts that suggests Nick may have killed his wife. Nick isn't being upfront about numerous things with the cops or with Margo, and then Fincher pulls a daring bait-and-switch at just past the one-hour point that provokes a palpable buzz of energy among the audience and forces you to view everything you've just seen in a completely different fashion.
To say any more would involve divulging massive spoilers, but the performances of Affleck and especially Pike, a very difficult role, are outstanding. They get tremendous support from one of the year's best ensembles, particularly in the unlikely casting of Neil Patrick Harris as one of Amy's ex-boyfriends who's still hung up on her, and Tyler Perry as Nick's lawyer, a big-money celebrity attorney known for defending husbands accused of killing their wives. Coon is excellent, as is Kim Dickens as the increasingly incredulous detective investigating Amy's disappearance. Fincher and Flynn spend quite a bit of time examining the notion of media hype, deftly represented by a shrill, shrieking, over-the-top harpy of a cable news broadcaster (Missi Pyle), clearly based on the loathsome Nancy Grace. They also take aim at the culture of fleeting celebrity and the idea that everything is entertainment. Witness how Nick is accosted by a flirtatious woman who aggressively takes a selfie with him against his wishes, and of course the photo ends up on cable news as "proof" that he's a callous, remorseless wife killer. A bar--called The Bar--owned by Nick and Margo becomes a destination for gawking rubberneckers as Fincher pays subtle homage to Billy Wilder's bile-soaked ACE IN THE HOLE (1951). Like many filmmakers before him, Fincher has frequently cited Hitchcock as an influence, and that's on display here as Pike's Amy isn't too far removed from the blonde and "complicated" heroines played by Kim Novak in VERTIGO, Janet Leigh in PSYCHO, and Tippi Hedren in MARNIE (Margo: "Nick! Don't you know 'complicated' is code for 'bitch?'"). There's also one fleeting shot where a character hastily exits a room in a way that's identical to "Mother" leaving the motel room after the shower murder in PSYCHO.
Nothing is what it seems in GONE GIRL, and even if you've read the book (I haven't), it works as exemplary storytelling as Fincher punches the narrative forward in the same hypnotic, matter-of-fact fashion he did with his 2007 masterpiece ZODIAC, a damn-near-perfect thriller that opened to great acclaim at the time but for some inexplicable reason, seems to be a lesser-mentioned Fincher film that's fallen through the cracks in just a few short years. It's rare these days to see a provocative adult thriller that gets the audience talking and opens the floor for post-viewing debate. That doesn't necessarily warrant the "deeper meaning" thinkpieces of the sort that seem to permeate review sites and blogs every week (and really, if GONE GIRL hasn't opened this past weekend, we'd be getting similarly pretentious, diarrhetic essays on ANNABELLE), but perhaps the flood of such thinkpieces is actually a damning critique that too few intelligent films for grownups are getting any exposure in the current cinematic climate.
There's some intriguing ideas in this occasionally effective but more often muddled horror film that has a hard time deciding what it wants to be. Debuting writer/director Blair Erickson shows some promising technique, knows how to use darkness to his advantage and has a clear knack for delaying reveals to the point of nail-biting agony--plus I'm always a sucker for the inherent unease of instantly disturbing garbled radio transmissions--but the movie's a bit of a mess and once everything is laid out, the finale is too predictable to be the shocking twist that Erickson wants it to be. Predominantly straight narrative but mixing in bits of faux doc and found-footage (ugh...I know), BANSHEE CHAPTER focuses on Anne (Katia Winter of DEXTER and SLEEPY HOLLOW), a reporter investigating the disappearance of her friend James (Michael McMillian of TRUE BLOOD). She has some footage of James ingesting a dose of a liquid drug supposedly used in the US government's top-secret MK Ultra mind control experiments of the 1960s. He got the drug from a source in Colorado and upon ingesting it, immediately senses that "they're coming," and a shadowy figure appears by the window as James' face distorts and his eyes bleed and turn black. Anne's investigation leads her to Colorado where she meets James' source: washed-up '60s counterculture hero and gonzo writer/conspiracy theorist Thomas Blackburn (Ted Levine). Blackburn informs her that the drug doesn't cause hallucinations, but rather, allows the user to become a receiver to see our "alternate reality." All clues point to an abandoned military research station, so the pair hit the road, all the while seeing visions of monstrous figures and hearing a nursery rhyme and gibberish coming from a short-wave numbers station.
