I've stated several times in past reviews that, while the sentiment is appreciated, it's time for today's filmmakers to move on from the John Carpenter homages, but we have to give BACURAU a pass. The latest from Brazil's Kleber Mendonca Filho (NEIGHBORING SOUNDS), who co-wrote and co-directed with Juliano Dornelles, BACURAU is a hypnotic, wildly unpredictable, savagely violent, and brazenly original genre-bender whose release on the arthouse circuit was shut down by the pandemic, leading to US distributor Kino Lorber making it the inaugural entry in their online "virtual cinema" partnership with independent theaters across the country. Opening with a shot of Earth seen from a satellite hovering in space and set "a few years from now," giving it a vaguely-established sci-fi angle, BACURAU immediately shifts to the title location, a fictional, impoverished town in the western Pernambuco area of Brazil. Teresa (Barbara Colen) arrives for the funeral of her 94-year-old grandmother, a beloved figure who's considered the "matriarch" of Bacurau. She brings the residents some medical supplies and vaccines, which have been in short supply since Bacurau's water and essentials have been cut off by a dam project and a water rights dispute overseen by the loathed Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), the self-appointed mayor of the nearby Serra Verde. He also makes cosmetic attempts at olive-branching by donating expired canned goods and so-called "painkillers" that Bacurau's alcoholic doctor Domingas (Sonia Braga) warns is nothing more than a black market mood inhibitor in suppository form. The town is forced to rely on water being delivered in a tanker by affable truck driver Erivaldo (Rubens Santos), but when that week's supply is lost when his truck is riddled with bullets from unseen snipers on the way into town, the residents, under the leadership of Teresa and political insurgent Acacio (Thomas Aquino) sense something is...off. They start getting the feeling that they're under siege, especially when two nervous strangers on trail bikes (Antonio Saboia, Karine Teles) happen to pass through town, and one secretly plants a signal jammer under a table in the local bar.
It's best to stop there with a plot synopsis, as things really start to get wild and the filmmakers go all-in on an "anything goes" approach with the intricately-detailed madness that unfolds. Flying saucer-shaped drones start appearing in the sky, Bacurau disappears from GPS and satellite imagery, phones and electricity go out, mind-altering substances are consumed, and things intensify with the deployment of some wonderful Brian De Palma split-diopter shots, and that's before legendary cult actor Udo Kier shows up as Michael, a mysterious German who's leading a group of racist, trigger-happy American mercenaries on some secret mission in the desert between Serra Verde and Bacurau. Mendonca Filho and Dornelles create a deliriously inspired mash-up of Carpenter and Alejandro Jodorowsky, with some bonus influence courtesy of Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and REPO MAN-era Alex Cox, augmented by some effective needle-drops, including Carpenter's "Night," an inspired synthgasm from his 2015 album Lost Themes, plus an improbable appearance by Spandau Ballet's "True." In an era of prefab cult movies and things like THE ROOM and BIRDEMIC, it's refreshing to see something like BACURAU come along in 2020. It's a real deal, instant cult classic for the midnight movie crowd, and seeing it for the first time is probably the closest we'll get in the present day to experiencing something like EL TOPO in the early '70s. It's the kind of movie where you truly have no idea what's going to happen next, and props to the filmmakers for giving veterans like Braga and Kier their best roles in years. Highly recommended. (Unrated, 131 mins) BODY CAM (US - 2020)
Paramount had BODY CAM set for theaters in May 2019 before bumping it seven months to December, and somewhere in the interim--likely due to last fall's tangentially similar body-cam-themed "bad cop" thriller BLACK AND BLUE--it disappeared from the release schedule altogether. They quietly dumped it on VOD in May 2020, a week before a Memorial Day weekend that ended with the horrific murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. It certainly wasn't intended to exploit a tragedy, but perhaps Paramount should've read the room a little better in releasing this on Blu-ray/DVD now at a time when tensions are still running high, given its subject matter involving the ghost of an unarmed black teenager seeking revenge on the cops who murdered him. BODY CAM is topical, but it doesn't do anything substantive with the issue. Just off suspension after video of a physical altercation with a civilian went viral and led to a citywide uproar, cop Renee Lomito (Mary J. Blige, not really capitalizing on her MUDBOUND Oscar nomination) is still trying to get over the drowning death of her young son, and sees work as a necessary distraction. She's partnered with rookie Danny Holledge (Nat Wolff) and on their first night together, they find the horribly mutilated body of another cop who never reported back after a traffic stop. His dashcam video shows him stopping a woman in a van before he's lifted into the air by an