1984's THE KILLING FIELDS and 1986's THE MISSION earned Roland Joffe a lifetime pass to the Respected Filmmakers Club, but his career's been in a near-constant state of freefall for the better part of 25 years. His last good movie was 1998's underrated modern noir GOODBYE LOVER, and in the years since, he crashed and burned with 2007's unwatchable CAPTIVITY, a repugnant SAW ripoff made at the height of the torture porn craze that has to go down in the annals of cinema as one of the most shocking and depressing downfalls for a once-revered filmmaker. Joffe's subsequent films range from forgettable at best to embarrassing at worst (who knows how he got roped into directing the t.A.T.u.-inspired Mischa Barton vehicle YOU AND I, which went straight to DVD in 2012 after three years on the shelf?), but THE FORGIVEN almost qualifies as a return to form. It's ponderous and slow-moving, and has to dumb it down for the audience (opening with a caption that defines "apartheid"), but it's also sincere, well-acted, and get better as it goes on. Set in 1996 in post-apartheid South Africa under President Nelson Mandela, THE FORGIVEN centers on Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Forest Whitaker) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a restorative justice body whose goal is to grant amnesty for those guilty of human rights violations, all in the hopes of the country coming together to put its past behind. Tutu is assessing the amnesty candidacy of Piet Blomfeld (Eric Bana), an ex-death squad member in a maximum security Cape Town prison. Blomfeld doesn't seem interested in clearing his conscience--he taunts the Archbishop with the kaffir slur and enthusiastically recounts his most vile crimes against black South Africans--but Tutu senses something in him when it comes to a court case involving two murdered teenagers that connects Blomfeld with two other death squad cohorts--Francois Schmidt (Jeff Gum) and Hansi Coetzee (Morne Visser)--who are now guards in the very prison housing him.
Based on the Michael Ashton play The Archbishop and the Antichrist, THE FORGIVEN was scripted by Ashton and Joffe and expands on the play by adding a subplot involving a 17-year-old black inmate (Nandiphile Mbeshu) forced into the attempted murder of Blomfeld to establish his cred on the inside only to be taken under his target's wing. Blomfeld's demonstration of a capacity to forgive and his AMERICAN HISTORY X/Come-to-Jesus moment where he realizes the error of his ways never quite come off as believable, despite Joffe's ham-fisted attempts to hammer it home by providing the loathsome, rage-filled racist with a tragic backstory to excuse the monster he's been for his entire adult life. But Bana is good, as is Whitaker, despite being forced to act around an almost comically large prosthetic nose that makes him look less like Desmond Tutu and more like Squidward from SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS. The long scenes between Tutu and Blomfeld (a fictional composite) constituted Ashton's play and here, with Blomfeld's unapologetic and horrifically detailed descriptions of his misdeeds, almost makes these sequences play like a post-apartheid EXORCIST III with back and forth monologues by the two stars. The climactic courtroom showdown between an on-trial Coetzee and the grieving mother (Thandi Makhubele) of two teenagers brutally slaughtered by Blomfeld while Coetzee and Schmidt looked on is powerful and unexpectedly moving. THE FORGIVEN is a mixed bag--it's too slow and meandering and the story arc for Blomfeld smacks of plot convenience--but it has its moments, especially once you can get around Whitaker's cartoonishly fake nose and focus on his performance. It's not enough to say the 72-year-old Joffe is back per se, but THE FORGIVEN shows that there might be some signs of life. (R, 120 mins)
BENT (Spain/US - 2018)
After winning an Oscar for co-writing CRASH with Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco made the little-seen crime drama 10TH AND WOLF and moved on to TV, creating the acclaimed but short-lived series THE BLACK DONNELLYS. He wrote and directed the straight-to-VOD BENT, his first feature film in over a decade, and it's a thoroughly generic and utterly forgettable present-day noir-inspired cop thriller. Disgraced ex-cop Danny Gallagher (Karl Urban) has just been paroled after serving three years for the killing of an undercover officer during a botched drug bust set up by his broke, gambling-addicted partner Charlie (Vincent Spano). They were supposed to nail scumbag businessman Driscoll (John Finn), but Charlie ended up getting killed, Gallagher took two bullets, and both Charlie's and Gallagher's names were dragged through the gutter after Driscoll framed them as corrupt, or "bent" cops on the take. Once he's out, Gallagher makes like an unlicensed and uncharismatic Philip Marlowe, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery that may involve the car bomb death of the wife of a Driscoll associate, as well as shady and untrustworthy femme fatale government agent Rebecca (a miscast Sofia Vergara), who's been ordered to keep Gallagher from digging any further, an assignment that inevitably involves showing up unannounced at his ramshackle pier house and immediately disrobing and stepping into the steaming shower with him.
