MORGAN (US - 2016) Directed by Luke Scott. Written by Seth Owen. Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brian Cox, Michael Yare, Boyd Holbrook, Chris Sullivan, Vinette Robinson. (R, 92 mins) Luke Scott has served as an assistant and a second-unit director on several films by his legendary and seemingly ageless father Ridley Scott, but MORGAN marks the 48-year-old scion's feature directing debut (Ridley's other filmmaker son, Jake Scott, debuted with 1999's PLUNKETT & MACLEANE). Pops Scott produced the film, and if Luke had any hopes of emerging from the long shadow cast by his visionary father, he's gonna have to try a lot harder than MORGAN. In all fairness, MORGAN looks fine, with some effective set design and a few breathtaking exterior visuals in a surrounding forest and on a lake (this was shot in Ireland), but the script by Seth Owen (rumored to be overhauled and rewritten by the director) is so derivative and obvious that any seasoned moviegoer will figure out where this thing is headed by the ten-minute mark. At a secret research facility in remote upstate New York, scientists have succeeded in creating, after two failed attempts, a flesh-and-blood, A.I. humanoid named Morgan (THE WITCH's Anya Taylor-Joy), who's five years old but whose accelerated growth rate gives it the appearance of a girl in her late teens. Cold and standoffish Lee Weathers (Kate Mara) is a risk assessment agent sent in by the project's corporate benefactors to determine Morgan's viability after it attacks one of the scientists, Dr. Kathy Grieff (Jennifer Jason Leigh), gouging out her eye in a fit of rage when it's informed it disobeyed the rules and can't go outside anymore. Lee is naturally met with apprehension and scorn by the rest of the research team--Dr. Simon Ziegler (Toby Jones), Dr. Amy Menser (Rose Leslie), Dr. Ted Brenner (Michael Yare), married Drs. Darren and Brenda Finch (Chris Sullivan, Vinette Robinson), and the head of the project, Dr. Liu Cheng (Michelle Yeoh)--with her only real ally coming from the facility's nutritionist/cook/potential love interest Skip (Boyd Holbrook).
Why these people can't prepare their own meals and require Skip to be on the payroll in a sworn-to-secrecy, middle-of-nowhere location for a minimum of five years is the least of the questions you'll have after watching MORGAN. As Morgan demonstrates more human qualities and has tangible feelings of joy and sorrow (it loves the outdoors and opera, and is set off when it's punished for wandering off the property while out on a walk with Amy), they've grown attached to it and refer to it as "she" and "her," which doesn't fly with the no-nonsense Lee. With her aloof, bottom-line attitude, Lee's character arc is pretty easy to pick up on thanks to Scott's inability to grasp the concept of subtlety. There's a big EX MACHINA influence on MORGAN, but it also works in a significant plot point of Dad Scott's first or second-most famous film in such a ham-fisted way that the biggest mystery isn't what the twist is, but how long it's going to take the rest of the dim characters to figure out what you already know. With her saucer-like eyes and the large pupil contacts she wears in some scenes, Taylor-Joy evokes memories of Delphine Chaneac's more monstrous Dren in Vincenzo Natali's 2010 film SPLICE, which took things in a decidedly more Cronenberg-ian slant, but whose transgressive perversions are hinted at here and dropped almost instantly. Indeed, there's something strongly suggested in outsider Amy's feelings for Morgan--feelings that don't seem to be maternal or sisterly. There's a throwaway line by Skip about how he briefly hooked up with Amy years ago before realizing "I'm not her type." There's enough in Leslie's performance here to suggest that Amy has other designs on Morgan but nothing comes of it (those who've seen SPLICE will recall that, yes, it went there).
