MESSAGE FROM THE KING (UK/France/Belgium - 2017) Directed by Fabrice du Welz. Written by Stephen Cornwell and Oliver Butcher. Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Luke Evans, Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, Natalie Martinez, Tom Felton, Jake Weary, Chris Mulkey, Dale Dickey, Tom Wright, Lucan Melkonian, Arthur Darbinyan, Diego Josef, Sibongile Mlambo. (Unrated, 103 mins) Belgian filmmaker Fabrice du Welz made his name with 2004's CALVAIRE, his contribution to the then-popular wave of "extreme" horror coming out of France, which included films like Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION, Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S), Julien Maury and Alexander Bustillo's INSIDE, and Pascal Laugier's MARTYRS. It was several years before du Welz returned with the mostly English-language "trip upriver as metaphor for journey into madness" horror film VINYAN, which bombed internationally and ended up going straight-to-DVD in the US. Du Welz took another extended break, returning with 2014's ALLELUIA, a grim chronicle of the same spree killers whose story was the basis of both the 1969 cult classic THE HONEYMOON KILLERS as well as the little-seen 2006 noir throwback LONELY HEARTS, and the crime thriller COLT 45, the latter of which is still waiting for a US release. With the Netflix Original film MESSAGE FROM THE KING, du Welz is working in America for the first time. A mainstream revenge thriller with echoes of THE LIMEY and TAKEN, MESSAGE focuses on Jacob King (42 and GET ON UP's Chadwick Boseman, soon to headline Marvel's BLACK PANTHER), who's just arrived in L.A. from Cape Town, South Africa looking for his younger sister Bianca (Sibongile Mlambo) after an urgent, garbled message that she's "in trouble" and has "something they want." Grilled by customs and with only $600 on him ("That's not much for a vacation," he's told. "I'll make it last," he replies), King pounds the pavement, first heading to Bianca's address only to be told by her hard-partying neighbor Trish (Natalie Martinez) that she vanished after her husband split, leaving Bianca to care for his 11-year-old son. Looking through some belongings Bianca left with Trish, King pieces together enough information to send him to Zico (Lucan Melkonian), a flunky for Ducmajian (Arthur Darbinyan), an Eastern European crime boss operating in SoCal. Armed with just a bicycle chain, King beats the shit out of Zico and some other goons, eventually learning that Bianca had a serious drug problem and was likely working as a prostitute. He makes contact with--and bicycle-chains--Bianca's drug dealer Frankie (a nothing bit part for former Draco Malfoy Tom Felton), and, from paging through Bianca's appointment book, gets some info from sleazy Beverly Hills dentist Dr. Paul Wentworth (Luke Evans) before finally checking out the morgue and identifying Bianca's body from an identical tattoo they each have on their right arms. He tells the attendant that the body is not his sister's, so needless to say, King is going full vigilante and making the guilty parties pay on his own.
King's trek through the skeezy underbelly of L.A.--captured very effectively by cinematographer Monika Lenczewska--eventually directs him to blockbuster movie producer Mike Preston (Alfred Molina), a pederast with a never-ending supply of young boys, including Bianca's stepson Armand (Diego Josef), sold by a desperate Bianca, who was forced into prostitution in order to pay off her dead husband's debt to Ducmajian before someone had her killed. Things get even more complicated when King finds a flash drive stashed in pack of Bianca's Marlboros that has some very incriminating evidence tying together Bianca, Ducmajian, Preston, and mob-connected mayoral candidate Frank Leary (Chris Mulkey). Shitbag Wentworth decides to use the situation to bilk some extra money out of both Preston and Ducmajian, but King is constantly a step ahead of all of them, resorting to some vintage YOJIMBO tactics to play all the sides against the other, inevitably leading to a final showdown.
