A throwback to both the French "extreme" horror movement of the mid-2000s as well as the vintage exploitation standby of the rape/revenge thriller, REVENGE hit international screens at just the moment that #MeToo and #TimesUp exploded in the global culture in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. As a result, many critics and bloggers seemed especially intent on making it a zeitgeist-capturing "issues" film when it really isn't. It's easy to see why molding it to fit a post-Weinstein narrative was easy: it's written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, working in a genre that's typically male-dominated from a behind-the-scenes standpoint. There's that, along with one of the main male villains spending the entire climax running around completely nude as he's being pursued by the vengeance-seeking Jen (a star-making performance by Matilda Lutz). Jen is the party-girl mistress of wealthy, married Richard (Kevin Janssens). He's got a weekend hunting trip planned at his posh desert getaway with two of his buddies, but he and Jen head out a day early to have the place to themselves. The buddies--Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimi (Guillaume Bouchede)--show up early and the quartet spend the evening drinking and having a good time. Jen and Stan do some playful slow dancing, and the next morning, while Richard is getting supplies for the hunt, Dimi is nursing a hangover, and Jen's packing so Richard's private chopper pilot can fly her home, Stan confronts her about "leading him on" and when she gets uncomfortable and tries to politely reject his advances, he rapes her as Dimi walks in, sees what's happening, closes the door, and turns up the volume on the living room TV to drown out the noise before blithely going for a swim. Richard returns and tries to calm Jen down, promising her a job with his company and wiring some money into her bank account to buy her silence. Furious that Richard's more concerned with protecting himself and his buddy than with her safety and well-being, she threatens to go to his wife, he belts her across the face, and she runs out of the house. The men chase her down, cornering her at a cliff as Richard pushes her off, impaling her on a tree branch and leaving her to die.
Of course, she survives, escaping with the branch still sticking out of her abdomen, and when Richard and the others return from their hunt assuming they'll dispose of her body, she's gone. After one of the more gruesome cauterization scenes in recent memory, Jen spends the rest of the film evading and eventually hunting down the trio, with results so violent and blood-soaked that it's really hard to believe this somehow managed to get an R rating. Even for the seasoned genre enthusiast, this is some pretty strong stuff, with one agonizing and painful scene with Stan rooting around inside his foot to remove a glass shard that goes on so absurdly long that a splatter newbie might very well throw up or pass out. Fargaet does a great job mining edge-of-your-seat suspense from Jen's pursuit of the men, often letting these scenes play out in long, real time takes. The final showdown between Jen and Richard is a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bloodbath. This is the kind of movie where a character has to Saran Wrap himself to keep his guts from spilling out. Lutz, previously seen in RINGS, which was hated by pretty much everyone, instantly establishes her genre bona fides in a ferocious performance that rivals Cristina Lindberg in Bo Arne Vibenius' THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE (1973) and Camille Keaton in Meir Zarchi's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978). And with its gruesome revenge tropes and Richard's reprehensible victim-blaming ("You're so damn beautiful, it's hard to resist you," he says in an attempt to justify Stan's actions), those are the real antecedents here, albeit with a much diminished focus on the rape aspect (in another example of defying expectations, the rape mostly takes place offscreen, with Jen's cries for help drowned out by the TV), and some admittedly clunky, high school creative writing-level symbolic religious imagery, from a rotten apple to Jen's impalement on the tree being a sort-of crucifixion. Other than the novelty of being directed by a woman and exhibiting more male nudity than female, REVENGE isn't making any statement about empowerment that Vibenius and Zarchi didn't make over 40-plus years ago. But even as a present-day homage to those cult classics, REVENGE is a riveting, visceral experience, and a breakout not just for Lutz, who throws herself into this fearless abandon, but also Fargeat, who's obviously a filmmaker to watch. (R, 108 mins) MARROWBONE (Spain - 2017; US release 2018)
The Spanish-made, English-language thriller MARROWBONE is the feature directing debut of Sergio G. Sanchez, best known as the writing partner of Guillermo del Toro protege and JURASSIC PARK: FALLEN KINGDOM director J.A. Bayona on 2007's THE ORPHANAGE and 2012's THE IMPOSSIBLE. Bayona is onboard as an executive producer here, and THE ORPHANAGE's influence is felt throughout, along with shades of the 1977 cult classic THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE, at least until the twists and turns start becoming apparent. The story is structured as such that said twists and turns are calculated too far in advance to be as effective as they should be, and MARROWBONE is a film that feels like it should've been made a decade ago. Set in 1969, it begins with American expat Rose Fairbairn (Nicola Harrison) fleeing England with her four children--adult Jack (George Mackay), late teens Jane (Mia Goth) and Billy (Charlie Heaton), and young Sam (Matthew Stagg)--across the Atlantic all the way to Marrowbone, her family's namesake ancestral home in a remote area of Maine. The reasons are initially vague--something about an abusive father--and the journey prompts a precipitous decline in Rose's health. She dies not long after they settle in and shortly after that, their father (Tom Fisher) finds them, appearing out of the nearby forest and taking a shot at Jane through her bedroom window.
