On DVD/Blu-ray: THEIR FINEST (2017) and DRONE (2017)

THEIR FINEST
(UK/Sweden - 2017)

It's overlong, mostly predictable and hampered somewhat by a third act plot development that rivals 47 METERS DOWN in terms of unnecessary cruelty, but THEIR FINEST is an enjoyably old-fashioned "war at home" WWII saga that became a small word-of-mouth art house hit in the spring. In London in 1940, Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) thinks she's getting a secretarial job with the Ministry of Information's film division. With most of the men called up as the war escalates, she's actually been hired as a screenwriter after department head Roger Swain (Richard E. Grant) was impressed with some comics she wrote for a newspaper in the absence of the regular writers who were off fighting. Teaming with in-house scribe Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), Catrin's job is to come up with inspiring scripts for movies to keep the British citizens' spirits lifted amidst constant air raids and concerns, as Swain puts it, "that there won't even be any theaters left to show them." Catrin is drawn to the story of twin sisters Lily and Rose Starling (Lily and Francesca Knight) who have found a certain degree of local fame for taking their father's boat, the Nancy Starling, to rescue soldiers at Dunkirk. The sisters have embellished the story significantly, as the Ministry eventually discovers that they tried to go to Dunkirk, but their engine broke down and they were towed back before they even left British waters. It's got too much crowd-pleasing potential to dismiss, so Catrin and Tom are instructed to fictionalize it, and to also add an authoritative male figure--a drunk uncle played by aging thespian Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy)--because no one will believe that two young women took a boat to Dunkirk.

Directed by Lone Scherfig (AN EDUCATION) and adapted from Lissa Evans' 2009 novel Their Finest Hour and a Half by veteran British TV writer Gaby Chiappe (HOLBY CITY, EASTENDERS, LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD), THEIR FINEST is definitely a "they don't make 'em like they used to" kind of movie, at times playing like one of Woody Allen's period comedies, mostly pleasant and anchored by an appealing performance from Arterton. THEIR FINEST does a nice job of presenting a woman's struggle in a male-dominated job market (of course, she makes less money than her male colleagues), and her duties inevitably lead to the expected resentment of her artist husband Ellis (Jack Huston), who has no money coming in and can no longer serve because of a leg injury sustained in the Spanish Civil War a few years earlier. There's also some timeless jabs at the eternal struggle between artists and the powers that be, with the filmmakers forced by the Secretary of War (Jeremy Irons) to cast American soldier and Eagle Squadron hero Carl Lundbeck (Jake Lacy) to appeal to the US, even though he can't act and there were no Americans at Dunkirk. It's Arterton's film, but the scene-stealer is the always-outstanding Nighy, whose Hilliard is a pompous, past-his-prime egotist humbled by the sacrifices made by those around him and eager to do his part by helping Lundbeck hone his acting chops, even talking his agent down from demanding more money and better accommodations because the plucky, can-do spirit of those around him have inspired him to such a degree. It's a warm and at times touching performance that again demonstrates why Nighy is one of our great character actors. THEIR FINEST is a film that's impossible to dislike even if it's rather slight when it's all said and done, and that late-film story development is jarring but in a way that somewhat negatively impacts the film as it sets it up for some ham-fisted sentimentality near the end. (R, 117 mins)



DRONE
(US/Canada - 2017)

A potentially interesting, politically-driven thriller, DRONE gets derailed when the filmmakers decide to make it overwrought and polemical, with its antagonist basically wearing a light that flashes "MESSAGE!" In Renton, WA, Neil Westin (Sean Bean) claims to be an IT troubleshooter for a software corporation. Unbeknownst to his wife Ellen (Mary McCormack) and 16-year-old son Shane (Maxwell Haynes), he's actually a CIA contractor who's part of a secret program that employs civilian drone pilots to drop bombs on suspected terrorists in the Middle East from the cozy confines of suburban Seattle, but a recent security leak threatens to expose the entire operation. Meanwhile, Imir Shaw (Patrick Sabongui) has arrived from Pakistan and leaves at least one dead body in his wake in his surveillance of the Westin family, including trailing an adulterous Ellen to a motel with a younger co-worker (Bradley Stryker) who wants to take their fling to a more serious level. Neil's also dealing with the recent passing of his Alzheimer's stricken father and can't find the words to write his eulogy when Imir shows up in his driveway under the guise of buying Neil's father's sailboat. Neil invites him in and as they discuss the boat and get to know each other, Ellen arrives home and they ask Imir to stay for dinner. As Imir starts slowly doling out his backstory, culminating in the revelation that it's the one-year anniversary of his wife and daughter being collateral damage in a US drone strike, it finally dawns on Neil that his dinner guest knows his real job and intends to avenge the death of his family by destroying Neil's.

