THE OUTPOST (US - 2020) Directed by Rod Lurie. Written by Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson. Cast: Scott Eastwood, Caleb Landry Jones, Orlando Bloom, Jack Kesy, Cory Hardrict, Milo Gibson, Jacob Scipio, Taylor John Smith, Jonathan Yunger, Alexander Arnold, George Arvidson, Will Attenborough, Chris Born, Ernest Cavazos, Scott Alda Coffey, Jack Devos, Sharif Dorani, Henry Hughes, James Jagger, Jack Kalian, Bobby Lockwood, Kwame Patterson, Daniel Rodriguez, Alfie Stewart, Trey Tucker, Brandon Wengryznek. (R, 123 mins)
THE OUTPOST is a harrowing chronicle of the Battle of Kamdesh, the bloodiest battle of the war in Afghanistan, taking place over a 12-hour period on October 3, 2009. In 2006, a series of outposts were created throughout the region to promote counterinsurgency, goodwill relations with locals, and to stop the flow of weapons and Taliban fighters coming in from Pakistan. PRT Kamdesh, which would eventually be renamed Camp Keating, was positioned in a cavernous area at the bottom of three peaks of the Hindu Kush Mountains, prompting one military analyst at the time to comment that it "might as well be called Camp Custer, because everyone at the outpost was going to die." Almost entirely surrounded by steep mountains with plenty of hiding places for the Taliban to mount an ambush, PRT Kamdesh is attacked in small bursts at least once a day, just to remind the Americans that they're constantly being observed. The outpost is run by CPT Keating (Orlando Bloom), who's respected by the men and also takes his role as diplomat seriously. He establishes a good relationship with the Afghan locals, but it's a harbinger of doom to come when he's killed by a bomb blast on patrol, prompting the renaming of PRT Kamdesh to Camp Keating in his honor.
Much of the first half of THE OUTPOST is spent on establishing the atmosphere and getting to know the characters, which does get a bit dizzying and hard to follow at times. The primary soldiers on which the film focuses are outsider Sgt. Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones), a Marine washout and a bad attitude case who routinely mouths off to superior officers and is generally regarded as an unreliable pain in the ass by everyone, and Staff Sgt. Clinton Romesha (Scott Eastwood), who's just been brought in with a new group as the film begins. There's a lot of ball-busting of the homophobic and racist variety to blow off steam ("You smell like a bag of dicks," says one, while another asks "If you had to fuck a guy, gun to your head, who would it be?" and the answer is "No gun necessary. Chuck Norris"), and one guy going off when he catches another jerking off to a stolen photo of his wife. Camp Keating goes through commanders in rapid succession: Keating's replacement, CPT Yllescas (Milo Gibson, one of Mel's sons), whose motto is "Embrace the suck," is, like his predecessor, killed by a bomb while on a routine patrol, and he's followed by the stern, standoffish CPT Broward (Kwame Patterson), who won't leave his quarters--even filling jars of piss for Carter to dispose--and there's soon whispers calling him "Broward the Coward." By the summer of 2009, Broward is relieved of duty and Keating is left in the temporary command of second-in-charge Lt. Bunderman (Taylor John Smith), with the outpost set to be closed by the Army by the first week of October. And at 5:58 am on October 3, 2009, over 300 Taliban and Afghan insurgents unleash hell from all sides of the surrounding mountains, the relentless attack coming from everywhere.
Based on the 2012 non-fiction book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by CNN anchor Jake Tapper (also one of about two dozen producers, along with Medal of Honor recipient Ty Carter), THE OUTPOST is directed by Rod Lurie, a West Point grad and film critic-turned-filmmaker who hasn't helmed a feature since his badly-received 2011 remake of Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS. Lurie put himself in a no-win situation by remaking such an iconic film, but taken on its own terms, his version has its merits, especially with its sinister depiction of the underlying sense of menace in a small Southern town that doesn't take too kindly to outsiders. Of course, Lurie is best known for 2000's political drama THE CONTENDER, and while he's helmed other solid films (1999's DETERRENCE, 2001's THE LAST CASTLE, 2008's NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH), THE OUTPOST is his best work in the last 20 years. What's most surprising about THE OUTPOST is the fact that it's produced by Cannon cover band Millennium and was shot in their usual stomping grounds of Bulgaria. It speaks to Lurie's skill and dedication to the project--and perhaps everyone rallying around him when his 27-year-old son Hunter, to whom the film is dedicated, died unexpectedly during pre-production--that he manages to transcend Millennium's sometimes dubious budgetary constraints and quality-control issues and makes this film look like it came from a major studio. Even the clown crew at Bulgaria's Worldwide FX brings their A-game when it comes to the visual effects and CGI explosions.
