From the folks at Quiver Distribution, the company that gave us THE FANATIC, comes the pre-fab cult heist flick MONEY PLANE, which would've been much more entertaining as a viral fake trailer instead of the actual terrible movie it's selling. Feeling drawn-out even at a mere 82 minutes, MONEY PLANE manages to corral the kind of slumming cast that Uwe Boll would put together if he was still in the game. But the guilty party here is director/co-writer Andrew Lawrence, the least-known of the Lawrence brothers, though he does provide Joey and Matthew with supporting roles. MONEY PLANE seemingly wants to be the SNAKES ON A PLANE of heist movies by letting you know that it's on the joke, but it fumbles so badly that it has a character exclaim "Whoa!" and it's not the one played by Joey Lawrence. After a botched attempt to steal a $40 million painting from an art museum only to find that it's already gone when they get there, man-bunned professional thief Jack Reese (Adam Copeland, aka WWE's "Edge") and his crew realize they've been set up. The mastermind? Self-aggrandizing crime lord Darius Emmanuel Grouch III, aka "The Rumble" (Kelsey Grammer), a cigar-sucking, art collecting asshole who bought a huge debt belonging to recovering gambling addict Reese and now expects him to work it off (cue The Rumble growling "I own you"). The job? Reese and his crew--Isabella (Katrina Norman), Trey (Patrick Lamont Jr), and Iggy (Andrew Lawrence)--are going to steal $1 billion in cryptocurrency and $40 million cash from the "Money Plane," an illegal "casino in the sky" that caters to rich criminals and is untouchable since it only flies in international airspace. The stakes? If Reese doesn't play ball, The Rumble will have his wife (Denise Richards) and daughter (Emma Gordon) killed.
Anything goes on the Money Plane (The Rumble: "You can even bet on a man fuckin' an alligator!"), and the clientele includes the world's highest-paid assassins and international weapons dealers, so Reese fits right in going incognito as a notorious human trafficker. But he manages to break away and commandeer the cockpit (he's also an experienced pilot) as Isabella and Trey are left to hack the database while Iggy does tech support on the ground. Overseen by the coldly lethal Concierge (Joey Lawrence), things start off easy on the Money Plane with Texas Hold 'Em but soon graduate to the kinds of games more akin to HOSTEL, like bets being placed a man vs. a cobra, or how long some poor guy can stay alive in a piranha tank (you can imagine how those turn out), and Trey is forced to go against J.R. Crockett (Matthew Lawrence), the Money Plane's "undefeated Russian Roulette champ" (wouldn't his being "undefeated" already be understood?). Copeland, who looks like he's in a perpetual state of shock, is a dull hero who spends most of the film confined to the pilot's seat. Thomas Jane shows up for a day's work as Harry, Reese's pipe-smoking Air Force buddy who gets a bunch of exposition that never ends up coming into play ("Remind me again why you made me your daughter's godfather!"), and there's no way Richards was on the set for more than an afternoon. But it's a scenery-chewing Grammer that's the main selling point here, dropping bon mots like "How about I just blow your brains out and I'll create my own damn Pollock?" and barking "Bring me my money!" every time he appears. Like Samuel L. Jackson bellowing "I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!," watching a shouty Frasier Crane drop F-bombs and take out his own henchmen in a fit of rage is the stuff of a great YouTube clip, but if you drink every time he says "money plane," you'll be passed out before you even get the chance to see him hoist an assault rifle and declare "It's Rumble time!" He quite obviously knows this is dog shit and is just amusing himself, but it also seems like he and Jane (working that prop pipe like John Cusack with a vape pen) are the only ones in on the joke. (Unrated, 82 mins)
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS (Italy - 2020)
At the age of 80, Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist and essayist J.M. Coetzee tries his hand at screenwriting with WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, based on his 1980 novel. The book--also turned into an opera in 2005 by Philip Glass--was conceived as a period apartheid allegory, set in a non-specified military outpost manned by officers of "The Empire," forever on guard for an attack by desert nomads--derisively termed "barbarians"--that never comes. Coetzee cited Dino Buzzati's 1940 novel The Tartar Steppe as a major influence, itself made into the 1976 film THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS by Italian director Valerio Zurlini. If you've seen the Zurlini film, the idea of the perpetual wait for a threat that looks increasingly existential and absurd with each passing year will certainly be familiar. And where Coetzee repurposed the idea for apartheid with his novel, he does so once again for the film with allusions to more present-day political concerns. Directed by Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra (his 2015 film EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT was a Best Foreign Film Oscar-nominee), WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS opens at a small town-turned-Empire outpost run by an unnamed magistrate (Mark Rylance), who's been left in charge for years and has found it's become a comfortably cushy assignment. The nomads roaming far out in the desert keep to themselves and the few that do make it near the walled-off outpost and attempt petty theft are generally given a night in jail and sent back on their way with no harm. The magistrate has developed a peaceful rapport with the locals and everybody gets along fine until the sadistic Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp) arrives for an "inspection," which involves "enhanced interrogation" of an uncle and nephew accused of trying to steal some sheep, resulting in the uncle being killed and the nephew nearly beaten to death. Deciding he still hasn't quite made his point, Joll commandeers a small group of officers and forces the nephew to guide them back to their camp, where Joll instigates an attack that results in more brutality and death.
One of the survivors (Gaya Bayarsaikhan) is brought back, bloodied and blinded by a heated fork that Joll repeatedly prodded near her eyes until she lost most of her sight. When Joll leaves the outpost, the magistrate is left to clean up the mess, nursing the girl back to health and returning her to her people. It's an arduous journey and when he arrives back at the outpost, Joll has returned, and with him is psychotic protege Officer Mandel (Robert Pattinson), both waiting to charge him with treason and abandoning his duties. The magistrate is thrown in jail with the other "barbarians" they've rounded up as they prepare for an attack from the nomads that wouldn't have happened had Joll not gleefully goaded them into it. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS plays the heavy hand at times--you almost expect a CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST moment where Rylance's dour magistrate will observe "I wonder who the real barbarians are"--and for the most part, it moves at the pace of Merchant-Ivory. But it's a slow-burner that's beautifully shot by the great and ageless Chris Menges (who won Oscars for his work on THE KILLING FIELDS and THE MISSION) and has a trio of excellent performances by Rylance, Pattinson, and especially Depp in his best work in quite a while. It's also among his least-mannered characterizations, a welcome surprise considering his wardrobe and quirky sunglasses make him look like he took a wrong turn on his way to a steampunk convention.
Coetzee takes some liberties with his own work, drastically toning down the magistrate's rather healthy sexual appetite on the page and making him generally chaste for the screen, though it's implied that he's a regular with an area prostitute (Isabella Nefar) and he spends enough time tending to and washing the blinded woman's bloodied, battered feet that this may end up at the top of Quentin Tarantino's Best of 2020 list. The Italian-made WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2019, but US distributor Samuel Goldwyn Films sat on it for a nearly a year--no doubt due in part to the pandemic, but possibly because of Depp's very public personal dramas. But then in June 2020, multiple women accused Guerra of sexual harassment and rape in incidents dating back to 2013. Given the potential for negative publicity and toxic blowback, it's little wonder that WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS is being given an ignominious DTV burial after nearly a year in limbo, but it's a quaint throwback to the kind of old-school desert epics they used to make, and worth a look for patient fans of the three stars. (Unrated, 114 mins)
HIGH LIFE, the latest film from French auteur Claire Denis (CHOCOLAT, TROUBLE EVERY DAY) is an arthouse/sci-fi journey to the end of the universe and the kind of mainstream audience-alienating pisser-offer that's become synonymous with distributor A24. But even they knew to keep this one at a limited level, topping out at 146 screens at its widest release. Not unlike SUNSHINE or INTERSTELLAR if directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, HIGH LIFE is certainly like nothing else you'll see in 2019, and it even switches between aspect ratios (1.66:1 most of the time, but also 1.33:1 and 1.85:1) for maximum cineaste cred. Denis doesn't make it easy: the pace is extremely slow, and it takes time to find your bearings, with the opening of the film actually being the middle of the story, with non-linear editing and cutaways to various points past and future eventually filling in the blanks like an early Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film with a touch of the significant passage of time of Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. The opening act is focused on Monte (Robert Pattinson), the lone remaining original member of the mission, and his infant daughter Willow, as something catastrophic has happened and Monte releases the bodies of several dead crew members into the forever nothingness of space. Denis cuts back and forth, revealing that a crew of death row convicts--among them Monte, Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), Boyse (Mia Goth), pilot Nansen (Agata Buzek), and Mink (Claire Tran)--who were assembled and given a chance to "serve science" on a journey to a black hole at the end of the universe in the hopes of harnessing a new energy source. It seems like a fool's mission, as one Earth-bound scientist (Victor Banerjee) even states that they won't even reach their destination in the lifetimes of those back home. But problems arise: captain Chandra (Lars Eidinger) suffers a stroke as a result of radiation poisoning and is put out of his misery by Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a deranged scientist who takes command of the mission and is obsessed with performing reproductive experiments and harvesting healthy fetuses, and isn't above sedating and raping a male subject to get the semen sample she needs.