Based on a series of Gallagher novels by J.P. O'Donnell, BENT is hopelessly muddled (there's even a red herring about "Arab terrorists" being involved), with an uncharacteristically dull Urban on what seems to be one of the least urgent quests for vengeance you'll ever see. BENT is filled with would-be hard-boiled dialogue that rarely works, mainly because it's delivered in such a bland fashion. It's the kind of movie that has a climactic showdown and shootout at a shipyard. It's the kind of movie where the bad guy delivers a long-winded, Christopher Walken-esque speech ("You know, in Alaska, they smoke this fish on the beach...") while intimidatingly slicing salmon with a huge knife. It's the kind of movie where you know a prominently-billed name actor has to have more to do with what's going on since he's barely in it until the last 15 minutes. Also with Andy Garcia as Gallagher's retired, fatherly cop mentor who pops up periodically to tell him to let the past go and get out of town, BENT doesn't even muster the energy to be a harmless time-killer on a slow night. Nobody seems really invested in it, and New Orleans is rather unconvincingly played by Rome, of all places. At least everyone got a nice Italian vacation out of it. (R, 96 mins)
Coming off like a shelved pilot for the dumbest CBS police procedural ever, the barely-released HANGMAN, aka DIPSHIT SE7EN, is easily one of the most idiotic, nonsensical, and intelligence-insulting thrillers to come down the pike in some time. There's no logic in its structure or how its characters obtain the clues that lead them to the next crime scene. They just go where the script needs them to go to advance whatever semblance of a plot the filmmakers have concocted. In a non-descript Southern city (this was shot in Georgia but might be New Orleans, as "House of the Rising Sun" is heard a few times because of course it is), former FBI profiler-turned-homicide detective Ruiney (Karl Urban) is assigned to babysit New York Times reporter Christi Davies (Brittany Snow), who's doing a ride-along for an investigative piece centered on her hometown. It isn't long before Ruiney stumbles onto the kind of elaborately-staged, time-intensive murder scene that only exists in movies and TV: a woman hanging outside a school with an "O" carved in her chest, and inside in a classroom, mannequins arranged like students, staring at the blackboard displaying the letter "O" in a ten-letter game of "Hangman." And carved into the teacher's desk? The badge numbers of Ruiney and his retired ex-partner Archer (Al Pacino). Archer has nothing going on except sitting in his parked car people-watching and doing Latin crossword puzzles, so he ends up tagging along on the investigation, which gets more gruesome and exponentially illogical with each new victim and letter.
Where to even start? I guess this is as good a spot as any: why don't they ever try to solve the puzzle? The whole "Hangman" element is ultimately a moot point, and when the word is finally revealed, they don't even explain what it means. The word is Latin, but how does the killer know Archer enjoys doing Latin crossword puzzles? Ruiney is provided with a tragic backstory about his wife's unsolved murder, but it takes Christi catching a nanosecond glance at her file to see the huge "V" carved into Mrs. Ruiney's torso to conclude that she must've been the Hangman's first victim. How could Ruiney and Archer never put that together? Even Archer mumbles "I missed it!" Why? Because the plot needed him to be stupid. Why is such a high-profile serial killer case being investigated by just one active cop, one retired cop, and a "Pulitzer Prize-winning" (as she mentions numerous times) reporter who has no business traipsing through blood-splattered crime scenes? And how does the killer know Ruiney's and Archer's badge numbers? When they finally confront the killer, the Hangman has no idea who Archer is, but then confesses that his whole M.O. is based on a childhood incident involving Archer 20 years ago when Archer was, if the flashback and makeup job on Pacino is to be believed, a 57-year-old rookie patrolman. The story and the motivations don't even make sense from shot to shot, let alone with plot developments and character arcs over the course of the movie. 77-year-old Pacino looks so groggy and sleepy here that he could easily be doing that old Three Stooges trick of drawing eyes on his closed eyelids. He's also dusting off the same inconsistent "Foghorn Leghorn Goes to Mardi Gras" drawl ("He sod-swapped mah caah!") that he used in MISCONDUCT, another instantly-forgotten VOD clunker from a couple years back. It's easily the worst performance of his career, simply because he isn't even motivated enough to liven things up with some vintage Pacino shouting (even junk thrillers like 88 MINUTES and RIGHTEOUS KILL got a little boost from Pacino's unbeatable combo of random yelling and his crazy hair). Remember great Pacino cop vs. serial killer thrillers like SEA OF LOVE and INSOMNIA? Does Pacino remember them? A scowling Urban doesn't fare much better, but he at least does a passable job of looking awake. And if you don't find the story lazy enough, then check out a CGI train wreck midway through where director Johnny Martin (VENGEANCE: A LOVE STORY) and the production design team don't even bother to stage any debris, metal, or anything resembling an accident scene. A train crashes into a car, there's a huge fake explosion, and then...there's nothing there except dirt and track. Even a 25 mph fender-bender will probably leave some plastic from a busted taillight. No one associated with this movie cares about anything. Over two decades after SE7EN, HANGMAN is still trying to scrounge for serial killer table scraps, but even a formulaic, by-the-numbers thriller has to have some kind of internal logic. This is just terrible storytelling, terrible filmmaking, and terrible acting from a slumming living legend who shouldn't have to resort to drek like this to get a lead role. (R, 98 mins)
JUST GETTING STARTED (US - 2017)
Writer/director Ron Shelton hasn't made a feature film since the 2003 Harrison Ford/Josh Hartnett action-comedy HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE (you forgot all about that one, didn't you?). With that in mind, it's hard telling what prompted the maker of BULL DURHAM, WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, and TIN CUP to end a 14-year big-screen sabbatical with something as generic and depressingly uninspired as the Christmas 2017 box- office bomb JUST GETTING STARTED. Starring in yet another geezer comedy after LAST VEGAS and the pointless remake of GOING IN STYLE, Morgan Freeman is Duke Diver, the freewheeling, fun-loving resident manager of Villa Capri, a posh retirement community in Palm Springs. He's got a pretty good gig: he's well-liked by everyone, treats the petty cash fund like his personal ATM, cleans up at his weekly poker game, and has a rotating cast of lovely retired ladies succumbing to his charms. His party comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of Suzie (Rene Russo), an internal auditor sent by the corporation that owns Villa Capri to take a look at Duke's creative accounting and fire him if necessary. But an even bigger annoyance to Duke is new resident Leo (Tommy Lee Jones), a wealthy mystery man in a ten-gallon hat who's spent time in the military, and regales Duke's lady friends--Roberta (Sheryl Lee Ralph), Lily (Elizabeth Ashley), and Marguerite (the late Glenne Headly in her next-to-last film; she died six months before the film's release)--by quoting Baudelaire and telling tales of his adventures in Machu Picchu. Duke and Leo begin a childish competition trying to one-up the other in chess, golf, weightlifting, and romance, with both vying for the attention of Johnny Mathis superfan Suzie, who finds herself falling for Duke's charms after he manages to get Mathis (playing himself) to play a gig at Villa Capri.
