Guadagnino and his BIGGER SPLASH screenwriter David Kajganich (whose writing credits also include 2009's BLOOD CREEK, a little-seen horror film that deserved a bigger audience) fashion their SUSPIRIA with the very Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Lars von Trier-esque subtitle "Six Chapters and an Epilogue Set in a Divided Berlin." Specifically, 1977 West Berlin, with the omnipresent Berlin Wall and the city in turmoil with bombings and recurring invocations of Baader-Meinhof, the far-left militant Red Army Faction, and the October hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by the PFLP. In the midst of this is Markos Dance Academy student and Red Army supporter Patricia Hingle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who befriends elderly psychotherapist Dr. Josef Klemperer ("Lutz Ebersdorf"--more on him shortly) and frantically spells out the details of a wild story that the place is run by a coven of witches. When Patricia disappears--those close to her believe she went underground with a terrorist outfit--her spot at Markos becomes available and is given to Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), who's also running away, fleeing a domineering, terminally ill mother and a repressive Mennonite upbringing in rural Ohio.
A rebellious outcast in both her congregation and her own family going back to her childhood--whether she was constantly daydreaming about dancing, obsessed with learning all she could about Berlin, or being caught masturbating in her closet--Susie feels destined for Markos, and more specifically, its renowned choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), who soon takes the naive, sheltered American under her wing as her protegee for sinister reasons that have to do with more than dancing. Meanwhile, Dr. Klemperer (in the worst-kept secret of 2018, "Lutz Ebersdorf," initially described by the filmmakers as a practicing doctor and non-professional actor making his debut, is really Swinton under extensive prosthetics), haunted by the disappearance of his wife during the Holocaust 35 years earlier, is disturbed enough by Patricia's story and the notes scribbled in her left-behind journals that he begins his own investigation into her claims about the Markos Academy, one that dovetails with Markos dancer Sara (Mia Goth), who bonds with Susie but remains troubled by Patricia's vanishing.
That plot synopsis is really just scratching the surface of everything Guadagnino and Kajganich are up to here. SUSPIRIA '18 does a masterful job of capturing late '70s Berlin, with the gray, dreary atmosphere, the constant rain, the political tumult (bombs and commotion are frequently heard outside the walls of the Markos), the nods to Fassbinder and the casting of Volker Schlondorff regular Angela Winkler (THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM, THE TIN DRUM) as Miss Tanner, the right-hand to Madame Blanc. The film takes place in a Berlin that's literally divided by a wall, but also by politics and history, particularly the still-open wounds of WWII, as represented by the mournful Klemperer. That extends to the scheming and machinations going on in the academy, with the staff divided over whether to give control to Madame Blanc or the aging and unseen founder Helena Markos. The score by Radiohead's Thom Yorke is moodily effective--a complete contrast to the progasmic bombast of Goblin--but doesn't really signify "Berlin" in a musical sense.
Rest assured, Guadagnino doesn't forget that he's making an Italian horror film, whether it's numerous instances of stomach-turning gore, a truly nightmarish climax that goes completely off the rails, a Yorke piano cue that sounds directly lifted from Fabio Frizzi's score for Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND, or a late-film cameo by Jessica Harper. There's also Argento-specific callbacks, from the friendship between Patricia and Klemperer reminiscent of Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasance in PHENOMENA, and Swinton's disguised second performance recalling Adrien Brody's ridiculous "Byron Deidra" act in the dreadful latter-day Argento dud GIALLO. In a physically demanding performance, Johnson is an effective Susie, whose character arc goes in a vastly different direction than Harper's did in Argento's film, allowing Goth's Sara to resonate more for the audience in a way that wasn't required of Stefania Casini, her predecessor in the role. The dance instructors who make up the coven are well-cast, particularly Winkler, Paul Verhoeven vet Renee Soutendijk, and Sylvie Testud, who's made up in way that looks like a tribute to Jane March's "Richie" in COLOR OF NIGHT. Swinton is a terrific Madame Blanc, whose mentoring of Susie echoes Klemperer's belief that "love and manipulation...they share houses very often." Guadagnino perhaps overindulges his friend and frequent star Swinton, who actually has a third role by the end of the film, coming perilously close to making this her own personal DR. STRANGELOVE (her work as Klemperer is a triumph of old-age prosthetic makeup that the Oscars should recognize, but she doesn't do enough with her voice to totally sell the "Lutz Ebersdorf" illusion). While an over-the-top, arthouse deep dive into late 1970s West German politics, history, sociology, and culture seems like a strange approach to remaking a legendary and beloved Italian horror film, it's too lofty in its ambitions and too unpredictably gonzo to simply dismiss, regardless of how much of a daunting horse pill it can be at times.
