THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT (US/Belgium - 2019)
Is there anyone who doesn't love Sam Elliott? He's a goddamn national treasure who's been a reliable presence in movies and on TV for 50 years, and he's one of those actors who's so consistently good that maybe we take him for granted. At any rate, the 74-year-old badass is enjoying a late-career renaissance that began with 2017's THE HERO, which didn't get great reviews but generated praise for Elliott as an ailing western star making amends with his family. He then received his first Oscar nomination for his work in Bradley Cooper's remake of A STAR IS BORN, but shot just before that (and released after) was THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT--the eclectic likes of John Sayles, Douglas Trumbull, and Lucky McKee are among its producers--which sounds like the kind of bizarre, bonkers movie that would venture into a revisionist history scenario akin to BUBBA HO-TEP and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. And it's...not. It's certainly sincere on the part of writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski, and he's to be commended for providing Elliott with a role that's tailor-made for him. And, in all fairness, the title delivers what it promises, but there seems to be a fundamental disconnect with the tone implied by a title like THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT and what's presented in the film.
For an hour or so, it's a serious, somber character study set in the 1980s, with elderly WWII vet Calvin Barr (Elliott) living a quiet life of small-town anonymity among family and neighbors who have no idea of the secret that's haunted him for 40 years: he was the trigger man (played in flashbacks by Aidan Turner) in a successful covert plot to take out Hitler (Joe Lucas), and the Allied forces and the German government subsequently covered it up. He also never got over Maxine (Caitlin FitzGerald), the schoolteacher and sweetheart he planned to marry but never contacted once he returned home from the war. He now spends his days with his dog, eating TV dinners, and going to the corner bar (and he's still able to handle three punks who try to steal his car), seemingly waiting to die. But his government calls on him again when an agent (Ron Livingston) informs him that a blood sample still on file at a military lab reveals him to be immune to a lethal virus spreading across Canada that's been traced the mythical Bigfoot (Mark Steger). The film abruptly switches gears to become a throwback '70s Bigfoot movie with Barr venturing alone into the Canadian wilderness to track and kill the creature. To get a feel of how much of an oddity this thing is, imagine Clint Eastwood spending the second half of GRAN TORINO hunting down the Loch Ness Monster. Elliott is terrific here as the melancholy Barr, but Krzykowski can only get away with subverting expectations to a point. Sure, the confrontation with Bigfoot has some action and grossout gore, but the Hitler section of the film is a bit of an anticlimactic dud, and the trite, facile symbolism (the pebble in Barr's shoe!) would generate dismissive eyerolls in a high school creative writing class. In the end, Elliott is the whole show here, and he's given the perfect intro, sitting alone at an empty bar looking down at his glass while Billy Squier's "Lonely is the Night" blares from the jukebox. If you took all the humor out of BUBBA HO-TEP, you'd still be left with the heartfelt and oddly convincing performances of Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK, so it wouldn't be a total loss. Similarly, THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT has the great Sam Elliott as its sturdy foundation, but no movie with that title should be this dour and downbeat. (Unrated, 98 mins)
KING OF THIEVES (France/Germany/UK - 2018; US release 2019)
A chronicle of the 2015 Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary in London headlined by a cast of living legends is a film that almost seems impossible to screw up. Hell, it's even got guys from two of the most iconic heist thrillers with THE ITALIAN JOB's Michael Caine and SEXY BEAST's Ray Winstone. But KING OF THIEVES is an almost total misfire--the heist is glossed over, the characterizations thinly drawn, the police investigation a muddled, incoherent mess. It never generates any tension or suspense, the actions of the characters seem completely random, and when all else fails, it relies on the tired standby of old people doing old people things, like griping about technology ("What's an eBay?"), or in the case of Tom Courtenay's befuddled character, giggling after unexpectedly ripping a loud, bubbling fart in a pool. Despondent and bored after the sudden death of his wife (Francesca Annis), former criminal Brian Reader (Caine) is approached about taking part in a safe deposit break-in at Hatton Garden by safecracking young acquaintance Basil (Charlie Cox), who's got the keys and the alarm code. In what seems like the next scene, Brian's got his old associates rounded up and they're inside, posing as repairmen working on a gas line. There's Terry Perkins (Jim Broadbent), Kenny Collins (Courtenay), Carl Wood (Paul Whitehouse), and brutish Danny Boy Jones (Winstone), and tensions flare afterward when Kenny takes it upon himself to bring in a fence in the form of doddering, incontinent drunkard Billy "The Fish" Lincoln (Michael Gambon), who can hardly be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Brian announces he's out, and Terry and Danny proceed to systematically cut everyone else out of the take, with none of them realizing that they've been under police surveillance pretty much the entire time thanks to their careless actions during and after the burglary.
It's hard to believe any of these guys had careers as professional criminals considering the stupid decisions they make, from not even obscuring their license plates outside the building (and the youngster Basil is the only one who thinks ahead and wears a disguise) to Kenny being assigned lookout and immediately removing his hearing aid and dozing off to all of them talking loudly in public places about what they did. Director James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE, RED RIDING: 1980, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING) and screenwriter Joe Penhall (THE ROAD and the creator of the Netflix series MINDHUNTER) could've approached this from the angle of inevitable, fatalistic doom, but they don't do much of anything. It's part GRUMPY OLD MEN and THE BANK JOB until its abrupt shift in tone when Terry and Danny start going full post-Lufthansa Jimmy Conway with their rapidly escalating paranoia and incessant talk of getting rid of everyone. It's obvious that the filmmakers assumed they had the kind of cast where this thing could basically just make itself, but it's total letdown for everyone. The elder statesman of the ensemble at 85, Caine is effortlessly Caine, and has some poignant moments in Brian's initial grieving, shrugging in disbelief that he'll never see his wife walk into the room again and observing "When somebody dies, nothing prepares you for the silence of an empty house." But in no time at all, KING OF THIEVES becomes such a plodding, lifeless bore that unless you're a completist who has to see everything Caine does, there's little reason to bother with it. That is, unless you've been waiting to cross "seeing Jim Broadbent's ass" off your bucket list. (R, 108 mins)
THE BLACK WINDMILL (US - 1974) Directed by Don Siegel. Written by Leigh Vance. Cast: Michael Caine, Donald Pleasence, Delphine Seyrig, Clive Revill, Janet Suzman, John Vernon, Joss Ackland, Catherine Schell, Joseph O'Conor, Denis Quilley, Derek Newark, Edward Hardwicke, Maureen Pryor, Molly Urquhart, Hermione Baddeley, Paul Moss, John Rhys-Davies. (PG, 106 mins) "If there are things about me that you hate, Alex...be grateful for them now." After setting up shop at Universal in the early 1970s, the producing team of Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown immediately knocked it out of the park by shepherding the Oscar-winning 1973 hit THE STING. The same year, they also produced the cult horror film SSSSSSS, and in 1974, gave the green light to Steven Spielberg's big-screen directing debut THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS. Impressed with the young director, they also produced his next film, JAWS, which set new standards for nationwide release strategies and defined the concept of the "summer blockbuster." In the midst of all this massive success for the Zanuck/Brown duo was 1974's THE BLACK WINDMILL, a kidnapping thriller that completely bombed with critics and audiences. Directed by the great Don Siegel (best known for the original 1956 version of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and 1971's DIRTY HARRY), THE BLACK WINDMILL was based on Clive Egleton's 1973 novel Seven Days to a Killing, and was adapted by Leigh Vance, a veteran TV writer and producer whose credits included THE SAINT, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, MANNIX, CANNON, BARETTA, FANTASY ISLAND, and HART TO HART.