The GRUMPY OLD MEN-derived storyline eventually gets sidelined once the other plot is introduced: Duke is in witness protection. He's a former New Jersey mob lawyer who ratted out his boss and a hit's been put on him by that boss' vengeful wife (Jane Seymour). There's probably supposed to be some mystery as to whether Leo is the hit man, but of course he's not, as Shelton turns the film into a poor man's MIDNIGHT RUN, with Leo and Duke hitting the road and bonding as they evade the assassin sent after Duke. The comedic elements of JUST GETTING STARTED are so lackluster that the film never once displays any real amusement or spark of life. Sequence after sequence passes with jokes that don't land or weren't there in the first place. And the very premise doesn't stand up to any scrutiny: early on, Duke wins some local "Man of the Year" award and declines to go to the awards luncheon, presumably because he's in witness protection and doesn't want to risk being seen outside of his Villa Capri comfort zone. Makes sense. So why then, would he allow himself to be seen smiling at the camera in a nationally-broadcast Villa Capri TV commercial that Seymour's character happens to catch, thus setting the entire story into motion? And hasn't Palm Springs historically been a big mob hangout and vacation destination? What FBI handler would put him there in the first place? Other than the unusual casting of Seymour--which Shelton squanders by completely forgetting about her--no one shines here, certainly not Freeman, Jones, and Russo, who have never looked more lethargic and ambivalent than they do here. Lots of things might read better on paper than they play out in execution. No one sets out to make a terrible film, but sometimes you can watch actors in a movie and you can see on their faces that they know it's just not working. But they're professionals, so they grit their teeth, do what they've been paid to do, and just get it over with. This is such an occasion, as JUST GETTING STARTED simply never does. (PG-13, 91 mins)
Arriving very soon after BLACK BUTTERFLY, SECURITY, and GUN SHY, ACTS OF VENGEANCE is Antonio Banderas' fourth straight-to-VOD vehicle in the last five months. Looking pretty ripped at 57, the prolific actor appears to have embraced the idea of jumping on the 60-and-over action bandwagon (he's also got something called BULLET HEAD hitting VOD in December). Shot under the title THE STOIC, ACTS OF VENGEANCE teams the busy Banderas with the great action director Isaac Florentine, the DTV legend behind US SEALS 2 and several excellent Scott Adkins actioners. Florentine is probably the best action filmmaker still stuck in low-budget B-movies, though at this point, it almost has to be by choice. Produced by Avi Lerner's Cannon cover band Millennium Films, ACTS OF VENGEANCE isn't top-shelf Florentine: the fight scenes, while outstandingly choreographed, are few and far between, and the inane script by Matt Venne (WHITE NOISE 2, MIRRORS 2) is a blatant ripoff of JOHN WICK. Smooth criminal defense attorney Frank Valera (Banderas) gets preoccupied at the office, breaking a promise to his wife Sue (Cristina Serafini) to make it to their daughter's talent show (or, as the Bulgarian production team labeled it on the marquee, "tallent (sic) show"). Hours go by and he gets concerned when they never make it home. Police arrive at the house and inform Valera that his wife and daughter were murdered. The investigation by detective Lustiger (Johnathan Scheach) goes nowhere, and Valera implodes: he takes a leave from his job, drinks to numb the pain, and voluntarily goes to a secret fight club--barely concealed in the upstairs of a bar on a busy street--to get the shit beat out of him, his way of punishing himself for not being there for his family.
He eventually has an epiphany after happening--in the most hackneyed way possible--on a paperback of the writings of Marcus Aurelius, channeling his sorrow and grief into the life of a stoic, taking a vow of silence ("Good things do happen when you shut the fuck up for a minute or two" is easily the script's most inspired line) and training with a sensai (played by martial arts expert Florentine) to condition himself in preparation of devoting his life to finding his wife and daughter's killers, refusing to utter a word until justice is served. There's a potentially interesting philosophical angle here that the film doesn't really explore aside from rudimentary analogies to samurai or ronin, but stylistically, it's all JOHN WICK. The supporting characters are poorly-defined, with Paz Vega turning up halfway through as a nurse who tries get close to Valera, but Robert Forster gets one scene, delivering a blistering, no-bullshit dressing down as Valera's father-in-law, who flat-out tells him that now that his daughter and granddaughter are dead, he wants nothing more to do with him. The big reveal involving the killer's identity involves a plot twist that calls Valera's entire competence as an attorney and even as a human being with a functioning brain into question, though it's always a good rule of thumb in these kinds of movies to pay attention to any prominently-billed, reasonably well-known actor who appears fleetingly and doesn't appear to have much to with the plot. Also with DREDD and STAR TREK's Karl Urban as a police officer who occasionally turns up at the secret fight club, ACTS OF VENGEANCE is passable as brain-dead action fare--the "NYC street" backlot at the Nu Boyana Studios in Sofia, Bulgaria is somehow even less convincing than usual--and it's at least better than Banderas' recent comedic shitshow GUN SHY. But despite allowing Florentine to work with bigger names than usual, ACTS OF VENGEANCE is one of the director's more forgettable efforts, though it's understandable if his mind was elsewhere: the film is dedicated to his late wife Barbara, who died in January 2017 after a two-year battle with cancer. (R, 87 mins)
REMEMORY (UK/Canada/US - 2017)