Director/co-writer Jason Bourque, a veteran of numerous Lifetime movies, takes entirely too long to generate any suspense with DRONE. Imir doesn't even make his intent known to the Westins until the last 15 minutes, and the bulk of the film feels like a long dinner sequence in a play. The film shows its cards too soon in establishing Imir as a threat and doesn't really explore the moral complexities of Neil's job. He doesn't seem to feel one way or another about it, though his decidedly non-PC colleague Gary (Joel David Moore) serves as a mouthpiece for intolerance with his labeling drone casualties as "dune coons." Subtlety is a foreign concept to DRONE, and it's not helped by an ineffective, mannered performance by Bean, who's usually a sure thing but here, he's using a forced, overdone American accent that completely undermines anything he might've been able to do with this character. A subplot about Neil's distance from his late father and Shane getting close to his grandfather in his final days adds nothing, due in large part because Haynes is a terrible actor. McCormack and Sabongui do what they can with paper-thin characters, and even when it finally gets going at the very end, Bourque still can't resist tacking on a final scene of clunky political commentary. DRONE isn't nearly as obnoxious in its pontificating as say, THE CRASH, another thriller from earlier this year that got tripped up in political preaching and also featured McCormack, but it's still not really worth anyone's time. (Unrated, 90 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS (2016)

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
(UK - 2016; US release 2017)

Directed by Colm McCarthy. Written by Mike Carey. Cast: Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua, Anamaria Marinca, Fisayo Akinade, Anthony Welsh, Dominique Tipper. (R, 111 mins)

Based on the 2014 novel and scripted by its author M.R. Carey, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is one of the more thoughtful and intelligent offerings in the overcrowded zombie genre, approaching its subject from a unique perspective and benefiting from refreshingly unpredictable and very human character arcs. Set in an apocalyptic, near-future England, the film opens in a bunker at a military installation where restrained children are kept in maximum security cells before being taken to their lessons restrained in wheelchairs. The soldiers point guns at them at all times and don't engage in conversation, even though young Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is polite, articulate, and eager to please. Outside the gates of the base, hordes of zombies, or "hungries," linger about, ferociously seeking any kind of food and turned into mindless flesh-eaters by a deadly fungal virus that spread across the globe. The children being kept at the base are second generation "hungries" who transformed in utero and burrowed out of their mothers' wombs after devouring their insides. The virus is transmitted through bites and body fluids, but the second generation hungries--the children--still display the capacity for humanity. They're able to talk and learn and their feral side only comes out when they're hungry (they're fed live worms) and catch the scent of a human. The soldiers and the others running the base cover themselves in a blocker gel that stifles their scent, but that still doesn't provide enough security for Sgt. Parks (Paddy Considine) who simply regards them as inhuman hungries and doesn't care about their more human side seen by their teacher Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton). Helen is in the minority with her views on attempting to treat the second generation hungries like children, especially when it comes to Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close), the research scientist working on a vaccine for the virus, which often involves killing and dissecting the young hungries. "They're children!" Helen argues, with Caldwell countering "They present as children!"

Caldwell is about to vivisect Melanie when Helen intervenes and the marauding hungries outside tear down the barrier and overtake the base. Almost everyone is slaughtered, with Caldwell, Parks, Helen, Private Kieran (Fisayo Akinade), and Melanie getting away, Melanie kept on top of the transport vehicle, restrained and wearing a clear Hannibal Lecter-type muzzle shield. It's here that THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS settles into a more comparatively routine, sprinting undead 28 DAYS/WEEKS LATER situation, with the small band of survivors making their way across the apocalyptic landscape that was once England (aerial views were shot by drones flown over the abandoned Chernobyl town of Pripyat), though Carey and veteran British TV director Colm McCarthy (RIPPER STREET, PEAKY BLINDERS) offer enough unique elements to keep things from feeling too rote and stale. The relationship that develops between Melanie and the others is unexpected, with even the hard-bitten Parks begrudgingly seeing the girl's human side after she does numerous things to help them, such as scouting paths to safe places since the hungries will leave her alone. THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS gets a lot from an often-remarkable debut performance from young Nanua. She's terrifying when her feral instincts take over and quite touching in fleeting instances where she's allowed to be a kid (Melanie's utter joy in putting on a pair of sneakers and communicating with Parks over a walkie-talkie is very nicely played by Nanua). Even Close's ostensible antagonist displays signs of empathy as their journey goes on, no matter how heartlessly matter-of-fact she is at times (Close spitting out "Was that cathartic?" when Caldwell is cracked across the face by Helen is a highlight). It's hard to do anything original with the zombie genre at this point, and indeed, a lot of the scenes play like any random episode of THE WALKING DEAD. But with a quartet of strong performances at its core (not to mention the sight of Glenn Close killing zombies) and some original ideas in its foundation as well its ultimate revelation, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS manages to separate itself from the rest of the horde.