Sanchez then immediately jumps ahead six months, and that incident isn't mentioned again until much later, the first clear sign that vital info is being withheld from the audience and that there's an obvious twist with more to come after that. The longer Sanchez draws it out and throws in other subplots--the reveal of the real reason they left England and a scandal involving their father being dubbed "The Beast of Bampton" by the British press; Jack courting local librarian Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy) and vying for her affections with Porter (Kyle Soller), the smarmy lawyer in charge of the Marrowbone estate; Jack's efforts to keep his mother's death a secret and deal with an attempted blackmailing by Porter; and Jack's insistence that only he go to town for errands while his siblings stay at the house--the more likely you are to figure out most of the third act developments that start flying fast and furious after an extremely slow buildup. There's some effective atmosphere throughout and some creepy moments here and there (little Sam's encounter with "the ghost" in their mother's room and the gradual realization that something is in the attic), but by the end, the twists and reveals are just deployed at an almost absurd rate, to the point where once everything is explained and rationally tied together, it becomes harder to swallow than what might've transpired otherwise. The performances are good, particularly Mackay, and Sanchez does a nice job at building some tension, but by the end, it just feels like the end result of recycling some leftover ORPHANAGE ideas after binge-watching some earlier M. Night Shyamalan. (R, 110 mins) 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN (UK - 2018)
A sci-fi thriller so bad that its only surprise is that Netflix failed to acquire it, 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN wastes a committed performance by BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's Katee Sackhoff in what's largely a one-woman show. After a failed mission to Mars in 2030 resulted in the deaths of the entire crew, all space missions became manned with an artificial intelligence working in conjunction with a human "supervisor" there to ensure AI functionality. In 2036, Mackenzie "Mack" Wilson (Sackhoff) is a supervisor on a return mission to Mars, but she's informed at launch--by her bureaucratic older sister Lena (Julie Cox), who runs mission control--that she's been demoted to second in command behind ARTi (voiced by Steven Cree), the sentient, British-accented AI system that was also part of the 2030 mission, whose victims included Mack's and Lena's father. The assignment is to investigate a mysterious cube-like structure that has suddenly appeared on Mars and is demonstrating an ability to teleport. Mack is hesitant to put all of her trust in ARTi, arguing that "We created AI to help us, not to lead us." If this sounds familiar, you're right: 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN is basically celebrating the 50th anniversary of a Stanley Kubrick masterpiece by offering up 95 minutes of shamelessly derivative, nutsack-riding 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY fan fiction, at least until an infuriating finale where it sees fit to reference EX MACHINA Turing tests before wrapping things up as a blatant ripoff of MOON. The mission is eventually joined by Sterling (Ray Fearon), one of Mack's colleagues, and director Hasraf "Haz" Dulull even has the chutzpah to stage a scene where Mack and Sterling sneak away to have a private conversation and are spied on by HAL 9--...er, I mean, ARTi. Dulull has a lot of experience on the visual effects and pre-viz teams of numerous big-budget Hollywood movies like HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, THE DARK KNIGHT, and PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME, in addition to the TV documentary series NOVA. The interior ship design is handsomely mounted and Dulull admirably makes 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN look much more expensive than it is, but even that falls on its face for a few scattered action bits that are badly rendered with laughably cheap effects more fitting for a 20-year-old sci-fi TV show. Devotees of Sackhoff will no doubt have to watch this, but know going in that she's better than the material and this is the maybe the dullest and dreariest sci-fi flick to come down the pike since 1987's NIGHTFLYERS. (Unrated, 95 mins)
JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (US - 2018) Directed by J.A. Bayona. Written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow. Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, Jeff Goldblum, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon, Peter Jason, Robert Emms, Charlie Rawes, Kevin Layne, John Schwab. (PG-13, 128 mins) Five films into a 25-year-old blockbuster franchise--let's count this all as one series--and it's understandable that coming up with fresh ideas might be a little difficult. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM, the follow-up to the 2015 reboot/sequel JURASSIC WORLD, recognizes this, and while it includes numerous visual callbacks and shout-outs to previous installments (including the brief return of an iconic fan favorite), it basically opts for the insane route, with a second-half shift into territory that's so illogical and ludicrous that it can't help but make itself oddly endearing. There's enough sly moments throughout--Bryce Dallas Howard's introduction begins with a close-up of her high heels that's so blatant that it can't be anything but a middle finger to everyone still bitching about her footwear from JURASSIC WORLD--that I'm actually willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to argue the plot holes and inconsistencies all you want, but I think they're well aware that they've made what will probably be the dumbest movie of 2018. I can't recall another director harangued more for getting a lucky break than Colin Trevorrow was with JURASSIC WORLD three years ago. Though the directorial reins have been handed off to Guillermo del Toro protege J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE, THE IMPOSSIBLE, A MONSTER CALLS), Trevorrow remains onboard as a producer and co-writer. With that in mind, it's very much Bayona's film, especially with its improbable second-half location change, but the director seems more than willing to help his franchise predecessor troll the trolls with bits like that high-heel intro, and a later shot where Howard's character arrives on an island and Bayona is sure to spend more time than necessary showing the audience that she's wearing boots.
When a raging volcano threatens the dinosaurs still living on Isla Nublar, the home of the ruins of Jurassic World, Congress must decide whether to intervene and rescue them or allow them to perish once again. Arguing in favor of letting them go extinct is Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who briefly appears at a congressional hearing to repeat the same arguments he leveled at spare-no-expense multi-billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) a quarter century ago. Congress eventually decides the US will not intervene, but then former Jurassic World PR head and current dinosaur conservationist Claire Dearing (Howard) is summoned to the northern California mansion of Hammond's previously unmentioned business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Lockwood is dying and the day-to-day operation of his empire is left largely in the hands of his right-hand man Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who hires Claire and two of her staffers--paleoveterinarian Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and dweeby IT expert Franklin Mills (Justice Smith)--to join a covert operation to rescue numerous dinosaur species and move them to a protected island sanctuary. Also necessary to the team is dino-whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who reluctantly goes along since one of the creatures they want to rescue is Blue the Velociraptor, with whom he's shared an emotional bond since it was born. Of course, once they're there, they realize they've been tricked (who saw that coming, other than anyone who's seen a previous JURASSIC movie?) and that, unbeknownst to the benevolent Lockwood, Mills' team of contracted mercenaries led by Wheatley (Ted Levine) aren't there to save the dinosaurs, but to gather the most valuable ones to sell to the highest bidder as part of a moneymaking scheme engineered by Mills and wealthy asshole Eversol (Toby Jones). Wheatley's job is to return the dinosaurs not to Lockwood's island sanctuary but to his estate, where a three-story, military-industrial-sized bunker exists underneath to house both the new captures as well as other hybrids, like the new "Indoraptor," engineered by original Jurassic Park scientist-turned-improbable supervillain Dr. Wu (BD Wong). Wu stole some DNA samples from Jurassic World with the intent of selling the newly-created creatures as military weapons, an idea first suggested by Vincent D'Onofrio's character in the previous film.
Once the story moves back to the Lockwood estate, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM more or less becomes THE OLD JURASSIC HOUSE, with Mills and Eversol holding a dinosaur auction for stock types like Slovenian arms dealers and hulking Russian mobsters, presumably taking a break from buying abducted girls from underground human traffickers before running afoul of Liam Neeson. But instead of Neeson, they're forced to contend with dinosaurs who escape from the holding area on one of the lower bunker levels and proceed to rampage through the mansion. Lockwood's precocious granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) ends up teaming with Owen and Claire, who are being held captive but break out with the help of a Stegosaur in the adjacent cell as the Indoraptor prototype wreaks havoc and pursues everyone through the mansion. This allows Bayona to showcase his gothic horror/del Toro influence and somehow turn JURASSIC WORLD into an "old dark house" throwback.