The BLACK MIRROR episode "The Entire History of You" did a better job of exploring similar subject matter, but an excellent performance by GAME OF THRONES' Peter Dinklage makes the melancholy sci-fi drama REMEMORY worth a look. It's gray, gloomy, occasionally Cronenbergian in its production design, and vividly Canadian in its chilly mood, as introverted model maker Sam Bloom (Dinklage), still mourning and blaming himself for the death of his younger brother Dash (Matt Ellis) in a car crash in which he was behind the wheel, involves himself in a mystery when groundbreaking psychiatric genius Gordon Dunn (Martin Donovan) is found dead in his office. Dunn was the CEO of Cortex, a company that created the Rememory Machine, a high-tech form of therapy in which Dunn is able to filter and record the memories of his patients down to every specific detail. It's a controversial technique that isn't without its detractors, most of whom seem to be his patients/guinea pigs, among them Wendy (Evelyne Brochu), a young woman with whom Dunn has been having an extramarital affair; Charles (Scott Hylands), a dementia-stricken man in an assisted living facility; and Todd (the late Anton Yelchin in one of his last roles), an anger management case who Sam considers the prime suspect in Dunn's death, which the police have labeled natural causes but he's convinced was murder. He ends up stealing the Rememory Machine and befriends Dunn's widow (Julia Ormond, also very good), while Dunn's sinister business partner (Henry Ian Cusick) acts suspicious and may have something to hide. Directed and co-written by Mark Palansky (who hasn't made a feature film since the 2006 Christina Ricci bomb PENELOPE), REMEMORY starts out like a mystery with deep sci-fi leanings, but eventually goes the route of Shyamalanian sentimentality, with Sam's investigation ultimately all smoke and mirrors leading to a conclusion that isn't really a surprise, as Sam obviously has secrets of his own that he's been hiding from everyone else, including the audience. In the end, it's an overlong and somewhat muddled BLACK MIRROR episode that's very well-shot, with a catchy electronic synth score, and two lead performances by Dinklage and Ormond that go the extra mile to make a minor and mostly forgettable film worth a stream on a slow night. (PG-13, 112 mins)
There's so many ways that this could've been a creative, daring film with a thoughtful subtext. But it's pretty much amateur hour in the hands of writer/director Craig Anderson, who rushes through the set-up only to have the characters whispering and wandering around in the darkness for most of the rest of the way, often requiring them to do stupid things to get to the next kill scene. Why else would a sheriff arrive and park his car 100 yards from the house--with plenty of driveway ahead of him--unless it's to get a bear trap thrown over his head by Cletus while walking the ludicrous distance from his car to the house? There's no sense of spatial layout to the house, so it's impossible to tell where anyone is at any given time, or how Cletus manages to end up in or out of the house so much. Wallace turns in a strong performance, though it's hard to tell if we're supposed to be on her side or not. The film justifies her decision but seems intent on making her and her family suffer for it. On top of that, very few of the characters are particularly likable (Ginny picks fights with everyone, repressed Peter spies on Ginny and Scott having sex in the laundry room) with the exception of easy-going Joe and devoted Jerry, who questions his entire life after learning about the abortion and angrily confronting Diane with "Do you want to kill me too?" (O'Dwyer, who has DS and is a well-known figure in Australia, is quite good). Cletus' kills are pulled off with little imagination and style, and when his monstrous face is revealed, it looks like a MAC AND ME mask that was left out in the sun too long. RED CHRISTMAS' closing credits include a list of recommended books and movies that deal with the subject of abortion from both the pro-life and the pro-choice angle, conveniently allowing Anderson to "both sides" his way around his own movie. He should've included a list of better Christmas horror movies to watch instead of this one, but since he didn't, I will: any of them. Pick one. (Unrated, 81 mins)
STAR TREK: BEYOND (US/China - 2016) Directed by Justin Lin. Written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Idris Elba, Sofia Boutella, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Lydia Wilson, Joe Taslim, Greg Grunberg, Deep Roy, Doug Jung, Melissa Roxburgh, Shea Whigham. (PG-13, 122 mins) It didn't take long for opinion to turn on 2013's STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. Opening to glowing reviews and an 86% score on Rotten Tomatoes, anticipation was high considering that it was the worst-kept secret of that summer that Benedict Cumberbatch's character was going to be revealed as Khan, the most iconic villain in the TREK canon. Once the opening weekend passed, fans were discovering that they didn't really like the movie all that much. Yeah, there was the screenwriting involvement of the much-maligned Damon Lindelof and director J.J. Abrams' distractingly gratuitous use of Dutch angles and lens flare, but INTO DARKNESS focused on Michael Bay-type action with no feel at all for the characters, demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the beloved STAR TREK work so well. To his credit, Abrams listened to the fans. He stayed onboard as a producer and hired Justin Lin, the veteran of the third-through-the-sixth installments of the FAST & FURIOUS franchise, to direct. Lindelof was out, and INTO DARKNESS co-writer Roberto Orci's script, co-written with Patrick McKay and John D. Payne, was extensively reworked by co-star Simon Pegg (who plays Scotty) and Doug Jung. Whatever remains of the original script is minimal, as only Pegg and Jung are credited, and the end result at least extends an olive branch to those unhappy with INTO DARKNESS, now generally regarded as the worst film in the TREK franchise, toppling the longtime title holder, the William Shatner-directed STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989). It's still got plenty of the blurry, shaky-cam CGI action mandatory for today's mega-budget franchise blockbusters, but this is the closest the rebooted TREK has come to "getting" these characters, now that they're in the familiar places from which we've known them since the 1960s. Cult star and proud nerd Pegg is guilty of giving Scotty some of the showier elements of the story, but he and Jung exert an effort to make this a throwback TREK, at least as far as the characters are concerned, particularly Zachary Quinto's Spock ("Horse shit?") and Karl Urban's perpetually grumpy "Bones" McCoy, who gets a huge expletive cut off in mid-beam with "Dammit, Spock! I'm a doctor not a fu--."
