HOW IT ENDS (US - 2018) Directed by David M. Rosenthal. Written by Brooks McLaren. Cast: Theo James, Forest Whitaker, Kat Graham, Kerry Bishe, Mark O'Brien, Nicole Ari Parker, Grace Dove. (Unrated, 113 mins) Another dud from Netflix's increasingly irrelevant movie division, HOW IT ENDS might be more accurately titled WILL IT END?, an apocalyptic slog that drags on for a long two hours before an infuriating non-ending that makes the entire endeavor look like a busted series pilot. The project was in gestation for several years, with Blake McLaren's script making the fabled "Black List" of buzzed-about but unproduced screenplays way back in 2010. Director David M. Rosenthal has a couple of acclaimed indies under his belt with JANIE JONES and A SINGLE SHOT, and he's got the remake of Adrian Lyne's JACOB'S LADDER already in the can for 2019, but HOW IT ENDS has nothing to say and offers nothing new to the end-of-the-world canon. Will (Theo James of the DIVERGENT films) is a Seattle lawyer and expectant father with his longtime girlfriend Sam (Kat Graham of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES). He's got business in Chicago and plans on staying an extra night to have dinner with Sam's parents and formally ask her stern, ex-Marine father Tom (Forest Whitaker) for his daughter's hand in marriage. Tom is a humorless, passive-aggressive asshole who still holds a grudge against Will for causing his boat to sink five years ago. As a result, dinner goes about as well as expected, with Tom instantly lashing out at Will even with his patient wife Paula (Nicole Ari Parker) telling him to lay off, with Will leaving before he even gets around to the whole marriage thing. The next morning, Will is on the phone with Sam and it cuts out, and when he's at O'Hare, the power goes out, phones are dead, and all flights are cancelled when the entire US power grid shuts down just after breaking news reports of a "seismic event" off the coast of California.
Will makes his way back to his future in-laws, where Tom is sending Paula to stay with their son before driving to Seattle to find Sam, telling Will "The only question is...are you going with me?" While not quite GUESS WHO'S COMING TO THE APOCALYPSE, it promises to be a tense road trip, especially since society has devolved into a hellscape of complete chaos and anarchy in a matter of hours (sort of like CELL, another, even worse end-of-days tale). Danger lurks at every mile marker as America suddenly makes Bartertown look like a vacation resort. They pick up a passenger with Native American mechanic Ricki (Grace Dove, who played Leonardo DiCaprio's doomed wife in THE REVENANT), but face constant obstacles, usually from assorted grizzled, DELIVERANCE-esque miscreants looking to steal gas and guns. Strange weather develops, from powerful storms to unbearable heat, with random earthquakes and birds migrating in strange formations. They're forced off of the cross-country I-90 and onto endless and ominous country roads with a dark, cloudy horizon that makes the apocalypse look like the old Simpson/Bruckheimer Films logo.
A few weeks ago, I reviewed IN DARKNESS and prematurely concluded that it would have the dumbest movie ending of 2018. I was wrong.
HOW IT ENDS doesn't explain the "how" of anything, not the least of which is how are they still trying to make Theo James happen? It just becomes a series of set pieces with rote apocalypse tropes in search of a point. It's like THE WALKING DEAD without the zombies and with...weather? Who knows? There's no hook here. Will eventually ends up making his way to the ruins of Seattle alone, and in the last 15 minutes, the filmmakers introduce Jeremiah (Mark O'Brien), a new major character who seems abruptly wedged in to serve as a third-act antagonist, apparently seeing the end of civilization as we know it as an opportunity to catch Sam on the rebound based on the assumption that Will was dead in Chicago. This is where they're taking the story? This is what it's all leading up to? A creep with a crush on the hero's girlfriend? "We have a bond! We thought you were dead!" Jeremiah sneers, searching for a mustache to twirl. Dude, it's been six days. Which is about how long HOW IT ENDS feels, as the drive from Chicago to Seattle seems to play out in real time. Character behavior and situations are idiotic--after some guys ambush them and steal their gas cans, Will, Tom, and Ricki speed up and follow them through a raging wildfire, firing a gun at the car that's filled with the combustiblegasoline they need. And marvel at how easily Tom manages to talk his way through a military roadblock just by saying "I was in the Marine Corps." Their arcs are equally ludicrous--Will has never touched a gun and is appalled by the very idea that they exist, but the next day, he's a crack shot firing out of a speeding car. Whitaker has little to do other than look pissed-off, and it comes as no surprise when he finally comes to respect Will and stop being such a hardass with him. The only remotely interesting character is Dove's Ricki, so of course, the filmmakers just have her wander off, never to be seen again. Much like HOW IT ENDS after its first weekend streaming on its way to the ever-growing scrap heap of forgettable Netflix Original films.
1984's THE KILLING FIELDS and 1986's THE MISSION earned Roland Joffe a lifetime pass to the Respected Filmmakers Club, but his career's been in a near-constant state of freefall for the better part of 25 years. His last good movie was 1998's underrated modern noir GOODBYE LOVER, and in the years since, he crashed and burned with 2007's unwatchable CAPTIVITY, a repugnant SAW ripoff made at the height of the torture porn craze that has to go down in the annals of cinema as one of the most shocking and depressing downfalls for a once-revered filmmaker. Joffe's subsequent films range from forgettable at best to embarrassing at worst (who knows how he got roped into directing the t.A.T.u.-inspired Mischa Barton vehicle YOU AND I, which went straight to DVD in 2012 after three years on the shelf?), but THE FORGIVEN almost qualifies as a return to form. It's ponderous and slow-moving, and has to dumb it down for the audience (opening with a caption that defines "apartheid"), but it's also sincere, well-acted, and get better as it goes on. Set in 1996 in post-apartheid South Africa under President Nelson Mandela, THE FORGIVEN centers on Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Forest Whitaker) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a restorative justice body whose goal is to grant amnesty for those guilty of human rights violations, all in the hopes of the country coming together to put its past behind. Tutu is assessing the amnesty candidacy of Piet Blomfeld (Eric Bana), an ex-death squad member in a maximum security Cape Town prison. Blomfeld doesn't seem interested in clearing his conscience--he taunts the Archbishop with the kaffir slur and enthusiastically recounts his most vile crimes against black South Africans--but Tutu senses something in him when it comes to a court case involving two murdered teenagers that connects Blomfeld with two other death squad cohorts--Francois Schmidt (Jeff Gum) and Hansi Coetzee (Morne Visser)--who are now guards in the very prison housing him.
