The kind of modest, uncomplicated programmer that just can't find a place in today's blockbuster-driven, franchise-focused business model, CHUCK is a film that should've been given a chance to be the sleeper hit it was obviously made to be. A long-in-the-works pet project of veteran actor Liev Schreiber, who also co-produced and co-wrote the script, CHUCK is a biopic of boxer Chuck Wepner, aka "The Bayonne Bleeder," the heavyweight champ of New Jersey. Wepner was never a major player in boxing outside of the Garden State but he made it far enough to get a shot at the title, almost going the distance at 36 years of age in a 1975 fight with Muhammad Ali, ultimately losing by TKO when the fight was stopped with 19 seconds left in the final round. Wepner's career fizzled for a few more years, when he would often be reduced to exhibition bouts with bears and, in one famous 1976 stunt, legendary wrestler Andre the Giant. Wepner retired from the ring in 1978, around the time he began benefiting from the notoriety of Sylvester Stallone and ROCKY when word started going around that Stallone's script was inspired by Wepner's bout with Ali. Stallone (played here by a surprisingly well-cast Morgan Spector) never confirmed it, but Wepner dined out on his tenuous connection to ROCKY for years, even getting an audition for a small part in ROCKY II and blowing it when he shows up late and coked-up and having not even taken a cursory glance at Stallone's script.
Schreiber worked on the script with Jerry Stahl (PERMANENT MIDNIGHT), Michael Cristofer (GIA), and Jeff Feuerzeig, a Wepner authority who directed the documentary THE REAL ROCKY for ESPN's 30 FOR 30 series. CHUCK doesn't sugarcoat its subject: he's obnoxious, self-absorbed, and a total bullshit artist. His wandering eye and his need to always be putting on a show drives his wife Phyliss (Elisabeth Moss) and daughter Kimberly (Sadie Sink) away. He's also all too eager to dive into the hedonistic, coke-fueled excess of the disco era '70s until he's eventually caught in an a drug sting and sent to prison in the 1980s. Schreiber is terrific as Wepner, and while nothing here is particularly fresh--Quebecois director Philippe Falardeau has obviously studied every move in the Martin Scorsese playbook--CHUCK works the biopic formula perfectly. Excellent performances all around give it a tremendous boost--Naomi Watts as a sassy bartender eyed by Chuck, Michael Rapaport as his estranged brother, Jim Gaffigan as his best buddy and chief enabler, and a scene-stealing Ron Perlman as his grouchy, Mickey-like trainer--and the period detail is convincing without being oversold. That's a pleasant surprise considering that it's produced by Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage, and while much of it was shot in NYC, the involvement of Avi Lerner means there was some work at the Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria, and from the looks of it, they were probably the boxing sequences and the exhibition bouts set in the strip club run by Chuck's sleazy pal (former DAILY SHOW correspondent Jason Jones), which take place on a set that should look familiar to anyone who's seen an UNDISPUTED sequel. CHUCK isn't award-caliber filmmaking, but it's solid entertainment that's well-acted, unpretentious, and doesn't overstay its welcome. In a summer filled with underperforming "sure things," a movie like CHUCK might've caught on and been a minor hit. But hey, whatever...I guess we needed another TRANSFORMERS loitering on four screens at a theater near you. (R, 98 mins)
KILL SWITCH (US/Netherlands - 2017)
If you're a follower of gut instinct, you may be ready to dismiss KILL SWITCH before it even begins once you're aware that director Tim Smit stylizes his palindrome name as "TimSmiT." But even if you give TimSmiT a pass, there's still plenty of reason to not even bother with KILL SWITCH, a tedious and abrasively off-putting hard sci-fi outing that borrows tons of ideas from other movies and TV shows but can't weave any of them into a story that's even remotely coherent. Shot in 2014 as REDIVIDER and probably only released at all because of Dan Stevens' starring turn in the live-action Disney blockbuster BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, KILL SWITCH takes place in a near-future where the world has run out of all energy resources. Physicist and former astronaut Will Porter (Stevens) is summoned to Holland by Abigail Vos (SKYFALL'S Berenice Marlohe), a representative of Alterplex Energy, a mysterious corporation run by billionaire Reynard (Gijs Scholten van Aschat). They've built a massive tower in Amsterdam that's a portal to "The Echo," an alternate, mirror image Earth created by Alterplex to be used to pool endless resources and energy for the real Earth. Just after the Tower goes live, the screen fades to black and Porter wakes up inside The Echo in possession of the "Redivider," a box designed to destroy The Echo's mainframe. It seems miscalculations were made by Reynard, and now one of the worlds--Earth or The Echo--must be destroyed to save the other. Judging from what's on display here, maybe TimSmiT should've considered annihilating both to save audiences from KILL SWITCH.
