If you thought Rob Zombie shit the bed with 31, then fuckin' hold his motherfuckin' beer because the unwatchable 3 FROM HELL is the kind of career-killer that's so bad that even some of his "gooble gobble, one of us!" fanboy faithful began turning on him after the film's three-night Fathom Events run a month before its Blu-ray/DVD release. The third chapter in what's--fingers crossed--a trilogy that began with 2003's HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and 2005's THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, 3 FROM HELL seems like a desperation move after his pointless remake of HALLOWEEN and its disastrous sequel, his ambitious but unsuccessful THE LORDS OF SALEM--which at least tried to do something different before falling apart in the end--and the dismal 31 were all starting to make him look like a hick-horror one-trick pony whose entire filmmaking career was an endless tribute to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2. A brutally intense and absolutely uncompromising throwback to '70s grindhouse at its grittiest, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS remains Zombie's masterpiece, and he's never come close to duplicating it since. Even with 14 years to think about it, he doesn't even seem to have the slightest semblance of a game plan with 3 FROM HELL, which ends up looking like a flimsy excuse for Zombie, his wife Sheri Moon Zombie, and some friends from the convention circuit to hang out under the guise of belatedly continuing the saga of the homicidal, serial-killing Firefly clan, despite the fact that they went out in a Skynyrd-abetted blaze of glory on a desert highway at the end of the 1978-set REJECTS. Turns out they survived the hail of police bullets, spent a year in intensive care, and then ended up in prison. Cut to a decade later: leader Captain Spaulding (the late Sid Haig in his last film) is executed, and Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley) orchestrates an escape with his previously unseen half-brother Winslow Foxworth Coltrane, aka "Foxy," aka "The Midnight Wolfman" (31's insufferable Richard Brake) after killing now-jailed bounty hunter Rondo (Danny Trejo). Meanwhile, at another prison, Baby (Mrs. Zombie) is denied parole (no shit) but gets bounced by the corrupt warden (Jeff Daniel Phillips), whose wife is being held hostage by DESPERATE HOURS superfans Otis and Foxy.
The titular trio head to Mexico and hole up in a sleazy south-of-the-border shithole where they run afoul of Rondo's crime boss son Aquarius (Emilio Rivera), who leads a Mexican wrestler-masked kill squad known as the Black Satans, leading to a long shootout set to Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida," as if MANHUNTER doesn't already exist. There's no way to sugarcoat this: 3 FROM HELL is absolutely abysmal. There can't possibly be a script. It's obvious that Zombie's making this up as he goes along and just letting the actors wing it, and improv doesn't appear to be anyone's strong suit. Moseley recycles the same schtick he's been doing since TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 but never finds the sense of terrifying menace that he brought to Otis in the previous film. Here, he just talks a lot of shit. Brake doesn't offer much other than a tired Bill Moseley impression, which leaves him more or less looking like the copy-of-a-copy that the Michael Keaton clones made in MULTIPLICITY, and a grating Sheri Moon Zombie doesn't even seem to be playing the same Baby as before. Remember the "Tutti Fuckin' Frutti" scene in THE DEVIL'S REJECTS? That's where she's at from start-to-finish here, with bonus meows, hisses, and vamping histrionics as Zombie does fuck-all to rein her in lest he be sleeping on the couch. You also get Dee Wallace humiliating herself as a sexually repressed prison guard, Clint Howard as a hacky clown-for-hire who pisses himself, Tom Papa and ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13's Austin Stoker as TV news anchors, Daniel Roebuck as a reporter, and Richard Edson as a scheming Mexican pimp.
