The kind of modest, uncomplicated programmer that just can't find a place in today's blockbuster-driven, franchise-focused business model, CHUCK is a film that should've been given a chance to be the sleeper hit it was obviously made to be. A long-in-the-works pet project of veteran actor Liev Schreiber, who also co-produced and co-wrote the script, CHUCK is a biopic of boxer Chuck Wepner, aka "The Bayonne Bleeder," the heavyweight champ of New Jersey. Wepner was never a major player in boxing outside of the Garden State but he made it far enough to get a shot at the title, almost going the distance at 36 years of age in a 1975 fight with Muhammad Ali, ultimately losing by TKO when the fight was stopped with 19 seconds left in the final round. Wepner's career fizzled for a few more years, when he would often be reduced to exhibition bouts with bears and, in one famous 1976 stunt, legendary wrestler Andre the Giant. Wepner retired from the ring in 1978, around the time he began benefiting from the notoriety of Sylvester Stallone and ROCKY when word started going around that Stallone's script was inspired by Wepner's bout with Ali. Stallone (played here by a surprisingly well-cast Morgan Spector) never confirmed it, but Wepner dined out on his tenuous connection to ROCKY for years, even getting an audition for a small part in ROCKY II and blowing it when he shows up late and coked-up and having not even taken a cursory glance at Stallone's script.
Schreiber worked on the script with Jerry Stahl (PERMANENT MIDNIGHT), Michael Cristofer (GIA), and Jeff Feuerzeig, a Wepner authority who directed the documentary THE REAL ROCKY for ESPN's 30 FOR 30 series. CHUCK doesn't sugarcoat its subject: he's obnoxious, self-absorbed, and a total bullshit artist. His wandering eye and his need to always be putting on a show drives his wife Phyliss (Elisabeth Moss) and daughter Kimberly (Sadie Sink) away. He's also all too eager to dive into the hedonistic, coke-fueled excess of the disco era '70s until he's eventually caught in an a drug sting and sent to prison in the 1980s. Schreiber is terrific as Wepner, and while nothing here is particularly fresh--Quebecois director Philippe Falardeau has obviously studied every move in the Martin Scorsese playbook--CHUCK works the biopic formula perfectly. Excellent performances all around give it a tremendous boost--Naomi Watts as a sassy bartender eyed by Chuck, Michael Rapaport as his estranged brother, Jim Gaffigan as his best buddy and chief enabler, and a scene-stealing Ron Perlman as his grouchy, Mickey-like trainer--and the period detail is convincing without being oversold. That's a pleasant surprise considering that it's produced by Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage, and while much of it was shot in NYC, the involvement of Avi Lerner means there was some work at the Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria, and from the looks of it, they were probably the boxing sequences and the exhibition bouts set in the strip club run by Chuck's sleazy pal (former DAILY SHOW correspondent Jason Jones), which take place on a set that should look familiar to anyone who's seen an UNDISPUTED sequel. CHUCK isn't award-caliber filmmaking, but it's solid entertainment that's well-acted, unpretentious, and doesn't overstay its welcome. In a summer filled with underperforming "sure things," a movie like CHUCK might've caught on and been a minor hit. But hey, whatever...I guess we needed another TRANSFORMERS loitering on four screens at a theater near you. (R, 98 mins)
KILL SWITCH (US/Netherlands - 2017)
If you're a follower of gut instinct, you may be ready to dismiss KILL SWITCH before it even begins once you're aware that director Tim Smit stylizes his palindrome name as "TimSmiT." But even if you give TimSmiT a pass, there's still plenty of reason to not even bother with KILL SWITCH, a tedious and abrasively off-putting hard sci-fi outing that borrows tons of ideas from other movies and TV shows but can't weave any of them into a story that's even remotely coherent. Shot in 2014 as REDIVIDER and probably only released at all because of Dan Stevens' starring turn in the live-action Disney blockbuster BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, KILL SWITCH takes place in a near-future where the world has run out of all energy resources. Physicist and former astronaut Will Porter (Stevens) is summoned to Holland by Abigail Vos (SKYFALL'S Berenice Marlohe), a representative of Alterplex Energy, a mysterious corporation run by billionaire Reynard (Gijs Scholten van Aschat). They've built a massive tower in Amsterdam that's a portal to "The Echo," an alternate, mirror image Earth created by Alterplex to be used to pool endless resources and energy for the real Earth. Just after the Tower goes live, the screen fades to black and Porter wakes up inside The Echo in possession of the "Redivider," a box designed to destroy The Echo's mainframe. It seems miscalculations were made by Reynard, and now one of the worlds--Earth or The Echo--must be destroyed to save the other. Judging from what's on display here, maybe TimSmiT should've considered annihilating both to save audiences from KILL SWITCH.
