Another month, another instantly forgotten Nicolas Cage movie. He's rather subdued here, which is not why anyone bothers watching VOD-era Nic Cage, and on top of that, it's more of a TRAFFIC-style ensemble exercise that keeps him sidelined for long periods, and despite his top billing, he's playing a generally secondary character. Atypical of present-day Cage, this one also offers a lot more in the way of real actors, but the blatantly NARCOS-inspired storyline feels like it's trying to cram two seasons worth of a binge-worthy TV cartel drama into 100 interminable minutes that seem more like three hours. Written and directed by Jason Cabell, a former Navy SEAL who apparently worked with the DEA in Colombia prior to breaking into movies, RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL deals with the aftermath of the fentanyl and heroin overdose deaths of two suburban Seattle parents, with their young daughter getting on the school bus and telling the driver "I can't wake them up." This case is personal for The Agent in Charge (Leslie Bibb), who's also the little girl's aunt. It seems there's been a rash of fatal overdoses in and around Seattle, all traced back to a bad shipment that recently landed in the area. The Vancouver-based The Boss (Barry Pepper) assigns his top Seattle area distributor, a pizzeria owner known as The Cook (Cage) to get to the bottom of why shipments in his region have been light and overcut, and he assigns his top enforcer The Executioner (Cole Hauser) to accompany him to the base of operation in Colombia and follow the next shipment back to see where it's happening and who's responsible.
As you can see, everyone gets a title in lieu of a character name, an annoying quirk that seems more at home in a '90s post-Tarantino crime flick than it does in an ostensibly serious movie. There's also The Man (Laurence Fishburne), a sleazy, drug-addled, sex-addicted middleman who spends most of his time getting high with hookers (Fishburne gets possibly the least-dignified intro of his career, The Man first seen maniacally jerking off in a porn parlor peep show booth); The Snitch (Adam Goldberg), who gets busted snorting coke outside a hospital where he's about to dump off two dead hookers who OD'd on The Man's merchandise, and ends up an informant after being tortured by The Agent in Charge; Number One (Peter Facinelli), a DEA associate of The Agent; and The Farmer (Clifton Collins Jr), who's seen periodically in some Colombia-set scenes but his exact purpose in the narrative isn't really explained. It's Fishburne who gets the most screen time, giving RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL more than he can possibly get from it in return, rendering his efforts all for naught. I would understand it if this was like Cage's recent A SCORE TO SETTLE, which gave him Benjamin Bratt among the cast of relative nobodies (along with an amazing "BEEF?!" meltdown), but here we have another Cage clunker that's somehow packed with established actors of various standing for no reason at all. Cage stopped caring a long time ago and seems to be content lucking into a JOE or a MANDY every couple of years (or Richard Stanley's upcoming and much-anticipated THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE). By now, we expect Cage to be in something like this, but why the overqualified supporting cast? Never mind being unworthy of Laurence Fishburne. RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL isn't even worth Cole Hauser's time. (R, 100 mins)
CORPORATE ANIMALS (US - 2019)
It's hard to believe anyone thought a mash-up of OFFICE SPACE and ALIVE (or SURVIVE! if you're a more old-school exploitation fan) would be a good idea for anything other than an SNL skit that mercifully got cut for time. And rest assured, the barely-released satirical workplace cannibal comedy CORPORATE ANIMALS is every bit as abysmal as it sounds. There's a few admittedly witty one-liners that land ("You fucked my lunch?!"), but CORPORATE ANIMALS, directed by Patrick Brice and written by Sam Bain, both part of the Duplass Brothers inner circle, offers little beyond the obvious metaphorical implications of ambitious employees going to extreme measures to survive, whether it's in the office or being trapped in a cave-in while on an ill-advised spelunking excursion as a team building exercise. The trip was organized by Incredible Edible Cutlery's scheming, bitch-on-wheels CEO Lucy Vanderton (Demi Moore), but an impromptu change in plans where she badgers guide Brandon (co-producer Ed Helms, showing up long enough to remind you of THE OFFICE) into taking her staff on the "experienced" route, which soon proves disastrous when an earthquake causes a cave-in that crushes Brandon to death (exit Ed Helms at the 17-minute mark). With little water and nothing to eat other than a sample package of Incredible Edible Cutlery, tensions flare after a few days when the starving survivors--among them marketing head and Lucy's "Beyonce of Business" Jess (former DAILY SHOW correspondent Jessica Williams) and her chief rival and Lucy's former intern/boytoy Freddie the Fucktoy (DEADPOOL's Karan Soni)--decide to eat Brandon in order to survive (and discover that Lucy already helped herself to his arm while everyone else was asleep). Other than some scattered shots of flesh-munching, the film is skittish about venturing too far into the grossout realm, with most of the time spent with the characters arguing about office and personal grievances in almost total darkness, with the end result so tedious that it's hard to believe it's only been 80 minutes when the closing credits finally start rolling.
