Based on a 2017 novel by German author Daniel Kehlmann, YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT reunites writer/director David Koepp with star Kevin Bacon, the pair having last collaborated on 1999's acclaimed supernatural thriller STIR OF ECHOES. Bacon once again plays a man tormented by strange, inexplicable occurrences, though instead of a blue collar everyman, he's now Theo Conroy, a wealthy former bank exec who's married to the much younger Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), with a six-year-old daughter named Ella (Avery Essex). Susanna is a moderately successful actress prepping for an eight-week movie shoot in London, so they decide to rent a spacious, modern home in a remote part of the Welsh countryside beforehand as a family getaway. But they have problems that were simmering at home that only proceed to reach a boil when they're stuck in the middle of nowhere. Theo has grown very insecure over their 30-year age difference, about which both Susanna and Ella regularly razz him ("Daddy, will you die before Mommy because you're so much older?"), and though she's only six, Ella is very perceptive and is aware that Theo had a wife before Susanna and that she died under mysterious circumstances that made him a tabloid target ("Why do people hate Daddy so much?" she asks). Theo is also annoyed by Susanna's constant text messages to and from a male colleague, as he's in constant fear that she'll leave him for a younger man. He's working through these jealousies and insecurities and writing in a journal, but the Welsh home only makes things worse. Theo begins to feel disoriented by various things that don't make sense: light switches don't work on the lights they should, doors mysteriously appear where there was once a wall, and a walk down a previously unseen hallway results in a four-hour loss of time. Sensing something is off in the layout, he measures the living room, and finds the interior is five feet longer than the exterior (Ella, holding the tape measure: "How can that be?"). He finds a Polaroid of himself standing in the hallway, a shot that seems to have been taken a minute earlier and left for him to discover. Both he and Susanna start having bad dreams, Ella sees strange shadows on her bedroom wall, and a couple of unfriendly locals seem skittish that they've rented what's known as "the Stetler house." And someone has scribbled "YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT!" and "NOW IT'S TOO LATE!" in Theo's journal.
In and of themselves, those instances have some creepy and unsettling potential. There's definitely a sense of THE SHINING in this house, especially with its labyrinthine design, its spatial impossibilities (an idea that also prompted House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski to make accusations of plagiarism), a ghostly woman in a bathtub, and the house's effect on the family staying there. But this Blumhouse production tries to meld their patented jump scares with the more cerebral dysfunctional family horrors of HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR mastermind Ari Aster, and its pieces never quite come together. It feels padded even at 90 minutes, like a TWILIGHT ZONE episode belaboring its point, with a muddled shrug of a reveal that you'll see coming long before Theo or Susanna do (Koepp makes a huge mistake by telegraphing it in an overtly obvious fashion in the opening scene). Bacon is the solid pro he's always been, and he has terrific father/daughter chemistry with young Essex (Seyfried, for reasons that can't be divulged without significant spoilers, is absent for a long stretch in the middle), but the payoff isn't worth the elaborate buildup. Koepp was one of the hottest screenwriters of the '90s and into the early '00s (APARTMENT ZERO, JURASSIC PARK, CARLITO'S WAY, THE PAPER, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, PANIC ROOM, SPIDER-MAN, and he created the acclaimed but little-watched TV series HACK), but to call his more recent work indicative of a slump would be an understatement: in the last few years, he's scripted the dismal likes of INFERNO and THE MUMMY and directed the unwatchable MORTDECAI. YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT is a step up from those, but it's no STIR OF ECHOES, and Koepp still hasn't regained his mojo relative to his 1990s glory days. Perhaps Universal wasn't feeling it either: this was originally intended to be a summer theatrical release, but once the pandemic hit, YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT wasn't given a new release date later in the year, nor was it bumped to 2021. Instead, it was among the first major-studio titles to get relegated to the premium VOD route. $2 at Redbox is one thing, but this is definitely not $20 PVOD material. (R, 93 mins)
LEGACY OF LIES (Ukraine/UK/US - 2020)
Scott Adkins, the hardest-working man in action movies, is back with LEGACY OF LIES, his second movie of 2020, with five more tentatively on the way before the end of the year. This mostly Ukrainian-financed espionage thriller gets too convoluted and sluggish for its own good, but it's anchored by a typically committed Adkins performance and some nicely-done fight scenes, with the star once again collaborating with busy stunt coordinator Tim Man (TRIPLE THREAT). Dutch writer/director Adrian Bol embraces the cliches without shame, with Adkins as Martin Baxter, a PTSD-stricken former MI-6 agent who walked away from the spy game after a botched mission in Kyiv 12 years earlier. Now a single dad to precocious, wise-beyond-her-years Lisa (Honor Kneafsey), Baxter works as a bouncer in a popular London club (cue a packed throng of decadent partiers and throbbing techno beats) and picks up some quick cash in (wait for it) underground MMA fights, but he's in such a slump on that end that Lisa secretly cashes in by betting against him. Baxter's past comes back to haunt him when Sacha (Yuliia Sobol), a crusading Ukrainian journalist and daughter of one of his late former colleagues, comes to him with a story about a dead MI-6 agent and a rat in the network, and something about exposing a Russian plot to develop a deadly nerve gas. He doesn't want anything to do with it, but is forced into action when ruthless Russian agent Tatyana (Anna Butkevich, waiting around for Luc Besson to call her to be the next Sasha Luss) kidnaps Lisa and gives Baxter 24 hours to find Sacha and some top-secret files she has in a safety deposit box in a Kyiv bank.
