Does "Skunk" sound like a man with a plan? If you're already involved in some seriously illegal shit and you're presented with a risky deal by your loudmouth, sketchy best buddy who calls himself "Skunk," the only guarantee is that it's doomed from the start. And despite his misgivings, slick NYC money launderer Moe Diamond (Liam Hemsworth) goes along anyway in the dreadful KILLERMAN, an amateurish pastiche of Michael Mann's THIEF and the Safdie Brothers' GOOD TIME if everyone in it acted like Buddy Duress. The first few minutes actually fool you into thinking KILLERMAN might be an unsung gem--the NYC skyline, shady characters forever looking for a big score, the old-school '70s grittiness of the diamond district, the persistent throb of its synth score--but it falls apart in near-record time. Moe and Skunk (Emory Cohen) make deliveries and launder money for Skunk's Russian mobster uncle Perico (Zlatko Buric). Perico's got a lucrative deal set up with a corrupt congressman who tells him to hold off because there's too much heat. Ordered by Perico to sit on the money until further notice, Skunk talks Moe into going with him on a can't-miss deal where they use Perico's money for a clandestine drug deal that will net a huge profit for them when they unload the drugs, with his uncle none the wiser after getting his money back. Of course, the can't-miss deal completely misses (because "Skunk"), as a squad of dirty cops raid the drug buy and Moe and Skunk barely manage to escape with the goods and the money. The ensuing car chase ends in a wreck where Moe suffers an amnesia-inducing head injury and has no idea why he's got a huge shipment of drugs and duffel bags full of cash.
There's some promise here, especially with the obvious affection for '70s crime thrillers on the part of writer/director Malik Bader. But it's all smoke and mirrors, and all Bader does is riff on other movies without bringing anything new to the table en route to a dumb twist ending. He's particularly enamored of GOOD TIME, from the setting, to the cinematography, to the music, and even going so far as to include an improbable hospital escape. Cliches abound--Moe's girlfriend Lola (Diane Guerrero) asks "When is this going to end?" when he has to back out of date night plans for the umpteenth time because of "work"--and stupidity takes center stage. There's no possible explanation for the scene where amnesia-stricken Moe insists on going to his apartment despite Skunk's warning that the whole area is probably under surveillance and crawling with cops, followed immediately by Moe in his apartment talking to Lola while Skunk stands in the middle of the busy street outside honking the horn and yelling "Moe, let's go!" right before the cops swarm in. If Bader wanted his own Robert Pattinson-styled GOOD TIME, he needed a more magnetic leading man than Hemsworth, who once again demonstrates why nobody cares about anything he's in if it doesn't have "HUNGER GAMES" in the title, and not even letting him go on an out-of-nowhere, late-film rampage of machete beheadings and dismemberments is enough to salvage it. As a director, Malik Bader also does nothing to rein in the histrionics of the one of the two main dirty cops, a constantly shouting rage case brought to headache-inducing life in a grating, attention-hogging performance by...(checks notes)...Malik Bader. (R, 112 mins)
SEMPER FI (US/UK/Italy - 2019)
Until it completely goes on leave from plausibility in its second half, SEMPER FI is a reasonably engrossing drama that unexpectedly offers career-best work from Jai Courtney and Nat Wolff, two actors who have been thoroughly mediocre to this point in everything they've done, and yet Hollywood still seems hellbent on making them happen. I'd all but given up on Courtney (A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD, TERMINATOR: GENISYS) after watching him embarrass himself in scenes opposite Christopher Plummer in THE EXCEPTION, but props where they're due: he's absolutely terrific here as Chris "Cal" Callahan, a cop in a small town in upstate New York. He and his buddies--firefighter and family man Milk (Beau Knapp), auto body mechanic and player Jaeger (Finn Wittrock), and construction worker Snowball (Arturo Castro)--are all Marine reservists, along with Cal's fuck-up younger half-brother Oyster (Wolff). Cal managed to pull some strings to get Oyster in the reserves despite a pair of felonies in his past, and even then Oyster still can't get his shit together, though he has talent for cooking and a pipe dream of opening a food truck business. All of that comes to an abrupt end when Oyster gets into a bar fight and winds up accidentally killing the guy who jumped him in self-defense, right after joking to another bar patron "I'm gonna kill that guy," when he sees him talking to a girl he had his eye on. Oyster tries to run with a half-assed plan of going to Canada and it's Cal who ends up bringing him in.
