OFFICIAL SECRETS (Canada/UK/China/US/Switzerland - 2019)
The saga of British whistleblower Katherine Gun is, at least stateside, one of the least-remembered chapters of the misguided journey to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a way, it's oddly fitting that OFFICIAL SECRETS, which stars Keira Knightley as Gun, was barely released in theaters by IFC Films. That's a shame, because it's a well-done political thriller as well as a solid investigative journalism drama from director/co-writer Gavin Hood, who most recently helmed 2016's riveting drone strike nailbiter EYE IN THE SKY. As the film opens in January 2003, Katherine, who was raised in Taiwan by British parents, works as a Mandarin translator for GCHQ, the signals intelligence division of the British government. It's a largely uneventful job until her entire department is sent a mysterious e-mail from the NSA that goes into detail about an intelligence plot between the US and UK governments to essentially bully and blackmail the less powerful members of the UN Security Council into going to war with Iraq under the guise of Saddam Hussein having WMDs. As everyone has signed an agreement that every aspect of their work falls under the 1989 "Official Secrets" Act, none of Katherine's co-workers give the e-mail much thought and refrain from discussing it. But she's troubled enough by its implications that she passes it on to a trusted government employee friend (MyAnna Buring), who in turn passes it to a controversial activist (Hattie Morahan) who then forwards it to Observer staff writer Martin Bright (Matt Smith). The Observer is fully onboard with the coming war, much to the chagrin of their bad-tempered US politics columnist Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans), who berates managing editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill) with frequent tirades that they should be doing their jobs as reporters instead of regurgitating Prime Minister Tony Blair's press releases. Alton reluctantly lets Bright run with the story, which eventually blows up in Katherine's face, as she never thought anything would come of it, and now the intelligence higher-ups are calling in the interrogators and breaking out the lie detectors because they know the leak had to come from the GCHQ department.
The resulting shitstorm offers Katherine the usual Alan J. Pakula-esque paranoia of bugged phones, surveillance, and being followed everywhere she goes, and it very nearly gets Katherine's Muslim husband Yasar (Adam Bakri) deported to Iraq. She eventually retains the services of civil liberties attorney Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes) when it becomes clear that the British government intends to prosecute her and send her to prison, with the added threat that even discussing any aspects of the case with a lawyer is itself cause for more charges of violating the Official Secrets Act. OFFICIAL SECRETS is a compelling drama that hits the ground running (it's not even 20 minutes in before we get a clandestine meeting in a dimly-lit parking garage), with a credible and restrained performance by Knightley that wisely avoids all the big awards-bait moments to keep her depiction of Katherine Gun as grounded as possible. The back end does suffer from a bit of some fawning Gun hagiography, and it may seem a little fashionably late as far as Iraq War-related movies go, but for the most part, OFFICIAL SECRETS is a fine film that deserved more attention than it got and probably could've been a decent word-of-mouth hit on the arthouse circuit (other familiar faces in the solid ensemble cast include Matthew Goode, Jeremy Northam, Indira Varma, and Kenneth Cranham). The closing scene, and particularly Fiennes' final line, would've been a real crowd-pleaser. (R, 112 mins)
MARY (US/Canada - 2019)
Remember when Gary Oldman won an Oscar for 2017's DARKEST HOUR? By any chance, does Gary Oldman remember? Just a few months ago, he appeared in the unwatchable support-group-for-assassins "comedy" KILLERS ANONYMOUS and he currently stars in the straight-to-VOD actioner THE COURIER (don't worry, I'm sure I'll get to it soon enough), where he's second-billed to Olga Kurylenko, currently third on the action heroine depth chart behind Milla Jovovich and Noomi Rapace. These aren't the kind of projects you tackle when you've just been awarded an actor's highest honor. They're the kind of jobs Nicolas Cage accepts to pay his bills for another month. And in the case with the moronic "possessed yacht" horror movie MARY, it's even worse as Oldman reportedly stepped in to replace--wait for it--Nicolas Cage. Dude, you're less than two years out from an Academy Award and you're taking Nicolas Cage's 2019 turndowns? To damn with faint praise, MARY is slightly better than KILLERS ANONYMOUS, but then, so are most new Nic Cage movies. MARY is a weak hodgepodge of at least a half-dozen underdeveloped ideas that are mostly abandoned amidst the incoherent mayhem that develops. Oldman phones it in as Dave, a Florida fisherman who impulsively buys a ramshackle old yacht called Mary in an attempt to set up his own boat charter business. It's also his way of trying to bring his family back together after his wife Sarah (Emily Mortimer) had a brief fling that put a strain on both their marriage and her relationship with their oldest daughter Lindsey (Stefanie Scott), while younger daughter Mary (Chloe Perrin) remains blissfully unaware of all the tension. I don't know...if Dave thinks buying a shitty old boat is gonna save his marriage, then I can see why Sarah stepped out on him.