There's also a completely batshit revelation about Maisie that goes nowhere and must be a set-up for the inevitable sixth film in the franchise. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is a spectacularly dumb movie with dumb people making spectacularly dumb decisions (we've already established that the Indoraptor is super-intelligent and ready for military use, but yeah Wheatley, sneak into its paddock to yank out a tooth for a trophy while it's unconscious--there's no way it's playing possum with you; and why would Jurassic World have been built on an island with a such a large and dangerous active volcano?), but amidst the idiocy, Bayona still brings his own sense of style and a personal touch. There's the gothic interiors of the Lockwood estate, Maisie being a young girl with no friends and largely left to use her vivid imagination (young Sermon recalls both Ana Torrent in THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE and CRIA CUERVOS, and Ivana Baquero in PAN'S LABYRINTH), and the presence of Geraldine Chaplin--a Bayona regular and fixture in Spanish art cinema since her professional collaboration and romantic relationship with filmmaker Carlos Saura in the 1970s--as Iris, Lockwood's nurse and Maisie's nanny. Given his past films and his experience, Bayona has more of a knack for this kind of genre fare than Trevorrow (whose only feature film prior to JURASSIC WORLD was the 2012 Aubrey Plaza indie comedy SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED) demonstrated and despite being an idiotic franchise installment, it still ends up coming across like a film by its director rather than an assembly-line product and audience obligation. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is so stupid that it has to be by design, but it seems hesitant to fully commit to its own lunacy or go far enough in fashioning itself as an auto-critique. Sure, Trevorrow and Bayona call out the tireless keyboard warriors with the Howard shoe shots, but they also drop the ball a few times. As much as Maisie sneaks around the labyrinthine Lockwood manor in the dumbwaiter, you'd think it would foreshadow an inevitable moment where a smaller dinosaur hides in it and attacks someone trying to use it to get away. I was all ready for JURASSIC WORLD: DINOS IN THE DUMBWAITER but it failed to transpire. It would've fit right in with a movie that has all manner of dino species milling about inside a loading dock patiently waiting for a door to open so they can get out. I don't think anyone who made this film took it seriously. This is supposed to be a comedy, right?
A MONSTER CALLS (US/Spain - 2016) Directed by J.A. Bayona. Written by Patrick Ness. Cast: Lewis MacDougall, Sigourney Weaver, Felicity Jones, Liam Neeson, Toby Kebbell, Geraldine Chaplin, James Melville, Ben Moor, Dominic Boyle, Oliver Steer. (PG-13, 108 mins) Acclaimed Spanish filmmaker and Guillermo del Toro protege J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE, THE IMPOSSIBLE) crafts his first genuine masterpiece with A MONSTER CALLS, adapted by Patrick Ness from his 2011 novel. The book came from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd, who planned to write it herself but only got as far as outlining the project before succumbing to terminal breast cancer in 2007, a battle that inspired the story. Dowd's editor passed her notes on to Ness, who agreed to write the novel. As a director, Bayona seems more akin to classic-era Spielberg than del Toro (Bayona is currently at work on the next JURASSIC WORLD movie, due in summer 2018), demonstrating a gift for getting natural performances out of young and inexperienced actors. He coaxes a star-making from young Lewis MacDougall (PAN) as Conor O'Malley, a lonely 12-year-old boy in a small British town trying to cope with the slow decline of his terminally ill mother (Felicity Jones). Treatment after treatment doesn't work, and Conor has no one to turn to--his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) is cold and stand-offish, and his father (Toby Kebbell) split several years ago and has since started a new family in Los Angeles ("You could come for Christmas and meet your sister," he tells Conor, who snaps "Half-sister"). He's bullied on a daily basis at school by Harry (James Melville) and spends his time sketching and drawing, a passion he inherited from his mother, who wanted to go to art school but put it on the backburner when she became pregnant with him. Conor is plagued by recurring nightmares in which he's clinging to his mother as she dangles over a bottomless hole that's opened up, always followed at 12:07 am by an ancient yew tree in the cemetery behind their home coming to life.