Sid Haig (1939-2019)
The sole saving grace--aside from the use of three James Gang deep cuts from the neglected Tommy Bolin era and an admittedly amusing scene with Sheri Moon Zombie doing a bad-ass slo-mo walk to Suzi Quatro's "The Wild One"--is the brief appearance of Haig, who's out of the film by the seven-minute mark. Frail-looking and obviously gravely ill, the beloved cult icon, who died just a few days after the Fathom Events screenings in September, nevertheless brings his A-game in his one scene, but when he's gone, it's quickly downhill from there. Tedious, ploddingly-paced, and ridiculously overlong at nearly two hours, the embarrassingly self-indulgent 3 FROM HELL is Rob Zombie hitting rock bottom, and the only thing it accomplishes is providing the final evidence one needs to concretely conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that THE DEVIL'S REJECTS was a fluke. No matter how bad it gets, Zombie will always have a core of apologists who will stand by whatever he does, so best of luck to them going forward. I'm done. (R, 115 mins)
NIGHT HUNTER (UK/US - 2019)
Shelved for two years before being dumped on VOD, NIGHT HUNTER is a bumbling and often incoherent procedural thriller that's just as formulaic as its title indicates and would've been right at home in the late '90s. In cold, snowy northern Minnesota, a young woman is killed jumping from a highway overpass while fleeing an unknown killer. Meanwhile, Cooper (Ben Kingsley), is a former judge who lost his wife and daughter to a killer who's never been apprehended. He channels his rage into becoming a vigilante who goes around entrapping, extorting, and castrating internet predators with the help of teenage accomplice Lara (Eliana Jones), a ward to whom he was appointed guardian. When Lara, who has a GPS tracker in her earrings, is abducted, the cops not only uncover Cooper's operation but they're also led to her location, where a deaf and mentally-impaired man named Simon (Brendan Fletcher) has several women held captive in cells in the basement. Marshall (Henry Cavill), a hard-nosed, inexplicably British-accented detective who--you guessed it--plays by his own rules, and profiler Rachel Chase (Alexandra Daddario) can't seem to get anywhere with him, and the mayhem doesn't stop even with Simon in custody: an entire forensics team is wiped out by a rigged gas leak in Simon's basement, another cop's baby is stolen, one is killed by a car bomb, and Rachel gets a bomb threat with a crayon-scrawled note reading (what else?) "Tick tock," meaning that someone else is pulling the strings and that Simon can't possibly be the primary culprit.
Writer and debuting director David Raymond corrals a solid cast in what should be a serviceable thriller, but it's so clumsily-edited and haphazardly-assembled that it never really catches fire. No by-the-numbers thriller like NIGHT HUNTER should be this hard to follow, and it ultimately can't even live up to its absurd potential as the next HANGMAN. Of course, there's a ridiculous twist 2/3 of the way through that a cursory glance at someone's medical records would've uncovered, but throwing in the big reveal and subsequently moving the plot forward demands that the cops be total morons. Daddario's Rachel has to be the dumbest profiler in the serial killer genre, and Fletcher obnoxiously overacts with the kind of slobbering, eye-bulging, vein-popping gusto that he brought to Uwe Boll's RAMPAGE franchise, his high point being when he yells "Tick tock, tick tock, who's the silly boo-boo?" while pissing on the walls of his cell. Elsewhere, a constipated-looking Stanley Tucci appears to be getting paid by the scowl as Marshall's irate captain, and Nathan Fillion is completely squandered as a police computer tech in a frivolous supporting role that literally anyone could've played. The Cooper/Lara plot thread is an interesting one that might've made a more entertaining film on its own, but NIGHT HUNTER can't stop tripping over its own feet, leaving Kingsley offscreen for long stretches (a good indication that they probably only had him for a few days) while we get character depth in the form of Cavill's boring, brooding Marshall trying to bond with his teenage daughter (Emma Tremblay) after splitting with his wife (Minka Kelly). Nothing against Henry Cavill, who's a fine actor under better circumstances, but wouldn't you much rather see a gonzo thriller with a vigilante Ben Kingsley going extreme TO CATCH A PREDATOR on some pedophile creeps? (R, 99 mins)
SPIDER IN THE WEB (UK/Israel/Belgium/Netherlands/Portugal - 2019)