They set sail on the Mary for a journey to the waters of Bermuda (uh oh), along with Dave's friend and business partner Mike (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and Lindsey crush Tommy (Owen Teague), and it isn't long before strange shit starts happening: Mary has a new imaginary friend and is drawing creepy pictures and smashes a glass in Lindsey's face (the only genuinely shocking moment); Tommy carves a symbol into his chest and attacks Dave; a ghostly figure pulls some INSIDIOUS jump scare moves on Sarah; and Mike loses it and tries to throw the family overboard. The entire film is told in flashback by Sarah to Jacksonville detective Clarkson (Jennifer Esposito), who's been brought in by the Coast Guard after Sarah and her daughters appeared to be the only survivors of a shipwreck. Clarkson quickly recommends a padded cell and a psych eval after listening to Sarah's story of a possessed boat and that "Evil needs a body to exist...the body was that boat." Written by Anthony Jaswinski (THE SHALLOWS) and directed by Michael Goi (who's helmed several episodes of AMERICAN HORROR STORY), MARY revels in every hackneyed horror cliche in the book, like Sarah conveniently finding a scrapbook of old-timey news clippings--that look like they were quickly generated on a production assistant's laptop that morning--detailing all the crews that set sail on the Mary going back to 1883 and were never seen again, and that the ghost haunting the ship is that of the drowned daughter of the very first Mary captain. Who left the scrapbook there for her? The ghost? That was awfully helpful of her. And how powerful is this malevolent spirit when Sarah can incapacitate it with a flare gun? The closing credits roll at 77 minutes after a twist ending you'll absolutely see coming, and the only mystery is why Oldman (and Mortimer, for that matter) is wasting his time with junk like this. The guy pretty much swept the Best Actor category throughout the 2018 awards season. I'd like to think he could parlay that into something more substantive than "Gary Oldman's MOON IN SCORPIO." (R, 84 mins)
Gary Oldman really should have better things to do after his DARKEST HOUR Oscar triumph than dropping in for Bruce Willis duty on a straight-to-VOD Lionsgate/Grindstone clunker like KILLERS ANONYMOUS. So should Jessica Alba, who has even less to do here than Oldman, yet both are prominently displayed on the cut-and-paste poster art for this utterly dreadful dark comedy that squanders them and an interesting premise and crosses its fingers hoping that frantically piling on one nonsensical twist after another in the final act will gaslight you into thinking you're watching a more clever movie than you are (and just take a moment and look at that poster--it looks like the graphic design team had a 5:00 pm deadline and started working on it at 4:57). KILLERS ANONYMOUS opens with a prologue where Oldman's unnamed character (a mystery man known only as "The Man") is summoned from Los Angeles to London by underling Jade (Alba) to assess a botched assassination attempt on a popular US senator (Sam Hazeldine) who's a rising star with presidential aspirations. Jade is killed during the opening credits (and that's it for Alba, who couldn't have worked on this for more than a day) by Krystal (co-writer Elizabeth Morris), who heads straight to a meeting of Killers Anonymous, a support group for assassins dealing with job-related stress and burnout. It's a potentially amusing idea, but once everyone arrives--there's also group leader Jo (MyAnna Buring); player Leandro (Michael Socha); mild-mannered Calvin (Tim McInnerny); sensitive Ben (Elliot James Langridge); 'fookin' 'ell, mate!" LOCK STOCK knockoff rage case Markus (top-billed Tommy Flanagan); and new member Alice (EMPIRE's Rhyon Nicole Brown), a mysterious American who's hesitant to say much--the film stops dead in its tracks as director/co-writer Martin Owen (LET'S BE EVIL) gives each of the characters their own long monologue about who they are and what brought them to KA.
