Opened 25 Years Ago: FARGO (3/8/1996)

 

FARGO opening in Toledo, OH on 3/29/1996

In Theaters/On VOD: THE POISON ROSE (2019)

THE POISON ROSE
(US/Italy - 2019)

Directed by George Gallo. Written by Richard Salvatore. Cast: John Travolta, Morgan Freeman, Famke Janssen, Brendan Fraser, Robert Patrick, Kat Graham, Peter Stormare, Ella Bleu Travolta, Blerim Destani, Julie Lott, Nick Vallelonga, Devin Ellery, Chris Mullinax, Melissa Greenspan, Sheila Shah, Nadine Lewington, Ashley Atwood, Anson Downes, Bill Luckett. (R, 97 mins)

It's always unfortunate when great movie stars don't team up until the downside of their careers. This means you get things like Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins having a one-scene confrontation in the 2016 straight-to-VOD dud MISCONDUCT, but they're never in the same shot together as it quickly becomes obvious that they weren't even there at the same time. That's not quite the case with John Travolta and Morgan Freeman in THE POISON ROSE, but it's just as dispiriting that these two never worked together until the era of VOD Travoltablivion. A neo-noir that feels like it's been frozen in ice since the waning days of Savoy Pictures and boasting the finest ensemble that 1997 had to offer, THE POISON ROSE opens in 1978 Los Angeles, as low-rent private eye Carson Phillips (Travolta, sporting a career-worst wig) is offered a job by a mystery woman (Julie Lott) to verify the whereabouts of an elderly relative named Barbara Van Poole, who's supposedly a patient at a sanitarium in Phillips' hometown of Galveston. Phillips is reluctant, as he got as far away from Texas as he could 20 years earlier when he was disgraced in a point-shaving scandal that ended his gridiron career. And before we go any further, yes, THE POISON ROSE is the kind of movie that asks you to buy 65-year-old John Travolta as a guy who was a college football star 20 years earlier.

Phillips arrives in Galveston and is promptly stonewalled by Dr. Miles Mitchell (Brendan Fraser, a last-minute replacement when Forest Whitaker backed out), the weirdo in charge of the sanitarium, who insists that Ms. Van Poole is undergoing intense treatment and cannot be bothered. Using his downtime to renew old townie acquaintances like Sheriff Bing Welsh (Robert Patrick), aging hippie Slide Olsen (Peter Stormare), and obscenely wealthy mover-and-shaker Doc (Freeman), Phillips gets involved in another mystery when college football star Happy Chandler (Devin Ellery) takes a nasty hit on the field and dies. An autopsy reveals speed, meth, and an overdose of a cancer drug in his system, and the chief suspect is his wife Becky (Ella Bleu Travolta), who has plenty of motive since Happy was abusive and was sleeping with several other women, including Doc's sultry chanteuse daughter Rose (Kat Graham). Further complicating matters is that Becky's mother is Jayne Hunt (Famke Janssen), the woman Phillips left after his football scandal and the widow of a Galveston oil baron who was Doc's chief competitor. Doc wants part of Jayne's empire and for her to talk a snooping Phillips into going back to L.A., and Jayne wants Doc to grease Sheriff Welsh and the local law to take the heat for Happy's death off of Becky. All the while, Phillips keeps investigating and uncovers a conspiracy of corruption, a cancer cluster resulting from groundwater contamination, rampant medical billing fraud, and disappearing sanitarium patients, with random people threatening and taking shots at him to let him know he's no longer welcome in Galveston.

This is more or less DIPSHIT CHINATOWN, with the period detail primarily limited to the cars and people smoking indoors, with no real point to it taking place in 1978. Freeman's Doc is straight out of the Noah Cross playbook ("He owns everyone and everything!" Jayne says) and the story is so convoluted that you'll ultimately stop caring. In relation to Travolta's recent output that's almost enough to make John Cusack and Bruce Willis look away in embarrassment (GOTTI, SPEED KILLS, TRADING PAINT), THE POISON ROSE has a little more going for it--it's hard to dislike any movie that opens with GREEN BOOK Oscar-winner Nick Vallelonga getting kneed in the balls--and its biggest disappointment is that it takes itself too seriously and never fully embraces its inherent insanity. This is a film where Peter Stormare is shown singing a country music ditty and even he doesn't have the weirdest accent in it. It's been a while since Fraser was in a feature film, and if he's gunning to reinvent himself as a character actor in the Sidney Lassick mold, he's off to a promising start with his fey, lisping, whiny Dr. Mitchell. Fraser gives THE POISON ROSE its biggest spark and it's entertainingly weird whenever he's onscreen, plus his final scene is a viral YouTube clip waiting to happen. There's a hilarious scene where local drug dealer Lorenzo (Blerim Destani) is firing at Phillips in an empty football stadium, and Phillips grabs a football and takes him down with a perfectly-thrown spiral. It's also nice to see Travolta acting with his daughter Ella Bleu, even if it's something dumb like Phillips teaching Becky how to properly dunk donuts in coffee. Screenwriter and Travolta pal Richard Salvatore, working from a self-published novel by, uh, Richard Salvatore, gets off a few good P.I. zingers in the requisite noir narration, with Phillips cracking that "the next big case Bing solved would be his first," but usually it's cliches along the lines of "This is a bad place...worse than you can imagine," or this groan-worthy exchange more fitting for DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID:

Phillips: "You're tough as nails."

Jayne: "Those nails got rusty."  

The film was directed by George Gallo, best known for scripting the 1988 buddy classic MIDNIGHT RUN and co-writing 1995's BAD BOYS, but has done little else of note. IMDb and some reviews are crediting two Italian filmmakers--Francesco Cinquemani and Luca Giliberto--as additional co-directors, though their names are nowhere to be found on the film itself. Shot in Savannah, GA, THE POISON ROSE is a US/Italian co-production from Cannon cover band Millennium and Italian producer Andrea Iervolino, and the closing credits list an Italian unit. Cinquemani--who also directed the abominable Italian HUNGER GAMES ripoff ANDRON that somehow starred Alec Baldwin--has been actively plugging THE POISON ROSE all over social media but it's not clear from this exactly what his or Gilibertro's contributions were. The inclusion of numerous Italian actors in the cast listing on the film's IMDb page who aren't even in the movie--among them Claudia Gerini (JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2) and Bruno Bilotta (DEMONS 2)--could indicate either some serious post-production tweaking or that Iervolino had Cinquemani and Giliberto shoot additional scenes specifically tailored for the Italian and/or European market, though I really can't imagine this being a hit anywhere.

On DVD/Blu-ray: KILL 'EM ALL (2017) and ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE (2016)

KILL 'EM ALL 
(US - 2017)

Jean-Claude Van Damme's DTV action films have historically been a cut above most of their ilk, but he stumbles badly with the arguably career-worst KILL 'EM ALL, a dull and uninspired Biloxi, MS-shot waste of time that sees fit to shamelessly rip off THE USUAL SUSPECTS two decades after the fact. KILL 'EM ALL jumps back and forth in time over the course of one day, opening with the aftermath of a massacre at a soon-to-be-closed hospital that's abandoned except for the emergency room. Nurse Suzanne (Autumn Reeser) is being questioned by FBI agents Holman (a ludicrously miscast Peter Stormare, looking like an aging rock band's tour manager) and Sanders (Maria Conchita Alonso) about Philip (JCVD), the mysterious stranger who took on a crew of hired killers and kept her safe during the hospital siege before vanishing. The agents, especially Holman, are skeptical about Suzanne's story and seem convinced that she's withholding details. In a brief detour that borrows a lot from EASTERN PROMISES, it turns out Philip infiltrated the Serbian "Black Hand," a crime outfit that rose from the ashes of the former Yugoslavia, and led by war criminal Dmitri Petrovic (Eddie Matthews), the man who assassinated Philip's activist father in front of young Philip 35 years ago (among other implausibilities, we're asked to believe that craggy-faced, 56-year-old JCVD is playing someone who was a little kid in the 1980s). A shootout starts at a nearby hotel and ends up at the hospital, where each of Petrovic's goons, including Radovan (Daniel Bernhardt, looking like a DTV Jon Hamm), Dusan (the mandatory bone thrown to JCVD's son Kristopher Van Varenberg, who's finally cut the shit and just decided to go by "Kris Van Damme"), and Almira (Mila Kali) not only get introductory captions but also momentum-and-time-killling flashbacks showing how lethal they are. Battling a knife wound and a concussion, Philip takes on each of them in the abandoned hospital as he fights to keep himself and Suzanne alive.