STAR TREK: BEYOND opens with the Enterprise just past the midway hump in a five-year mission in deep space, stopping off for supplies and R&R at Yorktown, a high-tech base and utopian community. Kirk (Chris Pine) is offered a Vice Admiral position in the Federation, but another matter is more pressing: a mission to rescue a stranded ship on Altamid after an escape pod with one survivor, Kalara (Lydia Wilson), arrives at Yorktown. The rescue turns into an ambush, with Kalara forced to steer them right into a trap set by alien despot Krall (an unrecognizable Idris Elba), who's holding her crew hostage on Altamid. Krall wants an artifact acquired by Kirk on a recent mission and stored in the Enterprise's archives, and launches a full-on assault on the Starship, destroying the Enterprise and leaving Uhuru (Zoe Saldana) and Sulu (John Cho) and the rest of the crew as hostages while other parties--Kirk and Chekov (the late Anton Yelchin, who died in a freak car accident a month before the film's release), Spock and Bones, and Scotty--get out in escape pods and are temporarily split up. Scotty teams up with Jaylah (Sofia Boutelle), a lone alien warrior, who takes him to the wreckage of the Franklin, a long-abandoned, century-old, pre-Federation Starfleet vessel. Eventually, the other parties meet up and get the Franklin back in semi-working condition, overcoming various obstacles (Spock is severely injured at one point, and Kirk and Chekov are briefly suspended in ice), before hatching a plan to beam the hostages on to the Franklin and get it back to Yorktown.
THE LOFT (US/Belgium - 2015) Directed by Erik Van Looy. Written by Wesley Strick. Cast: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller, Eric Stonestreet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rachael Taylor, Isabel Lucas, Rhona Mitra, Valerie Cruz, Kali Rocha, Elaine Cassidy, Margarita Levieva, Kristin Lehman, Robert Wisdom, Graham Beckel, Dora Madison Burge, Ric Reitz, Kathy Deitch, Laura Cayouette. (R, 103 mins)
It's rarely a good sign when a movie arrives in theaters in 2015 sporting a 2013 copyright after being shot in 2011. THE LOFT's nearly four years on the shelf have been attributed to distributor issues, with its release date shuffled numerous times as the film went from Warner Bros. to Universal, then finally to the smaller Open Road. It's not a terrible movie by any means, though it comes up far short of the USUAL SUSPECTS-type twistfest that it desperately tries to be. What's here is generally entertaining, diverting trash that could actually stand to be a little more trashy instead of just piling on the red herrings and dropped plot threads with reckless abandon. It's the kind of movie that offers unintended laughs when five people are in a room knowing that one among them is a killer, and we get close-ups of the five regarding each other with shifty, squinty eyes, accompanied by a ludicrously melodramatic Big Reveal/Cliffhanger/"Dun-Dun-DUUUUN!"-style music cue.
THE LOFT is an almost shot-for-shot remake of the 2008 Flemish-language thriller LOFT, which still stands as Belgium's highest-grossing homegrown film. LOFT was remade in similarly identical fashion as the Dutch LOFT in 2010. The 2008 LOFT was helmed by Erik Van Looy (THE MEMORY OF A KILLER), who makes his English-language directing debut with THE LOFT. Van Looy was also pressed into service on the Dutch LOFT when its director, Antoinette Beumer, and five others were injured by falling scaffolding on the set, stepping in as an uncredited backup director for a couple of weeks while Beumer recovered from her injuries. I'm not sure what else Van Looy can wring out of this story that he hasn't already, but THE LOFT (shot mostly in Brussels) follows the template of Bart De Pauw's original 2008 script, adapted by Wesley Strick, whose screenwriting credits include CAPE FEAR (1991), FINAL ANALYSIS (1992), and THE GLASS HOUSE (2001): five married guys have a secret apartment they agree to use as a getaway to hook up with mistresses and one-night stands. The whole thing is the brainchild of successful architect Vincent (Karl Urban), who gives keys to his four buddies: Chris (James Marsden), Luke (Wentworth Miller), Marty (Eric Stonestreet), and Philip (Matthias Schoenaerts, who played the same role in the Belgian LOFT). The film opens with Luke showing up at the loft and finding a dead, blood-covered blonde handcuffed to the bed. Van Looy cuts back and forth between the five men trying to work their way out of the situation and being interrogated by skeptical detectives (Kristin Lehman, Robert Wisdom), and the events of the previous year, starting with Vincent proposing the idea of the loft. All of the guys are bored with their perpetually sour-faced, ballbusting, complaining and/or needy wives. Shrink Chris fancies himself a family man but falls hard for icy blonde Anne (Rachael Taylor), who's not only the mistress of a city councilman (Ric Reitz), but also the sister of a patient who committed suicide. Vincent steps out on his wife (Valerie Cruz) with a younger woman (Isabel Lucas), with whom Luke is obsessed. Gregarious Marty, the loud fat guy of the group, sees his marriage ruined by his indiscretion on a business trip with Vincent and Luke. And Philip, the younger half-brother of Chris, is a violent cokehead who marries into a rich family and is irrationally overprotective of his 20-year-old sister (Dora Madison Burge).