An American production shot in the UK and France, THE BLACK WINDMILL stars Michael Caine in GET CARTER mode as John Tarrant, a British intelligence agent working undercover to nail a crew of arms smugglers selling weapons to the IRA. Led by McKee (John Vernon) and Ceil (Delphine Seyrig), the smugglers seem to be on to Tarrant, since they kidnap his young son David (Paul Moss) and hold him for a specific ransom of $500,000 in uncut diamonds, which just happens to be the exact amount procured by Tarrant's boss Cedric Harper (Donald Pleasence) to fund a different covert mercenary operation. Suspicious about the timing and the ransom amount, Harper orders around-the-clock surveillance on Tarrant, who's having some financial problems in the wake of a pending divorce from his estranged wife Alex (Janet Suzman), even having Scotland Yard inspector Alf Chestermann (Clive Revill) bug his apartment at the request of MI-6 head Sir Edward Julyan (Joseph O'Conor). Harper, convinced Tarrant is secretly working with the arms smugglers and staged his son's kidnapping, refuses to authorize the ransom, while Tarrant can clearly see someone among his colleagues is setting him up to take a fall for their own purposes. Of course, this can only mean one thing: Tarrant disobeys his bosses and goes rogue, stealing Harper's stash of diamonds and chasing McKee and Ceil to France in an effort find his son.
Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), the fairly obscure THE BLACK WINDMILL sets up the pieces for a crackerjack thriller that would seem upon a cursory glance to be a 1970s TAKEN (there's also a really good action sequence with a foot chase through the London Underground), and while it moves fairly briskly and has a fine cast in support of a quietly enraged Caine, it never quite comes together like it should. Perhaps Siegel is just out of his element with an international thriller (though he did fine with 1977's TELEFON), but he can't seem to settle on a tone. Indeed, not all of the actors appear to be on the same page when it comes to exactly what kind of movie they're in. Caine is all steely gravitas, as one might expect (except in one inspired bit where he does an amazing impression of Pleasence that has to be seen to be believed), and while he loves his son, Tarrant displays a detached, matter-of-fact coldness with Alex over the very real possibility that David is already dead, which serves as a reminder about why she hates his job and how it's driven them apart. Likewise, Vernon plays it straight as the chief villain, but Pleasence seems to be acting like he's in a spy spoof, breaking out every nervous tic in his repertoire to play a clueless oaf of a boss who has no business overseeing secret government operations and heading something called "The Department of Subversive Warfare," which itself sounds like something out of DR. STRANGELOVE. Pleasence is an undeniable hoot throughout--whether his Harper is getting mocked by his superiors for mistakenly referring to an agent named "Sean Kelly" as "Sean Connery," dismissing Tarrant's story about his kidnapped son when he's giddily distracted by a Q-like gadget man demonstrating an exploding duffel bag, refusing to put a phone all the way up to his ear, or constantly tugging on his mustache--but he seems to have wandered in from a completely different movie.
I suppose it's feasible that Siegel is using Pleasence's character to make some kind of commentary on inept and unqualified idiots falling upwards in life (a common refrain in DIRTY HARRY and its sequels, where Clint Eastwood is constantly disgusted with his incompetent superiors and bureaucratic pencil-pushers), but Pleasence is playing it far too broadly. Revill, too, seems to think he's in something more comedic with the way he works a simmering slow burn as events unfold. There's a terrific ensemble here and they're all good, but their clashing approaches and wildly divergent acting styles, and the erratic tone in the context of the film make THE BLACK WINDMILL seem like a quirky JANUARY MAN of its day, and "quirky" is not a word you'd imagine using to describe an ostensibly gritty early 1970s kidnapping thriller directed by Don Siegel and starring Michael Caine. It's not difficult to see why it tanked and is largely forgotten today, and while it's a minor footnote in the storied careers of Siegel, Caine, and Zanuck/Brown, it has its moments and is worth seeing for completists. And if you're a Donald Pleasence fan, well, you've definitely been deprived of something special with his work here.
DUNKIRK (US - 2017) Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Joachim ten Haaf, Matthew Marsh, Damien Bonnard, Will Attenborough, Bill Milner, voice of Michael Caine. (PG-13, 106 mins) Christopher Nolan's painstakingly-constructed DUNKIRK brings a harrowing you-are-there immediacy to the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk with an intensity that plays like a feature-length version of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN's opening sequence at Normandy. At 106 minutes, it's Nolan's shortest film since his 1998 pre-MEMENTO debut FOLLOWING, but it never feels less than epic in its presentation and its ambition. One of the few true purists left among A-list filmmakers, Nolan uses the barest minimum of CGI in DUNKIRK, instead going the classic route, shooting on film--mostly with IMAX cameras--with real extras, real locations, real ships, and real planes. For those who don't spend a lot of time watching old movies where such things were more commonplace, the difference is immediately, staggeringly obvious. There's a tangible sense of reality to the aerial shots and the long/wide shots up and down the beach, filled with thousands of extras as British soldiers waiting to be rescued that would've been compromised if done digitally. Nolan's approach to the film stands as proof that no matter how far CGI has progressed (WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is the current standard-bearer as far as fantasy cinema goes), when it comes to recreations of historical events such as this WWII story, the old ways remain the most effective.
There's a scene very late in the 1980 gangster classic THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY where British mob boss Bob Hoskins, trying to sever his ties with gangland past, chews out his New York Mafia partners for backing out of a business deal over fears that his criminal empire will interfere with their legit interests. "Us British," he explains, "We're used to a bit more vitality, imagination, touch of the Dunkirk spirit, know what I mean?" The Dunkirk spirit is present throughout, as Nolan presents three intercut narratives over the course of DUNKIRK: "The Mole," takes place one week before the evacuation; "The Sea" takes place one day before; and "The Air" one hour before. Of course, all three eventually come together, and while it may seem gimmicky, it's in line with Nolan's recurrent motif of playing with time elements (so important to MEMENTO, INCEPTION, and INTERSTELLAR). It works beautifully, with imagery in one tying into and complementing something going on in another, and with occasional characters popping up in other sections as the threads begin to overlap. It's not confusing at all, and it's becoming one of the things that make Christopher Nolan films so unique. "The Mole" focuses on young soldiers Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead) and Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), and later, Alex (One Direction's Harry Styles, who's surprisingly solid in his dramatic acting debut) at Dunkirk, where 400,000 mostly British soldiers are waiting to be evacuated after German forces have pushed them to the edge of the town, making them sitting ducks for German air raids. "The Sea" follows mild-mannered Dawson (BRIDGE OF SPIES Oscar-winner Mark Rylance), his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Peter's shy, introverted friend George (Barry Keoghan) as they take Dawson's boat out to sea, joining other civilians and Navy-commandeered private vessels on a dangerous mission to Dunkirk to rescue their officers. "The Air" centers on two Spitfire pilots--Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden)--left on their own after the squad leader is shot down, heading to Dunkirk to take out German planes, with Collins forced to land on the water and Farrier playing guessing games with his fuel after his gauge is damaged in a skirmish.
