ANGEL HAS FALLEN (US - 2019) Directed by Ric Roman Waugh. Written by Robert Mark Kamen, Matt Cook and Ric Roman Waugh. Cast: Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Danny Huston, Nick Nolte, Jada Pinkett Smith, Piper Perabo, Lance Reddick, Tim Blake Nelson, Joseph Millson, Ori Pfeffer, Rocci-Boy Williams, Michael Landes. (R, 121 mins) The third entry in a franchise so ridiculous that the only thing preventing Donald Trump from offering Gerard Butler a cabinet position is a presumed inability to correctly pronounce "Gerard," ANGEL HAS FALLEN dials down the raging "America! Fuck yeah!" boner of its two predecessors--2013's OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN and 2016's LONDON HAS FALLEN--which proved to be surprisingly popular mash-ups of the Cannon jingoism of the '80s with the dogshit CGI of the '10s. This time, Mike Banning (Butler), the head of Secret Service detail for OLYMPUS House Speaker, LONDON vice president and now President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), is in the running for a cushy D.C. desk job as a reward for his years of risking life and limb but is battling PTSD, chronic migraines, back pain, and a secret painkiller addiction that he's kept from his wife Leah (Piper Perabo, replacing Radha Mitchell). While on a routine detail on a presidential fishing trip in Pennsylvania, Trumbull's entire Secret Service team is wiped out by a drone attack, with Banning and the president barely escaping with their lives, the latter winding up in ICU in a coma. Banning awakens to find himself handcuffed to his hospital bed and informed by Secret Service director Gentry (Lance Reddick) and FBI Special Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith) that he's under arrest for the attempted assassination of the president and the premeditated murder of nearly two dozen Secret Service agents. His fingerprints and DNA were found in a van used to house the bat-like drones, and they've uncovered a secret bank account in his name with $10 million traced back to Russia.
With Trumbull incapacitated, Vice President Kirby (Tim Blake Nelson) is sworn in as acting president and, seeking revenge against the apparent Russian plot to assassinate Trumbull, immediately announces a return to the use of paramilitary contractors, namely Salient, a company owned by Wade Jennings (Danny Huston), Banning's old Army buddy who was really hoping that Banning could talk the anti-contractor Trumbull into offering him a lucrative deal. Meanwhile, Banning can't convince anyone he's been set up, and when Salient mercenaries take down his prisoner transport, he manages to escape and make his way to the isolated, rural West Virginia makeshift compound of his estranged father Clay (Nick Nolte), a grizzled, paranoid, anti-government mountain man who was so haunted by his time in Vietnam that he left his wife and young Mike and went off the grid. Realizing he's been set up by his old friend--and perhaps someone more powerful pulling the strings--and is now the most wanted fugitive in America, Banning reluctantly bonds with and gets some help from Clay before heading back to the hospital in Pennsylvania in an attempt to save the president's life and prove his innocence once and for all.
The last time Morgan Freeman played the US president was in 1998's asteroid-headed-toward-Earth opus DEEP IMPACT, and that was probably a more plausible film than ANGEL HAS FALLEN. The villainy of Wade is obvious from the outset, since he's played by Danny Huston, but the mid-film reveal of the real string-puller will only be a surprise if you've never seen a movie before. But relatively speaking, ANGEL is a bit less cartoonish than the two films that came before it, and is refreshingly devoid of Banning's smart-ass quips clanging to the ground, such as OLYMPUS' "Let's play a few rounds of Fuck Off...you're it!" and LONDON's "Why don't you boys pack up your shit and go back to Fuckheadistan?" That doesn't mean it's a gritty political thriller, but director and former stuntman Ric Roman Waugh (FELON, SNITCH, SHOT CALLER) has a knack for solid action and suspense sequences, including a striking late-film shootout over multiple stories overlooking a hospital lobby. There's also some--but not much--attempt at timely, nudging commentary with Banning being accused of Russian collusion and one key character being a dead ringer for (at press time and subject to change at any moment) Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, which should guarantee that actor's casting in the inevitable HBO miniseries chronicling the Trump presidency.
NOLTE!