Based on the Michael Ashton play The Archbishop and the Antichrist, THE FORGIVEN was scripted by Ashton and Joffe and expands on the play by adding a subplot involving a 17-year-old black inmate (Nandiphile Mbeshu) forced into the attempted murder of Blomfeld to establish his cred on the inside only to be taken under his target's wing. Blomfeld's demonstration of a capacity to forgive and his AMERICAN HISTORY X/Come-to-Jesus moment where he realizes the error of his ways never quite come off as believable, despite Joffe's ham-fisted attempts to hammer it home by providing the loathsome, rage-filled racist with a tragic backstory to excuse the monster he's been for his entire adult life. But Bana is good, as is Whitaker, despite being forced to act around an almost comically large prosthetic nose that makes him look less like Desmond Tutu and more like Squidward from SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS. The long scenes between Tutu and Blomfeld (a fictional composite) constituted Ashton's play and here, with Blomfeld's unapologetic and horrifically detailed descriptions of his misdeeds, almost makes these sequences play like a post-apartheid EXORCIST III with back and forth monologues by the two stars. The climactic courtroom showdown between an on-trial Coetzee and the grieving mother (Thandi Makhubele) of two teenagers brutally slaughtered by Blomfeld while Coetzee and Schmidt looked on is powerful and unexpectedly moving. THE FORGIVEN is a mixed bag--it's too slow and meandering and the story arc for Blomfeld smacks of plot convenience--but it has its moments, especially once you can get around Whitaker's cartoonishly fake nose and focus on his performance. It's not enough to say the 72-year-old Joffe is back per se, but THE FORGIVEN shows that there might be some signs of life. (R, 120 mins)
BENT (Spain/US - 2018)
After winning an Oscar for co-writing CRASH with Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco made the little-seen crime drama 10TH AND WOLF and moved on to TV, creating the acclaimed but short-lived series THE BLACK DONNELLYS. He wrote and directed the straight-to-VOD BENT, his first feature film in over a decade, and it's a thoroughly generic and utterly forgettable present-day noir-inspired cop thriller. Disgraced ex-cop Danny Gallagher (Karl Urban) has just been paroled after serving three years for the killing of an undercover officer during a botched drug bust set up by his broke, gambling-addicted partner Charlie (Vincent Spano). They were supposed to nail scumbag businessman Driscoll (John Finn), but Charlie ended up getting killed, Gallagher took two bullets, and both Charlie's and Gallagher's names were dragged through the gutter after Driscoll framed them as corrupt, or "bent" cops on the take. Once he's out, Gallagher makes like an unlicensed and uncharismatic Philip Marlowe, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery that may involve the car bomb death of the wife of a Driscoll associate, as well as shady and untrustworthy femme fatale government agent Rebecca (a miscast Sofia Vergara), who's been ordered to keep Gallagher from digging any further, an assignment that inevitably involves showing up unannounced at his ramshackle pier house and immediately disrobing and stepping into the steaming shower with him.
Based on a series of Gallagher novels by J.P. O'Donnell, BENT is hopelessly muddled (there's even a red herring about "Arab terrorists" being involved), with an uncharacteristically dull Urban on what seems to be one of the least urgent quests for vengeance you'll ever see. BENT is filled with would-be hard-boiled dialogue that rarely works, mainly because it's delivered in such a bland fashion. It's the kind of movie that has a climactic showdown and shootout at a shipyard. It's the kind of movie where the bad guy delivers a long-winded, Christopher Walken-esque speech ("You know, in Alaska, they smoke this fish on the beach...") while intimidatingly slicing salmon with a huge knife. It's the kind of movie where you know a prominently-billed name actor has to have more to do with what's going on since he's barely in it until the last 15 minutes. Also with Andy Garcia as Gallagher's retired, fatherly cop mentor who pops up periodically to tell him to let the past go and get out of town, BENT doesn't even muster the energy to be a harmless time-killer on a slow night. Nobody seems really invested in it, and New Orleans is rather unconvincingly played by Rome, of all places. At least everyone got a nice Italian vacation out of it. (R, 96 mins)
ROGUE ONE (US - 2016) Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Riz Ahmed, Jimmy Smits, Genevieve O'Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Fares Fares, Valene King, Anthony Daniels, Spencer Wilding, Daniel Naprous, Guy Henry, Paul Kasey, Warwick Davis, Ingvild Deila, Ian McIlhinney, Michael Smiley, Angus MacInnes, Drewe Henley, voices of James Earl Jones, Stephen Stanton. (PG-13, 134 mins) The first standalone STAR WARS film chronicles the events leading up to Princess Leia getting the plans for the Death Star at the beginning of A NEW HOPE back in 1977. ROGUE ONE had a notoriously troubled production, with a major script overhaul by BOURNE series screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who was also rumored to have supervised extensive reshoots, with a particular focus on the last 30 minutes, after no one was satisfied with director Gareth Edwards' rough cut. Indeed, many shots and some dialogue ("I rebel") from the first teaser trailer are nowhere to be seen and heard in the finished film, and with three credited editors along with an "additional editing" credit for veteran Stuart Baird, who's long had a reputation as Hollywood's go-to guy to work his magic in salvaging a wreckage, it's obvious to anyone schooled in today's cinema that the making of ROGUE ONE was far from smooth sailing (post-production ended on November 28, 2016, 18 days before the film's release date). Edwards, whose MONSTERS was a monster movie with very little in the way of monsters, and whose GODZILLA relegated Godzilla to little more than a cameo, is a director who takes unpredictability to a detrimental extreme. He seems to go out of his way to avoid giving the audience what they came to see, and for some reason, this has earned him accolades. Right from the start, it's apparent that Edwards is attempting to make ROGUE ONE his own by not including the iconic opening crawl that's been a staple of the STAR WARS canon for nearly 40 years.
The film gets off to the clunkiest start this side of RULES DON'T APPLY, jumping from location to location until the pieces are in place and the plot finally set in motion. Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is a scientist involved in the creation of the Death Star, the Imperial Forces' "planet destroyer" and a project with which he morally disagrees but worked on it since it was going to be built with or without him. Erso's wife is killed and he's taken prisoner by Imperial weapons director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), while his young daughter Jyn is taken in by Rebel leader Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). 15 years later, the grown Jyn (Felicity Jones) is a prisoner given a shot at freedom if she agrees to accompany Rebel spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on a mission to find her father. Believing Erso is working with Krennic and Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry, whose face has been replaced by a CGI recreation of the late Peter Cushing, who played Tarkin in STAR WARS and died in 1994), Andor's actual orders, unbeknownst to Jyn, are to kill Erso. Assembling a ragtag motley crew of outcasts and miscreants--reconditioned droid K-2SO (motion-captured by Alan Tudyk), Zatoichi-like blind warrior Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), mercenary Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and defector Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed)--they embark on their search for Galen Erso, with Andor having a change of heart once it's known that yes, Erso took a major role in designing the Death Star, but he included a flaw in its exhaust system to give it a major weakness and render it ultimately ineffective.
ROGUE ONE has a lot of shout-outs and callbacks to the rest of the franchise, whether it's appearances by Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits) or Dr. Evazan (played here by Michael Smiley), who was famously bounced from the Mos Eisley Cantina in the 1977 film, or the decision to use outtake footage of actors Angus MacInnes and Drewe Henley (who died in early 2016), who played the Gold and Red leaders, respectively, in A NEW HOPE. Darth Vader (played by both Spencer Wilding and Daniel Naprous, and again voiced by James Earl Jones) appears, and there's a very brief walk-on for C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2. The epic battle between the Imperial Forces and the Rebel Alliance fleet recalls some of the best moments from the original film and Edwards and cinematographer Greig Fraser (ZERO DARK THIRTY) put forth a concerted effort to match the look and style of the nearly 40-year-old franchise kickoff. But Vader's intro is weak, and 85-year-old Jones' legendary voice just doesn't have the rumbling power that it possessed in his younger years. Vader's big scene at the end is most likely a reshoot (perhaps that explains why two actors are credited with the role when the character only has two scenes), and I'd be willing to bet that the most crowd-pleasing elements of what's on display here were the work of Gilroy rather than Edwards--things that were added after it was determined that what Edwards was doing simply wasn't working (it's also worth noting that one of the credited editors is Tony Gilroy's brother John).
