On Blu-ray/DVD: THE COMMAND (2019), EL CHICANO (2019) and BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK (2019)

THE COMMAND
(France/Luxembourg/Belgium - 2019)

Originally titled KURSK, the Luc Besson-produced THE COMMAND is a strangely inert dramatization of the Kursk disaster in 2000, when two explosions--one small, followed by a second large enough to register on the Richter scale--sank a nuclear-powered Russian submarine that was part of a training exercise on the Barents Sea. Of the 118 officers onboard, 23 initially survived the explosions but all perished within the next couple of days due in large part to the inexcusably slow response of a Russian government desperate to save face and avoid national humiliation. The Russian Navy even stubbornly refused offers of rescue assistance from both England and Norway, who had ships in the vicinity that could be there in a matter of hours. The Kursk disaster was a huge embarrassment for Vladimir Putin, who became president just four months earlier and was roundly criticized for his handling of the tragedy. Adapted from Robert Moore's 2002 book A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy by screenwriter Robert Rodat (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), THE COMMAND doesn't have the courage of its convictions--or the 118 men who died--in its decision to make no mention of Putin at all, instead letting faulty, outdated equipment take the blame and the fictional composite Admiral Petrenko (Max von Sydow) serve as the villain, an old guard, bureaucratic company man overruling fleet commander Admiral Grudzinsky (TONI ERDMANN's Peter Simonischek), refusing help from British Commodore Russell (Colin Firth), and holding press conferences where he's forced to shout down angry wives and order them removed from the room when they start making a scene. Despite the kid-gloves treatment of Putin, it's these scenes that are the strongest in THE COMMAND, with the mutual respect between Russell and Grudzinsky tossed aside when Grudzinsky is removed from the situation after he goes rogue and takes England and Norway up on their offers to assist with a rescue. That rescue never happens because Petrenko decides Russia's honor--and the guarding any potential military secrets the rescuers might encounter--takes precedence over human lives ("They know what they signed up for," an unknown voice is heard saying over the phone). That voice is as close as THE COMMAND gets to a Putin appearance, as all scenes involving the president, reportedly a major supporting character in Rodat's script, were tossed in the shredder before shooting even began.

The submarine sequences aren't exactly the second coming of DAS BOOT, largely because we already know the outcome. There's some rudimentary characterization in the early going with a rushed wedding sequence that evokes memories of THE DEER HUNTER while showing the relative poverty of the Russian military in the way the officers make so little money that they have to pawn their watches to pay for champagne for the reception. Once on the sub, actors like Matthias Schoenaerts and August Diehl do solid work as men displaying valor and fighting to stay alive (and Schoenaerts goes above and beyond, holding his breath in a long scene underwater), but it's the scenes above water, with Schoenaerts' pregnant wife (Lea Seydoux) being coldly stonewalled at every turn in her search for news, that have a more dramatic impact. With an abundance of dodgy greenscreen and video-gamey CGI, it's clear that director Thomas Vinterberg (who worked with Schoenaerts on 2015's FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD) has ventured as far as he can from the minimalist "Dogme '95" movement he co-founded with his much more controversial friend Lars von Trier. But he still indulges in pointless wankery like the first 20 minutes of the film being in a windowboxed 1.66 aspect ratio, then opening up to 2.35 for the next 80 minutes before returning to the windowboxing for the last act. It might make artistic sense if there was a rhyme or reason to it--like one aspect ratio for the submarine scenes and another for above water--but that's not the case. Filmed in 2017, THE COMMAND also suffers from inadvertent bad timing in its eventual straight-to-VOD US release, as the harrowing HBO miniseries CHERNOBYL did an infinitely more effective job of depicting the indifference of the Russian government to the suffering of its people in a devastating tragedy. The late Michael Nyqvist (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, JOHN WICK) succumbed to cancer during production, and while Vinterberg said the actor completed his scenes before his death and initial festival screenings mentioned him being in it, he appears to have been cut from the final release despite his name remaining at the very end of the closing credits cast crawl. (PG-13, 119 mins)



EL CHICANO
(US - 2019)

Advertised as the first Latino superhero movie, EL CHICANO attracted some attention during its brief theatrical run when producer/co-writer/internet tough guy Joe Carnahan (NARC, SMOKIN' ACES, THE GREY) read some negative reviews and promptly began attacking those critics on social media. He ended up deleting his Twitter account and eventually admitted he was "punching down" to generate publicity for the movie. A dick move that's pretty much on-brand, but it didn't help, as it opened in 11th place and topped out at 605 screens, grossing just over $1 million. In the end, EL CHICANO is hardly a barrio BLACK PANTHER, as Carnahan and director/co-writer Ben Hernandez Bray (a veteran stuntman and the second unit director on several Carnahan films) don't really do anything interesting beyond setting their story in East L.A. In a prologue set 20 years ago, twins Diego and Pedro and their friend Jose witness masked avenger El Chicano brutally murder Jose's father, crime lord Shadow (Emilio Rivera). In the present day, Diego (Raul Castillo) is a dedicated cop long-estranged from Pedro, who chose a life of crime and has just committed suicide shortly after being paroled. Diego and his hothead partner Martinez (Jose Pablo Cantillo) are told by an informer (Noel Gugliemi) that Pedro didn't kill himself, but rather, was part of a massacre orchestrated by Jose, who took over his father's East L.A. empire and now goes by Shotgun (David Castaneda). Diego discovers a trail of clues that Pedro has left for him, revealing a storage unit where Pedro kept everything he needed for his plan to resurrect the long-dormant legend of "El Chicano" and rid the area of the likes of Shotgun once and for all. Unable to nail Shadow by the book and watched over by his no-bullshit captain (George Lopez), Diego is inspired to pick up with Pedro left off and become the new El Chicano, especially when Shadow partners with Mexican cartel boss El Gallo (Sal Lopez) and his son Jaws (Roberto Fabian Garcia, aka Chicano rap star Mr. Criminal, who also performs the theme song) to tighten his stranglehold on the area.

The hard-R EL CHICANO, which also counts Carnahan bro Frank Grillo as a co-producer, gets off to a decent start, but soon becomes a rote checklist of genre cliches and imagery swiped from other comic book and graphic novel films. It leans heavily on THE PUNISHER and especially THE DARK KNIGHT by the end, which sets up a sequel that looks pretty doubtful given the tepid response from critics and audiences. Castillo does a decent Christian Bale impression in his stoical performance, but Castaneda doesn't get the space to create a complex character like he did in the JCVD thriller WE DIE YOUNG. The familiar faces in the supporting cast aren't put to good use--Rivera and Gugliemi are killed off shortly after they appear, Aimee Garcia (GEORGE LOPEZ, DEXTER) is wasted in a thankless role as Diego's wife, and Mexican telenovela star and El Chapo bestie Kate del Castillo turns up at the end to set up that unlikely sequel. (R, 108 mins)




BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK
(US - 2019)

Having cut her teeth on horror anthologies starting with a producer credit on V/H/S, writer/director Roxanne Benjamin helmed one of strongest segments of SOUTHBOUND and the weakest of XX. She splits the difference with her feature-length debut BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK, which takes a terrific premise and doesn't really do anything interesting with it. Relative newcomer Karina Fontes is well-cast as Wendy, a part-time summer guide at the fictional Brighton Rock National Park (the film was shot in Idyllwild, CA). Wendy doesn't take the job as seriously as she should--she's always late for work and is considered a lightweight "indoor kid" by her more experienced colleagues--and as the season's winding down into fall, she decides to prove to the naysayers, namely her friend Maya (Emily Althaus), that she can hack it by offering to take Maya's assignment for the day: switching out seasonal signs and postings along one of the park's rougher trails. Wendy is absent-minded and easily-distracted, so of course she misplaces her map, gets lost, and wanders off the trail. She sends a selfie to Maya from the peak of a rock formation, to which Maya replies "Who's behind you in the pic?" Wendy sees what she's talking about in a nearby ravine: a dead body. She tries to call for help but killed her phone battery taking selfies and playing '80s music (Oingo Boingo and Expose on the soundtrack) while she danced along the trails all day, and she's in a remote area where radio reception is poor. What she manages to ascertain is that it's getting dark, they don't know where she is, and she's to stand guard over what might be a crime scene until the authorities can start looking for her in the morning. Then affable but vaguely sinister hiker Red (Casey Adams) shows up.