Nolan presents the stories in a clinical, matter-of-fact fashion. There's very little in the way of personal backstories of the characters (one emotional bit involving Dawson's reasons for partaking int he rescue are mentioned almost as an afterthought), with everything taking place in the moment. While it's debatable whether this leaves a cold chilliness to the human element, it works in the context of DUNKIRK because nothing matters but the evacuation. That doesn't mean there aren't powerful moments for some of the characters, whether it's outcast George going along in order to feel good about contributing to the war effort; or a shell-shocked sole survivor of a U-Boat attack (Cillian Murphy) picked up by Dawson; or the sympathetic Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) demonstrating true leadership in making sure every last soldier is evacuated from the beach. Nolan doesn't engage in jingoism or over-the-top chest-thumping here. The word "Nazi" is never said and German officers are never seen, and if this were made back in the '60s, it would be one of the very few WWII movies with no role for Karl-Otto Alberty. This is a nuts-and-bolts chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit, of a nation pulling together to do what it needs to do, even if it means civilians putting their lives at risk. With very little in the way of dialogue--Nolan's script was only 76 pages long--the film relies on visuals and sound design to tell its story, whether it's the constant, repetitive Hans Zimmer cues with a subtle clock ticking audible in the mix almost constantly, Hoyte van Hotema's cinematography showcasing the vast forever of the sea and the beach, and the terrifying, deafening shriek of German planes as they fly overhead, DUNKIRK transports the audience to another time and place. It also exists in a less divisive time when everyone did their part, and it's only fitting that it's made in such an old-school fashion. A defiant and very welcome "they don't make 'em like they used to anymore" exercise, DUNKIRK establishes Nolan as arguably the best commercial filmmaker working today, at this point boasting an almost Kubrick-ian track record of consistent high quality (the exception being the Nolan-produced sci-fi dud TRANSCENDENCE, which he had the sense to turn over to cinematographer-turned-debuting director Wally Pfister) and one of the few auteurs of his caliber doing everything humanly possible to preserve the classical notion of cinema as it's always been known.
GOING IN STYLE (US - 2017) Directed by Zach Braff. Written by Theodore Melfi. Cast: Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Alan Arkin, Christopher Lloyd, Matt Dillon, Ann-Margret, John Ortiz, Peter Serafinowicz, Joey King, Kenan Thompson, Josh Pais, Maria Dizzia, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Melanie Nichols-King, Ashley Aufderheide. (PG-13, 96 mins) 1979's GOING IN STYLE was sold as a wacky comedy about a trio of elderly retirees robbing a bank in Groucho Marx disguises. But the stick-up was only a small part of the story, which primarily focused on the three aging widowers (George Burns as Joe, Art Carney as Al, and Lee Strasberg as Willie) looking for something to alleviate the boredom, the loneliness, and the depression of getting old and spending their days sitting in the park feeding the pigeons. The breakthrough film for 28-year-old writer/director Martin Brest (who would go on to make BEVERLY HILLS COP, MIDNIGHT RUN, SCENT OF A WOMAN, and the career-ending GIGLI), GOING IN STYLE was a comedy but a dark and character-driven one, with poignant and heartfelt observations about growing old, living with regrets, and knowing you don't have a lot of time left. It wasn't a feel-good movie. Hell, Al and Willie both die, and Joe not only gets nabbed, but he's in prison at the end. Nearly 40 years later, GOING IN STYLE gets the remake treatment, appropriately cast with three living legends--Michael Caine as Joe, Alan Arkin as Al, and Morgan Freeman as Willie--but the results aren't the same. GOING IN STYLE '17 is perfectly acceptable in a dumb and unchallenging kind of way. It's less a story than it is a focus group-approved checklist of cliches, tropes, and contrivances. This new take is a GOING IN STYLE that's a mash-up of GRUMPY OLD MEN, THE BUCKET LIST, and HORRIBLE BOSSES. It's all about the bank robbery, now an intricately-planned heist with alibis, decoys, a getaway vehicle, and an ethnic accomplice in Jesus (John Ortiz), a Latino version of Jamie Foxx's Motherfucker Jones from HORRIBLE BOSSES, There's no depth to GOING IN STYLE '17. The humor is limited primarily to "It's funny because they're old!" jokes like a motorized scooter chase, Joe and Willie smoking weed and getting the munchies, and Al rediscovering the long-dormant sexual dynamo within after hooking up with still-foxy grocery clerk Annie (Ann-Margret).
Written by Theodore Melfi, whose script existed several years before he scored big by writing and directing HIDDEN FIGURES, and directed by, of all people, SCRUBS star, GARDEN STATE auteur, and emo cautionary tale Zach Braff, GOING IN STYLE '17 goes out of its way to give the trio substantial reasons to rob the bank. Retired from a Brooklyn steel mill that's about to screw over their workforce and move its operations to Vietnam, Joe, Al, and Willie find their pensions frozen with no money coming in. This causes Joe's house to go into foreclosure when his mortgage triples after being sold on a sketchy refinancing offer by the asshole loan manager (Josh Pais) at the bank. Joe is at the bank trying to deal with this issue when it's robbed by a trio of highly-coordinated gunmen. When Joe finds out the same bank that's foreclosing on him also holds the steel mill's liquidated pension accounts, the seed is planted. He convinces his best buddies to go along with him on a robbery by promising to only take the money they'd be getting in their pensions for the next seven or so years (estimating how long they'll likely be alive) and if any more is accrued, they'll give it to charity. After a test run of their crime skills fails miserably when they're busted shoplifting at the neighborhood market (this entire sequence is embarrassingly awful), they decide they need help from a pro, and end up meeting Jesus through Joe's weed-dealing ex-son-in-law Murphy (Peter Serafinowicz). Jesus helps them map out the heist, helps them set up alibis, and teaches them how to hotwire a car, at which the old guys are immediately experts. Sporting Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. Rat Pack masks, they barely pull off the robbery--a bank employee hits the silent alarm, but according to the movie's own timeline, it takes roughly 30 minutes for the police to arrive--but are pursued by dogged FBI agent Hamer (Matt Dillon), who knows they're his guys but can't prove it.
GOING IN STYLE '17 is so concerned with making the audience love its altruistic, irascible old geezers that it constantly stacks the deck against them for maximum sympathy: Joe's house in foreclosure, his daughter (Maria Dizzia) and granddaughter (Joey King) live with him after they get away from loser Murphy, Willie's in late-stage renal failure and hasn't told anyone that he needs a kidney transplant ASAP or he'll die, and he desperately wants to be closer to his own daughter and granddaughter who live across the country. Al has no pressing issues other than his innate grouchiness, which is vintage late-career Arkin, but his work here is awfully similar to 2012's already-forgotten STAND-UP GUYS, where he, Al Pacino, and Christopher Walken played aging mobsters pulling off One Last Job. GOING IN STYLE '17 is beneath its stars, but Freeman, Caine, and Arkin are so good at doing whatever they do whenever they're onscreen in anything that there's some moderate level of enjoyment to be had, even if it's watching the three of them sitting around watching TV and arguing about who THE BACHELORETTE's choice should be. But the whole thing is too formulaic and too afraid to take chances, like embracing the inherent sense of melancholy that Burns, Carney, and Strasberg were allowed to do back in 1979.
Burns, Strasberg, and Carney in the original 1979 version.
GOING IN STYLE '17 doesn't want to address any of these serious concerns in an intelligent, mature, and dignified way. It lacks the courage to allow any of its heroes to die (is there any chance Willie doesn't find a donor?) and goes for easy laughs like an old woman screaming "Who the fuck took my scooter?" when Joe commandeers it fleeing the grocery store, because geriatrics dropping vulgarities is a can't-miss, as decreed in the Burgess Meredith Amendment of 1993. It wants to show Freeman and Caine stuffing ham and pork loins down their pants and then getting all hazy and glassy-eyed after blazing up with Jesus' weed, or Arkin and Ann-Margret panting in a post-coital sweat. It's mostly good-natured and not done in a mean-spirited or mocking way (though there's several laughs at the expense of a senile and perpetually befuddled lodge brother played by Christopher Lloyd in total Reverend Jim mode), but at the same time, these are cheap and lazy jokes that allow the film to coast on the charm and the accomplishments of its three Oscar-winning stars. They're fun to watch, but wouldn't you almost rather watch 96 minutes of Freeman, Caine, and Arkin just sitting around bullshitting and telling stories? GOING IN STYLE '79 was a modest hit at the box office but is still fondly remembered by those who saw it 38 years ago. Will anyone remember GOING IN STYLE '17 38 days from now?