Look, like the entire HAS FALLEN trilogy, ANGEL is dumb. But unlike OLYMPUS, it doesn't show a series of establishing second-unit shots of the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, and the White House accompanied by the caption "Washington, D.C." (it was shot at London's Pinewood Studios and in Bulgaria, with the interstate highways of Pennsylvania and West Virginia looking strangely Eastern European). And it is amazing how Banning has managed to have the kind of career he's had, being the human shield for two presidents, with no one ever finding out about his crazy, off-the-grid, government-hating dad, or how every new-looking truck he manages to steal while on the run is somehow lacking in GPS or anyone reporting it stolen, or how Salient goons manage to get into Banning's house despite cops, Feds, and the media camped right out front. It is what it is, and the digital effects by the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX are as amateurish as ever, but Butler does his thing, Freeman's dignified presidential gravitas comes natural and is curiously comforting, and Huston is as smug and sneering as ever, which is the reason you hire Danny Huston. But never mind all that. What's really key in making ANGEL HAS FALLEN the most entertaining of the trilogy so far is Nolte. The 78-year-old living legend doesn't turn up until the midway point, but from his first appearance, he steals the film from everyone and instantly reminds you that he's a goddamn national treasure. Notoriously eccentric enough that his casting as a grizzled old mountain man seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Nolte gives this everything he's got, reveling in some hilarious one-liners ("You're welcome!") and back-and-forth bantering with Butler ("What is this, your manifesto?" Banning asks when he sees a stack of papers on Clay's table). Clay delivers an emotional, gut-wrenching monologue about how he felt chewed up and spit out by his country after his time in Vietnam that's so good that I wouldn't be surprised if Nolte wrote it himself. ANGEL HAS FALLEN is pretty standard as far as these formulaic things go, but it comes alive and steps up its game whenever Nolte is onscreen. When it's all over, you might ask yourself if every movie could benefit from having a madman-bearded Nick Nolte muttering, grumbling, and being a conspiratorial, cantankerous, and shotgun-toting old curmudgeon. The outtakes on the eventual Blu-ray have to be gold.
As far as unofficial entries in the Monty Python canon go, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING is so bad that it makes YELLOWBEARD look like MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. The first film to unite the five surviving members of the legendary comedy troupe since 1983's MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and Terry Jones; Graham Chapman died in 1989), ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was directed and co-written by Jones, who had the script stashed away since the early '90s and it shows. Jones almost got it going around 2003 but decided to put it on the backburner after the release of the Jim Carrey hit BRUCE ALMIGHTY, which has an almost identical concept but Jones' script has a Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett twist. Instead of being granted powers by God, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING's everyman hero Neil's (Simon Pegg) are granted courtesy of a crew of aliens--whose instantly recognizable voices are provided by the Python guys--who have happened upon Earth in their galactic journey and are deciding whether it's a planet worth saving. Picked at random by lead alien Death Dealing Darkness Bringer (voiced by Cleese), Neil is used as a guinea pig to gauge what a normal human will do with unlimited power. With a flick of his hand, Neil is able to make sweeping changes that he often has to walk back due to lack of specification (for example, after he causes an alien attack at a school that kills 40 people, his command to "Bring back everyone who died," ends up creating a brief zombie apocalypse). He tries to use his new ability to make his downstairs neighbor Catherine (Kate Beckinsale) fall for him while avoiding her psycho ex (a grating Rob Riggle), turns his best friend (Sanjeev Bhaskar) into a sausage, and, of course, makes his dick bigger. He also gets his dog Dennis to talk with the voice of the late Robin Williams, which should give you an idea of how long this thing sat around waiting for a US distributor. Shot in early 2014, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was dumped into a handful of US theaters in May 2017 by the rinky-dink Atlas Distribution, a company whose only noteworthy--and I use the term "noteworthy" loosely--accomplishment was releasing all three ATLAS SHRUGGED movies. Pretty much every joke lands with a thud in this flat and almost completely laughless fiasco that's made even more depressing by the fact that it was Williams' last performance and the last comedy we'll get from Jones, who was diagnosed with dementia shortly after shooting wrapped, prompting his retirement from public life in 2016. (R, 85 mins)
BLACK BUTTERFLY
(Spain/US - 2017)
A remake of a 2008 French film with the same title, BLACK BUTTERFLY was set to roll in 2011 with Nicolas Cage starring and Rod Lurie (THE CONTENDER) producing, but the project fell apart during pre-production. Director Brian Goodman, an actor whose only previous credit behind the camera was the little-seen 2008 crime drama WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU, remained attached, and by the time filming began, Cage was replaced by Antonio Banderas, and the film was now a Spanish co-production, shot in Italy with a mostly Italian crew (Mario Bava's grandson Roy Bava served as assistant director), and set in an isolated area of Colorado. Banderas is Paul, a washed-up novelist once anointed the Next Big Thing, but now in his fourth year of writer's block, drinking heavily, feeling sorry for himself after his wife left him, and holed up in a remote cabin failing to deliver an overdue film script that he hasn't even started writing. He's trying to sell his cabin out of financial necessity, and his real estate agent Laura (Piper Perabo) has yet to find any takers. After a road rage incident with a belligerent trucker continues at the local diner, Paul's ass is saved by Jack (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a glowering drifter looking for a place to stay. Out of gratitude, Paul offers Jack his guest room for the night, but Jack decides to stick around, doing some much-needed handyman work around the cabin and showing an intense interest in getting Paul off the bottle and writing again. Jack's demeanor gets more threatening and controlling and Paul, and eventually Laura, find themselves being held captive by the deranged Jack, who Paul is now convinced is a serial killer responsible for a string of murders in the region that date back several years.
