The surprisingly engaging BRAVEN doesn't pretend to be anything other than a formulaic action thriller, but it handles itself with such spirited gusto that it's easy to roll with what's basically ASSAULT ON LOG CABIN 13. Jason Momoa, best known as GAME OF THRONES' Khal Drogo, may be Aquaman but he has what's probably his best big-screen role yet as Joe Braven, a tough-as-nails logger with a heart of gold in a small, isolated Pacific Northwest town in the middle of snowy nowhere (the film was shot in Newfoundland). He's been running the family logging business since his dad Pops (Stephen Lang) has been suffering from accelerated dementia following an on-the-job head injury a year earlier. Pops has been pretty forgetful and sometimes fails to recognize his granddaughter Charlotte (Sasha Rosoff) and is prone to wandering into the town bar and causing trouble when he thinks random women are his late wife. The time has come for Joe and his wife Stephanie (Jill Wagner) to consider putting him in a home, and Joe wants to spend some time with Pops at the family cabin to discuss his care going forward. Once they arrive at the cabin, some problems arise: stowaway Charlotte snuck into the bed of Joe's truck and tagged along, and there's a crew of criminals led by ruthless drug lord Kassen (Garret Dillahunt as Kurtwood Smith as Clarence Boddicker) who arrive to retrieve a shipment of drugs stashed at the Braven cabin by one of Joe's dipshit drivers (Brendan Fletcher) who's been secretly hauling product for Kassen on his logging runs. Kassen makes it very clear that he wants his drugs and he's not leaving any of them alive when he's done, so Joe does what anybody would do: turn into an action hero and join forces with Pops, who drifts in and out of lucid, coherent thought, to protect the cabin, keep Charlotte safe, and take out Kassen's crew one by one.
Joe Braven is pretty adept with shotguns and a bow and arrow, and once she inevitably arrives looking for Charlotte, Stephanie is shown to be well-schooled in the ways of the crossbow. Yes, BRAVEN is the kind of movie where the good guys instantly turn into a family of John Wicks when their cabin is under siege, just like Kassen is the kind of bad guy who has to get pissed off and tell his flunkies "Enough...we're taking this cabin!" Except for a dodgy-looking greenscreen in the climax, veteran stunt coordinator and TV director Lin Oeding (CHICAGO FIRE, CHICAGO P.D.), making his feature debut, stages some occasionally wild and inspired action scenes when Joe starts unleashing hell on Kassen's guys (the bit where he hurls a flaming axe that lands in a guy's neck, then throws a jar of moonshine at him is pure PUNISHER: WAR ZONE). In a perfect world, BRAVEN would establish Momoa (also one of 26 credited producers) as a major action star, and his performance is quite good despite the silliness of the whole thing. Braven isn't a smartass and doesn't have any convenient witty quips at the ready. Momoa gets you on his side but plays it with just the right degree of gravitas to keep everything grounded. He's very good with young Rossof and he works well with Lang, one of our great character actors who gets saddled with too many junk movies to pay the bills. Pops is a difficult role that Lang handles beautifully. Watch the way he plays one scene where Pops traps one of Kassen's goons and drives a screwdriver into his lower jaw and up into his mouth. Despite the dementia, Pops' fight-or-flight kicked in but midway through forcing the screwdriver into the guy's jaw, Lang does this thing with his eyes where he conveys Pops was somewhere else and is only just then cognizant of the horrific act he's committing in self-defense. Of course, Lionsgate dumped BRAVEN on VOD with no fanfare and sure, there's nothing innovative about it whatsoever and I don't want to oversell it, but this is the kind of throwback, kickass, no-bullshit action movie that's impossible to resist and hugely enjoyable when done right. (R, 94 mins)