The cast is filled with funny and talented people--SNL vet Nasim Pedrad, Dan Bakkedahl cast radically against type as "Dan Bakkedahl," and the great Isiah Whitlock, Jr--but they aren't well utilized. Moore's inspired casting results in her getting some of the better lines ("Nut up and put that pussy into it!" she tells a terrified Pedrad as she descends into the cave, and later yelling "Your panic attack is not authorized!") and Freddie's weird obsession with Gary Sinise--even having a picture of him in his wallet--is a running gag that belongs in a better movie, but CORPORATE ANIMALS doesn't have anything beyond the cannibalism motif, and it doesn't even spend much time on it, instead exploring other avenues for "shock" comedy, like Harvey Weinstein jokes, full-frontal Bakkedahl, or Moore talking about rimjobs. You know your comedy is a lost cause when Isiah Whitlock Jr is in it and you don't even have him drop his signature line. Also with voice cameos by Britney Spears and members of the B-52s, for some reason. (R, 86 mins)
AMERICAN RENEGADES aka RENEGADES (France/Germany/Belgium - 2017; US release 2018)
Remember the Luc Besson-produced Navy SEALs actioner RENEGADES that was supposed to hit theaters in the summer of 2016? Distributor STX kept bouncing its release date around (a local Cinemark multiplex near me had a RENEGADES poster in a Coming Soon display for most of 2016) and by late 2017, removed it from the schedule completely. While it played everywhere else in the world in 2017, it didn't open in the US until the last week of 2018, unceremoniously dumped in a handful of theaters and on VOD by the financially-strapped EuropaCorp and sporting the nostalgically jingoistic, Cannon-esque retitling AMERICAN RENEGADES. That's probably not quite what everyone involved in this $75 million production had in mind, but looking at it now, it's not difficult to see why it panned out that way. AMERICAN RENEGADES is lugubrious, dead-on-arrival dud that must rank among the dullest men-on-a-mission military actioners you'll ever see. In a prologue set in 1944 Nazi-occupied France, German officers confiscate priceless art and 2000 bars of gold and move them to a secret vault in a bank in the small Yugoslav town of Grahovo. Local partisans exact revenge on the Nazis by blowing up a dam and destroying the village. 50 years later (1994 period detail is largely limited to a fight scene set to Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper"), an elite team of Navy SEALs led by Matt Barnes (STRIKE BACK's Sullivan Stapleton) and Stanton Baker (Charlie Bewley) extract war criminal Gen. Milic (Peter Davor) from his Sarajevo stronghold and turn him over to their commander, Adm. Levin (J.K. Simmons, cast radically against type as "J.K. Simmons"). Meanwhile, Baker is romantically involved with local bar server Lara (Sylvia Hoeks), who informs him that her grandfather was one of the Yugoslav partisans who blew up the dam and that the 2000 gold bars are safely nestled in the ruins of the bank, now 150 feet down in an area lake. She offers Baker and the rest of the team a deal: the gold is currently valued at $300 million, half of which is theirs if they can use their SEAL skills to retrieve it, with her ultimate goal to give $150 million to the displaced and the suffering in war-torn Bosnia. They go along with the plan, but only have 36 hours to pull it off since Adm. Levin has decided to ship them back home, as pro-Milic insurgents have put a price on all their heads.