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.
The finale to Uwe Boll and Brendan Fletcher's RAMPAGE trilogy is the clumsiest and preachiest yet. On the positive side, Boll seems to be walking back his gushing admiration for Fletcher's insane lone-wolf domestic terrorist Bill Williamson. Where the first sequel RAMPAGE: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT felt like a love letter to mass shooters, PRESIDENT DOWN at least admits that words and actions have consequences and by the end, Bill is most certainly the villain with a lot of blood on his hands. But the road there is paved with some welcome bits of old-school Boll idiocy that's not helped by the director struggling with his lowest budget yet. His German tax shelter heyday of being able to afford the likes of Ben Kingsley, Jason Statham, and Burt Reynolds a fading memory, Boll can't even corral cheap labor on the level of past RAMPAGE co-stars like Matt Frewer or Lochlyn Munro. Boll unsuccessfully tried to crowdfund the film--originally titled RAMPAGE 3: NO MERCY--on Indiegogo and Kickstarter but failed to meet his goal, leading to an inevitable YouTube meltdown excoriating fans for giving their money to Hollywood studios while not helping out important artists like Dr. Uwe Boll. So with a lot less money at his disposal, Boll relies heavily on flashbacks and stock footage from the first two films, and mainly has Fletcher's Bill posting YouTube rants from his hiding place in the middle of nowhere, which may be the perfect metaphor for 2016 Uwe Boll.
Long thought dead after the events of the previous film, Bill emerges from hiding to assassinate the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense during a speech to Congress. Of course, how he manages to accomplish this is a mystery, since it happens offscreen. The FBI, vowing to get to the bottom of the assassinations, assigns two--yes, two--agents, Molokai (Steve Baran) and Jones (Ryan McDonnell) and a Bureau computer expert (Scott Patey) to run the investigation out of what looks like an underfunded police precinct. Bill manages to hack into their computer system with the help of a mole inside the FBI, and once Molokai and Jones (worst cop show title ever?) spot him on some surveillance footage outside the White House, he starts taunting them from his undisclosed location and threatening their families. Unfortunately, the agents are unable to convince their bosses that Bill is the culprit because a publicity-hogging ISIS claims responsibility for the assassinations, prompting the reactionary new Commander-in-Chief to round up all the Muslims and Syrian refugees in the US, close all the mosques, and nuke the Middle East "with the full support of Russia and China." The notion of an irrational, knee-jerk US President content with blowing up a good chunk of the world is an uncomfortably prescient notion that Boll completely sidesteps and never mentions again. There's no satire, no poking people with sticks--instead, the focus is on Molokai and Jones finding out where Bill is hiding and leading a raid where of course, Bill gets the edge on everyone, but Jones makes it easy by not even bothering to wear a bulletproof vest.
