BRIGHTBURN (US - 2019) Directed by David Yarovesky. Written by Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn. Cast: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn, Meredith Hagner, Matt Jones, Gregory Alan Williams, Becky Wahlstrom, Emmie Hunter, Annie Humphrey, Stephen Blackehart. (R, 90 mins) Very nearly a casualty of alt-right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich's attempt to engineer the cancellation of executive producer and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY helmer James Gunn over some offensive tweets in his past as some kind of "both sides" revenge for Roseanne Barr losing her TV show, BRIGHTBURN is an intriguing superhero deconstruction that owes a tremendous debt to SUPERMAN. Following the Man of Steel template starting with a childless couple discovering a human-looking alien child and raising it as their own, BRIGHTBURN doesn't take long to ponder the hypothetical of young Clark Kent discovering his inner Damien Thorn and running with it. Unable to successfully conceive a child, happily married Tori (Elizabeth Banks, who starred in Gunn's SLITHER) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman) are at least enjoying the continued attempts when they're interrupted by a crash in the woods behind their farmhouse in rural Brightburn, Kansas. Cut to the 12th birthday of their adopted son Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn), who's discovering new things about himself, namely the extent of his physical strength and an uncontrolled rage at those who wrong him. He's drawn to a glowing, rumbling light in the barn--which he's been forbidden to enter and has obeyed that order until now--where something locked under the floorboards is sending him a message and frequently putting him in a trance. Tori and Kyle write it off to the onset of puberty, and after finding some hidden photos of naked women and autopsies under his mattress, Kyle addresses his son's confusion by telling him that sexual feelings and "touching it" are normal and that he shouldn't be ashamed.
Emboldened by the conversation ("Good talk," well-meaning Kyle says after the awkward interaction), Brandon begins acting on his urges by stalking cute classmate Caitlyn (Emmie Hunter), even entering through her bedroom window and watching her from behind the curtain. He later breaks her wrist after she calls him a "pervert" in front of other kids. As his mood becomes darker and his artistic scribblings more violent in nature, Tori still keeps attributing it to changing hormones. This is even after the body count starts rising in Brightburn, starting with the slaughter of Kyle's chickens all the way to Caitlyn's Brandon-hating mother (Becky Wahlstrom), followed by threats to the school guidance counselor (Meredith Hagner), who happens to be Tori's sister. Only Kyle seems to realize that maybe the innocent baby they rescued from a crashed space pod that they've kept locked away in a secret room in the barn for a dozen years--now donning a cape and a creepy, crimson executioner's mask and hood and demonstrating decidedly superhuman powers--might be a force they can no longer control.
Written by Gunn's brother Brian and their cousin Mark, and directed by David Yarovesky, whose 2015 indie horror film THE HIVE starred James and Brian's brother Sean Gunn, BRIGHTBURN takes a novel approach to the superhero concept by mashing it up with the "evil child" subgenre, which is having a comeback year already--in terms of quantity if not commercial success--with THE PRODIGY and THE HOLE IN THE GROUND. Its use of Brandon's discovery of his true nature as a metaphor for puberty is intriguing, and the film contains some inventively gruesome kills that rely on some good old-fashioned practical gore effects, but the more it goes on, the more difficult it is to buy the stupidity of the Breyers, particularly Tori, who's still making desperate excuses for Brandon's behavior even after the sheriff (Gregory Alan Williams) has some pretty damning evidence that her son is pre-teen serial killer (though they really don't do anything different from Ma and Pa Kent, who definitely lucked out by having a better kid who didn't give them any trouble). Banks and Denman are good, despite being saddled with lunkheaded characters (how does Kyle possibly think his solution to dealing with Brandon is going to work?), and Dunn, who resembles a young Paul Dano, has an effectively dead glare in his eyes. Yarovesky stages a couple of solid scare sequences, with one involving a glass shard and an eyeball that might even have fans of Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE squirming a little. The ending is a bit frustrating, only because it leaves the door open for a sequel, a feeling that's solidified shortly after by an early closing credits stinger featuring a surprise cameo from a major James Gunn BFF as a ranting, Alex Jones-type cable news nutjob making references to Rainn Wilson's character in Gunn's 2010 superhero black comedy SUPER, vaguely hinting at yet another goddamn "cinematic universe." Can't anybody just make a fucking stand-alone movie anymore?