MESSAGE FROM THE KING is fairly formulaic stuff with little in the way of surprises, except for one final reveal that's unnecessary. The script by Stephen Cornwell and Oliver Butcher (they also wrote the Liam Neeson thriller UNKNOWN) relies far too much on contrivance and makes things way too easy for King, a guy who's never been to L.A. before but gets around rather effortlessly and has the good fortune to stumble upon just the info he needs at all times (for instance, visiting Wentworth on a mere hunch, of course he spots Zico walking out after having his jaw reset following his run-in with King's bike chain). A few plot strands are left dangling, and Du Welz has no idea what to do with his female characters, with Trish completely vanishing from the movie as King befriends the only-in-the-movies "hooker with a heart of gold" and single mom Kelly (Teresa Palmer), who emphatically states "I never fuck them," drawing the line at blowjobs, a PRETTY WOMAN-esque bit of sugarcoating that just doesn't seem like a plausible caveat that's available to a battered hooker in an unrelentingly ugly environment as harsh and brutal as the one presented in MESSAGE FROM THE KING. Both Trish and Kelly are underdeveloped characters that would've been better served and made stronger if they were combined into one, especially since Trish just disappears. The villains are stock Eastern European scumbags, Evans is appropriately reptilian and Molina is thoroughly repulsive, whether he's ogling his boy toys or being a racist asshole (with a gun pointed at King, he justifies his reasons for shooting him with "Breaking and entering...self-defense...plus you're black").
MESSAGE FROM THE KING drags in the meandering dialogue scenes with King and Kelly, but ultimately, it's Boseman's intense, ferocious performance that drives it along, carrying this thing on his shoulders with an enraged glare and a very convincing South African accent. Even when the by-the-numbers script is making things entirely too easy for King, Boseman keeps you engaged and rooting for him. Though the pace lags in the middle after a furiously fast-moving opening act, MESSAGE FROM THE KING is purely commercial revenge thriller fare that could've easily been a nationwide theatrical release, but Netflix picked it up at last year's Toronto Film Festival, and relatively speaking, it's one of their better recent "Netflix Original" offerings. Du Welz acquits himself well in this sort of mainstream surrounding, but the purists and CALVAIRE fans can also take heart in knowing that he does indulge in his "extreme horror" past with a few moments of some truly startling violence and splatter, thanks to mostly to the flesh-ripping abilities of King's trusty bicycle chain. Netflix is probably the best fit for this, but even with its many shortcomings, Boseman makes it worth seeing as a decent time-killer.
When it opened in early 2015, the UK import THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY was the other BDSM film, the art-house counterpart to the more commercial and mega-hyped FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. Written and directed by Peter Strickland, whose BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO was a paranoia nightmare told in the vein of a 1970s Italian giallo, THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY follows numerous stylistic tropes seen in BERBERIAN, namely an unabashed adoration of the 1970s and an intricate and fascinating sound design. It's also a bit more substantive than the intriguing but empty BERBERIAN, which opened with a terrific set-up and then didn't really go any deeper than the surface. THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY's much-discussed opening credits sequence would appear to portend a softcore '70s sexploitation outing along the lines of a smutty British sex farce or an EMMANUELLE film, complete with a prominent credit for "Perfume by Je Suis Gizella." It's the story of a BDSM relationship between older, erudite lepidopterist Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and younger, demure protege Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna). Their role-playing takes on an almost JEANNE DIELMAN sense of precision repetition: Evelyn arrives at Cynthia's house, and Cynthia proceeds to make her clean the house, do the laundry, and be treated in all sorts of demeaning fashions, whether it's being interrupted or Cynthia making a mess where Evelyn just cleaned. Often, Cynthia will demand a foot massage. This repeats until we see that they're a loving couple and this is their intimate routine. But Strickland gradually reveals more: it's Cynthia who's the submissive, giving into Evelyn's domination and her demands to be humiliated. It's ultimately a story of the compromises, concessions, and the give-and-take involved in any committed relationship, whether it's one party acquiescing and allowing the use of an old trunk as a coffin for the other to be bound and held in as punishment, or whether one draws the line at treating the other as a "human toilet."