The message is muddled: Bill says he wants a world without violence in a film that opens with him shooting a random pedestrian in cold blood and concludes with him killing about a hundred FBI agents. Nothing here makes sense: why does Bill suddenly have a girlfriend (Crystal Lowe) and a kid? And how can he be presumed dead when he's actively posting videos to his YouTube channel to his legion of supporters? And when news of the assassinations of the President, VP, and Defense Secretary hits the wire, watch the only two news anchors seen in the film exclaim "Oh my God! The President is dead!" as the camera pans down to her reading the info off of a second page, as if that news a) would come over a teletype in 2016, and b) would be relegated to the second page. And are we to believe that the only two guys investigating the murder of the President, VP and Defense Secretary would exit a building and be confronted by one reporter? And it's one of the two news anchors we just saw? Boll ineptly inserts talking points about gun control and police brutality, but then he and Fletcher (they co-wrote the script together) go off on tangents about Hollywood's richest celebrities. There's jabs at Tom Cruise and Jennifer Aniston, and the murders of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Mark Zuckerberg among others are announced over the course of the film. These bits sound less like legitimate grievances about tabloid culture and more like a case of sour grapes from Boll and Fletcher because they aren't in the club. Canadian actor Fletcher's been around since the late '90s and was in hits like AIR BUD and FREDDY VS. JASON, and some Canadian arthouse films. He's also made eight movies with Uwe Boll. Dude, maybe that's why you're not in the club. You were in THE REVENANT (notice that Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't make Bill's Hollywood shit list). Maybe take a break from Uwe and start hanging out with Leo or Alejandro Inarritu a little more. You'll have time: Boll was so angry about the lack of fan support for the funding of RAMPAGE: PRESIDENT DOWN that he announced it would be his final film. Indeed, a post-credits stinger finds a pensive Boll tipping his hat to the camera and walking into the sunset. If that's the case, let me just say that for all your many, many faults, you were certainly never boring, Dr. Boll. Thanks for everything. I guess. (Unrated, 100 mins)
A BIGGER SPLASH (Italy/France - 2016)
The first English-language work by acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino reunites the director with Tilda Swinton, the star of his 2009 art-house breakthough I AM LOVE. Where that film showcased the director's adoration of all things Stanley Kubrick and Alain Resnais before settling into a sort-of Luchino Visconti autopilot mode (faux-Visconti is something THE GREAT BEAUTY director Paolo Sorrentino does a lot better), A BIGGER SPLASH feels a lot like the 1990s Bernardo Bertolucci that made THE SHELTERING SKY and STEALING BEAUTY. A remake of Jacques Deray's 1969 film LA PISCINE (released in the US as THE SWIMMING POOL), A BIGGER SPLASH is essentially one of these European films where some wealthy bourgeois types get together and things escalate into a powderkeg of unresolved issues and psychosexual mind games. Aging glam rock legend Marianne Lane (Swinton) blows out her voice on tour and has to take a significant amount of time off to recover from vocal cord surgery. She can only speak at a whisper and is convalescing on Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily with her younger lover, photographer/filmmaker Paul De Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts). Their days are spent lounging naked by the pool, getting massages, reading, and having a lot of sex until they get an unannounced visit from Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), Marianne's producer and ex-boyfriend, who's brought along Penelope (Dakota Johnson), the 22-year-old daughter he only recently found out he had. The boisterous, gregarious Harry brings a manic and disruptive presence to their quiet, idyllic getaway, even inviting a couple of other people--Mireille (Aurore Clement) and Sylvie (Lila McMenamy)--along, and it's clear that there's a past between these people that's still gnawing at both Harry and Paul. There's also numerous instances of Harry acting in a not-fatherly way with Penelope, and an uncomfortably close rendition of "Unforgettable" between the two at a karaoke bar creeps out Marianne enough that she confronts him, leading to Harry shouting "I'm not fucking my daughter!" in front of a bunch of people in the street. As Harry keeps professing his love for Marianne, Paul and Penelope go off exploring on their own, and anyone who's ever seen a movie before can see that things aren't going to end well.
