DARK CRIMES (US/Poland - 2018) Directed by Alexandros Avranas. Written by Jeremy Brock. Cast: Jim Carrey, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marton Csokas, Kati Outinen, Vlad Ivanov, Robert Wieckiewicz, Agata Kulesza, Piotr Glowacki, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julia Gdula, Anna Polony. (R, 93 mins) On the heels of another departure with a supporting role in Anna Lily Amirpour's post-apocalyptic 2017 freakshow THE BAD BATCH, Jim Carrey has the lead in DARK CRIMES, a suffocatingly grim post-GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO-style mystery set in a perpetually gloomy and overcast Poland as opposed to cold, wintry countries of Scandinavia. Carrey is Tadek, a lone wolf Krakow detective busted down to records after being disgraced in a past murder investigation and a year away from retirement. In addition to his likely getting too old for this shit, he's remained obsessed with that botched case, despite warnings to let it go from his bosses and the negative effect on his home life, with a wife and daughter he barely acknowledges. A body was found bound and gagged in a lake, and Tadek, who never stopped investigating while off duty, has found a clue that leads to The Cage, a long-closed brothel and notorious S&M sex club housed in the basement of an apartment building in Krakow's scenic industrial district. Tadek and his reluctant partner Wiktor (Piotr Glowacki) meet with building's former landlord (Zbigniew Zamachowski, the star of WHITE in Kieslowski's THREE COLORS trilogy) and uncover surveillance VHS tapes detailing the orgies and various activities that took place at The Cage, where the victim was a frequent visitor. Also living in an apartment in the building years ago was Krysztof Kozlow (Marton Csokas), who's now a famous, controversial writer specializing in nihilistic thrillers and being the misanthropic enfant terrible of contemporary Polish genre lit. Kozlow's latest novel describes a murder completely identical to the cold case, including specific details that were never made public. Convinced Kozlow is the killer and determined to redeem himself as a cop before retiring, Tadek grows even more fixated and begins tailing Kozlow as well as his drug-addicted, single mom girlfriend Kasia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), all the while spiraling into the darkness within himself and putting his job in jeopardy, especially when the trail of conspiracy and corruption--wait for it--leads all the way up the chain of command within the Krakow police.
DARK CRIMES is based on a 2008 true crime article written by David Grann (author of the book The Lost City of Z) that detailed a case involving Polish mystery writer Krystian Bala, who used his own 2003 novel Amok as a de facto confession to a murder he committed as well as an unpublished second book detailing a murder he planned to commit. It's a fascinating story that DARK CRIMES uses as a foundation and then quickly abandons, instead focusing on giving Carrey an opportunity to show his darkest possible side. The legendary comedian has done drama effectively before and is up to the challenge, but DARK CRIMES is a laborious, unpleasant, and ultimately oppressive disaster. Anyone well-versed in the Scandinavian mystery genre has to appreciate the sense of cold chill and isolation, but DARK CRIMES is downbeat and morose to the point of misery. It's got an appropriate score by Filter leader Richard Patrick (likely more affordable than Trent Reznor), but it gets no help from the funereal pacing and the obvious story developments. Show of hands: anyone not think Tadek was made the fall guy earlier when he got too close to the truth?
I get that director Alexandros Avranas (MISS VIOLENCE) is going for dreary and depressing, but DARK CRIMES just wallows in stomach-turning ugliness that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, especially in regards to Kasia, a junkie and former sex worker at The Cage who gets the majority of her available orifices violated by most of the male characters over the course of the film. This is getting to be business as usual for ANTICHRIST and NYMPHOMANIAC star Gainsbourg, once again cast radically against type as an irreparably damaged, bruised and abused cum dumpster. It gets even worse when Tadek goes through the inevitable "to know him, I must become him" phase of his pursuit of Kozlow and indulges in angry, violent, sadomasochistic sex with Kasia, which doesn't work when Carrey's vein-popping O-face looks like he's grunting "Alriiiiiighty then!" Carrey really isn't the problem here--his commitment to this long-shelved, straight-to-VOD dud (shot in 2015) is admirable. Production began just a few weeks after Carrey's former girlfriend Cathriona White died of a prescription drug overdose. One can sense that he's channeling that grief, despair, and rage into his performance as Tadek, but to what end? I love dark, bleak movies, but DARK CRIMES is a truly ugly, repulsive, exploitative film that offers absolutely nothing in the way of entertainment, suspense, or tension, has a twist reveal at the end that lands with a lifeless thud, and just leaves you feeling empty and depressed when it's finally over.