Considering its subject matter, BURGUNDY, whose creative spark was ignited, oddly enough, when Strickland turned down an offer to remake Jess Franco's 1974 film LORNA THE EXORCIST, is hardly the Skinemax softcore throwback you'd expect from the opening credits (which, as amusing and dead-on retro as they are, end up feeling like a stunt that has little to do with what transpires later) and the butterfly symbolism a tad too heavy-handed an obvious (and reminiscent of the 1995 art film ANGELS & INSECTS), but it manages to convey an overtly explicit feel without being very graphic at all. There's barely any nudity and only some fleeting onscreen sex. Yet Strickland's film is a hazy fever dream of erotica, with plenty of caressed skin, a couple of tastefully-executed sex scenes (he keeps the water sports heard but not seen), two excellent performances (Knudsen, in particular), and enough lingering shots of Knudsen's and D'Anna's feet to send it to the top of Quentin Tarantino's Best of 2015 list. (Unrated, 104 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant) THE CONNECTION (France/Belgium - 2014; US release 2015)
This French crime saga directed and co-written by Cedric Jiminez purports to tell the French side of the drug trade depicted in THE FRENCH CONNECTION. Despite his love of handheld cameras for maximum immediacy, Jiminez never achieves the kind of wired, adrenalized intensity that William Friedkin established 44 years ago, and aside from the immediate art-house cred that comes with being a subtitled, foreign-language film, THE CONNECTION is utterly and frustratingly ordinary in every way. Jiminez borrows some Friedkin here, some Scorsese there, a good-sized portion of Ridley Scott's AMERICAN GANGSTER, and a heaping helping of Michael Mann's HEAT in its mirror-image motif of law enforcer vs. criminal and how they're flip sides of the same coin. Just to hammer it home, Jiminez even casts two actors who look very much alike, almost like you expect him to pull a Bunuel switch at the midpoint and have the stars switch roles. At least that would've been something unpredictable. THE ARTIST Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin busts his ass to enliven the uninspired material, often channeling the pent-up rage of a young De Niro as Pierre Michel, a Juvenile Court magistrate in 1975 Marseilles. He's transferred over to the Organized Crime unit and ordered to do everything at his disposal to bring down drug kingpin Gaetan Zampa (Gilles Lellouche), the key figure in the Marseilles-to-NYC heroin trade.
What follows is over two hours of Michel and his task force of interchangeable, nondescript supporting actors unable to make anything stick to teflon Zampa during an obsessive investigation that lasts from 1975 to 1981, and both men see their private lives suffer as a result of their respective professions: Zampa's wife (Melanie Doutey) is temporarily placated when her husband gives her a disco to run (cue Blondie's "Call Me," which must mean the producers couldn't secure the rights to "Heart of Glass," the mandatory song for every establishing shot of a disco in a movie set in the 1970s), but Mrs. Michel (Celine Sallette) grows weary (as will the viewer) of Michel being called away by work from literally every meal he's able to have at home with the family. You could almost make a drinking game out of it. And of course, just as in HEAT, Michel and Zampa have a mid-film confrontation where they acknowledge they're not much different from one another, but they best stay out of the other's way. Jiminez admirably doesn't get sidetracked by paying too much attention to period detail other than long sideburns, a detour to Manhattan that shows off a badly CGI'd shot of the half-built Twin Towers (which were completed by 1975 anyway), and one character name-dropping John Travolta and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. Dujardin and Lellouche are excellent, and Benoit Magimel and Cyril Lecomte have some standout moments as some Zampa criminal associates, but they all deserve more worthy material than this rote, paint-by-numbers non-epic that plays like lukewarm leftovers of too many better movies that inspired it. (R, 135 mins) ALLELUIA (Belgium/France - 2014; US release 2015)