Of course, as these five dipshits try to figure out which one of them is responsible for the dead body in their party pad, long-simmering resentments and grudges boil over, usually involving creepy Luke and his seething jealousy over Vincent's way with women or someone making a passive-aggressive accusatory comment and getting a "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" in response. Or, one guy telling another "You're a sick fuck!" and getting "No, YOU'RE a sick fuck!" and a shove as a retort. It's hinted that Luke is a closeted homosexual who secretly desires Vincent, but that's quickly tossed aside (it's an interesting side note that Miller himself came out of the closet in 2013) because THE LOFT isn't daring enough to take it in that direction. The contrivances and conveniences come at a furious clip and it's all moderately entertaining enough, if a bit lacking in the courage to be anything but standard and safe. The resolution isn't so much unpredictable as it is ridiculous, with characters making one dumb, nonsensical decision after another just so Van Looy can keep the movie going. Say what you will about 1998's similar VERY BAD THINGS, but at least it had a sick-humored, anything-goes sense of adventure to it. By the time everything is explained, THE LOFT has nothing left to do but end with a whimper, offering up one of the weakest denouements in recent memory. THE LOFT is perfectly OK as the kind of movie you stop on while channel-surfing, and it'll no doubt have a long life on Netflix Instant and cable. But while it's always nice to see a '90s-style thriller on the big screen these days, it would've been a lot better if it didn't take itself so seriously, inadvertently serving as the perfect example of why these kinds of movies faded from popularity in the first place.
Directed by J.J. Abrams. Written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof. Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Benedict Cumberbatch, Anton Yelchin, Bruce Greenwood, Peter Weller, Alice Eve, Leonard Nimoy, Noel Clarke, Nazneen Contractor, Aisha Hinds, Deep Roy. (PG-13, 132 mins)
I'm not a Trekkie by any stretch of the imagination. I've enjoyed the 1966-69 TV series but never felt a real devotion to it. I've always been a much bigger fan of the movies, particularly that incredible three-film run of STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982), STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK (1984), and STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986). I really liked J.J. Abrams' terrific 2009 reboot STAR TREK and thought it did an excellent job of going back to the younger days of these iconic characters and updating the story and the visuals for a modern audience. Abrams and that film's two screenwriters (Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) are back for STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS, joined by Abrams' LOST co-creator Damon Lindelof, and the results are much less successful. Abrams and the writers seem to forget that the key to STAR TREK has always been the characters, and instead go for a "bigger is better" mentality more akin to Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer. Everything about ST:ID is bigger and louder. Characterization and creativity are sacrified and despite some positive elements, in the end it's just a lot of noise.
After ignoring protocol on a mission and continuing his arrogant, hot-dogging ways, young Capt. Kirk (Chris Pine) is relieved of his command of the Enterprise and sent back to the Academy. The demotion doesn't last long, as a bombing in London staged by renegade Starfleet Commander John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) leads to another attack at Starfleet command that kills Kirk's mentor Adm. Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood). Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) reinstates Kirk's command of the Enterprise and sends him and his crew--Spock (Zachary Quinto), Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and Dr. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve), a last minute replacement for an irate Scotty (Simon Pegg), who disagrees with the mission and refuses to go along but returns in a heroic capacity much later--to Kronos, the home of the Klingons, where Harrison is reportedly in hiding.
(MAJOR SPOILERS in the unlikely event you don't already know)
This is where I'd normally stop and say something like "to say anything more would involve spoilers," but considering the biggest spoiler is already the worst-kept secret of the summer and IMDb's page for ST:ID has Cumberbatch's character named as his true identity, there seems to be little point in carrying on with the charade: yes, Harrison is really genetically-engineered superhuman and future Kirk arch-nemesis Khan, and he's playing everyone--the Klingons, Starfleet, Marcus, and Kirk--against each other in order to rescue 72 cryogenically-frozen friends and colleagues being held in stasis by Marcus in exchange for Khan's scientific and biological expertise in helping him wage war on the Klingons.
After a pretty good first hour, ST:ID becomes one big action sequence after another. Some of these are nicely done, particularly one where Kirk and Khan (who briefly become, yes, allies) have to dodge space debris and then fit into a small airlock to board another ship, but each one seems to ramp up the sense of overkill. With the revelation that Harrison is Khan, easily the greatest of all villains in the STAR TREK universe, the film becomes more concerned with restaging vital moments of STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, frequently to its own detriment. Yes, we get a "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" invocation, a sacrifice for those needs, and the expected bellowing of "KHAAAAAN!" The filmmakers' idea of shaking things up is to have these moments involve different characters and it just feels gimmicky. There's no heart to it and it doesn't have the same effect because we aren't as invested in these characters. That's not a knock on the actors--Quinto is an excellent Spock, and while he's a dastardly Khan, even the Cult of Cumberbatch must concede that Ricardo Montalban simply raised the bar too high for anyone else to meet, let alone top--but it's the weakness of the writing. There's a reason STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN was a huge hit with Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike and has endured and become a timeless cinematic classic over the last 31 years, and it's not because of how big and flashy and over-the-top the action sequences were. It's the characters. It's the writing. And yes, the actors, but without all of those elements working in tandem, it's inevitably going to fall short even if the new ensemble does a decent job, and if the filmmakers insist on using so much of KHAN in ST:ID's plot, then they can't be surprised that fans resort to comparing the two.