There have been countless "men-on-a-mission" movies going back to the 1960s. How does this KELLY'S HEROES premise not work? Well, if you're co-writers Besson and Richard Wenk (THE EXPENDABLES 2, THE EQUALIZER), you come up with tired one-liners that clang to the ground and if you're director Steven Quale (FINAL DESTINATION 5, INTO THE STORM), you handle the action scenes as lifelessly as possible, with half the movie taking place underwater where it's impossible to tell what's going on. It also doesn't help that, with the exception of Bewley because his character is involved with Hoeks' Lara, there's almost nothing to differentiate any of the square-jawed SEALs on the team. Top-billed Stapleton registers zero (remember how he was the star of the 300 prequel and had it stolen right out from under him by Eva Green?) and the climax only comes to life once they're above water and have their asses saved by a hot-dogging chopper pilot improbably played by Ewen "Spud from TRAINSPOTTING" Bremner. Simmons had just won his WHIPLASH Oscar when this began filming in the spring of 2015, and he's clearly bringing some of that demeanor to this, as his bloviating admiral provides an R. Lee Ermey-esque spark when he's chewing out the SEALs. AMERICAN RENEGADES looks like a pretty expensive, large scale action movie, but the script needed some punching up, the actions sequences need more energy, and the cast needed to be populated by more engaging actors than Sullivan Stapleton and Charlie Bewley. (PG-13, 105 mins)
ASHER (US - 2018)
A longtime pet project for producer/star Ron Perlman, ASHER is the kind of indie that probably would've gotten some film festival accolades and ended up being a modest sleeper hit 15 years ago, but in 2018, it's inevitably relegated to the VOD scrap heap. It's really no great shakes, and fans of the '80s TV series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST already know that Perlman can play someone with a soft side, but ASHER is really just a harmless, low-key character piece that's a nice showcase for the more introspective side of a veteran actor who's spent most of his career under a ton of makeup or playing ruthless bad guys. Perlman is Asher, a disciplined, loner hit man for Brooklyn-based Jewish crime boss Avi (a kvetching Richard Dreyfuss). Spending most of his time in solitude listening to old records, cooking, and enjoying fine wine when he isn't on jobs assigned to him by his dry-cleaning handler Abram (Ned Eisenberg), Asher feels the years catching up with him, especially since Avi's only been using him sparingly and giving all the prime jobs to his younger ex-protege Uziel (Peter Facinelli). Bullet fragments remaining in his back from years earlier have affected his blood and weakened his heart, and when an out-of-order elevator forces him to walk six floors up for a hit, he's sweating profusely and so winded that chest pains cause him to collapse in the doorway of the target's neighbor, Sophie (Famke Janssen). Sensing his own mortality and wanting more to his life than killing people, Asher takes tentative steps toward romancing Sophie, a ballet teacher who's preoccupied with taking care of her dementia-stricken mother (Jacqueline Bisset). It isn't long before Asher finds both his and Sophie's lives are in danger when Avi gets word of an attempted coup by his own men, something Asher knows nothing about but is lumped in with the guilty when Avi decides to bring in a new crew to clean house and wipe out his old one.
