AFTERMATH (US/UK - 2017) Directed by Elliott Lester. Written by Javier Gullon. Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Scoot McNairy, Maggie Grace, Martin Donovan, Judah Nelson, Kevin Zegers, Larry Sullivan, Glenn Morshower, Hannah Ware, Jason McCune, Mo McRae, Mariana Klaveno, Christopher Darga, Lewis James Pullman. (R, 93 mins) Though he's now in the William Shatner self-deprecation phase of his career, Jean-Claude Van Damme very quietly established himself as a capable actor in a series of above-average and under-the-radar straight-to-DVD action movies throughout the '00s. In a similarly stealth fashion, in addition to action fare like the EXPENDABLES movies, THE LAST STAND, and ESCAPE PLAN, a post-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has made attempts to turn into a serious dramatic actor in a pair of low-profile departures when no one was looking. First was 2015's MAGGIE, a straight-faced zombie apocalypse saga where Arnold played a loving father determined to hold on to the shred of humanity in his teenage daughter after she's turned into one of the walking dead. And now, the grim drama AFTERMATH gives the nearly-70-year-old former action hero a chance to further stretch outside his comfort zone. Written by Javier Gullon (ENEMY) and counting Darren Aronofsky (BLACK SWAN) among its 27 credited producers, AFTERMATH is inspired by the story of Vitaly Kaloyev, a Russian man whose wife and two children were killed when two planes collided over Germany in the summer of 2002. He blamed supervising air traffic controller Peter Nielsen, who retired from his job and moved away but two years later, Kaloyev, still consumed by grief and rage, tracked him down to a small town in Switzerland, showed up at his front door, and stabbed him to death in front of his family.
AFTERMATH relocates the story to Cincinnati, OH (after all, this is also a Grindstone Entertainment and Emmett/Furla production), where Russian-born Roman Melnyk (Schwarzenegger) is a naturalized American citizen who has settled into a honest, hard-working, blue collar life as a construction site manager. Upon arriving at the airport to pick up his wife and pregnant adult daughter, who are returning home from an extended visit to see family in their native Kiev, Roman is ushered into an office where an airport staffer informs him that the plane carrying his wife and daughter crashed. Director Elliott Lester (the Jason Statham actioner BLITZ) cuts from Roman to Jacob Bonanos (Scoot McNairy), the air traffic controller on the graveyard shift who's left alone in the control tower when the required second controller decides to take a break, leaving Jacob to deal with a malfunctioning phone that requires him to remove his headset, causing him to notice too late that two passenger jets are headed toward one another (Lester very effectively depicts the crash not with special effects and destruction, but by both planes simply vanishing from Jacob's screen). Jacob is ushered into a conference room where he explains what happened and is assured that no one is blaming him, but he's so overcome by guilt in the days and weeks after that his wife Christina (Maggie Grace) decides it's best for her and their young son Samuel (Judah Nelson) to be away from him for a while, especially when vandals spray-paint "Killer" and "Murderer" over the front of their house. Meanwhile, Roman is finding it difficult to accept what's happened, especially when no one offers an apology and he's only met with smirking derision by the airline's slick, arrogant lawyer (Kevin Zegers), who repeatedly talks over him and tosses a $160,000 settlement contract across a table to him, refusing to even look at a photo of Roman's wife and daughter. Put on administrative leave and with his personal life falling to pieces, Jacob loses the support of his company-man boss (a perfectly-cast Martin Donovan), who encourages him to take a severance package, change his name, relocate to another city and start his life over. A year goes by, during which time Jacob has moved away and changed his name, while Roman is contacted by an ethically-challenged reporter (Hannah Ware) who's written a book about the fatal mid-air collision and alerts him to Jacob's whereabouts.
AFTERMATH sometimes feels like it's stacking the deck, with Zegers' attorney being such an unconscionable prick that you'll wish old-school Schwarzenegger would pummel the shit out of him. And it puts both Roman and Jacob through the usual tropes of grief, with Roman getting drunk and standing atop an under-construction building and contemplating jumping, while Jacob downs some pills before gathering his senses, purging them about 30 seconds later. One scene that seems almost too ludicrous and thoroughly unbelievable actually happened: when Roman manages to sneak into the crash site as a volunteer, he happens to see his daughter's pearl necklace on a branch and nearby, finds her body dangling high up in a tree that broke her fall from the sky. That actually happened when Kaloyev infiltrated a team of volunteers at the German crash site. Lionsgate isn't doing much with AFTERMATH, banishing it to VOD and a small handful of theaters. The trailer sells it as a sort-of formulaic Schwarzenegger revenge thriller, but it's a somber and low-key meditation on grief felt by two men who have lost everything in an incredible tragedy. It's inevitable that the focus will be on Schwarzenegger doing straight drama in what could be called his COP LAND, but doing so would detract from the outstanding performance by McNairy, who's become one of the most reliable character actors in movies today (KILLING THEM SOFTLY, ARGO, 12 YEARS A SLAVE). Jacob's negligence on duty was a legitimate mistake (though the trailer is edited as such that it looks like he's thoughtlessly getting coffee instead of doing his job), and you feel his anguish, especially in a difficult scene where he breaks down after being told 271 people are dead. Gullon's script puts Roman and Jacob through too a few too many cliched plot turns (their drinking, Jacob's fights with his wife, a paranoid Jacob stocking up on guns, Roman getting kicked out of the cemetery, where he spends his nights sleeping by his wife and daughter's graves), but by sticking to the events of its inspiration, it doesn't absolve anyone. This is especially true of Roman, who's slow-boiling anger goes way beyond wanting a sincere apology when he decides to take a concealed knife with him when he knocks on Jacob's door, proof positive he's gone from grief to madness and not in a cathartic, crowd-pleasing way. As good as Schwarzenegger was in MAGGIE, he didn't sound much like a midwestern farmer, and it helps that his performance here marks one of the few times in his career that his character has an excuse for that distinctive accent. That said, I'm not sure if there's an excuse for why, in 2017, we're still seeing Arnold's ass in a scene where Roman showers after work.
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.
