MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT (US/China - 2018) Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Monaghan, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Wes Bentley, Vanessa Kirby, Frederick Schmidt, Liang Yang, Kristoffer Joner, Caspar Phillipson, Alix Benezech. (PG-13, 147 mins) Big-budget summer blockbusters don't get much more entertaining than MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT, the sixth film in the durable, 22-year-old franchise. An incredible jolt of adrenaline in cinematic form, FALLOUT is easily the best in the M:I series so far, and it might even be the best movie Tom Cruise has ever made. Setting aside his batshit religion, Cruise may very well be The Last Movie Star and only a fool would count him out after a trio of forgettable underperformers--JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK, THE MUMMY, and AMERICAN MADE--that had all of the entertainment industry prognosticators concluding that the now-56-year-old (!) actor was washed-up and his time had passed. While we justifiably question the necessity of a TOP GUN sequel that's due out next year, FALLOUT is Cruise here and now in a series that's been on a roll, reteaming him once more with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning USUAL SUSPECTS screenwriter who emerged from an eight-year sabbatical to become Cruise's most trusted aide-de-camp in either writing (VALKYRIE, EDGE OF TOMORROW, THE MUMMY) or directing (JACK REACHER, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION) capacities in the ensuing decade. What everyone was saying about MAD MAX: FURY ROAD three years ago holds true here: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is an instant classic in the action genre.
A direct sequel to ROGUE NATION, FALLOUT is as convoluted as you'd expect, with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), botching a mission to intercept three weapons-grade plutonium orbs that end up in the hands of The Apostles, a splinter cell offshoot of The Syndicate, the organization run by international terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who was apprehended in the previous film. Assigned to retrieve the plutonium by IMF boss Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), the team is overruled by CIA chief Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett), who orders her own operative and attack dog Walker (Henry Cavill) to tag along. The story moves all over the globe, as Hunt ends up posing as a mystery man named John Lark, set to buy the plutonium from the Apostles with a wealthy socialite and arms dealer known as The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) acting as a go-between. Things get even more complicated when The Apostles refuse to pay for the plutonium, instead insisting that if "Lark"/Hunt wants the plutonium, he has to help Lane escape from a military-fortified prison transport. Throw in MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and her own assignment to kill Lane, Hunt being framed as a rogue agent once more, and a scheming Walker clearly up to games of his own, and the stage is set for one double-cross and jaw-dropping action set piece after another for a two-and-a-half hour stretch that's over before know it.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is a movie that just doesn't quit. It's a preposterous delight and a rare instance of an action film that actually merits the comparison to the proverbial standby blurb of a non-stop rollercoaster ride. Though there's some conservatively-deployed CGI and visual effects, the abundance of practical stunt work and action choreography solidifies Cruise's standing as Hollywood's most death-defying madman. McQuarrie's puzzle-like story construction and recurring motif of "Who's really who?" recalls THE USUAL SUSPECTS, but there's also generous helpings of humor and warmth among the IMF characters who, to borrow a term from the FAST AND THE FURIOUS series, have really become family by this point (it's Hunt's unwillingness to sacrifice Luther that causes him to lose the plutonium in the prologue, something that Sloane and Walker never stop reminding him). FAST AND THE FURIOUS fans may want to argue the point, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a big-budget franchise still creatively firing on all cylinders and running better than ever six installments deep. It's impossible to pick a best scene--the HALO jump, the bone-smashing men's room throwdown, the epic boat/car/motorcycle chase through Paris, the greatest "Tom Cruise running" sequence ever, or the nerve-wracking, INCEPTION-like cross-cutting race against time in the climax, when the team tracks Lane to a medical camp in Kashmir where a smallpox outbreak caused by The Apostles has just been contained, which involves a helicopter chase, a brawl that spills over to the side of a mountain, and the defusing of two nuclear devices. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is crowd-pleasing, edge-of-your-seat, popcorn movie perfection, the kind of relentlessly heart-pounding, balls-to-the-wall barnburner that restores your faith in the summer blockbuster.