Playing a lot like a shaky-cam, road-movie version of Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND with the Soy Sauce element of Don Coscarelli's JOHN DIES AT THE END, BANSHEE CHAPTER suffers from a clunky, lugubriously-paced first half that takes forever to get going in a typical post-Ti West slow-burn fashion, and the early found-footage sequences just feel like desperate pandering to make sure the film would be able to find a distributor (Anne even starts out filming her trip in faux-doc style, but Erickson abandons that rather quickly). The film gets a lot of mileage out of a strong performance by Winter and a gregarious one by Levine, playing a character clearly based on Hunter S. Thompson. There are some undeniably chilling moments scattered about, especially the long sequence where Anne is in a lab at the abandoned military facility and looks back eight minutes on the security footage and sees that something has entered the room and must still be in there with her. But too much of BANSHEE CHAPTER is derivative and filled with ostensibly smart characters doing dumb things. While his script could've used another polish or two, Erickson demonstrates enough skill behind the camera that I'm intrigued to see what he does next. Zachary Quinto was one of the producers. (R, 87 mins)
RUNNER RUNNER (US - 2013)
Justin Timberlake's status as an iconic pop music figure and his comedic skills on SNL are without question, but he hasn't had a lot of luck on the big screen other than supporting roles in acclaimed films like THE SOCIAL NETWORK and INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. Duds like IN TIME haven't done much to establish him as a box office draw and that trend continues with RUNNER RUNNER, a bland, boring thriller that audiences pretty much avoided during its theatrical run last fall. It had potential, considering the script was written by ROUNDERS scribes David Levien and Brian Koppelman, but it seems like all they did was rewrite that script and move it to the world of online gambling while half-assedly peppering it with references to the financial meltdown of several years ago. Timberlake is Richie Furst, a former Wall Street hot shot who lost everything in the collapse and is now struggling to pay his way through Princeton, largely through bookmaking and with commission earned by luring profs and fellow students to an online poker site. When he's ordered by the dean (Bob Gunton!) to shut down his operation, Richie gambles his entire savings on a poker site and loses. Sensing something fishy about the algorithms, Richie learns he was scammed and does what any struggling, broke college student would do: flies to Costa Rica to personally confront online gambling magnate Ivan Block (Ben Affleck), who's able to operate unencumbered by US federal laws. He manages a brief meet with Block, who's impressed enough to hire Richie to work for his operation. Now with money beyond his wildest dreams--and getting to sleep with Ivan's sultry assistant/lover (Gemma Arterton)--Richie is living the life. That is, until he's shaken down by overzealous FBI agent Shavers (Anthony Mackie), who's obsessed with bringing down Block and will do anything to nab him, even planting drugs in Richie's luggage to ensure his cooperation.