The initial set-up of BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK seems primed for an effective survivalist B-movie where "indoor kid" Wendy grows up and sees what she's made of. While it's no fault of Fontes, who does a good job in what's effectively a solo show after the first ten minutes (the only established cast member is veteran character actor John Getz, seen briefly as a local sheriff), Wendy's hard to root for as she makes one dumb decision after another. Offended that her co-workers think she can't handle the trail--and they're absolutely right--she proceeds to do everything possible to make her predicament worse, with the low point being when she freaks out and thinks something's behind her and ends up misting herself with capsaicin bear spray. Benjamin wrings some suspense out of shadows, breezes, and other random nature sounds and uses some effective editing techniques, but once the premise is established, BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK just spins its wheels to an unsatisfying conclusion. (R, 87 mins)

In Theaters: ANNA (2019)

ANNA
(France - 2019)

Written and directed by Luc Besson. Cast: Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy, Luke Evans, Lera Abova, Eric Godon, Andrew Howard, Jean-Baptiste Puech, Sasha Petrov, Adrian Can, Jan Oliver Schroder, Eric Lampaert. (R, 119 mins)

Managing to emerge generally unscathed from sexual assault allegations by a total of nine accusers after Paris prosecutors dropped charges in February 2019 stemming from Dutch writer and comedian Sand Van Roy's claims that he repeatedly raped her, French auteur Luc Besson is back with the throwback espionage thriller ANNA. The allegations against Besson broke just after ANNA finished production, and while watching it, it's hard not to think of the disconnect between the accusations and his recurrent theme of strong, ass-kicking women going back to 1990's highly influential LA FEMME NIKITA. ANNA is largely another retread of the same story, one that seems especially played out considering recent films like ATOMIC BLONDE and RED SPARROW, both inspired to some degree by LA FEMME NIKITA and mining very similar territory in the waning days of the Cold War. The star is Russian supermodel Sasha Luss, who had a small, motion-capture supporting role in Besson's megabudget 2017 sci-fi epic VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS. Luss' Anna is cut from the same cloth as Besson's first wife Anne Parillaud's title character in LA FEMME NIKITA and the kind of cult favorite badasses that his third wife Milla Jovovich played in the RESIDENT EVIL series and other actioners after achieving stardom in his 1997 film THE FIFTH ELEMENT. Luss has a similar background and career path as Jovovich and even resembles her at times, which only adds to the feeling of familiarity and wheel-spinning with ANNA.

Opening with a prologue where nine CIA operatives are killed in Moscow in 1985 and their decapitated heads sent back home to their boss Leonard Miller (Cillian Murphy), ANNA repeatedly jumps back and forth to various points from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, Anna Poliatova (Luss) is selling Russian dolls at a Moscow marketplace when she's spotted by a French modeling agent (Jean-Baptiste Puech) and whisked away to Paris. Her star soon rises and she gets involved with wealthy Russian Oleg (Andrew Howard), who deals arms to Syria and Libya. Just as they're about to consummate their relationship, she pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head. Cut back to 1987, when an orphaned, junkie Anna was recruited by KGB agent Alex Tchenkov (Luke Evans) and put under the stern tutelage of ruthless, unsympathetic, chain-smoking spymaster Olga (Helen Mirren, looking like Fran Lebowitz's stunt double). Under the guise of an up-and-coming supermodel, Anna is given assignments of escalating importance, rubbing out whoever Olga, Tchenkov, and KGB chief Vassiliev (Eric Godon) say, until the assassination of Oleg puts her on Miller's radar.

The time jumps and the twists and turns grow increasingly absurd and it gets more difficult to keep track of what is taking place when, though Besson does put it to clever use as all the pieces--eventually, finally--start falling into place. At this point, it's hard to take any thriller seriously when it uses chess as a metaphor (cue Anna gravely intoning "Checkmate!" as she blows someone's brains out), and Besson almost seems to be glibly winking at the audience, whether it's a long modeling-and-murder montage set to INXS' "Need You Tonight" or constant anachronisms that have to be intentional, like laptops and wi-fi in Anna's shithole Moscow apartment in 1987, and flash drives and cell phones in 1990. But then he strangely tosses in an era-appropriate pager for Miller near the end of the film, which seems peculiarly antiquated considering all the advanced technology everyone's been shown using to that point. Murphy and Evans are fine as flip sides of the same coin, both in their careers and in their simultaneous hot-and-heavy relationships with Anna, while Mirren is under no illusion that this is John Le Carre material and enjoyably hams it up for an easy paycheck. The statuesque Luss handles herself well in the action scenes, particularly where she takes on an entire restaurant full of goons in pursuit of a target, but she's a terrible actress otherwise, never once convincing you that she's capable of manipulating the KGB and the CIA. In the end, ANNA is nothing you haven't seen before and Besson is more or less ripping himself off. It's utterly insignificant but it's never boring and goes down like harmless junk food from Besson's EuropaCorp action assembly line, the kind of movie you'll stop on and end up watching on a lazy weekend afternoon a year from now when it starts running on cable in perpetuity for the rest of your life.

On Blu-ray/DVD: AMERICAN RENEGADES (2018) and ASHER (2018)

AMERICAN RENEGADES
aka RENEGADES
(France/Germany/Belgium - 2017; US release 2018)

Remember the Luc Besson-produced Navy SEALs actioner RENEGADES that was supposed to hit theaters in the summer of 2016? Distributor STX kept bouncing its release date around (a local Cinemark multiplex near me had a RENEGADES poster in a Coming Soon display for most of 2016) and by late 2017, removed it from the schedule completely. While it played everywhere else in the world in 2017, it didn't open in the US until the last week of 2018, unceremoniously dumped in a handful of theaters and on VOD by the financially-strapped EuropaCorp and sporting the nostalgically jingoistic, Cannon-esque retitling AMERICAN RENEGADES. That's probably not quite what everyone involved in this $75 million production had in mind, but looking at it now, it's not difficult to see why it panned out that way. AMERICAN RENEGADES is lugubrious, dead-on-arrival dud that must rank among the dullest men-on-a-mission military actioners you'll ever see. In a prologue set in 1944 Nazi-occupied France, German officers confiscate priceless art and 2000 bars of gold and move them to a secret vault in a bank in the small Yugoslav town of Grahovo. Local partisans exact revenge on the Nazis by blowing up a dam and destroying the village. 50 years later (1994 period detail is largely limited to a fight scene set to Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper"), an elite team of Navy SEALs led by Matt Barnes (STRIKE BACK's Sullivan Stapleton) and Stanton Baker (Charlie Bewley) extract war criminal Gen. Milic (Peter Davor) from his Sarajevo stronghold and turn him over to their commander, Adm. Levin (J.K. Simmons, cast radically against type as "J.K. Simmons"). Meanwhile, Baker is romantically involved with local bar server Lara (Sylvia Hoeks), who informs him that her grandfather was one of the Yugoslav partisans who blew up the dam and that the 2000 gold bars are safely nestled in the ruins of the bank, now 150 feet down in an area lake. She offers Baker and the rest of the team a deal: the gold is currently valued at $300 million, half of which is theirs if they can use their SEAL skills to retrieve it, with her ultimate goal to give $150 million to the displaced and the suffering in war-torn Bosnia. They go along with the plan, but only have 36 hours to pull it off since Adm. Levin has decided to ship them back home, as pro-Milic insurgents have put a price on all their heads.