BEAST OF BURDEN (US - 2018)
With indies like SWISS ARMY MAN, IMPERIUM, and JUNGLE, Daniel Radcliffe has made some intriguing career choices post-HARRY POTTER, but his attempt at an airborne LOCKE crashes and burns. LOCKE, which spent its entire 85 minutes inside a car with Tom Hardy, was a compact little suspense piece that also inspired last year's Netflix Original film WHEELMAN. Much like a copy of a copy losing its clarity, BEAST OF BURDEN is essentially DIPSHIT LOCKE, with Radcliffe as Sean Haggerty, dishonorably discharged from the Air Force for reasons we never learn, now working as a pilot flying drug shipments for a Mexican cartel. Sean's piloting a tiny, rickety, one-seater Cessna and he's constantly badgered with phone calls from his wife Jen (Grace Gummer, one of Meryl Streep's daughters), who thinks he's working for the Peace Corps; intimidating Mallory (Robert Wisdom), who represents the cartel boss; and Bloom (Pablo Schreiber), a DEA agent who's convinced Sean to rat out the cartel in exchange for new identities and medical coverage for Jen, who's just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Until the climax, when the story exits the Cessna and improbably becomes a murky chase and shootout thriller that requires the otherwise prepared and cool-under-pressure Mallory and Bloom to suddenly turn into careless idiots, BEAST OF BURDEN--basically LOCKE meets AMERICAN MADE--is largely a one-man show for Radcliffe, who mainly takes calls and grimaces as he pretends to fly a rickety plane through very inclement weather at night. This also means most of the film takes place in near-total darkness, which makes it hard to see what's happening on some occasions. The actor gives it his best shot, but there's just not much depth to Adam Hoelzel's script, as evidenced by a line from Bloom to Sean where Schreiber is actually required to say "You're a beast of burden living on borrowed time." The same could be said for Swedish director Jesper Ganslandt's time in Hollywood if BEAST OF BURDEN is any indication. (R, 90 mins)
MOHAWK (US - 2018)
Ted Geoghegan's 2015 feature debut WE ARE STILL HERE borrowed elements of THE FOG and displayed an affinity for the classic films of Lucio Fulci. It didn't exactly reinvent horror, but it was an anomaly in today's genre scene in that its focus was on middle-aged characters and was the kind of effective post-Ti West slow-burner that Ti West fans think Ti West makes. Geoghegan is back with MOHAWK, a complete misfire of a sophomore effort that has him regressing in every way. Set in New York in 1814 in the waning days of the War of 1812, the film tells a simple revenge/survivalist story that's hard to screw up, but does so anyway. A group of American soldiers led by Col. Hezekiah Holt (Ezra Buzzington) piss off the wrong Mohawk in Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn). She's a fierce warrior in a tribe that's adamantly remained neutral in the US and British conflict, and she's in a polyamorous relationship with fellow tribe member Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) and British officer and arms dealer Joshua Pinsmail (Eamon Farren). Holt and his men start by attacking Joshua, but he's rescued by Oak and Calvin and the pursuit begins. They eventually capture and kill Calvin and then Joshua, and shoot Oak and leave her for dead. She experiences a vaguely supernatural reawakening, and of course, makes them pay with their lives. And your time.