Cut to eight months later. Cal and the guys have been deployed to Iraq while Oyster got a 25-year sentence for attempting to flee as well as the damning testimony of that bar patron that was enough to make it premeditated murder. Once home, Cal suffers from PTSD over losing his temper and killing a man in Mosul and Oyster, still furious that his own brother arrested him, denies his visitation requests and refuses have anything to do with him. So far, so good, as director/co-writer Henry-Alex Rubin (best known for the 2005 wheelchair rugby documentary MURDERBALL, whose scene-stealing Mark Zupan can be spotted here as a patient at a VA hospital) gets strong, gut-wrenching performances from Courtney and Wolff, the latter convincingly portraying someone unable to articulate his rage and letting it boil inside of him, especially once we learn more about their complicated family history. But what starts as a solid--if occasionally melodramatic--character-driven tragedy takes an abrupt turn toward the ridiculous when Cal, getting word that Oyster is being abused by some sadistic guards, decides to bust his little brother out during a prison transfer and get him to Canada with help from the other guys. They all keep telling Cal what a stupid idea it is, yet they go along with it, and that includes Jaeger's ex-girlfriend (Leighton Meester), who's now an attorney. The film tries to explain away Cal's sudden lack of level-headed decision-making by blaming it on the PTSD, but it seems more like a plot convenience than anything, especially when he shows up at the bar witness' house and tries to threaten him into recanting his testimony. The whole prison break plot turn seems to be some kind of compromise Rubin reached with some of the two dozen credited producers, and while it doesn't cause SEMPER FI to completely implode on itself, it does result in the film working at cross purposes in terms of exactly what it wants to be. And the unfortunate casualties of this indecisiveness are the two fine performances by Courtney and Wolff, because if SEMPER FI accomplishes nothing else, it proves that these two are capable of delivering very good performances. (R, 100 mins)
A somewhat low-key take on THE PROFESSIONAL and THE TRANSPORTER, THE HUNTER'S PRAYER only managed a stealth VOD burial in June 2017 after over two years on the shelf. There's nothing original or inventive about it, but it's a perfectly acceptable time-killing chase thriller that's executed reasonably well in the capable hands of the long-absent Jonathan Mostow (BREAKDOWN, U-571), directing his first film since the 2009 Bruce Willis sci-fi dud SURROGATES. Mostow stepped in after journeyman Philip Noyce (PATRIOT GAMES, THE BONE COLLECTOR) bailed during pre-production, and had his TERMINATOR 3 and SURROGATES writing team of John Brancato & Michael Ferris (THE GAME) rework the script after Paul Leydon (THE FACTORY) and Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER) took cracks at adapting Kevin Wignall's 2004 novel For the Dogs. Sam Worthington (also one of 24 credited producers) is Lucas, a junkie hit man in the employ of shady UK financial titan Addison (DOWNTON ABBEY's Allen Leech). Another assassin, Metzger (RED ROAD's Martin Compston) has been sent to New York to whack the family of Martin Hatto (Eben Young), an associate who embezzled funds from Addison's company and is about to expose his illegal dealings to the FBI and Interpol. Lucas' assignment is to kill Hatto's teenage daughter Ella (THE GIVER's Odeya Rush), who's enrolled in posh boarding school in Switzerland. Haunted by PTSD from his military days in Fallujah, and now a hopeless drug addict with a young daughter he's never met, Lucas has a change of heart and decides to become Ella's protector as Addison sends Metzger and corrupt FBI flunky Banks (TRANSPARENT's Amy Landecker) to pursue the pair through Europe.
