THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME (US - 2020) Directed by Olivier Megaton. Written by Karl Gajdusek. Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Michael Carmen Pitt, Anna Brewster, Sharlto Copley, Patrick Bergin, Brandon Auret, Tamer Burjaq, James Richard Marshall, Terence Maynard, Sean Cameron Michael, Nathan Lynn, Neels Clasen, Leandie Du Randt Bosch, Johann Vermaak, Tiyler Kriel, Johnny Pienaar, Robert Hobbs, Daniel Fox. (Unrated, 148 mins) Despite having the most bomb-ass name in action movies, French director Olivier Megaton can't quite back it up. After helming a passable Luc Besson ripoff with 2002's RED SIREN, he was recruited by Besson himself, but most of Megaton's products that rolled off the EuropaCorp assembly line were among its least memorable, including TRANSPORTER 3 and TAKEN 3, the worst films in their respective franchises. Megaton split from his mentor and has been MIA for the six years since TAKEN 3, but he's back with the Netflix Original film THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME, written by Karl Gajdusek (OBLIVION, THE NOVEMBER MAN) and based on a 2009 graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini. Megaton appears to have abandoned his shaky-cam/quick-cut style that made some of his Besson films so difficult to watch, but unfortunately, LAST DAYS is boring, derivative, hopelessly muddled, and punishingly overlong at a thoroughly unjustified 148 (!) minutes. There's absolutely no credible reason on God's Green Earth for this to be two minutes longer than GOODFELLAS and still somehow feel like huge chunks of it are missing, plus it even has to rely on early (and quickly-abandoned) narration to help clear up loose ends and move things along and it can't even do that. The kind of film that thinks simply acknowledging its plot holes and narrative inconsistencies is sufficient enough to excuse them, THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME is a pointlessly bloated fiasco that can't decide what it is, what it's doing, or who it's even for.
Set in 2025 Detroit (the Motor City played--quite unconvincingly--by Johannesburg, South Africa), THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME deals with just that: America has become a dystopian, crime-infested hellhole, with jackbooted cops patrolling the streets with military hardware and shooting criminals on sight. It's five days until the government unveils, through its so-called American Peace Initiative, the "API signal," which alerts a synaptic blocker in the human brain that produces a high-pitched signal designed to incapacitate people and prevent them from committing acts they know to be unlawful. Crime will be instantly wiped out and unnecessary police departments will fall under government control, and advocates of civil liberties are making a run for the Canadian border, where the US military stands guard and shoots those trying to cross. Career criminal Graham Bricke (Edgar Ramirez) is recruited by scuzzy Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt, billed as "Michael Carmen Pitt," and doing a feature-length Jason Mewes impression) and his seductive fiancee Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster, straight out of a Besson film) to become a partner in a planned heist of $1 billion from the US government's "Money Factory" currency facility (stationed right by the Canadian border, for some reason). The idea is to get in and have ace hacker Shelby jam the ATI signal just as it goes live at midnight, thus giving them several minutes free of the piercing "brain rape" and allow them time to get out and get to the border. Cash manipulates Bricke into taking part because he's knows he's got an ax to grind with the government: he was in prison with Bricke's younger brother, who allegedly committed suicide but Cash reveals that the inmates were being used in ATI signal test runs (which happened to Bricke on a bank robbery a year earlier) that eventually caused his brother's death. Cash has his own reasons for the heist--he's the black sheep son of powerful Detroit crime boss Rossi Dumois (Patrick Bergin sighting!), and he wants to create his own legacy by pulling off the last crime in American history. And Shelby may not be who she claims to be, as she's periodically hassled by a pair of corrupt FBI agents (James Richard Marshall, Terence Maynard) who have kidnapped her little sister (Tiyler Kriel) to ensure her cooperation with whatever it is they need her to do.
FREE FIRE (UK - 2017) Directed by Ben Wheatley. Written by Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley. Cast: Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Jack Reynor, Sam Riley, Michael Smiley, Noah Taylor, Patrick Bergin, Babou Ceesay, Enzo Cilenti, Tom Davis, Mark Monero. (R, 90 mins) A critical and fan favorite who's received so many accolades that he's in danger of becoming the British Ti West, Ben Wheatley has what it takes to be major voice in genre filmmaking and he's been endorsed by the esteemed likes of Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright. But other than two standout films--2012's beyond misanthropic black comedy SIGHTSEERS and 2013's profoundly unsettling A FIELD IN ENGLAND--the results have been mixed at best. I never understood the critical acclaim and scenester love for his 2011 breakthrough KILL LIST, a film that can only knock you on your ass or even surprise you in the slightest if you're a serious, well-versed film connoisseur who's somehow never heard of THE WICKER MAN. Last year's HIGH-RISE gave Wheatley his largest budget and biggest-name cast yet, but his adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel, with its Margaret Thatcher premonitions and themes and ideas seen in so many subsequent things over time, seemed in 2016 like little more than a nice-looking exercise in production design and pointless retro '70s fetishism. With his latest film FREE FIRE, which gets a cosmetic cred boost from an executive producer credit for A FIELD IN ENGLAND fan Scorsese, Wheatley and his wife and regular screenwriting partner Amy Jump offer their take on the 1990s staple of the post-Tarantino crime flick, combined with some retro '70s leftovers from HIGH-RISE.
