On Blu-ray/DVD/VOD: FORCE OF NATURE (2020) and THE LEGION (2020)

FORCE OF NATURE
(US - 2020)

There'll no doubt be a knee-jerk, cancel-culture reaction among some to trash FORCE OF NATURE sight unseen just because they object to Mel Gibson being employed. But if you take the time to actually watch it, you'll find so many more valid reasons to hate it. An utterly, depressingly perfunctory Lionsgate/Grindstone DTV time-waster, FORCE OF NATURE is directed by Michael Polish who, with his twin brother Mark, formed the once-promising Polish Brothers team behind the 1999 cult indie hit TWIN FALLS IDAHO. That's a generation ago at this point, and after 2003's higher-profile NORTHFORK flopped, the brothers never really regained their momentum. Michael is flying solo here in hired-gun mode for this Puerto Rico-shot high-rise mayhem/disaster movie hybrid set during a Category 5 hurricane bearing down on San Juan (think THE RAID: REDEMPTION meets THE HURRICANE HEIST). Burned-out, suicidal cop Cardillo (Emile Hirsch) and rookie partner Pena (Stephanie Cayo) are sent to an apartment complex to force two stubborn residents to evacuate: aging German Bergkamp (Jorge Luis Ramos) and terminally ill retired cop Ray (Gibson), whose doctor daughter Troy (Kate Bosworth, Polish's wife) is desperately trying to get him to the hospital so he doesn't miss a dialysis treatment. Ray is a surly pain in the ass suffering from kidney and lung issues with some bonus colitis, and fears that if he goes in the hospital, he won't come out. But there's a bigger issue at hand: psycho criminal John the Baptist (David Zayas) and his crew are made aware of a Van Gogh painting worth $55 million that's in one of the units of the building, and with everyone presumably evacuated, all they need to do is go through each unit to find it. But they need to get rid of the unexpected witnesses, and thus begins a "survive the night" scenario as two separated groups--one with Cardillo, Troy, Bergkamp and tenant Griffin (Will Catlett) and the other Ray and Pena--are forced to take on a ruthless, trigger-happy John the Baptist as the hurricane rages around them.

This is serviceable B-movie material handled in the dumbest and least-inspired, DIPSHIT KEY LARGO way possible. Polish never really establishes the layout of the apartment complex, so it's hard to tell where anyone is in relation to others. Introduced taking an epic, gun-pointed-at-his-own-head Decompression Shower (© David James Keaton), Cardillo's baggage involves his accidentally shooting his ex-girlfriend and fellow cop back in NYC, which sent him on a downward spiral that landed him in San Juan, and somehow, the whole city knows about it ("How do you know about that?" he asks John the Baptist, who replies "I'm John the Baptist...I know everything!"). Griffin has a cop-hating black panther (!) locked up in a room in his apartment (!!), so you know there's no way that won't come into play at some point, and rest assured, Cory Miller's script makes it happen in the most idiotic way possible. Third-billed Gibson is on total Bruce Willis duty and really isn't in it all that much--in fact, Willis was set to play Ray until he backed out and Gibson replaced him. Imagine if you can an installment of Lionsgate/Grindstone's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series that Willis deemed unworthy of his time. Cancellation-era Gibson has done some fine work in under-the-radar gems like BLOOD FATHER and DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE, but he's just phoning it in here, playing Ray as an older, near-death variation of the plays-by-his-own rules Riggs from LETHAL WEAPON. I can deal with Gibson being an asshole anger management case offscreen while still respecting his work onscreen. But he's gotta try harder than FORCE OF NATURE. (R, 91 mins)


THE LEGION
(US/Spain - 2020)