Despite the serious subject matter, A BIGGER SPLASH is fairly lighthearted a lot of the time, right down to its slapsticky title that seems more fitting for a romantic comedy. It certainly doesn't portend the shift the story takes in the last 35 or 40 minutes, when an unexpected event occurs that gets the local police involved. A lot of this is due to a rambunctious performance by Fiennes, whose Harry is really a grating, insufferable asshole but the actor finds ways to make you like him and even feel sorry for him. Whether he's yammering on about his sexual exploits (it's suggested that Mireille and Sylvie, who may be mother and daughter, are among his conquests), humble-bragging about his uncredited contributions to the Rolling Stones' 1994 album Voodoo Lounge, or busting out the moves like Jagger while blasting their 1980 hit "Emotional Rescue" (a scene that must be seen to believed), Fiennes is the unabashed show-stealer here and even dominates the film when he's not onscreen. Working with screenwriter David Kajganich (whose credits include, of all things, the underrated 2009 horror movie BLOOD CREEK), Guadagnino leaves enough ambiguity to keep an audience discussing the events after the film is over, and manages to keep things focused even with the many changes in tone and some showboating filmmaking techniques in the early going, things that are mainly used when Fiennes is onscreen to accentuate what a loud jackass Harry can be. Guadagnino, Kajganich, Swinton, and Johnson are tentatively reuniting for the latest announced incarnation of the perpetually in-development remake of Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA. (R, 125 mins)
THE DARKNESS
(US - 2016)
With 2005's WOLF CREEK, Australian filmmaker Greg McLean seemed to be a new voice in horror, but that voice has had nothing to say for several years running. His follow-up film, the outstanding killer crocodile flick ROGUE, was buried by the Weinsteins, and McLean has yet to bounce back, with another six years passing before he resurfaced with the belated and over-the-top WOLF CREEK 2. Working with horror factory Blumhouse, THE DARKNESS is McLean's first Hollywood production and it couldn't possibly be any more predictably generic and lazy. During a family trip to the Grand Canyon, autistic Mikey Taylor (David Mazouz) finds some rocks with strange symbols and takes them as souvenirs. It isn't long before paranormal activity manifests itself back home, with Mikey talking to an unseen entity called "Jenny," and sooty handprints turning up all over the house. Dad Peter (Kevin Bacon, visibly bored) and Mom Bronny (Radha Mitchell) are too preoccupied to notice the supernatural goings-on or that their angry older daughter Stephanie (Lucy Fry) is bulimic and saving containers of her purgings under her bed as a way of acting out her resentment toward Mikey. After more shenanigans, like a possessed Mikey starting a fire and trying to kill his grandmother's cat, and all manner of standard-issue Blumhouse jump scares, Bronny discovers that some Anasazi curse has latched itself to Mikey and starts to believe this is some kind of karmic retribution over her past alcoholism (she falls off the wagon) and Peter's past infidelity (and he's tempted again by young intern at work).
Taking a page from THE EXORCIST in the way the demon enters a world in disarray, making it easy to possess Regan, McLean and co-writers S.P. Krause and Shayne Armstrong (the latter two co-wrote the Australian "sharks-in-a-supermarket" opus BAIT) toy with the idea of the demonic invasion of the home being a response to the various unspoken dysfunctions in the family. But they don't really do anything with it and everything is resolved too easily to get to the rote horror histrionics. Keeping your vomit in bags and tupperware containers under your bed is pretty odd, but hey, one visit to a therapist and moody, abrasive Stephanie is healthy and chipper. Instead, the filmmakers follow a Blumhouse checklist right down to the last-15-minutes introduction of a pair of eccentric demonology experts who do a quick drive-by exposition drop before an impromptu exorcism of the house. The film's twists and turns come straight out of Plot Convenience Playhouse. Is Paul Reiser only in this for a few scenes as Peter's fist-bumping, asshole boss just because the boss has a wife (Ming-Na Wen) who happens to have recently started pursuing an interest in Hopi Indian mythology? Well, that immediately qualifies her as an expert to advise Bronny after she figures out they're being haunted by a pissed-off Anasazi spirit. What are the odds? It's that kind of movie. THE DARKNESS plays like a Blumhouse sampler platter with a dash of INSIDIOUS and a scoop of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, but topped off with a generous sprinkling of some old-fashioned POLTERGEIST to make a total shit sandwich of a horror movie. It's a film that doesn't even try, and it's almost perversely impressive how it manages to go an entire 90 minutes without pursuing a single original idea. Where did THE DARKNESS go wrong? Who cares? Blumhouse and Greg McLean certainly don't. (PG-13, 92 mins)