JCVD has maybe the fewest lines he's ever had in a movie, and while he has several fight scenes here, he looks tired and seems like he's going through the motions. First-time director Peter Malota, a veteran stuntman and fight coordinator who's regularly worked with JCVD going back to 1991's DOUBLE IMPACT, relies on dizzying quick edits that render every brawl a tiresome blur. A lot of is certainly used to cover the understandable fact that the aging JCVD isn't as agile as he once was, but he's at least showing up for work, unlike his contemporary Steven Seagal. But KILL 'EM ALL is cheap-looking and slapdash enough that it's too close for comfort with Seagal-level quality, and it's probably not a coincidence that co-writer Jesse Cilio wrote the recent Seagal dud THE PERFECT WEAPON. By the time the final twists start coming, each one more ridiculous than the last, KILL 'EM ALL just gives up and doesn't even attempt to be subtle about how much it's ripping off THE USUAL SUSPECTS. Even a dipshit like Fenster could've made a better movie than this. (R, 95 mins)



ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE
(France/China - 2016; US release 2017)

If the gamer/wuxia fantasy ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE seems like it should've been made ten years ago, that's because it pretty much was--when it starred Jackie Chan and Jet Li and was called THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. Produced and co-written by Luc Besson, the $48 million ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE was given a huge 3-D release in China in November 2016, but was banished to VOD when it debuted in the US in May 2017, a couple of months after Zhang Yimou's expensive THE GREAT WALL underperformed in US theaters. It's not without its moments of KARATE KID-like retro charm, but at the same time, it feels awfully late to be jumping on the CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON bandwagon, making you wonder just how long Besson and regular writing partner Robert Mark Kamen (TAKEN, THE TRANSPORTER) had this one stashed away before Besson got around to assigning it to someone (in this case, COCKNEYS VS. ZOMBIES director Matthias Hoene). Jack Bronson (Uriah Shelton, most recently seen on Netflix's 13 REASONS WHY) is a bullied gamer who lives with his busy-single-mom-too-distracted-to-notice-all-the-shenanigans-going-on-in-her-house Annie (Sienna Guillory). He blows off his homework for video games and works part-time at antique shop, where his Chinese boss Mr. Chang (Francis Ng) gives him an ancient crock that turns out to be a portal to another time. He's visited through the crock by Zhao (Mark Chao), the chief guard to Princess Sulin (Ni Ni), who he leaves in the care of Jack, believing him to be the fabled "Black Knight," confusing him with his gaming avatar. Zhao has brought Sulin to the present day in order to escape Arun the Cruel (Dave Bautista), a despot who has murdered Sulin's emperor father and intends to claim her as his bride as he takes over the land. After Jack takes Sulin to the mall for some ice cream and some tired culture clash/fish-out-of-water comedy, some of Arun's men get through the time portal and end up trashing Jack's mom's house. This sends Jack and Sulin fleeing through the portal back to her time, where she's abducted by Arun, forcing Zhao and Jack, who's definitely not the Black Knight that Zhao was expecting, to set aside their differences and work together to rescue Sulin...if they don't kill each other first!

There's a nice '80s vibe to some of the early scenes, with Jack trying to avoid a bullying asshole named Travis (Dakota Daulby, really oozing that loathsome William Zabka prickitude) and a resulting reckless mountain bike chase through the streets (cue reaction shots with befuddled old people looking confused and scared). Jack even has the required overweight, obnoxious, comic relief best buddy in Hector (Luke Mac Davis as Jonah Hill as Josh Gad as Dan Fogler as Zack Pearlman), who tries to fistbump Sulin and rightly gets his ass kicked in the process. There's also some laughs to be had from a running gag involving Arun's incredibly stupid henchman Brutus (Zha Ka), but while it occasionally amuses, ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE never reaches beyond the level of merely OK. The action sequences are nothing special, and Shelton is as irritating here as Michael Angarano was in THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. There's too many easy, predictable jokes about Jack trying to get Zhao to loosen up, like when he provides human beatbox and club sound accompaniment to teach Zhao to dance (do they have time for this?), or sheltered, demanding Sulin learning contemporary slang ("You're the shit!" is her favorite).  A Robert Zemeckis or a Richard Donner probably could've made this a lot of fun 30 years ago, but it isn't retro enough to be completely funny and it isn't imaginative enough to be anything other than a run-of-the-mill knockoff of all the Zhang Yimou epics of the early-to-mid 2000s, like HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. (PG-13, 105 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: RUPTURE (2017); XX (2017); and BEYOND THE GATES (2016)

RUPTURE
(Italy/US - 2017)

RUPTURE is the first directing effort in a decade from Steven Shainberg, who had some significant critical acclaim with 2002's SECRETARY.  But after the mixed reception of his 2006 Diane Arbus biopic FUR, he concentrated on producing until ending his filmmaking sabbatical with this strange horror film that tries to straddle the line between arthouse and grindhouse and comes up short in both. Renee Morgan (Noomi Rapace) is a divorced Kansas City mom who drops off her son Evan (Percy Hynes White) for the weekend with his bitter, angry father. Heading to meet a guy she's been dating for a skydiving excursion, her plans are derailed when a device attached to her rear tire causes it to blow out and she's abducted on the side of a deserted road by several people in a hauling truck. Shackled and with black tape wrapped around her head with only her eyes, nostrils, and mouth exposed, she's taken several days away to a grimy, dimly-lit, generic horror movie warehouse at an undisclosed location and strapped to a table in an observation room. Various mysterious personnel--Dianne (Kerry Bishe), Dr. Nyman (Lesley Manville), and a well-dressed Bald Man (Michael Chiklis)--interrogate her with personal questions that seem to focus primarily on her fears. Exploiting her fear of spiders--which they already know because of hidden surveillance cameras throughout her home--their goal is to get her to break, to "rupture," to reach the point where she "destroys" her fear. These mystery people--are they part of a secret government operation?--are researching a genetic code known as "G10/12x," which they believe is the key to fear, and to lose that sense of being afraid causes an inner mutation that makes carriers of that gene the next phase of human evolution.