There's also a less technological BOURNE element (sorry, no "crisis suites" or Addison flunkies staring at a row of monitors and shouting "There he is! It's Lucas!") to the tireless pursuit of Lucas and Ella, and while it's not exactly a high-energy action thriller, Mostow keeps THE HUNTER'S PRAYER reasonably well-paced and entertaining. Almost everything is telegraphed in advance and easy to see coming unless you've never seen a movie before: the moment Lucas says he's never met his daughter, we know he's meeting her by the end. Likewise, the moment Lucas shows Ella how to load and fire a gun, we know she'll be the one to ultimately take out Addison during the inevitable showdown in the murky catacombs underneath his castle-like fortress. And of course, the moment Lucas and Ella begin to bond, we know he'll realize he has a reason to live and she'll care for him when he quits the needle cold turkey and goes through his FRENCH CONNECTION II-inspired withdrawal. Worthington, who's been taking on more character roles in films like EVEREST and HACKSAW RIDGE after years of Hollywood trying to make him a thing following AVATAR and CLASH OF THE TITANS (where Liam Neeson managed to upstage him and the entire cast with one perfect line), does a credible job in a role that feels like it was written with Jason Statham in mind. There's nothing here to get really excited about it--it is what it is, but if you're looking for a fairly diverting chase thriller with no thinking required, you can do a lot worse than THE HUNTER'S PRAYER. (R, 91 mins)
THE EXCEPTION (Germany/US/Switzerland/Belgium - 2017)
The kind of prestige period drama that probably would've starred Keira Knightley and James McAvoy a decade ago and gotten at least seven Oscar nominations, THE EXCEPTION instead was given a limited release and a DirecTV dumping by A24 and will be a complete non-factor come awards season. Based on the 2003 novel The Kaiser's Last Kiss by Alan Judd, THE EXCEPTION is a fictionalized look at events in the last year of the life of Germany's abdicated Kaiser Wilhelm II, played here by the always magnificent Christopher Plummer. Set in 1940 at Wilhelm's palace in Utrecht, where he's been in exile since 1918, the film centers on Nazi Capt. Stefan Brandt (Jai Courtney), a disgraced officer given the duty of heading to the Netherlands to lead security for the Kaiser, who serves no current political purpose but is still viewed as a figure of great symbolic importance to Hitler's Germany. Brandt's real assignment--and his shot at redemption after standing up to a brutal senior officer who took way too much joy in mowing down some Jewish children--is to determine if the Dutch Resistance has planted a spy among the Kaiser's housekeeping staff. Of course, Brandt makes the job difficult by having a torrid, borderline NIGHT PORTER-ish fling with Mieke (BABY DRIVER's Lily James), one of the Kaiser's maids and a secret Jew. Brandt is a Nazi with a conscience, and Mieke being Jewish doesn't really bother him, but what he doesn't know and what any seasoned moviegoer will immediately figure out is that Mieke is the spy. She's working for Winston Churchill and the British government, there to observe any possible interaction between the Kaiser and high-ranking Nazi officials. Of course, it gets personal once she has a chance to avenge the murder of her Jewish parents when the Kaiser is visited by Heinrich Himmler (Eddie Marsan). A conflicted Brandt is torn between his duty to Germany and his love for Mieke, and their forbidden affair is encouraged by the Kaiser who, in the context of this film, is shown demonstrating some mildly anti-Semitic sentiments but nothing of the level of the monstrous Himmler, which isn't really historically accurate--in real life, the Kaiser's papers written as late as 1940 reveal a still very virulent anti-Semite. In the fictionalized, romance novel world of THE EXCEPTION, the Kaiser is reduced to playing a wizened, wily matchmaker who inspires these two crazy kids to set aside the whole "Germans hate the Jews" thing and maybe they can make it after all. And we know they will, because Brandt ultimately chooses good over evil when he embraces Mieke, looks her in the eye, and proclaims "I've found something else to fight for." Maybe they should've fought for a better script.