There's nothing particularly surprising or original here, and a string of false endings only serves to make the film feel like it's loitering for an extra 15 minutes when it could've been sufficiently wrapped up by the 90-minute mark. LEGACY OF LIES is far from essential Adkins, but he's got several not-bad throwdowns that make it required viewing for his fans. The film is torn between being a brutal action flick and a John Le Carre-style espionage downer, and it never quite finds a balance. There's also a backstory involving Baxter's late wife and Lisa discovering the truth behind her death that's never adequately dealt with by the script, and we really could've done without the scene where a depressed Baxter gets caught up in memories of his wife, sitting on the floor turning his bedside lamp on-and-off FATAL ATTRACTION-style. Oh, and at one point, Baxter is told "You just signed your own death warrant!" Yeah, it's that kind of movie. (R, 101 mins)
DEEP BLUE SEA 3 (US - 2020)
A quick glance at the title DEEP BLUE SEA 3 will probably cause most people to wonder "Wait, there was a DEEP BLUE SEA 2?" A DTV sequel coming nearly two decades after a 1999 original that gave us one of the all-time great surprise kills and one of the dumbest closing credits songs ever, DEEP BLUE SEA 2 did the bare minimum to get by, hindered by a low budget and some really shitty CGI, and its story of sharks turning into super-intelligent beings used as experimental subjects in a mad billionaire's Alzheimer's research was beyond absurd. Look no further than the instant classic moment when the bad guy announces his intention to destroy the sharks once he gets all the research info he needs, and he fails to notice an eavesdropping shark either listening or reading his lips. DEEP BLUE SEA 3, which tragically misses the opportunity to call itself D33P BLU3 S3A, sometimes hits those same heights of silliness, and it's a bit of an improvement over its predecessor. Filled with a cast of familiar second-tier TV faces, DEEP BLUE SEA 3 stars Tania Raymonde (of LOST and Lifetime's JODI ARIAS: DIRTY LITTLE SECRET) as shark expert Dr. Emma Collins, who's working with a small research team at Little Happy, a mostly abandoned fishing village on a man-made island in the Mozambique Channel (it was shot in nearby South Africa). Dr. Collins is also a great white whisperer of sorts, unafraid to get up close and personal with one longstanding resident of a great white breeding ground near Little Happy. The team--Collins, her late father's military buddy Shaw (Emerson Brooks of THE LAST SHIP), techie nerd Spin (Alex Bhat), and college intern Miya (Reina Aoi)--have their peaceful existence intruded upon by--conveniently enough--her ex Richard (Nathaniel Buzolic of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES and THE ORIGINALS) and a crew of mercenaries that includes loose cannon Lucas (Bren Foster, another LAST SHIP alum), who are on the hunt for three unusually aggressive bull sharks that killed some residents of a fishing village 100 miles away.
Those three bull sharks tie into DEEP BLUE SEA 2--they're more experimental subjects with human-level intelligence, even understanding Richard's warning of "Back the fuck off!" when one is captured and the other two start attacking the boat. DEEP BLUE SEA 3 is pretty by-the-numbers until it finally embraces its innate stupidity about an hour in, starting with a surprise kill that's actually just as great as the one in the first film (which was honestly one of the best crowd reaction moments I've ever experienced as a moviegoer). Then, it's all-out madness, highlighted by sharks circling a slowly sinking Little Happy as Shaw and Lucas have a spontaneous, full-on choreographed MMA throwdown (Lucas: "C'mon, old man!"); some groan-worthy zingers ("Sorry, chum!"); and an underwater Wilhelm Scream. Writer Dirk Blackman (OUTLANDER, UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS) and director John Pogue (writer of U.S. MARSHALS, THE SKULLS, and GHOST SHIP) understand that these things are basically slasher films with sharks, so they try to make every shark kill the equivalent of the Samuel L. Jackson moment from the original--it works the first time, but the one immediately after is really unnecessarily cruel--and after a draggy start, DEEP BLUE SEA 3 turns surprisingly entertaining, even with PS2-level CGI that seems intentionally cartoonish. Foster's Lucas is a cardboard psycho villain who endangers everyone's lives for no other reason than that's what the script needs him to do. But Raymonde commits herself to this like it's her ticket to the A-list as Collins and lone remaining Little Happy resident Nandi (Avumile Qongqo) eventually find themselves forced to deal with out-of-control, hyper-intelligent sharks and a lunatic Lucas. Not exactly good, but more guiltily enjoyable than it has any reason to be, you can do a lot worse than DEEP BLUE SEA 3 when it comes to cheap DTV shark movies. (R, 100 mins)
THE MUMMY (US - 2017) Directed by Alex Kurtzman. Written by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman. Cast: Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari, Neil Maskell, Simon Atherton, Javier Botet. (PG-13, 107 mins) A simultaneous reboot of the Brendan Fraser franchise and at least the fourth attempt to kick off a new and updated 1940s-style monster cycle, it's obvious with the 2017 incarnation of THE MUMMY that Universal needs to get its shit together or give it up. 2004's VAN HELSING, 2010's THE WOLFMAN, and 2014's DRACULA UNTOLD all tried to reignite the legendary Universal monsters and failed, and now, in response to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, they're trying it again with the so-called "Dark Universe," an attempt to meld the classic Universal monsters with the comic book/superhero genre. There's already other films in various presumptuous stages of development, including an INVISIBLE MAN with Johnny Depp, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE with Russell Crowe, and yet another WOLFMAN with Dwayne Johnson, plus a BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, with a yet-to-commit Angelina Jolie's name being constantly mentioned. Universal's philosophy with the Dark Universe seems to be "If at first you don't succeed, throw another $200 million at it and cross your fingers."