unseen force and dropped on the hood of his cruiser. When her bosses look at the dashcam footage, there's nothing there. An improbable clue leads Lomito and Holledge to the dilapidated home of nurse Taneesha Branz (DREAMGIRLS' Anika Noni Rose), whose teenage son was found murdered months earlier while walking home after doing volunteer work for a church. Two more cops are killed in inexplicable supernatural encounters and again, surveillance video is mysteriously wiped after only Lomito sees it and before she can show anyone else. The fusion of dirty cops and Blumhouse jump scares is clunky and never really gels, though director Malik Vitthal does manage to pull off one really good scare set piece when Lomito and Holledge search Taneesha's house. Richmond Riedel's script was extensively reworked by THE PACT and THE PRODIGY director Nicholas McCarthy, probably brought in to punch up some of the horror elements, and it also has some uncredited contributions from 12 YEARS A SLAVE Oscar-winner John Ridley. There was certainly potential for some incendiary social commentary here, but after a generally effective first act, BODY CAM sort-of sputters out into rote, predictable genre cliches, giving its serious concept a rather shallow treatment. Not bad as these kinds of generic horror outings go, but it's easy to see why Paramount couldn't muster much enthusiasm over it. (R, 97 mins)
If the title THE KILL TEAM sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it's also the name of an acclaimed 2014 documentary by filmmaker Dan Krauss, chronicling a war crimes case where Army Staff Sgt. Calvin Diggs and four soldiers in his platoon were charged with murdering Afghan civilians in Kandahar in 2009. This new film sporting the title THE KILL TEAM is a narrative dramatization of those same events, starring Alexander Skarsgard in the Diggs role (here renamed "Deeks"), and written and directed by...Dan Krauss?! It's a mystery why Krauss saw fit to revisit the same material in fictionalized form so soon after (this was shot in 2017), other than giving potentially meaty roles to Skarsgard and Nat Wolff (also one of a dozen credited producers), the latter playing "Andrew Briggman," a rechristened version of initial whistleblower SPC Adam Winfield. THE KILL TEAM gets off to a good enough start with a shocking opening sequence where the platoon's staff sergeant is killed by an IED, leading to Deeks' arrival. Deeks is stern and no-nonsense, and tells the men "Give me your loyalty, and I'll give every one of you a chance to be a warrior." But he treats them well, grills steaks for them made to order, and winkingly looks the other way when he catches some of them smoking hash. Such actions form a tentative bond and allow him to insidiously manipulate the men under his command, some of whom already regard the Afghan civilians as "goat fuckers" and don't need much of an encouraging push to go along with whatever Deeks orders or even suggests. Briggman is rattled enough by what he sees that he sends instant messages about the goings-on to his military vet dad (Rob Morrow), who contacts US Army CID. Of course, it gets back to Deeks that someone close to him is talking and it doesn't take long for the guys to figure out who it is.
Known as the Maywand District Murders, the case provided ample riveting and shocking material in a documentary form but struggles to justify its existence as a narrative feature film that feels plodding even under 90 minutes. Skarsgard is fine and Wolff continues to demonstrate the credibility he unexpectedly showed in 2019's equally unseen SEMPER FI, but unless you're a fan of either of the two stars (or a Rob Morrow completist), there's really no reason to watch this when Krauss did a much more effective job the first time out. A24 didn't seem to see a lot of HURT LOCKER-type potential for THE KILL TEAM--the kind of well-intentioned film that just dies instantly once it leaves the secure confines of the festival circuit--giving it no push whatsoever with a release on just 39 screens and VOD. (R, 87 mins)
DANGER CLOSE (Australia/UK/US - 2019)
Outside of 1979's THE ODD ANGRY SHOT, the experience of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War has been generally unexplored in the movies. Far removed from the post-PLATOON explosion of the late '80s and at a time when the interest in Vietnam cinema has tapered off in favor of WWII or the various conflicts in the Middle East (like THE KILL TEAM above), DANGER CLOSE chronicles The Battle of Long Tan, which occurred on August 18, 1966, a day that has since been declared Vietnam Veterans Day in Australia. Its very setting of the Vietnam War almost gives it a throwback feel that's a bit dampened by some CGI and other obvious digital accompaniment, but director Kriv Stenders does an otherwise admirable job of shooting the battle sequences in a coherent fashion, avoiding the hyper-editing and the shaky-cam that a current Hollywood take on the same subject would've doubtlessly utilized. The Battle of Long Tan took place on a rubber plantation where Australian and New Zealand forces were outnumbered 108 to approximately 2000, and running out of ammo as they battled an onslaught of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces that surrounded them and kept coming from all sides.