In addition to the copious amounts of cum on display, nearly every bodily fluid and discharge puts in an appearance, including blood, piss, snot, breast milk, and menstrual blood. That's not to mention "The Fuck Box," a recreational masturbation chamber where the crew goes to let off some steam (and for Dibs to collect more specimens; seriously, there so much onscreen jizz in this that it probably qualifies for its own SAG card). Perhaps the most frequent Fuck Box flyer is Dibs herself, who rigs a contraption that gyrates in a mechanical bull-like motion as she rides a large silver dildo emerging from the center of it. Binoche leaves little to the imagination with her fearless performance here, and it's surprising that this managed to avoid an NC-17. HIGH LIFE isn't all about shock value, and the striking imagery of bodies floating in space, the sounds, and the overwhelming claustrophobia really stay with you even if the story proves frustratingly impenetrable at times. It feels like a more pervy Panos Cosmatos space movie at times, and another offbeat project for Pattinson, who also sings the closing credits song. Obviously, HIGH LIFE isn't for everybody (it would've been great to see this in a packed theater and count the walkouts), but it's a bold, original film that's an instant cult item and will no doubt take several viewings to unpack everything that's going on. (R, 113 mins)
THE PROFESSOR (US - 2019)
With his financial issues and the back-and-forth allegations and protracted legal battles with ex-wife Amber Heard, it's hard to tell from day to day whether Johnny Depp has been officially cancelled, but Lionsgate seemed to err on the side of caution by dumping THE PROFESSOR on VOD nearly two years after it was shot. Blatantly transparent Oscar bait for Depp, the film casts him as Prof. Richard Brown, a tenured Lit lecturer at an upscale university who's just been given a stage four lung cancer diagnosis. Facing the option of having maybe a year with treatment and six months without, he opts to live his remaining months to the fullest. Encouraged by his wife Veronica's (Rosemarie DeWitt) extramarital affair with asshole university president Henry (Ron Livingston), Richard goes all in--drinking in class, asking students for weed, raw-dogging a waitress in the men's room of a campus bar, and even accepting an offer of a blowjob from an admiring male student (Devon Terrell). He only confides his terminal illness to his colleague and best friend Peter (Danny Huston), and is unable to break the news to either Veronica or their teenage daughter Olivia (Odessa Young). THE PROFESSOR was shot under the title RICHARD SAYS GOODBYE, which may give it some connection to writer/director Wayne Roberts' debut KATIE SAYS GOODBYE, which played the festival circuit in 2016 but wasn't commercially released until it went straight to VOD in June 2019, a month after THE PROFESSOR. It's always amusing watching characters give zero fucks with nothing to lose, but too much of THE PROFESSOR plays like a disease-of-the-week take on AMERICAN BEAUTY, whether it's Olivia forced to listen to the passively aggressive combative dinnertime conversation between Richard and Veronica, or Richard threatening to blackmail Henry if he doesn't grant him permission to take a sabbatical. Livingston is saddled with a completely unbelievable character, never more so than when he sees Richard smoking a joint while lecturing his class outdoors, and harumphs "Is...is that a marijuana cigarette?!" like he just wandered in from REEFER MADNESS. Depp has some good moments, but the drama becomes more forced and implausible as it goes on. It's nice to see perennial sneering prick Huston in a rare sympathetic role, and Zoey Deutch is charming as one of Richard's students, but THE PROFESSOR just feels too rote and too familiar and a couple of decades too late to be borrowing so much of AMERICAN BEAUTY. (R, 92 mins)
Based on the acclaimed 1989 novel by Martin Amis, LONDON FIELDS' arduous journey to the screen has already taken its rightful place among cinema's most calamitous dumpster fires, while also confirming every suspicion that the book was unfilmable. David Cronenberg was originally attached to direct all the way back in 2001 before things fell apart in pre-production, with Michael Winterbottom (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE) and David Mackenzie (HELL OR HIGH WATER) also in the mix over the next several years. It wasn't until 2013 that filming actually commenced, with music video vet Mathew Cullen at the helm, making his feature directing debut, from a script initially written by Amis (his first screenplay since 1980's SATURN 3) and reworked by Roberta Hanley (VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE). After a private press screening at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival, where the film was acquired by Lionsgate, the planned public festival screening was abruptly canceled due to various lawsuits being filed amidst a very public spat between Cullen and the producers. These included: several of the producers suing Cullen after he missed two deadlines for turning in the finished film and they found out he was off shooting a Katy Perry video instead of completing post-production; Cullen countersuing when producers took the film away from him and recut it themselves; the producers suing star Amber Heard for breach of contract after she refused to record some required voiceovers after production wrapped and badmouthed the film to the media; and Heard countersuing, claiming the producers violated her no-nudity clause by hiring a double to shoot explicit sex scenes involving her character after she left. Deciding they wanted no part of the rapidly escalating shitshow, Lionsgate dropped the film, which remained shelved until the fall of 2018 when settlements were reached with all parties and a compromised version--assembled by some of the producers and disowned by Cullen--was picked up by, of all distributors, GVN Releasing, a small company specializing in faith-based, evangelical, and conservative-leaning fare, which the very R-rated LONDON FIELDS is decidedly not.
A movie about the making of LONDON FIELDS would be more interesting than watching LONDON FIELDS, an incoherent mess that looks like it was desperately cobbled together using any available footage, with little sense of pacing or narrative flow. Seeking any spark of inspiration, blocked American writer Samson Young (Billy Bob Thornton) answers an ad to swap apartments with famed British crime novelist Mark Asprey (Jason Isaacs). While Asprey writes his latest bestseller in Young's shithole Hell's Kitchen hovel, Young works in Asprey's posh London pad and finds his muse in upstairs neighbor Nicola Six (Heard). A beguiling and clairvoyant femme fatale, Nicola wanders into the neighborhood pub wearing a black veil and mourning her own death, having a premonition of her inevitable murder--on her 30th birthday on the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes Day--at the hands of one of the three men she encounters: the dour and jaded Young; upwardly mobile investment broker Guy Clinch (Theo James, at the beginning of the apparently perpetual attempt to make Theo James happen); and skeezy, lowlife, would-be darts champ and Guy Ritchie caricature Keith Talent (Jim Sturgess), who owes a ton of money to scar-faced, bowler-hatted Cockney gangster and chief darts rival Chick Purchase (an uncredited Johnny Depp, long before his and Heard's very acrimonious split, which should give you an idea of how old this thing is). Observing near and from afar how Nicola manipulates the men in her life, the dying Young weaves a complex tale that becomes the great novel he's always had in him. It seems like there's some kind of twist near the end, but it's hard telling with what's here.
