A more apt title for this nautical non-actioner might be ESCAPE PLAN: RUN STAGNANT, RUN DULL, as cult action heroes Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren reunite once again, though this is really a JCVD vehicle with a glorified cameo from Dolph. Van Damme is Scott Wheeler, an off-the-grid CIA agent who wakes up on a sub that doubles as a secret black-ops detention facility, located in deep waters off the southern coast of the US. He has no memory of how he got there, but he stands accused of traitorous actions against the US, specifically trying to sell classified intel on a drive that's gone missing. He repeatedly professes his innocence, even under the threat of gruesome eyeball injection torture by rogue agent Ferris (JCVD's old DEATH WARRANT nemesis Patrick Kilpatrick). Of course, Wheeler's being set up by former boss Rhodes (Al Sapienza), whose goons (the inevitable Kris Van Damme among them) take over the sub in search of Wheeler after he escapes from his holding cell and finds an unlikely ally in rookie agent Taylor (Jasmine Waltz), who doesn't buy what her bosses are selling her. Lundgren appears briefly in the beginning, as a German detainee named Marco, offering sage advice to Wheeler from an adjacent cell, but he then vanishes for most of the next hour and change before Wheeler springs him and then he finds a way to completely sit out the climax, ample evidence that Lundgren didn't spend more than a day working on this. If you're expecting an enjoyably old-school, throwback Van Damme/Lundgren actioner from the glory days of 1992, then you're better off rewatching UNIVERSAL SOLDIER. Murky and slow-moving, BLACK WATER is an inauspicious directing debut for cinematographer Pasha Patriki (GRIDLOCKED), not helped in the slightest by the fact that passing this tedious submarine thriller off as a JCVD/Dolph teaming is some straight-up Das Bullshit. (R, 105 mins)
BLEEDING STEEL (China - 2017; US release 2018)
When his Liam Neeson-esque revenge thriller THE FOREIGNER hit US theaters last year, many moviegoers probably assumed it was a comeback of sorts for Jackie Chan, who, other than voice work in the KUNG-FU PANDA movies, hadn't been seen onscreen in American multiplexes since the 2010 remake of THE KARATE KID. Quite the contrary, as the 64-year-old action icon remains as busy as ever, averaging three to four movies a year for the Asian market, most of which get no publicity whatsoever on their way to domestic VOD and Redbox kiosks. Chan's most recent Chinese film to stealthily drop in the US is BLEEDING STEEL, and it's one of his worst, an incoherent hodgepodge of ideas and styles that tries to be everything and succeeds at nothing. It's mostly dour and serious but has slapstick moments that come out of nowhere, and it might make a good kids or at least YA movie, but it's R-rated and far too bloody and violent for younger audiences. Even worse, it's no fun at all, and Chan is uncharacteristically boring as Lin Dong, a Hong Kong special agent whose young daughter XiXi (Elena Cai) is dying of leukemia in a hospital. He's unable to make it to her deathbed when he's called upon by his government superiors to deal with securing Dr. James (veteran Australian character actor Kim Gyngell), a recently defected geneticist whose witness protection has been compromised. Lin and his fellow officers protecting Jones are attacked by a "bioroid" creation of James' called Andrew (Callan Mulvey) and his group of pale, leather-trenchcoated bald dudes who look like they wandered in from a DARK CITY cosplay convention.