A passion project that Martin Scorsese's had in various stages of development since acquiring the rights to Shusako Endo's 1966 novel in the late '80s, SILENCE completes the legendary filmmaker's unofficial religious trilogy that began with 1988's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and 1997's KUNDUN. SILENCE was already made into a movie once with a 1971 Japanese adaptation, but SILENCE '16 again demonstrates Scorsese's recurring obsessions with faith and religion, themes that go back as far as his earliest films like 1968's WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR? and 1973's MEAN STREETS. Make no mistake--SILENCE is a horse pill. It's slow-moving and sometimes punishingly long at 161 minutes, which almost seems by design to put you in the mindset of his central character. It's the kind of visually stunning epic that you rarely see any more, equal parts Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, and Francis Ford Coppola, but filtered through the uniquely singular vision of arguably the greatest living American filmmaker. It's the reality of getting movies made today, but it's hard to believe that a director of Scorsese's reputation and stature has to get funding from a truckload of production companies (including the unlikely involvement of VOD and Redbox B-movie dealmakers Emmett/Furla Films, taking a break from being a half-assed Golan & Globus for a rare bid at respectability) from four countries with 40 (!) credited producers. C'mon, Hollywood studios. This is Martin Fucking Scorsese. If he comes to you with a project, give him the money. His films tend to stand the test of time, if that even matters anymore. Sure, they can't all be TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, and GOODFELLAS, but can you name a terrible Martin Scorsese film?
In 17th century Macau, two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Father Sebastiao Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield, having a breakout 2016 and even better here than he was in his Oscar-nominated turn in HACKSAW RIDGE) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) journey to Japan in search of their mentor Father Cristovao Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Ferreira's been missing for seven years, and a letter turns up in the hands of Bishop Valignano (Ciarin Hinds)--a letter the rogue Ferreira sent years earlier, indicating that he's apostasized, renouncing Christianity, leaving the priesthood and has no intention of returning from a missionary trip to Japan, where he's taken a wife and wishes to live a normal life. Instinctively concluding that this letter doesn't sound like the words of Ferreira, Rodrigues and Garupe insist on finding their teacher and embark on a trip that will draw obvious comparisons to Heart of Darkness and APOCALYPSE NOW, but also the grueling sort of quest that recalls Herzog's AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD and FITZCARRALDO, as well as Roland Joffe's THE MISSION. The missionaries will be double-crossed by guide Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozoka), will eventually be separated, and the story will focus primarily on Rodrigues. Rodrigues clashes with Inquisitor Inoue (a scene-stealing Issey Ogata), a powerful official hellbent on stopping the spread of Christianity in Japan, and willing to torture, crucify, and kill to do so (one harrowing scene has converted Japanese Christians crucified at sea, drowned by the incoming tide, then having their bodies set ablaze so they can't be given a Christian burial). Rodrigues will eventually find Ferreira and he isn't quite the Col. Kurtz-like madman you might be expecting. SILENCE is a difficult and challenging film that has definite slow stretches but it rewards the patient viewer. The script by Scorsese and Jay Cocks unfolds like a richly-textured novel, taking its time to build and establish the characters and get you in their heads, which makes the complete experience all the more powerful. Pitched by distributor Paramount as a major awards-season contender, SILENCE played well in NYC and Los Angeles but bombed hard when it expanded into wide release, relegated to one 9:55 pm showing per day when it finally made it to my area. It was almost shut out of the Oscars, earning just one nomination for Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography. It's not the kind of film that will appeal to casual moviegoers or even to casual Scorsese fans (though it explores recurring themes in his work, its style is more Terrence Malick than Scorsese). It's an often profoundly moving film about deeply committed faith, one that's philosophical without being preachy, and if you've followed Scorsese through the years, you'll recognize his passion and his concerns, his voice coming through even though it's somewhat of a stylistic departure for him. (R, 161 mins)
PATRIOTS DAY (US/China - 2016)
You might think it takes a special breed of asshole to bag on a movie that honors the victims and heroes of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, but it takes a special breed of asshole to create a bullshit composite character and make almost the whole thing about him. Composite characters are dramatic necessities in narrative chronicles of true events but here, it's a clumsy distraction that's alternately insulting and unintentionally hilarious. The last and by far the least of director/co-writer Peter Berg's unofficial "Mark Wahlberg: American Hero" trilogy (after LONE SURVIVOR and the underrated DEEPWATER HORIZON), PATRIOTS DAY has Wahlberg playing Tommy Saunders, a composite character created specifically for the film. Tommy, or as he'll be known from here on, "Tawmy," is a plays-by-his-own-rules homicide sergeant who played by his own rules one too many times and got temporarily busted down to patrolman. But he's free and clear and out of the doghouse after one more day--you guessed it--Patriots Day. Tawmy's got a bum knee but puts on a brace, plays through the pain, and does his jawb, and he's right there when the bombs set by the Tsarnaev brothers--Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) and Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff)--go off. He immediately calls for backup and oversees the triage unit, and when FBI Special Agent Rick DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) and Gov. Deval Patrick (Michael Beach) show up at the scene, they know that the only person they need to consult is, of course, Tawmy.