In 1978 Boston, Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Wheatley regular Michael Smiley) are two IRA members in town to buy guns with the help of local small-time criminals Justine (ROOM Oscar-winner Brie Larson), Bernie (Enzo Cilenti) and Frank's idiot nephew Stevo (Sam Riley). They're all greeted outside an abandoned factory by the sardonic Ord (Armie Hammer), who arranged a meet with South African arms dealer and "international asshole" Vernon (Sharlto Copley) and his associates Martin (Babou Ceesay), Gordon (Noah Taylor), and Harry (Jack Reynor). Stevo, bruised and battered from a fight he got into the night before after smashing a bottle over a woman's head and being beaten by her cousin, recognizes Harry as that cousin and tries to keep a distance from the negotiations, which are going south when Chris discovers Vernon, aka "Vern & Learn," didn't bring the weapons he ordered, instead trying to push lesser inventory off on him. Tensions escalate but Ord helps cool things down until everything blows up when Harry recognizes Stevo. Pushing and shoving leads to a forced apology from Stevo, but when he ends up boasting about what he did to Harry's cousin, Harry grabs a gun and shoots him, which sends various parties scattering about the main area of the factory as a feature-length gunfight erupts, with the added bonus of two hidden snipers--Howie (Patrick Bergin sighting!) and Jimmy (Mark Monero)--trying to pick off members of both groups for the mystery figure who hired them to abscond with both the guns and the money.
After a 15-minute set-up that includes CCR's "Run Through the Jungle"--apparently now required to be in every Brie Larson movie--being played as the characters walk through the warehouse, FREE FIRE is essentially a 75-minute version of the RESERVOIR DOGS standoff, which is amusing for a few minutes until it devolves into tedium. These buffoons are the worst shots in the history of gunfights, never killing anyone and mainly just clipping arms, legs, and shoulders, sometimes with the help of a ricocheting bullet, and before long everyone's just crawling around trying to get the edge on everyone else. This also leads to a lot of "Fuck you! No, fuck you! Gimme the money! Fuck you!" ad nauseum. It says a lot about the utter obnoxiousness of this character ensemble when Sharlto Copley is playing maybe the third-most annoying of the bunch. Top honors go to Riley's Stevo and Reynor's Harry. Murphy's Chris and Larson's Justine (this was shot two years ago, before ROOM was released) are the most reasonable and tolerable of the criminals, while Hammer's smirking, smartass Ord is obviously meant to be the source of quips that aren't nearly as quotable as Jump and Wheatley think they are.
There's a great '70s Ennio Morricone-goes-prog original score by EX MACHINA composers Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, a few funny lines that land and a couple of inspired gags--one involving Vernon completely engulfed in flames and using a fire extinguisher on himself, the other involving a van running over a guy's head and splattering it flat while an 8-track blares John Denver's "Annie's Song" from its radio, maybe the most jarringly incongruous use of a song accompanying horrific violence this side of the scalding LAYER CAKE beatdown set to Duran Duran's "Ordinary World"--but FREE FIRE doesn't really have enough to it to sustain even a 90-minute film. It's a throwback to Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS and Guy Ritchie's LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, with a little of Troy Duffy's cult classic THE BOONDOCK SAINTS with its Boston setting, but in the end, FREE FIRE isn't even on the level of a latecomer like Joe Carnahan's SMOKIN' ACES. It's fine that Wheatley holds those films on a pedestal, but he doesn't really do anything to justify FREE FIRE's existence. It's perfectly watchable and will probably be a Netflix and cable favorite for the next two decades that you end up watching because you can never remember until halfway through that you've already seen it, but it's still a prefab cult movie that doesn't understand cult cred is earned and not instantly granted just because of kitschy music and references to shoulder pads and 8-track tapes. Plus, Wheatley falls into the same trap Duffy did on the lackluster BOONDOCK SAINTS II, mistaking "insufferable assholes yelling and shouting" for "funny."
HARDCORE HENRY (Russia/US/China - 2016) Written and directed by Ilya Naishuller. Cast: Sharlto Copley, Danila Kozlovsky, Haley Bennett, Tim Roth, Andrei Dementiev, Sveta Ustinova, Darya Charusha, Ilya Naishuller. (R, 96 mins) Genre films have flirted with sequences with first-person POV fleetingly in the past, from relatively recent video game adaptations like HOUSE OF THE DEAD (2003) and DOOM (2005) and any number of 1970s-and-onward slasher films where the killer stalks their next victim (most recently done in the remake of MANIAC with Elijah Wood). Robert Montgomery's ambitious Philip Marlowe noir LADY IN THE LAKE (1947) was the first film to extensively tell a story through the first-person POV of the main character, only seeing what they see ("Starring Robert Montgomery...and YOU!"). The mostly English-language, partially Indiegogo-funded Russian import HARDCORE HENRY takes that concept to its absolute extreme (or "X-treme," if you prefer), with the entire 96-minute film seen from the POV of the title character, a dead and partially dismembered man reanimated as a cyborg, outfitted with a durable new arm and leg and annihilating everyone in sight on a mission of vengeance. It's no surprise that, with its first-person shooter gimmick and frequent weed references (like "4:20" spray-painted on a wall) that it's a prefab cult movie geared toward gamers and stoners, which certainly has some union on a Venn diagram. And though it would defeat the whole purpose of the project, you can't help but question whether, given the impressive nature of the stunt work and the chase scenes, and that it was shot in some run-down and apocalyptically atmospheric sections of Moscow that can barely be discerned with the non-stop camera movement, HARDCORE HENRY would've played a lot better had it been shot in a conventional fashion.