Making his directing debut, TimSmiT, a veteran special effects designer on films on recent VOD/DTV titles like LAST PASSENGER and TIGER HOUSE, takes an almost Murphy's Law approach. Other than some decent visual effects--no surprise since that's his day job--whatever can go wrong does as TimSmiT makes one bad decision after another. His attempt to turn it into a first-person shooter POV video game might predate the already forgotten HARDCORE HENRY, but by cutting back and forth between timelines with the first-person POV in The Echo and scenes on Earth with Porter and his sister (Charity Wakefield, one of the most awesomely British names this side of Benedict Cumberbatch) and her special needs son (Kasper van Groesen), TimSmiT kills any momentum that he might be building. The time element is a completely incomprehensible jumble, the rules of The Echo are never really established, and a potentially interesting character like underground rebel leader Hugo (Mike Libanon) is killed off almost immediately after he's introduced. KILL SWITCH is a miserable experience of SKYLINE proportions that starts in a confusing fashion and never gets its act together, stumbling all the way to an unsatisfying finish. The dumbest thing TimSmiT does--aside from doing that with his name--is having a charismatic and intense actor like Stevens (who was so great in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES and THE GUEST) at his disposal and leaving him offscreen for most of the movie. Stevens only worked on this for four days as TimSmiT cranked out his Earth scenes quickly and then used a stand-in to wear the GoPro for the first-person POV shots, then had Stevens revoice the stand-in a two-hour recording session after the rest of the film was finished. It's a level of commitment usually reserved for the likes of Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal, and it's kind of trifle that Stevens probably wishes he never made, with the end result being a sci-fi film so irritating that its only surprise is that Sharlto Copley isn't in it. (R, 92 mins)
SPOTLIGHT (US - 2015) Directed by Tom McCarthy. Written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy. Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian D'Arcy James, Billy Crudup, Len Cariou, Jamey Sheridan, Paul Guilfoyle, Gene Amoroso, Neal Huff, Elena Wohl. (R, 128 mins) "We've got two stories here: a story about degenerate clergy, and a story about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry. Which story do you want us to write? Because we're writing one of them."
As much a chronicle of the Boston Globe's breaking of a cover-up of systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic church as it is a document of a dying profession, SPOTLIGHT is a film that dives deep into the nitty gritty of newspaper reporting. What's refreshing is that it does so without the sense of heroism, martyrdom, and apologia that TRUTH, another recent journalism drama, rather shamelessly wallowed. In TRUTH, 60 MINUTES II producer Mary Mapes is crucified for rushed and sloppy work on a story about George W. Bush's days in the National Guard, but the film wants to make her a saint anyway, and an uncharacteristically grating Cate Blanchett's overwrought performance has her barreling through it doing everything short of wearing a "For Your Consideration" sandwich board to get awards attention. SPOTLIGHT goes in the opposite direction, immersing the audience in the daily grind of hardworking reporters. A lot of the film has them talking on phones, jotting down notes, and fumbling for a pen when theirs runs dry. They leave messages, check sources, meet interview subjects in coffee shops, sit outside offices waiting for an appointment, dig through files and old newspapers, and thumb through dog-eared reference books and directories chasing every tip, lead, and theory they get. They go where the story takes them as each new development opens up another Pandora's Box of paperwork and legal hurdles. A smart film that makes the boring minutiae of the job riveting, SPOTLIGHT may just be a notch below the great modern-era journalism films like Alan J. Pakula's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) or, to an extent, David Fincher's ZODIAC (2007), but it's easily the best film about investigative reporting since Billy Ray's SHATTERED GLASS (2003).