Tawmy's right there at the center of the action at the command center, taking charge and making sure everyone's on the same page, and thank Gawd he's there to inform DesLauriers how investigations work, imploring "Hey! Listen! I was hawmicide! Witnesses! We should talk to witnesses! Maybe somebody saw somethin'!" as everyone within earshot nods in agreement. Yeah, because I'm sure veteran FBI Special Agent Rick DesLauriers who, according to his FBI bio, has been an agent since 1987, has no fucking idea how to do his job, so props to Tawmy for being there to show him how it's done. Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman) also holds back on making any decisions until he runs things by Tawmy, who's given a special role in the investigation when DesLauriers asks "Hey, you know this area pretty well, right?" because obviously there's no way any other cawp knows more about Boston than Tawmy Saunders, Super Cawp! Because Tawmy can't be there for every break in the investigation without turning the film into outright fiction, when an FBI agent spots a possible suspect in Dzhokhar in surveillance footage, the first person DesLauriers alerts to this discovery is Tawmy. Later on, Tawmy's also the cop who first spots Dzhokhar hiding in a boat in a Watertown resident's backyard, and that's not long after a shootout between Watertown cops and the Tsarnaev brothers where one Watertown cop opens fire, shouting "Welcome to Watertown, motherfucker!" It's telling that the two best sequences in the film--Chinese college student Dun Meng's (Jimmy O. Yang) carjacking by and subsequent escape from the Tsarnaevs, and Tamerlan's American wife (Melissa Benoist) being interrogated by a sinister black ops agent (Khandi Alexander, killing it in just a few minutes of screen time)--are nail-biting set pieces that don't involve Wahlberg, at least until the Zelig-like Tawmy is the one who responds to Dun's 911 call, because of course he does. Why not just make an Altman-esque ensemble piece showing how all of these people worked together in pursuit of the suspects? PATRIOTS DAY pays a lot of lip service to the notion of a community coming together but in execution, it's almost all about Tawmy. I get that Tawmy is a symbol of "Boston Strong," but it just gets silly. Why clumsily straddle the line between paying reverent tribute and making a formulaic Mark Wahlberg vehicle, especially when the usually reliable actor responds by turning in what might be his career-worst performance (Tawmy sobbing on his couch and yelling "We're gonna get these motherfuckers!" is embarrassing)? It's hard to take the film seriously when Tawmy seems to be the only cawp who knows what he's doing, and one with enough juice to get lippy and bark "Who the fuck are you?" to an FBI guy. The real question is "Who the fuck is Tawmy?" (R, 133 mins)
EVOLUTION (France/Spain/Belgium - 2016)
The first film in over a decade by acclaimed INNOCENCE director Lucile Hadzihalilovic (she's married to IRREVERSIBLE director Gaspar Noe, edited his 1998 film I STAND ALONE and co-wrote his 2009 film ENTER THE VOID) is an impenetrable arthouse sci-fi/horror mood piece that feels like an aquatic UNDER THE SKIN and can best be described as what might've transpired if David Cronenberg remade THE LITTLE MERMAID. There's some memorable visuals (this was shot on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands) and a pervasive sense of ominous dread throughout, but it all seems to be an aimless, meandering voyage that doesn't really have anything in mind other than low-key and extremely slow-burning squeamishness. In a remote seaside village that seems to be frozen in time, young Nicolas (Max Brebant) is swimming and sees the body of a drowned boy with a bright red starfish attached to his navel. He tells his mother (Julie-Marie Parmentier), who dives in the area where he was swimming and only finds the starfish. There are no adult males in the village, which is populated only by young boys and their mothers, all plain and unemotional, with white eyebrows and their hair pulled back in tight librarian buns. The boys are fed a gruel-ish concoction of goop and worms and given a strange medicine in between visits to a local "hospital" where they're kept for observation and given ultrasounds by the female doctors and nurses. Nicolas becomes convinced that the village mothers are up to something and spies on them as the writhe naked in star-shaped formations, covered in a slimy film along the shore in the dead of night. Convinced his "mother," who has six suction-cup-like growths on her back, is not his mother, Nicolas is given an extended stay at the hospital, where he befriends strange nurse Stella (Roxane Duran), who decides to show him who--or more accurately, what--he really is. It's a lugubriously slow buildup to very little, but there's some effectively unsettling imagery along the way, with a droning score that really contributes to the escalating sense of unease. But mood and style aren't enough to get the job done with EVOLUTION, which ends up being some kind of asexual nightmare with a predictably ambiguous, hackneyed ending suggesting these creatures are about to walk among us. Some interesting ideas here, but EVOLUTION never comes together. (Unrated, 82 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
