MUTE (UK/Germany - 2018) Directed by Duncan Jones. Written by Michael Robert Johnson and Duncan Jones. Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux, Seyneb Saleh, Dominic Monaghan, Robert Sheehan, Gilbert Owuor, Jannis Niewohner, Rob Kazinsky, Noel Clarke, Mia-Sophie Bastin, Lea-Marie Bastin, Daniel Fathers, Andrzej Blumenfeld. (Unrated, 126 mins) After establishing himself as a major new voice in intelligent, thought-provoking sci-fi with 2009's MOON and 2011's SOURCE CODE, Duncan Jones jumped to the megabudget realm in 2016 with the $160 million WARCRAFT, an adaptation of the popular video game series. Met with a lukewarm response from the critics who loved his more brainy earlier films, WARCRAFT looks for now to be a franchise non-starter despite being a moneymaker everywhere but the US. After WARCRAFT and several tumultuous, emotional years of ups-and-downs in his personal life--his father David Bowie died in January 2016 and his beloved childhood nanny passed a year later, and he also became a father with a second child on the way after his wife emerged victorious in a battle with breast cancer--Jones decided it was time to make his long-gestating dream project MUTE, a script he wrote with Michael Robert Johnson (SHERLOCK HOLMES, POMPEII) way back in 2001 and was talking about as a potential second film nearly a decade ago when he was doing press for MOON. Jones was unable to generate any studio interest in MUTE at the time, but with Netflix agreeing to distribute pretty muchanything, he finally found a way to get it done with little interference, allowing him to make exactly the film he wanted to make. A Guy Ritchie-esque crime saga in its earliest drafts, MUTE's screenplay went through numerous transformations over the years as Jones would periodically rework it before stuffing it back in the bottom desk drawer until he had more time.
Judging from the end result, it looks like Jones didn't so much revise as he just found ways to cram in every idea he scribbled in the margins over the years. MUTE is a hot mess, but it's at least a great-looking mess. The biggest obvious inspiration is BLADE RUNNER, with MUTE taking place in a Berlin roughly 30 years from now, looking very much like the neon dystopian cityscapes of everything from Ridley Scott's influential classic to Luc Besson's THE FIFTH ELEMENT and it even seems indebted to the Wachowskis circa CLOUD ATLAS. Mute since a childhood accident that could've been remedied had his devout Amish mother not refused surgery, Leo Beiler (Alexander Skarsgard) lives a largely low-key life tending bar at a flashy club called Foreign Dreams, where his blue-haired girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh) is a waitress. He's ultimately fired after too many run-ins with customers who get belligerent with Naadirah, but things get even worse for Ben when she turns up missing after vaguely confessing "You don't really know me." In a concurrent story, AWOL Army medic and single dad Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) works for Maksim (Gilbert Owuor), the Russian gangster who owns Foreign Dreams. Cactus is working off a debt by operating on Maksim's goons as needed (bullet extractions, etc), and in exchange, Maksim is supposed to be obtaining forged passport documents that will get Cactus and his young daughter Josie (played by twins Mia-Sophie and Lea-Marie Bastin) back into the US. As Luddite Leo (who can barely operate an outdated cell phone and is referred to by one character as a "tech tard") tears Berlin apart looking for Naadirah, following clues that involve Maksim and shady pimp Nicky Simsek (Jannis Niewohner), his story will eventually--and cumbersomely--intersect with Cactus Bill's attempts to get out of the city with the help of his cybernetic surgeon buddy Duck Teddington (Justin Theroux).
The nuts-and-bolts of the story--Leo's stoical rampage through the seedy underbelly of the city--is the stuff of any number of generic thrillers you've seen a thousand times. Dropping that story into the middle of a gloomy noir set in future Berlin makes for some nice visuals, but the BLADE RUNNER worship is enough for Ridley Scott to obtain a restraining order, from the neon to the Spinner-style hovercars, the advertisements on the sides of skyscrapers, and Clint Mansell's electronic score that's filled with endless Vangelis and Tangerine Dreamgasms. It's also a love letter to his father's much-loved "Berlin Trilogy," with "Moss Garden" from 1977's "Heroes" and the Bowie-derived Philip Glass composition "Symphony No. 4 (Heroes)" making soundtrack appearances. There's shout-outs to German expressionism with one character owning a poster of the 1930 Emil Jannings/Marlene Dietrich classic THE BLUE ANGEL, and a general sense of melancholia that brings to mind what might've happened in an alternate universe where Wim Wenders made BLADE RUNNER. Further showing off his love of even the most off-the-wall German cinema, Jones at one point has Rudd's Cactus--who also carries a large Bowie (wink wink) knife--wearing a gaudy coat that makes him look like Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Wolf Gremm's 1982 sci-fi cult oddity KAMIKAZE '89.