JAWS: THE REVENGE (US - 1987) Directed by Joseph Sargent. Written by Michael De Guzman. Cast: Lorraine Gary, Michael Caine, Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young, Judith Barsi, Lynn Whitfield, Mitchell Anderson, Cedric Scott, Melvin Van Peebles, Fritzi Jane Courtney, Lee Fierro. (PG-13, 90 mins)
The JAWS franchise was put out of its misery (so far) after hitting rock-bottom with this inept, idiotic fourth installment, in which a now-widowed Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) is convinced that a great white shark--and the entire carcharodon carcharias species--has a personal axe to grind against her family. Yes, it's a vigilante shark (and it roars, like the shark in Enzo G. Castellari's 1982 Italian JAWS ripoff GREAT WHITE), first taking out the younger Brody son, Amity Deputy Sheriff Sean (Mitchell Anderson), then following--yes, following--Ellen when she goes to stay with eldest son Mike (Lance Guest in Dennis Quaid's JAWS 3-D role) and his wife (Karen Young) and daughter (Judith Barsi, who played Gary Busey's daughter in the 1986 B-action gem EYE OF THE TIGER) in the Bahamas, where Mike is part of a marine science research team with his Jamaican buddy (cue excessive use of "Hey,mon!") Jake (Mario Van Peebles). A grieving Ellen finds time for romance with wily local pilot and unlucky gambler Hoagie, played by a slumming Michael Caine, who infamously missed out on accepting his HANNAH AND HER SISTERS Oscar in person because he was stuck in the Bahamas working on this. An oft-cited Caine quote perfectly sums up his feelings on JAWS: THE REVENGE: "I've not seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house it built, and it is terrific."
JAWS: THE REVENGE began shooting in February 1987 and was in theaters just five months later on July 17, 1987. It's no surprise that it's rushed and sloppy, and no doubt the usually reliable journeyman director Joseph Sargent (best known for the 1974 classic THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE) could've done a better job with more money and more time. Even though this was made by Universal, it almost feels like a SUPERMAN IV-style slashed-budget hatchet job, as if Golan & Globus had somehow gotten hold of the JAWS rights and made this on the cheap through Cannon. This was Gary's first acting role since Steven Spielberg's expensive bomb 1941 (1979), and her only starring turn in a big-screen feature. The wife of Universal head Sid Sheinberg, Gary's presence here makes it tough to decide if it's a sincere nod to JAWS (there's also brief appearances by the Chief Brody-slapping Mrs. Kintner as well as the "Are you going to close the beeeeaches?" lady, and a scene where Mike's daughter imitates his actions at the kitchen table, like young Sean did with Chief Brody) or if Sheinberg gave it the green light as a vanity project for his wife. Gary is forced to do one stupid thing after another, including overacting and reacting to flashbacks to things her character couldn't possibly have witnessed (Chief Brody's "Smile you son of a bitch!" from the first film), and she really wasn't of enough importance to the first two films to build a fourth around. Now 78, Gary hasn't acted in a film since and one can't help but wonder if this movie would even exist--at least in this form--if her husband wasn't also the guy running the studio. From everything I've seen and read, she's a nice lady, but did anyone go away from JAWS and JAWS 2 thinking "Good flicks...but they could've used more Lorraine Gary"?
Universal's new Blu-ray, which looks great, has the "Mario Van Peebles survives and they blow the shark up" ending that was used for the film's European release and subsequent US home video editions. The Blu-ray's "alternate ending" (Van Peebles dies and Ellen rams the boat into the shark as it bleeds to death) was actually the US theatrical version's ending back in 1987. Honestly, the "Van Peebles dies" ending works slightly better--and I use the term "better" loosely--since the exploding of the shark involves 12-year-old stock footage from JAWS and looks exactly like the pieced-together, let's-just-get-this-over-with desperation Hail Mary that it is. JAWS: THE REVENGE did nothing for anyone involved with it, though Caine used it to mine some good-natured, self-deprecating yuks over his own mercenary career choices, which in those days were usually dictated by where they were being shot and how nice of a working vacation they'd provide. In July 1988, ten-year-old Barsi was a victim in a tragic murder-suicide in which her father killed her and her mother, then took his own life. She had two projects in the can at the time, both voice performances for Don Bluth animated films: she voiced Ducky in THE LAND BEFORE TIME, released in November 1988, and Anne-Marie in ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN, released in November 1989. Bluth dedicated both films to the young actress.
NOW YOU SEE ME 2 (US/China - 2016) Directed by Jon M. Chu. Written by Ed Solomon. Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Dave Franco, Daniel Radcliffe, Lizzy Caplan, Jay Chou, Sanaa Lathan, David Warshofsky, Tsai Chin, Ben Lamb, Richard Laing. (PG-13, 129 mins) Sure, 2013's enjoyable NOW YOU SEE ME was a sleeper hit, grossing $120 million in the US, but was anyone demanding more? Apparently so, as it did almost double that overseas. In what will go down as one of the least necessary sequels of the year, the thoroughly superfluous, $90 million NOW YOU SEE ME 2 isn't even inspired enough to be subtitled NOW YOU DON'T, and is the kind of perfunctory, clock-punching follow-up that makes you retroactively like the first one a little less. That film was directed by Luc Besson protege Louis Leterrier, a sure-handed pro who kept the story engaging and fast-moving, and really conveyed a knowledge and appreciation of magic. In the hands of STEP UP 2: THE STREETS, STEP UP 3D and JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER director Jon M. Chu, whose most recent film is 2015's flop-turned-inevitable-cult-movie JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS, NOW YOU SEE ME 2's chief goal seems to be how many nonsensical dei ex machina it can pull out of its ass like rabbits out of a hat. NOW YOU SEE ME had the magician team of The Four Horsemen using their skills to bankrupt greedy and corrupt insurance titan Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), whose company denied claims to scores of Hurricane Katrina victims. Tressler figures into the second half of this sequel in a way that you'll figure out long before the Four Horsemen do, but initially, the heroes--illusionist J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) and presumed-dead street magician Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), along with new addition Lula May (Lizzy Caplan)--have been in hiding, but are called back to public view at the behest of The Eye, the top-secret society of magicians. Their assignment: expose tech billionaire Owen Case (Ben Lamb) as a fraud intending to use his software to steal the personal info of millions of his customers and sell it on the black market. But someone else hijacks their presentation, also publicly outing rogue FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), who's still pretending to pursue the Four Horsemen for the benefit of his boss (Sanaa Lathan), even though he was revealed to be the enigmatic Fifth Horsemen at the end of the first film.
The figure behind all the mayhem is Case's former partner Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe), who faked his death a year earlier and has spent that time in Macau putting into play his Blofeldian plot to control the world's economy with a data chip device. Now a fugitive, Rhodes springs imprisoned magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) from custody and takes him to Macao to help get to the bottom of Mabry's plan. Of course, Bradley manages to get away from Rhodes--who blames Bradley for the magic trick mishap death of his father 30 years earlier--while the Four Horsemen pull off a complicated heist of the chip device from a top secret facility, with constant double-crosses coming from Mabry as well as Chase McKinney, Merritt's duplicitous and more-than-slightly effeminate twin brother played entirely too broadly by Harrelson, with a curly wig and a toothy grin that suggests what might've transpired had there ever been a hypothetical Marjoe Gortner one-man show based on the biography Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story.
