On Blu-ray/DVD/VOD: SWALLOW (2020) and RESISTANCE (2020)

SWALLOW
(US/France - 2020)

There are moments throughout SWALLOW that are so cringe-inducing that it's actually difficult to watch. It's a disturbing psychological thriller that turns into an emotionally raw drama, and surprisingly, the shift feels natural and unforced. A lot of that is due to what should've been a star-making performance by Haley Bennett, who's been paying her dues for several years now--her striking resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence usually comes up--and she had a breakout role in 2016's THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. SWALLOW was getting a lot of buzz when it opened in limited release two weeks before the coronavirus pandemic closed theaters, with IFC Films reopening it at one drive-in on Easter weekend when it became the #1 movie in America with a gross of just under $2000. It eventually turned up on VOD and is now on Blu-ray/DVD, and it's one of the year's most provocative films in search of an audience, and if the Oscars actually happen, Bennett's work here is surely worthy of a nomination. Bennett is Hunter, who lives an eerily perfect life with her husband Richie (Austin Stowell). They have a huge, modern architecture marvel of a home, and Richie just got a promotion at his dad's company. Richie is busy with work and when they go out, no one really pays attention to anything she says. She spends her days rearranging furniture, sketching, playing Candy Crush on her phone, and doing housework in dresses. She's an almost anachronistic June Cleaver taking care of a home that doesn't feel like hers. When she finds out she's pregnant, she plays the dutiful role of expectant mother, but something feels off. That's when she spots a marble in some trinket and impulsively decides to ingest it. When she passes it, she keeps it as a memento. Other mementos follow: a thumbtack, a thimble, a safety pin, even a AA battery.

To say much more about where SWALLOW's story goes would deprive you of the astonishment of watching Bennett navigate this character and the incongruous sense that it's a Douglas Sirk film made with the cold, clinical detachment of David Cronenberg. It's ultimately a film about patriarchy, control, and confronting the demons of the past. Hunter's life is a series of passive-aggressive slights by Richie: he's critical of her ironing, she spends the afternoon doting on creating the perfect dinner only to have him look at his phone the whole time they're eating, she's constantly apologizing for perceived inadequacies ("Do I make you happy?" and "I just want to make sure I'm not doing something wrong"), and her in-laws (David Rasche, Elizabeth Marvel) only start doting on her once she's carrying their grandchild. Nothing in Hunter's life is hers. Her only friends are Richie's friends, and when she takes charge during sex and has an intense orgasm, the only thing Richie can say is "I didn't finish." Once her secret--pica, an eating disorder where one feels a compulsion to ingest inedible objects--is exposed, Richie only sees it in terms of how it affects him ("I don't have time for this right now!" and "I can't believe this is happening to me!"). Richie can't do anything without the involvement and permission of his controlling father, who gave him a job, bought their house, etc. Richie and his father even try to sit in on Hunter's first therapy session (Richie's dad: "What medication are you giving her? I'm paying for this, so...I want results"). The scenes where Hunter swallows the various objects are profoundly uncomfortable, but watch the look of triumph on her face. Whatever this is--and she's initially unaware that it's an actual disorder--it's finally something that's hers. One could argue that the direction things go is a little too Movie of the Week-ish, but it works, and it's to writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis' credit that it doesn't rely on the most obvious, cliched explanation. It says something about the cold detachment of Hunter's picture perfect life that the burly, intimidating Syrian male nurse (Laith Nakli) that Richie('s dad) hires to watch her during the day turns out to be an unexpected source of empathy and support. In some ways with the topics it handles, it's an inadvertent companion piece to THE INVISIBLE MAN, which came out a week earlier and features an equally strong performance by Elisabeth Moss. (R, 95 mins)



RESISTANCE
(Germany/UK/Panama/China/US - 2020)

An earnest but simplistic Marcel Marceau biopic focused on the legendary mime's experiences with the French Resistance during WWII, RESISTANCE asks a bit much in casting Jesse Eisenberg, who's about 20 years too old to play Marceau at this point in his life. An aspiring actor in 1938 Strasbourg, Marcel is regarded with general disdain by his hard-working butcher father Charles (Karl Markovics of THE COUNTERFEITERS), his politically-engaged brother Alain (Felix Moati), and his cousin Georges (Geza Rohrig), who don't understand his passion for theater with the Nazis rapidly conquering Europe. By chance--primarily an interest in Alain's Jewish Resistance cohort Emma (Clemence Poesy)--Marcel finds himself entertaining orphaned Jewish children brought to Strasbourg, including young Elsbeth (Bella Ramsey, best known as Lyanna Mormont on GAME OF THRONES), whose father (Edgar Ramirez) and mother (Klara Issova) were killed on Kristallnacht. The kids bond with Marcel and love his clownish antics ("The children are the only ones who don't consider you completely ridiculous," Alain scoffs), but with Hitler's forces--represented by "Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighofer)--taking over France, Strasbourg is forced to flee to Limages in Vichy France, but even that doesn't last long since all of France is soon under Nazi control.