Voiced and motion-captured by Liam Neeson, the giant, fire-breathing tree monster is in Conor's imagination but mentors him in dealing with his problems--with the bullies at school, with his grandmother, the resentment he feels toward his father, and his refusal to accept that his mother is near death. The monster tells Conor three stories that have little to do with one another and whose points are initially lost on him. In them, nothing is black and white. People who are presumed evil are actually not and vice versa and there are no clear answers for anything. Conor is, as the tree monster says, "A boy, too old to be a child and too young to be a man." He's faced with thoughts that he can't process. He wants his mother to recover but is angry with her when the last-ditch attempt at treatment doesn't work. He's happy to see his visiting father, but it doesn't take long before he realizes that he's not the priority when Dad declines his request to move with him to L.A. ("There's just no room," Dad says). Things take a devastating turn when Mom is readmitted to the hospital and Conor is forced to stay with Grandma and crosses a line that may irreparably damage any chance at establishing a positive relationship with her. The moral of the tree monster's stories all parallel plot developments in the film, and in doing so, the tree monster is preparing Conor for the inevitable truth he has to face: that his mother is going to die and there's nothing he can do to stop it.
For anyone who's lost a parent or a close family member to a long illness, A MONSTER CALLS may dig up emotions both devastating and cathartic. You'll recognize every thought that runs through Conor's head: his wish that treatment is a success and everything will get back to normal, his anger when that doesn't happen, his wish that the suffering would just end, a sentiment that he misconstrues as wishing she'd die, which causes him extreme guilt ("You don't want her to die," the tree monster reassures, adding "But you want the pain to end. For her and for you"). It's hard to discuss a lot of what happens in A MONSTER CALLS without giving away too much, but it's a powerful and deeply moving film that addresses a difficult subject in a mature and thoughtful way. I wouldn't be at all surprised if psychologists and families find it to be a therapeutic tool in the future for helping children cope with the pending loss of a terminally ill parent. It's a film about loss and grief that handles real life issues in a blunt but sensitive fashion. It isn't afraid to show its characters in a negative light because that's how life happens. There are moments where you'll intensely dislike Conor, no matter how much you empathize with his situation, making A MONSTER CALLS a special effects-heavy fantasy with much going on under the surface--"monster" has numerous meanings here--pulling no punches and unafraid to take risks. It's depressing, heartbreaking, comforting, and hopeful in equal measure, and is thus far my pick for 2016's best film.
Directed by J.A. Bayona. Written by Sergio G. Sanchez. Cast: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin, Oaklee Pendergast, Geraldine Chaplin, Sonke Mohring, Ploy Jindachote, Johan Sundberg, Marta Etura. (PG-13, 113 mins)
There's little doubt that the creative forces behind THE IMPOSSIBLE approached the project with noble intentions. There's also little doubt the film, at times a tense, emotional, and grueling drama centered on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste when it's over. It gets a lot of things right: the tsunami itself is one of 2012's most harrowing sequences, very convincingly pulled off by the filmmakers and visual effects team, and the acting is, for the most part, excellent. These elements manage to carry the film for a while, but at some point, it stops working and the contrivances and the maudlin audience manipulation take over. There's much about THE IMPOSSIBLE that is very good, but just as much of it is problematic for a variety of reasons.
Based on the experiences of Maria and Enrique Belon, a Spanish couple vacationing with their three young sons at a resort in Khao Lak, Thailand over Christmas 2004, the film--a Spanish production--maximizes export potential by replacing the Belons with the Bennetts, a British-accented family from an unspecified country living in Japan, where dad Henry (Ewan McGregor) works. Mom Maria (Naomi Watts, her Australian accent intact) was a doctor "at home" but is now a stay-at-home mom to sons Lucas (Tom Holland), Thomas (Samuel Joslin), and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast). The tsunami hits on December 26, and in the catastrophic chaos, Maria and Lucas are separated from Henry, Thomas, and Simon. The sullen, close-to-teenaged Lucas grows up fast when it falls on him to help the badly-injured Maria. They're eventually rescued by some Thai people in the area and transported by pickup truck to the nearest hospital, where they end up getting separated in the confusion. Meanwhile, Henry is still near the resort with the other two boys and gives them to some fellow vacationers to take to a safe area in the mountains while he stays behind and looks for Maria and Lucas.