One thing that doesn't work in ROGUE ONE is the CGI recreation of Peter Cushing, done with the blessing of a trust overseen by his secretary and personal assistant. The face is convincingly done on a technical level, but the ruse is up the moment Tarkin starts talking and moving and it just doesn't look quite right. It's not a matter of it being done out of necessity, like when Oliver Reed died during the filming of GLADIATOR and Ridley Scott used outtakes to have his face CGI'd onto a double's body to finish a handful of remaining shots. 2004's SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW infamously used digitally manipulated footage of a young Laurence Oliver, who died in 1989, to function as the film's villain and it wasn't met with a favorable response then, so it's a mystery as to why a full-on CGI version of a long-deceased actor is being done here, unless the goal was just seeing if it could be done. Like almost all CGI, it comes close at times but generally misses the mark, primarily because we see too much of it. Tarkin doesn't have a lot of screen time, but the digital Cushing is seen enough that it's a distraction. We also get a CGI version of young Carrie Fisher for one scene as Princess Leia (played on set by Ingvild Deila), but at least it's brief enough to serve its purpose without becoming completely off-putting. At 134 minutes, ROGUE ONE is occasionally sluggish and could use some tightening, but it comes alive in the second half with the action and battle scenes. However, other than Jyn Erso, the characters aren't very fleshed out and we never feel the closeness to them that we did with Leia, Luke Skywalker, or Han Solo back in the day (I didn't even know Wen's character was named "Baze Malbus" until the closing credits). It does earn some points for ending on the most grim and downbeat note for the STAR WARS universe since THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, but that sense of fatalism--this can't end any other way--was a given considering the circumstances under which Leia gets the Death Star plans. In the end, ROGUE ONE has its moments, but won't go down as anyone's favorite STAR WARS film, and while I like the idea of standalone STAR WARS films, this never manages to feel like much more than big-budget fan fiction.
ARRIVAL (US - 2016) Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Written by Eric Heisserer. Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, Mark O'Brien, Russell Yuen. (PG-13, 116 mins) It's easy to see the trailers and the advertising for ARRIVAL and write it off as another alien invasion sci-fi movie, but it has bigger goals in mind and is ultimately about something else entirely. Having said that, the path it takes to get to where it's going borrows from a variety of sources. You'll easily spot ideas from other movies--CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and CONTACT immediately spring to mind, and the imagery of spacecrafts hovering over cities invokes INDEPENDENCE DAY and DISTRICT 9 among others, while its somber mood and its focus on the deconstruction and composition of language and communication takes things into an alien invasion PONTYPOOL realm. Though it's all a primer for a surprise third-act revelation that packs a wallop and shows ARRIVAL's true intent, even that has distinct echoes of both a no-budget cult classic from a decade or so ago as well as a certain '90s sci-fi mindbender, albeit with less apocalyptic implications.
Twelve shell-like spacecrafts appear at various points around the world, with one of them in Montana. Linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is brought in by the US Army's Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker) as a consultant to attempt to establish communication with the visitors and decipher their language. Largely withdrawn from the world following her 12-year-old daughter's death from a rare form of cancer, Louise immerses herself in her work and still has military security clearance from some translation work she did for a counterterrorism operation a few years earlier. She's joined by theoritical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) as they enter a gravity-free portal at the base of the "Shell" and very slowly open a line of communication from behind a giant glass divider in the ship with a pair of large, heptapod beings that they dub "Abbott & Costello." It's a slow process--too slow for Weber and irate CIA agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), whose main goal is to ascertain the threat level and who demonstrate little patience for the curiosity of linguistics, physics, and the wonder of scientific discovery, even though Abbott & Costello have done nothing aggressive. A growing sense of paranoia and too much of an Alex Jones-type right-wing TV pundit gets the better of a few renegade soldiers who try to blow up the shell while Louise and Ian are in it, their lives spared when Abbott & Costello use their gravitational powers to force them down the portal after unsuccessfully trying to warn them about the explosive device. They clearly mean no harm, but neither Louise nor Ian can convince Weber and Halpern of that, and the global operation goes south when paranoid Chinese military leader Gen. Shang (Tzi Ma) issues an ultimatum to the Shell over China, threatening to blow it up if they don't retreat. Various countries, working together, soon go off the grid and stop sharing information with one another as talks break down, humanity grows impatient and violent, and Louise is haunted by recurring dreams and visions of her dead daughter.
Quebecois INCENDIES director Denis Villeneuve, who crossed over into the mainstream with 2013's PRISONERS and 2015's SICARIO, isn't as commercial this time out, with one shot in particular a winking nod to his bizarre 2014 Cronenbergian indie ENEMY. With its chilly, cerebral tone, ARRIVAL occasionally has a Cronenberg feel to it, or at least looks a lot like what might've happened if an in-his-prime Atom Egoyan made an alien invasion movie. It's a film that's not particularly interested in accommodating those looking for action and special effects, but it's still accessible enough for the multiplex. Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer (LIGHTS OUT), who adapted Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life," don't seem to bother pretending to camouflage ARRIVAL's obvious influences, but it finds its own voice quite unexpectedly, and what initially appear to be plot holes, contrivances, and corner-cutting actually make sense once all is revealed. Whether that makes ARRIVAL legitimately clever or very smooth at pulling off some bullshit dei ex machina may be one of the many post-viewing discussion topics. Even with its unexpected late-film developments, ARRIVAL isn't quite the instant classic that many reviewers are making it out to be, but it manages to accomplish a lot more than most genre films that opt to travel down a road paved with the ideas of so many movies that preceded it.
SOUTHPAW (US - 2015) Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Kurt Sutter. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams, Naomie Harris, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Oona Laurence, Miguel Gomez, Skylan Brooks, Victor Ortiz, Beau Knapp, Dominic Colon. (R, 124 mins)
SOUTHPAW is the first big-screen project scripted by Kurt Sutter, who made a name for himself as a writer and producer on THE SHIELD and went on to become the mastermind behind SONS OF ANARCHY. As any viewer of those classic TV shows is aware, Sutter is drawn to strutting, tough-talking bro-huggers whose macho bravado masks a torrent of pain and anguish, men who play by their own rules and go outside the law if necessary if that's what it takes to get to another day because that's what they do. SOUTHPAW plays a lot like a whittled-down series that Sutter might've produced for FX, and as such, there's jumps in the narrative where things can be easily glossed over but there's no natural flow or feel for how one event leads to another. Plus, if you were to remove a few Eminem songs, the constantly spitting blood, and the plethora of F-bombs, and SOUTHPAW is every bit as hokey and melodramatic as any late 1930s/early 1940s Warner Bros. boxing programmer with James Cagney or Arthur Kennedy as a scrappy, wunderkind pugilist and Humphrey Bogart or Barton MacLane as his unscrupulous manager. SOUTHPAW is certainly watchable and has moments that are fine, but it hits every genre trope and cliche like it's bulldozing through a checklist, and yet it behaves as if it's somehow the first boxing movie with a down-and-out hero, once on top of the world, now kicked to the curb with something to prove, going the distance in the fight of his life.