Played by ten different stuntmen and cameramen (including writer/director Ilya Naishuller, who also has another acting role) with GoPro Hero 3 cameras attached to mask-like helmets on their heads, an amnesiac Henry awakens in a lab inside an airborne military plane over Moscow where his scientist wife Estelle (Jennifer Lawrence lookalike Haley Bennett) is working on him as some kind of top-secret project. The lab is overtaken by telekinetic albino supervillain Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), who's planning to create a race of biomechanically-engineered cyborg supersoldiers, but Henry and Estelle manage to get to an escape pod and crash land on an abandoned highway where Estelle is abducted by more of Akan's goons. Henry quickly meets up with Jimmy (DISTRICT 9's Sharlto Copley), a government agent and fast-talking exposition machine who helps in his quest for revenge against Akan, and, in one of the many nods to the video game influence, keeps getting killed and instantly reappearing in another, distinctly different guise (which also allows the increasingly grating and self-indulgent Copley--also one of a truckload of producers--to mercilessly ham it up).
Looking not unlike a co-production between the Russian mob and Red Bull, HARDCORE HENRY works surprisingly well for about 30 minutes, with some kinetic energy and chutzpah in its balls-to-the-wall, anything-goes mentality and it's buoyed by some truly hair-raising stunt work. But by half an hour in, it's played all of its cards and has no choice but to keep endlessly repeating itself. What was initially fun and gleefully over-the top--the violence and splatter here stretch the limits of the R rating about as far as it can go--turns deadening and headache-inducing as the gimmick runs its course in record time. Naishuller, a music video vet who shot several videos for the Russian punk band Biting Elbows in the same first-person-fashion (obviously, this is Naishuller's "thing"), is a protege of NIGHT WATCH director Timur Bekmambetov, who was the key producer here. The technique works in small doses, and this could've been an effective short film, but it doesn't take long for HARDCORE HENRY to turn into a toss-up between a Buzzfeed viral video designed to be watched on your phone, or DREDD re-imagined as a Russian dashcam video. Viewers with a low tolerance for shaky cam will bolt in record time, and Naishuller doesn't even try to rein in Copley, who seems to approach every role like he's Robin Williams on a talk show. There's some inspired moments scattered about--a bunch of Jimmy's various avatar incarnations doing a rendition of Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin," which Copley manages to pull off without being irritating; an argument yelled in Russian represented by overlapping, illegible subtitles; and a happy accident involving the actor playing Henry in a chase scene accidentally plowing over a stuntwoman on an escalator and Naishuller leaving the gaffe as is. He also acknowledges the importance of LADY IN THE LAKE to the first-person POV motif by its poster being visible on one character's living room wall.
It's commendable that Naishuller sticks to the rules he establishes and fully commits to the first-person ethos, but does that automatically mean it's a worthwhile film? From the buzz at Toronto and SXSW this year, it seems that the glowing reviews were praising the technical accomplishment more than the film itself, which was an issue with another recent gimmick film, the 138-minute unbroken, single-take VICTORIA. HARDCORE HENRY has some ballsy ideas, but it simply blows its load too quickly, lacking the staying power for a 90-minute movie. Many of the jokes are cheap and lazy, like Jimmy listening to Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" in his SUV, the punchline apparently being "There's a cheesy disco tune I recognize ironically," or Henry hopping on a horse, accompanied by the theme from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Tim Roth has about 30 seconds of screen time as Henry's father in his one human memory remaining, and it would appear his shots were done in Los Angeles by a separate crew listed in the credits, with someone even getting a "Dialect coach for Mr. Roth" credit when he has three lines of dialogue and uses the same RESERVOIR DOGS American accent he's been using for the last 25 years. And in this era of trigger warnings and delicate snowflake sensibilities, when is someone going to stand up for the albinos of the world and how the pigmentally-challenged have been treated by the movie industry? Approaching his role as if Akan is a Bond villain's henchman working on his own nefarious, global domination plot in his downtime, Kozlovsky is appropriately cartoonish, but saddled with numerous groan-inducing quips that land with a thud. When's the last time you saw an albino in pop culture depicted as just a normal person? When Edgar Winter last had a hit single?
CHAPPIE (US - 2015) Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell. Cast: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, Ninja, Yo-Landi Vi$$er, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Brandon Auret, Jason Cope, Johnny Selema, Maurice Carpede. (R, 120 mins)
When DISTRICT 9 opened to rave reviews in 2009 and eventually landed a Best Picture Oscar nomination, it appeared as if South African writer/director and Peter Jackson protege Neill Blomkamp, making his feature debut, was going to be the next major name in sci-fi/fantasy cinema. His long-delayed sophomore effort ELYSIUM bowed in summer 2013 to mixed reviews and has seen its reputation plummet in the ensuing year and a half. ELYSIUM was heavy-handed in its politicizing, but flaws and all, it generally worked for me, and it's entirely possible that the scorn it received was just a matter of balancing out some of the overabundance of praise heaped on DISTRICT 9--a fine film, but one with plenty of its own problems. It was a situation reminiscent of Neil Marshall, feted as horror's latest wunderkind after THE DESCENT in 2005, but whose 2008 follow-up DOOMSDAY, an entertaining, John Carpenter and George Miller-inspired mix tape of '80s cult action and horror, ended up being an expensive flop dismissed and despised by fans who just didn't seem to get it. Not to sound all "haters gonna hate," but I'm still not sure what the DOOMSDAY audiences wanted that Marshall failed to deliver. The situation is similar to what Blomkamp got with ELYSIUM: some gripes and complaints that snowballed into a borderline irrational pile-on.