Cullen put together his own director's cut that got into a few theaters for some select special engagements. It runs 11 minutes longer and with many scenes in different order (for instance, Depp appears seven minutes into this version but not until 35 minutes into Cullen's cut), but the only version currently on home video is the shorter "producer's cut" that GVN released on 600 screens to the tune of just $433,000. It's doubtful, but there's perhaps a good--or at least better--film buried somewhere in the rubble, and there's some enjoyment to be had from the scenery-chewing contest going on between Depp and Sturgess, who gets a ridiculous scene where he's dancing in a torrential downpour to Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing." It's an amusingly silly sequence but therein lies the conundrum of LONDON FIELDS: it hasn't the slightest idea what it's doing or what it wants to be. Is it a romantic murder mystery? A drama about manipulation and obsession? A grotesque black comedy? The climactic tournament showdown with Keith and Chick gets perilously close to turning into a darts version of KINGPIN, with both Sturgess and Depp fighting over who gets to be Bill Murray's Big Ernie McCracken. It's easy to see why there were so many conflicting intentions on LONDON FIELDS: there's a ludicrous 12 production companies, 46 credited producers, four credited editors, and even three guys credited with doubling Thornton. Heard seems game to play a seductive and dangerous femme fatale in a twisty noir thriller, but LONDON FIELDS is not that movie. Or any kind of movie, for that matter. (R, 107 mins)
THE LAST MAN (Argentina/Canada - 2019)
The first narrative feature from Argentine documentary filmmaker Rodrigo H. Vila is a resounding failure on almost every front, save for some occasionally atmospheric location work in what appear to be some dangerous parts of Buenos Aires. A dreary, dipshit dystopian hodgepodge of THE MACHINIST, JACOB'S LADDER, and BLADE RUNNER, the long-shelved THE LAST MAN (shot in 2016 as NUMB, AT THE EDGE OF THE END, with a trailer under that title appearing online two years ago) is set in a constantly dark, rainy, and vaguely post-apocalyptic near-future in ruins from environmental disasters and global economic fallout. Combat vet Kurt Matheson (Hayden Christensen) is haunted by PTSD-related nightmares and hallucinations, usually in the form of a little boy who seems to know an awful lot about him, plus his dead war buddy Johnny (Justin Kelly) who may have been accidentally killed by Kurt in a friendly fire incident. Kurt also falls under the spell of messianic street preacher Noe (Harvey Keitel, looking like Vila caught him indulging in some C. Everett Koop cosplay), who tells his flock that "We are the cancer!" and that they must be prepared for a coming electrical storm that will bring about the end of civilization (or, on the bright side, the end of this movie). Kurt gets a job at a shady security firm in order to pay for the fortified bunker he becomes obsessed with building, and is framed for internal theft and targeted by his boss Antonio (LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE's Marco Leonardi as Almost Benicio Del Toro), while at the same time having a clandestine fling with the boss' ex-model daughter (Liz Solari).
Oppressively dull, THE LAST MAN is an incoherent jumble of dystopia and apocalypse cliches, dragged down by Christensen, who still can't act (2003's terrific SHATTERED GLASS remains the only film where his limitations have worked in his favor), and is saddled with trite, sub-Rick Deckard narration on top of that (at one point, he's actually required to gravely mumble "If you look into darkness, the darkness looks into you"). Vila's idea of humor is to drop classic rock references into the dialogue, with Kurt admonishing "Johnny! Be good!" to the dead friend only he can see, and apparent Pink Floyd fan Johnny retorting with "Shine on, you crazy diamond!" and "You're trading your heroes for ghosts!" And just because a seriously slumming Keitel is in the cast, Vila throws in a RESERVOIR DOGS standoff near the end between Kurt, Antonio, and Antonio's duplicitous right-hand man Gomez (Rafael Spregelburd). The gloomy and foreboding atmosphere Vila achieves with the Buenos Aires cityscapes is really the only point of interest here and is a strong indicator that he should stick to documentaries, because THE LAST MAN is otherwise unwatchable. (R, 104 mins) TYREL (US - 2018)
It's hard to not think of GET OUT while watching TYREL, and that's even before Caleb Landry Jones appears, once again cast radically against type as "Caleb Landry Jones." The latest from provocative Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva (NASTY BABY), TYREL is a slow-burning cringe comedy that takes a sometimes frustratingly ambiguous look at casual racism in today's society. With his girlfriend's family taking over their apartment for the weekend, Tyler (Jason Mitchell, best known from MUDBOUND and as Eazy-E in STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON), who runs the kitchen in an upscale BBQ restaurant, accompanies his friend Johnny (Christopher Abbott) to a remote cabin for a reunion of Johnny's buddies, who are gathering to celebrate Pete's (Jones) birthday. The cabin is owned by Nico (Nicolas Arze), and it's an eclectic mix of rowdy dudebros that even includes openly gay Roddy (Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum). Tyler is already somewhat nervous as the outsider of the group and he's the only black man present, and things get off to a slightly awkward start when one of them thinks his name is "Tyrel," and Pete seemingly takes offense that Tyler doesn't remember meeting him on a prior occasion. The first night is mostly ballbusting (including casually throwing around the word "faggot" as a playful insult) and their usual drinking games that an uncomfortable Tyler doesn't feel like playing. He ducks out and pretends to go to sleep, which only earns Johnny's derision the next morning, so to put himself at ease, Tyler starts overdoing it, getting far too intoxicated over the course of the day, especially once a second group of guys, including rich, eccentric Alan (Michael Cera), show up.
Almost every comment is loaded with a potential misread, from questioning chef Tyler whether grits should be eaten with sugar or salt to someone asking "Is this a Rachel Dolezal thing...am I allowed to do this?" All of these guys are liberal and affluent to some degree, and TYREL speaks to how words and actions can be interpreted even if the intent isn't there, making the point that assumptions and belief systems are ingrained into one's psyche. No one says or does anything that's intended to be overtly offensive (Roddy brushes off the homophobic slur directed at another, because it's just guys being guys) or blatantly racist, but Tyler has been on the receiving end of it enough that his guard is always up. He frequently exacerbates the situation by overreacting in an irrational way, especially on the second day when he gets far more intoxicated than anyone else, even drunkenly helping himself to an expensive bottle of whiskey that was a gift for Pete, as Silva starts using subtly disorienting camera angles to convey Tyler's--and the audience's--increasing discomfort. TYREL is mainly about creating a mood of one unintentional microaggression after another, but Silva somewhat overstates the point by setting the getaway bash on the same weekend as President Trump's inauguration, a ham-fisted move that puts a challenging character piece squarely into "MESSAGE!" territory, especially when Alan breaks out a Trump pinata and smirks to Tyler, "Oh, you'll love this!" TYREL moves past that heavy-handed stumble, and ultimately, there's no big message to be had here, but while it seems slight on a first glance, much it will nevertheless stick with you. It's anchored by a perceptive performance by Mitchell, supported by an ensemble that's strong across the board, with a nice late-film turn by the late, great character actor Reg E. Cathey--in his last film before his February 2018 death from lung cancer--as one of Nico's neighbors. (Unrated, 87 mins)
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (US - 2017) Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Written by Michael Green. Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Leslie Odom Jr, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley, Tom Bateman, Lucy Boynton, Olivia Colman, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Marwan Kenzari, Sergei Polunin, Gerald Horan, Phil Dunster, Miranda Raison, Hayat Kamille. (PG-13, 114 mins) The first big-screen Hercule Poirot mystery since Peter Ustinov starred in Cannon's little-seen APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH way back in 1988, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS gives a mustache attached to the face of Kenneth Branagh the opportunity to play Agatha Christie's legendary detective. David Suchet enjoyed much success as Poirot in a series of PBS productions, including an ORIENT EXPRESS in 2010. The novel was also turned into a 2001 CBS TV-movie with Alfred Molina as a present-day Poirot. Suchet is often cited as the best Poirot, but the standard--at least as far as cinema is concerned--remains Albert Finney's Oscar-nominated turn as the fussy Belgian sleuth in Sidney Lumet's classic 1974 film version. While Christie adaptations were frequent (Margaret Rutherford played Miss Marple in several 1960s films, TEN LITTLE INDIANS was a big hit in 1965, and Tony Randall portrayed Poirot in 1966's THE ALPHABET MURDERS), it was the all-star MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS that got the ball rolling on a star-studded, big-screen Christie renaissance that lasted into the 1980s, including a 1974 remake of TEN LITTLE INDIANS, rushed into production by Harry Alan Towers to compete with Lumet's film; Ustinov starring as Poirot in 1978's DEATH ON THE NILE, 1982's EVIL UNDER THE SUN, the aforementioned latecomer APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH; and Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple in 1980's THE MIRROR CRACK'D, giving the actress an old-school test run before her long-running TV series MURDER, SHE WROTE.