Unlike ROUNDERS, which felt gritty and real, RUNNER RUNNER is cartoonish and absurd from the start, following a template very much like the structurally similar and equally forgettable financial thriller PARANOIA, right down to the villain threatening the protagonist's father (John Heard shows up for a couple of scenes). RUNNER RUNNER is filled with lazy writing to explain away its endless contrivances (Richie's roommate: "You're about to jet off to a country you've never been to, with a language you don't speak, bluff your way into Ivan Block's posse and expect him to just give your money back?"...next shot, Richie's landing in Costa Rica), and characters who say things like "You know who Meyer Lansky is?" and "You know what Napoleon said?" Even Ivan Block is prefaced by someone saying "He's like the Wizard of fucking Oz...no one gets behind the curtain!" He could've been a fun nemesis along the lines of ROUNDERS' Teddy KGB, so brilliantly played by John Malkovich in that film, but Affleck seems so bored that his performance--essentially a Bond villain version of his BOILER ROOM character--never really comes to life, even when he's dumping liquid chicken fat on some guys and threatening to feed them to his crocodiles (Affleck does get one great line, telling Timberlake's Richie "That's the problem with your generation...you sat around with your vintage T-shirts and your participation medals, but you never did anything"). By the time Richie inevitably devises an elaborate scheme to turn the tables on his mentor, the clichés and trite dialogue are simply out of control: "This isn't poker. This is my life...and I've got one play left." Levien and Koppelman are accomplished writers, but are they even trying here? Lifelessly directed by Brad Furman (THE LINCOLN LAWYER), RUNNER RUNNER is the kind of predictable, paint-by-numbers product that can't even mask how utterly bored it is with itself. (R, 91 mins)
Written and directed by Terrence Malick. Cast: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams, Tatiana Chilline, Romina Mondello, Marshall Bell, Charles Baker. (R, 109 mins)
After taking a 20-year sabbatical between 1978's DAYS OF HEAVEN and 1998's THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Malick seemed to inherit the "greatest living American filmmaker" title with the 1999 passing of Stanley Kubrick. All of his films, from his 1973 debut BADLANDS to 2005's THE NEW WORLD and 2011's THE TREE OF LIFE, are works of stunning beauty that are the singular and unique voice of a true auteur. Terrence Malick films are distinctly his. No one else makes Terrence Malick films the way Malick does, though some have come very close (Andrew Dominik's THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is a brilliant example). And indeed, other than Kubrick, it's possible that no other living American filmmaker is as universally lionized as Malick--even guys like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg aren't immune to criticism. With THE THIN RED LINE and particularly with the divisive THE NEW WORLD, to criticize Malick was to insult the very art of film itself. It was just not allowed, and anyone who didn't find Malick brilliant simply didn't "get it." Malick's fan base is one of the most fervently devoted in all of cinema, and if you spend enough time on film discussion boards, you'll inevitably see a Malick argument break out, with many of his base taking criticism very personally. In an era where film criticism is gradually being replaced by snark, nitpicking, and hate-watching, few other filmmakers inspire that level of undying devotion. On one hand, it's nice to see that kind of passion and thought-provoking discussion, but on the other, there's a fine line between sticking up for your guy and sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "La la la! Can't hear you!"
Having said that, early responses to Malick's latest film, TO THE WONDER, seem to indicate the first sign of trouble in paradise for the director and his fans. Since returning to filmmaking, Malick's work has become increasingly abstract and less character and plot-driven. Beautiful visuals accompanied by ethereal, whispery, stream-of-consciousness narration have always been a distinct Malick trademark, but with TO THE WONDER, his focus is more on these sorts of dreamlike ruminations and it's only a matter of time before he abandons plot, characters, and actors altogether.
Olga Kurylenko stars as Marina, a Parisian in a whirlwind romance with American Neil (Ben Affleck) as the film opens. There's very little dialogue spoken directly by the actors--almost all of it is past-tense narration. When we first see Neil, Marina, and her daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chilline), who, unless I'm mistaken, is the only character referenced by name, Marina's narration states "Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night." As they walk through the streets of Paris, Marina's voiceover continues: "Love makes us one. Two. One. I in you. You in me." This goes on for most of the film, though it quickly relocates to an anonymous suburb in Oklahoma, where Neil lives. Marina and Tatiana have a hard time adjusting to America, though Marina never seems to stop dancing and frolicking in the backyard, in the streets, or at the supermarket. Eventually, her visa expires and she leaves the unwilling-to-commit Neil, who reunites with his ex-girlfriend Jane (Rachel McAdams) for a short romance before Marina returns, without Tatiana, who's living in Paris with her father. Neil and Marina marry. Meanwhile, melancholy local priest Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) has a crisis of faith and tries to re-establish his connection with God, a theme touched upon by the devoutly religious Jane, and also explored by Marina and Neil, who begin searching for their spiritual side when their marriage starts to crumble.