Also not helping at all is the lens-flaring, jerky shaky-cam directing style that Abrams utilizes, making this feel like STAR TREK for the TRANSFORMERS crowd. There's really no reason for a climactic Spock/Khan fist fight, especially one that looks like the actors were CGI'd into outtakes from THE FIFTH ELEMENT. ST:ID is the kind of formulaic product that thinks it can be Taken Seriously by throwing in thinly-veiled references to topical events. Christopher Nolan's THE DARK KNIGHT and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES handled this effectively, but the inclusion of a suicide bombing, a Dick Cheney-esque warmongering military figure, and some 9/11-inspired imagery with a Starfleet ship commandeered by Khan crashing into a bustling metropolis seems contrived and offensive not for its inclusion but for the transparent obviousness of it. This is a junk movie conceived by a committee (even resorting to the now-standard "nefarious villain detained or standing in a cell while glaring at and/or taunting the hero" scene; see also Heath Ledger in THE DARK KNIGHT and Javier Bardem in SKYFALL). It's not an artistic vision or a serious statement. It's just loud and disorienting (and I didn't even see it in 3D) and at the risk of sounding like an old man telling J.J. Abrams to get off my lawn, I generally find it hard to enjoy a movie when it's giving me a pounding headache. Coming after such a successful reboot four years ago, STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS has its moments, but overall, it's a mostly empty and disappointing experience.
Were it not based on true events with material quoted directly from police reports, it would be easy to dismiss COMPLIANCE as one of the least believable thrillers in years. Inspired by a series of prank call scams over a 12-year period that authorities believe involve the same perpetrator, COMPLIANCE is a dramatization of the last such incident, one that took place at a McDonald's in Mount Washington, KY in 2004. Writer-director Craig Zobel takes small liberties--McDonald's becomes "ChickWich," the assistant manager in the real incident is changed to the store manager in the film, the caller used a supermarket pay phone but in the film, he's calling from his home using a prepaid cell, and all names have been changed--but what's onscreen is largely how the incident played out. Zobel's concern was to focus on the idea of obedience to figures of authority (think Stanley Milgram), be they law enforcement or in the structure of the workplace, specifically the rigid, by-the-book methods of a fast-food chain, but his script also gives the characters subtlely-displayed psychological reasons for some of what transpires. None of these prank calls lasted as long or went as far with as many people involved as the Mount Washington incident, and it's almost impossible to believe that it took several hours and an off-duty maintenance man to put a stop to what was happening.
On a busy Friday night at a ChickWich in rural Ohio, store manager Sandra (TV and stage vet Ann Dowd, given a rare big screen lead and running with it) is already on edge and nervous about telling her district manager about losing $1400 in food because of a refrigerator door that was left open all night. Her night goes from bad to worse when she gets a phone call from an Officer Daniels, who claims that he's got her district manager on the other line and he's with a customer who says that a cashier stole some money from her purse. "Daniels" gives a vague description that Sandra concludes to be Becky (Dreama Walker). Daniels orders Sandra to take Becky to the office, and an over-the-phone interrogation leads to a strip search, and far worse once Daniels badgers Sandra into getting her slightly drunk fiance Van (Bill Camp) involved. Zobel reveals early on that "Daniels" is in fact a seemingly well-to-do guy (Pat Healy) who's just calling from his own house and doing this for the sick thrill of seeing just how much he can manipulate them into obeying his increasingly ridiculous and dangerous demands. Anyone who's ever worked in a fast food or food or customer service environment will recognize how well Zobel captures the atmosphere, the jargon, and the mindset of such places. It helps that the film is cast with people who you've likely seen in many other things, but don't know their names and therefore don't have the distractions you might get if, say, Meryl Streep was playing Sandra. Dowd nails this character, just in the ways she's eager to please and be a team player (her district manager, the irate delivery driver, Daniels), and how, even in the stress of the situation, the harried boss in her still manages to reprimand Becky during the strip search for not wearing "the company's standard-issue khakis." Does Sandra have something against Becky? Is there a small part of her that's OK with what's happening? She did, after all, catch Becky and the much-younger assistant manager (Ashlie Atkinson) snickering behind her back at her awkward attempt to engage in girl talk. Walker also does a commendable job in a difficult and frequently uncomfortable role, spending a good chunk of the film wearing nothing but an apron. Produced by David Gordon Green (taking a break from directing terrible comedies that are sinking his once-sterling rep), COMPLIANCE is a riveting, intense, and often unpleasant film with a cast delivering believable performances as characters behaving in a very unbelievable fashion. (R, 90 mins)
DREDD (South Africa/UK - 2012)
Doing its best to blast away any bad memories of 1995's JUDGE DREDD, no one's favorite Stallone movie, DREDD is a hyper-stylized and outrageously violent take on the character created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, and is a much more successful interpretation. The film pretty much tanked in theaters, due in large part to its opening on a crowded weekend with about six other major releases, but this is one that will find a strong cult following in years to come. In the Cursed Earth wasteland of Mega-City One, merciless law enforcement officer Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) is assessing rookie partner Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), who failed her exams but has a strong psychic ability that Dredd's bosses think will be handy in the field. The two answer a homicide call at the 200-story slum block tower Peach Trees, home to 75,000 residents under the control of ruthless, scar-faced drug lord Madeline Madrigal, aka Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), who rules the market on the new and highly addictive street drug Slo-Mo, which creates the illusion of time moving at 1% of its speed for the user. Ma-Ma has had three rival gang members skinned alive and tossed off the top-floor balcony. Dredd and Anderson take one of Ma-Ma's gang, Kay (Wood Harris) into custody when Anderson's psychic senses confirm he's responsible for the three killings. Before they can exit Peach Trees, Ma-Ma orders the entire block put on lockdown, forcing Dredd and Anderson to shoot their way up and down the building, two against several hundred of Ma-Ma's enforcers.