All of this leads to the inevitable question: why does this 2017 remake of MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS exist? It brings nothing new to the table story-wise, with the mystery's solution being common knowledge to any older moviegoer who's seen the 1974 version and anyone who watched Suchet's run on PBS. Is it to give students something newer to stream when they want to skip the reading and have no idea who Albert Finney is and the quiz is tomorrow? Is that why Imagine Dragons' "Believer" was so prominently featured in the trailer? It's really just an excuse for director Kenneth Branagh to give star Kenneth Branagh some very wide latitude to ham it up. Boarding the Orient Express in Istanbul bound for Western Europe, Poirot makes the acquaintance of a diverse group of passengers: much-divorced, man-hunting Mrs. Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer); secret lovers Miss Debenham (Daisy Ridley) and Dr. Arbuthnot (Leslie Odom, Jr); missionary Pilar Estravados (Penelope Cruz); Princess Dragomiroff (Judi Dench) and her maid Hildegarde Schmidt (Olivia Colman); Count Andrenyi (Sergei Polunin) and his drug-addicted wife Countess Elena (Lucy Boynton); Nazi sympathizing Austrian professor Gerhard Hardman (Willem Dafoe); Marquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a car salesman; Ratchett (Johnny Depp), a sinister American "businessman" in the art forgery game; Hector MacQueen (Josh Gad), Ratchett's nervous, hard-drinking secretary; and Masterman (Derek Jacobi), Ratchett's long-suffering butler. Poirot turns down an offer to work as Ratchett's eyes and ears on the journey, as the corrupt entrepreneur has been receiving threatening letters and is aware that people are after him over his shady dealings. The second day of the journey, the train is stopped by an avalanche and left precariously stranded on a bridge in the mountains. But it gets worse when Ratchett's dead body is discovered in his compartment, with twelve random knife wounds over his torso and neck area.
Christie's novel and its adaptations thus far have arguably the most famous and well-known reveal of any whodunit. Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green (who's had a busy 2017 with LOGAN, ALIEN: COVENANT, and BLADE RUNNER 2049, plus his work on the Starz series AMERICAN GODS) don't change anything about the structure of the story or its final result, instead adding some ethnic diversity and some racial tension with Hardman not hesitating to air his true feelings about Arbuthnot, who fears that his being a black man instantly makes him a suspect (also the case for "Spaniard" Marquez). It's a lavishly-mounted production that allows Branagh to show off--perhaps too much--some directorial flair, with an overuse of overhead shots, Dutch angles, and beveled reflections. There's a CGI avalanche that looks like something out of an Asylum production, and one really badly-edited foot chase outside the derailed train. When we're shown the "how" part of the whodunit--one of the most memorable scenes in Lumet's 1974 version--Branagh bungles badly, staging the murder of Ratchett as a quick, shaky-cam, black & white cutaway that looks like something out of a cheap horror movie. And when he solves the mystery and confronts the passengers, the action is taken out of the tense, claustrophobic confines of the train car and moved to an improbably long table set up in a tunnel outside the train, with the suspects all seated Last Supper-style, out in the freezing cold with no visible breath. It's one thing to make a straight remake that gets a bunch of A-listers together to have a good time with a classic story, but the few changes that are offered are, if not worse, then at least dumber. Why do they have to go to the trouble of finding a long table and a bunch of chairs to sit outside? And if you're gonna do that, at least make it look cold.
Even with Pfeiffer, Depp, Dench, and Dafoe onboard, the whole point of something like this is the blinding shine of star power. In comparison to Lumet's film, Daisy Ridley is no Vanessa Redgrave, Leslie Odom Jr is no Sean Connery, Tom Bateman (as railroad official and Poirot pal Bouc, who assists in the investigation) is no Martin Balsam, and Josh Gad is no Anthony Perkins. In the end, ORIENT EXPRESS '17 is another in a long line of pointless remakes (2013's CARRIE, 2014's ROBOCOP, etc) that's not terrible but does nothing to justify its existence. It comes perilously close to being a Kenneth Branagh vanity project, with his Poirot making snide comments, laughing uproariously as he reads Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, and often coming across like a Larry David version of the legendary detective, letting the mustache--presumably a spare MORTDECAI prop loaned to him by Depp or a tribute to Sam Elliott in THE BIG LEBOWSKI--do most of the acting for him. And of course, since everything has to be a franchise now, the film ends with Poirot being summoned to Egypt because, "there's been a death on the Nile!"
Kevin Smith's 2014 man-surgically-transformed-into-walrus horror film TUSK was the result of Smith talking about a prank classified ad on his podcast and his listeners tweeting "#WalrusYes" if they wanted to see a movie about it. The TUSK spinoff YOGA HOSERS (the second of Smith's planned "True North" trilogy), released on just 140 screens, has an even more flimsy foundation, a horror comedy built around two minor characters: the Colleens, eye-rolling, can't even BFFs who work at the Canadian maple syrup convenience store chain Eh-2-Zed. Smith conceived YOGA HOSERS as a movie for his daughter Harley Quinn Smith (as Colleen McKenzie) and her friend Lily-Rose Depp (as Colleen Collette), and flat-out told the crowd attending its Sundance 2016 premiere that he wasn't making movies for audiences anymore. Mission accomplished. Possibly the worst horror comedy since 1987's BLOOD DINER, YOGA HOSERS is an unwatchable Kevin Smith home movie that manages to go 88 minutes without a single humorous moment, with the once-relevant and respected writer-director having no clue how teenage girls talk and pretty much relying on punchlines about Canadian accents that wouldn't have made it past the first read-through of the STRANGE BREW script 33 years ago. Did he think just having the Colleens repeatedly say "Soo-ree boot that!" would suffice? He haplessly tries to turn things like "yoga hoser" and "This is so basic" into the new "snoochie boochies," and by the time Jason Mewes shows up as a cop (!), it's pretty clear that Smith has turned into an embarrassing dad trying too hard to be cool around his daughter and her friends. Even Colleen McKenzie shouting Dante-from-CLERKS' oft-invoked "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" only serves as a depressing reminder of what Smith used to be. Other things Smith found funny enough to include in YOGA HOSERS: every character getting a hash-tagged "InstaCam" intro accompanied by '80s video game music; Justin Long as a yoga instructor named "Yogi Bayer," who says things like "Yoga Fett, soo-ree not soo-ree!"; everyone talking about hockey and snacking on "Pucky Charms"; the Colleens singing Styx's "Babe" and making Colleen Collette's dad (Tony Hale) cry like a baby as his girlfriend (Natasha Lyonne) refers to her cleavage as a "bouncy-house"; SNL's Sasheer Zamata as their no-nonsense principal Principal Invincible; Stan Lee as a 9-1-1 operator who answers "9-1-1, eh!"; a villain who speaks in Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Adam West impressions; and Lily-Rose's dad Johnny Depp, under a ton of makeup, looking like a syphilitic Kurt Vonnegut and with a bizarre French-Swedish hybrid accent, reprising his not-even-remotely beloved Guy LaPointe private eye character from TUSK.