There's good performances in MORGAN in the early-going, before it turns into a rote body count movie when Morgan escapes from the lab and starts killing everyone off one by one. Taylor-Joy does a solid job of balancing childlike innocence with palpable rage, but Alicia Vikander did it much better and with more complexity and ambiguity in EX MACHINA. Still, Morgan shows more emotion than Mara's Lee, whose brittle chilliness is oversold with a stick-up-her-ass demeanor and an "I'd like to speak to a manager" hairstyle that exemplifies MORGAN's rush to show its cards too soon. The veteran actors in the cast are underutilized: Leigh pretty much lies in a bed with gauze over her eye, catatonic with painkillers in one of the most inactive-by-design performances this side of Eric Stoltz in ANACONDA; Yeoh's Dr. Cheng drifts in and out of the story in ways that suggest Scott only had the actress for a very limited time (why is she not there for the big assessment of Morgan?); Brian Cox almost literally phones in his entire performance as the CEO of the company bankrolling the Morgan project; and Paul Giamatti has one ten-minute scene, breaking out every move in his "Paul Giamatti" arsenal as Dr. Shapiro, the psychologist brought in to interview Morgan. Giamatti's character is a man so bellicose and arrogant that the actor has barely finished emitting his first dismissive sneer before you conclude that he's not making out of the room alive. The fact that Shapiro's there because Morgan has attacked Kathy and his plan is to sit with it at the same table and agitate it to evaluate its temper--essentially poking Morgan with a stick until it attacks--tells you how smart this film and its characters are. MORGAN looks like what might've happened if EX MACHINA was made at a major studio and the suits let the test audiences and the focus groups dictate the outcome. It's never dull but it's doomed to be a forgotten afterthought as soon as its over, its primary influences thuddingly apparent to any knowledgeable cineaste with even a passing interest in genre fare. They've seen things the makers of MORGAN wouldn't believe. All those ripoffs will be lost online, like streams on demand.
MECHANIC: RESURRECTION (US - 2016) Directed by Dennis Gansel. Written by Philip Shelby and Tony Mosher. Cast: Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Tommy Lee Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Sam Hazeldine, John Cenatiempo, Toby Eddington, Femi Elufowoju Jr, Anteo Quintavalle, Yayaying Rhatha Phongam. (R, 98 mins)
The 2011 Jason Statham remake of THE MECHANIC was close enough to the 1972 Charles Bronson original that the older film's screenwriter Lewis John Carlino still retained a WGA-mandated co-writing credit despite retiring from movies in the late '80s. Five years later, Statham is back with MECHANIC: RESURRECTION, a film so ludicrous that it makes his own MECHANIC look like a PBS documentary on professional assassins. Right from the opening "Summit Premiere" logo, it's pretty clear that VOD was the original destination for this woefully cheap-looking sequel that's probably only getting a shot in wide release because of Statham's resurgence as a supporting actor in hits like the Melissa McCarthy comedy SPY and as the villain in last year's FURIOUS 7. MECHANIC: RESURRECTION has a lot of location footage shot around the world, but closeups of the actors are against an obvious greenscreen at Avi Lerner's Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria, with blurry and hazy CGI carelessly added in post. Background shots of bodies of water seem curiously still and there's always a halo-like outline around the actors, who sometimes look composited into the shot. Explosions look like pre-2000 CGI and the carelessness extends to typos throughout, whether an official document describes a sex offender as "extremly" dangerous or a character named Max Adams is mentioned in a newspaper headline reading "Max Adam's Financial Records..." All that silliness aside, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION is harmless fun and the kind of entertaining junk food that's hard for Statham fans to resist. As far as Statham sequels go, it's better than the anything-goes obnoxiousness of the unwatchable CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, recognizing its own silliness and more or less approaching it with a DEATH WISH 3 mentality that's right in line with Cannon-like ethos of Avi Lerner's Golan-Globus cover band Millennium Films.
Picking up a few years after faking his death at the end of the first film, professional killer-for-hire Arthur Bishop (Statham) is in hiding in Rio (cue establishing aerial shot of Christ the Redeemer statue accompanied by the caption "Rio de Janeiro, Brazil") when he has to dispose of a team of goons in the employ of former associate-turned-international criminal Crain (Sam Hazeldine as Almost Hugo Weaving). Fleeing to a Thai beach resort owned by his friend Mei (Michelle Yeoh), Bishop accidentally kills a guy attacking Gina (Jessica Alba). Of course, it was all a set-up: Gina is an American humanitarian aid worker based in Cambodia, and Crain threatened to kill all of the kids at an orphanage if she didn't lure Bishop into his trap. Crain wants Bishop to kill three men and he's holding Gina hostage to ensure his cooperation. The targets are Sudanese warlord Krill (Femi Elufowoji Jr), currently residing in an impenetrable island prison 70 miles off the coast of Malaysia; Adrian Cook (Toby Eddington), a billionaire Australian businessman (cue establishing aerial shot of the Sydney Opera House with a caption reading "Sydney, Australia") running a lucrative human trafficking operation; and Max Adams (a slumming Tommy Lee Jones), an eccentric American arms dealer based in Bulgaria. All of the hits have to look like accidents, and when Bishop loses all faith in Crain keeping his word, he decides to take matters into his own hands and turn the tables on his employer, who wants the three targets gone because they're his competition.