There have been countless "men-on-a-mission" movies going back to the 1960s. How does this KELLY'S HEROES premise not work? Well, if you're co-writers Besson and Richard Wenk (THE EXPENDABLES 2, THE EQUALIZER), you come up with tired one-liners that clang to the ground and if you're director Steven Quale (FINAL DESTINATION 5, INTO THE STORM), you handle the action scenes as lifelessly as possible, with half the movie taking place underwater where it's impossible to tell what's going on. It also doesn't help that, with the exception of Bewley because his character is involved with Hoeks' Lara, there's almost nothing to differentiate any of the square-jawed SEALs on the team. Top-billed Stapleton registers zero (remember how he was the star of the 300 prequel and had it stolen right out from under him by Eva Green?) and the climax only comes to life once they're above water and have their asses saved by a hot-dogging chopper pilot improbably played by Ewen "Spud from TRAINSPOTTING" Bremner. Simmons had just won his WHIPLASH Oscar when this began filming in the spring of 2015, and he's clearly bringing some of that demeanor to this, as his bloviating admiral provides an R. Lee Ermey-esque spark when he's chewing out the SEALs. AMERICAN RENEGADES looks like a pretty expensive, large scale action movie, but the script needed some punching up, the actions sequences need more energy, and the cast needed to be populated by more engaging actors than Sullivan Stapleton and Charlie Bewley. (PG-13, 105 mins)



ASHER
(US - 2018)

A longtime pet project for producer/star Ron Perlman, ASHER is the kind of indie that probably would've gotten some film festival accolades and ended up being a modest sleeper hit 15 years ago, but in 2018, it's inevitably relegated to the VOD scrap heap. It's really no great shakes, and fans of the '80s TV series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST already know that Perlman can play someone with a soft side, but ASHER is really just a harmless, low-key character piece that's a nice showcase for the more introspective side of a veteran actor who's spent most of his career under a ton of makeup or playing ruthless bad guys. Perlman is Asher, a disciplined, loner hit man for Brooklyn-based Jewish crime boss Avi (a kvetching Richard Dreyfuss). Spending most of his time in solitude listening to old records, cooking, and enjoying fine wine when he isn't on jobs assigned to him by his dry-cleaning handler Abram (Ned Eisenberg), Asher feels the years catching up with him, especially since Avi's only been using him sparingly and giving all the prime jobs to his younger ex-protege Uziel (Peter Facinelli). Bullet fragments remaining in his back from years earlier have affected his blood and weakened his heart, and when an out-of-order elevator forces him to walk six floors up for a hit, he's sweating profusely and so winded that chest pains cause him to collapse in the doorway of the target's neighbor, Sophie (Famke Janssen). Sensing his own mortality and wanting more to his life than killing people, Asher takes tentative steps toward romancing Sophie, a ballet teacher who's preoccupied with taking care of her dementia-stricken mother (Jacqueline Bisset). It isn't long before Asher finds both his and Sophie's lives are in danger when Avi gets word of an attempted coup by his own men, something Asher knows nothing about but is lumped in with the guilty when Avi decides to bring in a new crew to clean house and wipe out his old one.

Watching ASHER, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Ben Kingsley/Tea Leoni-starring YOU KILL ME, another generally light-hearted hit man comedy from a decade or so ago. It's all very familiar, but in the hands of a journeyman pro like Michael Caton-Jones (MEMPHIS BELLE, THIS BOY'S LIFE, ROB ROY, THE JACKAL, and uh, BASIC INSTINCT 2), ASHER is happily content to be what it is. Perlman is excellent as the tried-and-true "hitman with a heart of gold" who's so old school that he still presses his clothes and shines his shoes before heading out on a hit. He feels like a relic surrounded by increasingly younger colleagues, including loud and arrogant new guy Lyor (Guy Burnet), who's introduced mouthing off to Asher and mocking his heart problem, to which Asher replies "Is this your first job? You'll probably be the one who fucks everything up." Jay Zaretsky's script indulges in some humor that ranges from dark to quirky, whether it's Sophie, who has no idea what Asher does for a living, telling him that her mother wants to die and jokingly suggesting that he kill her, or the amusing sight of Dreyfuss' Avi dishing up steaming bowls of matzah ball soup for his goons. Other than one truly awful CGI explosion that looks like stock footage from a 25-year-old Bulgarian action movie, ASHER is an enjoyable and often sweet look at a lifelong old soul looking for something more in his twilight years. It isn't anything deep and meaningful, but the two stars are very appealing together, and it's a must-see if you're a Ron Perlman fan. (R, 104 mins)

In Theaters: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017)

VALERIAN AND THE 
CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS
(France/China/Germany/
UAE/US/Belgium - 2017)

Written and directed by Luc Besson. Cast: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delavingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Rutger Hauer, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Sam Spruell, Alain Chabot, Peter Hudson, Xavier Giannoli, Ola Rapace, Sasha Luss, Matthieu Kassovitz, Louis Leterrier, Olivier Megaton, voices of John Goodman, Elizabeth Debicki. (PG-13, 137 mins)

A long-planned pet project of legendary French auteur Luc Besson, VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS is an adaptation Valerian and Laureline, a sci-fi comic book series by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres that began way back in 1967 and ran until 2010. Filled with eye-popping artwork, the comics became a clear influence on other films, ranging from old-school animated classics like FANTASTIC PLANET and HEAVY METAL to STAR WARS and TOTAL RECALL and CGI-era films like AVATAR and JOHN CARTER. Mezieres also did some conceptual artwork during pre-production on Besson's 1997 favorite THE FIFTH ELEMENT, which now looks like a test run for VALERIAN, a $210 million, six-country co-production that currently stands as the most expensive independent film ever made. It's a film that manages to succeed entirely on being deliriously imaginative eye candy. The story on the other hand, inadvertently suffers from so many of its ideas and plot points already being utilized by films that came one to five decades before it. Among other things, there's a giant virtual reality shopping mall, some space battles straight out of STAR WARS, an alien baddie--voiced by John Goodman--who looks like Jabba the Hutt's younger brother, and a race of alien beings that not only seem to have wandered in from AVATAR outtakes but also have a FANTASTIC PLANET look about them, living on a planet that looks like a Roger Dean wet dream.

Set in the 2700s, VALERIAN deals with intrigue aboard a massive space station called Alpha, which was created in 1975 and spent the next eight centuries growing as it became a giant, peaceful utopian city floating through the galaxy, with hundreds of species from a thousand planets living and working together in harmony. That harmony is disrupted by a radioactive presence somewhere deep within the core of Alpha. Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner Sgt. Laureline (Cara Delavingne) are law enforcement agents assigned to protect Cmdr. Fillit (Clive Owen) to an Alpha summit where he plans to inform them that the radiation pocket is growing and could threaten the existence of Alpha in a matter of weeks. The summit is crashed by a group of Na'vi-looking beings who kidnap Fillit. These beings were also seen by Valerian in a dream. They're from the planet Mul, which was destroyed 30 years earlier for reasons classified to Valerian and even to Fillit's second-in-command Gen. Okto-Bar (Sam Spruell). The Defense Minister (Herbie Hancock?!) sends Valerian and Laureline on a mission to the outer reaches of the space to find and rescue Fillit, while at the same timeValerian attempts to get to the bottom of what his dreams mean and what these renegade beings from Mul are trying to tell him via the psychic connection they've established.

There's an overabundance of dazzling style, wall-to-wall visual effects, and other wild eccentricities in every frame of VALERIAN (the cute Melo the Converter, a tiny, Mul creature that can replicate any object it ingests would make a must-have toy for kids if this ended up being a hit). No expense was spared, and it's indeed one of the best-looking films of the year, making THE FIFTH ELEMENT look almost quaintly old-fashioned by comparison. But VALERIAN isn't on the level of THE FIFTH ELEMENT, and while it's never less than stunning just to watch it, the story is lacking, partially due to the familiarity of it being co-opted so much over the years, but also because Besson's characters aren't very interesting. Owen, Rihanna (as an imprisoned, shape-shifting alien princess), Ethan Hawke (as Jolly the Pimp, a loud but less flamboyant incarnation of Chris Tucker's Ruby Rhod from THE FIFTH ELEMENT), and Rutger Hauer (who has less than a minute of screen time during the opening credits as the President of the World Federation) have little to do, and the stunt casting of jazz legend Hancock--seen mostly as a hologram--is utterly pointless aside from Besson simply wanting to hang out with Herbie Hancock. At least Rihanna gets to sing and dance.