After a half-dozen production company logos, you're barely a minute into THE LEGION when you hear Oscar-nominated actor Mickey Rourke mispronounce "Caligula" as "Ca-lig-lee-uh" and you know you're in for something special. Rourke seems hellbent on squandering whatever reputation he has remaining with his one-day-on-the-set clockpunch of an appearance in this laughably cheap, incompetently-made melodrama set in 62 AD. As a disgruntled general named Corbulo, Rourke--with an eye patch, highlighted hair, Lee Press-On Nails, and enough mascara on his visible eye to make him the next face of L'Oreal (because he's worth it)--spends almost all of his screen time alone, against an obvious greenscreen, mumbling and ranting at a bust of Nero using curiously present-day vernacular, whether it's dropping F-bombs or complaining about a rival's "grubby little hands." Corbulo is peeved that Nero chose another general, Paetus (Joaquim de Almeida), to lead Roman troops into Parthia, where they've been surrounded on all sides by enemy forces and will likely die of starvation and exposure if they aren't killed first. Paetus and his adviser Marcus (Vladimir Kulich) decide to send soldier Noreno (Lee Partridge) on a foreboding mission across treacherous terrain to get to Corbulo and beg him to marshal his troops to rescue the Roman forces.

If that sounds a little like 1917 by way of ancient Rome, you're not far off, aside from the fact that THE LEGION makes Uwe Boll look like Cecil B. DeMille, is saddled with a pitifully low budget, and can almost muster a cast of tens despite having 41 credited producers. Most of the film is dedicated to Noreno running, running, and running some more, periodically stopping to battle a Parthian soldier he might encounter or rescue a young woman (Marta Castellvi) from being raped (she repays the favor by firing an arrow into the chest of a Parthian soldier who's attacking Noreno). He does some soul searching with an aging hermit named Saul (Bosco Hogan) and finally makes it to Corbulo's stronghold, where his arrival is announced and is met with Mickey Rourke mumbling, in the parlance of 62 AD, "A messenger? Where the fuck is he?" The big climax is a long, meandering discussion between Corbulo and his mistress Amiriah (Bai Ling), who has to talk him off the ledge and set him straight after the diva general refuses to help Paetus. Delivering performances that'll make you appreciate the dedication and pride that Steven Seagal takes in his craft, Rourke and Ling audibly flub lines and mispronounce words to the point that they might just be deliberately fucking with director Jose Magan, a veteran Spanish producer making his debut behind the camera (represented by the gaffe-afflicted credit "Directed Jose Magan"). Other than Xavier Gens' Lovecraftian COLD SKIN, Magan is hardly a producer of repute, having bankrolled the entirety of the unwatchable 2001-2006 output of Spanish non-auteur Maria Lidon, aka "Luna" (STRANDED, THE LIFE, MOSCOW ZERO). THE LEGION is bad enough that it almost feels like another craptacular Luna project, but Magan seems awfully proud of it: he's also credited with the story, producer, executive producer, line producer, casting director, post-production coordinator, and "financial services." So I guess there's only 38 producers if you count the three times Magan credits himself. (R, 96 mins)

On Blu-ray/DVD: LUCKY DAY (2019) and FREAKS (2019)

LUCKY DAY
(Canada/France - 2019)

Roger Avary's place in film history is secure thanks to the Oscar he shared with Quentin Tarantino for co-writing PULP FICTION, but the career paths of the former Video Archives co-workers went on decidedly different trajectories. While Tarantino became one of the most lauded and influential filmmakers of the modern era, Avary, whose own KILLING ZOE was released a few months before PULP FICTION, followed his Oscar win with the 1995 straight-to-video Rutger Hauer sci-fi/horror film MR. STITCH. He did some hired gun TV writing and script doctoring until his underappreciated and critically-panned 2002 film version of Bret Easton Ellis' THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, which has since acquired a well-deserved cult following. At the same time, Avary cobbled together an extensive amount of unused Kip Pardue footage from RULES' memorable "Victor's trip" sequence and assembled it into an adaptation of Ellis' semi-sequel GLITTERATI, but it remains unreleased to this day. Avary then settled into journeyman screenwriter mode, working on Christophe Gans' SILENT HILL and Robert Zemeckis' BEOWULF before his personal and professional life collapsed. Avary was behind the wheel in a 2008 drunk driving crash that killed his passenger. He pleaded guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter and other DUI-related charges and was sentenced to a year in a furlough program that allowed him to work during the day and return to jail at night. Those privileges were suspended when officials realized he was tweeting about jail conditions and he was ordered to serve out the remainder of his year in lockup, followed by five years probation.