Co-written by Philip Shelby, who scripted the absurd SURVIVOR, with Milla Jovovich vs. Pierce Brosnan, the latter a deadly assassin known as "The Watchmaker," MECHANIC: RESURRECTION marks the English-language debut of German director Dennis Gansel, who made the 2010 female vampire import WE ARE THE NIGHT. Gansel relies on standard quick-cut/shaky-cam action scenes that do little to distinguish himself as anything other than a hired gun who saw the project as a foot in the door to the American movie industry. It doesn't help that it looks as chintzy and corner-cutting as any late-period, circa 1990 Cannon production. The only thing really distinctive about MECHANIC: RESURRECTION is Arthur Bishop's newfound superhuman abilities. He can hold his breath underwater for incredible amounts of time. He can apparently delete himself from recorded footage, as when he orchestrates a killing involving a man falling out of a glass-bottom swimming pool at the top of skyscraper, and it's caught by onlookers with the footage going viral, and yet Bishop rappelling out of the way mere seconds earlier somehow doesn't appear. He can tally up an astronomical body count with nary a scratch on himself. He's also incredibly prepared: he can arrive anywhere in the world in a middle-of-nowhere location and already have a case filled with cash, phones, and passports under a floorboard of a shack or buried in the sand, waiting for him. He can arrive in these places with nothing on him and spontaneously set up an impromptu laboratory with chemicals, beakers, protractors, and other engineering accoutrements to create the gadgets he needs to pull off his jobs.
It also helps that the bad guys in the film employ the world's least-attentive henchmen, all of whom make it easy by conveniently looking the other way when Bishop approaches them for the kill. That is, when they aren't doing things like standing next to two awkwardly-placed red gas cans on a landing pad that are just waiting to be shot at for another CGI explosion courtesy of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX. Visual effects have always been the Achilles' heel of Millennium/Nu Image, who can corral enough money to lure big name talent but never could get special effects to advance beyond the level of a straight-to-VHS Frank Zagarino vehicle from 1996. Worldwide FX seemed to be stepping up their game with their convincing work in recent Millennium fare like STONEHEARST ASYLUM and CRIMINAL, but they apparently farmed the work on this one out to the unpaid interns. The effects here are embarrassingly bad, even if the film cost a relatively low-budget--by today's standards--$40 million, most of which probably went to Statham, Alba, a barely-utilized Yeoh, and a visibly inconvenienced Jones, who doesn't even appear until 70 minutes in and lets a couple of clip-on earrings do most of his acting for him. Turning Arthur Bishop into a hybrid of James Bond and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE's Ethan Hunt isn't a bad idea, and after a clunky and needlessly convoluted opening 20 minutes, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION--obviously a comedy--finds its footing and becomes stupidly likable thanks to an engaged Statham doing what he does best.
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY (US/China - 2016) Directed by Yuen Wo-Ping. Written by John Fusco. Cast: Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, Harry Shum Jr, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Jason Scott Lee, Eugenia Yuan, Roger Yuan, Juju Chan, Chris Pang, Woon Young Park, Darryl Quan, Veronica Ngo, Gary Young, Shuya Chang. (Unrated, 101 mins) On the heels of last year's success of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, JURASSIC WORLD, and STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, and despite the disappointment of TERMINATOR: GENISYS, everything old is new again. 2016 is now the year of the belated and unnecessary sequel that you're getting whether you want it or not: we've already had ZOOLANDER 2 (following the 2001 original) met with shrugging ambivalence, with MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2 (first film released in 2002), AMITYVILLE: THE AWAKENING (11 years since the remake), ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (MUPPETS MOST WANTED director James Bobin's followup to Tim Burton's little-loved 2010 ALICE IN WONDERLAND), INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (a Will Smith-less sequel to the 1996 blockbuster), KINDERGARTEN COP 2 (starring Dolph Lundgren, 26 years after the Arnold Schwarzenegger hit), THE STRANGERS 2 (eight years since the first one), and BAD SANTA 2 (13 years) on the slate. No one was really clamoring for further installments of any of these films (apparently, Nia Vardalos forgot that nobody gave a shit about the short-lived 2003 TV spinoff MY BIG FAT GREEK LIFE, cancelled by CBS after seven episodes), and such is the case with CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY, which arrives 16 years after Ang Lee's revered Oscar-winner, a perfectly-balanced mix of arthouse drama and mainstream action, and the key film in making Asian wuxia accessible in the US. None of the original film's primary creative personnel, from Lee on down, are involved in this sequel with the exception of veteran martial-arts coordinator Yuen Wo-Ping, who's been promoted to director in Lee's stead. Of the 2000 film's cast, only Michelle Yeoh reprises her role as the stoical, dedicated warrior Yu Shu Lien. Unlike the first Mandarin-spoken installment, the sequel was filmed in English, and other than a limited number of IMAX screenings, is debuting on Netflix.