THE MUMMY has a major A-lister at its foundation in Tom Cruise, and the 54-year-old actor is a good two decades too old to be playing Nick Morton, a smartass, devil-may-care Army recon officer and part-time fortune hunter who finds plenty of spare time to seek priceless treasure in dangerous areas of Iraq. With his wisecracking sidekick Chris (Jake Johnson), they're caught in a skirmish with Iraqi rebels, calling in an air strike that inadvertently opens a long-buried tomb housing the mummified Egyptian Princess Ahmamet (Sofia Boutella), deemed such a danger that she was entombed 1000 miles away in then-Mesopotamia. Centuries earlier, Ahmamet, after offering her soul to Set, the Egyptian god of death, slaughtered her entire immediate royal family to hasten her ascent to the throne. Forming an unholy alliance with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), with whom he recently had a one-nighter in Baghdad after which he snuck out of her hotel room and stole the map that led him to Ahmamet's burial ground, Nick boards a military plane to London, where subway construction crews have accidentally unearthed a tomb containing Egyptian artifacts that date back to Ahmamet's time. The plane is struck by a swarm of birds and Jenny ends up with the only parachute, while everyone else onboard perishes in the resulting crash.
That is, except Nick, who wakes up in a body bag in a London morgue with a tag on his toe, supernaturally kept alive after being cursed by the spirit of Ahmamet. The mummy has been taken to the London headquarters of Prodigium, a secret government organization devoted to collecting and containing the world's monsters, and led by Dr. Henry Jekyll (Crowe), who must take frequent injections of an antidote when he feels his evil alter ego Mr. Edward Hyde taking control. Ahmamet has come back to life, draining the life of those around her LIFEFORCE-style, but is now kept in chains in an underground Prodigium bunker, intent on breaking free and collecting the artifacts necessary for her to reassemble the "Dagger of Set," the weapon required to make her an all-powerful god. She eventually possesses a Prodigium tech and escapes, materializing outside as a giant sandstorm that destroys London (cue obligatory "Tom Cruise running" shot as he's being chased by sand and dust). Ahmamet reanimates the long-entombed skeletons of crusader warriors unearthed in the London excavation, as a still-possessed Nick, plagued by visions put in his head by Ahmamet, is determined to stop the mummy's reign of terror and somehow save his own spirit.
THE MUMMY is a chaotic mess that somehow took at least six writers to put together, and it doesn't seem like any of them looked over anyone else's work. Three are credited with the screenplay, including veteran journeyman David Koepp (JURASSIC PARK), USUAL SUSPECTS writer and Cruise BFF Christopher McQuarrie (who's no doubt responsible for the ludicrous climactic plot twist), and Dylan Kussman, an actor best known as Cameron, the student who turns against Robin Williams' John Keating in 1989's DEAD POETS SOCIETY. Others had a crack at it, including Jon Spaights (PROMETHEUS, PASSENGERS), Jenny Lumet (at what point did a Universal exec say "Maybe we should see what the writer of RACHEL GETTING MARRIED can do with this?"), and Alex Kurtzman (TRANSFORMERS, STAR TREK, STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS), who ended up directing. The end result is disjointed and unfocused, like a product that was cynically assembled by market research, trend analysis, and focus groups. Why is Universal so hellbent on shoehorning these characters into a superhero scenario in a "Dark Universe?" Crowe could probably make a plausibly frightening Jekyll & Hyde in a straight, serious adaptation, but here, growling and hulking out with significant CGI enhancement, he just looks silly in what amounts to the Dark Universe's Nick Fury surrogate (and why is Dr. Jekyll even here anyway? Other than 1953's ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Jekyll & Hyde wasn't part of the classic Universal Monsters roster). The film also pays winking homage to the Universal-released AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, when Chris is killed off by a poisonous spider bite and his rotting corpse keeps returning to bust Nick's balls, much like Griffin Dunne's mauled Jack did to David Naughton's lycanthropic David in the 1981 classic. As the mummy, Boutella probably fares best, though the CGI does a lot of the acting for her. And despite the claims of some historically-challenged entertainment journalists who must be unaware of 1944's THE MUMMY'S CURSE, 1971's BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB, and 1980's THE AWAKENING, Ahmamet is not the first female mummy in a movie.
Cruise looks out of his comfort zone in a horror film that can't settle on a tone (it works best as a straight adventure in its early scenes, before quickly imploding), and this just seems like a superfluous project for him to be tackling at this point in his career. Cruise has the Barry Seal biopic AMERICAN MADE due out later this year, but other than his commitment to doing his own stunts in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and JACK REACHER franchises and in a zero-gravity scene here, can you name the last time he really challenged himself as an actor playing a three-dimensional character? The serious actor side of Cruise has become harder to locate than the whereabouts of David Miscavige's wife. Where did BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY's Ron Kovic go? What happened to MAGNOLIA's Frank T.J. Mackey? Where's that Tom Cruise? He'll be 55 this year and his next two projects after AMERICAN MADE are MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 and the sequel TOP GUN: MAVERICK. Dude, what are you doing? At his point, is a future sequel to RISKY BUSINESS out of the question? Are we gonna get a 60-year-old Tom Cruise reliving his glory days and dancing around in his underwear to Bob Seger? In total coast mode with declining box office results but still big enough to avoid going the Nic Cage VOD route (for now), Cruise's career is in serious danger of becoming the Hollywood version of a classic rock band hitting the summer concert circuit and still selling a sufficient amount of tickets at big venues but playing nothing but the old hits for maximum nostalgia. He's the Def Leppard of A-list movie stars. The MISSION: IMPOSSIBLEs and the first JACK REACHER and EDGE OF TOMORROW were fine, but the last time he really stretched as an actor was when he put on a bald cap and a bunch of makeup and busted a move to Flo Rida in TROPIC THUNDER. It's almost like he left the committed, serious Cruise behind on that couch during his much-analyzed OPRAH freakout.