Watching ASHER, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Ben Kingsley/Tea Leoni-starring YOU KILL ME, another generally light-hearted hit man comedy from a decade or so ago. It's all very familiar, but in the hands of a journeyman pro like Michael Caton-Jones (MEMPHIS BELLE, THIS BOY'S LIFE, ROB ROY, THE JACKAL, and uh, BASIC INSTINCT 2), ASHER is happily content to be what it is. Perlman is excellent as the tried-and-true "hitman with a heart of gold" who's so old school that he still presses his clothes and shines his shoes before heading out on a hit. He feels like a relic surrounded by increasingly younger colleagues, including loud and arrogant new guy Lyor (Guy Burnet), who's introduced mouthing off to Asher and mocking his heart problem, to which Asher replies "Is this your first job? You'll probably be the one who fucks everything up." Jay Zaretsky's script indulges in some humor that ranges from dark to quirky, whether it's Sophie, who has no idea what Asher does for a living, telling him that her mother wants to die and jokingly suggesting that he kill her, or the amusing sight of Dreyfuss' Avi dishing up steaming bowls of matzah ball soup for his goons. Other than one truly awful CGI explosion that looks like stock footage from a 25-year-old Bulgarian action movie, ASHER is an enjoyable and often sweet look at a lifelong old soul looking for something more in his twilight years. It isn't anything deep and meaningful, but the two stars are very appealing together, and it's a must-see if you're a Ron Perlman fan. (R, 104 mins)
The visually striking but ponderous AUTOMATA succeeds in looking a lot more expensive than its $15 million budget, but it can't overcome an obvious, empty, and hopelessly derivative story that suggests at least a small percentage of whatever, if any, profit it makes should go to the estate of Isaac Asimov. Set in 2044 with 99.7% of Earth's population wiped out by solar storms that have turned the planet into a radioactive desert, AUTOMATA has the surviving humans corralled into covered cities after the ROC Corporation manufactures a line of Automata robots to build walls and climate-controlled clouds to create pockets of atmosphere amidst the dystopian hellscape. The robots have two protocols: 1) never harm a living thing, and 2) they are forbidden to alter themselves or other robots. When a robot is spotted working on itself and another sets itself on fire after being caught smuggling a piece of equipment out of a research facility, it's apparent to the powers that be at ROC that the robots have started to flagrantly disregard their second protocol. ROC insurance investigator Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) witnesses the robotic self-immolation and is led to cybernetics engineer Dr. Dupre (Melanie Griffith), who warns him that robot evolution is well within the realm of possibility should one of them figure out how to abandon the second protocol. Vaucan is abducted by a sex robot named Cleo (voiced by Griffith) and three others, who take him on a journey across the deadly desert to meet their leader, the Blue Robot (voiced by Javier Bardem), the robot who evolved into a semi-emotional being and began working on the others, forming a rapidly snowballing rebellion that threatens to exterminate what little is left of the human race. "Life finds a way," the Blue Robot explains to Vaucan. "Your time is coming to an end."
Co-written by director Gabe Ibanez, a protege of Alex de la Iglesia, AUTOMATA sounds like a film with heady ideas but it really comes off as silly most of the time. It's extremely convoluted and seems like a piecemeal stitching of other, better sources, with a lot of Asimov's Robot series, some Neill Blomkamp allegory (there's a definite DISTRICT 9 thing going on with humanity's shabby treatment of the robots), a bit of BLADE RUNNER in the high-tech, sleazy neon cityscapes of the protected areas, and a portion of post-apocalypse with the admittedly well-done CGI in the desert sequences, which look terrific but go on forever. Once the robots get Vaucan out there (wait a minute...isn't the desert supposed to be lethally radioactive?), the pace really slows down as too much time is spent on Vaucan haplessly demanding to be taken back to the city and Cleo replying that they "can't do that, sir," repeated multiple times over. There's a bit of a HARDWARE vibe going on as well, right down to the presence of Dylan McDermott as Wallace, a rogue, robot-hating cop hired by Vaucan's boss (Robert Forster) to venture into the desert to find him and take out the fugitive robots. A subplot involving Vaucan's very pregnant wife (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) goes nowhere and has so little effect on everything that it feels like a more expanded plot thread that's been drastically cut. Banderas does what he can and is an engaging enough hero, and Cannon cover band Millennium gets better work than usual out of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX. Ibanez obviously has a great eye for visual style, but with such a weak, hackneyed, cut-and-paste script, the terrific-looking but frustrating AUTOMATA can't help but feel like it's all surface and no substance. (R, 110 mins)