On DVD/Blu-ray: BANSHEE CHAPTER (2013) and RUNNER RUNNER (2013)

BANSHEE CHAPTER
(Germany/US - 2013)

There's some intriguing ideas in this occasionally effective but more often muddled horror film that has a hard time deciding what it wants to be.  Debuting writer/director Blair Erickson shows some promising technique, knows how to use darkness to his advantage and has a clear knack for delaying reveals to the point of nail-biting agony--plus I'm always a sucker for the inherent unease of instantly disturbing garbled radio transmissions--but the movie's a bit of a mess and once everything is laid out, the finale is too predictable to be the shocking twist that Erickson wants it to be.  Predominantly straight narrative but mixing in bits of faux doc and found-footage (ugh...I know), BANSHEE CHAPTER focuses on Anne (Katia Winter of DEXTER and SLEEPY HOLLOW), a reporter investigating the disappearance of her friend James (Michael McMillian of TRUE BLOOD).  She has some footage of James ingesting a dose of a liquid drug supposedly used in the US government's top-secret MK Ultra mind control experiments of the 1960s.  He got the drug from a source in Colorado and upon ingesting it, immediately senses that "they're coming," and a shadowy figure appears by the window as James' face distorts and his eyes bleed and turn black.  Anne's investigation leads her to Colorado where she meets James' source:  washed-up '60s counterculture hero and gonzo writer/conspiracy theorist Thomas Blackburn (Ted Levine).  Blackburn informs her that the drug doesn't cause hallucinations, but rather, allows the user to become a receiver to see our "alternate reality."  All clues point to an abandoned military research station, so the pair hit the road, all the while seeing visions of monstrous figures and hearing a nursery rhyme and gibberish coming from a short-wave numbers station.

Playing a lot like a shaky-cam, road-movie version of Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND with the Soy Sauce element of Don Coscarelli's JOHN DIES AT THE END, BANSHEE CHAPTER suffers from a clunky, lugubriously-paced first half that takes forever to get going in a typical post-Ti West slow-burn fashion, and the early found-footage sequences just feel like desperate pandering to make sure the film would be able to find a distributor (Anne even starts out filming her trip in faux-doc style, but Erickson abandons that rather quickly).  The film gets a lot of mileage out of a strong performance by Winter and a gregarious one by Levine, playing a character clearly based on Hunter S. Thompson.  There are some undeniably chilling moments scattered about, especially the long sequence where Anne is in a lab at the abandoned military facility and looks back eight minutes on the security footage and sees that something has entered the room and must still be in there with her.  But too much of BANSHEE CHAPTER is derivative and filled with ostensibly smart characters doing dumb things.  While his script could've used another polish or two, Erickson demonstrates enough skill behind the camera that I'm intrigued to see what he does next.  Zachary Quinto was one of the producers. (R, 87 mins)



RUNNER RUNNER
(US - 2013)

Justin Timberlake's status as an iconic pop music figure and his comedic skills on SNL are without question, but he hasn't had a lot of luck on the big screen other than supporting roles in acclaimed films like THE SOCIAL NETWORK and INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS.  Duds like IN TIME haven't done much to establish him as a box office draw and that trend continues with RUNNER RUNNER, a bland, boring thriller that audiences pretty much avoided during its theatrical run last fall.  It had potential, considering the script was written by ROUNDERS scribes David Levien and Brian Koppelman, but it seems like all they did was rewrite that script and move it to the world of online gambling while half-assedly peppering it with references to the financial meltdown of several years ago.  Timberlake is Richie Furst, a former Wall Street hot shot who lost everything in the collapse and is now struggling to pay his way through Princeton, largely through bookmaking and with commission earned by luring profs and fellow students to an online poker site.  When he's ordered by the dean (Bob Gunton!) to shut down his operation, Richie gambles his entire savings on a poker site and loses.  Sensing something fishy about the algorithms, Richie learns he was scammed and does what any struggling, broke college student would do:  flies to Costa Rica to personally confront online gambling magnate Ivan Block (Ben Affleck), who's able to operate unencumbered by US federal laws.  He manages a brief meet with Block, who's impressed enough to hire Richie to work for his operation.  Now with money beyond his wildest dreams--and getting to sleep with Ivan's sultry assistant/lover (Gemma Arterton)--Richie is living the life.  That is, until he's shaken down by overzealous FBI agent Shavers (Anthony Mackie), who's obsessed with bringing down Block and will do anything to nab him, even planting drugs in Richie's luggage to ensure his cooperation.