INFERNO (US - 2016) Directed by Ron Howard. Written by David Koepp. Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Ben Foster, Omar Sy, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish, Paul Ritter, Paolo Antonio Simioni, Fausto Maria Sciarappa, Gabor Urmai. (PG-13, 122 mins) We're pretty far removed from the publishing phenomenon of Dan Brown's breakout 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, the second installment in his series of Robert Langdon adventures. A world-renowned symbology professor and expert in religious and cultural iconography, Langdon is the hero of four Brown novels and three big-screen adaptations directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks: 2006's THE DA VINCI CODE, 2009's ANGELS & DEMONS (based on the first Langdon saga, published in 2000), and, seven years later, the belated INFERNO, from Brown's 2013 novel. While Inferno was the top-selling book of its year, it sold six million copies compared to the 80 million that Da Vinci moved a decade earlier. Likewise, interest in the cinematic Langdon has waned, with the $75 million budget a 50% slashing from the $150 million it took to make ANGELS & DEMONS seven years ago, the corner-cutting apparent in some cut-rate CGI work throughout. Everything about INFERNO feels like a contractual obligation. Howard does a serviceable job directing, and at least this is better than last year's bomb IN THE HEART OF THE SEA, but Hanks just doesn't seem very into this and was probably lured more by the prospect of a working vacation in Italy than any burning desire to go through the motions as Langdon one more time. Even in films that don't work, Hanks is one of the most effortlessly charismatic actors that the movies have ever offered. He was never the right choice to play Langdon but he made it work in the past. In INFERNO, he comes off as irritated and even a little tired, as if he really didn't want to do this, but was afraid he'd look like a dick if he said no.
In a set-up that couldn't be any more staggeringly silly if they'd ditched Langdon and had Hanks play David S. Pumpkins instead, INFERNO opens with a bloodied, amnesiac Langdon waking up in a Florence hospital with no recollection of what happened or how he got there. He escapes with ER doc Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) when assassin Vayentha (Ana Ularu) arrives dressed as a Carabinieri and starts shooting. Struggling to piece together the fragments of his short-term memory, Langdon discovers a small Faraday pointer/projector in a small biohazard tube in his jacket pocket. In it is an image of the Dante's Inferno-inspired Map of Hell painting by Botticelli. But the painting has been reworked, filled with letters and a cryptic message referencing billionaire American bioengineer Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster), who committed suicide three days earlier. Prior to his death, Zobrist achieved a prophet-like following among his cult of admirers with his warnings that the world was suffering from overpopulation and that the herd needed thinning. With French agents led by Christoph Bouchard (Omar Sy) and World Health Organization honcho and Langdon ex Dr, Elizabeth Sinskey (THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY's Sidse Babett Knudsen) in pursuit, along with the mysterious Harry Sims (Irrfan Khan), a freelance "facilitator" hired by Zobrist but concluding that his employer had a screw loose, Langdon and Sienna venture from Florence to Venice to Turkey in search of a virus created by the deranged Zobrist, designed to infect 95% of the world's population and wipe out at least four billion people in the first week of its global exposure.
The kind of movie where a character in Florence announcing "We need to go to Venice," is followed immediately by an establishing shot of canals filled with gondolas accompanied by the caption "Venice, Italy," INFERNO, like its predecessors, has to constantly stop the action to drop tons of exposition that the characters should already know for the benefit of the audience. You could almost make a drinking game out of Hanks' Langdon exclaiming "Of course!" followed by something obvious to him that requires a paragraph of explanation to keep the audience in the game (and his emphatic "I need to get to a library...fast!" from DA VINCI is equaled here when he gasps "My God! This is a labyrinth!"). It's stilted and awkward and, as in DA VINCI and ANGELS, Howard and his screenwriter (in this case, veteran journeyman David Koepp, fresh off his MORTDECAI triumph) don't have enough faith in the audience to keep up on their own. It's hard to pick the most guffaw-inducing moment. It could be Langdon analyzing a recording of himself slurring an apology just after his head was injured, concluding "Of course! I wasn't saying 'very sorry'...I was saying 'Vasari!'" But it's the whole tangent with the Dante death mask that's probably where INFERNO completely falls apart, asking the audience to buy that a heavily-guarded museum could go an entire day without any visitors, curators or security personnel noticing that one of its key attractions has been stolen, and that it's been stolen by Langdon (who doesn't remember stealing it) and an associate named Ignazio (Gabor Urmai), who's promptly forgotten about and never mentioned again. This is a ridiculously dumb movie but it's got some scattered positives, with a game, scene-stealing Khan seeing this for the junk that it is and having more fun than any of his co-stars, and Romanian actress Ularu has some standout moments as the driven, ferocious Vayentha and would probably impress if given her own action thriller to headline. The best thing about INFERNO is the catchy, synth-driven score by Hans Zimmer that may sound like leftover cues from his brilliant work on INTERSTELLAR, but he does more to give this some energy and distinct flavor than anyone else except Khan and Ularu. Zimmer's score almost has a retro John Carpenter-meets-Philip Glass by way of Italian horror quality that's quite effective given the predominantly Italian setting. But at the end of the day, there's just no point to this coming out now, years after the Da Vinci Code craze has died and with a visibly disinterested Hanks just wanting to get to the vacation part of the package deal before starting work on SULLY, which was shot after INFERNO but released first.