Marceau became a renowned hero in the French Resistance, and the last third of RESISTANCE depicts his taking part in a dangerous trek through Nazi-occupied France and into the bitter cold of the Alps to get a group of Jewish orphans to the Swiss border. The film is bookended by a 1945 speech to the troops about Marceau's heroism by Gen. George S. Patton, briefly played here by a possibly CGI'd Ed Harris. Marceau's story is one that would make a great movie, but writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz (HANDS OF STONE) is too easily sidetracked. There's entirely too much of Schweighofer's Barbie, and the third act turning into a FUGITIVE-style cat-and-mouse chase probably isn't how it went down. The same goes for the absurd scene where new father Barbie encounters Marceau and some other Resistance members on a train with the children and asks him for some parenting tips. It's hard to tell if the Barbie tangent is part of Jakubowicz's plan or the result of a suggestion by Schweighofer, also one of 24 credited producers, but there's no reason that a film about Marcel Marceau's time in the French Resistance should include a scene where Klaus Barbie is arguing with his wife. Eisenberg gets the miming down and exudes a certain childlike, Chaplin-esque presence during Marceau's performances, and the arc involving his father is interesting enough that you'll wish Eisenberg and Markovics had more scenes together, but RESISTANCE simply can't stay focused on the task at hand. (R, 121 mins)

On Netflix: WASP NETWORK (2020)

WASP NETWORK
(France/Spain/Belgium - 2020)

Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Cast: Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Ana de Armas, Wagner Moura, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Tony Plana, Nolan Guerra Fernandez, Osdeymi Pastrama Miranda, Julian Flynn, Anel Perdomo, Julio Gabay, Amada Morado, Carolina Paraza Matamoros, Omar Ali, Carlos Leal. (Unrated, 128 mins)

French auteur Olivier Assayas has dabbled in a bit of everything over his acclaimed career, from 1996's filmmaking satire IRMA VEP to the corporate espionage of 2002's DEMONLOVER and 2007's BOARDING GATE to heartfelt interpersonal pieces like 2008's SUMMER HOURS and 2019's NON-FICTION (both with frequent star Juliette Binoche), and a pair of dramas where he found a muse in Kristen Stewart, with 2014's CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (also with Binoche) and 2016's PERSONAL SHOPPER. His latest film, the Netflix-acquired WASP NETWORK, finds Assayas mining tangentially similar territory as 2010's CARLOS, his epic, five-and-a-half hour chronicle of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, made as a miniseries for French TV but acquired for the US by IFC in both its unedited version on the festival circuit and a truncated 166-minute cut for its brief US theatrical run and VOD (the Criterion Blu-ray edition only has the long version). Based on the true story of the "Cuban Five," WASP NETWORK details--and not always in the most coherent fashion--a Cuban espionage ring that set up shop in Miami in the early '90s, posing as dissidents and defectors fed up with Castro's communist regime having expecting things to change after the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, they were staunch Castro loyalists looking to infiltrate well-funded Cuban revolutionary groups based in Florida that were often working in conjunction with the FBI, and report their gathered intel back to government officials in Cuba.

The opening hour of WASP NETWORK follows two of the Cuban agents as they make their way to the US and settle in Miami. The first is pilot Rene Gonzalez (Edgar Ramirez, reteaming with Assayas after his career-best performance in CARLOS), who spends three months plotting the theft of a plane and flies under the radar all the way into Miami in 1990, leaving his wife Olga (Penelope Cruz) and their daughter Irma (Carolina Paraza Matamoros as a 6-year-old, then Osdeymi Pastrama Miranda as a teenager) behind in Havana. He doesn't need to worry about being granted asylum, since he was born in Chicago and his family returned to Cuba when he was a child. In 1992, Juan Pablo Roque (ELITE SQUAD and NARCOS star Wagner Moura, the Brazilian Mark Ruffalo) is a revered Cuban Air Force pilot who swims all the way to Guantanamo Bay to declare his intent to defect. He's an instant celebrity with TV interviews, a book deal, and glad-handing from the anti-Castro groups in Miami, and a whirlwind romance with Cuban-born divorcee Ana Margarita (Ana de Armas), who doesn't take long to realize something's up with all of his secrets, his expensive jewelry, and his $2000 suits. Rene keeps trying to get Olga to move to Miami, but his assignment was so top secret that she's still under the impression that he's a traitor and that his skills as a pilot are being used for drug trafficking.

Assayas jumps around quite a bit, and many of the details of the maddeningly confusing--apparently by design--first hour don't become clear until some extensive "get you caught up" narration by Carlos Leal, an abrupt "Four Years Earlier" card, and the midpoint introduction of Manuel Viramontez, aka "Gerardo Hernandez" (Gael Garcia Bernal), the spymaster behind the whole operation, which is codenamed "Wasp Network." The timeline is never really crystal clear--we just know some years have passed when Irma is played by an older kid--and much of the second half gets sidetracked with the machinations of rogue CIA agent and anti-Castro terrorist mastermind Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a string of Cuban hotel bombings committed by Cruz Leon (Nolan Guerra Fernandez) that keep Cruz, Ramirez, and Garcia Bernal offscreen for long stretches, the latter two mostly confined to clandestine lunch meetings at Miami restaurants.