THE EXCEPTION looks lavish enough but is hokey and insultingly simplistic throughout, with Brandt's cliched character (he's not the rule, he's "the exception," get it?) never registering thanks to the utterly blank Courtney (A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD, TERMINATOR: GENISYS, SUICIDE SQUAD), who's never going to be a star no matter how many times the movie industry tries to make him happen. He's completely miscast and entirely too present-day, Magic Mike buff to be a Nazi captain in 1940 (I'd suggest picturing Channing Tatum in this role, but Tatum is smart enough to know his limitations). Courtney sucks the energy out of scene after scene with his monotone delivery and blank stare, barely able to hold his own in scenes with James and Janet McTeer as the Kaiser's wife. Tony Award-winning stage director David Leveaux, making his big-screen directing debut, does Courtney a further disservice by giving Brandt a bunch of scenes with the Kaiser. And rest assured, nothing spotlights a mediocre leading man's shortcomings like having him spend significant chunks of screen time opposite Christopher Plummer, an 87-year-old living legend who's got more star power in his bowel movements than Courtney's been capable of mustering over his entire career. Some hyped actors that Hollywood insists on making a thing end up maturing into first-rate actors--Matthew McConaughey and Colin Farrell come to mind--so there's a chance Courtney might get better as he gets older. I don't mean to be a dick and dog Courtney so hard. He's probably a nice guy. But he's just...not good. And neither is THE EXCEPTION. (R, 107 mins)
With a US president still claiming that a "great,big, beautiful wall" is going up along the US/Mexico border, it's not hard to see some prescient political subtext to a film like DESIERTO, even if it spent two years on a shelf before STX released it on just 168 screens in the US. Directed, co-written, and edited by Jonas Cuaron (who co-wrote GRAVITY with his dad Alfonso, who's a producer here), DESIERTO can easily be read as a stern if inadvertent rebuke of the Trump agenda, but it's really a mean, gritty B-movie survivalist thriller that wouldn't have been out of place at a drive-in in the late 1970s with Hugo Stiglitz and Cameron Mitchell in the lead roles instead of today's Gael Garcia Bernal and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Bernal is Moises, one of about 19 migrants being taken through the "badlands" of the Sonoran Desert and across the border into Arizona by coyotes Lobo (Marco Perez) and Mechas (Diego Catano). The truck breaks down and they're forced to travel on foot in the baking, 120°F sun. After crossing over into the US, Mechas' smaller group ends up much further behind Lobo's, and they're forced to watch as Lobo and about 15 others are picked off one by one by Sam (Morgan), a racist vigilante who has appointed himself protector of the border. With his vicious dog Tracker at his side, Sam relentlessly pursues Moises and the scant few remaining as a game of cat-and-mouse ensues in the harsh, unforgiving elements.
DESIERTO is a simple, straightforward story that doesn't get bogged down in ham-fisted statements and Big Picture proclamations, It's a mainstream thriller that STX originally planned on opening wide but kept shuffling its release date and eventually downgraded it to a limited release, probably skittish over the tense political climate or, just as likely, commercial concerns that any of the dialogue not spoken by Morgan or, in one brief scene, Lew Temple (THE DEVIL'S REJECTS) as a border patrolman, is in Spanish with English subtitles (a French/Mexican co-production, DESIERTO was submitted to the Oscars to be Mexico's Best Foreign Language Film nominee but didn't make the cut). We don't learn much of Sam's backstory and we really don't need to. Most of Morgan's scenes are by himself or talking to Tracker, and Sam's got a real chip on his shoulder about Mexicans coming into "his" country. Moises' conscientious qualities are displayed when he intervenes when one migrant won't keep his paws off a woman who's clearly not interested, and there's some added poignancy to his situation when we learn he was already in the US and working on becoming an American citizen, but a traffic stop over a busted headlight escalated and he ended up in a detention center on his way to being deported, his wife and son still in America. He's determined to get back to them, even bringing his son his musical teddy bear that, of course, keeps going off at all the wrong times. Fast-paced and smart enough to not overstay its welcome at just 88 minutes, DESIERTO is an intense exploitation throwback with stunning desert cinematography by Damian Garcia that makes you feel every degree of the setting's sweltering temperature amidst the endless barren emptiness that gives Moises and the dwindling band of survivors little opportunity to hide from a psycho who's declared himself judge, jury, and executioner. (R, 88 mins)
MAN DOWN
(US - 2016)
Military personnel returning home with severe PTSD is a serious issue that deserves a serious film, but MAN DOWN isn't that film. That's not on star Shia LaBeouf who, for all of his eccentric performance art stunts and demonstrable past douchebaggery, has emerged as a compelling actor who throws himself into roles and is willing to take chances in outside-the-box projects like Lars von Trier's NYMPHOMANIAC and Andrea Arnold's AMERICAN HONEY. No, MAN DOWN fails because of the wildly inconsistent Dito Montiel, who got some acclaim with his 2006 debut A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS (featuring a younger LaBeouf), but whose best film remains 2009's FIGHTING. Montiel has shown occasional flashes of promise (the posthumous Robin Williams drama BOULEVARD is one of his better movies), but when he's having an off day--THE SON OF NO ONE, EMPIRE STATE--his work borders on the unwatchable, and even his muse Channing Tatum, who starred in his first three films, seems to have abandoned him. MAN DOWN is closer to the bottom end of Montiel's increasingly suspect filmography, and would be a complete train wreck if not for the commitment of LaBeouf, who gives it far more than he or anyone watching will get in return.