TWO MEN IN TOWN (US/France/Algeria/Belgium - 2014; US release 2015)
A low-key, deliberately-paced character piece, TWO MEN IN TOWN is a remake of a 1973 French film by Jose Giovanni, with Alain Delon as an ex-con trying to stay straight with the help of an elderly social worker (the legendary Jean Gabin in one of his last films) and a new girlfriend (Mimsy Farmer). He finds this difficult thanks to a variety of obstacles, chief among them an angry cop (Michel Bouquet) with a serious grudge against him, and a former criminal associate (a young Gerard Depardieu) who keeps trying to pull him back into his old life. This new version, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (DAYS OF GLORY, OUTSIDE THE LAW), moves the story from France to the sparsely-populated southern-most area of New Mexico, right along the US/Mexico border. Paroled after serving 18 years of a 21-year sentence for killing a deputy sheriff, William Garnett (Forest Whitaker) has a dark past as a vicious criminal and a drug dealer, but has found peace while incarcerated. He's converted to Islam, is devoutly religious, he's taught himself to read and earned his GED, and worked as a tutor and counselor to his fellow inmates. A model prisoner who has fought his demons and wants nothing more than to start his life over and get it right, Garnett gets some support from his sympathetic parole officer Emily Smith (Brenda Blethyn), gets a minimum wage job at a cattle farm, and starts dating nice bank teller Teresa (Dolores Heredia). But flashes of the old Garnett occasionally pop up, whether he arrives home from work to find Emily inspecting his room at a local halfway house, or smashing his neighbor's TV when he won't turn the volume down. His temper is egged on by big-shot, five-term sheriff Bill Agati (Harvey Keitel), who shows legitimate concern over a local vigilante group's unlawful treatment of illegals crossing the border, but extends no such goodwill toward Garnett. It was Agati's deputy that Garnett murdered, and he has no intention of letting him off the hook. Agati follows Garnett, harasses him while he's having dinner at a restaurant, shows up at Teresa's house to embarrass him, has him held overnight for a speeding violation, and even goes so far as to bully Garnett's boss into firing him. On top of that, Garnett's old criminal cohort Terrance (Luis Guzman) keeps turning up, endlessly hounding and threatening him about picking up where they left off and, like Ben Kingsley in SEXY BEAST, refuses to take no for an answer. With no one but Teresa and his parole officer allowing him to lead the quiet life he wants to lead, it's only a matter of time before Garnett explodes.
Anchored by a Ry Cooder-esque score by Eric Neveux, TWO MEN IN TOWN often has a PARIS, TEXAS-era Wim Wenders feel to it. Like Wenders, Bouchareb is a European filmmaker who manages to convey a unique view of the American Southwest. The cinematography by Yves Cape (HOLY MOTORS) effectively captures the sun-drenched surroundings and the desert highways that Europeans seem to have a special knack for achieving, because as outsiders, Bouchareb and Cape see the unique things that Americans in their positions might miss. This environment is nothing new to Bouchareb, who has an affinity for the region, having shot 2012's JUST LIKE A WOMAN in New Mexico as well, plus he produced Bruno Dumont's 2003 cult film TWENTYNINE PALMS, a desert road trip slow-burner shot in the title city and in Joshua Tree. A lean and intense Whitaker, who's been dismayingly terrible in pretty much everything he's done for the last several years, turns in his best performance in a long while as the tightly-wound Garnett. Keitel does some fine work as Agati, who, despite his early concern for some illegals before turning them over to the border patrol, is every bit the asshole that you expect an apparent sheriff-for-life in a small town in the middle of nowhere to be. Ellen Burstyn turns up for one very well-played scene as Garnett's adoptive mother, who couldn't bring herself to visit him even once while he was in prison. Blethyn seems miscast, and her performance is uneven, as the folksy tone of her line delivery seems more to mask her British accent than to convey the down-home, tell-it-like-is sass of her character. The conclusion leaves a little to be desired, and Bouchareb has no idea what to do with Keitel's character, instead turning the primary antagonist role over to Guzman while Keitel basically disappears from the film. Still, it's an interesting drama that flopped in Europe and only managed a VOD and scant US theatrical release here over a year after it played the Berlin Film Festival. It's flawed, but worth seeing for fans of Keitel and Whitaker, who hasn't been this good since his Oscar-winning turn in 2006's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. (R, 117 mins)
EXTRATERRESTRIAL (Canada - 2014)
Though the generically-titled EXTRATERRESTRIAL is not intended to be a remake of the 2011 Spanish film by Nacho Vigalondo, they do share the idea of a couple's relationship issues being put on the backburner by a sudden alien invasion. That wouldn't be the only derivative element of the latest film from the GRAVE ENCOUNTERS team of Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, who work under the name The Vicious Brothers. Their EXTRATERRESTRIAL is more concerned with being a blatant ripoff of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, with five archetypes--brain, nice guy, dude-bro, stoner, and blonde ditz--only here, they encounter UFOs and not-very-friendly aliens. April (Brittany Allen) is planning on a weekend at her parents' cabin with boyfriend Kyle (Freddie Stroma), but it turns into a blowout party when he invites their friends Seth (Jesse Moss as the dude-bro), Melanie (Melanie Papalia as the stoner), and Lex (Anja Savcic as the blonde ditz). April's rejection of Kyle's sudden proposal sours the weekend, but things go from bad to worse when a UFO crash-lands in the woods. Grabbing her dad's shotgun, April blasts one of the E.T.s, which doesn't bode well with its alien friends.