If anything might retroactively win over the ELYSIUM haters, it's Blomkamp's latest film CHAPPIE, the kind of misbegotten disaster that would derail a career in decades past. CHAPPIE is the work of a filmmaker who's bought into entirely too much of his own press, an agonizingly self-indulgent misfire that manages to get almost everything appallingly wrong. The tone of the film changes from scene to scene: sometimes it's a hyper-violent action movie, then it's practically a kiddie movie, then hopelessly maudlin, then stacked with half-assed political and religious subtext. Like its protagonist, Blomkamp seems to have the attention-span of a little kid, with the bulk of CHAPPIE coming off like a remake of ROBOCOP starring Johnny Five from SHORT CIRCUIT, and after cribbing from everything from BLADE RUNNER to PINOCCHIO, Blomkamp finally cashes out and ends up ripping off himself by turning it into a revamp of DISTRICT 9 with robots. There's precious little to praise and there's no way to sugarcoat it: CHAPPIE is incredibly and aggressively terrible.
An expansion of Blomkamp's 2004 short film TETRA VAAL, CHAPPIE is set a few years in the future in a Johannesburg that looks almost like a crime-plagued wasteland. In 2016, the government authorized the use of "Scouts," police robots designed and programmed by Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), an engineer with the Halliburton-like Tetravaal Corporation. The Scouts have drastically reduced the crime rate, driving the company's stock through the roof, making Wilson the golden boy of Tetravaal CEO Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver). That doesn't go over well with Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman), another Tetravaal engineer whose own militarized security program--giant ED-209-like war robots controlled via neural transmitters and called "Moose"--has its funding almost completely eliminated in favor of the Scouts. Wilson has been working on a program that creates a thinking consciousness in the Scouts, allowing them to form opinions and appreciate the finer things in life. Wilson's proposal is instantly rejected by the bottom-line-driven Bradley (one of the few good lines in the film is an incredulous Bradley laughing in Wilson's face and saying "Do you realize you just came to the CEO of a publicly-traded weapons corporation and pitched a robot that can write poems?"), which doesn't stop him from stealing Scout unit #22, one that's constantly in the facility for repairs and has finally been so damaged that it's earned a spot on the scrap heap, to attempt to run the artificial intelligence program on it himself. That plan falls apart when Wilson is carjacked by a trio of criminals--Amerika (Jose Pablo Cantillo), and Ninja and Yo-Landi, played by Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er of the South African rap group Die Antwoord--who targeted Wilson and hope to get him to reprogram the junked Scout so it can help them in some heists they need to engineer in order for Ninja to pay back the money he owes to scuzzy crime boss Hippo (Brandon Auret). Wilson runs the A.I. program and Chappie (voiced and motion-captured by Blomkamp regular Sharlto Copley) is essentially a helpless child who quickly finds his way, even calling Yo-Landi and Ninja "Mommy" and "Daddy" respectively.
It's a hokey concept at best that never properly channels its excess of uneven tones in an orderly or coherent fashion. Chappie looks like a cute robot, with antennae that resemble bunny ears, but who thought it was a good idea to put a kiddie-looking robot in an R-rated action movie with copious F-bombs and graphic violence? CHAPPIE goes straight downhill when Ninja and Amerika teach Chappie to be "gangster," as the sentient Scout spends the rest of the film strutting around with a cartoonish swagger, assorted bling (like a gold chain that reads "Hustler"), and a "$" spray-painted on his helmet, and calling people "fuckmother." Perhaps it's meant to be funny--the audience was laughing out loud when Chappie suddenly commandeers Wilson's van for a car chase--but the rest of the film isn't. Weaver is appropriately bitch-on-wheelsy as the tough CEO, but she can play that role in her sleep, while Jackman has what it takes to make a formidable villain but his character makes no sense at all, and I'm not just referring to his pointless mullet. Moore is said to be ex-military, but he's a scientist who wears cargo shorts to work and carries a gun in a holster even when he's in the office at his cubicle. He assaults Wilson--smacking him in the head with the gun--in the office in front of everyone and goes back to his desk, with no consequences. And when a security team is sent out to find the renegade Chappie, it's Moore who's leading the assault unit. What is his job, exactly? And how does he expect to get away with switching the entire Scout patrol offline, sending Johannesburg into violent, anarchic chaos as a way to convince Bradley that it's time to unleash the Moose, when he sabotages the program from his own lab, via his own computer, using his own password?