I don't in any way mean to diminish the pain and anguish that the Belons endured during this tragic event, but in the hands of director and Guillermo del Toro protege Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez (both were responsible for the promising 2007 fright film THE ORPHANAGE), THE IMPOSSIBLE had me grumbling to myself and rolling my eyes barely a minute into the proceedings when we see the Bennetts on the plane to Khao Lak, and a loose page that falls to the floor reveals the book Maria is reading is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (FORESHADOWING!). And in the immediate aftermath of the horrific tsunami (this sequence is a stunner, without question), something starts nagging at you. Where is everybody? There were thousands of people here two minutes ago, but now it's just Maria and Lucas. Maybe it's a directorial technique to show that they are the story's focus, but it just looks and feels odd. There's an occasional corpse and they do eventually find a little European boy on his own (Johan Sundberg), but the first Thai people we see are some raggedy-looking folks who drag Maria and Lucas to safety. Now, there's been some grumbling about this film choosing to focus on the effects of the tsunami on white European vacationers, but I don't necessarily have a problem with that in and of itself. Bayona and Sanchez chose to tell the story of one Spanish family's experiences in this event, and that's fine (though I wonder why the Spanish producers didn't just cast Spanish actors and make this a Spanish-language film; certainly someone as accomplished as, say, ORPHANAGE star Belen Rueda, arguably Spain's top actress, could've handled the Maria role), but the narrowed focus starts to feel embarrassingly tone-deaf as the film progresses. The only Thai people we see are the ones dropping everything to be of service to the wealthy white vacationers. Of course the Thai people in the devastated area graciously helped any survivors they found, but in choosing to focus on this particular family, the filmmakers don't even try to pay the slightest lip service to a population uprooted by the same catastrophic tragedy.
Maria Belon has claimed that the film is entirely accurate, but it feels awfully contrived. Of course, all the separated parties will meet at the same place by sheer coincidence (this after Henry makes the stupid decision of sending two of his kids off with total strangers in a foreign country), but the way the scene plays out reeks of shameless Hollywood horseshit. (SPOILERS) As Fernando Velazquez's score swells to an emotional apex telling the audience exactly how to feel, Lucas leaves Maria's post-surgery bedside to get her something to drink, just as Henry is wandering the halls in futile hope that they're at this hospital. In the distance, Lucas spots a man wearing the ugly swimming trunks that Henry was wearing when the tsunami hit. "Dad!" he yells, but Henry can't hear him in the commotion. Wandering outside, Lucas finds the truck full of kids being taken to safe place in the mountains. Thomas and Simon are on the back of the truck. Little Simon sees his oldest brother. "Lucas!" he yells. Thomas turns, sees his brother. "Lucas!" Lucas, distracted from his search for the man with the ugly swimming trunks, turns around and sees his kid brothers. "Thomas! Simon!" Meanwhile, Henry sits on the back of a truck outside of a hospital, resigned to the notion that Maria and Lucas aren't there. He glances over and sees two little kids kicking a red ball that looks just like the red ball he got for Simon. Now, Simon doesn't have this ball with him, but just the sight of that ball is all the evidence Henry needs to feel in his gut that My sons are here! And they are. They all see one another and embrace. And everyone, from the heroic rescuers to the life-threateningly injured, stops to share in the joy of the moment. All that's missing is a slow clap.
Despite the film eventually being crushed by the weight of its crowd-pleasing feel-goodness, it's impossible to understate the power of the remarkable work done by Watts and young Holland. Watts delivers the kind of fearless, unglamourous, physically-demanding performance that almost guarantees Oscar attention. Holland, in his onscreen debut (he revoiced a character in the English-language version of the animated THE SECRET LIFE OF ARIETTY), quickly reveals himself to be a gifted young actor and it's very likely we'll be hearing his name again down the road. THE IMPOSSIBLE works best in the early going, during the tsunami and the immediate aftermath, with Maria and Lucas wading through mud, muck, and debris and in a long, arduous sequence where Lucas is forced to help his injured mother climb a tree to safety. Watts and Holland are simply superb in their scenes together, but their award-caliber work is hindered significantly by too many ill-advised decisions by the filmmakers. Despite its many strengths and one of the most terrifying depictions of a natural disaster in all of cinema, the film is ultimately too calculated, too manipulative, and too heavy-handed for its own good.