The polyamory angle leads to exactly one interesting moment, when Calvin is being tortured and screaming in agony, and it's Joshua who insists on going back to rescue him while Oak tries to talk him out of it. What is the point of putting these characters in that relationship when it has no bearing on anything that develops? Is this a colonial survivalist thriller or a Dan Savage column? It's trying too hard. It's like Geoghegan said "I want to make a brutal, blood-splattered revenge saga, but I'm also woke." Has anyone watched BROKEN ARROW on Turner Classic Movies lately and thought "Yeah, this is good, but I could relate to it a lot more if Debra Paget was fucking Jimmy Stewart and Jeff Chandler's Cochise?" Also, why is there an anachronistic, intrusive, throbbing John Carpenter-styled synth score in a War of 1812 movie? The entire project has a student-film amateurishness about it that makes it look like a group of LARPing fanboys took over an historical site for a couple of weekends and a made a movie. With the exception of Buzzington, who brings a sort-of off-kilter Stephen McHattie intensity to Col. Holt, the performances are all various degrees of atrocious across the board, with the actors making no effort to sound period appropriate at all. Horn is a dull heroine, though in her defense, Geoghegan and co-writer Grady Hendrix (whose recent Paperbacks from Hell, a non-fiction chronicle of all those great horror paperbacks of the 1970s and 1980s, is a fun read) keep her offscreen for too much time. There's one nicely-done PREDATOR-inspired bit where Holt's fey translator (Noah Segan, who's just terrible and wearing a bad Henry Jaglom hat, for some reason) crawls into a hole and Oak's eyes materialize behind him, but considering the promise Geoghegan showed with WE ARE STILL HERE, MOHAWK is an alarming step in the wrong direction, both in concept and execution. (Unrated, 92 mins)
In the first ten minutes of THE BAD BATCH, heroine Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is banished to a vaguely post-apocalyptic desert wasteland in Texas, abducted by marauding cannibals who hack off her right arm and right leg and cook them on a grill, then she covers herself in her own shit to make the rest of herself less appetizing. So begins writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour's followup to the acclaimed A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT. THE BAD BATCH is a bigger film with bigger names, but it's definitely a classic case of a sophomore slump. Arlen manages to escape her flesh-eating captors and is taken by a mute, nameless hermit (Jim Carrey, of all people) to a makeshift town called Comfort, ruled by a guru-like cult figure known as The Dream (Keanu Reeves, looking like Joe Spinell circa MANIAC). After encountering one of the women who initially abducted her, Arlen, now sporting a prosthetic leg, kills her and takes the woman's young daughter Honey (Jayda Fink) back to Comfort. Honey was stolen from her father Miami Man (Jason Momoa) with the intention of grooming her for a life of sexual servitude to The Dream. Miami Man--himself a cannibal but hey, he's a sympathetic flesh eater and a loving father with artistic talent-- then ventures into the desert and enlists the aid of Arlen and the hermit to find his daughter.
After an intriguingly strange opening act, THE BAD BATCH just goes nowhere. Repetitive scenes of people walking through the desert and mumbling give the film the distinct feeling of an '80s post-nuke fused with Gus Van Sant's GERRY. An endless mid-film acid trip after a rave at The Dream's stops the film cold and it never recovers. Waterhouse is OK in the lead, but Amirpour can't decide if the focus should be on Arlen or Miami Man, a quandary that isn't helped by Momoa sporting one of the worst accents ever heard in a movie. He's supposed to be from Cuba, but he sounds like Mushmouth trying to do a Scarface impression, making about 90% of his dialogue unintelligible without putting on the subtitles. There's some nice cinematography and the film's vision of a dystopian hellscape is intermittently effective, as are some incongruously '80s and '90s-sounding music choices by present-day indie bands like Federale, whose track "All the Colours of the Dark" is used in a nicely-done montage. At the same time, a woman getting her neck snapped to Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" and Arlen getting her arm sawed off to Ace of Base's "All That She Wants" comes off as silly and pointless, and reeking of "Well, we got the clearance on these songs, so I guess we have to use them." Watching THE BAD BATCH, it's apparent that Amirpour had the beginnings of an idea but didn't know where to take it. There's certainly some political commentary to be mined from a fenced-off area of Texas, deporting undesirables--"The Bad Batch"--to the harsh outside, and Miami Man being an illegal immigrant, but Amirpour doesn't bother. She also wastes a potentially interesting supporting cast, with Giovanni Ribisi serving no purpose whatsoever as a nutcase called "The Screamer," Reeves getting a long monologue about where shit travels after it's excreted, and the unexpected casting of a silent, grizzled, barely recognizable Carrey in easily the strangest role of his career. Agonizingly overlong at just shy of two hours, and low-key to the point of catatonia, THE BAD BATCH is a barely half-baked concoction that falls almost completely flat and fails to follow through on the promise Amirpour displayed with her impressive debut. (R, 119 mins)
IT STAINS THE SANDS RED (Canada/US - 2017)