The script by Brian Nelson (HARD CANDY, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT) is filled with heady concepts, but once RUPTURE takes a hard turn towards sci-fi in its third act, its half-baked ideas don't hold up under much scrutiny. For the most part, it's a claustrophobic and unpleasant mix of MARTYRS, HOSTEL, and William Friedkin's BUG, but its disparate elements never really gel. RUPTURE might've made for a solid TWILIGHT ZONE episode, but by the end, there's more questions than answers (such as why, if these mystery people are capable of what they are, do they still have to rely on old-school security cameras to learn more about Renee prior to abducting her?). It's hardly the triumphant return of a briefly-lauded filmmaker, and it's hard telling what it was that made Shainberg decide RUPTURE was the project to lure him back behind the camera. RUPTURE stumbles with some embarrassingly bush-league CGI spiders and shape-shifting that appear to be on loan from a 1997 NuImage production, and other than Rapace, the cast--which also includes Peter Stormare, cast radically against type as "Peter Stormare," as the leader of this mysterious outfit--seems lost. Just as odd as Shainberg directing, it's hard telling what inspired Mike Leigh regular Manville (HIGH HOPES, TOPSY-TURVY, ANOTHER YEAR) to go slumming in something like this, unless it just seemed a lot smarter on the page. Similarly, someone forgot to tell Rapace that she's starring in a garbage B-movie, because she admirably gives this thing everything she's got. She's so committed--mentally and physically--to this character and her situation that she single-handedly makes RUPTURE worth seeing for fans of the original Lisbeth Salander. (Unrated, 101 mins)



XX
(US - 2017)

XX got a lot of buzz in horror circles for its unique standing as an anthology project created by and centered on women. In its initial stages, the filmmakers involved were set to be Jennifer Lynch (BOXING HELENA), Jen & Sylva Soska (AMERICAN MARY), Mary Harron (AMERICAN PSYCHO), Karyn Kusama (THE INVITATION), and former Rue Morgue editor Jovanka Vuckovic. By the time the XX was officially underway, Lynch, Harron, and the Soskas dropped out, with Kusama and Vuckovic joined by Roxanne Benjamin (SOUTHBOUND) and Annie Clark, better known as musician St. Vincent, with Mexican stop-motion animator Sofia Carrillo handling the wraparound and the "interstitial" segments between the stories. Oddly enough, it's the least-experienced filmmakers of the bunch who fare best, with Vuckovic's opener "The Box," based on a Jack Ketchum short story about a child's curiosity about the contents of a gift box held by a stranger on a train ultimately sending a family into emotional and physical turmoil as everyone who finds out what's in the box begins starving themselves. Clark's "The Birthday Party," which she co-wrote with Benjamin, is a deadpan farce with Melanie Lynskey as a wife and mom desperately trying to carry on with her seven-year-old daughter's birthday party even though her husband drops dead right before the guests arrive. It's a one-joke story that gets an admittedly huge laugh at the end, but perhaps not big enough to justify the elaborate buildup.

At that point, XX fails to heed its own advice with "Don't Fall," a useless ten-minute trifle from Benjamin with a group of obnoxious campers being pursued by a shape-shifting desert creature. The closer is "Her Only Living Son," and it's quite a disappointment from Kusama, who doesn't keep her INVITATION momentum going. Waitress and single mom Cora (Christina Kirk) is having a hard time dealing with her rebellious son Andy (Kyle Allen) on the eve of his 18th birthday. He's in trouble at school and he's prone to nasty mood swings, but his increasingly violent behavior is justified or outright ignored by those seemingly under his spell, including the overly friendly mailman (Mike Doyle) whose job it's been to "watch over him" all these years. It's bad enough that Kusama's script doesn't even follow its own internal logic, since much is made of Andy's resentment that they've had to move around every few years to avoid "Andy's father," which immediately calls into question how the mailman has watched over them "all these years." But what really makes "Her Only Living Son" collapse in on itself is that it's ultimately nothing more than fan fiction derived from a certain late 1960s supernatural horror classic that's obvious the moment "Andy's father" is mentioned. It's interesting that three of the four stories--and Carrillo's animation, to an extent--deal directly with the lengths a mother will go to protect her family, but Benjamin's story is not only the odd woman out, but it's also a complete waste of time. XX is a good idea, but two of the filmmakers fall asleep on the job:  Benjamin torpedoes any momentum this thing had going, and anyone who watches enough horror anthologies knows you have to finish big, but Kusama completely drops the ball and regardless of XX's intent, the result is an underwhelming disappointment. (R, 81 mins)



BEYOND THE GATES
(US - 2016)

Another in a long line of fetishistic '80s VHS horror throwbacks, BEYOND THE GATES has good intentions but stumbles by not knowing the difference between "slow burn" and "lollygagging," taking a promising premise and turning it into yet another fanboy-anointed "insta-horror classic" (© William Wilson) that's just not. Vincenzo Salvia's killer synth tune "Outrun with the Dead" gets things going in the right direction as two estranged brothers--elder, uptight Gordon (Graham Skipper) and younger, aimless slacker John (Chase Williamson of JOHN DIES AT THE END)--arrive in town to clean out and close up an old-school video store (played by the legendary L.A. memorabilia mecca Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee) owned by their father, who's been missing for seven months. The brothers clearly don't get along and there's hints of childhood trauma and their dad's heavy drinking, and Gordon's surly unease doesn't let up even with his loving and supportive girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant) in tow. Back in their dad's office, Gordon and John find a VCR/board game called "Beyond the Gates," which includes seizure-inducing strobe lighting as well as a sultry hostess (RE-ANIMATOR's Barbara Crampton) who seems to know of their father's whereabouts. She challenges the brothers and Margot to play the game and find four keys in various unlikely locations in order to save the soul of their dad, who's trapped in some kind of tortured purgatory within the game.

The concept of a haunted VCR board game sounds like something Charles Band would've commissioned at Empire in 1985 around the time of THE DUNGEONMASTER or TERRORVISION, and while that's ultimately the direction BEYOND THE GATES heads with the world inside the game being shrouded in thick fog and purple/pink neon lighting and some probably intentionally janky-looking practical splatter effects, director/co-writer Jackson Stewart takes entirely too long to get there. The script makes an effort to create strong characters, and Skipper and Williamson are believable as distant siblings forced to rebuild their long-lost bond, but BEYOND THE GATES loses its way.  There's a sense of lingering resentment toward recovering alcoholic Gordon, both from John and his bullying, asshole friend Hank (Justin Welborn), while Margot is saddled with unsubtle exposition drops about having a hard time sleeping after injuring her wrist in a vague "fall," a obvious red flag that the cycle of alcoholism and abuse has been passed on to Gordon and it's the very reason he split when he was 18 and never looked back. These are interesting ideas and characterizations that are left flailing as BEYOND THE GATES devotes entirely too much time to Gordon and John sitting around twiddling their thumbs while they decide to enter the game and rescue what's left of their dad. This could've been a smart film with a deeper subtext--like, say, THE BABADOOK or IT FOLLOWS--but it never finds the right balance between its character-driven, mumblecore components and its mandatory indulgence in heavy retro '80s worship. That opening synth jam is a keeper, though. (Unrated, 82 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

In Theaters: JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 (2017)

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2
(US/China - 2017)

Directed by Chad Stahelski. Written by Derek Kolstad. Cast: Keanu Reeves, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Franco Nero, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ruby Rose, Lance Reddick, Bridget Moynahan, Peter Stormare, Claudia Gerini, Peter Serafinowicz, Thomas Sadoski, Tobias Segal, Wass Stevens, Luca Mosca, Chukwudi Iwuji, Simone Spinazze. (R, 122 mins)

A sleeper hit in 2014, JOHN WICK was held in such ambivalent regard by Lionsgate subsidiary Summit that it almost went straight to VOD until someone decided to arrange some test screenings and the audience response was through the roof. An electrifying, non-stop action thriller about a retired assassin--an unstoppable killing machine known to those in his profession as "The Boogeyman" and "Baba Yaga"-- on a mission of vengeance when the son of a Russian crime boss steals his car and kills his dog, JOHN WICK was filled with memorable shootouts, quotable dialogue ("Oh..."), a sly sense of humor, and an almost graphic novel-like sense of imaginative world building. In this world, the assassins have accoutrements like their own gold coin currency and they stay at the Continental, a safe sanctuary where business is conducted and violence forbidden. Friends become foes and back again, and it's understood that it's "just business." But things turned personal for John Wick (Keanu Reeves): on the day after the funeral of his cancer-stricken wife (Bridget Moynahan), his car is stolen and his dog killed by Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the sniveling brat son of Wick's former boss, Russian crime lord Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist). Wick declares war on Tarasov and single-handedly wipes out his entire organization over the course of the film, all while dodging an endless parade of fellow assassins after the bounty placed on his head by Viggo. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 picks up shortly after where the first film left off, with Viggo's vengeful brother Abram (Peter Stormare) waiting in his secured office as his men try--and fail--to stop Wick, who's arrived at the Tarasov warehouse to reclaim his stolen car. Wick confronts Abram and spares his life, offering him a drink as a mutually agreed peace offering.