Delta Company was led by Australian Maj. Harry Smith (Travis Fimmel of VIKINGS), a generally unlikable and arrogant hardass who frequently complains to his C.O. Brigadier Oliver David Jackson (Richard Roxburgh) that he needs a more worthy assignment than overseeing a group of mostly conscripts averaging 20 years of age. Of course, after fighting with these "kids" and seeing their courage and sacrifice, Smith has a change of heart and is proud of them. That's about the extent of the character building in DANGER CLOSE (COLLATERAL screenwriter Stuart Beattie was one of five script contributors), which juggles a lot of characters who eventually start to blur (Luke Bracey as Sgt. Bob Buick, Sean Lynch as Sgt. Paddy Todd, and Daniel Webber as Pvt. Paul Large get a little more screen time and development than the rest). A Nancy Sinatra/"These Boots are Made for Walkin'" needle-drop provides a little too on-the-nose FULL METAL JACKET reference, but while DANGER CLOSE doesn't break any new ground in Vietnam cinema, it's well-made, sufficiently harrowing in spots, and it marks a long overdue tribute to the brave Australian and Kiwi forces who fought at Long Tan. (R, 118 min)
Does "Skunk" sound like a man with a plan? If you're already involved in some seriously illegal shit and you're presented with a risky deal by your loudmouth, sketchy best buddy who calls himself "Skunk," the only guarantee is that it's doomed from the start. And despite his misgivings, slick NYC money launderer Moe Diamond (Liam Hemsworth) goes along anyway in the dreadful KILLERMAN, an amateurish pastiche of Michael Mann's THIEF and the Safdie Brothers' GOOD TIME if everyone in it acted like Buddy Duress. The first few minutes actually fool you into thinking KILLERMAN might be an unsung gem--the NYC skyline, shady characters forever looking for a big score, the old-school '70s grittiness of the diamond district, the persistent throb of its synth score--but it falls apart in near-record time. Moe and Skunk (Emory Cohen) make deliveries and launder money for Skunk's Russian mobster uncle Perico (Zlatko Buric). Perico's got a lucrative deal set up with a corrupt congressman who tells him to hold off because there's too much heat. Ordered by Perico to sit on the money until further notice, Skunk talks Moe into going with him on a can't-miss deal where they use Perico's money for a clandestine drug deal that will net a huge profit for them when they unload the drugs, with his uncle none the wiser after getting his money back. Of course, the can't-miss deal completely misses (because "Skunk"), as a squad of dirty cops raid the drug buy and Moe and Skunk barely manage to escape with the goods and the money. The ensuing car chase ends in a wreck where Moe suffers an amnesia-inducing head injury and has no idea why he's got a huge shipment of drugs and duffel bags full of cash.