Unlike ROUNDERS, which felt gritty and real, RUNNER RUNNER is cartoonish and absurd from the start, following a template very much like the structurally similar and equally forgettable financial thriller PARANOIA, right down to the villain threatening the protagonist's father (John Heard shows up for a couple of scenes).  RUNNER RUNNER is filled with lazy writing to explain away its endless contrivances (Richie's roommate: "You're about to jet off to a country you've never been to, with a language you don't speak, bluff your way into Ivan Block's posse and expect him to just give your money back?"...next shot, Richie's landing in Costa Rica), and characters who say things like "You know who Meyer Lansky is?" and "You know what Napoleon said?"  Even Ivan Block is prefaced by someone saying "He's like the Wizard of fucking Oz...no one gets behind the curtain!"   He could've been a fun nemesis along the lines of ROUNDERS' Teddy KGB, so brilliantly played by John Malkovich in that film, but Affleck seems so bored that his performance--essentially a Bond villain version of his BOILER ROOM character--never really comes to life, even when he's dumping liquid chicken fat on some guys and threatening to feed them to his crocodiles (Affleck does get one great line, telling Timberlake's Richie "That's the problem with your generation...you sat around with your vintage T-shirts and your participation medals, but you never did anything").  By the time Richie inevitably devises an elaborate scheme to turn the tables on his mentor, the clichés and trite dialogue are simply out of control: "This isn't poker.  This is my life...and I've got one play left."  Levien and Koppelman are accomplished writers, but are they even trying here?  Lifelessly directed by Brad Furman (THE LINCOLN LAWYER), RUNNER RUNNER is the kind of predictable, paint-by-numbers product that can't even mask how utterly bored it is with itself.  (R, 91 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: BYZANTIUM (2013) and FRIGHT NIGHT 2: NEW BLOOD (2013)

BYZANTIUM
(Ireland/UK - 2013)

Many reviews of Neil Jordan's vampire film BYZANTIUM said it felt like the director was taking a second pass at his 1994 big-screen version of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE.  Considering the film's past/present structure, that's a valid statement but it doesn't really represent the whole film.  BYZANTIUM, scripted by Moira Buffini and based on her play, is frequently derivative in the way it feels like it belongs in the same Anne Rice universe but also in its similarities to the Swedish vampire hit LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008).  It manages to become its own beast, so to speak, and despite the occasionally slow pacing, the overlength, and the sometimes confusing structure, it overcomes its obstacles and ends up an interesting if inconsistent work.  Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) are a mother-daughter vampire pair passing themselves off as sisters in present-day London.  Clara works as a stripper, procuring her own victims among the drunk and belligerent men for whom she provides lap dances and, if the money's right, sexual services. Where Clara is ruthless and does what she needs to do for nourishment and money, the sympathetic Eleanor is quiet and withdrawn, feeding on humans but only those who are already about to die and who ask her to end their pain.  When a mystery man from their past turns up asking questions, Clara decapitates him and the two flee to a downtrodden seaside resort town that Eleanor senses they've visited before.  There, Clara latches on to lonely, schlubby Noel (Daniel Mays), who recently inherited a rundown hotel from his late mother.  She turns the hotel into a brothel called Byzantium as local men gradually start to vanish.  Fed up with her mother's lifestyle, Eleanor goes off to school and tries to live as normal a life as possible, befriending sickly Frank (the perpetually sickly-looking Caleb Landry Jones of ANTIVIRAL) and writing down her story for him.  Frank gives the memoir to their creative writing teacher (Tom Hollander) and soon, more men from Clara's past are on the scene.  In Eleanor's story, we learn that she and her mother are over 200 years old and that Clara was a prostitute servicing some Napoleonic-era soldiers who were part of a vampire order called the Pointed Nails of Justice.  Clara tricked her way into joining this He-Man Woman-Haters Club, and they've been after her and her daughter since.