What happened to Kevin Smith? It takes a good half hour for some semblance of a plot to form, and it seems at times like it's trying to go for a YA version of Don Coscarelli's JOHN DIES AT THE END sort-of thing, minus the ambition, creativity, and comedy. The Colleens, after getting some info from LaPointe, are targeted by Satanists working with the reanimated Andronicus Arcane (Ralph Garman), a cryogenically frozen Canadian Nazi stirred awake by the sounds of GlamThrax, the Colleens' band with 35-year-old drummer Ichabod (Adam Brody), a character named as such for the sole purpose of calling him "Dickabod" immediately after his introduction. Arcane is a protege of evil Adrian Arcand (Haley Joel Osment in flashbacks), the leader of the Canadian Nazi party in WWII whose "La Solution Finale" involved putting Canadian Jews on ships in Hudson Bay and deliberately sinking them. Integral to Arcane's nonsensical scheme are the Bratzis, 12-inch-tall PUPPET MASTER-looking Nazis made of bratwurst and with concentrated sauerkraut for blood. The Bratzis attack by burrowing up the asses of their victims and out the mouth, when they exclaim things like "Wunderbar!" and "Das Boot!" The Bratzis are played via prosthetics and CGI trickery by Kevin Smith himself, and I'm done here. (PG-13, 88 mins)
ELIMINATORS
(US/UK - 2016)
Arriving not long after the entertaining sequel-but-actually-remake HARD TARGET 2, ELIMINATORS--not a remake of the 1986 Empire Pictures cult favorite--is the latest Scott Adkins actioner, casting him as Martin Parker, an American widower living in London with his young daughter Carly (Lily Ann Harland-Stubbs). Martin leads a quiet life and works a boring job as a parking garage security guard, but his mysterious past is out in the open after a home invasion leads to him killing the intruders and being placed under arrest with his face all over TV. This catches the attention of Charles Cooper (James Cosmo), a powerful arms dealer who knows Martin's true identity: he's really Thomas McKenzie, an FBI agent who infiltrated Cooper's operation and was eventually placed in witness protection and shipped off to London. Cooper heads to London and hires Bishop (WWE star Wade Barrett), the most dangerous hit man in Europe, to find Martin/McKenzie and take him out. A Universal/WWE production shot in the UK and with a plot that makes it a sort-of B-action version of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, ELIMINATORS looks a lot more polished and big-screen-ready than most of Adkins' work for Millennium/NuImage, though director James Nunn (who previously worked with Adkins on the dismal GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS: UNDERGROUND) doesn't quite have the skills that an Isaac Florentine would've brought to the proceedings. After an engaging opening act, ELIMINATORS bogs down into one predictable plot development and contrivance after another, and for being Europe's most lethal hired assassin, Bishop sure seems to screw things up a lot and prove not very adept at getting the job done. It's pretty dumb and offers nothing new, but it's entertaining enough on a slow night as far as by-the-numbers Redbox and Netflix-ready action movies go. Adkins brings his A-game to this and once again shows he's ready for bigger things, and while he's been getting supporting roles in high-profile projects like DOCTOR STRANGE, it's really time for Hollywood to realize that its next big action star has been busting his ass in B-movies for at least a decade now. (R, 94 mins)
SIREN (US - 2016)
A feature-length expansion/spinoff of the "Amateur Night" segment of the 2012 horror anthology V/H/S, SIREN isn't always successful but proves to be more engaging than its overrated source film and its two sequels. "Amateur Night" dealt with three dudebros whose plan to get a hooker and shoot an amateur porn video in their hotel room backfires when the woman turns out to be a demonic, monstrous succubus. SIREN thankfully jettisons V/H/S's found-footage angle and has four guys on a wild bachelor party weekend for Jonah (JOHN DIES AT THE END's Chase Williamson), which leads them to a private strip club/sex dungeon in the middle-of-nowhere at the mansion of wealthy Mr. Nyx (Justin Welborn). Nyx is a collector of things supernatural, with many seductive non-human freaks imprisoned as sex workers and staying in their human form for his adventurous customers with disposable income. Of course, among his girls are "Amateur Night"'s nympho demon Lily (Hannah Fierman reprises her role). While Jonah's douchebag brother Mac (Michael Aaron Milligan) and his more laid-back buddies Rand (Hayes Mercure) and Elliott (Randy McDowell) party and fall victim to drinks laced with hallucinogenic leeches, Lily takes a shine to Jonah, who decides to be a hero and break her out of what he assumes is some kind of sexual slavery/human trafficking operation. A grateful Lily repays the favor by declaring Jonah hers with a chirpy "I like you" even as she shapeshifts, sprouts wings and lets loose a long tail that she uses for some unpleasant ass-play on the groom-to-be in a memorably twisted sex scene. Even at a brief 83 minutes, SIREN still doesn't have quite enough to justify its expansion to its own movie, but it gets a lot from Fierman going all in with an admirably fearless performance. Director/co-writer Gregg Bishop finds his voice late in the game as SIREN becomes increasingly demented and starts to take on a vintage Full Moon quality, suddenly bearing a strong resemblance to the kind of quietly unsettling horror film someone like Stuart Gordon would've made in the 1990s, like CASTLE FREAK. Not a start-to-finish winner, but SIREN gets better as it goes on, and ends up being a not-bad little horror sleeper. (Unrated, 83 mins)
BLACK MASS (US/UK - 2015) Directed by Scott Cooper. Written by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth. Cast: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Jesse Plemons, Peter Sarsgaard, Dakota Johnson, Corey Stoll, Rory Cochrane, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Julianne Nicholson, Juno Temple, W. Earl Brown, Bill Camp. (R, 122 mins)
If you listen closely in the theater, as the lights go down and BLACK MASS starts, you can almost hear CRAZY HEART and OUT OF THE FURNACE director Scott Cooper say "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to make a Scorsese movie." So it is with the much-anticipated BLACK MASS, touted as a return to form following a surplus of whimsical dress-up and endless self-indulgent eccentricities from former actor Johnny Depp. Even the most devoted Depp apologists turned on him after the loathsome MORTDECAI and to that end, BLACK MASS does showcase Depp's best performance in years, even if it's by default. Though he's not as "Depp"-y, it's still more of the same to some extent: as infamous South Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, he's again buried under a ton of caked-on makeup, a combination bald cap/receded hairline, and a pair of ice-blue contact lenses that look not unlike those used on Bill Bixby at the beginning of a Hulk-out into Lou Ferrigno on THE INCREDIBLE HULK. Taking place from 1975 to 1991, BLACK MASS covers a lot of ground with a lot of characters, but it has all the depth and insight of Bulger's Wikipedia page. There was probably a longer, more epic film here at some point--even shortly before the film's release, it was still being tweaked, with Sienna Miller's entire role as a Bulger girlfriend ending up on the cutting room floor due to what Cooper termed "narrative choices."
Though Depp is front and center as Bulger, it almost feels as though the film should be about FBI agent John Connolly, played here by Joel Edgerton (THE GIFT). A childhood friend of Bulger and his state senator brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), Connolly approaches Bulger in 1975 with an offer to become an FBI informant in an effort not to take down Southie crime operations, but rather, the Irish mob's Mafia competition. As the years go on, Bulger's Winter Hill Gang empire grows as he gives nothing to Connolly, who becomes complicit in Bulger's crimes by alerting him to FBI operations and falsifying reports under the guise of Bulger cooperation. Bulger is the devil on Connolly's shoulder, but their relationship really isn't explored, nor is there much in the way of escalating tension as Connolly gets in way over his head in his labyrinthine machinations to steer the FBI away from Bulger. We see him and co-conspirator agent John Morris (David Harbour) getting into shouting matches with incredulous colleagues played by Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott in superfluous extended cameos, and we see Connolly's new-found flashy sartorial choices not going over well with his wife (Julianne Nicholson), but nothing really happens with him until a new special agent (Corey Stoll) takes charge and starts holding him accountable as he still struts around the bureau office with a "What? Me Worry?" demeanor.
Connolly is a man obliviously drowning in his immoral and unethical choices and his pure hubris, but Cooper and screenwriters Jez Butterworth (EDGE OF TOMORROW) and Mark Mallouk are much more interested in Depp's feature-length Whitey Bulger impression. Depp is fine in the role, but at the end of the day, it's still not very far removed from what he's been doing for the last several years. He's using an intimidating monotone voice but letting the hairline and the contact lenses do almost all of the heavy lifting, and there's numerous scenes--the "family recipe" bit with Harbour's Morris, in particular--where he's just riffing on Joe Pesci and the "Funny how?" scene from GOODFELLAS. Cooper wants the entire film to be a Scorsese love letter, whether it's to GOODFELLAS or THE DEPARTED with its Baahston accents and Bulger being the prime inspiration for Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello in the latter film. Cooper doesn't have the style or the sense of energy to pull off Scorsese beyond a basic homage, and as a result, his film often keeps you at a distance.
BLACK MASS is a pretty decent movie, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it could've been an exceptional one. There's a great cast and a fascinating story here and all we really get when it's over is a Whitey Bulger Greatest Hits package that gets into a comfortable and too-familiar groove and never tries to go further than scratching the surface. Everyone loves a good Scorsese-style crime saga, but why not just watch a real one instead of a pretend one? For all the presence Depp has as Bulger, his performance is still pretty one-dimensional in execution, with very little known about him other than his skills as a master manipulator and feared killer. Other than Edgerton, everyone else just drops by on occasion. Dakota Johnson has a brief role as the mother of Bulger's young son, but when the son dies from Reyes' Syndrome, she's never seen or mentioned again. We also see a lot of Bulger soldiers, but with the exception of hapless schlub Steve Flemmi (Rory Cochrane), we learn little about them, other than they all eventually turn on Bulger to save their own asses. BLACK MASS is compelling from start to finish, but you've seen it all before. Overt Scorsese worship is fine when you can master the style and give it your own spin (like David O. Russell with AMERICAN HUSTLE), but Cooper's direction is workmanlike at best. Without a Thelma Schoonmaker by his side to help him find those distinct patterns and rhythms, Cooper is only capable of delivering Scorsese-lite. And Scorsese-lite works if you're looking for a two-hour, empty calories crime story to watch when nothing else is on. Just don't expect anything substantive.