NOW YOU SEE ME 2 is a mess. There's some of the charm of the first film in the camaraderie between the Four Horsemen, particularly some ballbusting between Atlas and McKinney, and it seems Eisenberg and Harrelson are having a good time. The globetrotting plot goes from NYC to Macao to London and makes a lot of noise, but not much sense. There's no sense of magic to a film where the tricks and illusions are all CGI'd or revealed to be some kind of absurdly complex conspiracy. Its twists and turns are such that the characters on the receiving end of them--be they the FBI, Mabry, Rhodes, various security guards, or Tressler--have to be completely incompetent idiots to fall for them (again in Tressler's case). The heist of the chip device starts out clever but becomes too belabored and improbable to even laugh at. The script, written by a returning Ed Solomon (BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, MEN IN BLACK), has little consistency, especially with Freeman's Stevens, whose purpose and loyalties change with little or no logic or flow whenever the movie needs them to (he and Caine are just here for the paid vacation to Macau). Taiwanese singer and actor Jay Chou, who you probably haven't thought of since his turn as Kato in the forgotten Seth Rogen disaster THE GREEN HORNET, is on hand as another new Horseman once they arrive in Macau (his character's grandmother is played by veteran actress Tsai Chin, best known as the treacherous daughter of Christopher Lee in the 1960s FU MANCHU movies), but he barely figures into the story and only seems to be there to satisfy a Chinese co-production deal with TIK Films. He likely has more to do in the version being released in Asia, but his complete insignificance to the film only highlights the fact that more work went into negotiating the business deal than coming up with a coherent story to justify its existence.
Dumbest of all is the opening at the expose of Case, where the Four Horseman are posing as waiters, bartenders, and security staff to get behind the scenes. These are world-famous magicians and international fugitives and the subject of ongoing media scrutiny and yet, here they are, undisguised, milling about a highly publicized event at a massive arena for America's biggest tech mogul, TV cameras everywhere, and not a single person recognizes them. Even dumber, right there at the event is Rhodes, openly talking to the Horsemen near the stage, in full view of everyone even though his sole case seems to scouring the ends of the earth to find them. Compare that to a scene later on in London when each of the magicians just show up at various street corners to set up their final takedown of Mabry as everyone stops what they're doing and whips out their phones because they recognize them as globally-known celebrities. Everything in this film relies on contrivance and convenience. NOW YOU SEE ME was hard to swallow, but it was a fun movie that had some inspired moments. The sequel turns its heroes into a combination of David Copperfield, Jason Bourne, 007, and Wikileaks. Honestly, by the end, I had no idea what was going on and I really didn't care. And it was upon that realization that I felt a kinship to Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine that I will likely never feel again.
THE HOLCROFT COVENANT (UK - 1985) Directed by John Frankenheimer. Written by George Axelrod, Edward Anhalt and John Hopkins. Cast: Michael Caine, Anthony Andrews, Victoria Tennant, Lilli Palmer, Mario Adorf, Michael Lonsdale, Bernard Hepton, Richard Munch, Carl Rigg, Shane Rimmer, Michael Balfour, Andre Penvern, Andrew Bradford, Tharita Olivera De Sera. (R, 113 mins)
A misfire that reunites director John Frankenheimer with his MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE screenwriter George Axelrod (who shares script credit with two other respected scribes in Edward Anhalt and John Hopkins), THE HOLCROFT COVENANT is an intriguing conspiracy thriller that just never finds its footing. Adapted from Robert Ludlum's novel, the film has a fatally miscast Michael Caine as Noel Holcroft, an American architect who gets involved in a decades-old plot hatched by his biological father--a high-ranking Nazi and member of Hitler's inner circle--to pay reparations to surviving Holocaust victims and heirs to those killed using a secret Zurich bank account that's ballooned to $4.5 billion in the 40 years since the end of WWII. Certain parties have other plans for the money, like creating a Fourth Reich, which requires getting rid of Holcroft, who has completely disavowed his father and whose mother (Lilli Palmer, in her last big-screen role before her death in 1986) fled Germany when he was 18 months old and settled in America where she married the man who would adopt Noel (Holcroft's repeatedly proclaiming "I'm a foreign-born American citizen!" seems to be Caine trying to explain away his distinctly Michael Caine accent). Holcroft isn't alone in this inheritance. He must share the proceeds with the children of two other Nazis who entered this "covenant"--the Von Tiebolt siblings (Victoria Tennant and Anthony Andrews) and famed conductor Jurgen Mass (Mario Adorf), which of course leads to numerous double and triple crosses and assassins lurking in the background and foreground of scenes, constantly making attempts on Holcroft's life.
Made during a several-year stretch when he was turning absolutely nothing down (how can we forget his triumphant turn in 1987's JAWS: THE REVENGE?), Caine finished shooting the comedy WATER on a Friday when he got a call to begin work on HOLCROFT on the following Monday, a last-minute replacement after a disagreeable James Caan bailed the day before shooting was to begin. In his memoir, Caine wrote that he arrived for his first day of work on HOLCROFT without seeing even a page of the script, so he had no idea what he was doing, only that it was a thriller and that he wanted to work with Frankenheimer (and, presumably, the pay was good). Nobody seemed to consider that Caine was completely wrong for the part and early scenes find him doing some weird thing with his voice where he's trying to sound American but quickly throws in the towel (Caine is one of the all-time greats, but his American accent, which sounds like someone doing a bad Michael Caine impression, wasn't any better when he tried it again on 2013's LAST LOVE). Frankenheimer spends too much time doing some distracting camera trickery and weird zooms and pointless Dutch angles instead of creating a suspenseful story. The script is a mess--it almost seems like none of the three credited screenwriters looked at what the others wrote--and Holcroft's transformation from a clueless dolt to a coldly lethal manipulator who becomes a crack shot when the movie needs him to never seems plausible. Coming soon after 1983's equally scattershot Sam Peckinpah swan song THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND, this would be the last big-screen Ludlum adaptation (other than a couple of TV-movies) until Hollywood finally got it right with THE BOURNE IDENTITY in 2002. For a globetrotting international thriller, it also looks surprisingly cheap and sloppy at times, with a London backlot doing a piss-awful job of portraying a Manhattan street, looking almost Bulgarian in its utter lack of conviction. And one laughable process screen shot shows Holcroft with some construction workers atop a skyscraper backed by a bush-league NYC skyline that looks edited in with all the cutting edge technology of your local TV weather forecast. Also, why does Noel Holcroft need a remote control for his answering machine? Is it that important that he put his bag on a chair ten feet away that he can't stand there and press "skip"?
THE HOLCROFT COVENANT is also the kind of film that gives away its surprises when you realize a prominently-billed actor has been given almost nothing to do and is barely in the first 3/4 of the movie, so of course, he has to end up being the chief villain (also, are we to believe that Caine, Tennant, Andrews, and Adorf are all roughly the same age?). There's some good work by Bernard Hepton as a British agent who helps Holcroft and the sluggish film finally comes to life with a climactic press conference that has a nice wink-and-a-nudge from Frankenheimer that's an obvious self-referential nod to a memorable scene in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. But all in all, THE HOLCROFT COVENANT is one of the great director's most forgettable films--not terrible (we're not talking THE EXTRAORDINARY SEAMAN or YEAR OF THE GUN here), but by no means essential, unless you never miss a Mario Adorf vehicle. Universal picked up the British-made HOLCROFT for the US but pretty much buried it, releasing it on just 73 screens in the fall of 1985 before it quickly turned up on video store shelves.
EXPOSED is one of those films with two parallel storylines that finally converge in the closing minutes. In a predominantly Latino neighborhood in NYC, Dominican-born Isabel (Ana de Armas) has a strange hallucination of a levitating albino while waiting for the subway at the very stop where a cop (Danny Hoch) is killed the same night. That dead cop's hard-nosed detective partner is widower and anger-management case Galban (Keanu Reeves), who focuses his investigation on local drug lord Black Jones (Big Daddy Kane). Galban digs deeper, ultimately getting romantically involved with his partner's widow (Mira Sorvino) and uncovering evidence of police corruption and his partner's extracurricular, outside-the-law activities that must involve Isabel or there'd be no movie, and perhaps there shouldn't have been. The chaotic backstory of EXPOSED is far more interesting than anything that ended up onscreen. Originally shot as DAUGHTER OF GOD, the film was an indie drama about, among other things, the plight of poor immigrants, violence against women, the lasting trauma of child abuse, and the effects of the war in Afghanistan on the families of those who serve. Making his feature writing/directing debut, Gee Malik Linton lucked into the involvement of Reeves following the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was originally cast as Galban and knew that it was intended to be a small role. Reeves, who became one of 30 credited producers and whose presence helped secure funding and a Lionsgate distribution deal, brought his KNOCK KNOCK co-star de Armas onboard, and all was well until Lionsgate saw Linton's cut.