With the B outfit Screen Media Films handling distribution, THE OUTPOST was likely doomed to a VOD release even before COVID-19 closed movie theaters indefinitely, but this is maybe the first new film I've seen since the advent of the pandemic that really should be seen on a big screen. Even at home, however, it succeeds as best it can in being an immersive experience, with Lurie presenting a seamlessly-edited, expertly-crafted 45-minute sequence in the second hour depicting the battle, with long takes and time spent establishing where everyone is in relation to others, creating coherence amidst the chaos, something many films of this sort don't really get a handle on. Jones does a terrific job of showing the arc of a character from screw-up to shattered hero without turning it into a cliche (and his acting in his final scene is reminiscent of Tom Hanks' breakdown in CAPTAIN PHILLIPS), while Eastwood, in a breakout performance, looks and sounds so much like his old man that it's actually eerie, especially when Broward chews out Romesha about returning fire on "suspicious activity" without authorization, and Eastwood seethes "Suspicious? So where were the bullets coming from, sir?" like Dirty Harry smarting off to a pencil-pushing boss. In addition to Eastwood and Gibson, other celebrity lineages are represented with Will Attenborough (grandson of Richard), Scott Alda Coffey (grandson of Alan Alda), and James Jagger (son of Mick), playing various soldiers at Camp Keating. A gritty, uncompromising look at the hell of war that's refreshingly lacking in tough guy posturing and jingoistic silliness typical of military actioners off the Millennium assembly line, THE OUTPOST is to the war in Afghanistan what BLACK HAWK DOWN was to the Battle of Mogadishu (fitting that Bloom is both movies), and it's one of the best films of the year so far.
Caleb Landry Jones, Rod Lurie (with pic of his late son Hunter),
and Scott Eastwood on the set of THE OUTPOST
Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone. Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Nicolas Cage, Rhys Ifans, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, Lakeith Lee Stanfield, Joely Richardson, Ben Chaplin, Nicholas Rowe, Basker Patel, Edward Snowden. (R, 134 mins) It would be nice if Oscar-winning filmmaker and tinfoil-hat fashionista Oliver Stone was back in provocateur mode with SNOWDEN, but the message is lost in the auteur's didactic execution. Told with myopic tunnelvision and with nothing but gushing admiration for its subject, SNOWDEN lumbers along with little in the way of nuance or subtlety, and nothing in the way of questioning the ex-CIA/NSA whistleblower. It's canonizing hagiography of the most one-sided order, with Edward Snowden the sole voice of morality in a world of evil big government surveillance that exists only to piss on the freedoms of Americans and can't possibly have any positive purpose whatsoever. This should be a nailbiting thriller but Stone is so distracted by his Snowden man-crush that it never has a chance to reach the heights of his in-his-prime conspiracy/paranoia triumphs like JFK or NIXON. It's more in line with the hokey, neutered simplicity of something like WORLD TRADE CENTER. Snowden is a complex, complicated figure, but you wouldn't know it by watching SNOWDEN. Stone isn't interesting in getting in Snowden's head, so you're better off checking out Laura Poitras' Oscar-winning 2014 Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR instead.
That said, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a terrific job of capturing Snowden's voice and mannerisms with uncanny accuracy. The film opens in 2013 as an on-the-run Snowden is holed up in a Hong Kong hotel preparing to leak secret CIA and NSA files to documentary filmmaker Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson). Jumping back and forth from 2004 to 2013, we follow Snowden through a short stint in the Army, where his goal of joining the Special Forces is stalled by brittle bones and a pair of fragile legs that get him a discharge. Told by his doctor that there's other ways to serve his country, the conservative, Ayn Rand-admiring Snowden is admitted into The Hill, the CIA training facility in Virginia where he becomes the top prospect of (fictional) instructor Corbin O'Brian (a vampiric Rhys Ifans). He also falls in love with liberal Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who joins him when his new CIA job takes him to places like Switzerland and Japan, where his focus is cybersecurity and designing programs that are ostensibly used to monitor post-9/11 terrorist activities. He leaves the CIA but works for them on a contractual basis later on, and is disturbed to find that much of the US government's surveillance focus is spying on its own citizens and that one of his programs is used for drone strikes in the Middle East. Growing increasingly concerned about the nature of his work and how far the surveillance goes (he's informed at one point that his suspicions about Lindsay having an affair are unfounded, proof that the omnipresent They are watching her and monitoring her computer and phone activity), he decides to blow the whistle, stealing thousands of secret files and fleeing the country before reaching out to activist filmmaker Poitras.