Making his directing debut, TimSmiT, a veteran special effects designer on films on recent VOD/DTV titles like LAST PASSENGER and TIGER HOUSE, takes an almost Murphy's Law approach. Other than some decent visual effects--no surprise since that's his day job--whatever can go wrong does as TimSmiT makes one bad decision after another. His attempt to turn it into a first-person shooter POV video game might predate the already forgotten HARDCORE HENRY, but by cutting back and forth between timelines with the first-person POV in The Echo and scenes on Earth with Porter and his sister (Charity Wakefield, one of the most awesomely British names this side of Benedict Cumberbatch) and her special needs son (Kasper van Groesen), TimSmiT kills any momentum that he might be building. The time element is a completely incomprehensible jumble, the rules of The Echo are never really established, and a potentially interesting character like underground rebel leader Hugo (Mike Libanon) is killed off almost immediately after he's introduced. KILL SWITCH is a miserable experience of SKYLINE proportions that starts in a confusing fashion and never gets its act together, stumbling all the way to an unsatisfying finish. The dumbest thing TimSmiT does--aside from doing that with his name--is having a charismatic and intense actor like Stevens (who was so great in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES and THE GUEST) at his disposal and leaving him offscreen for most of the movie. Stevens only worked on this for four days as TimSmiT cranked out his Earth scenes quickly and then used a stand-in to wear the GoPro for the first-person POV shots, then had Stevens revoice the stand-in a two-hour recording session after the rest of the film was finished. It's a level of commitment usually reserved for the likes of Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal, and it's kind of trifle that Stevens probably wishes he never made, with the end result being a sci-fi film so irritating that its only surprise is that Sharlto Copley isn't in it. (R, 92 mins)
SULLY (US - 2016) Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Todd Komarnicki. Cast: Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney, Mike O'Malley, Jamey Sheridan, Anna Gunn, Chris Bauer, Holt McCallany, Patch Darragh, Ann Cusack, Jane Gabbert, Molly Hagan, Michael Rapaport, Jeff Kober, Jerry Ferrara, Sam Huntington, Christopher Curry, Max Adler, Autumn Reeser, Jeffrey Nordling, Valerie Mahaffey, Delphi Harrington. (PG-13, 96 mins) It may seem like a stretch to make a feature film out of a six-minute incident and with SULLY, that proves to be the case. In a sense, it's an unusual project for Clint Eastwood who, at 86, is showing no signs of slowing down, working at a Woody Allen pace that renders a lot of his films a blur (quick: when's the last time you thought of JERSEY BOYS, HEREAFTER, or CHANGELING?). At just 96 minutes, SULLY is the shortest film he's ever directed, when one valid criticism that's been leveled at him over the years is his inability to keep a movie under two hours. But even 96 minutes seems too long for SULLY, which recreates the January 15, 2009 "Miracle on the Hudson" landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River no less than three times over the course of the film, along with a drawn-out climax that consists of characters at a National Transportation Safety Board hearing watching multiple real-time computer simulations. There's maybe a 70-minute movie here, but feature films don't run 70 minutes anymore. The short length aside, SULLY is very much a Clint Eastwood movie, with Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger (played here by Tom Hanks) a classic Eastwood hero: a professional, morally upstanding man who's spent his entire life doing his job and doing the right thing. Sully is respected by his colleagues, loved by his family, a man who follows his gut instincts and gets the job done. He's got problems like everyone else--in his case, a money pit property that's been long vacant and causing some significant financial worry--but his performance on the job is never less than stellar. All of that comes into question in SULLY when, just after takeoff on a flight with 155 people onboard, a bird strike causes both engines to burn out and fail. Quick-thinking Sully and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) run through the protocol and attempt to turn around to land at LaGuardia or at Teterboro in New Jersey. Unable to make it without the risk of a crash-landing in the city, Sully lands the plane on the frigid Hudson, and though some passengers were injured and flight attendant Doreen Welsh (Molly Hagan) suffered a severe laceration on her leg, everyone survived and Sully was hailed as an American hero.