Speaking of Ben Kingsley, he's clearly in one of his frequent "Just pay me and I'll do it" phases, and the tireless 75-year-old Oscar-winner's performance as an aging, weary Mossad agent close to being put out to pasture--whether voluntarily or by more aggressive means--is the chief selling point of the relentlessly talky and glacially-paced espionage thriller SPIDER IN THE WEB. In the latest from Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (ZAYTOUN, THE SYRIAN BRIDE, SHELTER), Kingsley is Avner Adereth, a spy for the Israeli government who's currently undercover in Antwerp, posing as an antiques dealer named Simon Bell. He's spent two years gathering intel on a Belgian medical supply company that he suspects is secretly involved in chemical weapons sales to Syria. Complicating matters is that his boss Samuel (Itzik Cohen) is losing confidence in him, believing Adereth to be slipping, burned-out, and flat-out making shit up and pocketing big payments designated for a source that he hasn't been meeting nearly as much as he's claimed. As a result, the clock's ticking on Adereth to produce some legitimate results, and Samuel assigns ambitious young agent Daniel (Itay Tiran) to babysit him and make sure the info he's giving them and the leads he's chasing are legit. Of course, Daniel is the son of Adereth's late colleague from back in the day, which brings emotion into play as the two form a hesitant bond. All the while, Adereth finds himself falling for Angela (Monica Bellucci), an environmental activist and doctor who works for the Belgian company and is unaware of their side-involvement in funding terrorism. She's also upset when he shows her how her employer has been polluting the fresh water supply, thus convincing her to get him a secret file called--wait for it--"Spider in the Web," that explicitly details all of their Syrian shenanigans. Convoluted double-crosses ensue, with at least one character not being who they claim to be, and it's all a rather rote imitation of John Le Carre, with Adereth even waxing rhapsodic on the author at one point in case you don't pick up on the influence. The generic SPIDER IN THE WEB is really nothing special, but Kingsley's regal performance single-handedly gives it a boost above the mediocre, making it worth a look on a slow night for his fans who don't mind their night getting even slower. (Unrated, 114 mins)
THE SILENCE (Germany/US - 2019) Directed by John R. Leonetti. Written by Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke. Cast: Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka, Miranda Otto, John Corbett, Kate Trotter, Kyle Breitkopf, Dempsey Bryk, Billy MacLellan, Chris Whitby, Barbara Gordon, Sarah Abbott, Kate Corbett. (Unrated, 90 mins) THE SILENCE is based on a 2015 novel by British horror/fantasy author Tim Lebbon, but that still won't stop the comparisons to last year's hit A QUIET PLACE. Filmed in 2017 and originally set to be released by the financially-strapped Golden Road before they sold it to Netflix, THE SILENCE was in production around the same time as A QUIET PLACE, and it's also interesting to note that SILENCE star Stanley Tucci is married to the older sister of A QUIET PLACE star Emily Blunt, so they had to know they had a family competition going with oddly similar horror movies about creatures who hunt by sound, with the action centering on a family that learns to exist in silence and can communicate by sign language since one of the children is deaf. Lebbon's novel is adapted by the writing team of Carey and Shane Van Dyke, the grandsons of Dick Van Dyke and best known for scripting various Asylum "mockbusters" like TRANSMORPHERS, STREET RACER, and THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED. The director is certified hack John R. Leonetti, a veteran cinematographer whose filmmaking credits include such classics as MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 2, ANNABELLE, and WISH UPON.
With that pedigree, THE SILENCE lives down to its expectations despite an intriguing set-up. Researchers are exploring an uncharted cave system 1000 feet below the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania when they're attacked by a horde of prehistoric, bat-like creatures that have been living and evolving in those sealed-off caverns for millions of years. The creatures are named "Vesps" by the scientific community. They're blind and hunt by sound, which means the hustling and bustling major cities are the first to be attacked and wiped out, followed quickly by the suburban and rural communities. The Andrews family--dad Hugh (Tucci), mom Kelly (Miranda Otto), teenage daughter Ally (Kiernan Shipka), younger son Jude (Kyle Breitkopf), Kelly's mother Lynn (Kate Trotter), and the family dog, along with Hugh's best friend Glenn (John Corbett), decide to get out of suburban New Jersey and head to the country where it's quiet. They're in two vehicles--Glenn and Jude in one and everyone else in the other--and they have an inherent advantage when it comes to keeping quiet: three years earlier, Ally lost her hearing in a car accident that killed Hugh's parents, prompting the whole family and Glenn to learn sign language. It isn't long before survivalist-type Glenn's impromptu shortcut leads to disaster when his SUV rolls off the road avoiding some deer. Jude already switched vehicles during a stop, and Hugh is unable to get a pinned and injured Glenn out of the wreckage. With the Vesps approaching, Glenn decides to fire his gun to attract them, sacrificing himself while the family takes refuge in their minivan. Any chance the dog will start barking uncontrollably?