MAN DOWN's story is told over three cross-cutting timelines haphazardly cut together with little regard for thematic overlap or storytelling rhythms. One shows Marine Gabriel Drummer (LaBeouf) and his best friend Devin Roberts (Hollywood still trying to make Jai Courtney happen) going through basic training and deployment in Afghanistan. The second is a meeting between a possibly suicidal Drummer and a military psychologist (Gary Oldman) after some traumatic incident that will be made clear later. The third is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland after a biochemical terrorist attack has wiped out most of America, with Gabriel and Devin searching for Gabriel's missing wife Natalie (Kate Mara) and young son Johnathan (Charlie Shotwell). The three narratives play out as tediously as possible, making the film feel much longer than its relatively brief 90 minutes. One storyline doesn't seem to belong and it's clear early on that Gabriel has had some kind of PTSD breakdown and maybe, just maybe, the future dystopia thread isn't really happening. But there's a bigger twist that can't be revealed without significant spoilers, and it feels cheap and insulting once it finally presents itself--not just because it demeans a serious subject but also because any experienced moviegoer will see it coming about 75 minutes before Gabriel does. MAN DOWN wants to pay respect to soldiers struggling with PTSD, but the impact veers too far from the intent. It dumbs the subject down into rote cliches and simplistic characterizations and motivations: Gabriel is ostensibly set off by one tragedy, but it seems driven more by his wife's infidelity; and his entire inspiration for joining the Marines seems to come from catching a few minutes of an O'REILLY FACTOR segment where Bill O'Reilly (credited with playing himself) warns viewers of the potential of terrorists engaging in biochemical warfare. MAN DOWN is heavy-handed and its future dystopia embarrassingly cheap-looking, but if you're a LaBeouf fan, it's probably still worth a look, if for no other reason than to see a fiercely committed performance in a futile search for a better movie. (R, 90 mins)
TRESPASS AGAINST US
(UK/US/UAE - 2016)
Bland and unengaging from the word go, the crime drama TRESPASS AGAINST US recalls films like 1978's KING OF THE GYPSIES and 1997's TRAVELLER and the short-lived FX TV series THE RICHES, all of which focused on a close-knit family of con artists and criminals who are constantly on the move and scraping by on small-time schemes. Despite the presence of two great actors in Michael Fassbender and Brendan Gleeson, TRESPASS AGAINST US never finds its footing and never gives you a reason to care about anyone or anything that's happening. Uneducated and illiterate Chad Cutler (Fassbender) has always lived in the shadow of his gregarious father Colby (Gleeson), who rules their tight-knit band of marauding West England low-lifes who have set up a semi-permanent trailer park in a vacant field. They get by on stealing cars, knocking over convenience stores, and other nickel-and-dime machinations, but Chad wants out. He wants something more for his wife Kelly (Lyndsey Marshal) and their children Tyson (Georgie Smith) and Mini (Kacie Anderson), but finds it hard to escape from under the thumb of the manipulative, controlling Colby. He also has a difficult time dealing with the pressure of being trapped by his own inability to read or write, which is why he insists on putting the kids in a good school even though the Cutler clan's criminal activities cause the kids to be truant enough to get them expelled. Not much happens in TRESPASS AGAINST US: there's a lot of "fook"s and "cunt"s being thrown about in thick accents that make the film reminiscent of early Danny Boyle or earlier Gleeson roles circa I WENT DOWN. The cops, led by Lovage (Rory Kinnear) are complete buffoons who even resort to kidnapping the kids from school in order to lure Chad to the police station, which is indicative of the inability of screenwriter Alistair Siddons and debuting director Adam Smith (a veteran of music videos and British TV favorites like SKINS and DOCTOR WHO) to settle on a tone. TRESPASS AGAINST US can't decide if it's a less grim, gypsy traveller take on ANIMAL KINGDOM or a wacky, would-be Irvine Welsh-type exercise. There's ill-conceived comic relief in the form of Gordon (Sean Harris), aka "Worzel," Chad's half-wit, borderline feral brother, a character so grating that it's a shock that Sharlto Copley wasn't cast in the role. Fassbender and Gleeson are exemplary performers, but they're both on autopilot here with little to inspire them. There's nothing here, no hook to get your interest in this family of assholes, and the stars seem to know it. A total misfire. (R, 100 mins)