BLACK MASS (US/UK - 2015) Directed by Scott Cooper. Written by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth. Cast: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Jesse Plemons, Peter Sarsgaard, Dakota Johnson, Corey Stoll, Rory Cochrane, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Julianne Nicholson, Juno Temple, W. Earl Brown, Bill Camp. (R, 122 mins)
If you listen closely in the theater, as the lights go down and BLACK MASS starts, you can almost hear CRAZY HEART and OUT OF THE FURNACE director Scott Cooper say "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to make a Scorsese movie." So it is with the much-anticipated BLACK MASS, touted as a return to form following a surplus of whimsical dress-up and endless self-indulgent eccentricities from former actor Johnny Depp. Even the most devoted Depp apologists turned on him after the loathsome MORTDECAI and to that end, BLACK MASS does showcase Depp's best performance in years, even if it's by default. Though he's not as "Depp"-y, it's still more of the same to some extent: as infamous South Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, he's again buried under a ton of caked-on makeup, a combination bald cap/receded hairline, and a pair of ice-blue contact lenses that look not unlike those used on Bill Bixby at the beginning of a Hulk-out into Lou Ferrigno on THE INCREDIBLE HULK. Taking place from 1975 to 1991, BLACK MASS covers a lot of ground with a lot of characters, but it has all the depth and insight of Bulger's Wikipedia page. There was probably a longer, more epic film here at some point--even shortly before the film's release, it was still being tweaked, with Sienna Miller's entire role as a Bulger girlfriend ending up on the cutting room floor due to what Cooper termed "narrative choices."
Though Depp is front and center as Bulger, it almost feels as though the film should be about FBI agent John Connolly, played here by Joel Edgerton (THE GIFT). A childhood friend of Bulger and his state senator brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), Connolly approaches Bulger in 1975 with an offer to become an FBI informant in an effort not to take down Southie crime operations, but rather, the Irish mob's Mafia competition. As the years go on, Bulger's Winter Hill Gang empire grows as he gives nothing to Connolly, who becomes complicit in Bulger's crimes by alerting him to FBI operations and falsifying reports under the guise of Bulger cooperation. Bulger is the devil on Connolly's shoulder, but their relationship really isn't explored, nor is there much in the way of escalating tension as Connolly gets in way over his head in his labyrinthine machinations to steer the FBI away from Bulger. We see him and co-conspirator agent John Morris (David Harbour) getting into shouting matches with incredulous colleagues played by Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott in superfluous extended cameos, and we see Connolly's new-found flashy sartorial choices not going over well with his wife (Julianne Nicholson), but nothing really happens with him until a new special agent (Corey Stoll) takes charge and starts holding him accountable as he still struts around the bureau office with a "What? Me Worry?" demeanor.
Connolly is a man obliviously drowning in his immoral and unethical choices and his pure hubris, but Cooper and screenwriters Jez Butterworth (EDGE OF TOMORROW) and Mark Mallouk are much more interested in Depp's feature-length Whitey Bulger impression. Depp is fine in the role, but at the end of the day, it's still not very far removed from what he's been doing for the last several years. He's using an intimidating monotone voice but letting the hairline and the contact lenses do almost all of the heavy lifting, and there's numerous scenes--the "family recipe" bit with Harbour's Morris, in particular--where he's just riffing on Joe Pesci and the "Funny how?" scene from GOODFELLAS. Cooper wants the entire film to be a Scorsese love letter, whether it's to GOODFELLAS or THE DEPARTED with its Baahston accents and Bulger being the prime inspiration for Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello in the latter film. Cooper doesn't have the style or the sense of energy to pull off Scorsese beyond a basic homage, and as a result, his film often keeps you at a distance.