WASP NETWORK isn't really able to gain any momentum since Assayas lets scenes end abruptly and goes for frequent and seemingly random fade-outs, almost as if this was cut down from a longer, CARLOS-type project that was intended for TV at some point. Indeed, it more often than not feels like the two-hour Cliff Notes version of a ten-hour miniseries. Such a format might've been more beneficial, considering the amount of time the main stars aren't around and that both Moura and de Armas abruptly exit during the second act. Assayas also indulges in a little Scorsese worship with a brief "last half hour of GOODFELLAS" vibe when de Armas' Ana gets wise and realizes too late that her husband was leading a double life and her world starts falling apart and all that's really missing in Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire." WASP NETWORK has a fascinating story to tell, but there's simply too much going on here for a two-hour movie to sufficiently handle and effectively tie all of its disparate plot and historical elements together. Months and years go by an in instant, characters appear and disappear, like Jose Basulto (Leonardo Sbraglia), the head of the Cuban exile outfit Brothers to the Rescue, who's set up as a major character but then doesn't really figure in at all. And can anyone explain the FBI agent played by an actor who has no idea how to pronounce the word "alias?"

On Netflix: THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME (2020)

THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME
(US - 2020)

Directed by Olivier Megaton. Written by Karl Gajdusek. Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Michael Carmen Pitt, Anna Brewster, Sharlto Copley, Patrick Bergin, Brandon Auret, Tamer Burjaq, James Richard Marshall, Terence Maynard, Sean Cameron Michael, Nathan Lynn, Neels Clasen, Leandie Du Randt Bosch, Johann Vermaak, Tiyler Kriel, Johnny Pienaar, Robert Hobbs, Daniel Fox. (Unrated, 148 mins)

Despite having the most bomb-ass name in action movies, French director Olivier Megaton can't quite back it up. After helming a passable Luc Besson ripoff with 2002's RED SIREN, he was recruited by Besson himself, but most of Megaton's products that rolled off the EuropaCorp assembly line were among its least memorable, including TRANSPORTER 3 and TAKEN 3, the worst films in their respective franchises. Megaton split from his mentor and has been MIA for the six years since TAKEN 3, but he's back with the Netflix Original film THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME, written by Karl Gajdusek (OBLIVION, THE NOVEMBER MAN) and based on a 2009 graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini. Megaton appears to have abandoned his shaky-cam/quick-cut style that made some of his Besson films so difficult to watch, but unfortunately, LAST DAYS is boring, derivative, hopelessly muddled, and punishingly overlong at a thoroughly unjustified 148 (!) minutes. There's absolutely no credible reason on God's Green Earth for this to be two minutes longer than GOODFELLAS and still somehow feel like huge chunks of it are missing, plus it even has to rely on early (and quickly-abandoned) narration to help clear up loose ends and move things along and it can't even do that. The kind of film that thinks simply acknowledging its plot holes and narrative inconsistencies is sufficient enough to excuse them, THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME is a pointlessly bloated fiasco that can't decide what it is, what it's doing, or who it's even for.

Set in 2025 Detroit (the Motor City played--quite unconvincingly--by Johannesburg, South Africa), THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME deals with just that: America has become a dystopian, crime-infested hellhole, with jackbooted cops patrolling the streets with military hardware and shooting criminals on sight. It's five days until the government unveils, through its so-called American Peace Initiative, the "API signal," which alerts a synaptic blocker in the human brain that produces a high-pitched signal designed to incapacitate people and prevent them from committing acts they know to be unlawful. Crime will be instantly wiped out and unnecessary police departments will fall under government control, and advocates of civil liberties are making a run for the Canadian border, where the US military stands guard and shoots those trying to cross. Career criminal Graham Bricke (Edgar Ramirez) is recruited by scuzzy Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt, billed as "Michael Carmen Pitt," and doing a feature-length Jason Mewes impression) and his seductive fiancee Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster, straight out of a Besson film) to become a partner in a planned heist of $1 billion from the US government's "Money Factory" currency facility (stationed right by the Canadian border, for some reason). The idea is to get in and have ace hacker Shelby jam the ATI signal just as it goes live at midnight, thus giving them several minutes free of the piercing "brain rape" and allow them time to get out and get to the border. Cash manipulates Bricke into taking part because he's knows he's got an ax to grind with the government: he was in prison with Bricke's younger brother, who allegedly committed suicide but Cash reveals that the inmates were being used in ATI signal test runs (which happened to Bricke on a bank robbery a year earlier) that eventually caused his brother's death. Cash has his own reasons for the heist--he's the black sheep son of powerful Detroit crime boss Rossi Dumois (Patrick Bergin sighting!), and he wants to create his own legacy by pulling off the last crime in American history. And Shelby may not be who she claims to be, as she's periodically hassled by a pair of corrupt FBI agents (James Richard Marshall, Terence Maynard) who have kidnapped her little sister (Tiyler Kriel) to ensure her cooperation with whatever it is they need her to do.

I don't say that to avoid spoilers--I legit don't know exactly what it is they want from Shelby. If THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME concentrated on the heist, it might've been OK. It seems to have trouble staying focused on itself, with more convoluted subplots than an entire season of a TV series. Of course, there isn't enough time to accommodate all of these details so things get lost in the shuffle, with so much extraneous, time-wasting bullshit about a Bricke/Cash/Shelby love triangle, Dumois' guys coming after Bricke for some past transgression involving his brother and $7 million, the same Dumois guys kidnapping Shelby and shooting her up with heroin, the corrupt FBI agents, etc. This nonsense goes on for a long stretch until a breaking news alert on TV announces it's one hour until the ATI signal goes live. You can almost hear the movie say "Oh shit, we forgot the heist!" as the distracted characters don't appear to have done jack shit in terms of planning a $1 billion job. Olivier Megalong also has no idea what to do with DISTRICT 9's Sharlto Copley--serial overactor and today's top box-office Flop Indicator (© Bob Cashill)--as Sawyer, a desk cop who's introduced in the opening act killing a tweaker in self-defense, thus awakening a dormant ticking time bomb within. At least it seems that way (and he has a shady past, with newspaper clippings taped up all over his apartment detailing a questionable shooting in his past), but then he vanishes for well over an hour before reappearing out of nowhere in the third act. Copley turns in one of his more restrained performances, believe it or not, but frankly his entire role could've been cut with the story losing nothing whatsoever aside from 15-20 minutes of the oppressive run time.