Once released, he wrote a few episodes of the Canadian TV series XIII in 2012, but LUCKY DAY marks Avary's first feature film project in over a decade. He started writing it while incarcerated, and it's easy to see the influence of his jail time in the story of safecracker Red (Luke Bracey from the POINT BREAK remake that you forgot happened), just paroled after serving two years after a botched bonds heist. He wants to settle down with his artist wife Chloe (Nina Dobrev) and eight-year-old daughter Beatrice (Ella Ryan Quinn), but that's impossible with deranged, unstoppable French hit man Luc Chaltiel (Crispin Glover) leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake in his quest for revenge against Red, who he blames for his brother's death in the job that got Red arrested. Other than the return of Roger Avary, the big selling point here is the over-the-top performance by Glover, who's using a ludicrous Inspector Clouseau accent as a ruthless assassin who only thinks he's French. It's amusing for a few minutes, but Glover sets a land-speed record for wearing out a welcome, and once that happens, all you're left with is the realization that Avary is just spinning his wheels on what amounts to nothing more than another belated Tarantino knockoff that feels two decades old right out of the gate, like something you'd stumble upon while browsing the new release shelves at Blockbuster in 1997.

He might be entitled to a bit of a pass considering his connection, but LUCKY DAY is mostly just garish and grotesque, with Clifton Collins Jr as Red's racist parole officer with an unexpected expertise in art, and David Hewlett as Chloe's sexually-harassing art gallery benefactor coming in close behind Glover in the running for the film's most grating performance (there's also brief appearances by Mark Dacascos, Tomer Sisley, Josie Ho, and a voice cameo by Eric Stoltz). Bracey is essentially a second-string Tom Hardy, and the film's only genuinely amusing moments are provided by Cle Bennett as Red's best friend Leroy, who's just changed his name to "Le Roi," and is having a hard time making it stick. Much of LUCKY DAY is devoted to Avary's self-indulgence, from a Bret Easton Ellis shout-out in the form of a door sign reading "This Is Not An Exit," to Red calling Chloe "Honey Bunny," and Dobrev looking and sounding a lot like Maria de Medeiros' Fabienne in PULP FICTION, almost as if Avary is taking this opportunity to let us know which elements of that classic are his contributions. A tribute to late producer Samuel Hadida, who died in November 2018, in the form of an end-of-credits stinger is a sincerely heartfelt gesture on Avary's part (Hadida co-produced KILLING ZOE, so they go back a long way), but LUCKY DAY is just...not good. (R, 99 mins)



FREAKS
(US/Canada - 2019)

A low-budget indie sci-fi outing that plays like an origin story for Dafne Keen's Laura in LOGAN, FREAKS managed to get some good buzz at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival but it was another year before it finally landed a straight-to-VOD release. Some of the praise given to the film was for the way it revealed itself through the eyes of its confused seven-year-old heroine, only letting the audience see it from her POV and, for quite a while, leaving anyone watching just as hopelessly confused as she is. That set-up is reminiscent of BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD as well as the ill-fated Blumhouse production STEPHANIE, but the way FREAKS presents itself starts to feel less like clever exposition and more like an excuse to pull anything and everything out of its ass, to the point where the film itself resembles a nonsense story that an imaginative seven-year-old might concoct. Young Chloe (Lexi Kolker) lives in a mostly boarded-up house--in the middle of an otherwise nice neighborhood--with her disheveled, nervous father (Emile Hirsch, looking a lot like a haggard Jack Black). He doesn't let her go outside and there's a half-dozen dead bolts on the front door. He makes her practice the biography of a fake identity he's devised for her and has stacks of cash hidden throughout the house. At this point, FREAKS could be about anything--a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a WALKING DEAD scenario, or a Shyamalanian/TWILIGHT ZONE scenario where the dad is a paranoid nutjob and the outside world he's keeping her from is completely normal. But Chloe demonstrates telepathic abilities. She gets in people's heads and influences them, and her ability to control others is getting stronger. She can control the mind of a neighbor girl (Ava Telek) across the street and make her role-play, lying with her and innocently cuddling as the dead mom Chloe never met. And Chloe is strangely drawn to the incessant jingle of an ice cream truck that's constantly parked outside her house, manned by the mysterious "Mr. Snowcone" (Bruce Dern), who seems to know a lot about her and her father and their strange abilities.