Jump ahead 13 years, and Lin ends up in Sydney, Australia when sci-fi author Rick Rogers (Damien Garvey) is killed by the Woman in Black (Tess Haubrich), a ruthless, bloodthirsty underling of a now-ailing Andrew. Rogers' latest book Bleeding Steel shares an alarming number of details that go into specifics on James' experimental work on Andrew, and it turns out the writer was buying the session notes of a witch (Gillian Jones) who's been serving as a quack therapist to confused orphaned teenager Nancy (Nanan Ou-Yang), who feels like her memories aren't her own and she isn't who she thinks she is. That's because she's really XiXi, who didn't die, and was instead treated with a regenerative drug by Dr. Jones. Lin figures this out and teams with younger sidekick Leeson (Show Lo) to protect his daughter from a sickly Andrew, who wants to transfuse her blood to give himself unlimited biomechanical powers. Or something. Chan (one of 50 credited producers) and director/co-writer Leo Zhang take this nonsense a lot more seriously than they should, so much so that it doesn't really gel when the star takes a few lengthy sabbaticals so the film can focus on Show's puerile antics, which include some asinine kung-fu moves while his pants fall down, accompanied by what sounds like someone trying to do the SEINFELD bass line. There's also a wacky food court brawl where an undercover Lin is working at a fast-food joint and wearing a nametag that reads "Jackie Chan." Only Haubrich seems to find the right tone in playing her role, and BLEEDING STEEL comes alive whenever she's onscreen, especially in the one standout sequence, a fight with Chan atop one of the shells of the Sydney Opera House. The film does earn some points for pulling arguably the most shameless deus ex machina in recent memory out of its ass in the climactic battle on Andrew's spacecraft (!) hovering over Sydney (!!), but this is far and away the dumbest movie Jackie Chan has ever made, and not in a good way. (R, 109 mins) DAMASCUS COVER (Singapore/UK - 2018)
Based on a 1977 novel by Howard Kaplan but with its setting updated to 1989 just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, DAMASCUS COVER is a spy thriller that wants to be both a BOURNE actioner and a methodical TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY-style espionage saga from the John Le Carre school, and definitely landing more in the latter camp with its low-key presentation and slow pacing that's frequently too plodding for its own good. The notion of showing the evolution of the spy game from the Cold War to the eventual War on Terror shows that director/co-writer Daniel Zelik Berk (a veteran producer whose most high-profile directing credit is the 1998 TV-movie SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK...FOR MORE) has put some thought into the project, but DAMASCUS COVER never really catches fire. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is Ari Ben-Sion, an undercover Mossad agent based in Berlin and posing as a German businessman named "Hans Hoffman." After he botches an extraction of an asset who blew his cover, he tries to redeem himself with his cantankerous boss Miki (the late John Hurt in his final role before his death in January 2017) by volunteering for a dangerous assignment that involves smuggling a chemical weapons scientist and his family out of Syria. He also crosses paths with an intrepid USA Today photojournalist (Olivia Thirlby) while trying to keep her at a distance, and ingratiates himself into the Damascus business world by glad-handing with a wealthy ex-Nazi (Jurgen Prochnow) in a time-consuming subplot that doesn't really go anywhere.
Sir John Hurt (1940-2017)
As expected, the story does some globetrotting, jumping between Berlin, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Damascus, with some attractive areas of Morocco portraying Israel and Syria, and there's the usual double-crosses and people not being who they claim to be, but DAMASCUS COVER just sort of putters along with no real sense of urgency and very little suspense. Igal Naor has a few good moments as a Syrian general, but Rhys Meyers is a bland hero and Prochnow has nothing to do (and I'm pretty sure that's a publicity shot of Prochnow from 1983's THE KEEP serving as the file photo in his character's Mossad dossier). It's competently made and looks nice, but DAMASCUS COVER is a footnote to the careers of everyone involved and it's notable only as Hurt's last film (he was cast as Neville Chamberlain in DARKEST HOUR but his battle with cancer forced him to back out just before shooting began, and he was replaced by Ronald Pickup). He's the old pro he always was in his sporadic appearances as Miki (who isn't too far removed from his Control in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY) and by the end, one gets the feeling that a more intriguing film could've been made about his and Naor's characters. Hurt's final shot near the end, hanging up a pay phone after somberly sighing "Goodbye, my friend," serves as a perfect farewell to a wonderful actor. (R, 94 mins)