Wick's return to retirement is short-lived however, as Italian mobster Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) presents a marker--a blood oath among assassins--demanding Wick pay a debt. D'Antonio helped Wick with the final task for Viggo Tarasov that got him his freedom, and it was under the condition that he stay retired. Since he emerged from civilian life to wipe out Viggo's organization, D'Antonio declares the marker reactivated. His demand is that Wick whack his Rome-based sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini), who represents the Camorra on the international council of assassins, a seat D'Antonio believes he should've inherited from his late father. Wick refuses to acknowledge the marker, prompting D'Antonio to blow up his house. Under advice from Continental manager Winston (Ian McShane), Wick concedes he has no choice but to fulfill the marker if he wants any chance of returning to retirement. He travels to Italy, where he's greeted by Julius (Franco Nero), the manager of the Continental's Rome branch. Once Gianna is eliminated, Wick is double-crossed by D'Antonio, who puts out a $7 million contract on his life to create the appearance that he must avenge his sister's murder (really, Wick should've seen that coming). Once he's back in NYC, the chase is on as Wick spends the entire second half of the movie evading every covert assassin in the city--which is everyone from homeless guys to food truck vendors to street musicians--looking to grab $7 million to take out their most lethal colleague on the planet.

With a body count somewhere between "astronomical" and "fucking ridiculous," JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 exists in a patently unreal world where no cops of any kind are visible. Returning director Chad Stahelski (going solo this time, without the original's uncredited co-director David Leitch, his name left off the film by a DGA snafu) and screenwriter Derek Kolstad go for the same approach as THE RAID 2: it's the same story, just on a significantly larger and much more grandiosely ambitious scale. The set pieces are done with even more intricate, ballet-like precision, whether it's a high-tech hall of mirrors or Gianna's top security detail Cassian (Common) and Wick having a silencer shootout in the middle of a crowded subway station where no one even hears the guns going off around them. Stahelski goes for a much more stylized look this time out, with some tracking shots that serve as some of the best Kubrick homages this side of Nicolas Winding Refn's ONLY GOD FORGIVES. And some garish neon color schemes coupled with the staging of the action end up concocting an unholy visual fusion of Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, and John Woo. There's amusingly bizarre touches like the call center where assassins order contracts being filled with typewriters and analog equipment and looking a lot like a 1940s switchboard exchange straight out of HIS GIRL FRIDAY. This is absolutely exhilarating and gloriously bonkers filmmaking that rewards fans of the first film with numerous callbacks (there's another ominous "Oh..." from someone and we finally get to see Wick kill multiple guys with a pencil, a story that everyone who hears the name "John Wick" seems to reference), but takes everything to a higher level of inspiration and execution. Almost everyone in the cast gets a moment to shine, whether it's Nero's Julius breaking up a THEY LIVE-level brawl between Wick and Cassian, an unusually gregarious Laurence Fishburne (MATRIX reunion!) as the Bowery King, solid turns by returning JOHN WICK vets McShane and Lance Reddick as the Continental concierge, and a silent, scene-stealing performance by Ruby Rose as Ares, a mute, androgynous D'Antonio assassin who gives an almost Oscar-caliber flutter of an eye-wink to reassure her boss that she can handle Wick (spoiler: she can't). An improvement upon an already exemplary predecessor, JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 takes its place beside the elite likes of THE RAID 2 and MAD MAX: FURY ROAD among the decade's greatest achievements in action cinema. It's that good.

On DVD/Blu-ray: CLOWN (2016); BASKIN (2016); and THE INVITATION (2016)

CLOWN
(US - 2016)

When 2015's COP CAR got some festival buzz going and became a minor hit on the arthouse circuit, it was enough to bump director/co-writer Jon Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford into megabudget circles with the upcoming reboot SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING. But long before COP CAR, Watts and Ford made their debut, the horror film CLOWN. Shot in late 2012 but kept on a shelf by the Weinstein Co. until 2016, CLOWN is a feature-length expansion of a fake trailer Watts and Ford made and posted to YouTube in 2010. The "trailer," about a demonic clown, jokingly proclaimed "From master of horror Eli Roth," which prompted a flattered Roth to meet with the pair and offer to produce an actual CLOWN movie. While Robert Rodriguez's MACHETE may have worked once--before the novelty wore off with MACHETE KILLS--CLOWN is more on the HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN end of fake trailers-turned-real movies. Leadenly-paced and feeling much longer than 99 minutes, CLOWN has dad Kent (Andy Powers) forced by a cancellation to don an old clown costume for his son Jack's (Christian Distefano) birthday party. The suit and makeup soon adhere to and fuse with his body, making it impossible to take off.  After several failed and increasingly gruesome attempts to get out of the costume, a desperate Kent shoots himself in the head only to find he can't die. This drives him to madness and murder, as his wife Meg (Laura Allen) learns from Karlsson (Peter Stormare), the suit's previous owner, that it's an instrument of a demon who subsists on the sacrificing of five children a year. This leads to a repetitive series of sequences with Kent pursuing children and slowly morphing into a full-on clown demon as Meg tries to keep him from killing Jack. There's some intriguing and occasionally ballsy ideas in CLOWN--Karlsson's brother was a pediatric cancer specialist, so the pair conquered the clown curse by offering the demon terminally ill children, and when the demon offers to give Kent back for one more child, Meg isn't above leading an innocent kid to the slaughter if it means saving her family--but CLOWN just doesn't come together. It's sluggish and dull, and it needs a better actor than Powers to really feel for Kent's plight. It doesn't skimp on the gore and some occasional shock value antics, but this story is, at best, a 20-minute segment in an anthology film. (R, 99 mins)

BASKIN
(Turkey/US/UK - 2016)

This Turkish import got some significant acclaim at film festivals and from the horror scenester echo chamber, which only serves as further evidence that fanboys will bestow accolades on pretty much everything. BASKIN is a tired, slow-moving splatterfest that's a veritable grab-bag of cribbed material. The crux of the plot is essentially a Turkish HELLRAISER, with a quintet of cops answering a call for backup and ending up at a long-abandoned police station off a dark country road on the middle of nowhere. There's some backstory about the father-son relationship between the in-charge Boss Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu) and young rookie Arda (Gorkem Kasal), who was more or less raised by Remzi after a traumatic childhood incident that, of course, comes into play late in the film. The dark, empty police outpost is filled with bloodied, contorted souls in a mad orgy of sex and torture, overseen by "The Father," played in a bit of FREAKS and THE SENTINEL-style stunt casting by non-actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu. The Father puts the cops through all the torture porn tropes, whether it's slowly tearing out one's intestinal tract or carving out another's eyes and tongue-kissing the socket before making him fuck a goat-masked woman from behind.