Despite being the best-known cast members, Jackman, Weaver, and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE's Patel all have supporting roles as Blomkamp inexplicably makes the criminal trio the de facto leads. Ninja and Vi$$er have more screen time than anyone, and while Copley's vocal performance is as annoying as many of his recent acting turns, it's the Die Antwoord duo who earn the top acting dishonors. A little of these two goes a long way, and Blomkamp grants them entirely too much wiggle room. It's one thing to have their songs throughout the film, and another to have them playing characters who share their own names, but why is Ninja wearing a Ninja shirt with his own image and "Die Antwoord" on it? I can see that kind of self-aggrandizing nonsense happening in a no-budget Albert Pyun movie where Big Pun plays a gangsta wearing a Big Pun shirt, but here? And Yo-Landi's bedroom--the criminals live in what looks like a partially demolished building--has Die Antwoord publicity shots all over the wall. If Blomkamp is a Die Antwoord superfan and wants to hang with them, that's great. But putting them front and center in a $50 million Hollywood movie--surprisingly low-budget by today's standards--is distracting stunt-casting at its most ill-conceived. Blomkamp presumably learned his lesson, as reports surfaced that Ninja was nothing short of an abrasive, uncooperative asshole during production--clashing the most with Cantillo, a veteran, professional actor--prompting Blomkamp to retool the script to reduce Ninja's role and the need for his presence on set. By the end of the shoot, Blomkamp reached his breaking point with Ninja and was quoted as saying "I don't ever want to be in the same room with him again." Frankly, the idea of Blomkamp and Ninja having a combative Werner Herzog-Klaus Kinski working relationship is fascinating. Let's hope some behind-the-scenes meltdowns were caught by the making-of crew, because that's certain to be better than anything that ended up in CHAPPIE. It's difficult to ascertain right now if Blomkamp is a one-trick pony just three films in, but CHAPPIE is so alarmingly bad that perhaps we should hold off on getting too excited about his being handed the ALIEN franchise.
A moody, highly effective slow-burner of a revenge thriller that works in large part due to its "hero" not really being cut out for what he's doing.Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) is a homeless man sneaking into houses for a bath, eating out of garbage cans, and living in his beat-up car on the beach. He's taken to the police station by a sympathetic cop (Sidne Anderson) who tells him he's not in trouble, but she wanted him to be in a safe place when he heard the news she has for him: Wade Cleland (Sandy Barrett) is being released from prison. Several years earlier, Wade killed Dwight's parents, a tragedy from which Dwight never recovered. Dwight visits a pawn shop but can't afford a gun, then he steals one from someone's truck, but can't unlock the chamber. Armed with a steak knife, he sits in his car outside the prison and follows the Cleland family to Wade's coming-home party at a local bar. Hiding in the men's room, Dwight stabs Wade in the neck and head when he comes in to take a leak, then runs outside and slashes the tires of the Cleland's limo, slicing open his hand in the process. When he gets in his own car, he realizes he dropped the keys next to the body. Stealing the limo and driving it on a flat tire, he finds a teenage Cleland boy in the back and lets him go. Dwight visits his estranged sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) and confesses what he's done. She's glad Wade is dead, though Dwight wonders why it hasn't been in the news. Believing the Cleland family hasn't called the cops because intend to respond to Dwight's act personally, Dwight tells Sam to leave town with her kids as he's suddenly in way over his head with a shady family who's more dangerous than he ever imagined.
Writer/director/cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier doesn't present Dwight as a tough badass, but rather, a sad incompetent whose plan for revenge is short-sighted, to say the least. He desperately wants to avenge the murder of his parents, but doesn't plan ahead and isn't equipped to handle the unexpected problems that arise, like getting his sister to safety or getting shot in the leg with an arrow. Dwight doesn't go after the Clelands with guns blazing--in fact, he's lucky if he can manage to get a shot off at all. Saulnier disperses the backstory very conservatively, and only near the end do all the details, and just how deeply the bad blood between the Evans and Cleland families runs become clear to the audience. Though the Clelands are a family of rednecks, Saulnier avoids the cliches that come with that label. BLUE RUIN drew a lot of comparisons to early Coen Bros., particularly BLOOD SIMPLE, in its depiction of unlikely people getting into deadly situations that quickly spiral beyond their control and capabilities, but with its early bits of dark humor, the film plays more like the Coens doing WINTER'S BONE. It's anchored by a powerfully internalized performance by Blair, and there's a brief, scene-stealing supporting turn by Devon "Buzz from HOME ALONE" Ratray as a high school friend who helps Dwight out (THE BRADY BUNCH's Eve Plumb also appears as one of the Cleland clan). True to its title, BLUE RUIN is a bleak and gritty noir of sorts that presents an atypical, low-key spin on the standard revenge saga. (R, 90 mins)
ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE (US - 2014)
It's a little late to be making knockoffs of THE CRAFT, and if ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE seems a little tardy, part of the reason might be that the filmmakers already made it 15 years ago. The writing-directing team of Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson made an ultra low-budget, shot-on-video version immediately after graduating from college. Since then, both have remained gainfully employed in the industry with varying degrees of success: McKee is best known for his 2003 cult classic MAY, with Sivertson's claim to infamy being Lindsay Lohan's 2007 dumpster fire I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. Both have made Jack Ketchum adaptations, with McKee co-directing 2008's RED (a terrific little gem that no one knows about) and handling 2011's inexplicably acclaimed THE WOMAN solo, while Sivertson directed 2006's THE LOST. Older, wiser, and having played and barely survived the Hollywood game, the two old friends reunited to give their debut a do-over. They made some incidental plot changes, but the general idea is the same: a group of cheerleaders are killed and one's goth, Wiccan ex-girlfriend casts a spell that brings them back to life, but they need the blood of the living to survive, all the while still being catty bitches about everything. Yes, it's essentially VAMPIRE ZOMBIE HEATHERS. McKee and Sivertson offer an intriguing set-up that