Equal parts DISPHIT FAST & FURIOUS, DIPSHIT PURGE, DIPSHIT 1984, and DIPSHIT DEN OF THIEVES--which was itself DIPSHIT HEAT (© David James Keaton)--LAST DAYS can't figure out if it's a heist movie, a sci-fi movie, an Orwellian political statement, or an action movie, consequently failing to succeed on any of those fronts. The idea of a mind-control signal as a measure to prevent crime is prime sci-fi fodder, and it even introduces a chip that can be implanted in cops to make them immune to it, but wouldn't that seemingly encourage dirty cops? The film doesn't extrapolate on such issues. And if the signal stops those who "know" and internally acknowledge that they're doing something illegal, what about sociopaths who feel no remorse or guilt? Would the signal stop them? LAST DAYS tries to address that late in the game, but introduces the subject like some mind-blowing game-changer of a plot twist regarding one main character, but any intelligent viewer would've asked that question two hours earlier. And what about white collar crime? Or does the American Peace Initiative only pertain to illegal acts perpetrated by the lower class we see here, depicted across the board as a mob of subhuman criminals? Also, I realize this is based on a decade-old graphic novel and was shot a year ago, and was not intended as a social commentary on what's happening now, and makes no relevant observations during two-and-a-half hours of overstaying its welcome to the point where it could claim squatters rights, but considering some of its imagery and the current climate in America, perhaps Netflix should've read the room a little better and benched this one until things cooled down. Or at the very least, until someone could recut it and try to make a more reasonable 100-minute movie out of it.

On Netflix: BRIGHT (2017)

BRIGHT
(US - 2017)

Directed by David Ayer. Written by Max Landis. Cast: Will Smith, Joel Edgerton, Noomi Rapace, Edgar Ramirez, Lucy Fry, Ike Barinholtz, Brad Henke, Veronica Ngo, Happy Anderson, Margaret Cho, Enrique Murciano, Jay Hernandez, Alex Meraz, Dawn Olivieri, Matt Gerald, Joseph Piccuiro, Scarlet Spencer, Andrea Navedo, Cle "Bone" Sloan, Brandon Larracuente. (Unrated, 117 mins)

Netflix enters the realm of the brain-dead blockbuster with the $90 million BRIGHT, the follow-up teaming of star Will Smith and director David Ayer after last year's SUICIDE SQUAD, a film that grossed $750 million worldwide despite nobody really liking it all that much. While SUICIDE SQUAD's contributions to pop culture are limited to teenage girls and MILFs dressing as Harley Quinn for Halloween and this image accompanying any article on Margot Robbie for the rest of her life, BRIGHT is a film nobody will remember a week from now. Nobody's dressing as a BRIGHT orc for Halloween. Playing like the rough draft of a gritty L.A. cop script if written by the late Gary Gygax after he just saw ALIEN NATION in 1988 and immediately ran it through his shredder, BRIGHT tries to fuse Ayer's love of cop movies into the realm of otherworldly fantasy, existing in a present-day world where humans, orcs, and elves have co-existed since the defeat of the "Dark Lord" 2000 years ago. In an effort to promote the appearance of diversity, the LAPD has given burned-out cop--is there any other kind?--Daryl Ward (Smith) an Orc partner named Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton under extensive old-school prosthetics). There's some heavy-handed allegorical implications of racism in an era of controversial police shootings of unarmed black men, with the insulated "protect the shield" attitude extending to the calculated ostracizing of Jakoby. Ward pleads with his watch commander Sgt. Ching (Margaret Cho) to get a new partner, but since nobody wants to work with him either, the two are forced to pair up...if they don't kill each other first!

Or bore the viewer to death first. Ward and Jakoby answer a call and discover a bloodbath at the hideout of the Shield of Light, a fringe underground group of renegade elves prepping to stop the resurrection of the Dark Lord. The lone survivor is Tikka (Lucy Fry as Milla Jovovich in THE FIFTH ELEMENT), a gibberish-spouting elf in possession of a magical, glowing wand that's intended for a "Bright," a standard-issue "chosen one" with the power to defeat the minions of the Dark Lord (any guesses who the Bright will be?). Ching and three other dirty cops arrive, planning to plant the wand on Jakoby and accuse him of stealing it, using that as an excuse to kill Jakoby and Ward, who hates Jakoby but refuses to go along with railroading a fellow officer. Ward ends up killing the other cops to protect Jakoby, and the three find themselves on the run, fleeing a variety of pursuers: the L.A.P.D.; villainous dark elf Leilah (Noomi Rapace), who's after the the wand and Tikka; evil Orc gang leader Dorghu (Brad Henke), and Kandemore (Edgar Ramirez), an elf agent in the FBI's "Division of Magic."