BYZANTIUM has a great opening half hour, but then meanders a bit when it gets bogged down in the 200 years ago backstory and even more when one of the soldiers (Jonny Lee Miller) tells his own story within the flashback.  It picks up again in the home stretch, but the final scene between Clara and Eleanor feels rushed considering the emotional buildup to it, as one interpretation of the film could be as a metaphor for a concerned mother (it's not often you see vampires being concerned about money and keeping a roof over their head) learning to let go of her child.  Even with its problems (sorry, but "Pointed Nails of Justice" just sounds too goofy for a serious film), it's just nice to see a vampire film for adults that isn't populated with brooding hotties headed straight for the Teen Choice Awards.  A terrific Arterton has the showier role, attacking it with sometimes feverish gusto while avoiding the easy pitfall taking it over-the-top, but it's Ronan's Eleanor who's at the heart of BYZANTIUM, effectively conveying the human side of vampirism, showing no malice or desire to harm anyone and struggling with the anguished burden of eternal life.  With one foot in the arthouse and the other in the multiplex, BYZANTIUM sometimes takes on too much and becomes too unwieldy for its own good, but it's an interesting take on the vampire genre that will certainly find a cult following rather quickly.  (R, 118 mins)


FRIGHT NIGHT 2: NEW BLOOD
(US - 2013)

Ostensibly a sequel to FRIGHT NIGHT (2011), which was a remake of FRIGHT NIGHT (1985), FRIGHT NIGHT 2: NEW BLOOD has nothing to do with FRIGHT NIGHT (2011) and is actually another remake of FRIGHT NIGHT (1985), with elements of that film's sequel FRIGHT NIGHT PART 2 (1989).  Does that make sense?  Just by breaking that down, I put more thought into FRIGHT NIGHT 2: NEW BLOOD than the filmmakers did.  Directed by Eduardo Rodriguez (STASH HOUSE) and written by Matt Venne, whose screenplays for WHITE NOISE 2 and MIRRORS 2 have apparently made him the go-to guy for in-name-only DTV sequels, this "sequel" has hero Charley Brewster (Will Payne) pining for his ex Amy (Sacha Parkinson) while they, and his buddy Evil Ed (Chris Waller) are on some group exchange student sojourn to Romania, where production services can be cheaply procured by budget-conscious Hollywood studios unwilling to spend any more coin on a Will "Who?" Payne-headlined movie than is absolutely necessary.  They're attending a seminar on European art history taught by the sexy Prof. Gerri Dandridge (Jaime Murray of HUSTLE and DEFIANCE), who, of course, is a vampire but Charley can't prove it to anyone. 

 

This mostly follows the template of Tom Holland's 1985 classic, with the twist of turning Jerry Dandridge (previously played by Chris Sarandon in 1985 and Colin Farrell in 2011) into "Gerri" Dandridge and utilizing both the legend of Elizabeth Bathory and riffing on Julie Carmen's "Regine Dandridge" (Jerry's vengeful vampire sister) from FRIGHT NIGHT PART 2 (1989).  It's all a rather slipshod affair with a mostly uninteresting cast (only British TV vet Murray seems above the material), and thoroughly unlikable characters.  Waller plays Evil Ed as a smirking douchebag until the plot requires him to be a horror geek, and Peter Vincent, so brilliantly played by Roddy McDowall as a has-been TV horror host in the 1985 film (in a performance that, believe it or not, briefly generated some Supporting Actor Oscar buzz) and acceptably by David Tennant as a Vegas magician in 2011, is here a cynical, hard-drinking, asshole reality-TV monster hunter played by Sean Power.  It's hard to imagine McDowall's Peter Vincent telling a vampirized Evil Ed to "Kiss the cross, bitch!" which is pretty much the level of this loud, stupid, and boring film.  The only real surprise FRIGHT NIGHT 2: NEW BLOOD offers is Evil Ed telling the Bathory story and having it play out onscreen in animated graphic novel form.  It doesn't really serve a purpose, but it's something, I guess.  Bland actors, dull performances (in their defense, they're all British or Irish and with the exception of Murray, using American accents), and the mandatory shitty CGI splatter.  What a forgettable, pointless waste of time. (Unrated, 99 mins)