Trapped in the minivan might've been a good way to sustain the tension, but it isn't long before they take their chances and hoof it in total silence, happening on a farmhouse whose owner instantly runs outside, firing her gun and screaming "Get off my property!" which of course, instantly gets her attacked and devoured by a flock of Vesps. That's the kind of insultingly lazy writing that just shows utter contempt for the audience, with the filmmakers taking the easiest possible route to get the family in the safe confines of an isolated rural home. That's followed by an immediate burst of genius as Hugh turns on a loud wood chipper, causing a ton of blind Vesps to fly into it and get instantly shredded. Why doesn't he just leave the wood chipper running and kill them all? Because there'd be no movie and more importantly, no inane third act home invasion curve ball, where a creepy reverend (Billy MacLellan) and his flock show up at the house, all of them with their tongues cut out to ensure silence and the reverend demanding Hugh hand over Ally, holding a handwritten sign that says "The girl is fertile." I can't speak for Lebbon's novel, but the Vesps have been out of their cave for seriously like, two days by the film's timeline. 48 hours into a national emergency and this clearance bin Immortan Joe and his crazed cult have already severed their own tongues and are out there stalking families and trying to abduct fertile underage girls? The milk in their fridge hasn't even expired yet.
There are a couple of intriguing elements that aren't really explored, like just how quickly everyone turns on one another when the shit hits the fan (watch a bunch of New Yorkers trapped in the subway kick a woman and her crying baby off the train to get eaten by the Vesps), and the Vesps using the carcasses of their victims--human and animal--as incubators for their eggs. More of that ickiness would've given this some appropriately apocalyptic and generally unsettling cred. Or just give me a whole movie of Stanley Tucci shredding blind prehistoric dinosaur bats in a wood chipper and I--and no doubt The Tucci Gang--would be totally onboard with it. But this is seriously just cheap-looking, SyFy-level junk. The Tooch is one of our most reliable character actors (and an Oscar nominee for THE LOVELY BONES), and he's an accomplished screenwriter as well (BIG NIGHT). Surely, he read the script for THE SILENCE and could see that it was hot garbage. Did he need to make a down payment on a new house? A kid starting college the next fall? He classes it up as best he can, and THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER's Shipka (currently starring with Otto on Netflix's CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA) turns in an appealing and very credible performance, even taking the time to learn ASL in preparation, which is really going above and beyond for something this dumb.
By now, it's pointless to find any rhyme or reason when it comes to Nicolas Cage's career choices. These days, his only A-list gigs come from voice work in animated films like SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE, and every once in a while, he'll luck into a FROZEN GROUND, JOE, THE TRUST, or MOM AND DAD among his plethora of VOD clunkers. But 2018 was the year of MANDY, Panos Cosmatos' gonzo mindfuck of a midnight movie that got a lot of festival buzz and was an instant, legit cult classic right out of the gate. It immediately became an essential entry in the Cage canon and got him the most acclaim and attention he'd received in years. But any hopes that MANDY would herald a Cageassaince are dashed with BETWEEN WORLDS, a moronic and amateurish supernatural thriller that hit VOD at the tail end of last year. With enough strange ideas and Cage once again cast as a blue collar loner who finds himself caught up in all sorts of inexplicable mayhem, BETWEEN WORLDS could almost pass itself off as a distant cousin to MANDY, but it's filmed in such a basic, rudimentary fashion so devoid of style and a sense of professionalism that it actually looks, at best, like a student film that accidentally got a distribution deal. It seems the only trick that co-producer/writer/director Maria Pulera has in her arsenal--aside from somehow cajoling the great Angelo Badalamenti into composing the main theme, which I guess is there to give the film a Dipshit David Lynch vibe--is the repetitious and pointlessly wanky reliance on low-angle close-ups of everything from a coffee carafe to a bottle of beer to the hairy ass crack of an overweight convenience store clerk. That, and the ability to get real and long-established actors like Cage and Franka Potente (RUN LOLA RUN, THE BOURNE IDENTITY) to embarrass themselves in a project that's far beneath them.