If it sounds like I made that synopsis up as I went along, then yeah, that's what FREAKS is like. I haven't even mentioned the intermittent breaking news alerts on their TV about drone strikes in Seattle or the tenth anniversary of an attack that wiped out Dallas. Or a government agent (Grace Park) who's pursuing "Abnormals," or the more derisively-termed "Freaks," a race of apparent alien invaders who were rounded up a decade ago in a "Relocation Act" and shipped off to a massive internment camp called Madoc Mountain (cue ham-fisted Trump-era immigration allegory). Or that sometimes, Chloe's dead mother (Amanda Crew) appears in her closet, only the closet looks like a holding cell of some kind. Or that Chloe can manipulate time and that a few months for some might be several years for others. The writing/directing team of Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky maybe deserve some props for somehow cobbling together every half-baked idea and passing thought they've ever had and cramming them into one movie, almost like they went into it assuming this was gonna be their only shot and said "Fuck it, we're going all-in." But FREAKS just doesn't work. Its mythology is confusing and utterly arbitrary and its characters' behavior and the extent of their abilities is dependent on whatever a particular scene needs them to do. The entire film feels like an endless barrage of dei ex machina the likes of which are rarely seen outside of late-period Stephen King novels (doesn't "Mr. Snowcone" sound like a King character?), so much so that there's never any suspense because whatever obstacles Chloe faces, the script will just make up some bullshit on the spot to move her to the next scene. Possibly the most inexplicably acclaimed sci-fi film since CHRONICLE, FREAKS is a mess, but the filmmakers do alright from a technical standpoint with an obviously small budget, and they get good performances out of Hirsch and Kolker. Dern looks completely bewildered, and it's probably not in character. Check out the tragically underseen CAPTIVE STATE instead. (R, 105 mins)

In Theaters: ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD
(US/UK/China - 2019)

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Luke Perry, Julia Butters, Damian Lewis, Mike Moh, Lorenza Izzo, Damon Herriman, Zoe Bell, Lena Dunham, Rumer Willis, Samantha Robinson, Costa Ronin, Rafel Zawierucha, Nicholas Hammond, Mikey Madison, Madisen Beaty, Maya Hawke, Michael Madsen, Clifton Collins Jr, Scoot McNairy, Rebecca Gayheart, Marco Rodriguez, Clu Gulager, James Remar, Martin Kove, Brenda Vaccaro, Daniella Pick, Harley Quinn Smith, Omar Doom, James Landry Hebert, Lew Temple. (R, 161 mins)

An epic, freewheeling, kaleidoscopic wet dream for hardcore movie nerds, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD allows Quentin Tarantino to fly his geek flag like never before. What other director could get away with stopping a big-budget, wide-release summer movie cold for an impromptu lesson on the making of 1960s Italian spaghetti westerns and the Americanized pseudonyms that were often employed by their directors? A love letter to the Hollywood 50 years ago on the cusp of tumult and tragedy, HOLLYWOOD takes place in February and August of 1969 and centers on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor desperately clinging to the fading fame brought by his starring turn a decade earlier on a TV western called BOUNTY LAW. The show was cancelled when he quit to do a pair of movies that ended up bombing (and he lost out to Steve McQueen for the lead in THE GREAT ESCAPE, a role he was up for along with "the Three Georges--Peppard, Maharis, and Chakiris") and has spent the latter half of the '60s doing failed pilots and bad guy guest spots on nearly every network TV show. He's desperate enough that he's seriously considering an offer by his new agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) to head to Rome to make easy money doing spaghetti westerns and 007 knockoffs. He's also gotten a bad rep around town for his drinking, and multiple drunk driving accidents have caused him to lose his license, forcing him to be driven everywhere by his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who's also his errand boy, confidante, drinking buddy, and seemingly his only friend. When he isn't driving Rick around, house-sitting for him, or being a handyman around his house, Cliff lives in a broken down trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In with his loyal pit bull Brandy. Cliff's fortunes mirror those of Rick's: where Rick can only land quick-paycheck guest spots because of two costly big-screen flops and a troubled personal life, Cliff has become persona non grata among the Hollywood stuntman community after the mysterious death of his wife Billie (Rebecca Gayheart). It was ruled an accident but rumors still persist that he killed her and got away with it.