Delavingne is OK, but it's a good thing VALERIAN can get by on its visuals, because there's a massive black hole at the center of it thanks to the almost deal-breaking miscasting of DeHaan, an actor that Hollywood is hellbent on making a thing no matter how many times audiences flatly reject them (see also "Courtney, Jai"). The decision to cast him as a sarcastic, womanizing, hot-dogging Han Solo-esque space jockey is a miscalculation that stops VALERIAN cold every time he smirks and/or opens his mouth. DeHaan is trying to go for Harrison Ford's bad boy charm but can only convey "smug twerp." In the form of DeHaan, it's impossible to buy Valerian's plethora of sexual conquests--his "playlist," as Laureline calls it--or that Laureline is even the slightest bit won over by anyone with DeHaan's shit-eating grin. Try not to Picard Facepalm hen he pours his heart out with "You're the only one I want on my playlist." DeHaan can work in the right role--he's fine in THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES and A CURE FOR WELLNESS--but casting him as Valerian is a decision that comes from an alternate universe 1977 where George Lucas wanted to cast someone from AMERICAN GRAFFITI as Han Solo but sent Harrison Ford home and gave the part to Charles Martin Smith instead. Lest it sound like I'm piling on DeHaan, Besson's dumb script doesn't help, as shown in one scene where Valerian mumbles something about "I'm a soldier! I follow orders!" 30 seconds after he just cold-cocked his commanding officer. VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS is entertaining and endlessly watchable pulp sci-fi, but it's just too bad that Besson spent so much time envisioning this incredibly ambitious and expensive movie in his head and kinda blew it to an extent by making such a terrible decision for his lead actor that it ends up having a profoundly negative effect on the movie.

On DVD/Blu-ray: KILL 'EM ALL (2017) and ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE (2016)

KILL 'EM ALL 
(US - 2017)

Jean-Claude Van Damme's DTV action films have historically been a cut above most of their ilk, but he stumbles badly with the arguably career-worst KILL 'EM ALL, a dull and uninspired Biloxi, MS-shot waste of time that sees fit to shamelessly rip off THE USUAL SUSPECTS two decades after the fact. KILL 'EM ALL jumps back and forth in time over the course of one day, opening with the aftermath of a massacre at a soon-to-be-closed hospital that's abandoned except for the emergency room. Nurse Suzanne (Autumn Reeser) is being questioned by FBI agents Holman (a ludicrously miscast Peter Stormare, looking like an aging rock band's tour manager) and Sanders (Maria Conchita Alonso) about Philip (JCVD), the mysterious stranger who took on a crew of hired killers and kept her safe during the hospital siege before vanishing. The agents, especially Holman, are skeptical about Suzanne's story and seem convinced that she's withholding details. In a brief detour that borrows a lot from EASTERN PROMISES, it turns out Philip infiltrated the Serbian "Black Hand," a crime outfit that rose from the ashes of the former Yugoslavia, and led by war criminal Dmitri Petrovic (Eddie Matthews), the man who assassinated Philip's activist father in front of young Philip 35 years ago (among other implausibilities, we're asked to believe that craggy-faced, 56-year-old JCVD is playing someone who was a little kid in the 1980s). A shootout starts at a nearby hotel and ends up at the hospital, where each of Petrovic's goons, including Radovan (Daniel Bernhardt, looking like a DTV Jon Hamm), Dusan (the mandatory bone thrown to JCVD's son Kristopher Van Varenberg, who's finally cut the shit and just decided to go by "Kris Van Damme"), and Almira (Mila Kali) not only get introductory captions but also momentum-and-time-killling flashbacks showing how lethal they are. Battling a knife wound and a concussion, Philip takes on each of them in the abandoned hospital as he fights to keep himself and Suzanne alive.

JCVD has maybe the fewest lines he's ever had in a movie, and while he has several fight scenes here, he looks tired and seems like he's going through the motions. First-time director Peter Malota, a veteran stuntman and fight coordinator who's regularly worked with JCVD going back to 1991's DOUBLE IMPACT, relies on dizzying quick edits that render every brawl a tiresome blur. A lot of is certainly used to cover the understandable fact that the aging JCVD isn't as agile as he once was, but he's at least showing up for work, unlike his contemporary Steven Seagal. But KILL 'EM ALL is cheap-looking and slapdash enough that it's too close for comfort with Seagal-level quality, and it's probably not a coincidence that co-writer Jesse Cilio wrote the recent Seagal dud THE PERFECT WEAPON. By the time the final twists start coming, each one more ridiculous than the last, KILL 'EM ALL just gives up and doesn't even attempt to be subtle about how much it's ripping off THE USUAL SUSPECTS. Even a dipshit like Fenster could've made a better movie than this. (R, 95 mins)



ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE
(France/China - 2016; US release 2017)

If the gamer/wuxia fantasy ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE seems like it should've been made ten years ago, that's because it pretty much was--when it starred Jackie Chan and Jet Li and was called THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. Produced and co-written by Luc Besson, the $48 million ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE was given a huge 3-D release in China in November 2016, but was banished to VOD when it debuted in the US in May 2017, a couple of months after Zhang Yimou's expensive THE GREAT WALL underperformed in US theaters. It's not without its moments of KARATE KID-like retro charm, but at the same time, it feels awfully late to be jumping on the CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON bandwagon, making you wonder just how long Besson and regular writing partner Robert Mark Kamen (TAKEN, THE TRANSPORTER) had this one stashed away before Besson got around to assigning it to someone (in this case, COCKNEYS VS. ZOMBIES director Matthias Hoene). Jack Bronson (Uriah Shelton, most recently seen on Netflix's 13 REASONS WHY) is a bullied gamer who lives with his busy-single-mom-too-distracted-to-notice-all-the-shenanigans-going-on-in-her-house Annie (Sienna Guillory). He blows off his homework for video games and works part-time at antique shop, where his Chinese boss Mr. Chang (Francis Ng) gives him an ancient crock that turns out to be a portal to another time. He's visited through the crock by Zhao (Mark Chao), the chief guard to Princess Sulin (Ni Ni), who he leaves in the care of Jack, believing him to be the fabled "Black Knight," confusing him with his gaming avatar. Zhao has brought Sulin to the present day in order to escape Arun the Cruel (Dave Bautista), a despot who has murdered Sulin's emperor father and intends to claim her as his bride as he takes over the land. After Jack takes Sulin to the mall for some ice cream and some tired culture clash/fish-out-of-water comedy, some of Arun's men get through the time portal and end up trashing Jack's mom's house. This sends Jack and Sulin fleeing through the portal back to her time, where she's abducted by Arun, forcing Zhao and Jack, who's definitely not the Black Knight that Zhao was expecting, to set aside their differences and work together to rescue Sulin...if they don't kill each other first!