It was the eye socket moment where I finally lost my patience with BASKIN. Not because of the gore or the perverse French kissing of the eye socket--that wasn't the problem at all. Even from the start, little things started rubbing me the wrong way and I was getting grouchy without really realizing it, whether it was a restaurant scene where the cops are swapping stories and one goes into a Joe Pesci "Funny how?" routine from GOODFELLAS; or the long exploration of the dark, cavernous underbelly of the abandoned police station that just seemed a little too much like SESSION 9; or the fleeting glimpse of an obviously non-human figure darting across the frame like he was trying to find his way back to THE DESCENT. Director/co-writer Can Evrenol, expanding his 2013 short film of the same name, was wearing his love of horror movies on his sleeve, but it was just getting to be too much. Too forced. By the time The Father turns up about an hour in, talking about being "one with the cosmos" and "you always carry Hell with you," he started to sound a lot like HELLRAISER's Pinhead in the days when he was simply known as "Lead Cenobite." But then the eye socket scene happened and Evrenol lost me. He accompanies it with a prominent cue from Riz Ortolani's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST score--including that synthy beeeeeew!--and the transparency was just too much to ignore. That's what I concluded to be the exact moment where those lauding the film tilted their heads back, closed their eyes, exhaled slowly and purred "Oh, right there. That's the spot. I'm yours, BASKIN." There's nothing here but Evrenol name-checking bits and pieces of his favorite horror movies, bringing nothing new to the table but fooling enough people into proclaiming BASKIN some triumphant new vision of horror. It's lazy, it's uninspired, and worst of all, it's not scary. At all. It's all smoke and mirrors, and once again, horror fans prove themselves to be the biggest genre pushovers in moviegoing. BASKIN is the most overrated horror film since GOODNIGHT MOMMY. One more time, gang: start being a little more discerning, and a little less concerned with making sure your free screeners and your convention credentials keep coming. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix)


THE INVITATION
(US - 2016)

While everyone was busy fellating BASKIN, another horror film was stealthily released around the same time that actually deserved the accolades but more or less fell off the radar even with the scenesters. A slow-burner that starts ratcheting the tension in the first scene and never lets up, THE INVITATION is a film where it's best to go in knowing as little as possible. It's also one of the best films of the year that you've probably heard nothing about. En route to a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) accidentally hit a coyote that Will is forced to put out of its misery via tire iron. That will turn out to be the least upsetting thing about the evening. The dinner party is at Will's old house, hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, record producer/recovering addict David (Michiel Huisman). Several of their closest friends are there and it's been two years since they've all been together, the group more or less splintering when Will and Eden's young son died and their marriage didn't survive the aftermath. Right off the bat, Will gets a strange vibe from Eden and David, the two endlessly talking about a trip to Mexico where they embraced a self-help philosophy of grief coping known as "The Invitation." Also at the party is a friend they met in Mexico, a clingy and needy young woman named Sadie (Lindsay Burdge), who almost instantly offers to sleep with Will. There's also the ominous presence of stranger named Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), a friend of Eden's and David's who breaks the ice by showing the group a DVD of an assisted suicide they observed in Mexico. Wounds that never completely healed are torn open as Will vehemently disagrees with the way Eden has addressed her grief. He's also bothered by Pruitt and the fact that the windows have bars on them, that David has locked all the doors from the inside, and the fact that one of the guests they're still waiting on left David a voice mail two hours earlier saying he was the first one there, yet no one has seen him and he's nowhere to be found.

Things only get more claustrophobic and uncomfortable from there, with things boiling over into sheer terror by the end. So many films do the slow-burn approach that ends being a lot of buildup to nothing, but THE INVITATION hooks you in from the start. No matter how slow or meandering it may seem in the early going, every line, every incredulous glance, and every reaction from Will is important. Screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi must've been sitting on this one for a while and saving it for the right occasion, because nothing else they've written--AEON FLUX, the CLASH OF THE TITANS remake, R.I.P.D., and both RIDE ALONGs--would indicate a capacity for the complexity and near anxiety-attack levels of suspense that transpire here. Nothing it as it seems and you'll never see where the story is heading with THE INVITATION. It's directed by Karyn Kusama, who established her indie cred with 2000's GIRLFIGHT but then washed out with high-profile studio projects AEON FLUX (2005) and JENNIFER'S BODY (2009). She's mainly been keeping busy directing TV (THE L WORD, CHICAGO FIRE, HALT AND CATCH FIRE), and THE INVITATION is her first feature film in seven years. It's a small masterpiece as far as modern day horror goes, a film that got some glowing reviews but very little attention from horror fans seemingly ready to call anything that gets made a classic. That's not to say THE INVITATION is an Insta-Horror Classic (© William Wilson), but it's one of the very few films of recent years, along with THE BABADOOK, IT FOLLOWS, THE WITCH, and HUSH, that deserves the kind of fawning hype that comes with today's horror offerings. (Unrated, 100 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

On DVD/Blu-ray: EVERY THING WILL BE FINE (2015) and THE CONFIRMATION (2016)

EVERY THING WILL BE FINE
(Germany/Canada/France/Sweden/Norway - 2015)

One of the major voices of the 1970s New German Cinema who reached his pinnacle in the next decade with the classics PARIS, TEXAS (1984) and WINGS OF DESIRE (1987), Wim Wenders has enjoyed his biggest success in the latter half of his career with documentaries like THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999), PINA (2011), and his contributions to the PBS series THE BLUES. His first narrative feature since 2008's surreal PALERMO SHOOTING (one of Dennis Hopper's last films, and still unreleased in the US), EVERY THING WILL BE FINE plays more like an homage to SWEET HEREAFTER-era Atom Egoyan, from the crux of its story being a tragedy uniting several people, to its cold, wintry Canadian setting. Judging from the end result, Wenders can't do vintage Egoyan any better than Egoyan can these days. Making superfluous use of 3-D, which is limited mostly to some falling snowflakes for the six people who managed to see this in a theater, EVERY THING WILL BE FINE offers the most somnambulant cast this side of Werner Herzog's HEART OF GLASS, headed by James Franco as Tomas Eldan, a struggling Quebecois novelist whose marriage to Sara (Rachel McAdams, with a distracting and stilted Swedish--I think--accent) is in a rough patch. It gets worse when Tomas is involved in a freak accident on a snowy rural road where he thinks he narrowly averted hitting a young boy in a sled but realizes too late that there were two boys on the sled and the other died, pinned under his SUV. This scene, where Tomas thinks he and the surviving kid had a close call but slowly realizes, when the boys' shell-shocked single mother Kate (Charlotte Gainsbourg) asks where the other boy is, that he's accidentally killed the unseen second child, is by far the best in the film and it's all downhill from there.