There's a kinship among the pair, but the laid-back Cliff tends to spend much of his time consoling the insecure and depressed Rick, who has a slight stutter offscreen and laments that he's "washed-up" and doesn't want to do "Eye-talian westerns." The third figure in the story is Rick's next-door neighbor, promising VALLEY OF THE DOLLS co-star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whose new husband, Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski (Rafel Zaweirucha), is the toast of the town with the huge success of ROSEMARY'S BABY. The lives of Rick, Cliff, and Tate will intersect in a variety of ways over the course of HOLLYWOOD's 161-minute running time, and while the specter of Charles Manson (played here by Australian actor Damon Herriman, also cast as Manson in the upcoming season of Netflix's MINDHUNTER) looms large over the proceedings, this is not another HELTER SKELTER chronicle of the Tate-LaBianca murders of August 9-10, 1969. Tarantino, with the help of veteran visual effects maestro John Dykstra (STAR WARS), vividly, almost obsessively, recreates 1969 Hollywood to the point where you feel immersed in the past. The period detail is often astonishing, from the cars to the movie marquees to the production design to its depiction of the counterculture and the perfect selection of needle-drops (bonus points for possibly being the first late '60s-set film involving hippies to not feature Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"). Rick's derisive scorn toward "the goddamn hippies" signifies his being stuck in the past of his heyday, while Cliff has a more accepting, come-what-may attitude, particularly in his recurring flirtaceous encounters from afar with hitchhiking flower child Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) until one fateful day when he finally decides to give her lift. As played by Robbie, Sharon Tate is the ingenue with a heart of gold, and the scene where she goes solo to a matinee at the Bruin in downtown L.A. to see herself in the Dean Martin "Matt Helm" adventure THE WRECKING CREW ("I'm in the movie!" she cheerfully tells the girl at the ticket booth) and gets quietly overcome with joy at the audience laughing at her comedic performance and cheering her kung-fu ass-kicking of co-star Nancy Kwan is truly touching.

Countless familiar faces play figures--both real and fictional--who wander in and out of the story, sometimes in the blink of an eye. On the entertainment front, there's Timothy Olyphant as LANCER star James Stacy, who would lose his left arm and leg in a motorcycle accident in 1973; the late Luke Perry, in his last film, as LANCER co-star Wayne Maunder; Nicholas Hammond as TV director and character actor Sam Wanamaker; and Rumer Willis as Tate friend Joanna Pettet. Emile Hirsch is Tate's ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, who still remains close to her, patiently waiting for her to leave Polanski; Damian Lewis is an uncanny Steve McQueen getting stoned at the Playboy Mansion; Mike Moh is Bruce Lee in possibly the film's funniest scene; Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell are husband-and-wife stunt coordinators on LANCER (Russell is also the film's occasional narrator and is not playing his DEATH PROOF character Stuntman Mike as some speculated); Dakota Fanning is Manson follower Squeaky Fromme; Lena Dunham, Harley Quinn Smith (Kevin's daughter), and Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) are other Manson disciples; and in a role intended for Burt Reynolds, who attended a table read with Pitt and Fanning but died just before he was scheduled to shoot his scenes, Bruce Dern is elderly and blind George Spahn, the owner of Spahn Ranch, a long out-of-commission 55-acre movie and TV western location set that was taken over by Manson and his "family."

Tarantino treats ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD as his cinematic playground, and the more well-versed you are in obscure TV and Eurocult titles of the day, the more fun you'll have with it (I would love to see Rick Dalton and Gordon Mitchell in an Antonio Margheriti Eurospy thriller called OPERAZIONE DYN-O-MITE!). As has been the case with latter-day Tarantino (never more than in the bloated THE HATEFUL EIGHT, a story that didn't need to take 168 minutes to be told), his tendency to meander does rear its head every now and again. While it's important to the story in terms of Rick's bottoming out and eventual path to redemption, the painstakingly laborious recreation of long takes and sequences from LANCER, where Rick has a guest spot as a bad guy, is the filmmaker at his most self-indulgent. At the same time, Rick's interaction on the set of LANCER with a committed, eight-year-old method actress (Julia Butters) provides HOLLYWOOD with one of its most genuinely moving moments, along with the final scene, which actually had people in the audience applauding. As good as DiCaprio and Robbie are, the secret weapon here is Pitt, who delivers a possible career-best performance. He's at the center of one of the film's strongest sequences--a visit to the Spahn Ranch that's every bit as intense and stomach-knotting as Jake Gyllenhaal's journey into the film programmer's basement in ZODIAC--and he's the key element of a shocking climactic showdown for the ages in a startling bit of revisionist history that makes this a great companion piece to Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.