TERMINATOR: GENISYS (US - 2015) Directed by Alan Taylor. Written by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier. Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, J.K. Simmons, Byung-hun Lee, Matt Smith, Courtney B. Vance, Sandrine Holt, Dayo Okeniyi, Michael Gladis, Wayne Bastrup, Griff Furst, Afemo Omilami. (PG-13, 125 mins)
The fifth entry in the TERMINATOR franchise also functions as a reboot that eliminates the third and fourth films from the series continuity. That's too bad, since the middling TERMINATOR: RISE OF THE MACHINES (2003) and TERMINATOR: SALVATION (2009), about which I recall nothing except Christian Bale's on-set meltdown with cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, look like neglected, misunderstood classics compared to the ill-advised TERMINATOR: GENISYS. The best thing GENISYS has going for it is the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Fans will no doubt get a kick out of his re-introduction but that joy quickly fades into a blurred rubble of narrative incoherence, CGI histrionics, and post-Michael Bay destruction porn. Indeed, TERMINATOR: GENISYS represents the TRANSFORMERS-and-Marvelization of the franchise. James Cameron's THE TERMINATOR (1984) and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991) look like quaint, quiet relics compared to the garish stupidity on display here. Story and character are sacrificed in place of so much computer-generated mayhem that half the film looks animated. There's no need for a CGI'd Arnold to be bouncing around the frame like a pinball, and good and evil Terminators hurling one another around like WWE stars. It's THE TERMINATOR reimagined for gamers who don't have a problem with the way movies look today in yet another attempt to make Schwarzenegger matter to teenagers and millennials, when it's clear from his recent box-office grosses that, while his aging fan base might come out to see him, younger fans don't give a shit, and GENISYS isn't likely to change that. To them, Schwarzenegger is a relic whose films they've occasionally seen their dads watching on TNT. GENISYS resorts to cheap references and groan-inducing pandering to the lowest-common denominator because it has nothing to say and no reason to exist. Don't believe me? Then justify the scene where the Terminator, Sarah Connor, and Kyle Reese get arrested to the tune of Inner Circle's "Bad Boys." Yeah, that's right...the COPS theme. Do you find that funny? Yeah? Then by all means, go see TERMINATOR: GENISYS. And thank you for being the reason blockbuster movies are as dumbed-down and generic as they are.
Veteran TV director Alan Taylor (THE SOPRANOS, GAME OF THRONES) has THOR: THE DARK WORLD under his belt and GENISYS feels very much like The Terminator was dropped into a Marvel superhero movie. The script by Laeta Kalogridis (NIGHT WATCH, SHUTTER ISLAND) and Patrick Lussier (DRIVE ANGRY) gathers the Terminator, Sarah Connor (GAME OF THRONES' Emilia Clarke), Kyle Reese (Hollywood still trying to make Jai Courtney happen), and John Connor (Jason Clarke) into an alternate timeline of the events of the first two films. In an attempt to thwart Judgment Day on August 29, 1997, a 2029 John Connor sends Reese back to 1984 to follow the original Terminator and stop him from killing Sarah Connor, thus preventing John's birth and his eventual victory over Skynet, the sentient computer system that brings about nuclear destruction. So far, so familiar. But when the Terminator arrives in 1984 (in scenes recreated from the first film due to rights issues, so you get a punk who sort of looks like a young Bill Paxton), things already look a bit off, starting with the Terminator itself. It's a CGI recreation of a young Schwarzenegger, and it has that same eerie, dead-eyed, not-quite-there look that the young, CGI Jeff Bridges had in TRON: LEGACY. The Terminator is then ambushed by what appears to be the Terminator from the second film (Schwarzengger, for real), but is actually another Terminator sent back to 1973 when Sarah Connor was just nine years old. The events of GENISYS take place in an alternate reality based on Sarah encountering the good Terminator from T2 much earlier than that film's setting of 1997. In GENISYS, an orphaned Sarah has been raised by the Terminator and has already been trained for her role as a soldier in the upcoming war on Skynet. Much like the audience, Reese is confused, but in his travel back to 1984, has seen visions of his own alternate reality and realizes Judgment Day is not in 1997 but in 2017. So after some perfunctory chase sequences involving a return appearance by T2's liquid-metal T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee), Sarah and Kyle time travel to 2017 where they're met by a graying Good Terminator (though he's a machine, his human casing ages) and prepare to take on Genisys, a powerful computer program created by Cyberdine Systems, the corporation behind Skynet. Genisys will electronically link everything and everyone and put their entire lives online, thereby allowing the self-acting Skynet to bring about Judgment Day.