Busy VFX siblings and occasional directing team The Brothers Strause (ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM and the awful SKYLINE) produced this would-be mindfuck that irritates more than it entertains. Melding elements of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS with a circa 2000 teen party comedy, +1 doesn't have nearly enough substance to last 90 minutes and feels like something more akin to a TWILIGHT ZONE episode and even then it would need some work to get to 30 minutes. Sensitive nice-guy David (Rhys Wakefield, the grinning home-invasion leader in THE PURGE) has just had an ugly breakup with his away-at-college girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw) when she catches him kissing her fencing rival. While everyone else went away to college a year earlier, David, his best friend Teddy (Logan Miller), and loner Allison (uncredited twins Suzanne and Colleen Dengel) stayed at home, and now everyone's back for an epic bash at Angad's (Rohan Kymal) parents' house. At the same time, an object crashes in someone's backyard and a kind-of lifeforce melds with the power lines, spreading throughout the town and causing periodic brief blackouts. During the first of these blackouts, a doppelganger is generated for everyone at the party, and it takes a while for David to notice, but once he does, he sees that they're repeating what the actual people did a short time earlier (as shown by, among other things, David seeing himself walking through the party looking for Jill). With each short power blackout, the doubles get closer and closer in time, to the point where paranoia takes over and partygoers are soon duking it out with their identical doubles.
It's an admittedly clever concept, but that's ultimately all it is. Director Dennis Iliadis (who helmed 2009's surprisingly OK remake of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT) and writer Bill Gullo seriously belabor the point--how many times do we need to see David or Teddy or Jill watching themselves in events from 45 or 30 or 15 minutes earlier before they realize we get the gimmick? Before long, the whole thing is just a way for David to win Jill back by pulling some GROUNDHOG DAY shenanigans, which makes no sense since he isn't sure which Jill he's winning (Teddy even brings this up when he yells "Do you even care which one?"). David means well, but he's kind of an immature creep, and his actions throughout the film reflect that. It's a risk to make this guy the hero and if +1 had any point, it's a ballsy move that might've worked. But there's nothing here other than the initial hook. The main characters--David, Jill, Teddy, and Allison--are fleshed-out a bit, Miller provides some likable comic relief as the tries-too-hard Teddy who can't believe he gets to hook up with the impossibly hot Melanie (Natalie Hall), and Iliadis deserves some props for choosing to go for some good ol' gratuitous nudity that you don't generally see in these types of movies, but +1 never kicks into gear. It's derivative, dull, and there's no way in hell a group of one-year-out-of-high-school kids this diverse would ever be at the same party. Wallflower Allison is routinely bullied by these people--why would she even go to their party? In fact, when someone references the Book of Talmud and a Woody Allen-ish Jewish kid pops up out of nowhere to provide expository info and is promptly never seen again, I started to wonder if Iliadis and Gullo were just punking the audience. Then I thought "What audience?" (Unrated, 96 mins)
TOAD ROAD (US - 2013)
Centered on the urban legend of an abandoned asylum on Toad Road in York, PA and the surrounding wooded area that's allegedly home to the seven gateways to Hell, the micro-budgeted, cinema verite-styled TOAD ROAD isn't really a horror film. It's not really much of any film as director/writer/cinematographer Jason Banker has his cast seemingly riff and improv what's largely a look at privileged, drug-abusing slackers smoking, snorting, and inhaling anything that will get them high and through the day. Feeling like what might happen if Harmony Korine directed a mumblecore Lucio Fulci tribute to REQUIEM FOR A DREAM by way of JACKASS, the Elijah Wood-produced TOAD ROAD focuses on James (James Davidson), who's introduced high as shit, dragged down a hallway with his pants around his ankles. This is every day for James and his buddies--whether they're dropping acid, blowing Vicks inhalers in each others' eyes, or setting one another's pubes on fire, they only exist to see how fucked-up they can get. James somehow attracts the attention of college freshman Sara (Sara Anne Jones), who's experiencing freedom from her parents for the first time and wants to explore the hedonistic lifestyle of James and his friends. For James, whose dad still pays his rent, developing feelings for Sara has convinced him that maybe it's time to quit dicking around and grow up. But Sara is intent on dropping acid and venturing to Toad Road and attempting to pass the seven gates.