This story is largely conveyed visually, with frequent nonsensical narration ("Enter me. Show me how to love you" and "What is this love that loves us?"), that would be completely laughable to English-speaking audiences were it not mostly in French (for Kurylenko) or Spanish (for Bardem) with English subtitles (maybe French and Spanish audiences will find it just as terribly-written). There's no denying that TO THE WONDER is a visually stunning film. Malick and his NEW WORLD/TREE OF LIFE cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki achieve a very European view of suburban America, almost in a Michelangelo Antonioni or Wim Wenders way. They and the constantly moving camera manage to find the visual beauty in fast-food restaurants, laundromats, appliance stores, Wal-Mart, and Walgreens, and even in a polluted lake or with the buzz of fluorescent lights and the hum of central air units. In a way, I think this is partially Malick's homage to Antonioni's 1964 film RED DESERT with its depictions of human alienation and loneliness in an increasingly industrialized world of homogenized familiarity. It's set and shot in Oklahoma but with the chain stores, fast-food joints, gas stations and Econo Lodges all over, it could be anywhere. Thankfully, Malick doesn't work in texting or Facebook, but that's probably because he isn't aware of those things. With his increasing disdain for characters and plot construction, it doesn't seem like Malick knows how people talk anymore. Malick's going to be 70 this year and the writing in TO THE WONDER sounds like he plagiarized the tear-smeared scribblings in an emo kid's journal. And it's even worse in the rare instances where there's actual spoken dialogue. Witness the scene where Jane's Italian friend (Romina Mondello) visits her in Oklahoma: she speaks and behaves like no human being would and it's the film's strongest indication that, like latter-day Kubrick, Terrence Malick probably doesn't get out much.
I get what he was going after with the "together yet isolated" thing. The religious stuff seems a little wedged in, but hey, whatever, it's his movie. A lot of TO THE WONDER looks like it was shot on the fly (there's a few instances of passersby glancing at the camera) and Malick didn't really know what he wanted until he started putting it together. TO THE WONDER was shot in 2010 and 2011 and it took Malick plus five credited editors to put it all together, with the narration (mostly Kurylenko and Bardem) then used to advance the "story." When other filmmakers display an over-reliance on voiceover, it's a desperation Hail Mary move, but if you listen to Malick fans, when he does it, he's reinventing the rules of cinema.
Regardless, even the most slavishly devoted Malick apologists seem to be rejecting TO THE WONDER, the general feeling being that Malick is simply going too far in his abandonment of conventional narrative. He doesn't seem to know what to do with his actors: Of the major stars, Bardem probably comes off best since he gets to play the closest thing resembling a well-rounded character. You could make a drinking game out of how many times Kurylenko dances, turns and looks at the camera, and does another pirouette. McAdams isn't in it enough to really make an impression, and Affleck, who had most of his dialogue cut, just looks confused, much like Sean Penn in the present-day scenes in THE TREE OF LIFE (it's worth noting that Penn later said he had no idea why he was even in the finished film). Young Chilline turns in the most natural performance, since Malick mostly lets her simply be herself. Jessica Chastain, Rachel Weisz, Amanda Peet, Barry Pepper, and Michael Sheen all had co-starring roles in principal photography--all were left on the cutting room floor, further evidence to support the idea that Malick was just pulling the completed film out of his ass. Sure, they got paid, but who wastes the time of five name actors? Of course, like any piece of art, a film can evolve from its inception to completion, but if you're completely cutting people like Chastain and Weisz out of the film, then you simply didn't know what you wanted when you finished shooting, let alone started. Malick also assembled star-packed casts for three subsequent films that are in various states of post-production (KNIGHT OF CUPS, due out later this year, plus VOYAGE OF TIME and a still-untitled third film), indicating an uncharacteristic burst of productivity for the notoriously sporadic director. But who knows how many of those performances will get axed before the films are eventually released?
TO THE WONDER is a breathtakingly beautiful film, no question about it. When it hits DVD and Blu-ray, it'll be interesting to see if playing the chapter stops at random makes the slightest bit of difference. My advice: wait and watch the Blu-ray and hit the mute button. I have nothing but respect for this one-of-a-kind cinematic figure, but it's disheartening to see Terrence Malick making what looks and feels like a parody of a Terrence Malick film.