THE DAMNED (Colombia/US - 2014)
Spanish-born director Victor Garcia has earned a dubious name for himself as a go-to guy for shitty DTV sequels like RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (2006), MIRRORS 2 (2010), and the unwatchable HELLRAISER: REVELATIONS (2011), a crass exercise in Weinstein audience contempt--so much so that Doug Bradley refused to reprise his iconic role as Pinhead--shot fast and cheap when they realized they were about to lose the rights to the franchise. Garcia has been a gun-for-hire on all of these, demonstrating none of the promise of other top-drawer DTV auteurs and seeming like a hack who only got the lowly sequel gigs that Joel Soisson turned down. Garcia finally comes into his own with THE DAMNED, which isn't the most original horror film you'll ever see, but it's done with such spirited verve and frenzied panache that it wins you over in spite of the usual gaping lapses in logic that seem to haunt these kinds of films. Widower David (Peter Facinelli) and his fiancee Lauren (Sophia Myles) arrive in Bogota to pick up his college-age daughter Jill (Nathalia Ramos). Jill has been vacationing with her journalist aunt and late mom's sister Gina (Carolina Guerra), has hooked up with Gina's cameraman Ramon (Sebastian Martinez), and hasn't been answering David's calls. David is persistent, but the quintet have to drive about four hours to another town to get Jill's passport, which she carelessly left behind. Ignoring the warnings of local cop Morales (Juan Pablo Gamboa), and traveling down a dangerous mountain road, they get caught in a flash flood, destroying Gina's truck, forcing them to find refuge at a decrepit inn run by Felipe (Gustavo Angarita). The guest register shows no one's stayed at the inn since 1978, and the skittish Felipe doesn't want them wandering around. Searching for a bathroom, Jill hears a voice crying for help. She and Ramon find a little girl, Ana Maria (Julieta Salazar), in a secret locked cell in the basement. They free her, and all hell breaks loose. Ana Maria is the current host of "La Bruja," the spirit of a 17th century witch with the power to jump from body to body when the current host is killed. Felipe has had Ana Maria locked in the basement cell since 1978, and with a torrential downpour making escape impossible, now has an inn filled with interlopers for La Bruja to freely possess at will.
Screenwriter Richard D'Ovidio's (THE CALL) idea of an evil spirit moving from body to body isn't exactly a new concept, having been used to great effect in John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987), William Peter Blatty's THE EXORCIST III (1990), and Gregory Hoblit's FALLEN (1998) to name a few. And the notion of keeping a demonic spirit locked away owes a lot to the second-season TWILIGHT ZONE episode "The Howling Man," and Michael Mann's THE KEEP (1983). But after years of execrable swill, Garcia finally establishes himself as a legitimate talent outside the shackling expectations of bad DTV sequels. Garcia got his start working on the effects crews on several of RE-ANIMATOR producer Brian Yuzna's Spanish productions of the early 2000s, such as DAGON (2001) and WEREWOLF HUNTER (2004). A lot of those Yuzna titles dealt with travelers being trapped in a desolate place, and in that way, THE DAMNED (shot under the title GALLOWS HILL) plays a lot like something Yuzna would've shepherded a decade or so ago. Garcia is conservative with digital effects, but really seems to prefer the practical if at all possible--it's nice to see latex and wet, spurting blood in a horror movie these days. Garcia also makes terrific use of tried-and-true genre tropes like creepy dolls, a chair rocking itself, covered mirrors, and cockroaches infesting the inn. The cheap jump scares work, and there's a doomy, rainy atmosphere throughout. Sure, characters do dumb things (David: "From now on, we all stick together!" he exhorts three seconds before wandering into another room alone), but as the film morphs into one of the more highly-energized EXORCIST knockoffs (Myles, in particular, throws herself into this), there's a genuinely sinister and unsettling method to La Bruja's madness in the way it's able to see inside the souls of those around it, exposing their deepest secrets and exploiting their guilt and weakness. You've seen most of what's in THE DAMNED before, but Garcia's enthusiasm, the film's relentless pace, and the overwhelming sense of hopelessness, grief, and despair make it far more effective than it has any right to be. (R, 87 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)