Luke Perry (1966-2019)

Though mournful and elegiac at times, ultimately, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is surprisingly wistful and uplifting in its own strange way, and even though it exists in an insulated, alternate universe of make-believe (Vietnam is barely mentioned), it's indicative of an older and more reflective Tarantino. Granted, it's jaw-droppingly outrageous at times, but in the redemptive arcs of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth in an industry that's leaving them behind, there's a certain parallel with Pam Grier's and Robert Forster's characters in JACKIE BROWN, and for all the game-changing influence that PULP FICTION had 25 years ago, it's JACKIE BROWN that's looking more and more like Tarantino's best work with each passing year. Like most Tarantino films, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is compulsively rewatchable--maybe fast-forward through a couple of those LANCER scenes on subsequent revisits--and filled with several moments that are instantly etched in your moviegoing memory. In spite of his self-indulgent tendencies--which some believe came about after the unexpected death of his regular editor Sally Menke in 2010, but he was getting pretty tough to rein in way back around the time of KILL BILL--and his omnipresent foot fetish (he seems really taken with Robbie's and Qualley's), he's one of the few American auteurs for which each new film remains a legitimate and wildly unpredictable event, and to that end, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD delivers the goods.

On Blu-ray/DVD: BACKDRAFT 2 (2019) and NEVER GROW OLD (2019)

BACKDRAFT 2
(US/Belgium - 2019)

In addition to creating random franchises for its 1440 DTV division with sequels to TREMORS, THE SCORPION KING, DEATH RACE, DRAGONHEART, and JARHEAD, Universal has also decided to start raiding their back catalog for some really belated follow-ups like KINDERGARTEN COP 2 (27 years between films), HARD TARGET 2 (21 years after the first), COP AND A HALF: NEW RECRUIT (24 years), and THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE (a ludicrous 42 years after THE CAR). After 28 years, they've given us the sequel you never knew you didn't need with BACKDRAFT 2. Incredibly, they managed to get screenwriter Gregory Widen to cobble a script together, somehow convincing him to take a brief respite from cashing HIGHLANDER and THE PROPHECY royalty checks for the rest of his life. Also returning are William Baldwin as Brian McCaffrey, now a Chicago fire chief, and Donald Sutherland as the incarcerated Ronald Bartel, the Hannibal Lecter of Windy City arsonists. The story focuses on Chief McCaffrey's hothead nephew Sean (Joe Anderson as the son of Kurt Russell's late character from the 1991 original), a plays-by-his-own-rules arson whisperer prone to inner monologues that begin with statements like "We only come out at night..." when confronting a fire and "Stay out of my burn!" when higher-ranking fire department desk jockeys and pencil-pushers question his methods. Forced to take on rookie partner Maggie Rening (Alisha Bailey) and greeting her with "You know anything about this work?," Sean--who also says things like "I don't like fire...but I understand it"--is convinced he's dealing with a serial arsonist in a convoluted plot that ends up involving mercenary contractors selling missile production secrets to either the Russians or the Chinese. Or something. Who gives a shit?