I can't even believe I just wrote that last paragraph. Who thought it was a good idea to combine a hard-R cop thriller with Dungeons & Dragons? The script is credited to Max Landis (son of John and the writer of CHRONICLE and VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN), who was faced with several sexual misconduct allegations just as Netflix rolled this out, but it's obvious Ayer rewrote significant chunks of it. Ayer's fingerprints are all over, whether it's the ballbusting banter between Ward and Jakoby, the "survive the day" motif so vital to the Ayer-penned TRAINING DAY and his much later END OF WATCH, and most glaringly, an entire plot development involving Dorghu and his son that Ayer lifted almost completely from that long, intense sequence in TRAINING DAY when Ethan Hawke's Hoyt is held in a bathtub at gunpoint by Cliff Curtis' Smiley. The glum BRIGHT is riddled with fantasy genre cliches as well: in a shocking turn of events, evil Leilah jumps from a high point and does a three-point superhero landing looking down, then lifting her head to make eye contact with Ward.

It also takes itself far too seriously for such a bonkers premise, so much so that very few of the humorous elements are successful amidst the confused mash-up of dark fantasy, horror, and cop tropes. The only big laugh comes from the revelation that Orcs like death metal, and the sight of a seething Ward watching Jakoby jam along in the police cruiser to Cannibal Corpse's "Hammer Smashed Face," calling it "one of the great love songs." Elsewhere, tiny fairies are regarded as common household pests. Ward swats one with a broom, quipping "Fairy lives don't matter today!" which is one of many Smith groaners that clang to the ground throughout (other witticisms include "A Bright came in and used the wand to magic everyone the fuck up!" and "You fucked over my life for some stupid Orc knucklehead?" and "You're gonna need to unfuck us!  Magic us to Palm Springs or some shit!"). Edgerton comes off the best, not surprising given that he's playing the most sympathetic character and one who's discriminated against by his colleagues as well as his own kind for selling out to become a cop and for being an "unblooded orc," whatever that is. BRIGHT can be summed up best by a perfectly appropriate event that takes place at exactly the halfway point: the action stops cold for a long dialogue scene that exists simply so Kandemore can deliver a mid-film exposition dump to his cynical partner Montehugh (Happy Anderson) in an attempt to catch the viewer up to speed on the incoherent plot. While it serves its purpose, it does prompt a bewildered Montehugh to offer the ultimate BRIGHT auto-critique: "What a shitshow."

On DVD/Blu-ray: HANDS OF STONE (2016) and I.T. (2016)

HANDS OF STONE
(US/Panama - 2016)

There's no cliche untouched in this biopic of Panamanian boxing legend Roberto Duran, focusing primarily on his two 1980 bouts with Sugar Ray Leonard (the second was the infamous "No Mas" fight where Duran quit midway through the eighth round). Edgar Ramirez does a solid job of conveying the ego and arrogance of Duran, but it's hard to get a handle on Duran as a character in the context of this film, since we really only see him being a braying, insufferable jackass. On top of that, Venezuelan-born writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz (his first film since 2005's SECUESTRO EXPRESS) tries to include too many storylines, so much so that the film frequently feels like an eight-part HBO limited series randomly whittled down to just under two hours. There's flashbacks to Duran's youth, detours into Panamanian unrest and clashes with the US over the Panama Canal Zone, and in telling Duran's story, Jakubowicz must also tell the story of Duran's aging trainer Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro). A revered figure in boxing, Arcel was run out of the sport in the 1950s by NYC mobster Frankie Carbo (John Turturro) after trying to expand it beyond the underworld, and while this may have a basis in fact (Arcel's life was spared if he agreed to never earn another dime from boxing; he trains Duran for free), here it just seems like an excuse to take a brief sojourn into GOODFELLAS/Scorsese territory simply because it's Robert De Niro, whose presence here is already a nod to RAGING BULL (Nicholas Colasanto's fictionalized mobster character in that film was based on Carbo). Jakubowicz rushes through everything--eight years flash by in an instant, and you never get a feel for Duran's fame; Duran and his wife Felicidad (Ana de Armas of KNOCK KNOCK) have five kids in a montage. Piled-on subplots either go nowhere or are completely abandoned: Arcel having an estranged, drug-addicted daughter serves no purpose other than giving one scene to De Niro's daughter Drena, and a long sequence where Chaflan (Oscar Jaenada), a doofus Duran toady, steals some food, leads people on a chase, and gets flattened by a truck doesn't advance the plot or seem to affect Duran in any way. Jakubowicz also shoehorns in an ersatz Howard Cosell (Robb Skyler) and Don King (Reg E. Cathey), both of whom get too much screen time but not enough to have any real purpose. The ring sequences are done with the now-standard quick cuts and whooshing pans and aren't shot in a particularly exciting fashion, though it gets a bit of a boost thanks to strong, A-game performances from De Niro and a magnetic Usher Raymond as Sugar Ray Leonard.