There's some promise here, especially with the obvious affection for '70s crime thrillers on the part of writer/director Malik Bader. But it's all smoke and mirrors, and all Bader does is riff on other movies without bringing anything new to the table en route to a dumb twist ending. He's particularly enamored of GOOD TIME, from the setting, to the cinematography, to the music, and even going so far as to include an improbable hospital escape. Cliches abound--Moe's girlfriend Lola (Diane Guerrero) asks "When is this going to end?" when he has to back out of date night plans for the umpteenth time because of "work"--and stupidity takes center stage. There's no possible explanation for the scene where amnesia-stricken Moe insists on going to his apartment despite Skunk's warning that the whole area is probably under surveillance and crawling with cops, followed immediately by Moe in his apartment talking to Lola while Skunk stands in the middle of the busy street outside honking the horn and yelling "Moe, let's go!" right before the cops swarm in. If Bader wanted his own Robert Pattinson-styled GOOD TIME, he needed a more magnetic leading man than Hemsworth, who once again demonstrates why nobody cares about anything he's in if it doesn't have "HUNGER GAMES" in the title, and not even letting him go on an out-of-nowhere, late-film rampage of machete beheadings and dismemberments is enough to salvage it. As a director, Malik Bader also does nothing to rein in the histrionics of the one of the two main dirty cops, a constantly shouting rage case brought to headache-inducing life in a grating, attention-hogging performance by...(checks notes)...Malik Bader. (R, 112 mins)
SEMPER FI (US/UK/Italy - 2019)
Until it completely goes on leave from plausibility in its second half, SEMPER FI is a reasonably engrossing drama that unexpectedly offers career-best work from Jai Courtney and Nat Wolff, two actors who have been thoroughly mediocre to this point in everything they've done, and yet Hollywood still seems hellbent on making them happen. I'd all but given up on Courtney (A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD, TERMINATOR: GENISYS) after watching him embarrass himself in scenes opposite Christopher Plummer in THE EXCEPTION, but props where they're due: he's absolutely terrific here as Chris "Cal" Callahan, a cop in a small town in upstate New York. He and his buddies--firefighter and family man Milk (Beau Knapp), auto body mechanic and player Jaeger (Finn Wittrock), and construction worker Snowball (Arturo Castro)--are all Marine reservists, along with Cal's fuck-up younger half-brother Oyster (Wolff). Cal managed to pull some strings to get Oyster in the reserves despite a pair of felonies in his past, and even then Oyster still can't get his shit together, though he has talent for cooking and a pipe dream of opening a food truck business. All of that comes to an abrupt end when Oyster gets into a bar fight and winds up accidentally killing the guy who jumped him in self-defense, right after joking to another bar patron "I'm gonna kill that guy," when he sees him talking to a girl he had his eye on. Oyster tries to run with a half-assed plan of going to Canada and it's Cal who ends up bringing him in.
Cut to eight months later. Cal and the guys have been deployed to Iraq while Oyster got a 25-year sentence for attempting to flee as well as the damning testimony of that bar patron that was enough to make it premeditated murder. Once home, Cal suffers from PTSD over losing his temper and killing a man in Mosul and Oyster, still furious that his own brother arrested him, denies his visitation requests and refuses have anything to do with him. So far, so good, as director/co-writer Henry-Alex Rubin (best known for the 2005 wheelchair rugby documentary MURDERBALL, whose scene-stealing Mark Zupan can be spotted here as a patient at a VA hospital) gets strong, gut-wrenching performances from Courtney and Wolff, the latter convincingly portraying someone unable to articulate his rage and letting it boil inside of him, especially once we learn more about their complicated family history. But what starts as a solid--if occasionally melodramatic--character-driven tragedy takes an abrupt turn toward the ridiculous when Cal, getting word that Oyster is being abused by some sadistic guards, decides to bust his little brother out during a prison transfer and get him to Canada with help from the other guys. They all keep telling Cal what a stupid idea it is, yet they go along with it, and that includes Jaeger's ex-girlfriend (Leighton Meester), who's now an attorney. The film tries to explain away Cal's sudden lack of level-headed decision-making by blaming it on the PTSD, but it seems more like a plot convenience than anything, especially when he shows up at the bar witness' house and tries to threaten him into recanting his testimony. The whole prison break plot turn seems to be some kind of compromise Rubin reached with some of the two dozen credited producers, and while it doesn't cause SEMPER FI to completely implode on itself, it does result in the film working at cross purposes in terms of exactly what it wants to be. And the unfortunate casualties of this indecisiveness are the two fine performances by Courtney and Wolff, because if SEMPER FI accomplishes nothing else, it proves that these two are capable of delivering very good performances. (R, 100 mins)