Less a sequel to BACKDRAFT and more like a pilot for a bad spinoff series that got rejected by Crackle, BACKDRAFT 2 never gets around the insufferably grating performance of Anderson (who was a great Mason Verger when he replaced Michael Pitt on the third season of HANNIBAL), who comes off as one of the most off-putting heroes in quite some time. Much of that is due to the British actor seriously overcompensating with his American accent, a problem facing every cast member aside from Baldwin (who's really looking like Alec these days) and Sutherland, as this was shot mostly in Romania and Canada with an almost-entirely British cast (more than everyone else, the guy playing Sean's ATF nemesis is seriously struggling with his American accent). At least Baldwin emerges unscathed in his handful of scenes, but Sutherland, who couldn't have spent more than a day on the set, is a hammy embarrassment as the gleeful, cackling Bartel, who's consulted by Sean, correctly assuming that the arsonists have sought the advice of "the master." So terribly-written and cartoonishly cliched in almost every aspect that it practically qualifies as self-parody, BACKDRAFT 2, directed by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego (APOLLO 18, THE HOLLOW POINT), offers a hero who lives in an abandoned warehouse that's approximately the size of an airplane hangar, a potential drinking game every time someone gravely intones "It's a backdraft," a climactic showdown in a massive shipyard, a shitty theme song by what sounds like an Imagine Dragons cover band, and what might go down as the funniest bad guy demise of the year. It's one of the most cynical name-brand DTV cash-ins to come down the pike since, well, THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE, and that also goes for BACKDRAFT director Ron Howard, who gets a courtesy executive producer credit but I'm willing to bet he won't even know this exists until his accountant shows him his 2019 income tax return. As for Universal dusting off ancient catalog titles for really late Redbox sequels, what's next? May I suggest Scott Eastwood in HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER 2? (R, 102 mins)



NEVER GROW OLD
(Ireland/Luxembourg/Belgium/France - 2019)

A muddy and bloody western of the post-PROPOSITION sort, NEVER GROW OLD is part of a recent trend of underseen revisionist European art westerns, similar in tone and style to SLOW WEST, THE SALVATION, and BRIMSTONE. Written and directed by Irish filmmaker Ivan Kavanagh (THE CANAL), the film is set in 1849 in a puritanical haven of Garlow, a town on the California Trail. Overzealous Preacher Pike (Danny Webb) effectively rules Garlow, having banished alcohol, gambling, and prostitution to its economic detriment. Most of the businesses have left, and the residents are following suit. Garlow's undertaker/carpenter, Irish immigrant Patrick Tate (Emile Hirsch), doesn't have much work, but he does have a pregnant French-born wife, Audrey (Deborah Francois), son Thomas (Quinn Topper Marcus), and young daughter Emma (Molly McCann). Patrick tries to talk Audrey into leaving on the two-month journey to the promised land of California, but she hopes to build a good, Christian life in Garlow. That goes to hell on a dark and stormy night with the arrival of outlaw Dutch Albert (John Cusack, looking like cult filmmaker Richard Stanley) and his two cohorts, Sicily (Camille Pistone), and hulking mute Dumb-Dumb (Sam Louwyck), who carries his preserved severed tongue and uses it as a comedic prop. Albert is in pursuit of Bill Crabtree, an ex-partner who cheated him out of some money, and intimidates Patrick into taking him to see Crabtree's wife (Anne Coesens), who claims he left her and their teenage daughter a year ago. Disappointed that there's no booze, gambling, or women in Garlow, Albert decides to buy the decrepit hotel, reopening it as a saloon with gambling and whores, defying Preacher Pike and causing an escalating body count, which keeps Patrick busy but puts a strain on his family, especially when Dumb-Dumb decides he wants Audrey for himself and Patrick is too afraid to do anything about it.

NEVER GROW OLD opens with some thinly-veiled jabs at evangelicals and quickly takes a turn for the relentlessly downbeat, with Patrick constantly being prodded, bullied, and emasculated by the ruthless Albert, who doesn't get much resistance in his takeover of Garlow, either from the all-talk Preacher Pike or the useless sheriff (Tim Ahern), and you know this is the type of movie where a meek character like Patrick will only be pushed so far before he snaps. Albert's atrocities are endless, particularly when Crabtree's financially-strapped wife begs to be hired as a prostitute, and he'll only take her on if the teenage daughter is part of the package. Dutch Albert is a character who makes UNFORGIVEN's Little Bill Daggett look affable, and to NEVER GROW OLD's benefit, this is the John Cusack that even John Cusack seems to have forgotten about most of the time. He's absolutely terrifying as a western outlaw version of Frank Booth, and it's easily his best performance since 2014's LOVE & MERCY. NEVER GROW OLD doesn't blaze any new trails, but it makes an unsettling impression with its grim atmosphere, a climax as violent as Travis Bickle's rampage in TAXI DRIVER, and Cusack bringing to life a personification of pure evil that sticks with you. Look for this one to find a cult following pretty quickly. (R, 100 mins)

In Theaters: LONE SURVIVOR (2013)

LONE SURVIVOR
(US - 2013)