Banker is obviously going for a heavy-handed addiction metaphor with the "gateways to Hell" stuff, but it takes about 55 of the film's 76 minutes to even get there. There's some intriguing elements, especially with James waking up in the woods on Toad Road and being told six months have passed and he's a suspect in Sara's disappearance. But Banker has no interest whatsoever in conventional narrative, and that would be fine if there was anything else here. Considering they aren't professional actors, Davidson and Jones aren't bad, and if TOAD ROAD acquires any cult following at all, it'll be due to 24-year-old Jones' death from a heroin overdose just as the film was making the festival rounds in 2012. There's an undeniably queasy feeling watching her character hell-bent on immersing herself in the culture of addiction "for the experience" and knowing she'd die that way before anybody saw the movie. Jones was an aspiring model and this was her only film (she also appeared in a Death Cab for Cutie video). She had an appealing presence and even when TOAD ROAD is going nowhere--which is to say, essentially its entire running time--the camera seems to love her. What a waste. (Unrated, 76 mins)
BLINDSIDED (US/Canada - 2014)
Shot two years ago under the title PENTHOUSE NORTH, the ludicrous home invasion thriller BLINDSIDED was set to be released theatrically by Dimension Films in 2013, but executive producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein obviously had a change of heart. They didn't even give it a courtesy DVD dumping, instead selling it to Lifetime, who ran it the first weekend of 2014 as a "Lifetime Original Movie" before it turned up on Netflix Instant a few days later. Those are some pretty major red flags, and coupled with the fact that it stars the great Michael Keaton and the charming Michelle Monaghan, and is the first film in a decade directed by Joseph Ruben, a veteran pro who knows how to make commercial, crowd-pleasing suspense thrillers (he's best-known for 1987's THE STEPFATHER, 1991's SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY and 1993's THE GOOD SON), the initial assumption you might have about Dimension's treatment of this film is that it must be terrible. And you'd be right.