Jake Gyllenhaal is light heavyweight world champion Billy Hope (Sutter never was one for subtlety), currently holding a 43-0 professional record but being urged to slow down by his Noo Yawk-talking wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams). Billy and Maureen both "came up through the system," and met in a Hell's Kitchen orphanage when they were 12 years old. They've been blessed with fame and fortune and only want the best for their young daughter Leila (Oona Laurence). Maureen, or "Mo," wants Billy to call it a career, but with all of his homeboys on his payroll and his opportunistic manager Jordan Mains (50 Cent, cast radically against type as a piece of shit) always pushing him, Billy has to keep the money rolling in, with a $30 million offer from HBO already on the table for his next fight. All of that goes south when mouthy up-and-comer Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez) keeps publicly calling him out to grant him a shot at the title. During one such encounter at a gala benefit for the orphanage, Miguel threatens to "take your title and your bitch," and a brawl ensues that results in Mo being shot and killed. Almost overnight, Billy's lawyer informs he's in serious debt and owes back taxes. When a drunk, depressed Billy crashes his car into a tree on the front lawn, the house goes into foreclosure and Child Protective Services take Leila into custody. Almost all of his friends abandon him and Mains dumps him in favor of Escobar (cue Fiddy with the mandatory "Nothin' personal...it's just business, baby"). Billy moves into a shithole apartment in the projects and when a grieving Leila refuses to see him during one of his supervised visits, he has nowhere to go but the ramshackle gym of Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), an old-school trainer, blind in one eye from his days in the ring, the kind of taskmaster who charges fifty push-ups for swearing and whose speed and heavy bags are barely held together with duct tape. Through Tick, will Billy learn back-to-the-basics boxing and earn the respect of the kids at the gym, thereby attaining respect for himself? Will he find the fire--the "eye of the tiger," if you will--that once propelled him into the upper echelons of the sport, win back the love of his embittered daughter and symbolically avenge his wife's death by regaining the belt that's has since been won by the ever-boasting Escobar? If you've ever seen a movie before, you'll know where SOUTHPAW is going long before it gets there.
Sutter and director Antoine Fuqua (TRAINING DAY, THE EQUALIZER) leave no cliche untouched throughout SOUTHPAW. They also gloss over subplots that range from undeveloped (the home situation of a kid who hangs out at Tick's gym) to outright abandoned (Escobar's crack-addled wife and the investigation into who shot Maureen). The film seems to think that it can coast by solely on Gyllenhaal's startling physical transformation into the ripped Billy Hope. It's quite a contrast to last year's NIGHTCRAWLER, where the actor lost weight to appear wiry and gaunt as a sleazy, greasy tabloid videographer. Gyllenhaal's lack of an Oscar nomination for NIGHTCRAWLER remains one of the more outrageous Academy snubs in recent years, but his performance in SOUTHPAW reeks of transparent Oscar bait. The role was originally conceived with Eminem in mind, and that seems to be who Gyllenhaal is trying to emulate. As a result, his performance too often feels like mannered posturing and a collection of twitches and flinches. Billy Hope is a man who has a hard time articulating himself to the point where exploding in violence is all he can do, but Gyllenhaal's performance is too much of a performance. Compare his work to that of Channing Tatum in FOXCATCHER--a film I really didn't like, but Tatum is a revelation in it--and you see the difference. Gyllenhaal is simply trying too hard and it ends up backfiring on him. Whitaker makes some good moments out of a stock, cardboard character. Young Laurence does a good job of capturing the sass and fire demonstrated by McAdams in her brief screen time (she's gone by the 30-minute mark), enough that they're both quite believable as mother and daughter, while Naomie Harris can't do much with a superfluous supporting role as Leila's child services case worker (why is she at the final fight between Billy and Escobar?). Fuqua's staging of the fight sequences is mostly well-handled, but occasionally demonstrates an overuse of today's quick-cut, shaky-cam approach--not to the point where it's overwhelming, but enough that you miss the in-the-ring intensity of ROCKY or RAGING BULL. Never boring but instantly forgettable, SOUTHPAW is one of Fuqua's weakest films and as far as recent boxing movies go, it isn't even as interesting as last year's DTV Dominic Purcell B-movie A FIGHTING MAN, with the film's sporadic positive elements negated by a thoroughly predictable and maddeningly formulaic presentation. Regardless of how much time Gyllenhaal spent getting physically prepped for the role, there isn't a single thing here that hasn't been recycled from a hundred other boxing movies before it.
TWO MEN IN TOWN (US/France/Algeria/Belgium - 2014; US release 2015)
A low-key, deliberately-paced character piece, TWO MEN IN TOWN is a remake of a 1973 French film by Jose Giovanni, with Alain Delon as an ex-con trying to stay straight with the help of an elderly social worker (the legendary Jean Gabin in one of his last films) and a new girlfriend (Mimsy Farmer). He finds this difficult thanks to a variety of obstacles, chief among them an angry cop (Michel Bouquet) with a serious grudge against him, and a former criminal associate (a young Gerard Depardieu) who keeps trying to pull him back into his old life. This new version, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (DAYS OF GLORY, OUTSIDE THE LAW), moves the story from France to the sparsely-populated southern-most area of New Mexico, right along the US/Mexico border. Paroled after serving 18 years of a 21-year sentence for killing a deputy sheriff, William Garnett (Forest Whitaker) has a dark past as a vicious criminal and a drug dealer, but has found peace while incarcerated. He's converted to Islam, is devoutly religious, he's taught himself to read and earned his GED, and worked as a tutor and counselor to his fellow inmates. A model prisoner who has fought his demons and wants nothing more than to start his life over and get it right, Garnett gets some support from his sympathetic parole officer Emily Smith (Brenda Blethyn), gets a minimum wage job at a cattle farm, and starts dating nice bank teller Teresa (Dolores Heredia). But flashes of the old Garnett occasionally pop up, whether he arrives home from work to find Emily inspecting his room at a local halfway house, or smashing his neighbor's TV when he won't turn the volume down. His temper is egged on by big-shot, five-term sheriff Bill Agati (Harvey Keitel), who shows legitimate concern over a local vigilante group's unlawful treatment of illegals crossing the border, but extends no such goodwill toward Garnett. It was Agati's deputy that Garnett murdered, and he has no intention of letting him off the hook. Agati follows Garnett, harasses him while he's having dinner at a restaurant, shows up at Teresa's house to embarrass him, has him held overnight for a speeding violation, and even goes so far as to bully Garnett's boss into firing him. On top of that, Garnett's old criminal cohort Terrance (Luis Guzman) keeps turning up, endlessly hounding and threatening him about picking up where they left off and, like Ben Kingsley in SEXY BEAST, refuses to take no for an answer. With no one but Teresa and his parole officer allowing him to lead the quiet life he wants to lead, it's only a matter of time before Garnett explodes.