Directed by Pete Travis (VANTAGE POINT) and scripted by novelist and frequent Danny Boyle collaborator Alex Garland (28 DAYS LATER, SUNSHINE), DREDD belongs to the same class of over-the-top insanity along the lines of PUNISHER: WAR ZONE (2008). Travis splatters gallons upon gallons of CGI blood (very cartoony, but appropriate in the context of the film) across the screen, with occasional old-school Karo syrup to keep it real. He does a nice job of establishing a John Carpenter-style siege situation, complete with non-stop, droning techno music, and DREDD immediately joins the short list of "high-rise mayhem" classics like DEMONS 2 (1986), ENEMY TERRITORY (1987) and DIE HARD (1988), and more recent examples like THE HORDE (2010), ATTACK THE BLOCK (2011), CITADEL (2012), and THE RAID: REDEMPTION (2012), to which it drew many unfair ripoff accusations. Urban is absolutely perfect as Dredd, and Thirlby holds her own as the wet-behind-the-ears rookie just trying to survive her first day on the job. The many scenes with characters under the influence of Slo-Mo probably played a lot better in 3D on the big screen than they do flat at home, but they provide some of the trippiest visuals this side of Gaspar Noe's ENTER THE VOID. DREDD simply had the misfortune of opening on the wrong weekend. It's one of the best action thrillers of 2012 and deserved a better reception. (R, 96 mins)
SLEEP TIGHT (Spain - 2011; 2012 US release)
Spanish horror master Jaume Balaguero, best known for co-directing the first two [REC] films with Paco Plaza, made this bleak, unsettling thriller while Plaza helmed [REC] 3 solo. SLEEP TIGHT is definitely the better film, with misanthropic apartment building concierge/handyman Cesar (Luis Tosar) engaging in a quiet war against the tenants of the building when he isn't contemplating suicide. First it's little things like letting plants die and giving a tenant's dog food that he knows will make it sick. Cesar soon devotes all of his psychotic energy to the endlessly upbeat Clara (Marta Etura). At first, Balaguero and screenwriter Alberto Marini deceive the viewer into thinking this is a riff on the 2011 Hilary Swank/Jeffrey Dean Morgan thriller THE RESIDENT, where he's obsessively fixated on her from a misguided romance angle when he sneaks into her apartment, goes through her things, uses her toothbrush, and hides under her bed, waiting until she's asleep to chloroform her and crawl into bed to snuggle with her while she's out cold. No, quite the contrary. He's unable to feel any joy or happiness in his life and simply wants to break her constantly positive, cheery personality. He purposely clogs her sink, hides a cherished watch that was a gift from her mother, sends her anonymous threatening text messages from a prepaid cell, plants cockroach eggs throughout her apartment and injects skin allergens into her cosmetic products to cause a miserable rash all over her body. When her apartment is overrun with cockroaches and he offers to fumigate it, he's enraged to find that she isn't even upset about having to throw so many of her things away. "Oh, well! It's time for spring cleaning anyway!" she says with a smile. Balaguero and Morini approach much of the film with a twisted sense of humor, but things eventually turn grim and violent when Clara rekindles a romance with her ex-boyfriend (Alberto San Juan), who immediately senses something isn't right with the concierge.
There's a few implausible moments here and there that stretch credibility and threaten to derail the train, such as the scenes where Cesar is tiptoeing through Clara's apartment undetected while she and the boyfriend are there, or the fact that there's no security system or cameras in such a nice building. But overall, thanks to a disturbing performance by Tosar (it's interesting to note that he and Etura have been a couple offscreen for several years), SLEEP TIGHT generally works, with some very suspenseful set pieces, generous portions of dark humor (particularly when Cesar finds an unexpected nemesis in a bratty neighbor girl who knows what he's up to but opts to blackmail him instead of telling anyone), and a creative structure in that the film is completely from Cesar's point of view and with the antagonist as protagonist, in a strange way, you find yourself oddly rooting for him when he's trying to glide through Clara's apartment undetected. Overall, Balaguero succeeds in making SLEEP TIGHT an interesting film with a different approach to the psycho stalker flick. (Unrated, 101 mins)
GUNS, GIRLS & GAMBLING (US - 2012)
This wretched, decade-and-a-half late throwback to the post-PULP FICTION wave of Tarantino knockoffs like THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD (1995) and 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY (1996) was on the shelf for two years before Universal quietly dumped it in one theater in L.A. in December 2012. There isn't a single thing that works in this tired, unfunny and utterly pointless endurance test that's only recommended for people who think DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO is a unsung gem waiting to be rediscovered. Nice guy John Smith (Christian Slater, whose presence draws obvious comparisons to TRUE ROMANCE) gets in over his head after a night of poker with four Elvis impersonators at a Native American casino. Someone has stolen a priceless Apache tribal mask, and now everyone in town is after it and killing everyone who gets in their way. Among the players: Elvis Elvis (Gary Oldman, another TRUE ROMANCE vet), Gay Elvis (Chris Kattan), Asian Elvis (Anthony Brandon Wong), Little Person Elvis (Tony Cox), The Rancher (Powers Boothe), The Cowboy (Jeff Fahey), The Girl Next Door (Megan Park), The Sheriffs (Dane Cook, Sam Trammell), The Chief (the late Gordon Tootoosis, who died in 2011), and The Blonde (Helena Mattsson, trying way too hard to be Charlize Theron), a sexy, Poe-quoting assassin. It's an endless series of flat jokes and predictable double crosses and the cast just looks lost, though chances are they had more fun making this than anyone will have watching it. I imagine Slater and Oldman (what is he doing in this?) probably reminisced about TRUE ROMANCE and maybe Oldman broke out his Drexl Spivey act to entertain his co-stars and the crew. Regardless, this is his worst career decision since TIPTOES. And for those keeping score, this is the second awful film Slater's made that involves a casino heist pulled off by Elvis impersonators. Did he learn nothing after surviving the wreckage of 3000 MILES TO GRACELAND? (Unrated, 90 mins, also available on Netflix streaming)