Written and directed by Peter Berg.  Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Eric Bana, Yousuf Azami, Ali Suliman, Alexander Ludwig, Jerry Ferrara, Sammy Sheik, Rich Ting, Dan Bilzerian, Rohan Chand. (R, 121 mins)

LONE SURVIVOR is an often visceral and unflinchingly brutal adaptation of Marcus Luttrell's 2005 chronicle of his time as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan.  Played in the film by Mark Wahlberg, Luttrell was involved Operation Red Wings, a four-man operation to take out Ahmad Shah (Yousuf Azami), a major Taliban figure.  As the title hardly warrants a spoiler alert, things didn't go as planned.  Making their way into the remote Kunar Province mountains, Luttrell, Lt. Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch), and Matt "Axe" Axelson (Ben Foster) find themselves outnumbered and unable to contact the military base, and opt to secure positions higher in the mountains but they're stumbled upon by three goat herders.  After deciding to cut them loose--the film presents it as a debate, but Luttrell has said Murphy made the call as per rules of engagement--the four SEALs make a run for it to wait for extraction but are soon overwhelmed by Shah's forces, who outnumber them 4-to-1.

Writer/director Peter Berg (THE RUNDOWN, THE KINGDOM, BATTLESHIP) handles this extended firefight sequence--which takes up about a third of the running time--quite well aside from an occasional over-reliance on shaky-cam.  Berg takes the time to lay out the positions of the principles to give the audience the lay of the land and to watch the methodology at work.  You'll be thoroughly convinced these four actors have been to hell and back, from the utterly convincing makeup work to the sounds of bullets tearing through flesh and bones slamming into rocks as the SEALs roll down a mountainside.  Luttrell served as a technical advisor and Berg spent time with US forces in Iraq to observe them in action and make the depiction of the Red Wings ordeal as ultra-realistic as possible.  He even included little details to honor the memories of those involved, like a shot of Lt. Cmdr. Erik Cristensen (Eric Bana) wearing Birkenstocks at the base.  Cristensen was killed during an attempted rescue of Luttrell and a look at his Wikipedia page reveals that his mother requested he be buried wearing his ubiquitous Birkenstocks. It mostly works--there's a level of raw, take-no-prisoners ferocity here that doesn't approach SAVING PRIVATE RYAN levels but is easily in the same class as BLACK HAWK DOWN.

But to get there, you have to endure some frequently tiresome military clichés.  Berg wants to honor these fallen heroes, and he succeeds, but the opening and closing narration by Wahlberg-as-Luttrell sounds like a bad high-school essay, especially when he's talking about a "fire within."  The same goes for sniper Axe positioning himself and grunting "I am the reaper" or "You can die for your country, but I'm gonna live for mine!"  or Luttrell's "I'm about to punch their time card." Of course, this is probably an accurate depiction but it comes off as tired, macho warrior chest-thumping more akin to a RAMBO movie.  Fortunately, Berg keeps the jingoism to a minimum, especially in the last third when Luttrell is found and given shelter by Muhammad Gulab (Ali Suliman) and the members of a peaceful Afghani village who lay their own lives on the line, knowing the Taliban are after the American.  These anti-Taliban Afghanis, living by a 2000-year-old code of honor, were instrumental in saving Luttrell's life and let's be honest, a lot of Hollywood depictions of Luttrell's experiences would've eliminated them entirely in order to spend more time waving the flag.  Berg's script doesn't allow for much in the way of character development other than Murphy planning a wedding, Dietz trying to pick some interior design colors for his girlfriend back home, and Axe being married.  Oddly enough, it's Luttrell who gets the least amount of character sketching.  But it works--it's a BAND OF BROTHERS/"fuckin' A, bro!" film first and foremost, but knowing these men a little more might've given it greater emotional weight.  While Wahlberg is fine, his breakdown in the climax feels, through no fault of his, like a lightweight revamp of a similar scene at the end of CAPTAIN PHILLIPS which represented arguably the best acting of Tom Hanks' career.  Aided by an effectively minimalist score by post-rock outfit Explosions in the Sky, LONE SURVIVOR isn't a war movie classic, but it's good, accomplishing what it sets out to do, and does so in a way that honors the heroes--American and Afghani--of Operation Red Wings and its aftermath.