How heavy-handed is SNOWDEN? The surveillance program is called "Prism," and when invoking it, Stone feels the need to frame shots with a prism effect that's also used when epileptic Snowden has seizures. It actually caused snickering in the audience about the 10th or 12th time it's used. How unsubtle is SNOWDEN? Ifans has been directed to play O'Brian in the most ominously sinister fashion possible, making it difficult to tell if he's a top CIA official or the Antichrist. Watch when he's shown speaking with Snowden in a conference room, Snowden physically there, but O'Brian on a giant, theater-sized screen as Ifans' looming, side-eyed visage takes up the entire display, just in case the whole "Big Brother is watching" concept wasn't already clear. The performances are generally solid, though Nicolas Cage is squandered in an intriguing but tiny role as a benched analyst curating antiquated espionage equipment, his sole purpose being to unknowingly supply the Rubik's Cube that Snowden will use years later to stash the SD card with all the files. But it's Ifans' bizarre portrayal that really sticks out, bringing to mind what might happen if PHANTASM's The Tall Man worked for the CIA. There's a nerve-shredding, Alan J. Pakula-type paranoia thriller to made about Snowden's exploits, and less preachy filmmakers could've done wonders with the subject. Remember that incredible Donald Sutherland exposition drop in JFK? That Oliver Stone could've done something with SNOWDEN. So could Michael Mann in INSIDER mode or David Fincher channeling ZODIAC. There's also a nice Mann vibe in some of Anthony Dod Mantle's digital cinematography in locations all over the world that recalls last year's criminally underrated hacker thriller BLACKHAT. Unfortunately, Stone the filmmaker defers to Dr. Stone the lecturing activist with an agenda. The film completely flies off the rails in a catastrophic climax that recalls Professor Steven Seagal's speech at the end of ON DEADLY GROUND, as Gordon-Levitt actually exits the film and Snowden takes over, playing himself being interviewed via internet from Russia, basking in the standing ovation he gets at a TEDTalk event. This drawn-out finale--more like a tacked-on Snowden infomercial--concludes with an inspirational, manipulative score crescendoing as a pensive Snowden finishes the interview, closes his laptop and turns away, in profile, triumphantly staring out the window of his Russian apartment and smiling, looking like he's waiting for Stone to cue up Foo Fighters' "My Hero" for the closing credits.
Bernard Rose's ongoing freefall into absolute irrelevance continues with this aggressively awful, straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray modern updating of Mary Shelley's classic novel, co-produced by Avi Lerner and Cannon cover band NuImage. Rose, who established his horror bona fides with 1989's PAPERHOUSE and 1992's CANDYMAN, hasn't made a good film since the late '90s (his most recent efforts include the found-footage SX_TAPE and the atrocious Paganini biopic THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST) and for a while, his take on FRANKENSTEIN is promising enough that it starts looking very much like a comeback. Accordingly, since everything Rose has touched for nearly the last 20 years turns to shit, so goes FRANKENSTEIN. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the film finds Victor Frankenstein (Danny Huston) and his wife Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss) conducting top-secret experiments at a high-tech research facility. Using digital technology, they've created "Adam" (Xavier Samuel), who's essentially a baby in the body of an adult. Elizabeth bottle-feeds him and Adam learns to say "Mama," but the experiment is deemed a failure when boils start developing all over his body. An attempt at euthanizing him fails when the presumed-dead Adam jerks awake as his skull is being sawed open. He escapes from the facility and creates havoc all over Los Angeles, with the strength of ten men and seemingly impervious to bullets. When he's arrested and the cops find Elizabeth's work ID in Adam's possession, they call her in but Adam goes berserk when she claims to have never seen him before. Rejected by his "mother," the increasingly monstrous-looking Adam escapes police custody and is befriended by homeless, guitar-strumming blind man Eddie (Rose's CANDYMAN star Tony Todd), who dubs him "Monster" and hooks him up with Wanda (Maya Erskine), an area streetwalker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him to a fleabag motel and doesn't seem to mind that he's starting to resemble The Toxic Avenger.