TWO MEN IN TOWN (US/France/Algeria/Belgium - 2014; US release 2015)
A low-key, deliberately-paced character piece, TWO MEN IN TOWN is a remake of a 1973 French film by Jose Giovanni, with Alain Delon as an ex-con trying to stay straight with the help of an elderly social worker (the legendary Jean Gabin in one of his last films) and a new girlfriend (Mimsy Farmer). He finds this difficult thanks to a variety of obstacles, chief among them an angry cop (Michel Bouquet) with a serious grudge against him, and a former criminal associate (a young Gerard Depardieu) who keeps trying to pull him back into his old life. This new version, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (DAYS OF GLORY, OUTSIDE THE LAW), moves the story from France to the sparsely-populated southern-most area of New Mexico, right along the US/Mexico border. Paroled after serving 18 years of a 21-year sentence for killing a deputy sheriff, William Garnett (Forest Whitaker) has a dark past as a vicious criminal and a drug dealer, but has found peace while incarcerated. He's converted to Islam, is devoutly religious, he's taught himself to read and earned his GED, and worked as a tutor and counselor to his fellow inmates. A model prisoner who has fought his demons and wants nothing more than to start his life over and get it right, Garnett gets some support from his sympathetic parole officer Emily Smith (Brenda Blethyn), gets a minimum wage job at a cattle farm, and starts dating nice bank teller Teresa (Dolores Heredia). But flashes of the old Garnett occasionally pop up, whether he arrives home from work to find Emily inspecting his room at a local halfway house, or smashing his neighbor's TV when he won't turn the volume down. His temper is egged on by big-shot, five-term sheriff Bill Agati (Harvey Keitel), who shows legitimate concern over a local vigilante group's unlawful treatment of illegals crossing the border, but extends no such goodwill toward Garnett. It was Agati's deputy that Garnett murdered, and he has no intention of letting him off the hook. Agati follows Garnett, harasses him while he's having dinner at a restaurant, shows up at Teresa's house to embarrass him, has him held overnight for a speeding violation, and even goes so far as to bully Garnett's boss into firing him. On top of that, Garnett's old criminal cohort Terrance (Luis Guzman) keeps turning up, endlessly hounding and threatening him about picking up where they left off and, like Ben Kingsley in SEXY BEAST, refuses to take no for an answer. With no one but Teresa and his parole officer allowing him to lead the quiet life he wants to lead, it's only a matter of time before Garnett explodes.
Anchored by a Ry Cooder-esque score by Eric Neveux, TWO MEN IN TOWN often has a PARIS, TEXAS-era Wim Wenders feel to it. Like Wenders, Bouchareb is a European filmmaker who manages to convey a unique view of the American Southwest. The cinematography by Yves Cape (HOLY MOTORS) effectively captures the sun-drenched surroundings and the desert highways that Europeans seem to have a special knack for achieving, because as outsiders, Bouchareb and Cape see the unique things that Americans in their positions might miss. This environment is nothing new to Bouchareb, who has an affinity for the region, having shot 2012's JUST LIKE A WOMAN in New Mexico as well, plus he produced Bruno Dumont's 2003 cult film TWENTYNINE PALMS, a desert road trip slow-burner shot in the title city and in Joshua Tree. A lean and intense Whitaker, who's been dismayingly terrible in pretty much everything he's done for the last several years, turns in his best performance in a long while as the tightly-wound Garnett. Keitel does some fine work as Agati, who, despite his early concern for some illegals before turning them over to the border patrol, is every bit the asshole that you expect an apparent sheriff-for-life in a small town in the middle of nowhere to be. Ellen Burstyn turns up for one very well-played scene as Garnett's adoptive mother, who couldn't bring herself to visit him even once while he was in prison. Blethyn seems miscast, and her performance is uneven, as the folksy tone of her line delivery seems more to mask her British accent than to convey the down-home, tell-it-like-is sass of her character. The conclusion leaves a little to be desired, and Bouchareb has no idea what to do with Keitel's character, instead turning the primary antagonist role over to Guzman while Keitel basically disappears from the film. Still, it's an interesting drama that flopped in Europe and only managed a VOD and scant US theatrical release here over a year after it played the Berlin Film Festival. It's flawed, but worth seeing for fans of Keitel and Whitaker, who hasn't been this good since his Oscar-winning turn in 2006's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. (R, 117 mins)
EXTRATERRESTRIAL (Canada - 2014)
Though the generically-titled EXTRATERRESTRIAL is not intended to be a remake of the 2011 Spanish film by Nacho Vigalondo, they do share the idea of a couple's relationship issues being put on the backburner by a sudden alien invasion. That wouldn't be the only derivative element of the latest film from the GRAVE ENCOUNTERS team of Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, who work under the name The Vicious Brothers. Their EXTRATERRESTRIAL is more concerned with being a blatant ripoff of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, with five archetypes--brain, nice guy, dude-bro, stoner, and blonde ditz--only here, they encounter UFOs and not-very-friendly aliens. April (Brittany Allen) is planning on a weekend at her parents' cabin with boyfriend Kyle (Freddie Stroma), but it turns into a blowout party when he invites their friends Seth (Jesse Moss as the dude-bro), Melanie (Melanie Papalia as the stoner), and Lex (Anja Savcic as the blonde ditz). April's rejection of Kyle's sudden proposal sours the weekend, but things go from bad to worse when a UFO crash-lands in the woods. Grabbing her dad's shotgun, April blasts one of the E.T.s, which doesn't bode well with its alien friends.
Diverting but not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, EXTRATERRESTRIAL doesn't really get the whole "meta" thing down like CABIN IN THE WOODS did. Like CABIN, it also has unseen puppet masters secretly calling the shots, in this case it's exposition supplied by Travis (Michael Ironside), a pot-growing, conspiracy-theorist Vietnam vet who lives in a nearby cabin. He knows what's the alien visitors have been up to in the woods and tells April and the others of a secret treaty between the US government and the aliens that dates back to Roswell: the government agrees to leave the aliens to go about their business of abducting yokels if they do so quietly and in limited numbers so as not to draw attention. In exchange, as Travis puts it, "We get to keep acting like we're running things down here." It's an interesting concept that gets a lot of mileage out of a terrific performance by Ironside, but the Vicious Brothers err in taking him out of the film far too early. Gil Bellows is also very well cast in a haggard, beaten-down-by-life way as the beer-gutted sheriff who hasn't been able to get past his wife's disappearance a decade earlier, and when these kids start talking about UFOs and aliens, coupled with a shell-shocked local mom (GINGER SNAPS' Emily Perkins) telling the same story where her husband and son were taken away, he starts seeing an explanation for what happened to her. EXTRATERRESTRIAL opens strong and for a while, it has the feel of an old-school '80s crowd-pleaser, but with its two major assets--Ironside and Bellows--not getting enough screen time, we're left with mostly uninteresting leads (Allen is a strong, appealing heroine, but the rest range from forgettable to, in Moss' case, excruciating). Connoisseurs of alien invasion films may enjoy what's easily cinema's nastiest anal probe scene, but there's little consistency: if the aliens can establish a psychic link strong enough to force one character to blow his own head off, then why can't they find Perkins' character, who's hiding in plain sight? And if the aliens are supposed to be keeping things on the down-low, why are they spending so much time and abducting so many people in this neck of the woods? The film really stumbles with an overdone, maudlin finale that leads to a downbeat NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD ending that it doesn't earn, instead coming off as unnecessarily mean-spirited. Though it's rather unrestrained in its CABIN IN THE WOODS worship, there's a good film desperately trying to break out of the merely average EXTRATERRESTRIAL. As far as recent alien invasion pics go, it's at least preferable to the Milla Jovovich con job THE FOURTH KIND and the unwatchable SKYLINE, one of the worst major-studio releases in years. (Unrated, 101 mins)
MORTDECAI (US - 2015)
After a string of misfires that saw former actor Johnny Depp's stock plummet with fans (THE RUM DIARY, DARK SHADOWS, THE LONE RANGER, TRANSCENDENCE, and his incognito supporting role in Kevin Smith's pathetic TUSK), it seems as if the world put its foot down with MORTDECAI. After at least two months of the most relentlessly pushy ad campaign in recent memory, moviegoers actively revolted and let it bomb hard in theaters. On its own terms, it could've been an amusing throwback to double entendre-filled '60s comedies, like something Peter Sellers might've made around the time of THE PINK PANTHER, WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? or AFTER THE FOX. But the world made it known that it's clearly sick of Depp's constant crutches of pancake makeup and whimsical vocal affectations, and seeing him in the MORTDECAI trailers with a waxed mustache and a forced British accent trading randy and sassy quips with Goop publisher and vagina-steaming advocate Gwyneth Paltrow was where everyone drew the line, took a stand, and emphatically declared "No more!" The $60 million MORTDECAI, based on a series of 1970s comic adventure novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli, grossed just $8 million in the US and took a beating from critics, making it a safe bet that this won't become another PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise for Depp. The wasteful budgets of today's movies often border on criminal, but it seems especially offensive here. Other than paying a bunch of big names to jerk themselves off (Depp got paid $10 million), nothing here warrants pissing away $60 million. Think what $60 million could've done for people in need. Who the fuck needed MORTDECAI?