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON is a great film, a masterpiece deserving of all its accolades and one that, aside from some sporadic instances of wonky wire work that was the best they could do at the time, has aged beautifully and lost none of its power. It is a timeless and heart-wrenching tale of honor and unrequited love and the inability to turn back the hands of time, with parallels drawn between multi-layered characters of different generations. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY is...not that. In many ways, it's a dumbed-down, less-complicated remake of the first film. Set 18 years later, the Green Destiny, the famed sword that once belonged to the late Li Mu Bai (played in the original by Chow Yun Fat), is again stolen from the compound of Sir Te, who has just passed away and Yu Shu Lien has arrived to pay respect to her mentor. While the sword goes through a number of hands throughout the film, the initial thief, Wei Feng (Harry Shum Jr) was sent by the nefarious Hades Dai (a scenery-chewing Jason Scott Lee), an evil warlord who has clashed with the Te family and with Yu Shu Lien in the past. Wei Fang is thwarted by young Snow Vase (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who wishes to learn from the wise Yu Shu Lien. Meanwhile, Te's son (Gary Young) has hired enigmatic warrior Silent Wolf (IP MAN's Donnie Yen), a legend long presumed dead following an ill-fated battle with Hades Dai, and his ragtag group of mercenaries to track down the Green Destiny. Silent Wolf was also the fiance of Yu Shu Lien in the years after she grieved for Li Mu Bai, a love that was professed only in the final moments of Li's life.
Throughout much of SWORD OF DESTINY's running time, it just seems that screenwriter John Fusco (YOUNG GUNS, THUNDERHEART, and the Netflix series MARCO POLO) is simply recycling the events of the 2000 film. Parallels abound all over the place--the theft of the Green Destiny, Yu Shu Lien taking a young protege under her wing (Bordizzo looks exactly like the first film's Ziyi Zhang), an extended mid-film flashback that shows the connection between the two younger lead characters, and another case of a long-lost love breaking Yu Shu Lien's heart once more. Yuen is better known to American audiences for his martial-arts coordinator work on films like THE MATRIX and KILL BILL, but he also directed a number of early Jackie Chan films, like SNAKE IN THE EAGLE'S SHADOW and DRUNKEN MASTER (both 1978) as well as 1993's IRON MONKEY, which was retooled by the Weinsteins for its US release in 2001, which only came about following the success of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. Yuen's directing efforts have been sporadic over the last 20 or so years, but his action scenes remain curiously inert here, or at least pale in comparison to the work he did for Lee 16 years ago. Something's just missing from this sequel, and it's not just Lee, the writers, and the bulk of the cast. Lee's film was an immersive experience, while SWORD OF DESTINY leaves you cold and distant, and a lot of that is due to the distractingly digital world in which it takes place (even a potentially great battle on a frozen lake sees its impact drastically diminished by CGI artifice). Lee used as many actual locations as possible in the original, but with the exception of some exteriors shot in Auckland, New Zealand, everything here has that distinct and lifeless "actor standing in front of a greenscreen" look. Lee's film was breathtaking because it presented a world that, even with the wire work, was a living, breathing, tangible thing. SWORD never has a chance to achieve that.
It also doesn't have Chow acting opposite Yeoh, which gave the first film so much of its rock-solid foundation. Yeoh is very good here and ably carries the film--without her, the whole thing would likely be a lost cause--but her Yu Shu Lien doesn't have the same chemistry with Yen's Silent Wolf that she had with Chow's Li Mu Bai, and that's likely because despite his top billing, Yen is absent for long stretches and really only serves as a guest star in a supporting role. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY has more fantastical elements (yes, even more than flying up on rooftops and running across water), like an evil blind sorceress (Eugenia Yuan) and a general vibe that makes it feel more like CROUCHING TIGER, GAME OF THRONES. It looks and plays like a DTV sequel or the debut episode of a CROUCHING TIGER cable series spinoff, watchable and by no means terrible, but unable to accomplish anything more than being an inferior knockoff of something far more lasting and significant.