DAUGHTER OF GOD got positive reaction from test audiences, but Lionsgate insisted they were promised a commercial Keanu Reeves thriller, and no one was going to confuse DAUGHTER OF GOD with POINT BREAK, SPEED, or JOHN WICK. They proceeded to take the film away from Linton, gutting it from 126 minutes to 102, losing much of the cultural elements--most of DAUGHTER OF GOD was in Spanish with English subtitles--and eliminating entire subplots and characters. The biggest change they made was cutting down the screen time of those who remained in the film while keeping everything with Reeves, who signed on for what was to be Hoffman's small supporting role--a big-name actor doing a solid to help out a new indie filmmaker--but was now the co-lead with as much screen time as de Armas. A "source" claimed Reeves supervised the overhaul, first called WISDOM and then changed to the more lurid EXPOSED, though Reeves' rep insisted he had nothing to do with it. Realizing he was fighting a battle he had no chance of winning, Linton successfully petitioned to have his name removed as director, with credit going to Alan Smithee protege "Declan Dale," while remaining credited for his screenplay under his own name. It should go without saying that EXPOSED, in its released form, is almost cataclysmically awful and borderline unwatchable, the logical end result of trying to turn a low-key and largely foreign-language art-house drama into a mainstream cop movie. Disjointed and dull, with fantastic elements that make appearances as random as those of the recognizable character actors in the supporting cast (Christopher McDonald plays Galban's captain, and Michael Rispoli appears a couple of times for some reason), and with the war in Afghanistan and child abuse subplots now looking exploitatively wedged in and quickly abandoned, the film makes no sense at all and more or less just ends in the least satisfying way possible, topped off with the bonus of glacially slow closing credits to inflate the truncated running time by another ten minutes. It's certainly a possibility that Linton's director's cut of DAUGHTER OF GOD is a worthwhile film, though considering he named an inner city, African-American crime lord "Black Jones," one shouldn't be too quick to assume it's a lost masterpiece. Lionsgate dumped EXPOSED on VOD and in as few theaters as contractually required with no publicity at all. Welcome to Hollywood, Gee Malik Linton! (R, 102 mins)
YOUTH
(Italy/France/UK/Switzerland - 2015)
Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino returns with a spiritual cousin to his Oscar-winning THE GREAT BEAUTY, set at an almost tomb-like resort in Switzerland. Like the guests, the film never seems to leave that location, at least until the final scene, with the primary focus on two elderly friends, both artists, both feeling the effects of a lifetime of love, loss, regret, and age, with the looming feeling that death is waiting just around the corner. It's a film of much sadness and melancholy, but it's not a depressing downer, and is in fact quite funny at times, even if it's not what US distributor Fox Searchlight seemed to pass off as a GRUMPY OLD MEN for the art-house crowd. Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a legendary composer and conductor, now retired and refusing an offer by an emissary of the Queen to be knighted and to perform his most famous piece, "Simple Songs," at a gala event for the Royal Family. Fred's best friend of 60 years is renowned filmmaker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel, in his best role in years), who's working with four young screenwriters on what he intends to be his final masterpiece, his "testament" to a life in cinema. You can already sense the Fellini homages in the form of nude bodies--young, old, toned, and flabby--posed in pools and saunas in an almost still photography fashion, coupled with Visconti shout-outs in the ornate but dreary resort that's still a draw for the jet-set but, like its central characters, has seen better days.
Characters drift in and out of the story--Rachel Weisz is Lena, Fred's daughter and assistant, who's just been dumped by her husband (Ed Stoppard), who happens to be Mick's son; Paul Dano is a Shia LaBeouf-like American actor, deeply focused on his art and working with the most important European filmmakers but unable to escape the fact that everyone knows him from a big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster where he played a robot; and Jane Fonda as an aging, embittered Hollywood legend, star of 11 of Mick's 20 films, who flies all the way from L.A. to Switzerland to tell Mick a lot of things he doesn't want to hear--but Caine's Fred and Keitel's Mick are the foundation. The two icons are magnificent together, whether they're lamenting the inevitability of the end, or reminiscing about a girl they both loved 60 years ago and clearly still think of often (leading to one of Keitel's most unexpectedly poignant scenes). YOUTH can be downbeat (Weisz spits out a devastating monologue where Lena unloads on her father for leaving her mother decades earlier) and cynical (a cinema purist who dedicates the film to Francesco Rosi, Sorrentino doesn't have much use for television), but it's also very funny. Fonda's only in the movie for five minutes, but she makes every second count, whether she's emphatically stating that she had no problem blowing producers to get a foot in the door 50 years ago or telling Mick "Stop licking my ass" when he's overselling how great she looks. Her character is crass and vulgar ("She's only read two books her entire life, and one of them was her autobiography written by a ghost writer," Mick tells Fred), and Fonda plays it to the hilt with very little screen time. Fred and Mick start their days bitching about how they can't piss and are later shocked when they're out on a walk and happen upon to elderly resort visitors screwing up against a tree. Like the classic Italian cinema that Sorrentino adores, YOUTH is artsy and surreal, whether Fred sits in a field of cows conducting a symphony played by their cowbells, or Mick is confronted by all of the heroines from his movies. The most outrageous bit comes from Dano's brooding method actor, prepping a Hitler biopic and deciding to get in character by spending his remaining days at the resort walking around in full Hitler makeup and costume to get the feeling of alienation and being hated, which seems like exactly the kind of idiotic, attention-seeking stunt LaBeouf would pull. YOUTH is a lovely, hypnotic film that deserved more exposure than it got, even though "Simple Songs" got an Oscar nomination, which is odd considering it's an almost sublimely awful composition, perhaps intentionally so. (R, 123 mins)
LEGEND
(US/UK/France - 2015)
Peter Medak's 1990 film THE KRAYS was a mean, tough chronicle of twin British gangster siblings Ronnie and Reggie Kray played by two-years-apart brothers Martin and Gary Kemp, best known as, respectively, the bassist and lead guitarist of the '80s radio staple Spandau Ballet. LEGEND--what a terrible title--is based on John Pearson's book The Profession of Violence, and tells essentially the same story, with Tom Hardy playing both roles. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland (PAYBACK), who won an Oscar for his L.A. CONFIDENTIAL screenplay, LEGEND has Hardy turning in two distinctive and vividly exceptional performances as the gay, hot-tempered, paranoid schizophrenic Ronnie and the ostensibly more focused and level-headed Reggie, but one of the key facets of the film is how their personalities eventually cross over to the point where Reggie gets so out of control that an on-his-meds Ronnie is the one who has to calm him down. LEGEND doesn't have much to go on other than Hardy's performances. Helgeland is content to let his star carry the weight of an otherwise rote and routine gangster movie that borrows liberally from Scorsese, right down to a long GOODFELLAS tracking shot when Reggie takes his girlfriend and eventual wife Frances (Emily Browning) to a nightclub, and pissed off British mobsters constantly calling each other "cunts" instead of "jerkoffs." The time element in LEGEND isn't handled very well--we know the Krays ruled London from the late '50s to the late '60s, but the film seems to start in the late '60s and we see their ascent in the nightclub scene after a partnership with Philadelphia-based gangster Angelo Bruno (Chazz Palminteri shows up for a couple of scenes), a top underling of Meyer Lansky. There's conflict with the Krays' cash handler Leslie Payne (David Thewlis) and hapless flunky Jack McVittie (Sam Spruell), whose brutal murder at the hands of an enraged Reggie is what would eventually be the beginning of the end for the Krays, with Reggie sentenced to life in prison in 1967, though he'd get a "compassionate release" in 2000, when he was dying of cancer and had only a few weeks to live (Ronnie would succumb to a fatal heart attack in prison in 1995).