There's a lot of good intentions with MUTE, but as is often the case when a filmmaker is granted a large budget and a lot of leeway, it looks like Jones couldn't bear to part with anything he wrote or shot. The first hour is a ponderous dawdle, with Skarsgard absent for long stretches while Jones makes the peculiar decision to have Rudd and Theroux act and dress like Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H, right down to Rudd's admittedly amazing horseshoe mustache that gives Gould's '70s look a run for its money. There's a gross pedophilia subplot that seems to belong in another movie, and for some reason, Sam Rockwell has a brief cameo as his character from MOON. Things go completely off the rails in the third act, in good and bad ways, with one character's abrupt exit and an another's actions turning it into an unexpected variation of THE VANISHING, with the whole "future Berlin" element pretty much abandoned. MUTE looks like Jones had fragments of ideas for a half dozen movies and threw them together without really smoothing out the transitions and the rough edges. But it looks good, there's some really impressive production design and top-shelf CGI, and there is one really astonishingly mean-spirited bit with the way one character is forced to spend his last gasping moments watching his worst nightmare become reality and can do nothing but die with the realization that he's powerless to stop it. A horrifying, devastating moment like that is evidence that Jones isn't slacking here, but he's juggling too many half-baked ideas and trying to pay tribute to too many things, and when the credits finally roll, it looks like a bunch of pieces that don't really fit. In the end, MUTE is a misfire, but an occasionally intriguing one.
Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Cast: Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, Christina Applegate, Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, Dylan Baker, Meagan Good, Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, Josh Lawson, Judah Nelson, Fred Willard, Chris Parnell, June Diane Raphael. (PG-13, 120 mins)
Back in 2004, the $25 million ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY made more than triple its budget but never topped the box office and dropped out of the top five after two weeks. The film became a modern comedy classic on DVD and cable, where it amassed a devoted cult following when people discovered how consistently hilarious and quotable it is. Star/co-writer Will Ferrell left SNL two years earlier and had the hits OLD SCHOOL and ELF, but it was ANCHORMAN that would become the defining work of his big-screen career and his partnership with director/co-writer Adam McKay, though I contend that 2010's THE OTHER GUYS is their masterpiece. It's nearly a decade later, and after what must be the longest, most aggressive, and all-encompassing marketing campaigns in cinema history, ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES arrives just before Ferrell resorted to going door-to-door across America in his Ron Burgundy wardrobe. With double the budget, probably to accommodate the increased star power and salary requirements of Ferrell and Steve Carell, it's obviously a bigger movie. And a louder movie. It's also bombastically self-indulgent as Ferrell and McKay seem to be making it up as they go along. Nine years ago, they had enough outtakes and abandoned subplots from the first film to assemble the straight-to-DVD spinoff film WAKE UP, RON BURGUNDY. There's no such restraint here. Running nearly 30 minutes longer than the first film, Ferrell and McKay gather up seemingly every discarded comedy idea they concocted since the first entry and throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. Its rapid fire assault of gags might sound ambitious but it comes off as sloppy and desperate, almost like they could be working on a higher level than we're expecting but more likely they're just punking us with an almost Sandlerian level of audience contempt. There's no doubt the coming weeks will find passionate defenses of the film and you'll see terms like "anarchic," "absurdist," "subversive," "Dadaist", and maybe even, and I can't believe I'm writing this, "Bunuel-ian" tossed about with wild, pretentious abandon as if there's some deeper shit going on, but even as a fan of Ferrell, the first film, and absurdist humor, I found ANCHORMAN 2 to be jaw-droppingly unfunny and a dumpster fire of a movie, the kind of catastrophically awful train wreck where it's not hyperbolic to suggest that it's Ferrell and McKay's GIGLI or THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH.
Opening in 1980 to the sounds of Christopher Cross' "Ride Like the Wind," the first of countless soft-rock tunes used where simply hearing them is supposed to be the joke, ANCHORMAN 2 finds news anchor Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and wife/co-anchor Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) relocated to NYC from San Diego, with their six-year-old son Walter (Judah Nelson). When Veronica is called up to the network by boss Mack Harken (Harrison Ford), who subsequently fires Ron, their marriage falls apart. After a botched suicide attempt, Ron is contacted by Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker), who's scouting for news personalities for Global News Network, a new 24-hour cable news network bankrolled by Australian billionaire Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson). Lured by the promise of stardom and seeing it as another chance to do what he was born to do, Ron decides to reassemble his news team: reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), weatherman Brick Tamland (Carell), and sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner). Saddled with the 2:00-5:00 am graveyard slot, Ron finds a rival in prime-time anchor Jack Lime (James Marsden), and comes up with an idea to give the audience the news they want instead of the news they need. With his focus on vacuous entertainment stories, cute animals, high-speed chases, debates devolving into shouting matches, and smoking crack on-air, Ron becomes the country's biggest news star and inadvertently brings about the downfall of television news standards.