Diverting but not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, EXTRATERRESTRIAL doesn't really get the whole "meta" thing down like CABIN IN THE WOODS did. Like CABIN, it also has unseen puppet masters secretly calling the shots, in this case it's exposition supplied by Travis (Michael Ironside), a pot-growing, conspiracy-theorist Vietnam vet who lives in a nearby cabin. He knows what's the alien visitors have been up to in the woods and tells April and the others of a secret treaty between the US government and the aliens that dates back to Roswell: the government agrees to leave the aliens to go about their business of abducting yokels if they do so quietly and in limited numbers so as not to draw attention. In exchange, as Travis puts it, "We get to keep acting like we're running things down here." It's an interesting concept that gets a lot of mileage out of a terrific performance by Ironside, but the Vicious Brothers err in taking him out of the film far too early. Gil Bellows is also very well cast in a haggard, beaten-down-by-life way as the beer-gutted sheriff who hasn't been able to get past his wife's disappearance a decade earlier, and when these kids start talking about UFOs and aliens, coupled with a shell-shocked local mom (GINGER SNAPS' Emily Perkins) telling the same story where her husband and son were taken away, he starts seeing an explanation for what happened to her. EXTRATERRESTRIAL opens strong and for a while, it has the feel of an old-school '80s crowd-pleaser, but with its two major assets--Ironside and Bellows--not getting enough screen time, we're left with mostly uninteresting leads (Allen is a strong, appealing heroine, but the rest range from forgettable to, in Moss' case, excruciating). Connoisseurs of alien invasion films may enjoy what's easily cinema's nastiest anal probe scene, but there's little consistency: if the aliens can establish a psychic link strong enough to force one character to blow his own head off, then why can't they find Perkins' character, who's hiding in plain sight? And if the aliens are supposed to be keeping things on the down-low, why are they spending so much time and abducting so many people in this neck of the woods? The film really stumbles with an overdone, maudlin finale that leads to a downbeat NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD ending that it doesn't earn, instead coming off as unnecessarily mean-spirited. Though it's rather unrestrained in its CABIN IN THE WOODS worship, there's a good film desperately trying to break out of the merely average EXTRATERRESTRIAL. As far as recent alien invasion pics go, it's at least preferable to the Milla Jovovich con job THE FOURTH KIND and the unwatchable SKYLINE, one of the worst major-studio releases in years. (Unrated, 101 mins)
MORTDECAI (US - 2015)
After a string of misfires that saw former actor Johnny Depp's stock plummet with fans (THE RUM DIARY, DARK SHADOWS, THE LONE RANGER, TRANSCENDENCE, and his incognito supporting role in Kevin Smith's pathetic TUSK), it seems as if the world put its foot down with MORTDECAI. After at least two months of the most relentlessly pushy ad campaign in recent memory, moviegoers actively revolted and let it bomb hard in theaters. On its own terms, it could've been an amusing throwback to double entendre-filled '60s comedies, like something Peter Sellers might've made around the time of THE PINK PANTHER, WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? or AFTER THE FOX. But the world made it known that it's clearly sick of Depp's constant crutches of pancake makeup and whimsical vocal affectations, and seeing him in the MORTDECAI trailers with a waxed mustache and a forced British accent trading randy and sassy quips with Goop publisher and vagina-steaming advocate Gwyneth Paltrow was where everyone drew the line, took a stand, and emphatically declared "No more!" The $60 million MORTDECAI, based on a series of 1970s comic adventure novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli, grossed just $8 million in the US and took a beating from critics, making it a safe bet that this won't become another PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise for Depp. The wasteful budgets of today's movies often border on criminal, but it seems especially offensive here. Other than paying a bunch of big names to jerk themselves off (Depp got paid $10 million), nothing here warrants pissing away $60 million. Think what $60 million could've done for people in need. Who the fuck needed MORTDECAI?