finds student videographer Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) infiltrating a tight-knit clique of cheerleaders after one dies in a horrific cheering accident. Her whole plan is to rip apart the perfect world of the cheerleaders and their jock boyfriends. That storyline is working quite well until it's abandoned after an intense and well-acted confrontation that unfortunately leads to silliness once a car chase results in the girls dying when their car plummets into a river. The jocks chasing them split, but lesbian Maddy's witch ex Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) happens to be in the area and brings them back to life. From then on, McKee and Sivertson can never settle on a tone, careening wildly between sick, black humor (virginal, sensitive dudebro has sex in a bathroom stall with one undead cheerleader, then brags to his buddy "I was all up in that sweet freezer! It's supposed to be cold, right?") and grueling, Rob Zombie-esque unpleasantness. There's some worthwhile moments, and the directors get a pair of strong performances from Stasey and Smit-McPhee, but it's all rather uneven and quite dumb, some of the visual effects are pretty bush-league, and the film feels like it's visiting from the distant netherworld of 1998. (R, 90 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
OPEN GRAVE (US/Hong Kong - 2014)
A promising premise is quickly squandered in this ponderous Hungary-shot horror film from Spanish director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, who's somehow still able to find employment after the universally-loathed APOLLO 18. Sharlto Copley (DISTRICT 9) wakes up in the titular location, surrounded by rotting corpses. He's rescued by a mute woman (Josie Ho) who takes him to a house where several others (among them Thomas Kretschmann) are suffering from group amnesia. Hazy details slowly come into view over what's happened to them and why as they try to escape and are met by strange, almost feral people and keep running into corpses used as scarecrows. The twists and turns in the story aren't really that interesting or suspenseful and the film ultimately turns into yet another stale variant of an already played-out subgenre. Copley is a bit more tolerable here than he was in Spike Lee's OLDBOY, but Ho, whose character doesn't understand English and can only write Chinese, has absolutely nothing to do but stand around and look at her histrionic co-stars and may as well be wearing a T-shirt that says "I'm only here to satisfy a Hong Kong co-production deal." Scenes of tense bickering are supposed to convey the sense of mistrust and paranoia among the protagonists, especially when a foggy Copley starts to think he might be the one responsible for all the mayhem. But after the 19th or 20th shouting match between frazzled people who can't remember who or where they are in a film that feels way longer than it is, there's a good chance you'll stop caring. Even Leonard Shelby would run out of patience with these assholes. (R, 102 mins)
Directed by Spike Lee. Written by Mark Protosevich. Cast: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Imperioli, Pom Klementieff, James Ransone, Max Casella, Linda Emond, Lance Reddick, Hannah Ware, Richard Portnow, Elvis Nolasco, Rami Malek, Caitlin Dulany, Cinque Lee. (R, 104 mins)
Park Chan-wook's 2003 film OLDBOY was the second part of the director's "Vengeance" trilogy of stand-alone films connected by the common theme of obsessive revenge, coming between 2002's SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and 2005's LADY VENGEANCE. OLDBOY was the first to be released in the US, in the spring of 2005, and it became an immediate hit with cult and arthouse audiences for its savage violence, stylish direction, and creative set pieces, most notably a long, single-take sequence where the hero takes on an endless hallway full of thugs while armed with just a hammer, plus an instantly-legendary scene where the lead actor eats a live octopus. Anchored by a galvanizing, ferocious performance by Choi Min-Sik and a devastating plot twist near the end, OLDBOY is almost universally considered a modern classic, so an American remake was inevitable. It marks an unusual project for Spike Lee, who's in total director-for-hire mode here, bringing none of his usual style to the proceedings (it's very telling that it's "A Spike Lee Film" and not "A Spike Lee Joint"). After a moderate level of hype in past months, FilmDistrict dumped this on just 500 screens for Thanksgiving with almost no publicity other than star Josh Brolin entering rehab just a few days prior, and both Brolin and Lee voicing their displeasure that the producers took the project away from Lee during post-production, cutting anywhere from 35 to 60 minutes out of it, depending on who's telling the story. This is also noteworthy as FilmDistrict's last release before folding and being absorbed by Focus Features, so it's obvious they're just doing the bare minimum here. As far as American remakes for the subtitle-phobic go, OLDBOY isn't bad. It frequently blunders and miscalculates, but admirably doesn't water-down or sugarcoat the shocking major reveal. Lee and screenwriter Mark Protosevich (THE CELL, I AM LEGEND) also alter the rationale for the villain's actions, and believe it or not, that particular element is even more dark and twisted than in Park's original version.
In 1993, Joe Doucett (Brolin) is an alcoholic, asshole ad exec and deadbeat dad who's late with child support payments and his ex-wife is running out of patience. After losing a lucrative deal when he drunkenly hits on the client's wife, Joe wanders around town in a stupor until he's abducted and held prisoner in a dingy hotel room. There are no windows and he's fed twice a day and given a bottle of vodka. He sees a news report that his ex-wife has been murdered and his DNA is all over the crime scene. Days, weeks, years pass. Every night, gas is released in the room and he passes out. He watches TV (the inaugurations of Clinton and Bush and the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina indicate how much time is passing), befriends a family of mice that's ultimately served to him for dinner, uses the time to quit drinking, clear his head, and exercise obsessively. He writes letters to his daughter Mia--who's been adopted by a new family and, as he learns from a TV show about his wife's murder and his own disappearance, grows up to be a cellist of some repute--vowing to prove his innocence and be a better father when he gets out. He writes an endless list of names of people he's wronged. He watches the inauguration of Barack Obama. After 20 years in this one room with no human contact, he's set free with a smartphone and wallet filled with money as he tries to piece together what happened and who is responsible. He meets Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), a recovering addict who works as a nurse at a free clinic, and after reading his letters to Mia, decides to help him in his quest for answers.