DEATH NOTE (US - 2017) Directed by Adam Wingard. Written by Charles Parlapanides, Vlas Parlapanides and Jeremy Slater. Cast: Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley, Shea Whigham, Willem Dafoe, Paul Nakauchi, Masi Oka, Jason Liles, Jack Ettlinger, Artin John. (Unrated, 100 mins)
After nearly a decade in development and with a budget reportedly between $40 and $50 million, the American adaptation of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's legendary Japanese manga series Death Note finally arrives as a Netflix Original movie with some controversial baggage in tow, facing accusations of "whitewashing" by having the story moved to the US with American characters. There's really no controversy here--there's already been several TV and movie adaptations of the series in Japan going back a decade, and moving the story to Seattle is no different than RINGU being remade as THE RING or SEVEN SAMURAI being remade as THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. If one sets aside their hand-wringing outrage and bothers watching the movie, they'll find far more legitimate reasons to dislike it. DEATH NOTE is a total misfire from director Adam Wingard, who not very long ago was a genre golden boy with YOU'RE NEXT and THE GUEST but did some damage to his growing brand with last year's heavily-hyped and ill-advised reboot BLAIR WITCH. Any hopes that BLAIR WITCH was a minor bump in the road are dashed with DEATH NOTE, where Wingard demonstrates absolutely no feeling for or connection to the material. Screenwriters Charles & Vlas Parlapanides (IMMORTALS) and Jeremy Slater (the 2015 FANTASTIC FOUR reboot and the creator of the EXORCIST TV series) make the story's transition from Japan to Seattle cumbersome and clunky, and what worked on the page and in the previous adaptations simply doesn't translate (it's also worth noting the absence of Wingard's usual writer and creative partner Simon Barrett). This gives Wingard little to work with, as he instead opts to fall back on easy solutions that makes cult movie nerds giddy, like a synth-heavy throwback score by Atticus Ross, credits in the John Carpenter font, and pointless retro fetishism with '80s songs by INXS, Berlin, Chicago, and Air Supply. These things can be fun in and of themselves in the context of a compelling film, but when they're used as desperation moves as they are here, all they do is spotlight the deficiencies, as DEATH NOTE becomes less like an American interpretation of a revered manga and more like a decade-and-a-half too late ripoff of FINAL DESTINATION and DONNIE DARKO.
Brainy high school outcast Light Turner (Nat Wolff) has a lucrative business doing math homework for all the jocks, but soon finds himself with unlimited power when a tattered old book titled "Death Note" falls out of the sky and lands at his feet. Inside are pages of complicated instructions, but essentially, all the owner of the book needs to do is visualize an individual, write down their name and a cause or circumstance of death and it will be made so. Light's been given the book by a demonic figure called Ryuk, who looks like Groot's meth-addled cousin and is voiced and motion-captured by Willem Dafoe. Light's newfound power gets him the girl, cheerleader Mia (Margaret Qualley of THE LEFTOVERS) and together, they start using the Death Note to take out bad people, from high school bullies to the mob boss who got acquitted for killing Light's mother years earlier, to terrorists and drug cartel leaders. They create the persona "Lord Kira," which attracts the attention of L (Lakeith Stanfield of GET OUT), an enigmatic agent who wears a hoodie and covers the bottom half of his face. L arrives in Seattle and quickly figures out that Light is Kira, though he gets no cooperation from Light's cop dad (Shea Whigham). Light loses control of the Death Note when people whose names he didn't write down--like FBI agents working with L--start turning up dead, prompting him to suspect Ryuk is planning to kill him before passing the book on to someone else.
DEATH NOTE is a jumbled mess. The longer it goes on, the more convoluted and less interesting it becomes, pulling arbitrary rules out of its ass when the story backs itself into a corner and needs to get to the next scene. The characters are completely unbelievable, even by fantasy genre standards, and Wingard's set-up is so rushed that the whole thing feels like a season of a TV show whittled down to 100 minutes. Light's initial reaction to the book's abilities is understandable dismay, but he accepts it pretty quickly, and Mia's blase response to his demonstration that he can kill people generates a look that shrugs "#whatever." No one seems to be on the same page with how to play this, and Wolff, while significantly less punchable here than he was in ASHBY, is still so devoid of charisma and screen presence that you'll long for the relative magnetism of someone like Dane DeHaan. Stanfield's performance as L has enough eccentricity that he at least gets your attention when he's onscreen, and he, along with Dafoe's taunting tone and inimitable cackle bringing Ryuk to life are the only positives about DEATH NOTE, and that's not nearly enough to salvage this from total oblivion.