As far as unofficial entries in the Monty Python canon go, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING is so bad that it makes YELLOWBEARD look like MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. The first film to unite the five surviving members of the legendary comedy troupe since 1983's MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and Terry Jones; Graham Chapman died in 1989), ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was directed and co-written by Jones, who had the script stashed away since the early '90s and it shows. Jones almost got it going around 2003 but decided to put it on the backburner after the release of the Jim Carrey hit BRUCE ALMIGHTY, which has an almost identical concept but Jones' script has a Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett twist. Instead of being granted powers by God, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING's everyman hero Neil's (Simon Pegg) are granted courtesy of a crew of aliens--whose instantly recognizable voices are provided by the Python guys--who have happened upon Earth in their galactic journey and are deciding whether it's a planet worth saving. Picked at random by lead alien Death Dealing Darkness Bringer (voiced by Cleese), Neil is used as a guinea pig to gauge what a normal human will do with unlimited power. With a flick of his hand, Neil is able to make sweeping changes that he often has to walk back due to lack of specification (for example, after he causes an alien attack at a school that kills 40 people, his command to "Bring back everyone who died," ends up creating a brief zombie apocalypse). He tries to use his new ability to make his downstairs neighbor Catherine (Kate Beckinsale) fall for him while avoiding her psycho ex (a grating Rob Riggle), turns his best friend (Sanjeev Bhaskar) into a sausage, and, of course, makes his dick bigger. He also gets his dog Dennis to talk with the voice of the late Robin Williams, which should give you an idea of how long this thing sat around waiting for a US distributor. Shot in early 2014, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was dumped into a handful of US theaters in May 2017 by the rinky-dink Atlas Distribution, a company whose only noteworthy--and I use the term "noteworthy" loosely--accomplishment was releasing all three ATLAS SHRUGGED movies. Pretty much every joke lands with a thud in this flat and almost completely laughless fiasco that's made even more depressing by the fact that it was Williams' last performance and the last comedy we'll get from Jones, who was diagnosed with dementia shortly after shooting wrapped, prompting his retirement from public life in 2016. (R, 85 mins)
BLACK BUTTERFLY
(Spain/US - 2017)
A remake of a 2008 French film with the same title, BLACK BUTTERFLY was set to roll in 2011 with Nicolas Cage starring and Rod Lurie (THE CONTENDER) producing, but the project fell apart during pre-production. Director Brian Goodman, an actor whose only previous credit behind the camera was the little-seen 2008 crime drama WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU, remained attached, and by the time filming began, Cage was replaced by Antonio Banderas, and the film was now a Spanish co-production, shot in Italy with a mostly Italian crew (Mario Bava's grandson Roy Bava served as assistant director), and set in an isolated area of Colorado. Banderas is Paul, a washed-up novelist once anointed the Next Big Thing, but now in his fourth year of writer's block, drinking heavily, feeling sorry for himself after his wife left him, and holed up in a remote cabin failing to deliver an overdue film script that he hasn't even started writing. He's trying to sell his cabin out of financial necessity, and his real estate agent Laura (Piper Perabo) has yet to find any takers. After a road rage incident with a belligerent trucker continues at the local diner, Paul's ass is saved by Jack (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a glowering drifter looking for a place to stay. Out of gratitude, Paul offers Jack his guest room for the night, but Jack decides to stick around, doing some much-needed handyman work around the cabin and showing an intense interest in getting Paul off the bottle and writing again. Jack's demeanor gets more threatening and controlling and Paul, and eventually Laura, find themselves being held captive by the deranged Jack, who Paul is now convinced is a serial killer responsible for a string of murders in the region that date back several years.