There's a nice '80s vibe to some of the early scenes, with Jack trying to avoid a bullying asshole named Travis (Dakota Daulby, really oozing that loathsome William Zabka prickitude) and a resulting reckless mountain bike chase through the streets (cue reaction shots with befuddled old people looking confused and scared). Jack even has the required overweight, obnoxious, comic relief best buddy in Hector (Luke Mac Davis as Jonah Hill as Josh Gad as Dan Fogler as Zack Pearlman), who tries to fistbump Sulin and rightly gets his ass kicked in the process. There's also some laughs to be had from a running gag involving Arun's incredibly stupid henchman Brutus (Zha Ka), but while it occasionally amuses, ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE never reaches beyond the level of merely OK. The action sequences are nothing special, and Shelton is as irritating here as Michael Angarano was in THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. There's too many easy, predictable jokes about Jack trying to get Zhao to loosen up, like when he provides human beatbox and club sound accompaniment to teach Zhao to dance (do they have time for this?), or sheltered, demanding Sulin learning contemporary slang ("You're the shit!" is her favorite).  A Robert Zemeckis or a Richard Donner probably could've made this a lot of fun 30 years ago, but it isn't retro enough to be completely funny and it isn't imaginative enough to be anything other than a run-of-the-mill knockoff of all the Zhang Yimou epics of the early-to-mid 2000s, like HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. (PG-13, 105 mins)

In Theaters: THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED (2015)

THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED
(France/China/Belgium - 2015)

Directed by Camille Delamarre. Written by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Luc Besson. Cast: Ed Skrein, Ray Stevenson, Loan Chabanol, Rasha Bukvic, Gabriella Wright, Tatiana Pajkovic, Wenxia Yu, Noemie Lenoir, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Lenn Kudrjawizki, Samir Guesmi. (PG-13, 96 mins)

Coming seven years after 2008's abysmal TRANSPORTER 3 and without Jason Statham or TRANSPORTER: THE SERIES star Chris Vance, THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED seems like the kind of desperation reboot that should've held its world premiere at the Redbox in the vestibule of your nearest Walmart. It's as dumb as you might expect, but it's also surprisingly entertaining if you just sit back and roll with it, plus it's got a great set piece at an airport that's probably--even with some significant digital assistance--the most gonzo action sequence this side of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. Replacing Statham is future trivia question response Ed Skrein, a part-time British rapper and one-time Daario Naharis on the third season of HBO's GAME OF THRONES (he was replaced in the fourth and on by Michiel Huisman). Skrein doesn't have the imposing screen presence or the bullish persona of Statham, but he grows on you as the movie goes on. Like Statham's interpretation of Transporter Frank Martin, Skrein's younger version prefers to work alone, but finds himself part of a ragtag team here, almost like Luc Besson and co-writers Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS) are taking a page from the FAST & FURIOUS playbook, minus someone grunting "family" in every other line.

After the usual parking garage introduction where Martin is shown taking care of a gang of dipshits trying to steal his car, the Transporter is on to his latest no-questions-asked job: driving a mystery woman named Anna (Loan Chabanol). Anna says she has two packages, which turn out to be two additional passengers, Maria (Tatiana Pajkovic) and Qiao (Wenxia Yu). A fourth woman, Gina (Gabriella Wright) is at their destination, having tazed Frank Martin Sr. (Ray Stevenson), the Transporter's just-retired spy dad, holding him hostage to ensure Frank Jr's cooperation. Anna and the others are setting in motion an elaborate plan to drain the assets of numerous Monaco-based Russian crime lords and blame it on their pimp Arkady Kasanov (Rasha Bukvic), a human trafficker specializing in kidnapping teenage girls and forcing them into a lifetime of selling their bodies on the French Riviera. Double-crosses predictably ensue, but the Transporter and his dad come to sympathize with the long-abused women, and of course, it's personal between Frank Jr and Kasanov, who knew one another during their days as Special Forces mercenaries.

Other than being younger and lankier, Skrein mostly sticks to the Statham template, and there's a lot of good back-and-forth between Skrein and Stevenson, and the two actors work well enough together that Frank Sr would be a most welcome addition should there be future TRANSPORTERs. Though he takes part in a lot of the action, I doubt Stevenson's portrayal of Frank Sr. is meant to be an older version of the Statham character. There's enough here to suggest that it's both a reboot and a sequel, though the Transporter's detective pal Tarconi, played by Francois Berleand in the first three movies and on the TV series, is absent. The plot is busy enough that Frank Sr manages to find himself kidnapped twice and there's a very likable rapport between the Martins and the women, with the appealing Chabanol nicely channeling a young Monica Bellucci throughout. Director and Besson protege Camille Delamarre (BRICK MANSIONS) handles action sequences with much more clarity than TRANSPORTER 3's Olivier Megaton, a director who has yet to live up to his awesome name. There's still a lot of zooming and quick-cuts, but Delamarre keeps thing coherent, whether it's the car chases or a bank vault brawl, where the Transporter engages in what Joe Bob Briggs might term "safe deposit box-fu," or most notably, the bonkers airport sequence, which is almost worth the price of admission. It's not enough for the Transporter to drive his car 200 mph on a runway to get under an accelerating jet to catch his dad through the sunroof as he drops out of the cargo hold exit under the plane--no, then he has to speed back down the runway and up a ramp, going airborne into a jetway, then making a getaway by driving through the concourse like the Blues Brothers in a mall, crashing out through the airport's main entrance and blending in with the traffic undetected. Yeah, THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED is that kind of movie and is fully self-aware. It's not on the same level as the franchise's standard-bearer, the Louis Leterrier-directed 2005 masterpiece TRANSPORTER 2 (Transporter, ambushing bad guy on a plane: "This flight's been cancelled." Bad guy: "Wrong. You've been cancelled!"), but it's a good sign that there's an unexpected reserve of fuel left in the tank.

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE HOMESMAN (2014); V/H/S: VIRAL (2014); and BAD TURN WORSE (2014)

THE HOMESMAN
(France/US - 2014)

In the small frontier town of Loup in the Nebraska Territory in the 1850s, three women have gone insane: Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter) suffers a breakdown after being unable to conceive a child and watching her husband (David Dencik) throw her just-deceased mother's corpse out in a heavy snowstorm before it starts stinking; Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto), a mother of three, tosses her newborn baby into an outhouse pit; and 19-year-old Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) loses her three children over three days to diphtheria. Rev. Dowd (John Lithgow) has decided to send them away to receive special care and treatment at a hospital in Iowa run by Altha Carter (Meryl Streep), the wife of a prominent Methodist minister. The trip is at least five weeks away and the women's husbands (there's also William Fichtner as Theoline's, and Jesse Plemons as Arabella's) are either unable or unwilling to make the journey, so Loup spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) volunteers. Cuddy moved to the area from New York, owns a large piece of land, and contributes to the welfare of Loup but is still gossiped about as she's been unable to land a husband. Now resorting to proposing marriage to men strictly as a business deal, the lonely Cuddy is repeatedly turned down for being "too bossy and too plain-looking." Looking for purpose in a life that's left her "uncommonly alone," Cuddy agrees to transport the three women across the Missouri River into Iowa, and finds an unwilling partner in a man calling himself George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones). A scheming claim jumper, Briggs made some enemies and Cuddy finds him strung up in a noose and left for dead, kept alive only by sheer luck as he's managed to keep the horse holding him there from bolting. Cuddy cuts him down and offers him $300 and a jug of whiskey to help with the journey and provide protection from various threats and obstacles that may arise.