Anchored by a Ry Cooder-esque score by Eric Neveux, TWO MEN IN TOWN often has a PARIS, TEXAS-era Wim Wenders feel to it. Like Wenders, Bouchareb is a European filmmaker who manages to convey a unique view of the American Southwest. The cinematography by Yves Cape (HOLY MOTORS) effectively captures the sun-drenched surroundings and the desert highways that Europeans seem to have a special knack for achieving, because as outsiders, Bouchareb and Cape see the unique things that Americans in their positions might miss. This environment is nothing new to Bouchareb, who has an affinity for the region, having shot 2012's JUST LIKE A WOMAN in New Mexico as well, plus he produced Bruno Dumont's 2003 cult film TWENTYNINE PALMS, a desert road trip slow-burner shot in the title city and in Joshua Tree. A lean and intense Whitaker, who's been dismayingly terrible in pretty much everything he's done for the last several years, turns in his best performance in a long while as the tightly-wound Garnett. Keitel does some fine work as Agati, who, despite his early concern for some illegals before turning them over to the border patrol, is every bit the asshole that you expect an apparent sheriff-for-life in a small town in the middle of nowhere to be. Ellen Burstyn turns up for one very well-played scene as Garnett's adoptive mother, who couldn't bring herself to visit him even once while he was in prison. Blethyn seems miscast, and her performance is uneven, as the folksy tone of her line delivery seems more to mask her British accent than to convey the down-home, tell-it-like-is sass of her character. The conclusion leaves a little to be desired, and Bouchareb has no idea what to do with Keitel's character, instead turning the primary antagonist role over to Guzman while Keitel basically disappears from the film. Still, it's an interesting drama that flopped in Europe and only managed a VOD and scant US theatrical release here over a year after it played the Berlin Film Festival. It's flawed, but worth seeing for fans of Keitel and Whitaker, who hasn't been this good since his Oscar-winning turn in 2006's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. (R, 117 mins)
EXTRATERRESTRIAL (Canada - 2014)
Though the generically-titled EXTRATERRESTRIAL is not intended to be a remake of the 2011 Spanish film by Nacho Vigalondo, they do share the idea of a couple's relationship issues being put on the backburner by a sudden alien invasion. That wouldn't be the only derivative element of the latest film from the GRAVE ENCOUNTERS team of Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, who work under the name The Vicious Brothers. Their EXTRATERRESTRIAL is more concerned with being a blatant ripoff of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, with five archetypes--brain, nice guy, dude-bro, stoner, and blonde ditz--only here, they encounter UFOs and not-very-friendly aliens. April (Brittany Allen) is planning on a weekend at her parents' cabin with boyfriend Kyle (Freddie Stroma), but it turns into a blowout party when he invites their friends Seth (Jesse Moss as the dude-bro), Melanie (Melanie Papalia as the stoner), and Lex (Anja Savcic as the blonde ditz). April's rejection of Kyle's sudden proposal sours the weekend, but things go from bad to worse when a UFO crash-lands in the woods. Grabbing her dad's shotgun, April blasts one of the E.T.s, which doesn't bode well with its alien friends.
Diverting but not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, EXTRATERRESTRIAL doesn't really get the whole "meta" thing down like CABIN IN THE WOODS did. Like CABIN, it also has unseen puppet masters secretly calling the shots, in this case it's exposition supplied by Travis (Michael Ironside), a pot-growing, conspiracy-theorist Vietnam vet who lives in a nearby cabin. He knows what's the alien visitors have been up to in the woods and tells April and the others of a secret treaty between the US government and the aliens that dates back to Roswell: the government agrees to leave the aliens to go about their business of abducting yokels if they do so quietly and in limited numbers so as not to draw attention. In exchange, as Travis puts it, "We get to keep acting like we're running things down here." It's an interesting concept that gets a lot of mileage out of a terrific performance by Ironside, but the Vicious Brothers err in taking him out of the film far too early. Gil Bellows is also very well cast in a haggard, beaten-down-by-life way as the beer-gutted sheriff who hasn't been able to get past his wife's disappearance a decade earlier, and when these kids start talking about UFOs and aliens, coupled with a shell-shocked local mom (GINGER SNAPS' Emily Perkins) telling the same story where her husband and son were taken away, he starts seeing an explanation for what happened to her. EXTRATERRESTRIAL opens strong and for a while, it has the feel of an old-school '80s crowd-pleaser, but with its two major assets--Ironside and Bellows--not getting enough screen time, we're left with mostly uninteresting leads (Allen is a strong, appealing heroine, but the rest range from forgettable to, in Moss' case, excruciating). Connoisseurs of alien invasion films may enjoy what's easily cinema's nastiest anal probe scene, but there's little consistency: if the aliens can establish a psychic link strong enough to force one character to blow his own head off, then why can't they find Perkins' character, who's hiding in plain sight? And if the aliens are supposed to be keeping things on the down-low, why are they spending so much time and abducting so many people in this neck of the woods? The film really stumbles with an overdone, maudlin finale that leads to a downbeat NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD ending that it doesn't earn, instead coming off as unnecessarily mean-spirited. Though it's rather unrestrained in its CABIN IN THE WOODS worship, there's a good film desperately trying to break out of the merely average EXTRATERRESTRIAL. As far as recent alien invasion pics go, it's at least preferable to the Milla Jovovich con job THE FOURTH KIND and the unwatchable SKYLINE, one of the worst major-studio releases in years. (Unrated, 101 mins)
MORTDECAI (US - 2015)
After a string of misfires that saw former actor Johnny Depp's stock plummet with fans (THE RUM DIARY, DARK SHADOWS, THE LONE RANGER, TRANSCENDENCE, and his incognito supporting role in Kevin Smith's pathetic TUSK), it seems as if the world put its foot down with MORTDECAI. After at least two months of the most relentlessly pushy ad campaign in recent memory, moviegoers actively revolted and let it bomb hard in theaters. On its own terms, it could've been an amusing throwback to double entendre-filled '60s comedies, like something Peter Sellers might've made around the time of THE PINK PANTHER, WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? or AFTER THE FOX. But the world made it known that it's clearly sick of Depp's constant crutches of pancake makeup and whimsical vocal affectations, and seeing him in the MORTDECAI trailers with a waxed mustache and a forced British accent trading randy and sassy quips with Goop publisher and vagina-steaming advocate Gwyneth Paltrow was where everyone drew the line, took a stand, and emphatically declared "No more!" The $60 million MORTDECAI, based on a series of 1970s comic adventure novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli, grossed just $8 million in the US and took a beating from critics, making it a safe bet that this won't become another PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise for Depp. The wasteful budgets of today's movies often border on criminal, but it seems especially offensive here. Other than paying a bunch of big names to jerk themselves off (Depp got paid $10 million), nothing here warrants pissing away $60 million. Think what $60 million could've done for people in need. Who the fuck needed MORTDECAI?