Helgeland sticks to the standard-issue tropes and basics here, with a lot of time spent on Reggie and Frances' crumbling marriage while curiously glossing over Ronnie's relationship with "Mad Teddy" Smith (KINGSMAN's Taron Egerton). He also utilizes the hackneyed device of having the film narrated by a dead character, and even resorts to a sneering Reggie confronting dogged Scotland Yard inspector Nipper Read (Christopher Eccleston) with the obligatory "Ya know, we're not all that different, you and I" speech. Hardy is exponentially more effective as the Krays than the Spandau Ballet siblings were, but THE KRAYS is the overall better film even though it took some liberties with history. THE KRAYS had a vicious and ominously sinister LONG GOOD FRIDAY feel, along with a WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?-esque freakshow of a performance by the great Billie Whitelaw as the Krays' harridan mother, a character who barely figures into LEGEND and mainly just makes a couple of dismissive remarks about how Frances can't make a decent cup of tea. By comparison, LEGEND just feels like an overlong Scorsese retread in a London setting. A much bigger success in the UK than in the US, where its planned nationwide release was busted down to a limited run at the last minute, LEGEND inspired two cheap, Asylum-worthy British knockoffs with this year's THE RISE OF THE KRAYS and THE FALL OF THE KRAYS, as movies about the Krays are apparently to the UK what Coco Chanel biopics are to France. (R, 132 mins)
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (US/UK - 2015) Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Cast: Colin Firth, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Caine, Mark Strong, Taron Egerton, Sofia Boutella, Sophie Cookson, Mark Hamill, Jack Davenport, Samantha Womack, Hanna Alstrom, Bjorn Floberg, Geoff Bell, Ralph Ineson, Richard Brake. (R, 129 mins)
Like 2010's KICK-ASS, director Matthew Vaughn's last adaptation of a Mark Millar comic book series, KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (which Millar co-created with Dave Gibbons) takes unbridled joy in pushing the envelope and poking people with sticks. Without a little girl dropping countless F-and-C-bombs, KINGSMAN isn't going to attract quite the same level of controversy. Nevertheless, some are taking umbrage with the hilarious final shot, essentially a very hard-R riff on all of those quips and double entendres that would close out a James Bond movie as 007 wraps up the adventure and canoodles with the Bond girl while M or Q or Moneypenny listen or observe with their disapproving "Really, 007!" facial expressions. The entire film is an homage to the more lighthearted spy films of old, particularly Roger Moore's tenure as 007, while also functioning as a meta commentary on spy movies in general, with characters lamenting that today's genre items are much too serious and downbeat. That's an especially amusing aside, considering two of this film's stars--Colin Firth and Mark Strong--appeared in 2011's low-key and magnificently somber TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. The connection to spy films past extends to the presence of the legendary Michael Caine, who played British agent Harry Palmer in a series of five films from 1965 to 1996. Vaughn and regular co-writer Jane Goldman play these meta elements just enough that they remain amusing, wisely resisting the urge to make it too self-consciously cute. For the most part, KINGSMAN is bit on the longish side and, like so many of its present-day counterparts, suffers from some blasts of dubious CGI that's distracting in its cartoonish artifice, though I tend to be a little more lenient on that when it's a comic book adaptation. Overall, KINGSMEN is generally witty and wildly entertaining, deftly mixing thrilling action, big laughs, and shocking violence, aided by a fine cast of serious actors obviously enjoying themselves and having a good time.
Unemployed London troublemaker Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) gets into a row at a pub and retaliates by taking the guy's car for a joyride. Arrested, Eggsy resorts to an emergency number on the back of a medal given to him 17 years earlier by Harry Hart (Firth), a co-worker of his late father, who died on the job. He was told to call that number if he ever needed anything, and 17 years later, he calls in that favor and is sprung from jail by Hart with all charges dropped. Hart tells Eggsy that he's a Kingsman--like his father--an agent in a top-secret government intelligence agency. Hart, codename Galahad, feels responsible for Eggsy, as Eggsy's father saved the lives of Galahad and other Kingsman agents by diving on top of an Iraqi suicide bomber, sacrificing himself for the greater good of the team. It so happens that there's a vacancy in the Kingsman agency--which Galahad would like filled by Eggsy-- after Lancelot (Jack Davenport) is killed by Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), a legless assassin with prosthetic, sharpened Oscar Pistorius-like running blades. Gazelle is the chief henchman to eccentric, billionaire internet mogul Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), a philanthropist whose supposed concern with climate change is a cover for a far more nefarious master plan. Valentine orchestrates a global giveaway of SIM cards that provide free phone and internet service for everyone, for life. As evidenced during a trial run at a Kentucky church, whose congregation is filled with hatemongering racists, gun nuts, and homophobes, the internet signal received by those with Valentine's SIM cards causes its users to behave in uncontrollably violent, destructive fashion. The SIM card is a mind and impulse control/manipulation signal, and Valentine has been meeting with and occasionally kidnapping the world's more important dignitaries and luminaries--including prominent climate change expert Prof. Arnold (Mark Hamill in some in-joke casting, playing a character who was originally named "Mark Hamill" in the comic book)--and implanting a chip behind their ears to make them immune from the signal, thereby giving an overcrowded, global warming-damaged world a much-needed do-over, where the lesser, more gullible people of society remove themselves from the equation and the rich and privileged one-percenters reign supreme. As Eggsy and others are trained in the ways of the Kingsman by their mentor Merlin (Strong), Galahad conducts an investigation of Valentine at the behest of the agency's leader Arthur (Caine), one that will put the entire organization to a test in order to save the planet from the megalomaniacal madman.
As goofy as KINGSMAN is, its plot isn't any more ludicrous than something like MOONRAKER (some of the climax even takes place in space!). From the various Kingsman gadgets to Valentine's insane plot and his lethal right-hand (wo)man with some kind of gimmicky physical attribute to Jackson's loud and hammy performance, KINGSMAN frequently resembles a lighthearted 007 entry if Bond was paired up with a street-smart soccer hooligan for a sidekick. Egerton does a fine job as Eggsy, with his cocky exterior masking smarts and sensitivity on which Galahad is willing to stake his reputation. The relationship that forms between the two men--one who never knew his father and the other who blames himself for it--is portrayed very nicely by Egerton and Firth. But it's really Jackson, acting like a mash-up between Spike Lee, Mark Cuban, and Auric Goldfinger, who steals the show. KINGSMAN also offers a lot in the way of ballsy, subversive jabs, not only at the massacre of a bunch of brainless Kentucky yokels who gather at the very Westboro Baptist-esque church to spread their hate and intolerance, but in the corrupt politicians in Valentine's pocket--there's digs at the left and the right here--and the way they sell everyone out to save their own asses, not to mention what Sweden's Princess Tilde (Hanna Alstrom) is willing to do if the world is saved. KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE takes the PUNISHER: WAR ZONE approach to older spy movies, but is a bit like a more refined KICK-ASS. It's still got something to offend everyone, but does so in the classiest way possible. It's a film that sets out to entertain while occasionally making your jaw drop and wondering "Did it really go there?" Yes, it does, and that's exactly why it's such great fun, and it's Vaughn's best film since his directing debut with 2004's LAYER CAKE.