Based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout, THE HOMESMAN was directed and co-written by Jones, and it turns into an interesting companion piece with his 2005 feature directing debut THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (also, like THE HOMESMAN, co-produced by unlikely Jones pal Luc Besson). Both films--and tangentially, Jones' 2011 HBO film THE SUNSET LIMITED--share the common themes of death, honor, and redemption, but THE HOMESMAN is another beast altogether. Stunningly shot by Rodrigo Prieto, it finds Jones in auteur mode, with nearly every shot intricately staged and precisely framed as exquisite works of art. There's a Clint Eastwood aesthetic in his depiction of the west that recalls UNFORGIVEN (1992), and Jones not only takes time to build the characters but also, like Kelly Reichardt's minimalist MEEK'S CUTOFF (2011), is a stickler for harsh realism. THE HOMESMAN dives into the arduous obstacles and unpleasant realities of frontier life, the very realities--disease, isolation, environment--that turns three women into "cuckoo clocks" and the five-week journey into a months-long ordeal. This is an offbeat and thoroughly unique western, anchored by two terrific performances from Jones and Swank, and it's a film that would seem to have been a natural hit with audiences until you actually see it. Between this and THREE BURIALS, Jones has proven himself to be a gifted storyteller and a challenging filmmaker unconcerned with commercial appeal, and a lot of THE HOMESMAN is just too weird to play on 3000 screens and be the next OPEN RANGE or APPALOOSA sleeper hit (it's probably the best western since John Hillcoat's brutal 2006 western THE PROPOSITION). Lionsgate didn't seem to have any idea what to do with this, releasing it under its arthouse Roadside Attractions banner and only rolling it out on 220 screens. From the situations that arise--namely a whopper of an unexpected plot turn that completely shifts gears about 2/3 of the way in, and Briggs' ultimately surreal and nightmarish run-in with an erudite and dismissive hotelier (James Spader)--and the sly way Marco Beltrami's score vacillates between the grand, sweeping accompaniment you'd expect to hear in a John Ford western to the eerie and unsettlingly discordant piano and percussion sounds during the darker moments, THE HOMESMAN is a western that consistently defies genre expectations while utilizing standard tropes like Briggs' eventual redemption still not altering his status as an outsider--think of the way John Wayne's Ethan Edwards stands outside that door at the end of THE SEARCHERS, an unsympathetic and violent man who finds salvation in bringing his family back together but still remains distanced from that family, always and forever an outcast no matter how heroic he may be. Jones' George Briggs remains an enigma--it's clearly not his real name and we never learn about his obvious outlaw past, but he does what he's been paid to do and the journey, with all its ugly brutality and outright horror, is his redemption. Therein lies Jones' niche in the western genre: he's a John Ford purist at heart in a nihilistic Sam Peckinpah world. Also with Barry Corbin, Tim Blake Nelson, and Hailee Steinfeld (TRUE GRIT), THE HOMESMAN is bold and uncompromising, quirky and unpredictable, and one of the great undiscovered films of 2014. (R, 123 mins)


V/H/S: VIRAL
(US - 2014)

The third entry in the horror anthology franchise is not only the worst, but it also might be the worst portmanteau since that pair of slapped-together GEORGE A. ROMERO PRESENTS DEADTIME STORIES releases from a few years ago. Making its predecessors look like DEAD OF NIGHT and CREEPSHOW by comparison, V/H/S: VIRAL is a sloppy, incoherent, unwatchable disaster, with a wraparound story that has nothing to do with the events we see in the stories that unfold. DEADGIRL director Marcel Sarmiento handled the wraparound, "Vicious Circles," which deals with a would-be viral video dickbag who's fighting with his girlfriend but splits to follow a car chase on TV that speeds by his house. "Dante the Great," directed by Gregg Bishop (DANCE OF THE DEAD), is about an egomaniacal, murderous magician (Justin Welborn), whose magic is powered by his haunted cloak, and is notable for the land-speed record it sets in ditching its faux-doc concept to go for straight narrative. TIMECRIMES director Nacho Vigalondo helms "Parallel Monsters," where a guy (Gustavo Salmerin) encounters his doppelganger, at which time they agree to swap universes for 15 minutes but it's hardly a harmless visit. Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead direct "Bonestorm," where a bunch of skaters head to Tijuana and run afoul of a south-of-the-border death cult, with the entire segment shot almost exclusively with helmet-cams with occasional switches to first-person shooter POV shots. A fifth segment, "Gorgeous Vortex," was cut from the film just before release, with the explanation being that it slowed down the pace and changed the tone of the project, but it's included on the DVD and Blu-ray as a bonus segment at the conclusion of the actual film. Directed by Todd Lincoln (the completely forgettable THE APPARITION), it's an impenetrable, bizarre, dialogue-free fever dream that's completely pretentious bullshit that doesn't get a pass simply because it seems to be a little more high-minded than the idiocy that made the final cut. A photo-finish with RAZE as 2014's worst film and the absolute nadir of the hipster horror movement, which is pretty much that last thing I have to say about V/H/S: VIRAL. You win, fanboys. I'm out. (R, 81 mins)

BAD TURN WORSE
(US - 2014)

An intermittently interesting Texas noir, BAD TURN WORSE has moments where it looks like it'll be another twisty BLUE RUIN, but it doesn't know when to shut up and can't avoid belaboring its points. For example, when you've got a main character handing a copy of Jim Thompson's South of Heaven to another character and telling them "You've gotta read this!" at the five-minute mark, you might be trying a little too hard. A thriller with teenage protagonists that too often feels like it was written by teenagers--which is a shame because who doesn't want to love a bleak, cynical noir written by someone named Dutch Southern?--BAD TURN WORSE works in a love triangle, a haphazardly-planned heist, money-laundering, and $20,000 belonging to a Corpus Christi gangster but still ends up with the inevitable showdown at an abandoned cotton gin where the chief villain spends an inordinate amount of time dropping snide bon mots on the hapless protagonists as he spells out his master plan instead of just dealing with the issue at hand. In a small and mostly dead Texas town, Bobby (Jeremy Allen White) and his bookworm friend Sue (Mackenzie Davis)--she's the Jim Thompson superfan--can't wait to go to college, much to the disappointment of Sue's boyfriend BJ (Logan Huffman), who's bummed about losing his friends and acting out in the worst way possible. Like, stealing $20K from the safe of small-time criminal Giff (Mark Pellegrino), who runs a cotton gin owned by ruthless, big-city crime lord Big Red (William Devane). BJ blows the whole $20K on going to the city for the weekend and making it rain, showing Bobby and Sue a good time before they leave. But when they return on Monday, Giff wants to know who took the money, and to protect BJ, Bobby takes the blame. Giff wants his money back and forces the trio to steal another $20,000 from a money-laundering drop used by Big Red's guys. Needless to say, there's one double-cross after another, especially once BJ discovers that Bobby and Sue have been carrying on a clandestine fling behind his back.

Writer Southern and sibling directors Zeke & Simon Hawkins do a commendable job of establishing the downbeat atmosphere of this hellhole of a town (the film played the festival circuit a year before its eventual release, under its original title, WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE). It's the kind of place where all the businesses are boarded up, everyone works at Giff's cotton gin, and there's little business opportunities except very small-time crime (one suspects the copper wire business is booming). Even the sheriff (Jon Gries) is on Giff's payroll. Sue and Bobby are often chided by the townies for "goin' off to college," and even Bobby's mom dismisses his newfound educational aspirations with "You're not a college kid...you're a cotton kid," almost like she knows he's only going so he can be close to Sue (that's also why BJ thinks he's going). Sue is obviously too smart for BJ (and Bobby, for that matter), but unlike BJ, she never intended them to be forever. It's a depressing, dead-end town where dreams died at least a generation back, and it's the perfect setting for such a story. It's good for about 2/3 of the way, but in the final act, everything collapses as the filmmakers resort to piling on the double-crosses and have Pellegrino's Giff stop just short of donning a monocle and twirling a mustache to show how nefarious he is. Pellegrino has some great moments where he gets to spit out some memorable dialogue ("You sure like to gamble for someone with such a shit pokerface," he tells Bobby, and when he gives Bobby an ultimatum after threatening to have his goons rape Sue, he promises "I'm gonna do more to your sweet pea than hollow out her heinie-hole") but Southern has the character behave too inconsistently, careening wildly from criminal mastermind to none-too-bright doofus depending on what the story needs him to be in any given scene. Devane makes an impression with his too-brief screen time, showing up to deal with Giff and lay down the law in a bathrobe and slippers. BAD TURN WORSE is OK, but it could've easily been something a little more if the filmmakers didn't feel the need to oversell, overplot, and overexplain, like they didn't trust their audience to process the ambiguities or connect the dots. Certainly, any fan of Thompson's brand of hard-boiled pulp fiction could've made the homage-to-Thompson connection without having it stated by the characters time and again throughout. Well-intentioned and occasionally quite good, BAD TURN WORSE is more like Target Just Missed. (Unrated, 92 mins)

In Theaters: TAKEN 3 (2015)

TAKEN 3
(France/US - 2015)

Directed by Olivier Megaton. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Cast: Liam Neeson, Forest Whitaker, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, David Warshofsky, Don Harvey, Dylan Bruno, Sam Spruell, Andrew Howard, Jonny Weston, Al Sapienza, Wallace Langham, Steve Coulter. (PG-13, 109 mins)

With no one else in his family left to be abducted by evil Albanian human traffickers and their vengeful relatives, retired CIA special ops badass Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) channels his inner Richard Kimble when he returns to his apartment, picks up a knife on the floor and finds the dead body of his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) just as the cops barge in and he looks guilty as hell. A fleeing Mills takes advantage of his extensive knowledge of the layout of every home in the neighborhood, eventually evading his pursuers via a secret door in someone's garage that leads to the L.A. River. Mills goes on a city-wide rampage to prove his innocence--causing millions of dollars of damage in the process--while being doggedly pursued by Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard--er, I mean, Detective Frank Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), who demonstrates his eccentricity and intelligence by constantly twirling a knight chess piece between his fingers and marveling at the wily Mills' ability to evade capture.