Of course, even though it was a tragic accident, Tomas is plagued by guilt and half-heartedly attempts suicide, demonstrated in a trite montage where Wenders shows him crashing in a cheap motel, empty booze and pill bottles and torn up papers strewn about the room. The film repeatedly jumps through a few years at a time. Tomas and Sara have split up and he feels compelled to help the devoutly-religious Kate in some way. She's forgiven him and doesn't blame him and though they seem drawn to one another through their mutual grieving, Wenders and screenwriter Bjorn Olaf Johannessen don't indulge anything further, since that would mean something happening. The film takes place over an 11-year period, and every time Wenders seems to be building to something, he calls a time-out and jumps ahead four years. It's especially frustrating in the last section, when Tomas gets a letter from troubled, 16-year-old Christopher (Robert Naylor), who was five when he survived the accident that killed his little brother. Tomas has become a bestselling author, channeling his pain into prose and becoming rich and famous, and while Christopher is a fan of his work, he feels his brother's death has somehow worked in Tomas' favor while his mother has never really recovered. While Tomas and his second wife Ann (Marie-Josee Croze) are away on a brief book tour, someone--obviously Christopher--breaks into their house and urinates all over their bed. Just as EVERY THING WILL BE FINE seems poised to turn into a thriller of some kind, the film abruptly ends in the most enraging way possible, with Franco--who's about as believable a Quebecois novelist named Tomas as you'd expect--turning to the camera and smiling. Did Wenders just feel "Hey, it's been a while, I should probably make a drama again"? There's some beautiful cinematography by the venerable Benoit Debie, but EVERY THING WILL BE FINE is a film that keeps stopping itself dead in its tracks. Scenes crescendo into nothing and collapse, actors appear and disappear (Peter Stomare has one scene as Tomas' publisher; frequent Wenders actor Patrick Bauchau plays Tomas' dementia-addled father). It seems to be actively avoiding being about anything. The actors seem to be partially sedated, even more so as the film goes on. When a remarried Sara has a chance meeting with Tomas at a Patrick Watson concert (yes, time-killing concert footage) and slaps him, it seems less out of anger than to simply revive Franco. A comatose Wenders misfire like 2001's THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL moved at the pace of plate tectonics but at least had an insane performance by a neck-braced Mel Gibson to occasionally liven things up--there's nothing of the sort in EVERY THING WILL BE FINE. Life is filled with disappointments, regrets, and unresolved issues--which can make for compelling cinema but not when it's done the way Wenders does it here. It seems like a sincere enough film, but what's the point? (Unrated, 119 mins)



THE CONFIRMATION
(UK/US/Canada - 2016)

The kind of slight, low-key character piece that goes over like gangbusters at film festivals but plays to crickets and tumbleweed in general release, THE CONFIRMATION is the directing debut of Oscar-nominated NEBRASKA screenwriter Bob Nelson. As in that film, we have a story set in a blue collar town where most of the residents have seen better days. Anthony (MIDNIGHT SPECIAL's Jaeden Lieberher) has it pretty good other than his ambivalence about being prodded into confession and confirmation by his church-going mom Bonnie (Maria Bello) and stepdad Kyle (Matthew Modine). Bonnie and Kyle are going away to a church-sponsored couples retreat for the weekend, leaving Anthony in the care of his alcoholic, sporadically-employed carpenter dad Walt (Clive Owen). Slumped-shouldered Walt has been dealt some shitty hands and is beaten down by life, but he's trying to make things work. He's on his latest attempt to quit drinking and isn't sure what to do with Anthony over the weekend, but that soon becomes a moot point as the pair encounter one obstacle after another. Walt gets a lucrative job lined up for Monday morning, but his expensive and sentimental (they were his dad's) specialty tools get stolen from his truck, his truck breaks down, a trip to drop a huge jar of change into a Coinstar machine at the grocery store to get some quick cash is all for naught when Anthony accidentally hits the "Donate" button, and they get locked out of the house when Walt gets an eviction notice. Borrowing Bonnie's SUV--Anthony neglects to tell Walt the brakes need replaced--the pair spend the weekend tracking down Walt's tools BICYCLE THIEF-style, getting help from a variety of odd folks both helpful and dubious, ranging from Walt's fatherly friend Otto (Robert Forster), drunken gun nut Vaughn (Tim Blake Nelson), and eccentric drywaller Drake (Patton Oswalt) whose claim to have the inside info on Walt's tools is negated by the fact that everyone knows he's back on meth.

THE CONFIRMATION is basically a standard redemption saga, with Walt and Anthony bonding and everyone realizing Walt's not such a loser after all. Nelson gives the story time to breathe and find its way, even with the trite symbolism of carpenter Walt "building" a relationship with his son. Walt tries to keep his temper in check as the deck is constantly stacked against him and and does everything he can to not cave to temptation and disappoint his son (after a bad withdrawal episode the first night, the first thing out of Walt's mouth in the morning is "Are you OK? Did I hurt you?"). Though he's hardly a textbook role model, Walt tries to dispense life lessons to the boy, and of course, he learns just as much from the wise-beyond-his-years Anthony. There's some legitimate surprises in the development of some of the characters: Anthony forms a friendship with Vaughn's sensitive son Allen (Spencer Drever); when Walt finds out who stole his tools, he feels sympathy rather than anger; and after constantly hearing from Walt what a useless tool he is, we're surprised to find that Kyle is actually a genuinely nice and sincere guy once we meet him. There's no big scenes or huge plot reveals in THE CONFIRMATION. It's a quiet, working-class indie film where the actors probably wore there own clothes and packed their own lunches for Nelson's heartfelt labor of love. It's not much to get excited about, but Owen and Lieberher make a good team, and fans of the actors will definitely want to check it out. (PG-13, 101 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: VICE (2015); SON OF A GUN (2014); and MALL (2014)

VICE
(US/Germany - 2015)

If you fused WESTWORLD with HOSTEL--and why would you?--you'd get something that looks a lot like VICE, a thoroughly crummy sci-fi shoot 'em up boasting what might be Bruce Willis' laziest performance yet. Another in the ongoing, Redbox-ready series of low-budget action clunkers that feature frequent cutaways to a prominently-billed Willis sitting behind a desk or standing in an office looking annoyed, VICE reteams the actor with director Brian A. Miller, right on the heels of their PRINCE triumph. Willis is Julian Michaels, the CEO of Vice, a fantasy playland of the near-future where the male customers can engage in whatever destructive, illegal, and/or deviant behavior they choose because the rules of society don't apply. And it doesn't matter because the beautiful women that Vice customers beat, rape, and kill--known as "residents" or "artificials"--are just clones sprung from human DNA, significantly more human than machine, and all they need is some tweaking, rewiring, and a memory wipe to be ready for the next night's parade of sociopathic Philip K. Dickheads. One artificial, Kelly (Ambyr Childers) escapes, prompting Michaels to send his Vice officers into the city to find her, much to the chagrin of haggard, greasy-haired detective Roy Todesky (Thomas Jane), a surly cop with an ever-present toothpick in his mouth who plays by his own rules and has some ethical beefs with Vice, namely that once the population gets a taste of getting away with rape and murder with artificials, they'll only start craving it more, but with the real thing.