BLACK BUTTERFLY is merely dull and nonsensical for most of its duration, with all the talk about writing, plot, and characters threatening to spill over into a trite exercise in meta storytelling. It doesn't even do anything interesting with the unexpected casting of legendary cult director Abel Ferrara (KING OF NEW YORK, BAD LIEUTENANT) as the manager of the town's tiny carryout, and anyone else would've asked Paul to leave after the first night, but then there'd be no movie. A third act twist requires some significant suspension of disbelief but livens things up in a vaguely giallo-like way portended by the title (I was briefly reminded of AMUCK and Dario Argento's TENEBRE as things started to fall into place), putting things in a different perspective and making it appear that the film is well on its way to maybe not quite completely redeeming itself but at least finishing big in a way that makes it a reasonably entertaining time-killer. But then Goodman and writers Marc Frydman (Lurie's longtime producing partner) and Justin Stanley shit the bed by adding one last twist that represents arguably the hoariest of all thriller genre cliches, one so ancient and played out that it almost qualifies as some kind of sick practical joke that it's being used seriously in 2017. Really, guys? That's how you decided to wrap this up? It couldn't be any more infuriating if Goodman, Frydman, and Stanley appeared on camera and said "You just watched this for 90 minutes. Dumbass." (R, 93 mins)
WILSON
(US - 2017)
Adapted by Daniel Clowes from his 2010 graphic novel of the same name, WILSON doesn't continue the success of two previous big screen Clowes adaptations, 2001's GHOST WORLD and 2006's ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL. Both directed by Zwigoff, GHOST WORLD and ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL succeeded where WILSON fails. That's probably not the fault of WILSON director Craig Johnson (THE SKELETON TWINS), but rather from Clowes watering down his own source material and not having the right person in the lead. Woody Harrelson is one of our finest actors, but he's all wrong as Wilson, taking the kind of grumpy misanthrope that's similar to Steve Buscemi's Seymour in GHOST WORLD and the kind of character that was owned by Paul Giamatti a decade or so ago in AMERICAN SPLENDOR and SIDEWAYS, but playing it as an inconsistent mixture of Asperger's and unbalanced psycho. A bitter curmudgeon whose only friend is his Miniature Schnauzer Pepper, Wilson is the kind of guy who rails against everything that's wrong in the world, smugly spouting off about all of the world's ills without provocation. He's the kind of guy who will sit down next to someone on an otherwise empty bus or invite himself to share a table with someone in an empty coffee shop and make pushy small talk. There will be five available urinals and he'll take the one right next to the one being used and strike up a conversation, of course excusing himself with "Nice cock, by the way." Wilson is supposed to be an fearless guy who doesn't play by society's norms and conventions but he's really just an abrasive, irredeemable prick, and when Harrelson plays him cackling and with wild eyes, you realize how much this needs a Buscemi or a Giamatti, or maybe even a Kevin Spacey to really convey the tone of Clowes' work. You'll want to get away from this movie the same way everyone else tries to back away from Wilson.
Even if having Harrelson play it this way was the intent, the film just never catches fire, lurching lugubriously from one DOA set piece to the next as almost every joke gets chirping crickets in response. WILSON feels like a film made by people who don't understand the material, which is inexplicable considering Clowes wrote the script himself (or, at least, he's the only credited writer). Tired of his angry routine, Wilson searches for a new purpose in his life after his father dies. He seeks out his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern) who left him 18 years earlier, aborting their child and getting involved with drugs and prostitution. She's cleaned up her act and turned her life around, and she reveals to Wilson that she actually had the baby and put it up for adoption. Ecstatic about being a father, Wilson finds the girl, Claire (Isabella Amara), an overweight, 17-year-old outcast, and he and Pippi try to establish a relationship with her. What follows is one improbable plot development after another, including an ill-fated trip to visit Pippi's bitchy sister Polly (Cheryl Hines), and Wilson being arrested on kidnapping charges. Sequences just seem to exist in a vacuum in WILSON--there's little forward momentum, either comedic or dramatic, and no one seems to exist in the real world. Clowes really nailed the psychology of his characters in GHOST WORLD, one of the best films of its decade, but this just feels like watered-down GHOST WORLD outtakes, right down to the very Enid-like Claire. There's one legitimately funny scene where Wilson intentionally rear-ends a woman's car just so he can ask her out on a date, and instead attracts a large crowd of witnesses, and Judy Greer is as charming as ever as a dog-sitter who somehow finds something worthwhile about Wilson, but in the end, it just goes nowhere and says nothing, and never gets around the obstacle of a great actor being badly miscast. Fox apparently knew they had a dud on their hands, releasing this on just 300 screens for a total gross of $650,000. (R, 94 mins)