An appalling, obnoxious vanity project for star/producer Depp, MORTDECAI is every bit as awful as you've heard, which is tragic because there's a surplus of squandered talent. This is a film with an alarming contempt for its audience. It's obvious the actors are having a much better time than the viewer and you soon realize you're paying to attend a party where you're deliberately being excluded from the fun. Eccentric, jet-setting--and broke--British art dealer Lord Charlie Mortdecai (Depp) gets roped into a plot by his friend and M.I.5 agent Martland (Ewan McGregor) to recover a rare stolen Goya painting. So begins a globetrotting adventure that finds Mortdecai and his faithful, hulking manservant Jock (Paul Bettany) tangling with Russian mobsters, vacuous Californians, and the nympho daughter (Olivia Munn) of a shady L.A. art figure (Jeff Goldblum, cast radically against type as "Jeff Goldblum"). Meanwhile, Mortdecai's wife Johanna (Paltrow) also gets pulled into the pursuit of the Goya, providing Martland with an opportunity to steal her away from Mortdecai, which he's been trying to do since their college days. There's very little in the way of comedy in the script by Eric Aronson, whose lone previous writing credit is the 2001 Lance Bass/Joey Fatone vehicle ON THE LINE. It's too bad director David Koepp, a veteran screenwriter whose credits include JURASSIC PARK, CARLITO'S WAY, and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, didn't write it as well--perhaps he could've brought something to the table other than Aronson, whose approach seems to have been scribbling "Johnny Depp, British accent, mustache" on a piece of scrap paper, crossing his fingers, and hoping everything would work itself out. As it is, MORTDECAI's idea of comedy is Depp's overdone accent and the fact that he has a mustache and his character is a pompous dolt who still calls America "The Colonies." That's it. Every joke is based on one or a combination of those things. There's one legitimate AUSTIN POWERS-style laugh--Mortdecai at a men's room urinal as a Russian gangster grabs him from behind, injecting a sedative into his neck as Mortdecai quips "Oh! I've read about this!"--and that's it. There's nothing here. One of the emptiest films of the year, MORTDECAI is what happens when a movie star is too rich and out of touch for anyone to tell him no. Depp hasn't tried in years because he doesn't have to, so he enjoys another fat payday, amusing himself by mugging shamelessly with a wacky accent and a fake mustache. Well, I guess that means at least one person found MORTDECAI amusing. (R, 107 mins)
TAKEN 3 (France/US - 2015) Directed by Olivier Megaton. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Cast: Liam Neeson, Forest Whitaker, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, David Warshofsky, Don Harvey, Dylan Bruno, Sam Spruell, Andrew Howard, Jonny Weston, Al Sapienza, Wallace Langham, Steve Coulter. (PG-13, 109 mins)
With no one else in his family left to be abducted by evil Albanian human traffickers and their vengeful relatives, retired CIA special ops badass Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) channels his inner Richard Kimble when he returns to his apartment, picks up a knife on the floor and finds the dead body of his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) just as the cops barge in and he looks guilty as hell. A fleeing Mills takes advantage of his extensive knowledge of the layout of every home in the neighborhood, eventually evading his pursuers via a secret door in someone's garage that leads to the L.A. River. Mills goes on a city-wide rampage to prove his innocence--causing millions of dollars of damage in the process--while being doggedly pursued by Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard--er, I mean, Detective Frank Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), who demonstrates his eccentricity and intelligence by constantly twirling a knight chess piece between his fingers and marveling at the wily Mills' ability to evade capture.
NEESON!
TAKEN 3 is the least and hopefully last of this Luc Besson action franchise. Neeson stumbled into a second career as an aging action hero with the surprise success of the first TAKEN back in 2009. That film seems like gritty neo-realism when held up against the events that unfold in TAKEN 3, in which everyone involved is simply going through the motions, starting with Neeson. The actor's seemingly effortless gravitas just fizzles here, and for the first time in his action-star phase, Neeson looks bored and completely checked out. One can't blame him, considering the idiocy of Besson's and Robert Mark Kamen's script and the abysmal direction of Besson protege and returning TAKEN 2 helmer Olivier Megaton, who previously steered another solid action series to its nadir with 2008's TRANSPORTER 3. It's bad enough that the story is essentially a ripoff of THE FUGITIVE (with one of the guilty parties missing a pinky instead of an arm), but TAKEN 3 is dumb even by Besson standards. There's one sequence where Mills' daughter Kim (31-year-old Maggie Grace, still apparently playing 20 or 21), who jokes about inheriting her father's "OCD gene," is on her way to school and makes her morning stop at a carryout for a peach yogurt drink (always grabbing the fourth drink from the front) only this time, there's a note from her on-the-run dad on the fourth container back saying "Drink this now." It's been drugged with something to make her sick a bit later, but he did so in order to get her to leave her class and head to the restroom to vomit, where he's waiting with an antidote, so he can talk to her. Is there some reason he couldn't just put a note on the container telling her to meet him in the ladies' room near her class? Why spike the yogurt smoothie and deliberately cause gastrointestinal distress? What if she didn't make it to the restroom? It just seems like more work than necessary. I'd say Mills was overthinking it, but there's absolutely no way that "overthinking" and "TAKEN 3" should be mentioned in the same sentence.
NEESON!
The plot is as standard-issue and by-the-numbers as it gets and a better script would've provided some more back-and-forth phone banter, mind games, and grudging respect between Neeson's Mills and Whitaker's Dotzler. Both actors are capable of more than TAKEN 3 allows them to do or cares for them to attempt. Of course Mills is being framed. Of course some stock Russian mobsters--led by ruthless ex-Spetsnaz killing machine Oleg Malankov (Sam Spruell)--are behind it all. And of course it has something to do with Malankov seeking revenge for some shady and collapsed business deal with Lenore's asshole husband Stewart, now played by Janssen's HEMLOCK GROVE co-star Dougray Scott (replacing Xander Berkeley), bland and lifeless here and looking like he still hasn't recovered from losing the role of Wolverine in 2000's X-MEN to second-choice Hugh Jackman after being stuck working on reshoots for the behind-schedule MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II. As dumb and uninspired as TAKEN 3 is (don't miss Mills driving a car down an elevator shaft), it's really Megaton's directing style that's the biggest deal-breaker. There is no scene that Megaton can't chop into nanosecond increments that would give Michael Bay a bout of vertigo. Action sequences are just a blurry smear of colors and quick cuts. Featuring three nausea-inducing car chases that make GETAWAY look like THE SEVEN-UPS, TAKEN 3's action is lost in a headachy haze of CGI vehicle flips and shaky-cam incoherence, much of which seems to be orchestrated around Neeson's stunt double. There are a few shots where you can tell Neeson is involved (the brawl in the carryout, for example), but most of the time, there's some alarmingly Seagal-esque chicanery going on where you see Mills fighting but not his face, as Megaton cuts to a close-up of a grimacing Neeson before cutting back to Mills fighting, as "Neeson" is either shot from behind or his head is out of the frame. On one hand, sure, at 62, Neeson's not a young man anymore, but in his other action movies, he's made a point of doing as much as he could. One can hardly blame him for not caring enough about the quality of TAKEN 3 or rightfully concluding that it wasn't worth risking injury on something so subpar. TAKEN was a surprise, lightning-in-a-bottle blockbuster that became a modern action classic. TAKEN 2 was an unnecessary but stupidly enjoyable victory lap. TAKEN 3 shows the franchise in a downward spiral worthy of the last two DIE HARD movies and is just no fun for anyone, from the actors to the audience. Liam Neeson is the man, and in films like THE GREY and A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, he brings a "thinking man's asskicker" complexity to his roles, and in something like NON-STOP, he manages to overcome the obstacles and still deliver a strong, convincing performance. But even Neeson can't conceal his TAKEN burnout with his half-hearted clock-punch of a performance here. Perhaps it's time for him to use the very particular set of skills that he's acquired over a long career and move on to something new.
When Forest Whitaker won his Oscar for 2006's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, it was just as much for his powerful performance as Idi Amin as it was an acknowledgment of his over 20 years of consistently exemplary work in lead and character roles. Whitaker was as reliable as they came, and his presence almost always meant a good film would be better or, worst-case scenario, a bad film would be bearable at least while he was onscreen. Since the Oscar, he's been on a skid that easily rivals Cuba Gooding, Jr., Nicolas Cage, and Adrien Brody, but Whitaker's astonishing mutation into one of our current worst actors is somehow more alarming than the others, mainly because when you see him giving these terrible performances in terrible movies like THE EXPERIMENT, CATCH .44, and FREELANCERS, you can see he's giving it everything he's got, and then some. Perhaps he knows the material is shit and he's overcompensating in his attempts to turn it into something. Twitching, gesticulating, and yelling are now his constant crutches. But even being in the presence of the likes of Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Shepard in OUT OF THE FURNACE didn't help matters: Whitaker's performance as an inexplicably grunting police chief was so bad that he stopped the movie cold every time he opened his mouth. Whitaker's past accomplishments will always be his and, by all accounts, he is a very nice and genuine guy, but seriously, what the hell is going on here? Why can't he act anymore? Watching Forest Whitaker in most of his recent films is almost always a painful, depressing sight.