BLACK MASS is a pretty decent movie, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it could've been an exceptional one. There's a great cast and a fascinating story here and all we really get when it's over is a Whitey Bulger Greatest Hits package that gets into a comfortable and too-familiar groove and never tries to go further than scratching the surface. Everyone loves a good Scorsese-style crime saga, but why not just watch a real one instead of a pretend one? For all the presence Depp has as Bulger, his performance is still pretty one-dimensional in execution, with very little known about him other than his skills as a master manipulator and feared killer. Other than Edgerton, everyone else just drops by on occasion. Dakota Johnson has a brief role as the mother of Bulger's young son, but when the son dies from Reyes' Syndrome, she's never seen or mentioned again. We also see a lot of Bulger soldiers, but with the exception of hapless schlub Steve Flemmi (Rory Cochrane), we learn little about them, other than they all eventually turn on Bulger to save their own asses. BLACK MASS is compelling from start to finish, but you've seen it all before. Overt Scorsese worship is fine when you can master the style and give it your own spin (like David O. Russell with AMERICAN HUSTLE), but Cooper's direction is workmanlike at best. Without a Thelma Schoonmaker by his side to help him find those distinct patterns and rhythms, Cooper is only capable of delivering Scorsese-lite. And Scorsese-lite works if you're looking for a two-hour, empty calories crime story to watch when nothing else is on. Just don't expect anything substantive.
Outside of Ralph Fiennes' powerful and little-seen 2011 directorial debut CORIOLANUS, I've never been a big fan of putting Shakespeare in a modern setting while keeping the actual text of the play. It almost always comes off as a gimmick whose novelty wears off by the 15-minute mark. Michael Almereyda's NYC-set HAMLET (2000) is usually cited as the best of its type, but other than Ethan Hawke doing the "To be or not to be..." soliloquy while browsing the aisles of a Blockbuster Video, do you remember anything about it? Almereyda and Hawke are back with a modern take on Cymbeline, a late Shakespeare romance first performed five years before Shakespeare's death. It's one of his least-known works, sporadically dragged out of storage but rarely studied and enjoyed by few other than the most ardent completists. There was a BBC television production of it in 1982, with Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, and Helen Mirren, but CYMBELINE marks the first big-screen take on the play, with Almereyda centering the action on the New York-based Briton Motorcycle Club, led by King Cymbeline (Ed Harris). Cymbeline has a lot on his plate with the Queen (Milla Jovovich), his power-crazed, status-obsessed second wife, who plans on shifting the balance of power in her favor by arranging the marriage of Cloten (Anton Yelchin), her son by her late first husband, to Imogen (FIFTY SHADES OF GREY's Dakota Johnson), Cymbeline's daughter. But Imogen is in love with another, the lower-class skateboarder Posthumus (Penn Badgley). After Posthumus is run out of the city by Cymbeline, he stays with his friend Philario (James Ransone), where he makes the acquaintance of the duplicitous Iachimo (Hawke). After listening to Posthumus talk of his love for the virginal Imogen and how she'll remain true to him until they can be together, Iachimo wagers that he can seduce her. When she rejects his advances, Iachimo hides in her room until she's asleep and falsifies evidence of a conquest that never took place. This sets off a chain reaction of misunderstandings and chaos involving the central players, along with Cymbeline's right-hand man Pisanio (John Leguizamo), banished nobleman Belarius (Delroy Lindo), the ghost of Posthumus' father Sicilius Leonatus (Bill Pullman), the Rome police force, led by the corrupt Caius Lucius (Vondie Curtis-Hall), plus a magical potion that makes its sleeping user appear dead, and Imogen disguising herself as a young man named "Fidele."