It's a feelgood story for the ages, but Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki (PERFECT STRANGER) need a dramatic element. Sure, there's Sully's post-landing second-guessing of his decisions and a certain degree of PTSD suffered by the two pilots, but that's not enough. Shot entirely with IMAX cameras, SULLY does a convincing job of putting the audience right there with Sully and Skiles in a real-time recreation of the incident. Eastwood has a knack for getting into the nuts-and-bolts minutiae of a job down cold, whether it's here with the flight attendants ("BRACE! BRACE! BRACE! HEADS DOWN! STAY DOWN!") and the air traffic controllers or with the way he showed prison employees going about their preparation for an execution in 1999's TRUE CRIME. With the camera capturing every worried look on the faces of Sully and Skiles and with the skillful, precision-timed editing of Blu Murray, the depiction of the bird strike and the subsequent water landing is unquestionably the high point of SULLY. Outside of the plane, Eastwood wisely lets the film rest on the shoulders of Hanks, who continues to cement his status as the Jimmy Stewart "everyman" of his generation. The actor gets fine support by an understated Eckhart, whose Skiles is such a likable character (his film-ending closing line brings down the house) that he almost manages to steal the movie from Hanks.
But as with other Eastwood biographical works, SULLY plays a little too fast and loose with the facts. It isn't quite the borderline hagiography of Chris Kyle and Frankie Valli that were AMERICAN SNIPER and JERSEY BOYS, respectively, nor is it filled with the hokey simplicity of INVICTUS, probably his worst film as a director. The "Miracle on the Hudson" is a story where the closest thing to a villain is a flock of birds that were flying in the wrong place at the wrong time. To counter that, Eastwood and Komarnicki turn the NTSB investigators into the de facto bad guys, going through the list of standard protocol questions but with a tone that starts out incredulous and rapidly escalates to accusatory and prosecutorial. All of the NTSB computer simulations re-enacted by experienced pilots indicate Sully could've made it to LaGuardia. Sully and Skiles both disagree, but Sully's career and pension are on the line if he's wrong, with the head of the inquiry, Charles Porter (Mike O'Malley), glaring at Sully with a seething contempt that borders on snarling hostility by the end. The names of the NTSB investigators were changed for the movie (at Sullenberger's request, according to Hanks, as Sully himself felt that the script's depiction of them was inaccurate). O'Malley's "Charles Porter" doesn't exist, but Robert Benzon, the actual head of the investigation, has spoken out against the film's presentation of the NTSB officials as hatchet men bent on taking Sully down. The investigation was cordial and without such incident, never as inflammatory and antagonistic as SULLY suggests, but it fits into Eastwood's recurring motif of working men in the field and on the frontlines always suffering at the hands of bureaucrats, desk jockeys, and pencil pushers, and ever-hobbled by an over-reliance on technology when the old ways are still the best.
This idea has gone back to the police commissioner and the mayor never just letting Dirty Harry do his job and blow away some scumbags or how the young brainiacs at NASA need the old guys to bail them out in 2000's SPACE COWBOYS. This was evidenced in Eastwood's last film to date as an actor, 2012's TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, where he was in his now-standard, post-GRAN TORINO "Get off my lawn!" mode as a cranky old baseball scout who has no use for "those damn computers" and young punk scouts who only look at numbers and don't feel the game in their hearts ("Anybody that uses computers doesn't know a damn thing about this game," he growls). Eastwood heroes have no use for that shit--they go with their guts and their instincts. Sully did that on January 15, 2009, but he also wasn't subsequently targeted by the NTSB. Fact-based films have always taken dramatic liberties. Even Paul Greengrass' CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, a film whose closing minutes feature arguably the finest acting Hanks has ever done, had to make you care about a guy who, by most accounts, was kind of an asshole and wasn't really well-liked by his peers. Things have to be depicted in different ways for dramatic purposes, but with SULLY, the shoehorning-in of the NTSB out to "get" Sully only serves to demonstrate just how little material is here for a feature-length film. SULLY can't even find anything for three-time Oscar-nominee Laura Linney to do as Mrs. Sully besides sit at home in her kitchen, sob into a phone and repeatedly ask "Is it almost over, Sully?" To Eastwood's credit, he doesn't go full PATCH ADAMS and have all of the passengers walk into the inquiry and prompt the NTSB meanies to have change of heart and start slow-clapping until Sully gets a standing ovation from the entire room, but it doesn't seem out of the question, especially the borderline mic-drop of a way that Sully shuts down Porter (which never happened). Still, the entire room smiles and nods as if to say "You showed them, Sully!" The flight sequences and the excellent work by Hanks and Eckhart (and, briefly, Patch Darragh as Patrick Harten, the air traffic controller trying to talk Sully down to LaGuardia) make SULLY worthwhile viewing, but the rest suffers from forced and fabricated conflict that simply didn't exist.