LOGAN LUCKY (US - 2017) Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Rebecca Blunt. Cast: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Seth MacFarlane, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Katherine Waterston, Dwight Yoakam, Sebastian Stan, Brian Gleeson, Jack Quaid, Farrah McKenzie, David Denman, Macon Blair, Jon Eyez, Deneen Tyler, Ann Mahoney, Jim O'Heir. (PG-13, 118 mins) Steven Soderbergh cried wolf on retiring from feature films a number of times before finally making it official after 2013's SIDE EFFECTS, but he never really went away. He directed HBO's Liberace biopic BEHIND THE CANDELABRA and all 20 episodes of Cinemax's two-season series THE KNICK. He didn't direct the MAGIC MIKE sequel MAGIC MIKE XXL but he served as its cinematographer under his D.P. pseudonym "Peter Andrews" and he edited it as "Mary Ann Bernard." He was also executive producer on other series like Amazon's RED OAKS, Starz's THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (a spinoff of his experimental 2009 Sasha Gray vehicle), and Netflix's upcoming GODLESS, in addition to producing indies like WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN and Spike Lee's DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS. In short, Soderbergh is working more than ever, and with an arsenal of pseudonyms that's approaching Joe D'Amato and Jess Franco levels, his return to the big screen was only a matter of time. LOGAN LUCKY, shot by "Peter Andrews," edited by "Mary Ann Bernard," and written by the unknown "Rebecca Blunt," which is already assumed to be yet another Soderbergh alias, finds the filmmaker in familiar territory, insofar as it's a heist movie that puts it in the same wheelhouse as his OCEAN'S ELEVEN trilogy and OUT OF SIGHT, and like the OCEAN'S movies, it's played for laughs, but Soderbergh's feature film homecoming has some tricks up its sleeve that make it very much its own unique thing.
In his fourth Soderbergh film, Channing Tatum stars as Jimmy Logan, a West Virginia construction worker fired by his crew boss after failing to disclose the bum knee from a high school football injury that ended his once-plausible chances of making it to the NFL. His ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) lives just across the state line in North Carolina and is planning to move with their daughter Sadie (Farrah McKenzie) to Lynchburg, VA, where her wealthy second husband (David Denman) is opening a new car dealership. Jimmy receives little consolation from his younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a bartender with a prosthetic left arm in place of the one he lost in Iraq. Clyde reminds Jimmy of the "Logan Curse," which has affected generations of their family, prompting Jimmy to take drastic measures to reverse it. With the help of their baby sister Mellie (Riley Keough), the Logan siblings team up to rob the cash deposit vault of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during the final NASCAR race of the season by taking advantage of the pneumatic tube system that moves throughout and under the speedway via chutes, a system Jimmy discovered on his last job with the construction crew, remedying a series of sinkholes that formed beneath the speedway property. The Logans enlist the aid of appropriately-named explosives man Joe Bang ("introducing Daniel Craig"), and are not deterred by the problematic fact that he's still locked up ("I am in-car-cer-ra-ted!" Bang sounds out for the Logans) for another five months and the job needs to be pulled off before the construction crew completes their work in four weeks.
Other figures drift in and out of the story in inspired, Coen Bros.-like situations, from obnoxious British business mogul and NASCAR team owner Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane, looking like a cross between Mandy Patinkin and Avery Schreiber); Dayton White (Sebastian Stan), a Chilblain driver who suffers a bad reaction after being contractually obligated to drink a Chilblain-endorsed energy drink on camera; Joe Bang's lunkhead brothers Sam Bang (Brian Gleeson) and Fish Bang (Jack Quaid); and, much later, humorless, no-nonsense FBI agent Sarah Grayson (Hilary Swank). Soderbergh goes against your gut expectations by avoiding the easy trap of milking these characters for condescending laughs, instead opting for a Coen Bros. approach where he shows much empathy for the Logans, and even for Joe Bang's brothers, who are more the stereotypical hillbilly yokels to a certain degree (they're introduced toilet seat-pitching and bragging that they "know everything there is to know about computers," including "all the Twitters"). Jimmy's plan is ridiculous and damn near impossible but time and again, he, along with Clyde, Mellie, and Joe Bang, prove themselves quite resourceful and have clearly thought this whole thing through even as obstacles constantly threaten to halt the job. The often absurdist humor doesn't approach the lunacy of, say, RAISING ARIZONA, but rather, the more deadpan side of FARGO. Tatum and especially Driver really nail the tone here and are gifted with numerous bits of quotable dialogue. Sure, Clyde's prosthetic arm is played for some easy laughs, but they're great laughs, and one brief detour into a prison riot negotiation (the standoff arranged to get Joe Bang out of jail) between the exasperated warden (Dwight Yoakam) and inmates demanding the prison library stock the titles in the Game of Thrones series that George R.R. Martin has yet to publish is brilliantly funny, as they refuse to believe that the new books don't exist and the warden can't convince them that the TV series has moved past the novels. LOGAN LUCKY could maybe run 15 minutes shorter and it has a few too many characters than it has time to properly showcase (MacFarlane, Stan, and Katherine Waterston as a nurse in a mobile free clinic are barely in it, and Swank doesn't even appear until 95 minutes in), but it's a lot of fun and a reminder that "offbeat" and "quirky" can still be a good thing. Plus it's got one perfect scene involving Sadie and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," that's maybe the sweetest thing Soderbergh's ever done.