An appalling, obnoxious vanity project for star/producer Depp, MORTDECAI is every bit as awful as you've heard, which is tragic because there's a surplus of squandered talent. This is a film with an alarming contempt for its audience. It's obvious the actors are having a much better time than the viewer and you soon realize you're paying to attend a party where you're deliberately being excluded from the fun. Eccentric, jet-setting--and broke--British art dealer Lord Charlie Mortdecai (Depp) gets roped into a plot by his friend and M.I.5 agent Martland (Ewan McGregor) to recover a rare stolen Goya painting. So begins a globetrotting adventure that finds Mortdecai and his faithful, hulking manservant Jock (Paul Bettany) tangling with Russian mobsters, vacuous Californians, and the nympho daughter (Olivia Munn) of a shady L.A. art figure (Jeff Goldblum, cast radically against type as "Jeff Goldblum"). Meanwhile, Mortdecai's wife Johanna (Paltrow) also gets pulled into the pursuit of the Goya, providing Martland with an opportunity to steal her away from Mortdecai, which he's been trying to do since their college days. There's very little in the way of comedy in the script by Eric Aronson, whose lone previous writing credit is the 2001 Lance Bass/Joey Fatone vehicle ON THE LINE. It's too bad director David Koepp, a veteran screenwriter whose credits include JURASSIC PARK, CARLITO'S WAY, and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, didn't write it as well--perhaps he could've brought something to the table other than Aronson, whose approach seems to have been scribbling "Johnny Depp, British accent, mustache" on a piece of scrap paper, crossing his fingers, and hoping everything would work itself out. As it is, MORTDECAI's idea of comedy is Depp's overdone accent and the fact that he has a mustache and his character is a pompous dolt who still calls America "The Colonies." That's it. Every joke is based on one or a combination of those things. There's one legitimate AUSTIN POWERS-style laugh--Mortdecai at a men's room urinal as a Russian gangster grabs him from behind, injecting a sedative into his neck as Mortdecai quips "Oh! I've read about this!"--and that's it. There's nothing here. One of the emptiest films of the year, MORTDECAI is what happens when a movie star is too rich and out of touch for anyone to tell him no. Depp hasn't tried in years because he doesn't have to, so he enjoys another fat payday, amusing himself by mugging shamelessly with a wacky accent and a fake mustache. Well, I guess that means at least one person found MORTDECAI amusing. (R, 107 mins)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Written by Adam Cozad and David Koepp. Cast: Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Kenneth Branagh, Keira Knightley, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Colm Feore, Lenn Kudrjawizki, Peter Andersson, Alec Utgoff, Nonso Anozie, Elena Velikanova, Gemma Chan, David Paymer, David Hayman, Kieron Jecchinis. (PG-13, 105 mins)
Bounced from the busy Christmas 2013 schedule and dumped in January, JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is the second reboot of Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan" series, and the first since 2002's THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. In that film, Ben Affleck played a younger version of the CIA analyst previously portrayed by Alec Baldwin in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990) and, in the best Ryan incarnation, Harrison Ford in PATRIOT GAMES (1992) and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER (1995). Now, in SHADOW RECRUIT, essentially a re-reboot, Chris Pine is introduced as a collegiate Jack Ryan, who enlists in the Marines after 9/11. When he's shot down over Afghanistan and heroically saves two soldiers even with a broken back, he's visited at Walter Reed by CIA official Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner), who presents an offer: go back to school to get his doctorate in economics and work for the CIA as a covert agent on Wall Street, where his job will be to monitor global financial accounts to search for transactions that may be tied to terrorist activity and the funding of sleeper cells in the US.
Cut to a decade later, as Ryan spends his days at a desk analyzing market trends, financial algorithms, and bank accounts, but still isn't allowed to divulge his CIA status to fiancée Dr. Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley). The pair met when she was a med student working in physical therapy during his post-Afghanistan recovery. Their relationship and Ryan's need for secrecy get even more complicated when he has to go to Russia on a CIA job to audit the accounts of investment broker Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh) after noticing some inexplicable inconsistencies in their market performance. Cherevin has stockpiled billions of dollars in a series of secret accounts at the behest of a group of old-school Russian politicos led by Sorokin (Mikhail Baryshnikov). Their plan is to launch a terrorist attack as a distraction while using these secret accounts to bankrupt the United States. What was supposed to be a simple audit turns into a major situation when Ryan is nearly killed by Embee (Nonso Anozie), sent by Cherevin to ostensibly serve as Ryan's driver and bodyguard but instead given instructions to eliminate him. Ryan gets the upper hand and kills Embee and is met by Harper, who's been nearby the whole time. "You're operational now," his mentor informs him as he hands him a gun. There's another problem: Cathy has decided to show up in Moscow on a hunch that Ryan is having an affair.
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is the first film in the Ryan franchise that isn't based on a novel by Clancy, who died in 2013. It's an original screenplay by David Koepp and Adam Cozad, and it's pretty clear that it's heavily influenced by the BOURNE series and Daniel Craig-era 007. As directed by Branagh, who seems to have taken a respite from Shakespeare adaptations to reinvent himself as a genre gun-for-hire after 2011's THOR, SHADOW RECRUIT is brisk popcorn entertainment that moves along at such a relentless clip that it's easy to overlook its many derivative and frequently ludicrous elements. There's nothing here you haven't seen before--from the shaky-cam (but still watchable) action sequences to Ryan's improbable metamorphosis from desk-jockeying numbers nerd to Indestructible Action Daredevil to the rapid-fire brainstorming of the analysts as they pinball ideas around to figure out the location of the terrorist attack and have all the info they need instantly available on their laptops (of course, Cathy's the one who figures it out) to Ryan's sweat-on-the-brow high-tech break-in at an impregnable fortress of an office to steal computer files as Harper is observing from a nearby building to gravely intone "Five minutes, Jack," and "He's on the move...two minutes, Jack." It's almost as if the filmmakers are working from a checklist instead of an actual script. They also don't seem to trust the audience with too much in-depth information: this is one of those films that opens with a shot of Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, the Westminster Bridge, and the London Eye ferris wheel, yet still feels the need to include the caption "London." Of course, soon after that, there's an aerial shot of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline accompanied by a helpful "New York City."
Nonetheless, JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT still works even as it becomes increasingly ridiculous and predictable in its second half. As shown in UNSTOPPABLE and the new STAR TREK films (even the terrible INTO DARKNESS), Pine has a genuinely engaging screen presence that works in his favor, especially in his scenes with Costner, who seems ready to gradually settle into elder statesman-type roles with grace and class as he approaches 60. Costner is still youthful enough that he probably could've almost played Jack Ryan had they kept the character in the Baldwin/Ford age bracket of the 1990s Ryan films, but he and Pine have a credible teacher/student chemistry that's very likable, especially with Harper's occasional good-natured griping to Ryan ("Any way you can wipe that boy-scout-on-a-field-trip look off your face?"). Knightley doesn't have much to do other than nag and get kidnapped, which you'll see coming (and speaking of nothing to do, what's with 1993 MR. SATURDAY NIGHT Oscar-nominee David Paymer buried in the credits with a ten-second, two-line walk-on as a Wall Street analyst?). Branagh the director could've done a better job of keeping Branagh the actor from hamming it up. He doesn't go overboard but the Russian accent is laid on a little thick at times and the character is handled with clichés (of course, he's introduced listening to opera and beating the shit out of an underling), and he occasionally comes off as more of a psychotic Bond villain than a genius financier and international criminal.