Under their collaborative moniker "The Vicious Brothers," Colin Minahan and Stuart Ortiz earned a small degree of cult notoriety among horror scenesters with their 2011 found-footage debut GRAVE ENCOUNTERS. The wrote and produced that film's 2012 sequel, and they wrote 2014's EXTRATERRESTRIAL, with Minahan directing solo. That arrangement continues with IT STAINS THE SANDS RED, the duo's day-late-and-a-dollar-short contribution to the zombie apocalypse genre. There's a couple of clever ideas here, but they're enough for maybe a 15-minute short film as opposed to a padded, laborious, 92-minute slog. Opening in medias res with the zombie invasion underway and Las Vegas in ruins, we're introduced to stripper Molly (Brittany Allen, also the star of EXTRATERRESTRIAL) and boyfriend Nick (Merwin Mondesir) speeding down a desert highway on their way to an air field where one of his friends has offered to fly them into Mexico. The car gets stuck in the sand as one lone, shambling zombie (Juan Riedlinger) approaches. Nick wastes his remaining bullets trying to shoot it in the head and is eventually killed and eaten when he tries to get out of the car to retrieve his dropped cell phone. Molly gathers what supplies she can--water, smokes, and a vial of coke--and begins hoofing it 30 miles through the desert in her Gene Simmons platform shoes with the zombie following in persistent pursuit. It moves slow enough that she can get a good distance and take periodic breaks, but it never stops and never gets tired, sort-of like a zombie version of IT FOLLOWS.
That's a nifty idea for a short film, but Minahan and Ortiz really struggle to get this thing to 90 minutes. Once the premise is established, along with a gross but admittedly clever bit where she manages to distract the zombie--who she eventually names "Smalls"--by offering it her bloody tampon to munch on while she gets a head start on her next getaway, this thing runs out of gas in record time. Minahan shoots in a saturated and frequently garish style that's more ugly than anything, and hardly any time has elapsed before Molly's babbling to herself and Minhan's already breaking out the surreal, grotesque, NATURAL BORN KILLERS-esque flourishes. She eventually forms a bizarre kinship with Smalls that comes out of nowhere and makes no sense--she even declines rescue from military personnel on one occasion because she doesn't want to leave the zombie alone. There's also a pointless detour involving a pair of yahoos who rescue then rape her, and she keeps having flashbacks to the son she abandoned in favor of her irresponsible, Vegas party girl lifestyle. The sliver of remaining humanity left in Smalls awakening Molly's dormant maternal instincts might've been a good idea if it had any foundation, but nothing in IT STAINS THE SANDS RED (a cool title, at least) makes sense, and everything that happens requires Molly to be conveniently stupid in order to advance the plot. Riedlinger is OK as Smalls, but he's not giving DAY OF THE DEAD's Howard Sherman any competition when it comes to great zombie performances. It doesn't help that he exits the film with nearly 30 minutes to go as Molly, much like IT STAINS THE SANDS RED, continues on aimlessly. An interesting set-up, but this thing just goes nowhere fast and has nothing to add to an already overcrowded genre. (Unrated, 92 mins)
ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE (US - 2017) Directed by Mark Cullen. Written by Mark Cullen and Robb Cullen. Cast: Bruce Willis, John Goodman, Jason Momoa, Thomas Middleditch, Famke Janssen, Adam Goldberg, Kal Penn, Wood Harris, Stephanie Sigman, Christopher McDonald, David Arquette, Elisabeth Rohm, Jessica Gomes, Maurice Compte, Ken Davitian, Billy Gardell, Tyga, Victor Ortiz, Sol Rodriguez, Sammi Rotibi, Adrian Martinez, Ron Funches. (Unrated, 94 mins) While it seems like a good idea for former actor Bruce Willis to take a break from his landmark "Phoning in his performance from his hotel room" series of Lionsgate/Grindstone VOD titles by actually legitimately headlining a movie again, ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE shows he needn't have bothered. Unceremoniously dumped on VOD by RLJ Entertainment after two years on the shelf, VENICE is an episodic shaggy dog story with Willis as Steve Ford, the only licensed private eye in Venice Beach. He's a disgraced LAPD detective (as shown in a framed newspaper headline on a wall in his house, which seems like an odd memento to display) who ambles about from case to case and spends his plentiful downtime beach-bumming and skateboarding. He's got a protege in young John (Thomas Middleditch), who also serves as the narrator (he gets the first lines of the film over an establishing shot: "Ah...Venice Beach...") and gets involved in various ongoing cases that Steve is barely working: a missing young Samoan woman named Nola (Jessica Gomes), who's found and promptly hops into bed with Steve, which leads to her angry brothers chasing Steve, who makes a getaway by skateboarding around Venice Beach nude; an artist known as "the Banksy of Venice" who keeps spray-painting sexually explicit graffiti on an apartment building owned by scheming businessman Lou the Jew (Adam Goldberg); and an auto repossession involving powerful drug lord Spyder (Jason Momoa) that ends up propelling the central story. Seeking revenge on Steve, Spyder's guys burglarize his sister's (Famke Janssen) house and steal Steve's beloved Parson Russell terrier Buddy. When Spyder's girlfriend Lupe (Stephanie Sigman) runs off with Buddy and a shipment of Spyder's cocaine, Steve reluctantly agrees to recover the coke for him if it means finding Buddy.