INTERSTELLAR (US - 2014) Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, William Devane, Timothee Chalamet, Leah Cairns, David Oyelowo, Collette Wolfe, voices of Bill Irwin, Josh Stewart. (PG-13, 169 mins)
Like the work of his contemporary David Fincher, the films of Christopher Nolan are among the very few that qualify as legitimate "event" films. A master filmmaker who, like Fincher, consistently draws comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, Nolan has one of the finest track records of any filmmaker in the modern era, even with the inevitable backlash that comes with such a high level of acclaim. Through MEMENTO, the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, and INCEPTION, Nolan's scope and vision grow with each new project. His latest film, INTERSTELLAR, is his most ambitious yet, a stunning sci-fi saga filled with state-of-the-art visual effects, a memorable, organ-driven Hans Zimmer score, breathtaking cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY), and excellent performances all around, and one packed with such grandiose vision that it can't be contained in one reality or even in one galaxy. With obvious influences including the likes of Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (1972), along with Douglas Trumbull's SILENT RUNNING (1972), Robert Zemeckis' CONTACT (1997), and Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE (2007), INTERSTELLAR often feels like it's juggling too many hard sci-fi concepts. On one hand, it's almost impossible to not marvel at such a staggering achievement, but on the other, it magnifies Nolan's few weaknesses. In the span of just a few moments, your mouth is agape at what you're seeing, then you're groaning as the characters overexplain something for the third or fourth time. Again utilizing his trademark intercutting (think of that SUV's endless plummet into the water in INCEPTION), Nolan can present a brilliantly-edited set piece of nail-biting intensity with three or more distinct and equally suspenseful things simultaneously unfolding, then follow it with a hoary cliche like someone taking their last dying, gasping breath as they're about to reveal a deep, dark secret.
INTERSTELLAR takes place in a near future where Earth is dangerously close to being unable to sustain itself. Crops are scarce--they've just lost okra and corn is on its way out. Cities resemble a new Dust Bowl, the New York Yankees play to a crowd that consists of a few people on a small set of bleachers and the roster is filled with people who have no idea how to play baseball. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a NASA-trained ex-pilot and widower struggling to make it as a farmer while supporting his teenage son Tom (Timothee Chalamet), ten-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and his wry, wise father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). Times have changed--all government money goes toward farming and organizations like NASA have been disbanded and discredited, as evidenced by Murph getting suspended from school for bringing an old textbook that doesn't reflect the new accepted version of history: that NASA wasn't a legit outfit and the moon landings were faked to help bankrupt the Soviet Union. Books keep falling off of Murph's bookshelf and Cooper dismisses her talk that it's a "ghost." Dust blowing in the windows falls in a specific pattern on her bedroom floor. Scientist and curious mind that he still is at heart, and Murph being his daughter, they eventually figure out that the pattern is a code for coordinates on a map. They follow it and stumble on a seemingly abandoned NORAD outpost in the desert that houses what's left of the space program: Cooper's old mentor Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), his protegee/daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), scientists Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi), and the de facto head of NASA (William Devane). Brand tells Cooper that 50 years earlier, a wormhole was discovered behind Saturn and probes sent through it found another galaxy with a dozen potentially habitable planets. Earth has, at most, a generation left before it dies, and they need to find another planet to sustain human life and carry on the species, either by colonizing it with the humans left on Earth or, if that fails, by incubating fertilized eggs on the new planet. Twelve astronauts were sent on a mission a decade earlier to survey each of the planets. Nine have been eliminated from contention and Amelia, Doyle, and Romilly need a pilot to get them through the wormhole to investigate the three planets where colonization has been deemed possible and attempt to locate the surviving astronauts.
Of course, Cooper leaves his family behind and has no idea how long he'll be gone, which doesn't go over well with Murph. A miscalculation by Amelia results in three members of the team--Amelia, Cooper, and Doyle--spending over three hours on a planet where one hour equals seven Earth years. When they return to the main spacecraft, Romilly is 23 years older and there's communication messages from the now-grown Tom (Casey Affleck) and the still-resentful Murph (Jessica Chastain), who's now working with the elderly and wheelchair-bound Prof. Brand to finish the equation that will being the quartet back to Earth. It's here that INTERSTELLAR goes in directions that are best approached knowing as little as possible.
In many ways, it's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY if Kubrick films had the ability to be warm and sentimental. And that streak of sentimentality is where INTERSTELLAR sometimes stumbles. Nolan is clinical and doesn't wear sentimental well. His protagonists--think Guy Pearce's Leonard Shelby in MEMENTO, Christian Bale's Alfred Borden in THE PRESTIGE and Bruce Wayne in the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb in INCEPTION--are driven by emotion that's been distorted into obsession and, in most cases, revenge. That cold focus is something that draws the Kubrick analogies. Practically every major character in INTERSTELLAR gets a scene where Zimmer's score--quite majestic and often dark but still a bit much at times--swells up John Williams-style as tears roll down their faces. This look doesn't suit Nolan, and sometimes, the film seems less inspired by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or SOLARIS or SUNSHINE (there's even talk of doing a shortcut to "sling-shot" around a black hole to land on one of the planets, much like the Boyle film's last-ditch, desperate "sling-shot" effort to drop the payload and restart the sun), and more like a secret, elaborate, hard sci-fi adaptation of the 1977 Todd Rundgren/Utopia song "Love is the Answer." The song's not in the movie, but someone at a more maudlin point in the proceedings alludes to love being the answer, which made me think of the song, and well, here, read the lyrics:
Name your price
A ticket to paradise
I can't stay here any more
And I've looked high and low
I've been from shore to shore to shore
If there's a short cut I'd have found it
But there's no easy way around it
Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer
Shine on us all, set us free
Love is the answer
Who knows why
Someday we all must die
Were all homeless boys and girls
And we are never heard
It's such a lonely world
People turn their heads and walk on by
Tell me, is it worth just another try?
Tell me, are we alive, or just a dying planet?
What are the chances?
Ask the man in your heart for the answers
Nolan's films have a grim darkness to them and that extends to INTERSTELLAR, particularly in some the mid-film plot turns. All the tears and the crying makes for an uneven work as Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan try to have it both ways, and it's the same thing that made something like A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001) so frustrating, as Steven Spielberg brought a never-realized Kubrick project to life and you can see in the film the precise moment where Kubrick's cold, clinical script ended and Spielberg's heart-tugging contributions took flight. Some of it works with INTERSTELLAR, particularly Cooper seeing the 23 years older Murph on a video message and realizing how bitter she remains over him leaving. It's heartbreakingly played by both McConaughey and Chastain, who's very good throughout. Other times, such as the climax (well, one of the climaxes, I should say), which follows this film's version of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY's "Jupiter and beyond the infinite..." set piece, and Prof. Brand's repeated invocation of Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," the Nolan brothers are just belaboring the point for maximum mawkishness.
Please note that these are immediate reactions. Like Kubrick, Nolan is a filmmaker whose work is difficult to judge on one viewing. That's never been the case more than it is with INTERSTELLAR, a flawed film with some issues of tone that nonetheless has too many brilliant sequences and powerful performances to dismiss. There's a lot to process here, and for everything that doesn't work, there's ten things that do. Performances are terrific across the board, with Hathaway, Lithgow, and young Foy also standing out, in addition to a sardonic and droll work by Bill Irwin as the voice of TARS, the ship's robot, ballbusting the crew with his humor setting at 95% ("Why don't we take that down to 75?" Cooper instructs TARS after the robot jokes about using them as slaves for his planned robot colony). It's a gargantuan, visually dazzling, and often thematically bold piece of work, but in the end, it's really just a bigger, longer SUNSHINE, one of the most underrated sci-fi films of the last decade. INTERSTELLAR is demonstrative of Nolan wanting to make his Kubrick groundbreaker and Tarkovsky art film but needing to make sure it's Spielberg-accessible and audience-friendly. Most of the time, the reconciling of those two goals balances out, but the film struggles in the moments when that balance is lost.