Those digs at today's cable news--which are obvious and don't really threaten to erase memories of Paddy Chayefsky and NETWORK--are about as thoughtful as ANCHORMAN 2 gets. Aside from the use of early '80s radio staples, the film constantly utilizes future debacles and scandals as a source of easy, lazy humor ("Sponsored by BP: Nature's Best Friend," and Brian cites O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, and Robert Blake as his posse who call themselves "The Ladykillers"), and it's funny once or twice, but by the 20th time, it's a little stale. There's a certain expectation of callbacks and references when you're dealing with a comedy as revered as ANCHORMAN, and that film's first invocations of "Great Odin's Raven!" or "By the beard of Zeus!" were hilarious. Not so much here, when Ferrell is bellowing nonsense like "By the hymen of Olivia Newton-John!" What? And I haven't even gotten into an extended subplot where Ron goes blind after a head injury and spends his days in seclusion at a lighthouse and bottle-feeding a shark before freeing it into the open water. Ron Burgundy was always a pompous chauvinist, but here's he's just a bleating, tone-deaf asshole. Sometimes, it's as if he's not even playing the same Ron Burgundy from the first film, but rather, an even more cartoonish parody of Ron Burgundy. Indeed, ANCHORMAN 2 is so scattershot, random, and over-the-top that it makes the comparatively sophisticated ANCHORMAN look like BROADCAST NEWS. When Ron gets involved with African-American, female boss Linda Jackson (Meagan Good)--this is after he first meets her and can't stop the Tourette's-styled barking of "Black!" at her--he has dinner with her family, where he steers the conversation to the level of her "stank" during sex and throwing out a "Say what?" to her mother. Has Ferrell even seen the first ANCHORMAN recently? Does he remember making it?
But that's nothing compared to what's happened to Carell's Brick Tamland. Carell wasn't a star back in 2004 and was primarily known as a DAILY SHOW correspondent. In the ensuing decade, he's had considerable success with THE OFFICE and several movies. Brick was a minor character with some funny bits in ANCHORMAN, but now that Carell is arguably as big a star as Ferrell, they probably had to give Brick stuff to do to entice Carell back. What transpires is nightmarish. Carell plays Brick not as a low-IQ, amiably naive man-child, but instead like a thousand-yard-staring psychopath prone to shrieking and screaming for no reason. He gets an endurance test of a subplot where he falls in love with an eccentric, incompetent GNN secretary named Chani (Kristen Wiig), and their endless, laughless scenes play out like bad improv or an exceptionally awful 12:55 am SNL skit where you can almost hear crickets chirping in Studio 8H. No one's having a good day here--it doesn't help that Rudd and Koechner have almost nothing to do, so they at least emerge from the wreckage largely unscathed--but there's simply too much of this reconceived Brick Tamland in this and Carell turns in what may very well be the worst performance you'll see in a major movie in 2013.
Even by the standards of a Judd Apatow production, there's too much of everything here--except comedy. I get the "anarchic" spirit the filmmakers might be going for, but when I hear that term, I think of the action in BLAZING SADDLES crashing over into Buddy Bizarre's musical at the end. Every rambling, overlong sequence in ANCHORMAN 2 plays like something that only the actors think is funny. You can actually see Carell and Wiig almost breaking during some of their conversations, and I'm sure there's plenty of bloopers with the two of them losing it. But what's onscreen is just not funny. It's not even "weird" or "offbeat" funny. Joke after joke after joke lands with a dead thud. Did anyone at Paramount actually watch this, or did they just figure they'll get the $50 million back before the toxic word-of-mouth spreads? Even the expected rival news crews Battle Royale--one of the original film's best scenes--is restaged here with a ridiculous amount of cameos and other out-of-nowhere additions (Brick hoisting a sci-fi ray gun?), but that's it. Once you see the famous faces and all of Ferrell's buddies who showed up to hang out, there's not really anything else there. So why not have John C. Reilly play the soul-sucking ghost of Stonewall Jackson or Harrison Ford sprouting fur and turning into a "were-hyena" for no reason? Sure, it's insane but is it funny? Ranking somewhere between CADDYSHACK II and SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT PART 3 on the comedy sequel scale, ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES is an excruciating Will Ferrell home movie where the legend of Ron Burgundy has gone to die.