NEESON!

TAKEN 3 is the least and hopefully last of this Luc Besson action franchise. Neeson stumbled into a second career as an aging action hero with the surprise success of the first TAKEN back in 2009. That film seems like gritty neo-realism when held up against the events that unfold in TAKEN 3, in which everyone involved is simply going through the motions, starting with Neeson. The actor's seemingly effortless gravitas just fizzles here, and for the first time in his action-star phase, Neeson looks bored and completely checked out. One can't blame him, considering the idiocy of Besson's and Robert Mark Kamen's script and the abysmal direction of Besson protege and returning TAKEN 2 helmer Olivier Megaton, who previously steered another solid action series to its nadir with 2008's TRANSPORTER 3.  It's bad enough that the story is essentially a ripoff of THE FUGITIVE (with one of the guilty parties missing a pinky instead of an arm), but TAKEN 3 is dumb even by Besson standards. There's one sequence where Mills' daughter Kim (31-year-old Maggie Grace, still apparently playing 20 or 21), who jokes about inheriting her father's "OCD gene," is on her way to school and makes her morning stop at a carryout for a peach yogurt drink (always grabbing the fourth drink from the front) only this time, there's a note from her on-the-run dad on the fourth container back saying "Drink this now." It's been drugged with something to make her sick a bit later, but he did so in order to get her to leave her class and head to the restroom to vomit, where he's waiting with an antidote, so he can talk to her. Is there some reason he couldn't just put a note on the container telling her to meet him in the ladies' room near her class?  Why spike the yogurt smoothie and deliberately cause gastrointestinal distress?  What if she didn't make it to the restroom?  It just seems like more work than necessary. I'd say Mills was overthinking it, but there's absolutely no way that "overthinking" and "TAKEN 3" should be mentioned in the same sentence.

NEESON!

The plot is as standard-issue and by-the-numbers as it gets and a better script would've provided some more back-and-forth phone banter, mind games, and grudging respect between Neeson's Mills and Whitaker's Dotzler. Both actors are capable of more than TAKEN 3 allows them to do or cares for them to attempt. Of course Mills is being framed. Of course some stock Russian mobsters--led by ruthless ex-Spetsnaz killing machine Oleg Malankov (Sam Spruell)--are behind it all. And of course it has something to do with Malankov seeking revenge for some shady and collapsed business deal with Lenore's asshole husband Stewart, now played by Janssen's HEMLOCK GROVE co-star Dougray Scott (replacing Xander Berkeley), bland and lifeless here and looking like he still hasn't recovered from losing the role of Wolverine in 2000's X-MEN to second-choice Hugh Jackman after being stuck working on reshoots for the behind-schedule MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II. As dumb and uninspired as TAKEN 3 is (don't miss Mills driving a car down an elevator shaft), it's really Megaton's directing style that's the biggest deal-breaker. There is no scene that Megaton can't chop into nanosecond increments that would give Michael Bay a bout of vertigo. Action sequences are just a blurry smear of colors and quick cuts. Featuring three nausea-inducing car chases that make GETAWAY look like THE SEVEN-UPS, TAKEN 3's action is lost in a headachy haze of CGI vehicle flips and shaky-cam incoherence, much of which seems to be orchestrated around Neeson's stunt double. There are a few shots where you can tell Neeson is involved (the brawl in the carryout, for example), but most of the time, there's some alarmingly Seagal-esque chicanery going on where you see Mills fighting but not his face, as Megaton cuts to a close-up of a grimacing Neeson before cutting back to Mills fighting, as "Neeson" is either shot from behind or his head is out of the frame. On one hand, sure, at 62, Neeson's not a young man anymore, but in his other action movies, he's made a point of doing as much as he could. One can hardly blame him for not caring enough about the quality of TAKEN 3 or rightfully concluding that it wasn't worth risking injury on something so subpar. TAKEN was a surprise, lightning-in-a-bottle blockbuster that became a modern action classic. TAKEN 2 was an unnecessary but stupidly enjoyable victory lap. TAKEN 3 shows the franchise in a downward spiral worthy of the last two DIE HARD movies and is just no fun for anyone, from the actors to the audience. Liam Neeson is the man, and in films like THE GREY and A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, he brings a "thinking man's asskicker" complexity to his roles, and in something like NON-STOP, he manages to overcome the obstacles and still deliver a strong, convincing performance. But even Neeson can't conceal his TAKEN burnout with his half-hearted clock-punch of a performance here. Perhaps it's time for him to use the very particular set of skills that he's acquired over a long career and move on to something new.

In Theaters: LUCY (2014)

LUCY
(France - 2014)

Written and directed by Luc Besson. Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-Sik, Amr Waked, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Pilou Asbaek, Analeigh Tipton. (R, 89 mins)

Where most auteurs start with genre efforts to get their feet wet and mature into serious filmmaking, Luc Besson's career has largely been the exact opposite. Early films like LE DERNIER COMBAT (1983) and THE BIG BLUE (1988) exhibited art-house aspirations that culiminated in his 1990 classic LA FEMME NIKITA, which perfectly combined his artistic and commercial sensibilities.  You could say the same for 1994's THE PROFESSIONAL, aka LEON, initially dismissed by most critics but now considered one of the best films of its decade.  1997's THE FIFTH ELEMENT has amassed a large cult following, though 1999's THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC was badly received and prompted Besson to take a lengthy sabbatical from directing. These days, Besson is best known for his EuropaCorp action assembly line that gave us Jason Statham's TRANSPORTER and Liam Neeson's TAKEN franchises, films directed by Besson proteges yet exhibiting all the signature stylings of their boss. After last year's disappointing gangster comedy THE FAMILY, Besson is making a quick return to American multiplexes with LUCY, which has enough scientific theorizing in it to make it seem like Besson's most ambitious film yet. Instead, it's his dumbest.

Equal parts Besson action movie and "Luc Besson's COSMOS" if the confused director was mistakenly getting scientific and philosophical consultation from Mike Tyson rather than Neil DeGrasse Tyson, LUCY is an absurd sci-fi outing that has occasional flashes of fun but just gets arduously tiresome the longer it goes on. Scarlett Johansson is Lucy, an American college student in Taipei who's forced by her dirtbag boyfriend (Pilou Asbaek) to deliver a briefcase with unknown contents to psychotic Korean gangster Mr. Jang (Choi Min-Sik, the original OLDBOY). Inside the briefcase are bags of a synthetic drug called CPH4, and Jang's men sew it into her stomach, forcing her to work as a mule. Before she can get to the airport, an altercation with some of Jang's goons causes the bag to break and the drug to leak into her bloodstream, giving Lucy an increasingly heightened sense of awareness. She soon has the ability to control everything around her, starting with people and moving on to electronic signals and matter itself. Making her way to Paris and teaming up with cop Del Rio (Amr Waked), Lucy tries to make contact with renowned scientist Prof. Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), one of the world's leading experts on brain function, with Jang and his underlings in hot pursuit.

"I'm in, Luc.  No, don't send the script.
Not gonna read it anyway. Here's the account number."