An appalling, obnoxious vanity project for star/producer Depp, MORTDECAI is every bit as awful as you've heard, which is tragic because there's a surplus of squandered talent. This is a film with an alarming contempt for its audience. It's obvious the actors are having a much better time than the viewer and you soon realize you're paying to attend a party where you're deliberately being excluded from the fun. Eccentric, jet-setting--and broke--British art dealer Lord Charlie Mortdecai (Depp) gets roped into a plot by his friend and M.I.5 agent Martland (Ewan McGregor) to recover a rare stolen Goya painting. So begins a globetrotting adventure that finds Mortdecai and his faithful, hulking manservant Jock (Paul Bettany) tangling with Russian mobsters, vacuous Californians, and the nympho daughter (Olivia Munn) of a shady L.A. art figure (Jeff Goldblum, cast radically against type as "Jeff Goldblum"). Meanwhile, Mortdecai's wife Johanna (Paltrow) also gets pulled into the pursuit of the Goya, providing Martland with an opportunity to steal her away from Mortdecai, which he's been trying to do since their college days. There's very little in the way of comedy in the script by Eric Aronson, whose lone previous writing credit is the 2001 Lance Bass/Joey Fatone vehicle ON THE LINE. It's too bad director David Koepp, a veteran screenwriter whose credits include JURASSIC PARK, CARLITO'S WAY, and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, didn't write it as well--perhaps he could've brought something to the table other than Aronson, whose approach seems to have been scribbling "Johnny Depp, British accent, mustache" on a piece of scrap paper, crossing his fingers, and hoping everything would work itself out. As it is, MORTDECAI's idea of comedy is Depp's overdone accent and the fact that he has a mustache and his character is a pompous dolt who still calls America "The Colonies." That's it. Every joke is based on one or a combination of those things. There's one legitimate AUSTIN POWERS-style laugh--Mortdecai at a men's room urinal as a Russian gangster grabs him from behind, injecting a sedative into his neck as Mortdecai quips "Oh! I've read about this!"--and that's it. There's nothing here. One of the emptiest films of the year, MORTDECAI is what happens when a movie star is too rich and out of touch for anyone to tell him no. Depp hasn't tried in years because he doesn't have to, so he enjoys another fat payday, amusing himself by mugging shamelessly with a wacky accent and a fake mustache. Well, I guess that means at least one person found MORTDECAI amusing. (R, 107 mins)
TUSK (US - 2014) Written and directed by Kevin Smith. Cast: Michael Parks, Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Genesis Rodriguez, Guy LaPointe, Harley Quinn Smith, Lily-Rose Melody Depp, Jennifer Schwalbach. (R, 107 mins)
Since becoming one of the iconic faces of the '90s indie cinema explosion, Kevin Smith has spent the better part of the last decade trying to find a niche as a filmmaker ambling into his 40s. His 2004 film JERSEY GIRL got caught up in the post-GIGLI, "Bennifer" backlash. 2006's CLERKS II was a likable if unnecessary sequel, and 2008's ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO was accused of being a Judd Apatow ripoff. After parting ways with Harvey Weinstein and dropping his View Askew production banner, Smith helmed the laughless Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan buddy cop comedy COP OUT (2010) and self-released the ambitious but not always successful thriller RED STATE (2011), a complete departure from his previous work that found him taking aim at the hate-mongering Westboro Baptist Church. Smith spends a lot of time on speaking engagements and his SMODCAST podcast, which led him to make his latest, the horror film TUSK. In the SMODCAST episode titled "The Walrus and the Carpenter," Smith and producer Scott Mosier were pranked by a classified ad that involved someone getting free room and board if they dressed like a walrus. They spent an hour of the "Walrus" episode batting around hypothetical ideas and at the end, Smith asked listeners to tweet "#WalrusYes" if he should make the movie and "#WalrusNo" if he shouldn't. Of course, "#WalrusYes" won out and now we have TUSK.
Shot in quickie fashion in a mere two and a half weeks in November 2013, TUSK may not have the shitty special effects of a SHARKNADO, but it's still every bit as much of a prefab cult/midnight movie and Smith should be smart enough to know that true cult movies aren't conceived as cult movies. Like any of the SyFy or Asylum silliness, TUSK would make a much better two-and-a-half minute fake trailer than an hour-and-45-minute movie. Obnoxious podcaster Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) co-hosts the raunchy and offensive THE NOT-SEE PARTY with his best friend Teddy Craft (Haley Joel Osment). Their premise is that Wallace goes around and gathers stories and conveys them to the travel-phobic Teddy, who refuses to leave Los Angeles, a podcast premise about as flimsy as that of TUSK. Anyway, Wallace is heading to Winnipeg to interview "The Kill Bill Kid," a viral video sensation who sliced off his own leg with a sword while doing half-assed martial arts moves in his garage. Wallace arrives at the guy's house only to find that his and Teddy's constant podcast mockery has driven the man to suicide. Hoping it's not a wasted trip, Wallace does some snooping around and finds a flyer advertising free room and board to anyone who listens to the homeowner's tales of seafaring adventure. The old sea salt is Howard Howe (Michael Parks), a wheelchair-bound old man who regales Wallace with tales of Hemingway and quotes from Coleridge and a long, emotional story about how his life was saved by a friendly walrus after a shipwreck. Wallace realizes too late that Howe has drugged him. When he wakes up, he's missing a leg as Howe reveals his ultimate plan: he misses his walrus friend--dubbed Mr. Tusk--so much that he's going to surgically reconfigure Wallace's body and sew him into a suit, allowing him to go "full walrus" and keep him captive in a secret basement aquarium.
The idea of a walrus-obsessed psycho going balls-out HUMAN CENTIPEDE on a self-absorbed hipster dipshit has endless possibilities for dark humor and the macabre, but Smith is plowing through this thing so quickly that there's no focus. The whole film is obviously a tossed-off goof for Smith, though admittedly, seeing Wallace's hipster mustache being used for walrus whiskers is hilarious. Smith gets a good amount of credible menace from Parks, who's enjoyed a busy cult rebirth since a Quentin Tarantino rescue mission led to his being cast as grumbly Texas Ranger Earl McGraw in the opening sequence of Robert Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996). Now 76, Parks has an inherently off-kilter speaking and acting style that wasn't fully appreciated in his youth, but guys like Tarantino, Rodriguez, Smith, and especially Jim Mickle in the 2013 remake of WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, have made good use of him in his elder statesman years. Smith cast Parks as a deranged, Fred Phelps-inspired evangelical madman in RED STATE, and TUSK gives the veteran actor his meatiest role in years, waxing rhapsodic about the sea, whiskey, women, and yes, walruses. But a little of it goes a long way, and once Long's Wallace is surgically mutilated, his tongue removed, and the femurs in his legs shaped into walrus tusks, the film has pretty much made its point and played all of its batshit cards but still has nearly an hour to go.
Much of that second hour is devoted to, and completely derailed by, the arrival of Quebecois private eye Guy LaPointe, played by one Guy LaPointe. It's a mystery guest star, and since the cat's pretty much out of the bag and a visit to TUSK's IMDb page spoils it anyway, LaPointe is actually a cross-eyed, chain-smoking Johnny Depp, sporting a beret, a wig, a fake goatee, and the most intentionally ridiculous French accent this side of Pepe Le Pew. Looking like a homeless, meth-addled Inspector Clouseau, LaPointe assists Wallace's girlfriend Ally (Genesis Rodriguez) and Teddy in their search when Wallace manages to leave frantic voice mails for them. LaPointe has been pursuing serial killer Howe, the latest in a long line of false identities, for years, estimating that he's killed and dismembered 23 people. Depp only worked on the film for two days at the very end of the shoot, which was more than enough time for Smith to let him completely run rampant with his grab-bag of affectations, ad-libbing and rambling on endlessly, especially in a painfully tedious flashback scene where he actually meets Howe. There's been much evidence of late to suggest that audiences are getting bored with Depp and his mannered performances, and while he's only in the last 30 or so minutes of TUSK, he's a key factor in it stopping dead in its tracks. That's also on Smith, who gets a dread-filled momentum going in the relationship between Howe and the transformed Wallace and steers it straight into a ditch by being far too accommodating with Depp's worst tendencies as the increasingly hammy actor seems hellbent on fast-tracking it to the Nic Cage self-parody phase of his career.