The real stars of VICE are Childers and Bryan Greenberg as Evan, a Vice designer who created Kelly in the image of his late wife, who succumbed to cancer several years earlier. Kelly and Evan join forces to fight off Michaels' Vice army as well as Todesky, a sort-of Blade Stumbler who has a real chip on his shoulder about artificials and doesn't want Kelly in his city. Of course, Kelly and Todesky eventually pull an "...if they don't kill each other first!" and set aside their differences when she gets an upgrade from one of Evan's associates (Brett Granstaff, one of 21 credited producers) and goes full TERMINATOR on Vice headquarters. Dull and dreary, VICE displays some fleeting hints of being something with interesting ideas, but it constantly backs off and opts for the coasting route. It's also the kind of movie where characters always talk in expository nonsense, saying things they should logically already know but doing so for the benefit of the audience, like two Vice techs working on some artificials and one going into all the specifics about the operation and how it works. Wouldn't the other tech already know that since he works there? Childers doesn't exactly stake her claim as the next Milla Jovovich, while Jane looks understandably bored in the kind of role Willis would've been playing 10-15 years ago. Few actors are worse at masking their utter disinterest in a project than Willis, and as usual for this type of gig, Bruno sleepwalks his way through what was probably two, perhaps three days on the set. His entire role consists of pacing around the Vice control room scowling at a row of monitors like he's auditioning for a role in the next BOURNE movie, and dispatching orders to his chief lackey (Johnathan Schaech), who does all of the leg work in the search for Kelly. Willis mumbles lines like "Find her" and "Whaddaya got?" and "She's experiencing flashbacks?!" and "Bring up the temperature in Sector 5" like it's a chore to even enunciate before finally waking up in the climax to yell "Initiate the kill switch!" when all of the artificials start breaking free from computer control and commence evolving into their own beings. Miller, Childers, and Jane speak gushingly of Willis in the DVD's cast/crew interviews, with Jane saying "It's like he's not even acting." Indeed. Oh, and take a wild guess which VICE star is absent from the cast/crew interviews. (R, 96 mins)


SON OF A GUN
(Australia/UK/Canada - 2014)

An excellent performance by Ewan McGregor isn't enough to overcome the trite cliches in this prison drama-turned-heist flick from Australian writer-director Julius Avery. Making his feature debut, Avery wisely lets the film rest on McGregor's shoulders, and there's a genuine sense of tension and unease in the early part of the film, but shortly after it leaves the prison, it turns into every other double-cross-filled heist flick you've ever seen, regardless of how much it's been gritted up. Brenton Thwaites (OCULUS, MALEFICENT, THE GIVER) co-stars as JR, a 19-year-old serving six months in a tough Australian prison. He's rescued from a shower rape by Brendan Lynch (McGregor), a grizzled con who's serving 20 years for armed robbery. The two bond over a mutual knowledge of chess and Lynch takes the kid under his wing, assigning him to work for him on the outside once his sentence is up in exchange for protection while he's inside. Once he's paroled, JR hijacks a chopper and stages a daring prison yard escape for Lynch and his cronies Sterlo (Matt Nable) and Merv (Eddie Baroo). Lynch is ruthless but at least has some kind of code of honor, beating the shit out of Merv and leaving him behind when a radio news update reveals that Merv was locked up for child rape ("Did you know about that?" Lynch asks Sterlo before smashing Merv's face in). Lynch, Sterlo, and JR get involved in a gold heist masterminded by crime boss Sam Lennox (Jacek Koman), the owner of Tasha (Alicia Vikander), a Russian prostitute who catches JR's eye. Of course, backstabbings ensue as Lennox tries to shaft Lynch out of the deal, with Lynch in turn trying to reduce JR's cut and advising him to stay away from Tasha. Of course, the heist goes haywire thanks to the itchy trigger finger of an incompetent idiot they're forced to take along on the job--in this case Lennox's obnoxious nephew Josh (Tom Budge). And naturally, JR must help Tasha break free from Lennox's shackles while ultimately besting his scheming mentor and all the more experienced criminals around him.

Avery's direction is fine, but his script really needs some work. It's almost as if he thinks he's the first screenwriter to concoct innovative ideas like a career criminal taking on One Last Score So He Can Retire, or an abused Russian hooker with a heart of gold, or a chess analogy for the situations in which his characters find themselves. When McGregor's Lynch (loosely based on real-life Australian criminal Brenden Abbott) is introduced as a chess aficionado, is there any doubt that once he realizes the tables have been turned on him, it'll be confirmed by a phone call that ends with a taunting "Checkmate"? And when Lynch gets the edge on the duplicitous Lennox, was it really necessary for Avery to punctuate this new plot development with a shot of a toppled king on a chessboard? SON OF A GUN starts out fine but fizzles quickly, and while McGregor works overtime to elevate things (getting no help from a dull, listless Thwaites), somebody needed to step in with some toughlove and tell the well-intentioned Avery that this wasn't the first heist movie ever made, and that his rote plot, cardboard characters, and played-out chess references were bush-league conventions more suited for a high-school creative writing exercise. (R, 109 mins)



MALL
(US/Japan - 2014)

Based on a 2001 novel by Eric Bogosian, MALL begs one simple question: is there a single reason this film exists? Who thought adapting a decade-old novel into an ennui-soaked, CRASH-like mosaic centered on a mass shooting at a shopping mall would be something anyone wanted to see? The answer: Bogosian's good friend Vincent D'Onofrio. D'Onofrio produced and co-wrote the script with his buddies Sam Bisbee and Joe Vinciguerra, his collaborators on his unwatchable, released-in-2012-after-three-years-on-the-shelf directorial debut DON'T GO IN THE WOODS. D'Onofrio left the direction of MALL to Linkin Park DJ Joe Hahn, who brought along most of his bandmates to compose the grating score. MALL is one of those films that's so stunningly awful and unrelentingly amateurish that I don't even know how to approach writing about it. It doesn't even look finished. There are bad movies and there are bad movies. Then there are movies like MALL. Movies that come around once in a great while and are so staggeringly atrocious that their sheer awfulness is beyond any and all comprehension. How does something go this wrong?  D'Onofrio has been in the business for 30 years. He acts in major movies and television projects. He's worked with pretty much everyone. He knows people. Why are DON'T GO IN THE WOODS and MALL so astonishingly terrible? How is it possible that the man who brought such indelible characters as FULL METAL JACKET's Private Pyle and LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT's Robert Goren to vivid life suddenly makes the work of Ed Wood look like Stanley Kubrick when he decides to work on the production end? Has he learned nothing on the sets on which he's worked? If you're able to read these sentences, or put a sentence together, or hell, even if you've ever been to a mall, you could probably do a better job of scripting and directing MALL than D'Onofrio and Hahn. MALL fails miserably at every turn. It's inept and tone-deaf on an almost Tommy Wiseau-level. It storms out of the gate already shitting the bed, with meth-addled Mal (James Frecheville of ANIMAL KINGDOM) killing his mother (Mimi Rogers) and setting their trailer on fire before going off on a shooting rampage. Less than three minutes into the film and there's already glaring issues too distracting to ignore: the CGI fire is unspeakable; the rusted-out, ramshackle trailer is just awkwardly parked in the middle of an otherwise welcoming, good-looking, middle-class neighborhood where it's doubtful the residents would have much patience for an unstable mother/son meth-head team just loitering about; and when there's a cut to Frecheville walking away from the trailer after setting it ablaze, the filmmakers neglected to add the CGI fire to the shot, so you've got the suddenly not-on-fire trailer plainly visible in the background when, just a moment ago in the previous shot, it was engulfed in fake flames that make the visual effects in BIRDEMIC look professional by comparison. There's a reason--many, actually--that this film was on the shelf for two years before getting a one-screen theatrical release.