Shot in 2013 and unreleased for three years, HANDS OF STONE means well but feels compromised and lacks focus, with too many flashbacks, superfluous supporting turns (Ellen Barkin pops up a few times as Mrs. Arcel), dead-end detours, stalled subplots, lazy period detail (cue Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" during a montage of disco-era excess), two jarringly gratuitous, ass-thrusting sex scenes for both Duran and Sugar Ray with their respective wives, and an uplifting, feelgood ending that the Duran we just watched for 100 minutes simply doesn't earn. Despite a lot of pre-release publicity, this tanked hard at the box office, landing in 16th place its opening weekend and tumbling 86% by its third. Sure, that could be due to the movie simply not being very good, but the word of mouth was no doubt toxic as The Weinstein Company snuck what's essentially a foreign language film--whenever De Niro or Usher aren't onscreen, it's in Spanish with English subtitles--into wide release in multiplexes at the end of summer. (R, 111 mins)




I.T.
(Ireland/France/Denmark - 2016)

A laughable thriller that simultaneously manages to be a ripoff of 2006's instantly forgotten FIREWALL and a '90s "(blank)-from-Hell" throwback, I.T. has star and producer Pierce Brosnan as Mike Regan, an aviation magnate whose D.C.-based business (the US capitol is badly played by an egregiously miscast Dublin, Ireland) is in a rough patch with an SEC investigation just as he's about to take the company public. The highly-publicized rollout of a new app is barely saved by I.T. temp Ed Porter (James Frecheville), whose quick thinking circumvents some embarrassing technical glitches at a press conference. A grateful Regan invites Porter over to the house for dinner and asks him to tweak and modernize his smarthome set-up. It isn't long before Porter starts inviting himself over, getting friendly with Regan's 17-year-old daughter Kaitlyn (Stefanie Scott) on social media, and showing up at her school to give her a ride home in his muscle car. Regan quickly grows frustrated and fires I.T. Guy-from-Hell Porter, not knowing that he's already rigged the massive Regan home and is able to spy on them and control everything from his high-tech stronghold, the type of decrepit loft that serves as a nerd command center with huge monitors all over the place like some homage to SLIVER. Psycho Porter terrorizes the Regan family by hacking their security system and blaring death metal through their house in the middle of the night; hacks into Regan's business and plants phony damning evidence for the SEC investigators to find; hacks into the database of Regan's wife Rose's (Anna Friel) doctor and sends her an e-mail saying her recent mammogram shows breast cancer; sends a video of Kaitlyn masturbating in the shower to everyone at her school; and almost kills Regan by hacking into his car's brake system and subjecting him to one of the least-convincing CGI car wrecks you'll ever see. Needless to say, Regan can't convince anyone that Porter is responsible for everything that's happening, so he fights fire with fire, hiring off-the-grid hacker and cyberspy Henrik (Michael Nyqvist as Gene Hackman in ENEMY OF THE STATE) to help rid him of Porter for good.

Aspiring to be the kind of zeitgeisty, hot-button thriller that Michael Douglas would've made in 1998, I.T. could've been reasonably entertaining and trashy fun in the right hands, but it glosses over all the details, assuming words like "hack" and "firewall" will sound smart enough if they're uttered as frequently as possible. Frecheville, an alleged actor who seemed to show some potential several years ago in the acclaimed ANIMAL KINGDOM, is becoming a go-to nutjob for the VOD/Redbox scene between this and 2014's unwatchable MALL, probably one of the ten worst films I've ever seen. He's probably supposed to be scary when he's lifting weights in the nude and spazzing out, or lip-syncing with wild abandon behind the wheel to Missing Persons' 1982 hit "Words," but the only result is unintended laughter. Using a bizarre, affected, exaggerated brogue that sounds like a drunk guy doing a bad Pierce Brosnan impression, Brosnan is uncharacteristically terrible here, continuing his post-007 slide (SALVATION BOULEVARD, THE LOVE PUNCH) that's been broken up recently only by the fairly entertaining THE NOVEMBER MAN. For what it's worth, the straight-to-VOD I.T. is marginally better than Brosnan's recent URGE, but then, so are things like identity theft and bedbugs. Directed by John Moore, somehow able to find employment after 2013's A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD. (Unrated, 96 mins)

In Theaters: JOY (2015)

JOY
(US - 2015)

Written and directed by David O. Russell. Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rossellini, Dascha Polanco, Elisabeth Rohm, Ken Howard, Susan Lucci, Donna Mills, Laura Wright, Maurice Benard, John Enos, Alexander Cook, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Melissa Rivers. (PG-13, 124 mins)

With JOY, a loose biopic of inventor, entrepreneur, and HSN personality Joy Mangano, writer/director David O. Russell has started to coast on formulaic tropes that stretch back to 2010's THE FIGHTER and 2012's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Like those two justifiably acclaimed films, JOY has a down-and-out protagonist trying to scrape by while being helped but more often hindered by an ostensibly well-meaning but absurdly dysfunctional family. We had Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) in THE FIGHTER, struggling to succeed in the ring while dealing with a crackhead brother (Christian Bale), a pushy mother (Melissa Leo), and a small army of almost comically unpleasant sisters, and Pat Solitano, Jr.(Bradley Cooper) in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, struggling to come out on top with his bipolar disorder while falling for a bitter young widow (Jennifer Lawrence) and dealing with his wacky friends and family, headed by his superstitious, Philadelphia Eagles-obsessed dad (Robert De Niro). Lawrence, De Niro and Cooper all star in JOY (all also appeared in Russell's 2013 Scorsese homage AMERICAN HUSTLE), and Lawrence's title character is largely cut from the same cloth as Micky Ward and Pat Solitano.