After a prologue set in 1976, where a molesting priest is quietly ushered out of a police station by Boston Archdiocese officials, the story moves to the summer of 2001 with Globe's hiring of new chief editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), a man known for his bottom-line concerns during stints in New York and Miami. Baron thinks there might be a story in an alarming number of allegations against that 1976 priest, which got a brief mention in the Metro section some time back, but was never pursued with any vigor by the paper. Wanting to re-establish the Globe as the local paper of record with a focus on Boston concerns, Baron directs the Spotlight team--a four-person crew of reporters who work on months-long investigative pieces--to chronicle the paper trail of accusations against the priest. Led by editor Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton), the Spotlight team--Mike Rezendes (a jumpy Mark Ruffalo), Sasha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian D'Arcy James)--go to work, butting heads with lawyers, victims, church officials, rival papers, and concerned city big shots among others, not to mention the whole effort being jeopardized when Baron makes them put the story on the backburner for six weeks after September 11, 2001, during which time the Spotlight team is temporarily split up and assigned to other 9/11-related beats. Boston is a strongly Catholic community, and there's a concern that such talk may not rest well with the devout churchgoers. But when old Archdiocese guides show that many of the molesting priests--they eventually uncover 87 of them in Boston alone--were classified as "on sick leave" during times that coincide with the accusations, the Spotlight team correctly hypothesizes that it's a status given to priest reassigned to other parishes or sent away after an abuse incident that's settled privately and promptly buried by Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), the head of the Boston Archdiocese who's known of the plethora of incidents that have been going on for decades, with the cover-up trail leading all the way to the Vatican.
Directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy (THE STATION AGENT), who somehow made this and the career-worst Adam Sandler movie THE COBBLER in the same year, SPOTLIGHT boasts one of the year's strongest ensembles, headed by a resurgent Keaton on the heels of his triumphant BIRDMAN comeback. Keaton's been down this road before in Ron Howard's underrated THE PAPER (1994), and he's perfectly cast as the driven, quick-witted (when told by a lawyer friend that he read an article about Baron being the Globe's first Jewish editor, Robby replies "Really? Must've been a slow news day") Spotlight leader. McAdams and James are fine, but don't really stand out like Keaton or, for better or worse, Ruffalo, whose mannered performance takes some getting used to but is said to be an accurate portrayal of Rezendes. The actors also get sterling support from Billy Crudup and Jamey Sheridan as tight-lipped, big-shot attorneys behind a series of abuse case settlements, John Slattery as the Globe's managing editor Ben Bradlee, Jr. (whose father was executive editor of The Washington Post when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story), and Stanley Tucci as victims' advocate Mitchell Garabedian, an eccentric, crusading lawyer who's been representing a number of abuse victims in their cases against the Archdiocese. SPOTLIGHT is as no-nonsense as its characters, a methodical and matter-of-fact grinder that tells its story as effectively as the Spotlight team pursued theirs. It doesn't make Baron, Robinson, and the writers into glory-seeking heroes--they're just people doing their job and doing it with commitment and tireless determination. TRUTH was about glory, but SPOTLIGHT is about the guts.
Not as good as EUROPA REPORT but still far better than STRANDED, THE LAST DAYS ON MARS is, like those films, another throwback ,'80s-inspired outer space horror outing that only managed the get the slightest of theatrical releases. This one tries to be a thinking person's sci-fi film along the lines of EUROPA REPORT, MOON, and SUNSHINE, but it works best when it's content to be a straight-up B-horror movie. Indeed, MARS gets off to an extremely brisk start for these kinds of things, barely establishing most of the characters before they start getting offed one by one. Then, faced with a lot of time and too few people left to kill, things slow down to the point where it becomes a crushing bore. It almost feels like director Ruairi Robinson and screenwriter Clive Dawson have more highbrow things in mind but decided to get the commercial obligations out of the way first and finding nothing else on their plate to fill the second half of the movie. They should've slowed down and paced themselves for the long haul. And have fun with it--this should've been titled SPACE ZOMBIES or even MARS NEEDS ZOMBIES and just rolled with it.