If you've seen Park's OLDBOY, then you know where the primary plot is headed. And yes, Lee stages his own version of the hallway/hammer fight (which was previously ripped off by the forgettable Jude Law sci-fi dud REPO MEN) that goes on longer and is more elaborate but doesn't work as well. Also not working as well is Lee's reliance on what looks like the finest CGI splatter technology that 1997 has to offer (one shotgun blast to the head is just embarrassing). While Choi's performance in Park's film is hard to top, Brolin's level of commitment is undeniably impressive. He both gained and lost weight for the role, then bulked up the muscle (in some scenes, he looks a lot like Brad Davis in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS). While Joe adapts to 2013 life rather quickly (this may have played out more believably in Lee's original cut), Brolin is very good with his halting walk and confusing looks, almost looking like an animal at times. There's even some chance for humor in some of his dialogue, as he incredulously asks Marie "I need to look at the Yellow Pages...where are all the pay phones?" Olsen is charming as the kind-hearted Marie, a damaged soul who sees a strangely kindred spirit in this helpless man who's lost two decades of his life. Where the film's biggest problems arise are with its villains. Samuel L. Jackson has a minor supporting role as the guy overseeing Joe's imprisonment, but he's just an employee. The real antagonist is billionaire Adrian Pryce, played by Sharlto Copley in a performance that can be charitably described as "odd." In the original film, Yu Ji-tae played the villainous Lee Woo-jin as ruthless and mocking. With perfectly-sculpted facial hair and eyebrows, and long, manicured fingernails, Copley plays Pryce as a preening, prissy hybrid of Vincent Price, Dr. Evil, and Paul Lynde. Lee Woo-jin is cold and calculating. Adrian Pryce is an effeminate, over-the-top Bond villain. It doesn't work at all, and while Copley's only doing what he's been directed and scripted to do, his performance is an unmitigated disaster. If I thought Lee watched any Eurotrash flicks at all, I'd swear he had Copley pattern his performance on some of cult actor John Steiner's more colorful turns in gems like SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS.
Lee and Protosevich ditch the original film's hypnotism element, which proves to be another big mistake. By abandoning the hypnotism angle, they create some plausibility issues that Park managed to skate away from--for Pryce's plan to work, a lot of coincidences have to fall perfectly into place. And in compiling his list of those he's harmed, it never occurs to Joe or his childhood buddy Chucky (Michael Imperioli) to think of Pryce? The guy's a billionaire, so it's not like he lives an anonymous life. And Pryce can just walk right into Chucky's bar and Chucky doesn't recognize this billionaire with whom he went to school? And what did Chucky do with his private school education that he's now running a shitty bar? And how does Pryce have a camera set up in the backroom of Chucky's shitty bar? See? Too many things fall perfectly into place. At least in Park's version, you could say "Well, they were hypnotized and programmed to react a certain way when they heard this or saw that." But in Lee's version--at least in its released state, that is-- it's just a string of ludicrously easy trips to Plot Convenience Playhouse.
Brolin's performance makes OLDBOY worth watching, but Lee's film still pales in comparison to Park's original. Given the post-production tinkering and FilmDistrict's eventual dumping of it anyway, it has to be disheartening for the actor to have obviously invested a large amount of mental and physical exertion into his work only to have it go largely unnoticed if not outright dismissed. Choi is an impossible act to follow as the protagonist of OLDBOY, but Brolin does his damnedest to match him and almost makes it. It's too bad the same can't be said for the rest of the film. Unlike some remakes, OLDBOY doesn't insult its source, but it doesn't add much to it, either. Fans of the original will probably find it an interesting curio if nothing else.
With technical advisors from NASA and Lockheed Martin and stock footage of Neil deGrasse Tyson to establish its bona fides as a "thinking person's sci-fi film," EUROPA REPORT offers a bit more to chew on than most commercial space operas...for a while, at least. It's also one of the rare found footage films that sticks to the conceit and doesn't start cheating when it gets backed into a corner. It relies on hard science and expects the viewer to keep up, probably why it wasn't given a wide release but has already developed a small cult following. It only falters a bit near the end when it seems to make concessions by showing what it feels it has an obligation to show. What's supposed to be a big reveal feels a bit underwhelming, but it's a small issue with a mostly thoughtful, first-rate sci-fi film. The Europa One is a privately-funded exploration to find evidence of life on Europa, one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, where scientists believe water exists under the surface. Europa One loses contact with Earth for an extended period of time over a year into the mission, and the film consists of "recently declassified footage" being made available so that the fragmented story of their journey can finally be pieced together.