Once-promising high-school valedictorian Joy is an airport ticket clerk and divorced mother of two struggling to support everyone in her family: kindly, encouraging grandmother MiMi (Diane Ladd), her soap opera-addicted, shut-in mother Terry (Virginia Madsen), and even her ex-husband Anthony (Edgar Ramirez), who still lives in the basement. She also has to periodically take in her dad Rudy (De Niro), when he's in between girlfriends, and puts up with older, bitter half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm)--Rudy's daughter by his first wife--who constantly bad-mouths Joy to her own children. Fed up with none of her dreams coming to fruition and everyone's dependence on her, Joy long ago abandoned her gift of creativity when real life set in. After mopping up a spill and cutting herself on broken glass while hand-wringing the mop, Joy is inspired to create a single-looped thread, self-wringing mop and gets investment backing from Rudy's newest lady friend, wealthy widow Trudy (Isabella Rossellini). Eventually, Joy gets a meeting with QVC exec Neil Walker (Cooper) and after a couple of stumbles that lead to Joy going on the air herself to sell it, the "Miracle Mop" becomes a huge hit, but Joy is unprepared for the cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world of commerce. 95% of the film is Joy's struggle with little regard to the time frame, then it ends with a five-minute wrap-up where years have gone by and she's suddenly a huge business mogul with inventors coming to make product deals with her as if she's Vito Corleone doling out favors on his daughter's wedding day.

At face value, JOY can be seen as an uplifting tale of determination and can-do spirit as the underdog achieves the American Dream and overcomes the obstacles to become a self-made success. But the story is so predictable and the characters surrounding Joy such unlikable and quirky cartoons that it never rings true. Russell seems to vacillate between lighthearted Coen Bros. and less-precious Wes Anderson throughout. Russell isn't as interested in production design as Anderson, but character-wise, it fits that mold. It's often like THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS restaged as a blue-collar HUDSUCKER PROXY. JOY is almost defeated by a bungled opening half-hour that jumps all over the place and never gets the groundwork and exposition effectively conveyed (it's telling that there's four credited editors). We're shown Joy's family as the train wreck they are and get little sense of what brought them to this place of almost outrageous self-delusion. Anthony is constantly regarded as a lazy, deadbeat fuck-up by the family, but he ends up being Joy's rock while everyone else except the loving MiMi--even the allegedly business-savvy Trudy, who insists they don't need a patent attorney--gives Joy terrible advice and almost actively thwarts her progress. Scenes sometimes end in the middle of sentences--possibly an ill-advised stylistic choice--and there's huge gaps in the story that are simply left hanging: does Joy ever quit her airport job? We see her being told she's getting moved to the night shift, then her job is never mentioned again. Why is Peggy such a bitch to Joy? Why do we see so much of Joy's daughter but never even get a clear look at her son's face? Joy Mangano (her last name is never mentioned onscreen) has patented over 100 inventions but we only hear of two: the Miracle Mop and the Huggable Hanger.

Russell has directed Lawrence, Christian Bale, and Melissa Leo to Oscars (along with nominations for Cooper, De Niro, Jacki Weaver, and Amy Adams), with second nominations after the win for Lawrence and Bale. He's certainly an actor's director and JOY intermittently works in fits and starts thanks to its cast: 25-year-old Lawrence is miscast and a decade too young to play someone who quit college 17 years earlier to take charge of the family after her parents' divorce (Mangano was already in her mid-30s when she invented the Miracle Mop), but manages to get by on her energy and screen presence. De Niro has a couple of good De Niro moments (he's really funny in the flashback to Joy and Anthony's wedding, and when he unloads on Terry with "You're like a gas leak--we can't see you, we can't smell you, but you're silently killing all of us!"), Cooper only has a few scenes, but his tour of the QVC operation with Joy is probably Russell's most inspired sequence in the film, and Ladd provides some much-needed warmth and humanity as the loving MiMi. Ramirez is alright but isn't given much to do but stand around, but almost everyone else--Madsen with her gaudy, unsightly eyewear, Rohm constantly glowering and seething, Rossellini's inconsistent shifting from kindly widow to ruthless shark--is stuck playing unplayable characters. Madsen comes off the worst by far, with her pathetic helplessness and her addiction to a terrible daytime soap--featuring characters played by soap vets Susan Lucci, Donna Mills, and John Enos, among others--getting entirely too much screen time (it seems like it'll function as a Greek chorus of sorts, but with Lucci, Mills, and the others giving intentionally terrible line readings, it ultimately plays as a cheap, lazy recurring gag that doesn't really belong in this movie). Madsen's Terry also gets a love interest in Haitian plumber Toussaint (Jimmy Jean-Louis) in a quickly abandoned subplot that never seems plausible and goes nowhere fast. There's probably a very good movie hiding somewhere in the middling misfire JOY ends up being. It feels like Russell is half-assing it, banking on the track record of the proven Lawrence/Cooper/De Niro magic to carry the weight and compensate for the cut corners and shortcomings of a script that maybe needed another polish or two before it was ready to roll.