With his 2004 feature debut, the rural, backwoods-set CALVAIRE, Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz became linked with the French "extreme horror" movement popularized by the likes of Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION (2003), Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's INSIDE (2007), Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S) (2008) and Pascal Laugier's MARTYRS (2008). Du Welz followed CALVAIRE with the ambitious but unfocused VINYAN (2008), an English-language "ramshackle-boat-journey-upriver as metaphor for journey-into-madness" horror film that took too long to get to its genuinely unnerving, terrifying finale. VINYAN tanked worldwide before going straight-to-DVD in the US in 2009 and Du Welz vanished. He resurfaced in 2014 with a pair of thrillers, ALLELUIA and COLT 45, though only the former has received a US release (Du Welz's next project will bring him to Hollywood 12 years after he made a splash with CALVAIRE--the Chadwick Boseman action thriller MESSAGE FROM THE KING is due out in early 2016). ALLELUIA is a very loose and aggressively unhinged retelling of the 1940s "Lonely Hearts Murders," where spinster nurse Martha Beck and con-artist/gigolo Raymond Fernandez pursued victims through personal ads and proceeded to rob and murder the women whose ads Fernandez answered, with Beck posing as his sister. The story was previously depicted in the 1969 cult classic THE HONEYMOON KILLERS, with Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco, the 1996 Mexican film DEEP CRIMSON, and the barely-released 2006 thriller LONELY HEARTS, which focused on the detectives (John Travolta, James Gandolfini) pursuing the Lonely Hearts serial killers (Jared Leto, Salma Hayek). Du Welz's version updates the story to the present-day, with lonely morgue attendant and single mother Gloria (frequent Almodovar star Lola Duenas) meeting Michel (Laurent Lucas) after her friend Madeleine (Stephane Bissot) posts her profile on an online dating site. After falling hard for Michel even knowing he's a scheming con artist, Gloria impulsively leaves her young daughter with Madeleine and hits the road with Michel, finding women on dating sites and often going for the long con, with Michel marrying them and Gloria posting as his sister. The adventure stirs some kind of psychosis in Gloria, who grows insanely jealous when Michel has to sleep with their marks, which usually results in Gloria going off the deep end and brutally murdering the women. Michel becomes her unwitting accomplice, helping her dispose of the bodies--her job experience at the morgue comes in handy--but as their con games go on, Gloria grows increasingly deranged, with Michel unable to control her and her wild impulses.
Du Welz sometimes gets a little too goofy for his own good, such as Gloria getting a somber musical number before taking a saw to the corpse of the couple's latest victim, or a half-baked attempt at putting a vague supernatural spin on things with Raymond's prayer rituals and a bizarre sequence of a naked Michel and Gloria dancing by a raging fire, but ALLELUIA is a grim and disturbing sleeper that sneaks up on you. A lot of it has to do with the almost claustrophobic immediacy of the grainy, 16mm cinematography by Manuel Dacosse (AMER, THE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS), but most of it is the thoroughly off-the-chain performance of Duenas. Du Welz and Duenas pull a cunning bait-and-switch with how plain and mousy she's introduced. You question the logic of her going to work the morning after meeting Michel and having him stay the night, then leaving her daughter with him. Once they're a couple and on the road, Michel soon realizes he has no idea what he's gotten himself into, and doesn't enter into his con games with murder in mind until Gloria puts him in that position. Michel is just a scheming heel who's trying to con lonely women out of their money--it's he who becomes an accomplice to murder and it's he who's forced into murder by Gloria, in whom he's awakened a sleeping giant prone to uncontrolled fits of rage and limb-flailing meltdowns. It's a slightly different take on the subject that seems to have been chosen simply because Du Welz wanted Duenas to let it rip with wild abandon, and she obliges. There are some instances where Du Welz is distracted by what he probably perceived to be transgressive shock value, like a scene where Gloria masturbates while Michel sucks on her toes and jerks off, or when he stages one of the most precariously-framed mainstream cinema blowjobs in recent memory, but ALLELUIA is a mostly effective bit of grim bleakness that stumbles here and there, didn't need the dumb musical number and could use a stronger ending, but Duenas' mad, almost possessed performance makes it a must-see. (Unrated, 93 mins)