Samuel L. Jackson had two movies open on May 4 of this year. One was THE AVENGERS, which had a $207 million opening weekend. The other was the absurd MEETING EVIL, which didn't fare quite as well. One of the most ludicrous thrillers of the year, MEETING EVIL opened on one (yes, one) screen in the US (in addition to VOD), where it grossed $525 to land in 131st place for the weekend. Based on a novel by Thomas Berger, MEETING EVIL finds John (Luke Wilson) having a very bad day: he loses his job, he comes home to find a foreclosure notice on the front door, and he's fighting with his wife (Leslie Bibb). Then he helps a stranger whose car stalled in front of his house. The stranger is Richie (Jackson), a surly, foul-mouthed, fedora-wearing madman who parks in handicapped spaces and makes John an unwitting accomplice on an afternoon killing spree in town. For a while, director/screenwriter Chris Fisher (somehow still employable after S. DARKO), seems to be aiming for the "Richie is a figment of John's imagination and John's really doing all the killing" twist, and honestly, as predictable and played-out as that is, it would've at least been something cohesive and with a purpose. Berger's novel has to do a better job of making its points than Fisher's script and direction do. There's a vaguely supernatural vibe to a lot of what's going on (what's with the little girl and the dog seemingly keeping a vigil outside John's house?), but it wraps up with a thoroughly generic explanation that's a big buildup to very little and doesn't even bother trying to tie up its loose ends. Fisher also haplessly attempts to work in some topical commentary with detective Tracie Thoms (DEATH PROOF) saying that "Rich people actin' all crazy lately...they ain't never been broke before," but it seems forced and phony. And worst of all, he can't seem to commit to what, or even who, the villain really is. The best scenes involve the sometimes witty repartee between Thoms and lead detective Muse Watson, going full-on Kris Kristofferson with the weary, chain-smoking, and gravelly-voiced act. Those two characters might've been more interesting in their own movie. Wilson is pretty bland, and even Jackson's signature self-righteous, chip-on-the-shoulder act is starting to feel a little shopworn. (R, 89 mins)
WANDERLUST (US - 2012)
WANDERLUST disappeared from theaters pretty quickly but it's already developed a cult following, which is usually the case with anything from the crew behind THE STATE, RENO 911, and PARTY DOWN (plus STELLA, WAINY DAYS, and CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, in addition to the films THE TEN and ROLE MODELS) Directed by David Wain and co-written by Wain and Ken Marino, WANDERLUST is a lot funnier than the trailers made it look, sort-of an edgier, recession-era LOST IN AMERICA with ambitious New Yorkers George (Paul Rudd) and Linda Gergenblatt (Jennifer Aniston) falling in with Elysium, a hippie commune (or, as the residents call it, an "intentional community") in the outskirts of Atlanta. George loses his job and HBO rejects Linda's documentary on penguins with testicular cancer, so they head to Atlanta, where George has a menial job doing data entry for his obnoxious, port-o-potty-magnate brother Rick (Marino), but get sidetracked at the commune, mistaking it for a bed & breakfast. Elysium was founded by the now-senile Carvin (Alan Alda), but now run by the charismatic Seth (Justin Theroux), who doesn't understand the NYC world with its "Zenith televisions and Walkmans and laserdiscs and answering machines." The essential plot is George and Linda figuring out what they want to do with their lives, but WANDERLUST gets a lot of mileage out of a terrific ensemble cast of genuinely funny people, all of whom get big moments in the spotlight (perhaps too many for Joe Lo Truglio, who spends about 95% of his screen time completely naked as the resident nudist). From Rudd and Aniston on down to the smallest roles (a dirty-talking Linda Lavin kills in two brief scenes as a real estate agent), almost every scene has some inspired bit of lunacy taking place (an improv bit with Rudd psyching himself up for a night of free love with Malin Akerman goes on almost agonizingly long, but Wain and Marino make it worth it with a huge, one-line payoff by Kathryn Hahn in the next scene). Also with Lauren Ambrose, Kerry Kenney-Silver, Jordan Peele, Michaela Watkins (stealing multiple scenes as Marino's drunk, pill-addled wife), Zandy Hartig, Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, and possibly the funniest cameo of 2012. Judd Apatow produced, but wisely left Wain and Marino to do their thing. Indeed, WANDERLUST is perhaps the only Apatow production that doesn't feel like one, and not just because it isn't pointlessly stretched past the two-hour mark. (R, 98 mins; the Blu-ray contains, as a bonus feature, a second version of the film, running around 80 minutes, comprised of alternate takes with different jokes and dialogue)