On the last day of a six-month international mission to the red planet, crew member Marko (Goran Kostic) is investigating trace evidences of life when a crater opens up and sucks him under the Martian surface. Captain Brunel (Elias Koteas) leads some of the crew on a search, and they lose Dalby (Yusra Warsama) in the process. While Brunel and a few others are still out, a zombified Marko and Dalby turn up at the ship and try to kill the others. As the infection spreads and the dead crew members revive to attack, second-in-command Campbell (Liev Schreiber) is forced to find his inner Ripley and take control. LAST DAYS works best in the early going, and it starts so well that it just barrels through its limited number of actors and grinds to a halt right when it should be gaining momentum. It's a backwards approach that might've worked if the filmmakers had anything significant to say, but this isn't exactly hard sci-fi we're dealing with here. It's zombies in space but somehow finds a way to screw it up. With location shooting in the vast deserts of Jordan, LAST DAYS looks terrific, the interiors on the ship have an effectively claustrophobic atmosphere, and the cast (Schreiber and Koteas are good, and there's also Olivia Williams, Romola Garai, and Johnny Harris) is unusually credible for such standard genre fare. It's suspenseful and engrossing for about 50 minutes before its slow, shambling stagger to an unsatisfying conclusion. Universal put up some of the budget, but must not have seen much potential, opting to hand the US distribution rights over to Magnet, who dumped it on 13 screens for a $24,000 gross. (R, 98 mins)
COLD COMES THE NIGHT (US - 2014)
The late, great Anthony Perkins' son Osgood Perkins co-wrote this drab, tired would-be film noir that offers no suspense and no surprises other than a shockingly bad performance by the usually infallible Bryan Cranston. Using the dual crutches of fading eyesight and a garbled Russian accent, Cranston is Topo, a money mule on a delivery with his dumbass nephew/driver Quincy (Robin Lord Taylor). They stop for a few hours' sleep at a shitty motel run by widowed Chloe (Alice Eve), who lives on the property with her daughter Sophia (Ursula Parker of LOUIE). The motel primarily functions as a brothel for the local hookers and a safe haven for drug dealers, overseen by corrupt cop Billy (Logan Marshall-Green), an ex of Chloe's who gives her a cut of his proceeds (Chloe, of course, has a heart of gold and the illegal activities are just a way to make ends meet). When Quincy attacks a hooker and both are killed in the melee, his Jeep--with the money Topo was supposed to deliver--is impounded by the cops, led by (who else?) Billy, who searches the vehicle and makes off with the loot he finds inside. Desperately needing his money and helpless with his poor eyesight, Topo kidnaps Chloe and forces her to help him recover what belongs to his employers.
COLD COMES THE NIGHT just never works, whether it's the inconsistency of Topo's eyesight (he can't drive, he can't count money and can't see to write anything on a piece of paper in front of his face, but he's a point-blank crack shot and can get the edge on several people who can actually see), the cartoonish ludicrousness of Cranston's accent, which is less like a BREAKING BAD badass and more like Evil Yakov Smirnoff (at one point, he pulls a gun and orders someone to "Shut fuck up"), or the complete lack of urgency in the slumbering direction of co-writer Tze Chun, who never gives this any sense of pacing, energy, or logic. Watch the scene where Billy pulls Chloe and Topo over for a traffic stop, swearing at them over his PA speaker in the middle of town, in no way behaving like a dirty cop who knows how to keep a secret. There's ultimately no reason for Topo to be blind or Russian other than to indulge Cranston with a character who comes off more like an SNL parody than a credible, threatening villain. There's so little here that the film actually ends at around the 78-minute mark, but there's an absurdly slow-moving, 12-minute (!) closing credits crawl to pad this thing out to 90 minutes. Cranston is uncharacteristically off his game here, but Marshall-Green (PROMETHEUS) is worse, and KIDS star Leo Fitzpatrick is wasted in a nothing role as a second driver who taxis Topo around. A bland misfire, the thoroughly forgettable COLD COMES THE NIGHT opened on just 16 screens in January 2014, pulling in a paltry $17,000. (R, 90 mins)