It's Norman's assertion--and Besson's as well, I suppose--that human beings use only 10% of their brain capacity. As the CPH4 is absorbed by Lucy's body and completely overhauls her chemical structure, her brain rapidly begins increasing in power.  At 20%, she can control electronic signals and communicate with Norman through the TV in his hotel room. At 30%, she can diagnose undetected health issues just by touching someone. By the time she reaches 50-60%, she's able to control the thoughts and actions of those around her, manipulating matter and even time itself. As Del Rio and the French cops battle Jang's army in a huge shootout, Lucy goes on her own version of the Stargate sequence in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, transforming into a black, sinewy human computer as she travels back through the dawn of time, starting with Native Americans and going back to cavemen, dinosaurs, and eventually, the Big Bang.

Its in the last third that Besson totally goes off his rocker and LUCY becomes a self-indulgent action version of THE TREE OF LIFE. But honestly, LUCY just never works. Besson fails to get any momentum going early on by running two parallel stories--Lucy being cornered and trapped in her situation with Jang is frequently intercut with a heavy-handed display of stock nature footage and Norman lecturing to a large auditorium of students and fellow scientists at a Paris conference. The science is mostly made up by Besson, but the real problem is that the cutting to Norman grinds the film to a halt in a way that recalls Steven Seagal's mumbling environmental speech at the end of ON DEADLY GROUND, only spread apart to constantly interrupt any suspense or action that might be developing. A barely-awake Freeman, in his second terrible sci-fi movie in the last three months (anyone remember TRANSCENDENCE?), has obviously stopped giving a shit and will apparently read whatever is handed to him. It's nice to see Choi doing some vintage OLDBOY screaming, but he has little else to do. LUCY might make an interesting companion piece to Johansson's recent UNDER THE SKIN as both films require her to rely on an otherworldly stare and an innate seductiveness (and both films have her utilizing a mysterious, undetermined black matter), but LUCY goes in an opposite direction as her character becomes more unemotional and alien as the story proceeds. And the comparisons end there. There's some amusing moments as Lucy experiments with her newfound powers, but such bits are few and far between, and even a big action sequence like a car chase is ruined by crummy, carelessly-executed CGI and gratuitous shaky-cam. Besson tries to make some grand, life-affirming points about humans living to their potential, which he probably intended as something profound and powerful, but instead comes across as an utterly tone-deaf lack of self-awareness.

In Theaters: BRICK MANSIONS (2014)

BRICK MANSIONS
(France/Canada - 2014)

Directed by Camille Delamarre.  Written by Luc Besson. Cast: Paul Walker, David Belle, RZA, Gouchy Boy, Catalina Denis, Ayisha Issa, Carlo Rota, Bruce Ramsay, Andreas Apergis, Frank Fontaine, Richard Zeman, Robert Maillet, Ron Lea, Mark Camacho. (PG-13, 90 mins)

The 2004 French-language Luc Besson production BANLIEUE 13 became a blockbuster hit in Europe before its 2006 US release as DISTRICT B13 (which led to the 2009 sequel DISTRICT B13: ULTIMATUM) and succeeded in both the mainstreaming of parkour and putting Besson protege and future TAKEN director Pierre Morel on the map.  Given the ubiquitousness of parkour over the subsequent years--including a memorable action sequence in 2006's 007 reboot CASINO ROYALE--it seems odd that Besson would not only fashion a belated, demanded-by-no-one English-language remake now but also that he would utilize one of BANLIEUE's stars, French parkour master David Belle, in the same role he played a decade ago. Again scripted by Besson (with regular collaborator Robert Mark Kamen credited as "artistic consultant") and directed by another in the seemingly endless line of Besson disciples--in this case, his frequent editor Camille Delamarre, making his feature directing debut--BRICK MANSIONS moves the action from the slums of Paris to a walled-off housing project in the near-future war zone of Detroit in 2018.

Brick Mansions is controlled by Tremaine (RZA), a ruthless drug lord and red pepper culinary enthusiast who's enraged over a drug shipment jacked and destroyed by Lino (Belle), a do-gooder who's lived in Brick Mansions his whole life and is sick of Tremaine and his goons running things.  Brick Mansions is under constant guard by police and military personnel, all of whom are on Tremaine's payroll, which Lino finds out the hard way when he brings Tremaine to them only to be tossed in prison himself for killing a cop in the ensuing melee.  Enter undercover Detroit narcotics detective Damien Collier (the late Paul Walker), who just nabbed high-ranking gangster George the Greek (Carlo Rota, the Canadian Stanley Tucci, playing yet another variation on his Yakavetta character from THE BOONDOCK SAINTS), and has had his eyes on Tremaine for a while:  Collier's dad was a legendary Detroit cop killed by Tremaine during a botched raid on Brick Mansions years earlier.  The mayor (Bruce Ramsay) and the top Detroit brass send Collier into Brick Mansions in classic Snake Plissken-style when Tremaine gains possession of a neutron bomb that's set to go off in ten hours.  Posing as a prisoner, Collier finds himself in a transport with Lino, who's determined to rescue his ex (Catalina Denis), who's being held captive by Tremaine, who's also demanding $30 million in his Hawaiian bank account (?) to not launch the neutron bomb right at downtown Detroit.  Amidst bickering and constant disagreement, Collier and Lino team up to take out Tremaine and his Brick Mansions army and stop the bomb from going off...

...if they don't kill each other first!

As far as empty calories entertainment goes, you could do a lot worse than BRICK MANSIONS. It moves fast and there's some entertaining action sequences when Delamarre can keep the camera somewhat still.  Yes, most of the action is of the dizzying, quick-cut shaky-cam variety, with bonus pointless stutter zooms (even with all of Belle's by-now familiar parkour antics, the highlight is Collier's extended pursuit of George the Greek). Cliches and silliness abound:  every shitbag in Detroit is a parkour expert, George the Greek acts like he's the first crime boss to use a shark tank as a ham-fisted metaphor, and it's a wonder Tremaine has any empire at all with incompetent flunkies like the hapless K2 (Gouchy Boy) and psycho-bitch Rayzah (Ayisha Issa) in his employ. Besson does take things in an unexpected--and dumber--direction than BANLIEUE in his handling of Tremaine, who faced a much different fate in the original film (that film's co-writer Bibi Naceri played the same character, then called Taha Bemamud).  Here, RZA plays Tremaine as someone equally cold-blooded as Taha, but Tremaine's eleventh-hour transformation into not just a good guy (which is what happened to K2 in the original film), but a noble hero who doesn't have to pay for his crimes reeks of fast and furious post-production revision, as if Besson wanted him along for the ride in case there's a sequel. Another decision clearly made after the fact is the distracting dubbing of many of the French and Quebecois supporting players (only some second-unit establishing shots were done in Detroit; the rest of the film was shot in Montreal).  The dubbing is most obvious with Belle, whose thick accent has been completely revoiced, making the constant references to his nationality--like calling him "Frenchy" or "French asshole"--meaningless. There's an unsubstantiated rumor making the rounds that it's Vin Diesel dubbing Belle, but as of this writing, nothing's been confirmed.

Paul Walker (1973-2013)

In his last completed role before his tragic death in a car crash in November 2013 (CGI and his two brothers serving as doubles will be used to finish his performance in FAST & FURIOUS 7, due out in April 2015), Walker is game for the intense action and his fans will certainly want to check this out.  While it's not really a stretch for him, BRICK MANSIONS provides a better showcase for the actor than recent junk like VEHICLE 19 and the unwatchable PAWN SHOP CHRONICLES. Much like the planned English-language remake of Gareth Evans' Indonesian THE RAID, a film with which BRICK MANSIONS shares some "high-rise mayhem" similarities, there's little reason to rework a foreign-language film that's not only better but was already embraced by action enthusiasts and didn't feel the need to dub over a French lead actor's performance as a French guy to ensure that he didn't sound French, a decision that fully summarizes the inherent pointlessness of BRICK MANSIONS.