Until Adam escapes from Frankenstein's research lab, FRANKENSTEIN is actually OK. Samuel's performance was credible and there seemed to be enough clever ideas that this was shaping up to be a promising reinterpretation and Rose's best film in a long time (particularly memorable is a ghoulishly macabre bit where Adam gets the upper hand on the Frankenstein associate--named Dr. Pretorius, of course--conducting his autopsy). But once Adam is out of the lab and on the streets, FRANKENSTEIN just crashes and burns on an almost LEGION level. It's not really conveyed in a proper time element how Adam goes from having the cognitive and motor skills of an infant to learning how to shower, being coordinated enough to take on a couple of gang members, and eventually programming a GPS on a dead hooker's smart phone to find out where the Frankensteins live, possibly the dumbest tech-based plot development in a horror movie since Simon Callow faxed his own ejaculate in 2009's unwatchable CROWLEY. Approaching FRANKENSTEIN with the apparent goal of turning it into MARY SHELLEY'S TIME OUT OF MIND, the second half of the film focuses on the friendship between Adam and Eddie, in a tired and obvious revamping of the blind hermit segment in James Whale's THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, moved to the mean streets of L.A. Rose throws in embarrassingly ham-fisted commentary on bad L.A. cops (one is played an overacting Jeff Hilliard in the world's worst tribute to Bill Paxton-as-Hudson-in-ALIENS), and even resorts to a philosophical Eddie invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "Free at last!" in reference to Adam. Rest assured, Rose is taking this completely seriously, but you may be distracted when your mind wanders off to questions like "Who thought this was a good idea?" and "Does this take place in a world where Frankenstein movies have never existed?" and "At what point do Rose's loved ones stage an intervention?" He tweaks elements of both the novel and the early FRANKENSTEIN films that starred Boris Karloff, and yes, there's even a climactic funeral pyre, where CGI flames engulf both the monster and what's left of Rose's credibility as a filmmaker. (R, 90 mins)
DIABLO
(US - 2016)
Scott Eastwood looks and sounds a lot like his legendary dad Clint, and that was probably all the makers of DIABLO felt they needed to make it work. It also borrows core ideas from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and UNFORGIVEN and enough of a particular 1973 western that one could sarcastically dub this HIGH PLAINS POSEUR. The setting is Colorado in 1872, and Eastwood is Jackson, a Civil War vet whose farm is set ablaze by a gang of Mexicans who take off with his new bride Alexsandra (Camilla Belle). Following the trail south to Mexico, Jackson sets off on a vigilante mission to rescue his wife and kill her abductors. He's hindered in his efforts by the mysterious Ezra (THE HATEFUL EIGHT's Walton Goggins), an overtly Mephistophelian figure who keeps appearing on the trail saying things like "Your soul is the toll," and "You're on my road, you pay my price." It's some pretty obvious soul-sellling, "Road to Hell" symbolism that probably seems like deep stuff to screenwriter Carlos De Los Rios, whose credits include several Asylum mockbusters like THE DA VINCI TREASURE and PIRATES OF TREASURE ISLAND. Unfortunately, De Los Rios and director Lawrence Roeck (who has a tenuous connection to Clint; he was a camera operator on THE EASTWOOD FACTOR, one of former Time film critic and full-time Clint BFF Richard Schickel's shamelessly slurping documentaries on the iconic actor) aren't done yet, as DIABLO goes along on an unspectacular but inoffensive path until about 50 minutes in, with a total bullshit plot twist that's the hoariest cliche this side of waking up and finding that it was all a dream. You can't even hint at what it involves without completely giving it away, but let's say the twist is similar to a certain beloved 1999 film with an unreliable narrator. The twist completely derails Eastwood's performance which, while not great, was decent enough to that point to carry a small, low-key western that inexplicably feels the need to switch gears and become a horror movie midway though. There's some really beautiful cinematography by the veteran Dean Cundey and brief appearances by jobbing pros like Danny Glover, Adam Beach, and Joaquim de Almeida, but by the time the asinine finale rolls around, DIABLO only succeeds in shooting itself in the foot. (R, 83 mins)