Directed by David Koepp. Written by David Koepp & John Kamps. Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez, Jamie Chung, Aasif Mandvi, Wole Parks, Henry O, Christopher Place. (PG-13, 90 mins)
While never quite crashing and burning, PREMIUM RUSH gets off to such an exhilirating, entertaining start that it feels a little more disheartening than you'd expect when it starts sputtering around the midpoint. The major problem is that director/co-writer David Koepp (veteran journeyman screenwriter of films as varied as APARTMENT ZERO, JURASSIC PARK, CARLITO'S WAY, PANIC ROOM, and SPIDER-MAN among many others) can't settle on a tone, and has so many balls juggling throughout that he eventually just gives up and PREMIUM RUSH falls victim to what almost every real-time thriller succumbs: the complete abandonment of anything resembling a plausible time element. This is an inherently cartoonish thriller, starting with the central character's name, but Koepp plays so fast and loose with time that it becomes too distracting and too ludicrous to ignore.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Wilee, nicknamed "The Coyote," NYC's top bike messenger. He's a law school graduate who never took the Bar because he thrives on the adrenaline, hates the idea of wearing a suit and working in an office, and just needs to ride! It's what he does. Around 5:15 pm, Wilee is dispatched to Columbia University to deliver an envelope from office employee Nima (Jamie Chung), who happens to be the roommate of Wilee's ex Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), with whom he happens to work, to an address in Chinatown by 7:00 pm, which means Wilee must essentially travel the entire length of NYC in under two hours, during rush hour. With his fixed-gear, no-brake bike, Wilee sees it as a quick job, but things get complicated by the persistent interference of deranged detective Monday (Michael Shannon), who wants what's in Nima's envelope. This sets the film off on what's essentially one long car vs. bike chase through the streets of Manhattan, and a lot of it is very exciting and impressively constructed, even with some subtle CGI enhancements. Koepp occasionally pauses the action when Wilee hits an obstacle (red light, taxi door, pedestrian with a stroller, etc) so he can make a split-second decision on which way to go, and for a while, PREMIUM RUSH has the same sort of adrenalized feel of 2006's CRANK. There's also some inside jokes for movie nerds, with one chase clearly referencing THE FRENCH CONNECTION, and a great running gag with a cackling, twitchy Monday, who's deep in debt to some loan sharks and Triad gangsters and thinks what's in the envelope will bail him out, repeatedly introducing himself as "Forrest J. Ackerman, from the Internal Revenue Service."
But this fun, freewheeling, over-the-top feel is ultimately discarded and the film becomes increasingly predictable and formulaic, and there's simply no way that all of this could take place in the time allotted by Koepp and John Kamps' script. Maybe we're not supposed to notice the bumper-to-bumper rush hour NYC traffic where Monday is still somehow magically able to drive his car beside the bike-riding Wilee at fast speeds while the two engage in back-and-forth smartass banter. Koepp occasionally has a clock appear on the screen and he'll backtrack to earlier that day, to show, for instance, how Monday got into his predicament. It's here where the cracks start to show, right around the time one of these backtracks seems to put Vanessa in two places at once. It's established that she's at work, but the script needs her to be back at her apartment in the middle of the workday--packing her belongings, no less, because Nima has asked her to move out, for reasons that have to do with what's in the envelope. And right about that same time, Vanessa is shown leaving the messenger service's office to go on a delivery. But the worst is when Koepp expects us to believe that Wilee collides with a taxi at 6:33 pm, and is then placed in an ambulance, driven in the ambulance while having a long conversation with a desperate, enraged Monday, then ends up in the backseat of Monday's car as the two drive to another location...by 6:38 pm? In NYC? And about four hours worth of incidents happen before Wilee, of course, just meets the 7:00 pm deadline, and it's already dark outside. Dark at 6:59 pm, Eastern time? On what's clearly established as a hot summer day?
At least Gordon-Levitt and Shannon are fun to watch, and Koepp makes effective use of NYC locations. Shannon, in particular, is having a blast as the more-than-slightly unbalanced Monday in a performance that's fitting for the guy who's frequently been called his generation's Christopher Walken. It's just too bad that PREMIUM RUSH falls victim to such lazy writing, which is shocking for someone with Koepp's level of experience. Ultimately, the film's most interesting scene is an outtake early in the closing credits, showing the aftermath of a stunt gone awry when Gordon-Levitt flew off his bike and into the back window of a taxi. The actor is shown with a gash down his right arm that required 31 stitches (the injury is written into the film, as Gordon-Levitt's arm is wrapped in some of the later scenes), and you can hear Koepp say "I think we better get you to the hospital." The long-delayed PREMIUM RUSH was shot two years ago (as evidenced by a huge Times Square billboard for the endlessly-hyped, short-lived, and already-forgotten NBC series THE EVENT), and was originally set to be released in January 2012 before being bumped to late summer, most likely in an attempt to capitalize on Gordon-Levitt's supporting role in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.
Gordon-Levitt immediately after an accident during filming