It's one thing to be awful but it's also utterly generic. Ruben and frequent screenwriting collaborator David Loughery (they previously worked together on 1984's DREAMSCAPE and 1995's MONEY TRAIN, and Loughery also scripted such films as 1992's PASSENGER 57 and 2008's LAKEVIEW TERRACE) are both uncharacteristically asleep-at-the-wheel here and seemed to prep for this by rewatching WAIT UNTIL DARK, telling Keaton to do some Michael Keaton stuff, giving Monaghan a white cane, and hoping other minor details like a plausible plot and competent filmmaking would just work themselves out. Ruben's no Hitchcock, but he's made some very good movies and one legitimately great one with THE STEPFATHER. BLINDSIDED, on the other hand, is easily his worst thriller (I'd say it's his worst film overall, but not with the 1980 comedy GORP on his resume). Monaghan is Sara, a combat photographer who loses her sight in an Afghanistan suicide bombing. Three years later, she lives with her boyfriend Ryan (Andrew Walker), who owns a posh penthouse apartment in Manhattan and "has some money." It's New Year's Eve, and after buying some wine for a quiet night in, Sara returns home and, until she slips in a pool of blood, is unaware that Ryan is lying dead in the kitchen. Sara is then terrorized by Chad (REVENGE's Barry Sloane), a psycho who insists Ryan has some money hidden in the penthouse. Eventually, they're joined by Chad's boss, the matter-of-fact Hollander (Keaton), who then tells Sara that Ryan has made off with his diamonds and he thinks they're stashed somewhere in the apartment. You can predict the rest: they play cat-and-mouse games, yell a lot, Sara gets tortured via waterboarding, and of course, she tries to play the bickering criminals against each other. The underemployed Keaton, kicking off his 2014 "Fuck It, Just Pay Me" tour that includes the ROBOCOP remake and NEED FOR SPEED, has some enjoyably snarky moments in the way he condescendingly addresses Chad's frequent bouts of incompetence, but there isn't a single thing in BLINDSIDED that you haven't seen before, unless you count greenscreen work and CGI that can best be described as "unfinished." The unbelievably shoddy look of BLINDSIDED--the NYC skyline in the background is hilariously unconvincing, as is the CGI breath as characters stand out on the terrace in freezing temps (when the filmmakers remember to use it, that is) and one character's cartoonish fall from the terrace--is the likely reason the Weinsteins dropped this like a bad habit, pawning it off on presumably less-demanding TV viewers who might be more inclined to forgive crummy visuals at home than they would be laughing it off the screen at the multiplex. BLINDSIDED just looks like a movie that everyone involved simply walked away from during post-production. There's probably a story to tell with what went wrong here. I hate to think Ruben returned from a decade-long sabbatical to make something this uninspired, amateurishly sloppy, and riddled with plot holes. (Unrated, 85 mins; currently only available on Netflix Instant)
The latest TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE reboot pretends none of the original's three sequels or the mid-2000s Michael Bay-produced remake and prequel happened, and opens as a direct sequel to the 1974 film, picking up right where it left off for a ten-minute prologue. In it, the deranged, cannibalistic Sawyer clan are all killed in a fire started by a vigilante mob. A childless couple among the vigilantes takes a Sawyer infant to raise as their own. Then it jumps to the present day, with 20-ish Heather (Alexandra Daddario), that grown child, getting news that her biological grandmother has left her a mansion in Texas. Off she goes with her friends, who are eventually killed one by one by the black sheep still locked in the basement: Leatherface (Dan Yaeger), who it turns out is Heather's cousin. TEXAS CHAINSAW gets off to a surprisingly OK start before constructive sloppiness by director John Luessenhop and the screenwriters (JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY director Adam Marcus among them) starts becoming too much of a distraction. These college-age kids should be in their late 30s at least, as the film takes place 39 years after the 1973-set events of the first film and this film's own prologue. Yet, Heather and her friends look to be in their early 20s...but the film can't be taking place in the mid-1990s because people are using smartphones. Maybe that's being nitpicky, but there's other issues, like stacking the deck with a cartoonishly evil Texas he-man mayor (Paul Rae) who's such an asshole that it's easy for the filmmakers to make Leatherface the hero. And they can't even keep track of their own characters, as a sheriff's deputy played by Scott Eastwood (Clint's lookalike son), a fairly important element of the story, completely vanishes during the climax. This TEXAS CHAINSAW (even the shorthand title comes across as half-assed), produced by Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage, is stupid but it isn't completely terrible--it's almost good compared to the Bay productions--but it exerts the bare minimum to get by and does nothing to justify its existence. Just stick with the first two films that Tobe Hooper directed. The rest are irrelevant, as are the cred-begging cameos by past CHAINSAW vets Gunnar Hansen, Bill Moseley, John Dugan, and Marilyn Burns. (R, 92 mins)
TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE (US - 2013)
Is a movie doomed the moment Stephen Dorff is cast in the lead? That's not to say that Dorff is a bad actor, because he's not, and his bad movies are rarely if ever his fault. He gave the performance of his career in Sofia Coppola's SOMEWHERE (2010), but that's just it: nobody saw it, and the film wasn't as good as he was in it. Dorff puts forth effort in serious indies that play to crickets and tumbleweed, but then gets a reputation as a washout hack when he does a random DTV thriller or pitches e-cigs to pay the bills. The guy had some momentum going in the '90s, but hasn't been able to catch a break since Leonardo DiCaprio started getting all of his roles. He's turned in some good performances and maybe some day, luck will finally be on his side but, unfortunately for Dorff and the viewer, TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE is not that day. It's hard to say where the Cleveland-shot TOMORROW went wrong, but it's never a good sign when a film is held in limbo for a couple of years because the filmmakers are filing lawsuits. Matthew F. Jones adapted his novel Boot Straps, but was so appalled at the end result that he sued the producers and director David Jacobson (2006's DOWN IN THE VALLEY) and tried to prevent it from being released. It eventually got a token limited release in April 2013 before being dumped on DVD and Blu-ray six weeks later, with no extras whatsoever, unless you count "Scene Selection." It seems everyone associated with TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE has actively distanced themselves from it.