He scrapes bottom with REPENTANCE, and since he also produced it, he has no one to blame but himself, though there's plenty of that to share with director Philippe Caland and screenwriter Shintaro Shimosawa, a former producer and writer on Whitaker's justifiably short-lived CBS series CRIMINAL MINDS: SUSPECT BEHAVIOR. Shimosawa has also logged time on Fox's hilariously awful THE FOLLOWING, which should be another huge red flag about what awaits the viewer in REPENTANCE (the film is a remake of a still-unreleased Caland film titled THE GURU & THE GYPSY, completed in 2012 and featuring Caland in the role played by Whitaker here). If you've ever wished for more socially-conscious torture porn with an uplifting, spiritual ending, then REPENTANCE is where it's at. In what's now a typically mannered, hyperventilating performance, Whitaker stars as Angel, a grieving and clearly troubled man unable to cope with the death of his mother. He still feels her and sees her following him around. He seeks the guidance of self-help author and life coach Tommy Carter (Anthony Mackie), who uses meditation and yoga to help Angel address the psychological blocks in his grieving process. But Tommy has his own secrets: he survived a near-death experience four years earlier, and the circumstances around it have led his older brother Ben (Mike Epps) to resent him, his success, and his marriage to Maggie (Sanaa Lathan). When Tommy tries to break off the sessions with Angel, Angel knocks him out cold and goes full MISERY on his favorite writer, holding him captive in a bomb shelter under the house and inflicting all manner of torture and pain on him, starting with a spike through the leg. Obviously, there's a connection between Tommy and the death of Angel's mother that might have something to with the opening scene of Tommy and Ben driving drunk four years earlier and running over someone. And there is the primary problem with REPENTANCE: Caland and Shimosawa never met a twist they couldn't telegraph ludicrously far in advance to the point where it's basically a self-spoiler. Obviously the person they hit is Angel's mother. Obviously, Angel knows this and has targeted Tommy. REPENTANCE also requires its characters to behave like idiots: after Tommy goes missing for several days and Maggie is informed by his manager (Peter Weller) that he's been a no-show at his book signings, Maggie never calls the police. Instead, she just keeps texting him and leaving messages. After Tommy's been missing a little while longer, Ben gets a text from him (actually sent by Angel) to meet him at a strange address. Is Ben suspicious of this strange address? Does he call the cops or even Maggie? Nope. He goes to the address, and it's Angel's mostly boarded-up house. Again, does Ben call the cops? Is he alarmed? Nope. He stands around until he gets conked over the head by Angel and dragged in the basement with his brother because Shimosawa is a shitty writer. The crammed-in feel-good ending is insultingly stupid, but considering what came before, what else do you expect? I might suggest a life coach for Forest Whitaker if he continues squandering his talent in shit-shows like REPENTANCE. At least we'll always have GHOST DOG. (R, 94 mins) RAZE (US/France - 2014)
New Zealand-born stuntwoman Zoe Bell is best known for doubling Uma Thurman in KILL BILL and playing herself in Quentin Tarantino's DEATH PROOF portion of GRINDHOUSE. Since then, she's turned up in small roles in mostly DTV actioners and is part of The Asylum's upcoming all-female EXPENDABLES knockoff MERCENARIES, with the likes of Vivica A. Fox, Cynthia Rothrock, Brigitte Nielson, and Kristanna Loken. Bell's latest film RAZE gives her the lead as well as a producing credit, and reunites her with DEATH PROOF co-stars Tracie Thoms and, in a brief cameo, Rosario Dawson, whose presence here proves that she's indeed a Bell friend, but not a good enough friend that she'd stick around any longer than absolutely necessary. RAZE is a numbingly violent, offensively idiotic waste of time from director Josh C. Waller, giving us back-to-back bed-shitters with this right on this heels of his awful MCCANICK. Bell is Sabrina, who wakes up in some kind of underground bunker with garishly red Dario Argento hallways. She's an unwilling participant in a twisted tournament hosted by cartoonishly psychotic high-society couple Joseph (Doug Jones) and Elizabeth (Sherilyn Fenn sighting!), who have narrowed it down to the final six in a fight to the death. If you lose or refuse to fight, your dearest loved one will also be killed. They've got Sabrina's daughter and she's determined to emerge victorious.
What is the point of RAZE? Imagine FIGHT CLUB with just the fights, and David Fincher botching the job. It's basically just one shaky-cam, quick-cut fight sequence after another, all ending with the loser getting their face beaten to hamburger. Joseph and Elizabeth appear to be the Tyler Durden organizers for the EYES WIDE SHUT one-percenter set, but to what end? We get the what, but what about the why? A lot of people seem to be in the know about the tournament. But who? Cops? Politicians? Other movers & shakers? Why is it taking place? RAZE is indicative of the kind of "born on third base and thinks it hit a triple" mentality of today's cult cinema, the notion that all you need to do is show up and make the reference and you're "cult." RAZE can't even be bothered to make the reference. Many reviews have likened it to an old-school, 1970s women-in-prison movie. Anyone who thinks this has obviously never seen an old-school, 1970s women-in-prison movie. It's hard to care about anything when we learn almost nothing about the characters and there's no context in which the story exists. The women are abducted and taken to this place and they fight to the death. There's no suspense, no satire, no commentary on class struggle or social issues, no underlying themes, no message of empowerment for women, and ultimately, no answers and no payoff at the end. Where's the entertainment here? It's just women pummeling each other into ground chuck. There's nothing here. Waller is so bad at his job that both Sabrina's fight with psychotic captive Phoebe (Rebecca Marshall) and her revenge on her captors are anti-climactic letdowns. RAZE is one of the most shallow, miserable film experiences I've had in quite some time. It's not overtly misogynistic because the movie would be equally worthless if it had just men in the tournament, but it sure does feel like girl-on-girl wife-batterer porn disguised as a BLOODSPORT knockoff. Is it supposed to be edgy or subversive because it involves women? If so, then Waller and screenwriter Robert Beaucage are even dumber than RAZE already makes them look. The worst film of 2014 so far. (R, 92 mins)
Directed by Scott Cooper. Written by Brad Ingelsby and Scott Cooper. Cast: Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Zoe Saldana, Sam Shepard, Tom Bower, Bingo O'Malley, Dendrie Taylor. (R, 116 mins)
Initially planned as a Ridley Scott film starring Leonardo DiCaprio (both stayed on as producers), OUT OF THE FURNACE is the second effort by CRAZY HEART director Scott Cooper, and it's an ambitious, often very subtle mood piece disguised as a revenge thriller. Set in the mid-2000s to the present day, FURNACE takes place in a small, blue collar Pennsylvania town and Cooper does a marvelous job of conveying that unique atmosphere of a town where smoke and steam are constantly billowing through the air, everyone works at the same mill, drinks at the same bar, and everyone knows everyone. It's the kind of place where time is not exactly frozen, but it seems to be about a decade or two behind. Generation after generation works at the mill, and no one ever really leaves. Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck) tries to leave by joining the military and serving multiple tours in Iraq, but he comes back a damaged, broken man. He doesn't want to work at the mill, even though it was good enough for his older brother Russell (Christian Bale) and their dad (Bingo O'Malley sighting!), who's dying of cancer. When playing the ponies only ends up with him deep in debt to local loan shark John Petty (Willem Dafoe), he decides to be Petty's fighter in a bare-knuckle brawling ring. Rodney takes a dive to help settle Petty's debt to Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), a snarling, almost demonic meth kingpin and "inbred Jersey" crime lord who's so vicious and dangerous that even the cops--both local and state--are afraid to go after him. Needless to say, things don't go as planned.