Even in its original form, with its scheming Queen, sleeping potion, Imogen disguised as a boy, and the appearance of a patriarchal poltergeist, Cymbeline probably felt like a stale, self-parodying retread from a coasting Bard in its day, and at no point does CYMBELINE work. Despite a detailed opening crawl that tries to explain what's going on, the film is almost impossible to follow and that isn't helped by the lugubrious pacing (this is one of the longest 98-minute movies you'll ever see). The Shakespeare-speech-in-a-modern-setting gets old in record time, especially with Johnson's absolutely dreadful performance as Imogen. She's terrible here, giving Shakespeare a Millennial, vocal-fry spin with a generous helping of can't even that was always sorely lacking in the cinematic takes of Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. Johnson and Badgley get the most screen time, with top-billed Hawke turning up in a handful of scenes that amount to little more than an extended cameo. Jovovich's role is even smaller and Harris, in an ostensibly nice nod to his early breakthrough in George Romero's 1981 classic KNIGHTRIDERS, never looks or sounds comfortable. The direct-from-Shakespeare dialogue aside, another reason CYMBELINE doesn't work as a Shakespearean biker movie is because it feels like too much of a retread of the TV series SONS OF ANARCHY. During its run on FX, SONS creator Kurt Sutter made no secret of the Shakespearean themes running through the show and its characters, particularly Charlie Hunnam's Hamlet-like Jax and Katey Sagal's very Gertrude-inspired Gemma. So, for Almereyda to take a Shakespeare play, regardless of how obscure it might be, and work in a criminal motorcycle gang has to make you wonder what he was thinking. Had he heard of the show? Does he have basic cable, Hulu, or Netflix? What was Lionsgate thinking when they retitled the film ANARCHY and unveiled a trailer for it before yanking it and changing it back to CYMBELINE? The problem here is that Almereyda updates the setting but that's all he does. Fiennes made CORIOLANUS work by making its themes relevant to today's global political climate. By contrast, Almereyda has nothing to say about anything with CYMBELINE, so we're left with hacky plot bits like Iachimo taking a selfie with a sleeping, scantily-clad Imogen or Cloten getting on his laptop to do a Google search. (R, 98 mins)
HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 (US - 2015)
Capitulating to the demands of no one, the painful HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 somehow arrived in the nation's multiplexes only to promptly tank, likely due to nobody even remembering the first one from way back in 2010. How did this even get in theaters in the first place? Five years on, it seems like one of those belated sequels that would've gone straight-to-DVD, like all those later AMERICAN PIE spinoffs with only Eugene Levy still showing up to get paid and the spotlight given to a Seann William Scott lookalike as Stifler's cousin. Maybe it got into theaters because 3/4 of the original HOT TUB TIME MACHINE lineup is back, though it's not an understatement to say that John Cusack skipping out on this is the best career decision he's made in years (he apparently shot a cameo that didn't make the theatrical cut but turns up at the end of the unrated Blu-ray version). This time out, Lou (Rob Corddry), who's used the powers of time travel to become a rock god who invented the search engine "Lougle," gets shot in the balls by an unseen and vengeful assailant, prompting him, son Jacob (Clark Duke) and buddy Nick (Craig Robinson) to travel to an alternate timeline to find out who tries to kill him. In the future, they're also joined by Adam (Adam Scott), the son of Cusack's character. From the start, it's dick jokes, lazy '90s nostalgia, bodily functions, dick jokes, a grating Corddry mugging shamelessly, dick jokes, puking, gay sex jokes, dick jokes, a game show where Nick has to fuck Adam in the ass, dick jokes, a tired-looking Chevy Chase, dick jokes, Christian Slater as the game-show host, dick jokes, and dick jokes. None of the gags here are funny and maybe two even flirt with being semi-remotely amusing. HOT TUB TIME MACHINE wasn't exactly on its way to the Criterion Collection, but it fell into the "dumb but fun" category. This, on the other hand, is as obnoxious and unfunny a comedy as you're likely to see. HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2--"Un Film de Steve Pink," according to the credits--mistakes being loud and yelling "fuck" a lot for comedy and gives its flop-sweating stars--who have been funny in other things, like the original HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, for example--nothing to work with, and it's somehow even less entertaining than MORTDECAI, presumed to be the standard-bearer for terrible comedy in 2015. At least MORTDECAI had one legitimate laugh. That's one more than HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 offers. (R, 93 mins)