I haven't read Jones' novel, so I can't compare the book and the film, but Jacobson seems to be going for some blatant David Lynch worship here--I should clarify "Lynch when his films were still coherent"--specifically WILD AT HEART and some of the more grounded-in-reality portions of LOST HIGHWAY. Dorff is ex-con Charlie, assigned by crime boss The Buddha (Willem Dafoe, who was in WILD AT HEART) to whack someone. Charlie kills the guy but botches the job by leaving a witness, and then hits the road with bewitching part-time porn actress Florence Jane (Michelle Monaghan--why isn't she getting better roles?) and then...well, not much else. There's a lot of mumbling about trying to find and kill the Buddha. For a while, Jacobson flirts with the idea that Florence Jane is a figment of Charlie's imagination, and she wears a blonde Marilyn Monroe wig at one point for no apparent reason. After a potentially intriguing, modern noir set-up (with opening credits accompanied by Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Hear Voices"), Jacobson plants his mouth firmly on Lynch's nutbag and acts like his work is done, stumbling into coast-mode and stranding the audience with two uninteresting characters, lots of open road, and no shortage of Angelo Badalamenti/TWIN PEAKS-styled vibrato in Peter Salett's highly derivative score. With the game Monaghan providing its only spark, TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE isn't the worst film of 2013 (though it tries to be), but it may very well be the dullest. (Unrated, 92 mins)
HELLGATE (US/Thailand - 2012)
This tired snoozer of a horror movie has some nice location shooting in Thailand but not much else to recommend. After barely surviving a Bangkok car crash that kills his wife and son, Cary Elwes starts having visions of the usual quick-cut, herky-jerky ghosts and demons. His nurse (Ploy Jindachot) conveniently has an aunt who knows all there is to know about the Thai spirit world, and she directs him to aging American surfer dude/ghostbuster William Hurt. Hurt, of course speaking from experience, tells Elwes that the souls of his wife and son are not at rest (Elwes was in a coma for five weeks after the accident and was unable to say goodbye to them) and it's that vulnerability that makes him a magnet for other malevolent spirits that Elwes now has the power to see. Naturally, Elwes must go on a journey deep into the haunted jungles of Thailand to give these souls closure. Predictable and ploddingly-paced, with J-horror cliches and embarrassing CGI, HELLGATE squanders a potentially interesting setting with the most rote, cliched story imaginable. The bland Elwes has demonstrated comic chops in the past, but he's really never been an interesting dramatic actor and that doesn't change here, while Oscar-winner and four-time nominee Hurt is obviously just onboard for the free Thailand vacation. In a more inspired fright flick, Hurt's character could've been a real hammy crowd-pleaser (the bit where he's just suddenly standing there with a surfboard is amusing and feels like it was improvised by the actor), but everyone from the actors to writer-director John Penney just seem to be taking this far too seriously, as if it's the first horror film to ever deal with the subject of tortured spirits in some purgatorial limbo. Penney, whose infamous ZYZZYX ROAD made headlines for its $30 box office gross back in 2006, has been involved in enjoyable horror films in the past--he co-wrote the cult favorite THE KINDRED (1987) and scripted RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 (1994) and worked with Hurt before, scripting the underrated B-movie CONTAMINATED MAN (2000), which is still in regular night-owl rotation on cable--but HELLGATE, originally titled SHADOWS when it was shot in 2010, is just dead on arrival. (Unrated, 93 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