But the film isn't about Rodney. It's about Russell, and one of the strong points of the script is that it takes its time building the characters and circumstances. It's a good hour before the crux of the plot is set in motion and it works because it helps you know these people. It's uncommon in a lot of today's mainstream cinema to be this character-driven. It's the kind of construction that was commonplace in the '70s but has little place in today's multiplexes. To that end, you can probably file OUT OF THE FURNACE in that same burgeoning "refusing to give the audience what it wants" subgenre of low CinemaScore grades along with KILLING THEM SOFTLY and THE COUNSELOR. At least for a while, that is. But more on that in a bit.
Russell has always felt the need to bail his little brother out of trouble, and that's still the case well into adulthood. He wants to settle down and marry his girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana), but after one too many drinks at the bar where he goes to settle another of Rodney's debts with Petty, he gets in a car accident that kills the occupants of the other vehicle (including a child). The crash wasn't completely Russell's fault--the other car was backing out of a driveway and didn't see Russell's truck--but he was driving under the influence, and is sent to prison for five years, during which time his father dies and Lena leaves him for police chief Barnes (Forest Whitaker). When the shit hits the fan between his brother and DeGroat and the police prove predictably useless, family does what family does, and Russell and his Uncle Red (Sam Shepard) decide to take matters into their own hands.
Barnes makes an interesting comment to Russell at one point, trying to talk him out of going vigilante and explaining that DeGroat and his hillbilly brethren have "entire generations who have never come down off that mountain." You could probably say the same thing about the Baze family and their friends and neighbors. The script doesn't really explore those parallels since we don't learn much about DeGroat's clan. Once Russell and Uncle Red decide to take action, the film becomes inconsistent and skids a bit. It's never believable for a moment that Russell and Uncle Red gain such easy access to DeGroat's meth headquarters and are permitted to walk out upright. Nor is it plausible that DeGroat would just bring one flunky with him to meet a mystery man who's threatened him over the phone. The actors are almost all superb across the board, particularly Bale who, the disastrous HARSH TIMES excepting, can disappear into any role and accent, and a terrifying Harrelson, who's introduced in the opening scene and only appears fleetingly for the next hour or so, but his powerful presence is felt even in his absence. Shepard, who's aged into one of our finest character actors (if you haven't seen the barely-released BLACKTHORN, you're missing one of the best films of the last few years that no one's heard of), is a performer who can speak volumes without saying a word, and he's perfect as Russell's voice of reason. The only real botch in the casting is with Whitaker, who starts using some bizarre grunting voice midway through his performance that completely derails every scene he's in from that point. It's almost like he's trying to use Bale's Batman voice. Whitaker has historically been a fine actor and the guy's got an Academy Award. I haven't seen LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER yet, but this is another in a string of embarrassing performances by the actor, who at some point apparently forgot how to act.
And then there's the ending. Without spoiling anything, Cooper has said that the final shot is an homage to THE GODFATHER PART II. Maybe it was in the script, maybe it wasn't, but if the film ended one shot sooner, it would be remarkably more effective. The terrible final shot destroys the ambiguity of what just came before it--which is where it should've ended--and feels not like an homage to a classic film but rather, a focus-group-suggested decision by the studio to spell everything out for audiences who want definitive closure. The shot before the final shot wasn't quite on the level of THE SOPRANOS as far as open-endedness goes, but it would've been a much more powerful experience if it ended there. In short, there's much to appreciate in OUT OF THE FURNACE, but some bumbling and stumbling in the second half unquestionably do it some irreparable harm.
A huge box office hit when released in its native Norway and the rest of Europe in 2006, COLD PREY (Norwegian title: FRITT VILT) took three years to get a straight-to-DVD release in the US. The inevitable COLD PREY II has finally arrived on DVD in the US, a belated five years after its European theatrical run. The first film had five snowboarders on a trip to the Jotunheimen region of southern Norway finding shelter at an abandoned resort where they're pursued by a relentless killing machine who's basically the Norwegian cousin of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Here, that film's Final Girl, Jannicke (Ingrid Borso Berdal) is found dazed and delirious and holding the dead killer's pickaxe, and transported to a nearby hospital that--of course--is operating with a skeleton crew because it's about to close down for good (helpful hint for slasher film protagonists: if you work in a hospital that's about to close, don't stick around; and when the lights flicker off and then back on, someone will instantly appear directly behind you). As any fan of classic old-school slasher films like HALLOWEEN II and VISITING HOURS can attest, a nearly-abandoned hospital is an outstanding setting for these types of things, and COLD PREY II is cut from the same cloth. The hulking killer (Robert Follin), thought dead, simply went into a brief hibernation from the cold. When the doc in charge (Fridtjov Saheim) idiotically resuscitates him, the bodies start piling up in various gory ways until it's down to Jannicke and other doc Camilla (Marthe Snorresdotter Rovik) for the final showdown.
There's no real surprises in COLD PREY II and because there's a limited number of people who can get killed, it takes about half of the running time before anything starts happening. But once the killer is on the loose, things pick up considerably, and director Mats Stenberg (awesomely-monikered COLD PREY director Roar Uthaug co-produced and has a story credit) offers some impressively-constructed chase and kill scenes. Also helping a lot is a truly badass Berdal staking her claim as a modern-day scream queen with her tough, gritty performance as Jannicke. Like its predecessor, COLD PREY II brings nothing new to the table and relies too much on characters behaving stupidly, but it does a nice job executing tried-and-true genre staples and doing so with respect and affinity. You don't need to see it, but doing so isn't a waste of your time. It proved to be another huge success in Europe, prompting a COLD PREY III in 2010, which, following the time frame of the first two, should hit US shores sometime in 2017. (Unrated, 90 mins)
PAWN (US - 2013)
This thoroughly forgettable thriller opened on a couple of screens four days before its DVD/Blu-ray release and showcases a large cast of recognizable faces in a completely by-the-numbers plot that's so routine that if you listen closely, you can practically hear their sighs of ambivalence. Ex-con Sean Faris promises his pregnant wife (Nikki Reed) that he'll stay out of trouble, but then he finds himself in the middle of a hostage situation at an all-night diner when a crew of gunmen led by Michael Chiklis barge in to rob the place. They're really after a hard drive that's being kept in the safe, and it's something that involves the grizzled diner owner (Stephen Lang as Scott Glenn) and the local crime boss (Ronald Guttman), whose villainy is instantly given away by the fact that he's the only person in the greasy spoon wearing an ascot. The slumming cast also includes Ray Liotta as a mob mystery man, Forest Whitaker and Marton Csokas as on-the-take cops, and Common as the hostage negotiator. For some reason, Chiklis uses a comically over-the-top Cockney accent that's basically an exaggerated impression of Jason Statham as Ray Winstone as Bob Hoskins, certainly to creatively infuse his character with some texture and depth and not at all an attention-hogging stunt suggested and supported by co-producer Michael Chiklis. (R, 88 mins)