In Theaters: DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2014)

DELIVER US FROM EVIL
(US - 2014)

Directed by Scott Derrickson. Written by Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman. Cast: Eric Bana, Edgar Ramirez, Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Sean Harris, Chris Coy, Dorian Missick, Mike Houston, Lulu Wilson, Olivia Horton, Scott Johnsen. (R, 118 mins)

It's been 41 years since THE EXORCIST was released and filmmakers still crank out demonic possession movies as if they have something new to bring to the table. DVD bargain bins are cluttered with the forgettable likes of STIGMATA (1999), LOST SOULS (2000), THE UNBORN (2009), THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT (2009), THE RITE (2011), THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012), and THE POSSESSION (2012). THE LAST EXORCISM (2010) was a well-done found-footage variant, though it spawned an awful sequel. Writer-director Scott Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman fashioned one of the more relatively interesting entries in the current possession parade with 2005's THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE which, while not a great movie by any means, was a surprisingly compelling mix of demonic horror and courtroom drama, a sort-of LAW & ORDER: EXORCISM based on the case of Annaliese Michel (also chronicled in the 2006 German film REQUIEM and the 2011 Asylum knockoff ANNALIESE: THE EXORCIST TAPES) that got a lot of mileage from the presence of respectable actors like Tom Wilkinson and Laura Linney, plus Jennifer Carpenter's impressive performance as the possessed Emily Rose. Derrickson later helmed 2012's grim and disturbing SINISTER without Boardman, but the duo are back together for another possession rehash with the "inspired by true events" DELIVER US FROM EVIL. Based on the experiences of Bronx cop-turned-demonologist Ralph Sarchie (played here by Eric Bana), chronicled in his 2001 book Beware the Night, the hopelessly generic DELIVER US FROM EVIL doles out just about every possession cliche you've been seeing since 1973, but seems especially devoted to recycling major plot points of 1990's THE EXORCIST III, minus William Peter Blatty's sharply unique writing and his direction of numerous unsettling sequences throughout. Derrickson's lazy jump scares can be seen coming a mile away (when Sarchie closely examines grainy surveillance footage, you know an evil face is going to flash on the screen and make him bolt back in his seat) and the possession bits get downright laughable as things go on, as the classic rock-savvy demon seems to have an odd affinity for The Doors, haunting Sarchie with greatest hits staples like "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" and "People are Strange," and even hurls some "Is everybody in?  The ceremony is about to begin!" as the exorcism commences.  Call me a possession genre purist, but I'll take "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!" any day of the week.

Sarchie is a tough-as-nails cop working the night shift with wisecracking, hot-dogging partner Butler (a miscast Joel McHale, looking ridiculous in an Alice in Chains tee and the seven deadly sins tattooed on his neck).  The job is taking its toll on Sarchie, though perhaps it wouldn't if he didn't let his internal "radar" direct him to jump on every dangerous call that comes over the radio. He's got a loving, church-going wife in Jen (Olivia Munn) and an impossibly cute daughter (Lulu Harris), and Jen looks past his being a lapsed Catholic, lamenting that she--wait for it--feels like she doesn't know him anymore and "Even when ya heah, ya not heah." Over the course of a few shifts, Sarchie and Butler encounter a dead baby thrown in the trash, a woman (Olivia Horton) tossing her child in a ravine outside the lion's den at the Bronx Zoo, a dead handyman (Scott Johnsen) in a basement, and Jimmy (Chris Coy), an Iraq War vet who's beating his wife. They're all connected by another Iraq War vet named Santino (Sean Harris), who's caught on camera and seen by witnesses at all of the crime scenes.  Sarchie is hounded by Father Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez), a loose-cannon priest who dabbles in exorcism on the side. The Bronx zoo mom is a member of his parish, and he's convinced she's demonstrating signs of demonic possession. Soon, these evil forces invade Sarchie's life as he begins seeing and hearing things that aren't there on a conscious level, and his daughter falls victim to the out-of-tune strains of a beat-up jack-in-the-box and a stuffed toy owl that hoots on its own. Mendoza informs Sarchie that he has a gift, that his "radar" for cases is actually a sixth sense gift of a connection to the spirit world, and that the spirit may be targeting him for a past sin.

It's hard to imagine what past sins Bana and Ramirez committed to get stranded in a film as bad as this one. They're fine actors but they can't really bring much life to these characters. The spiritual conversations between Sarchie and Mendoza don't exactly have the same sense of insight, banter, and rich characterization that you've seen in similar scenes between Lee J. Cobb's Lt. Kinderman and Jason Miller's Father Karras in THE EXORCIST, or George C. Scott's Kinderman and Ed Flanders' Father Dyer in THE EXORCIST III. Derrickson is pretty shameless in his EXORCIST III worship throughout, from the cop angle to an irresponsible doctor in the psych ward to a possession victim going on a rampage in the hospital, acting under the control of the demonic spirit. Sarchie even races home once he realizes the possessed Santino is at his house, just like Viveca Lindfors' shears-wielding nurse in Blatty's film. Derrickson and Boardman (the duo also wrote Atom Egoyan's empty DEVIL'S KNOT) try to awkwardly shoehorn in some Iraq War commentary but they never really allow it to develop.  Santino, Jimmy, and the handyman were all vets who encountered a Latin verse carved into the wall of a cave as some evil latched on to them. Are the filmmakers trying to make some kind of heavy-handed analogy between PTSD and possession?  Who knows?  They can't even follow through on all of the plot threads, the constant Doors references are just silly, the SNL "Da War of Da Woilds" accents overbaked, the SE7EN-inspired set design too darkly-photographed, and the only thing that really keeps your attention is the recurring continuity flub with the bandaging on Sarchie's right arm that appears and disappears throughout. Drab and dull, overlong and underthought, the tired and vacant DELIVER US FROM EVIL wheezes its way to its weak conclusion, seemingly working from a checklist rather than an actual script.