BLACK BUTTERFLY is merely dull and nonsensical for most of its duration, with all the talk about writing, plot, and characters threatening to spill over into a trite exercise in meta storytelling. It doesn't even do anything interesting with the unexpected casting of legendary cult director Abel Ferrara (KING OF NEW YORK, BAD LIEUTENANT) as the manager of the town's tiny carryout, and anyone else would've asked Paul to leave after the first night, but then there'd be no movie. A third act twist requires some significant suspension of disbelief but livens things up in a vaguely giallo-like way portended by the title (I was briefly reminded of AMUCK and Dario Argento's TENEBRE as things started to fall into place), putting things in a different perspective and making it appear that the film is well on its way to maybe not quite completely redeeming itself but at least finishing big in a way that makes it a reasonably entertaining time-killer. But then Goodman and writers Marc Frydman (Lurie's longtime producing partner) and Justin Stanley shit the bed by adding one last twist that represents arguably the hoariest of all thriller genre cliches, one so ancient and played out that it almost qualifies as some kind of sick practical joke that it's being used seriously in 2017. Really, guys? That's how you decided to wrap this up? It couldn't be any more infuriating if Goodman, Frydman, and Stanley appeared on camera and said "You just watched this for 90 minutes. Dumbass." (R, 93 mins)
WILSON
(US - 2017)
Adapted by Daniel Clowes from his 2010 graphic novel of the same name, WILSON doesn't continue the success of two previous big screen Clowes adaptations, 2001's GHOST WORLD and 2006's ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL. Both directed by Zwigoff, GHOST WORLD and ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL succeeded where WILSON fails. That's probably not the fault of WILSON director Craig Johnson (THE SKELETON TWINS), but rather from Clowes watering down his own source material and not having the right person in the lead. Woody Harrelson is one of our finest actors, but he's all wrong as Wilson, taking the kind of grumpy misanthrope that's similar to Steve Buscemi's Seymour in GHOST WORLD and the kind of character that was owned by Paul Giamatti a decade or so ago in AMERICAN SPLENDOR and SIDEWAYS, but playing it as an inconsistent mixture of Asperger's and unbalanced psycho. A bitter curmudgeon whose only friend is his Miniature Schnauzer Pepper, Wilson is the kind of guy who rails against everything that's wrong in the world, smugly spouting off about all of the world's ills without provocation. He's the kind of guy who will sit down next to someone on an otherwise empty bus or invite himself to share a table with someone in an empty coffee shop and make pushy small talk. There will be five available urinals and he'll take the one right next to the one being used and strike up a conversation, of course excusing himself with "Nice cock, by the way." Wilson is supposed to be an fearless guy who doesn't play by society's norms and conventions but he's really just an abrasive, irredeemable prick, and when Harrelson plays him cackling and with wild eyes, you realize how much this needs a Buscemi or a Giamatti, or maybe even a Kevin Spacey to really convey the tone of Clowes' work. You'll want to get away from this movie the same way everyone else tries to back away from Wilson.
Even if having Harrelson play it this way was the intent, the film just never catches fire, lurching lugubriously from one DOA set piece to the next as almost every joke gets chirping crickets in response. WILSON feels like a film made by people who don't understand the material, which is inexplicable considering Clowes wrote the script himself (or, at least, he's the only credited writer). Tired of his angry routine, Wilson searches for a new purpose in his life after his father dies. He seeks out his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern) who left him 18 years earlier, aborting their child and getting involved with drugs and prostitution. She's cleaned up her act and turned her life around, and she reveals to Wilson that she actually had the baby and put it up for adoption. Ecstatic about being a father, Wilson finds the girl, Claire (Isabella Amara), an overweight, 17-year-old outcast, and he and Pippi try to establish a relationship with her. What follows is one improbable plot development after another, including an ill-fated trip to visit Pippi's bitchy sister Polly (Cheryl Hines), and Wilson being arrested on kidnapping charges. Sequences just seem to exist in a vacuum in WILSON--there's little forward momentum, either comedic or dramatic, and no one seems to exist in the real world. Clowes really nailed the psychology of his characters in GHOST WORLD, one of the best films of its decade, but this just feels like watered-down GHOST WORLD outtakes, right down to the very Enid-like Claire. There's one legitimately funny scene where Wilson intentionally rear-ends a woman's car just so he can ask her out on a date, and instead attracts a large crowd of witnesses, and Judy Greer is as charming as ever as a dog-sitter who somehow finds something worthwhile about Wilson, but in the end, it just goes nowhere and says nothing, and never gets around the obstacle of a great actor being badly miscast. Fox apparently knew they had a dud on their hands, releasing this on just 300 screens for a total gross of $650,000. (R, 94 mins)