Director Sebastian Cordero (CRONICAS) and writer Philip Gelatt do some jumping back and forth with the footage that's a bit confusing for a while until things start falling into place. After that, they do an excellent job of keeping the various cameras and varying viewpoints coherent. There isn't much in the way of character development except for engineer James (DISTRICT 9's Sharlto Copley) feeling homesick and missing his wife and kids. Everyone else seems to put the mission first, right down to their ability to carry on even after mishaps result in a death or two. These two tragedies are expertly handled by Cordero but it's hard to ignore that both happen because the people involved weren't following orders, regardless of how heartbreaking the first one is and how well-played it is by the actor involved. The international cast also includes Daniel Wu as the mission commander, Anamaria Marinca as the second-in-command, Christian Camargo and Karolina Wydra as science officers, and Michael Nyqvist (star of the original GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) as the chief engineer. Embeth Davidtz, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., and the unlikely Dan Fogler play the scientists on Earth overseeing the mission. With minimal special effects and a focus on dialogue rather than action and explosions, EUROPA REPORT probably won't fly with the sci-fi blockbuster crowd, but even with its minor flaws, it's an interesting little gem that should appeal to fans of films like Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE and Duncan Jones' MOON. (PG-13, 90 mins)
With the pace dragging the way it does, Leonardi and Mills also find plenty of time to crib from JU-ON and RINGU with Mary's herky-jerky CGI possession histrionics, plus M. Night Shyamalan's THE VILLAGE, Wes Craven's DEADLY BLESSING and even Lucio Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. The Stull of the film is based on Stull, KS, a tiny town just outside of Topeka that's reputed, according to urban legend, to be a gateway to Hell. But NOTHING LEFT TO FEAR never explores that nor does it really find its own voice, plodding along until its lame twist when there's nothing left to rip off. Tired, forgettable, and unrelentingly dull, NOTHING LEFT TO FEAR marks an inauspicious producing debut for former Guns N' Roses guitarist and aspiring movie mogul Slash, who also co-wrote the score, taking none of his signature sound and instead infusing it with the same level of bland facelessness as the film it accompanies. (R, 100 mins)
Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, William Fichtner, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, Wagner Moura, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Emma Tremblay, Faran Tahir. (R, 109 mins)
ELYSIUM opens in a 2154 Los Angeles that makes the 2019 L.A. of BLADE RUNNER look like the good old days. Sometime in the early 22nd century, Earth became such an overpopulated, crime-and-disease-infested shithole that the world's wealthiest people (read: the one-percenters) headed to the space station paradise of Elysium, which hovers above the planet. The privileged of Elysium live in a safe world where there's no crime and things like cancer are easily detected and eradicated upon signs of the first trace by in-home MedPods. Elysium is off limits to the people of Earth, essentially populated by one massive underclass who live in shantytowns and bombed-out buildings. Any attempts by refugees to enter Elysium's atmosphere--usually to get to a MedPod to cure a terminal illness--result in immediate apprehension and return to Earth. That is, until one day when intolerant Elysium defense secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) decides to make an example of three ships trying to get to Elysium by having them blown up with drone missiles activated by her psychotic Los Angeles-based Elysium sleeper agent Kruger (DISTRICT 9's Sharlto Copley), which gets her on the shit list of Elysium's President Patel (Faran Tahir). Meanwhile, in L.A., ex-con Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) is trying to live a normal life, working on the assembly line at the Elysium-owned Armadyne factory, which manufactures robot security drones to keep order on Earth. Due to a bullying manager and workplace negligence, Max is exposed to a massive dose of radiation while on the job, and a robot medical tech gives him some painkillers to stay somewhat functional and informs him "You will be dead in five days. Thank you for your service."
Knowing he can be cured if he can get to Elysium, Max teams up with old crime cohort Julio (Diego Luna) to pull off a job for powerful, fast-talking smuggler/hacker Spider (Wagner Moura). A gravely-ill Max is fitted with a surgically implanted neurological exoskeleton, wired into his spine and head, which gives him strength and allows him to receive data directly into his brain. Spider wants Max to retrieve data from Armadyne boss Carlyle (William Fichtner), who possesses a "reboot" code for Elysium that Delacourt wants to use to stage a coup against the sympathetic Patel and run Elysium her own way. Spider has his reasons for wanting the reboot code, and Max just wants to get to Elysium to cure the cancer rapidly growing inside of him, and both have to deal with an enraged Kruger, who just wants everyone dead.
As you can see, you've got your unsympathetic, selfish one-percenters, the war-mongering defense secretary, critiques of workplace abuse and lack of access to quality health care, and a revolt of the disenfranchised. Blomkamp's politics are pretty obvious (if, for instance, you think Delacourt is the hero, you might not be Blomkamp's target audience), but he never lets things get too polemical once the action kicks in. DISTRICT 9 immediately elevated Blomkamp to the big leagues, and he delivers with impressive set pieces, masterful handling of visual effects, and managing a much bigger cast of established actors compared to his previous effort, and it's nice that he brought his pal Copley along with him. Damon is in fine BOURNE mode once things get serious, and Copley and ELITE SQUAD's Moura (a huge star in his native Brazil) really have some fun chewing the scenery. Only Foster seems uneasy, due mostly to her performance being re-looped in post-production. It's her voice, but apparently test audiences didn't like the accent she was using. Despite her above-the-title billing, Foster doesn't have a lot of screen time, and it's glaringly obvious in some of her close-ups that she's revoicing herself because there's several bits where the words are out of sync with her lip movements. Maybe there was a script change that necessitated changing some of her dialogue, but it's very uncommon for dubbing in a big-budget American movie to be that sloppy (this was also the case with Svetlana Khodchenkova's performance as Viper in THE WOLVERINE), especially when it involves someone of Foster's stature. She certainly looks the part, but she just doesn't seem comfortable in the role. Maybe it's that she probably didn't get to work with most of the major stars except for one brief scene with Copley and Alice Braga--Damon and Foster have no scenes together, and their characters never meet. It's ultimately a minor quibble about an otherwise fine film--with its release date delayed multiple times by Sony after being shot two years ago--from someone who's all but guaranteed to become a major genre leader in years to come.