Mal makes his way to a nearby shopping mall, but not before we meet an ensemble so loathsome--the exception being widowed Haitian security guard Michel (Gbenga Akinnagbe)--that you're actually rooting for Mal to take them all out. There's bored housewife Donna (Gina Gershon); sleazy tux-rental store owner Barry (Peter Stormare); and lecherous perv Danny (D'Onofrio), who gets busted peeping into a dressing room where Donna is trying to lure him in for an anonymous quickie. But the central character is smug, pretentious, skinny-jeaned Jeff (Cameron Monaghan of SHAMELESS), introduced referencing Orwell's 1984, and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf while bitching about corporate control, the mall's "dystopian landscaping," and how the fresh cookies "smell just like the ones your mom never made." When he's not perfecting his disaffected poseur act, Jeff pines for the cold, teasing Adelle (India Menuez) and takes some Ecstasy before the mayhem commences, as Mal opens fire, killing some Paul Blarts and quickly fleeing to some nearby woods. Hahn and D'Onofrio (who, over the course of the film, gets two quick sex scenes, one masturbation scene, and a handjob from Adelle, making it clear why producer/screenwriter Vincent D'Onofrio thought veteran character actor Vincent D'Onofrio was perfect for the role) can't even stage Mal's massacre with the slightest modicum of competence: he starts at the upper level where it's dark and Barry is closing the store. We see all the other store gates pulled down, but yet Jeff, Adelle, and some friends are, at the same time, down in the food court, where the mall is packed, people are shopping, and it's bright. After Mal goes to the woods where the cops stand around in one confined area wondering why they can't find him, Jeff and his friends hang around the mall and vandalize shit. Really?  The mall's not closed off? There's no media, no police, no one from the coroner's office, no yellow police tape? Then you start thinking, "Were they killed in the shooting and now they're Shyamalanian ghosts wandering the mall? Because then at least this complete disregard for reality and continuity might, in context, make some kind of sense," but they weren't killed. And it doesn't make sense. Jeff eventually goes to a bar where he runs into Donna and they hook up at a nearby motel and...no. No. You know what? Who gives a shit? Fuck this movie. (R, 88 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

In Theaters/On VOD: THE ZERO THEOREM (2014)

THE ZERO THEOREM
(UK/Romania/France - 2014)

Directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by Pat Rushin and Terry Gilliam. Cast: Christoph Waltz, David Thewlis, Melanie Thierry, Lucas Hedges, Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Ben Whishaw, Peter Stormare, Emil Hostina, Pavlic Nemes, Dana Rogoz. (R, 106 mins)

A Terry Gilliam film for those who have never seen a Terry Gilliam film, THE ZERO THEOREM is the sort of dystopian sci-fi nightmare that can't help but feel like reheated leftovers coming from the guy who gave us the 1985 masterpiece BRAZIL. For longtime Gilliam devotees who have followed the auteur's post-Monty Python work for the last 35 or so years, THE ZERO THEOREM will have the distinct feeling of a classic rock act releasing a "give 'em what they want" record after several years away. Known as much for his groundbreaking vision as for the obstacles that have stood in his way over the years--battling Universal execs over BRAZIL, the collapse of his THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE chronicled in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary LOST IN LA MANCHA (2002), clashing with Harvey Weinstein over THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005), and restructuring THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (2009) when Heath Ledger died a third of the way into filming--the independently-financed THE ZERO THEOREM is a rare example of Gilliam being able to make exactly the film he wanted to make, with minimal interference. That's all the more reason that the underwhelming result is a bit on the disappointing side. With a budget reportedly in the vicinity of just $10 million--shoestring by today's standards--Gilliam has miraculously fashioned an arresting visual experience. But when a sci-fi film is released in 2014 and much of the plot hinges on virtual reality, it's a pretty safe bet you're working from a script that's been kicking around for a while. University of Central Florida English prof and screenwriting neophyte Pat Rushin gave his ZERO THEOREM script to producer Richard Zanuck way back in 2004. It didn't end up in Gilliam's hands until 2009 and it's hard telling just how much of Rushin's original script remains (Gilliam is also credited with "additional dialogues"). But even if you factor out the dated subject of virtual reality, Gilliam just doesn't seem like he's bringing his A-game to this one.

That's not to say it's a bad movie, but Gilliam just has nothing significant to say. THE ZERO THEOREM is packed with visual and thematic callbacks to earlier Gilliam films (most notably BRAZIL, 1991's THE FISHER KING and 1995's 12 MONKEYS, and eagle-eyed viewers will spot a quick cameo by Gilliam's late FISHER KING star Robin Williams), but not in a way that advances the film or Gilliam as an artist. Instead, it's done in a way that makes what was once innovative and groundbreaking seem uninspired and stale. In a future that's equal parts BRAZIL, BLADE RUNNER and the Martian red-light district in Paul Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL, ManCom worker drone/"entity cruncher" Qohan Leth (Christoph Waltz) lives in the ruins of a fire-ravaged church that was abandoned by a sect of monks who took a vow of silence (in one of the film's few inspired moments, Leth quips that "No one broke the silence to yell 'Fire!'"). Leth works as a mathematician of sorts at a Kafka-esque workspace that looks like a video game console. He pleads for a work-at-home assignment because he's waiting for a special phone call--a phone call he's been waiting on for years--and doesn't want to miss it. He gets his wish, and is assigned by his jokey ("I'm a few raisins short of a full scoop!") but condescending supervisor Joby (David Thewlis) to work on finding "The Zero Theorem," a guaranteed dead-end of an equation that manages to defeat anyone who attempts to solve it. Leth slowly loses his mind as he obsessively tries and fails to conquer the Zero Theorem, all while dealing with the impossibly demanding upload schedule, represented by calls from a judgmental-sounding automated computer voice. Sensing that Leth is stressed out, Joby has Bainsley (Melanie Thierry) visit him. Leth once met Bainsley at a party of Joby's that he reluctantly attended, and he's crushed when he eventually learns she's a sex worker who was paid to see him. He also gets intrusive visits from ManCom intern Bob (Lucas Hedges), the 15-year-old son of ManCom manager Management (Matt Damon).

That Damon's cold, unfeeling manager character is actually named "Management" is a pretty solid indicator of just how heavy-handed the dark-humored elements of THE ZERO THEOREM can be. Tilda Swinton also turns up, still sporting her SNOWPIERCER teeth, as Leth's online therapist, named "Dr. Shrink-ROM." Really? Subtlety is not the name of Gilliam's game here. The dated concepts, the Gilliam's Greatest Hits selections (at least three supporting characters are almost identical variants of those seen in BRAZIL), and the ham-fisted ways he demonstrates the dehumanized nature of Leth's corporate-saturated world that's a garish interpretation of our own conspire to present a Terry Gilliam that may have reached that late-period Stanley Kubrick or present-day George Romero/Terrence Malick tipping point where an influential, trail-blazing genius is getting a little older and is starting to come off like a guy who doesn't seem to get out much.

While it has a sizable number of issues on the writing front, THE ZERO THEOREM does score in a strictly visual sense. The decaying church that Leth calls home is marvel of production design, and a ghoulish, hairless Waltz, looking like a futuristic Nosferatu, has never been creepier. Waltz plays Leth as aggressively unlikable as possible and it's a challenge for the actor to keep the audience focused on a thoroughly irritating and unappealing character who generates little sympathy. Leth speaks in plurals, constantly referring to himself as "we" and "us," and he's always testing the patience of those around him with his extreme OCD ways. It's a tough performance, and even though the endless tics and mannerisms bring to mind Brad Pitt's Jeffrey Goines in 12 MONKEYS, the great Waltz is up to the task, which helps as it's largely The Christoph Waltz Show throughout. The actors and the production design team persevere through a bit of a misfire that has a difficult time overcoming its "been there, done that" vibe. Gilliam is past the point of proving himself, and by no means is THE ZERO THEOREM an exercise in futility like, say, a new Dario Argento film. At 73, Gilliam has every right to coast into his emeritus years by raiding his back catalog if that's what he wants to do, but I don't think it's demanding too much to expect something a little more substantive from someone of his stature. But then, it's not like Gilliam's been on a roll lately: PARNASSUS was his first good film since 1998's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, with 2005 giving us the Gilliam career-nadir double-shot of THE BROTHERS GRIMM and TIDELAND. PARNASSUS was a welcome return to the filmmaker's fun, ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN side and a step in the right direction. Five years later with THE ZERO THEOREM, and Gilliam is simply running in place.