This goes on for about an hour, intermittently broken up by frequent bitching about quiet Alice by resident loudmouths Markus and Krystal, and while it might be a nice acting class exercise for the cast, it doesn't make for a very engaging film. Owen occasionally cuts away to Morgan (Isabelle Allen), a teenage runaway who's hiding in a crawlspace and eavesdropping on everything, and to a grimacing Oldman, whose enigmatic "The Man" is positioned on a nearby rooftop listening in on the bugged session while on the phone counseling a troubled killer (Suki Waterhouse) back in L.A. Not unlike a deadening mash-up of early Guy Ritchie, SMOKIN' ACES, and THE ICEMAN COMETH, the pointless and self-indulgent KILLERS ANONYMOUS is an absolute endurance test that doesn't have a single clever or even remotely amusing moment in its 96 excruciating minutes, which is pretty tough to accomplish considering the offbeat black comedy potential of a support group for assassins. Your first inclination would be to think that this must be some unreleasable dud that was shot four or five years ago and is only now being dusted off because of Oldman's DARKEST HOUR awards run. Nope...production began in July 2018, a good three months after the Oscars. Gary Oldman showed up on the set of KILLERS ANONYMOUS a newly-anointed Academy Award-winner. Did he lose a bet? Was his family being held hostage? Was he choking in a restaurant and Owen was there to successfully administer the Heimlich, making Oldman feel obligated to do him a solid in return? What is Gary Oldman doing in this movie? What is Jessica Alba doing in this movie? Hell, I don't even know what Tommy Flanagan is doing in this movie. (R, 96 mins)
ASTRONAUT (Canada - 2019)
It's hard to watch ASTRONAUT and not think that it might exist in some alternate post-CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND where an elderly Roy Neary is still watching the skies. That's because Richard Dreyfuss stars in this slight but sincere Canadian drama from debuting writer/director Shelagh McLeod. Dreyfuss is Angus Stewart, a 75-year-old retired civil engineer, astronomy enthusiast, and recent widower who's been forced to sell his home and move in with his daughter Molly (Krista Bridges), son-in-law Jim (Lyriq Bent), and adoring young grandson Barney (Richie Lawrence) after recurring TIAs and a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation and angina. Though Barney loves having him around and learning about space, his presence causes tension between between Molly and Jim, so he reluctantly agrees to move into a nursing home after Molly finds him in the midst of another mini-stroke. Though he befriends other residents--including a flamboyant Art Hindle and Graham Greene as a partially paralyzed stroke survivor--the irascible Angus quickly grows bored with the rigidity of the facility's director (Mimi Kuzyk), and at Barney's suggestion, enters himself in an online lottery created by Elon Musk-like multi-billionaire Marcus Brown (Colm Feore), where the winner gets a seat on Brown's ultimate dream project: the first commercial space flight. The age cut-off is 65, so Angus simply shaves off a decade and divulges nothing about his worsening health situation. And of course, he makes the cut.
A film aimed at senior audiences who might balk at all the R-rated talk and geriatric threesomes in Clint Eastwood's THE MULE, ASTRONAUT is corny, maudlin and shamelessly manipulative. But Dreyfuss admirably resists his innately hammy impulses and turns in a heartfelt performance as a man who knows the end is near and just wants one shot at his lifelong dream. There's certainly a strong argument to be made that everything that unfolds is just a fantasy of dying man, and an attempt at suspense in the third act where Angus' expertise in engineering helps avert a potential disaster for Brown is a little too hokey, but this is really all about Dreyfuss. He shows a genuine camaraderie with young Lawrence and his scenes with Bridges have a realism to them that will resonate with anyone who's lost a parent and knows the other doesn't have much time left. ASTRONAUT loses its way a little in the home stretch, but it's the kind of film that probably would've been a minor sleeper hit of the STRAIGHT STORY sort in the late '90s. And it gives Dreyfuss--last seen embarrassing himself by playing a deranged criminal mountain man like the love child of Walter Brennan and Strother Martin in the dismal Gina Carano actioner DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF--a worthy late-career dramatic lead. Call it MR. HOLLAND GOES TO SPACE. (Unrated, 97 mins)