Bruce Willis at the exact moment he was told
he'd have to leave his hotel room to work on this film
Some of the plot threads come together, but most don't. VENICE feels like a semi-improvised series pilot that got rejected by Seeso and Crackle. It's a mix of KEANU (which was in production at the same time) and a quirky detective story with shades of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, THE BIG BOUNCE, and INHERENT VICE, but with no chemistry between the actors and 99% of the jokes landing with a thud. The LEBOWSKI aspirations are apparent in the casting of John Goodman as Steve's best friend Dave Jones ("No, not the legend from the Monkees," explains SILICON VALLEY's ever-punchable Middleditch), a surf shop owner who's being taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife (Elisabeth Rohm) and comes across like a morose, self-pitying, sad-sack version of Walter Sobchak. It's a character that plays to exactly none of Goodman's strengths, and you know you're in a bad movie when John Goodman can't make it better. There's also Wood Harris as a money-laundering crime boss, David Arquette getting prominent billing for one shot of skating past Steve and shouting "We're putting the band back together!," Kal Penn as a convenience store clerk, BORAT's Ken Davitian as a ruthless loan shark who promises a "Belarus Bowtie" to anyone who doesn't pay him back within a day ("You cut off balls, stuff them down throat, you slit throat, and..." "They pop out like a bowtie," Steve says, echoing a line you'll already hear coming), and Christopher McDonald, cast radically against type as "Christopher McDonald," in this case an asshole real estate mogul trying to sabotage a lucrative deal for Lou the Jew.
Though he's in nearly every scene, Willis, whose level of commitment to his craft can be ranked somewhere between "senioritis" and "Seagal," coasts through this with a half-assed smirk and a visible ambivalence. He's always been good with wisecracks but rarely adept at comedy past the days of MOONLIGHTING and Blake Edwards' BLIND DATE, back in 1987 when he was young and still gave a shit. At 62, Willis is at the age when he should be tackling serious work and thinking about his legacy rather than slumming through D-grade VOD thrillers and unfunny comedies for a paycheck he doesn't even need. It's hard to believe he'd want to reunite with the sibling writing team of Mark & Robb Cullen, best known for their TV work (LAS VEGAS) but also the writers of the awful 2010 comedy COP OUT, Kevin Smith's buddy-cop movie homage that stood as the director's worst film until YOGA HOSERS. Willis hated making COP OUT and infamously clashed with Smith, so his beef must not have been with the Cullens, but VENICE is ample proof that they aren't exactly on their way finding sponsors for a membership at the Friars Club. While there is one legitimately funny line (a throwaway from a bartender when a nude Steve skateboards across the bar: "Steve, you can't have a gun in here!"), the pacing is laborious (it takes 40 minutes for Buddy to go missing), the credits riddled with careless gaffes (Elisabeth Rohm's name is spelled correctly in the closing credits but misspelled "Elizabeth" in the opening, and the closing credits show Goldberg's character as "Low the Jew"), and it goes without saying that the best performance comes from the dog. Buddy deserves better than ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE.