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)
Written and directed by Jeff Wadlow. Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jim Carrey, Morris Chestnut, John Leguizamo, Clark Duke, Donald Faison, Iain Glen, Steven Mackintosh, Monica Dolan, Lindy Booth, Andy Nyman, Benedict Wong, Garrett M. Brown, Yancy Butler, Matt Steinberg, Claudia Lee, Augustus Prew, Lyndsy Fonseca, Daniel Kaluuya, Tom Wu, Olga Kurkulina, Ella Purnell, Tanya Fear. (R, 105 mins)
Matthew Vaughn's 2010 film version of the controversial Mark Millar-written/John Romita, Jr-illustrated comic book was, like its source, an acquired taste. Moments of extreme violence combined with a little girl using some of the most over-the-top gutter language imaginable outraged some, while others--myself among them--found it funny and quite inspired. Vaughn is still onboard as producer for the sequel, handing the franchise over to writer-director Jeff Wadlow, whose previous credits include the 2005 slasher film CRY WOLF and the 2008 teen martial arts actioner NEVER BACK DOWN. Lightning doesn't strike twice with KICK-ASS 2, which reunites most of the main cast but is markedly lacking in energy and seems to be struggling to find a reason to exist.
Dave Lizewsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is no longer fighting crime as costumed superhero Kick-Ass, much to the disappointment of orphaned Mindy Macready (Chloe Grace Moretz)--aka Hit Girl--who now lives with guardian and cop Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut) after the death of her ex-cop father Damon (Nicolas Cage in the first film), aka superhero Big Daddy. Dave gets back in the Kick-Ass game just as Mindy gets out, having realized it's time to put away the past and get on with being a teenager. Meanwhile, vengeful Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), son of the mobster killed by Kick-Ass in the first film (played there by Mark Strong), abandons his Red Mist superhero persona and remakes himself as the ultimate supervillain, donning S&M leather gear and christening himself "The Motherfucker." The Motherfucker recruits a team of arch-villains--among them Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina), Black Death (Daniel Kaluuya), The Tumor (Andy Nyman), and Genghis Carnage (Tom Wu) to form an evil army called "The Toxic Megacunts," who set out to destroy Kick-Ass and bring the city to its knees.
The formula just isn't nearly as much fun the second time around. I never thought I'd say this, but the vital ingredient missing from KICK-ASS 2 is the down-to-earth humanity that Nicolas Cage brought to the first film, particularly in his loving, well-meaning but misguided relationship with his daughter. In recent years, Cage generally hasn't been one to keep a film grounded, but Wadlow's main goal here just seems to be as childishly offensive as possible, and it's still watered down from Millar's original comic book version. Moretz has grown quite a bit in the last three years, and since she's not a little kid anymore, there isn't the same level of transgressive amusement in having her say things like "cunt," "cocksucker," and "snatch." Mintz-Plasse has some funny moments as The Motherfucker, but he doesn't have much to do other than rage and yell. Taylor-Johnson is so bland that he practically vanishes from the screen, which isn't a quality one looks for in a lead character. He and Moretz (who really doesn't seem like she wants to be here) made a great team in the first film, but now that she's grown, sexual tension enters the fray and Wadlow spends too much time on their everyday lives, especially with Mindy trying to fit in at school with a clique of mean girls led by the bitchy Brooke (Claudia Lee), a subplot that culminates in projectile vomiting and diarrhea, and gets more screen time than big-name franchise addition Jim Carrey as Col. Stars & Stripes, a patriotic ex-mob enforcer and born-again Christian who leads a group of costumed heroes aiding Kick-Ass in his battle against The Motherfucker.
Carrey infamously denounced KICK-ASS 2 in the weeks before its release, saying that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre changed his outlook on the film and cinematic depictions of violence in general. It's possible he knew the movie stunk and didn't want his fans to see it for him only to find that he's barely in it. The trailers sold Stars & Stripes as being a wild, crazy, Jim Carrey kind-of character, but other than a couple of ad-libs ("Yeah, there's a dog on your balls!"), his performance is very low-key and, in relation to Moretz and Mintz-Plasse, played fairly straight (he even tells people to stop swearing). With only a few scenes, it's a minor supporting role at best--he appears 30 minutes in and is gone by the 60-minute mark--and it's surprising that Carrey even took the job considering how little he has to do. And speaking of people who should have better things to do, why is John Leguizamo here in a nothing role as The Motherfucker's driver? Leguizamo's not a great actor, but he has headlined major movies. Leguizamo doesn't bring anything uniquely his to this role, and like Carrey's Stars & Stripes, it's a role that anybody could've played.
KICK-ASS 2 has a larger cast of characters but gives them less to do with weaker characterizations. Some occasional laughs, yeah...but a lot of jokes land with a thud and the greenscreen and CGI work in a climactic car chase is just embarrassingly bad, creating absolutely zero tension or excitement. Having thoroughly enjoyed the first film, I really tried to like this, but then realized I was putting more effort into trying to like this than the filmmakers put into making it.