A film with a modicum of intelligence in its foundation might've used Genisys--essentially an even more evil fusion of Facebook, Twitter, and Google--as a substantive commentary on today's ubiquitous nature of social media and our over-reliance on computer technology. But TERMINATOR; GENISYS is too busy making COPS references and having Arnold spout one-liners and signature quips (of course "I'll be back" makes an appearance) to deal with that. Schwarzenegger is easily the best thing about the film, and there are some scattered moments that work, like the genuine emotion his Terminator feels toward Sarah, or the gleam in his eye when he bonds with Reese, like a father reluctantly letting his little girl go. But do those have any place in a TERMINATOR movie? The film feels in constant danger of abandoning its plot to become WHEN SARAH MET KYLE, with the mismatched pair engaging in rom-com banter, and the Terminator in the role of her overprotective dad, forever about to shake his head, raise his fist, and yell "Reeeeeeese!" On one hand, it's nice to see Arnold as the Terminator once more, but on the other, it's unfortunate that the 67-year-old actor is resorting to this for a hit, especially on the heels of the barely-released MAGGIE, the most out-of-left-field project of his career since directing a 1992 cable remake of CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT starring Dyan Cannon. Not everything in GENISYS is awful, but the worthwhile moments are few and far between, and by the time one character's true nature is revealed in a midway twist (actually spoiled by some of the trailers), the film becomes too confused with itself to care. It doesn't use Arnold to its best advantage, instead relegating the Terminator to basically being a sideline character (much like THE EXPENDABLES 3 left a tired-looking Arnold babysitting the parked chopper) and talkative exposition machine, as he was conveniently implanted with all of this knowledge prior to being sent to 1973 in the alternate timeline. When was the Terminator ever this chatty? While the iconic star gets a few decent moments, none of the other actors fare as well. Emilia Clarke is OK as Sarah, but Jason Clarke is stuck with an unplayable John Connor, and it doesn't help that the film is never really sure what it wants the character to be. Fresh off of his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for WHIPLASH, J.K. Simmons, in the most inconsequential post-Oscar role this side of Michael Caine in JAWS: THE REVENGE, plays a laughingstock L.A. cop who believes Sarah's and Kyle's time travel story before vanishing from the movie. Former DOCTOR WHO Matt Smith is a holographic representation of Genisys in a plot development that in no way reminds one of RESIDENT EVIL. Worst of all is Courtney, apparently the go-to guy when you've decided to drive your franchise off a cliff (A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD), who's a complete black hole as Reese, emoting like a lunkheaded jock and demonstrating none of the desperation and humanity of Michael Biehn's performance in the first film.
TERMINATOR: GENISYS is odd in that it makes so many references to the first two films yet seems designed for those who haven't seen them or don't like them. Sure, the special effects in the first TERMINATOR are 31 years old and some haven't aged well, but it's still a marvelously inventive and thrillingly-told story, with nonstop action, strong performances, and believable characters that you care about. T2 raised the bar on the action and the visual effects, and while it has its flaws and the attempts to humanize the good Terminator occasionally fell flat, it still holds up. GENISYS, on the other hand, just flounders in its quest for a reason to exist. It's a two-hour video game, as dumb and obnoxious as a TRANSFORMERS movie, and somehow, showcasing extensive CGI that not only makes zero improvements on the groundbreaking work Cameron and his crew did on T2 nearly 25 years ago, but actually looks worse! TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY was the first film with a budget to crack $100 million and every penny was up on the screen. Remember when that was an inconceivable amount of money to spend on a movie? TERMINATOR: GENISYS cost $170 million and looks like it should be premiering on cable. So go ahead and tell me blockbusters have gotten better.