Scenes of Howe and the walrusified Wallace swimming together, Howe singing to Wallace, and the climactic battle between Wallace and a walrus-costumed Howe set to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" are the kind of things that belong in a fake trailer. Character development is sketchy--we learn through periodic cutaways that Wallace is a cheating asshole who probably loves Ally but can't resist the "road head" that his travels offer--and Rodriguez has a very good scene where she delivers a long monologue, spilling her feelings about Wallace directly to the camera, but it belongs in another movie. The more TUSK goes on, the more it starts to resemble the kind of prank that inspired it in the first place, like something its maker never really thought through or didn't fully understand how to approach. An unsettling, Cronenberg-ian body-horror film could've been made here, but instead, Smith opted for a self-indulgent home movie that only he and his buddies find funny. TUSK barely hangs together and it's a coin flip whether this or COP OUT is Smith's worst film, but everyone here apparently had so much fun that they're reconvening in his action comedy YOGA HOSERS, due out next summer, with Depp unfortunately returning as Guy LaPointe, which I don't see becoming his next Jack Sparrow.
TRANSCENDENCE (US/China - 2014) Directed by Wally Pfister. Written by Jack Paglen. Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara, Cole Hauser, Clifton Collins Jr., Josh Stewart, Lukas Haas, Cory Hardrict, Falk Hentschel, Steven Liu, Xander Berkeley, Wallace Langham. (PG-13, 119 mins)
Since his 2000 breakthrough MEMENTO, Christopher Nolan's go-to cinematographer has been Wally Pfister, who got his start working second unit camera crews on Roger Corman productions like BODY CHEMISTRY and SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III before photographing early 1990s straight-to-video erotic thriller "classics" like SECRET GAMES and ANIMAL INSTINCTS. Pfister got an Oscar for his work on Nolan's INCEPTION, and makes his directing debut with TRANSCENDENCE, which lists Nolan as an executive producer, features several Nolan vets in the cast (Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Josh Stewart, Lukas Haas), and has a very Nolan-like concept courtesy of first-time screenwriter Jack Paglen. Paglen's script is muddled, and though it's probably meant to be a gray area, there's no consistency in the characterizations or who the villain is really supposed to be. There's an argument for ambiguity but given how hopelessly convoluted and downright silly the whole film is, the answer could very well be that the filmmakers simply don't know. Considering its pedigree, TRANSCENDENCE is a misfire of catastrophic proportions, a supposedly cutting-edge vision filled with hard sci-fi techno-jargon, but it continually proclaims the most rudimentary messages that sound like Paglen's cribbing from a college freshman's Intro to Philosophy essay exam. It makes thuddingly obvious observations about the internet and our reliance on technology, with paranoid lip service paid to government surveillance and the lack of privacy in social media, tossing out buzzwords like "upload" and "off the grid" and even throws a bone to those who might still be losing sleep over Y2K. How old is this script? And how many times did it get shuffled to the bottom of Nolan's slush pile before he got sick of coming across it and punked his buddy Pfister into making it?
In a performance so somnambulant that Pfister should've just used a picture of him with a Conan O'Brien superimposed, talking mouth, Johnny Depp is Dr. Will Caster, an artificial intelligence pioneer who, with his work partner and wife Evelyn (Hall) and their associate Max (Paul Bettany), has designed PINN, a fully sentient computer system. Will is targeted by a "neo-Luddite" anti-technology terrorist group called R.I.F.T. (Revolutionary Independence from Technology) with members who have infiltrated his own research team and plotted a series of computer lab bombings across the country. After giving a speech at a university, Will is shot by one such activist (Haas), though the bullet only grazes him. The damage is done however, as he soon grows deathly ill and it's revealed the bullet was poisoned with radiation that's now in his bloodstream. Given five weeks to live, Will abandons his research until Evelyn comes up with the idea of wiring into his brain and loading his consciousness into PINN. Will dies, and soon begins communicating with Evelyn and Max through the computer system, instructing her to download "him" to the internet. Max is alarmed by the suddenly megalomaniacal Will and when he voices his objections, Evelyn sends him on his way to be abducted by R.I.F.T., and he eventually join forces with them. Meanwhile, Will, alive online and seen MAX HEADROOM-style on computer monitors, hacks into various global computer systems, clearing out Wall Street and depositing the money into an account for Evelyn to buy Brightwood, a nearly-deserted desert ghost town, converting it into their high-tech base of operations for a complete technological takeover. The virtual Will evolves at such an accelerated rate that he's able to heal the sick and disabled, who are then linked to his source code, synched with him to function as living, tangible extensions of himself. He's creating an army of Will Casters, with the government, led by FBI agent Buchanan (Murphy) and Will's old colleague Tagger (Freeman), aligned with Max and R.I.F.T. in hot pursuit.
This film is an absolute mess. What is Christopher Nolan doing shepherding what amounts to little more than a $100 million remake of THE LAWNMOWER MAN? Paglen's script is an incoherent, nonsensical jumble. The film opens in a dystopian CHILDREN OF MEN-type setting, with keyboards being used as doorstops and Max mentioning that "there might be phone service in Denver." Will's death and subsequent online reanimation happened five years earlier, and the Brightwood plotline two years after that. Brightwood was funded with money stolen by "Will" and Evelyn. When Buchanan drags Tagger to Brightwood two years later, how is it possible that he hasn't brought along the entire bureau to arrest her? Instead, she introduces them to the virtual Will and then they leave to plot a military attack, with help from R.I.F.T. What the hell is the government doing working with a domestic terror organization? Especially the one that caused all the trouble by killing Will in the first place? We learn so little about Buchanan and R.I.F.T. leader Bree (Kate Mara) that it's probable that neither Pfister nor Paglen know, either. Does anyone pay for their crimes in TRANSCENDENCE's world?
It's been said that no one sets out to make a bad movie, that sometimes they just happen. Watching TRANSCENDENCE, you can actualy see the actors wearing defeat throughout. You can see on Freeman's face and hear in his line deliveries that he knows this is a dud. While it's nice to see Depp sans the Tim Burton security blanket of white pancake makeup and silly costumes and not crutching on eccentricities and assorted Hunter S. Thompson affectations, this is probably his worst performance. It's one that reflects his utter lack of engagement with the material--and you could hardly blame him--and is not that of an actor, but rather a bored celebrity who already has more money than he'll ever spend in a lifetime. Sure, the material is stale and dated, but at least a Nolan regular like Christian Bale would've brought something to the role, like a pulse, perhaps. Hall is OK but suffers playing a sketchily-designed character, but she at least fares better than Bettany, Murphy, and Mara, who are saddled with even less. Considering that he's a cinematographer first, you'd think Pfister would at least give the film a great look, but it's not even very interesting on that level. There's a lot of long, ominous corridors and expansive labs of the antiseptic, dehumanized Kubrick variety, but they're shot very plainly by HOT FUZZ cinematographer Jess Hall. TRANSCENDENCE stumbles out of the gate and never finds its footing, and it only gets more pretentious, ponderous, and hokey as it proceeds.
Going back to the silent era, there's no shortage of great cinematographers who became accomplished filmmakers--Karl Freund, Freddie Francis (who quit directing and went back to cinematography late in his career, winning an Oscar for GLORY), Jack Cardiff, Mario Bava, Nicolas Roeg, and Jan de Bont to name just a few. Gordon Willis photographed some of the most iconic films of the 1970s (KLUTE, THE GODFATHER, THE GODFATHER PART II, THE PARALLAX VIEW, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN) before making his directorial debut with the 1980 suspense thriller WINDOWS. It was the first major release of its year, opening to universally toxic reviews and was all but buried by its studio for over 30 years before getting an MOD DVD release. Willis was arguably the top D.P. in American cinema for a decade, got his shot at running the show and blew it. He promptly licked his wounds and returned to his old gig, keeping busy and eventually retiring in 1997. He never directed a second film. WINDOWS is a bad movie but it looks terrific. TRANSCENDENCE doesn't even have that going for it. I guess what I'm saying is this: TRANSCENDENCE is Wally Pfister's WINDOWS.