In an opening filled with one of the most laboriously clumsy exposition dumps I've ever seen, Alabama trucker Joe Majors (Cage, wearing what looks like the tattered remains of his CON AIR mullet), still grieving the loss of his wife and young daughter in a recent house fire, is using the men's room at a gas station when he walks in on a burly guy strangling a woman. The woman is Julie (Potente), and Joe thinks he saved her life, but it's something else entirely: since a near-drowning experience as a child, she's had the ability to cross "between worlds," with a psychic ability to rescue those near death. She uses it sparingly, but needs it now because her grown daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell) is in a coma after a motorcycle accident that morning. In order to go between worlds, she has to be taken to the brink of death herself, with strangling being the most convenient way, and she paid the guy to choke her. Since he ruined the connection, Joe feels obligated to choke Julie himself in order for her to save a non-responsive Billie at the hospital, and it works. Before long, Joe and Julie are a thing but something isn't right with Billie. She's soon leering at Joe, tempting him in various states of undress when Julie isn't around, and giving him under-the-blanket handjobs on the couch while they watch TV and Julie's in the kitchen making dinner. Yep, you guessed it: when Julie went between worlds, Billie's soul was switched out with that of Joe's late wife, who's now inside Billie's body, ready for action, and not at all pleased that he's hooked up with Julie.
BETWEEN WORLDS doesn't even follow its own barely-there logic, and its primary justification is simply for Cage to channel his inner Talk Show Robin Williams, with Pulera apparently so grateful that he said yes that she does nothing to rein him in. In a performance that makes his work in the long-forgotten early '90s erotic potboiler ZANDALEE seem disciplined, Cage has several absurdly over-the-top sex scenes with both Potente and Mitchell, sometimes amusing himself while thrusting away by randomly quoting and pantomiming the crucifix masturbation scene in THE EXORCIST or reading aloud from a book of erotic poetry with a cover that reads "Memories by Nicolas Cage." He ad-libs endlessly (Potente: "Want a beer?" Cage: "Does the Tin Man have a sheet-metal cock?"), and totally loses it in the finale, which has him sobbing uncontrollably and cradling his dead daughter's Jack-in-the-Box while pouring gasoline on himself to the tune of The Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack." Mind you, as on-brand as this is for Nic Cage--who wouldn't wanna see the movie I just described?--none of it is ever as entertaining as it sounds. Similar to his disastrous performance in the unwatchable ARMY OF ONE, Cage's histrionics come off as exhausted and overly affected, because there's no movie here--it's just him goofing off for 90 minutes. Something more polished and professional might've made Cage's antics more palatable, but BETWEEN WORLDS is a film that displays all the production value of a high-end sex tape or hostage video, magnifying the fact that Cage has nothing to work with and really begging the question of what even attracted him and Potente to this thing in the first place. (R, 91 mins)
A PRIVATE WAR (US/UK/Germany - 2018)
One of the most overlooked films of the 2018 awards season, at least by the general moviegoing public, A PRIVATE WAR is a harrowing chronicle of Marie Colvin, an American expat and war correspondent who spent nearly 30 years covering the most dangerous areas of the world for the UK's Sunday Times. The film covers the post-9/11 era, where Colvin, portrayed here in a remarkable performance by Rosamund Pike, spent most of her time embedded in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, venturing into places and situations that most journalists would consider too dangerous (when asked if she's afraid, she replies "You're never gonna get to where you're going if you acknowledge fear...fear comes later"). She lost the sight in her left eye after catching shrapnel in a bomb blast in Sri Lanka in 2001--with an eye-patch subsequently providing her signature look--and after two miscarriages, two failed marriages to journalist/novelist David Irens (Greg Wise), and now too old to have children, she threw herself into her work and grew even more ambitious and addicted to the danger. After befriending photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) in Iraq, she convinces him to tag along with her and a translator, breaking the rules and moving ahead of US troops to corroborate rumors of a Saddam Hussein-ordered mass grave in Fallujah. Her actions both earn the respect and test the patience of everyone in her life, from Conley to her editor (Tom Hollander), her best friend (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a sympathetic potential love interest (Stanley Tucci). Colvin extensively covered the Syrian civil war, and her life came to an end in the city of Homs, where she, Conroy, and journalist Remi Ochlik (Jeremie Laheurte) would be trapped in a building receiving heavy artillery fire trying to evacuate residents from the area. Only a seriously-injured Conroy survived, with Colvin and Ochlik succumbing to injuries sustained from a bomb blast. Only hours before her death, Colvin was interviewed by Anderson Cooper in prime time on CNN.
SPOTLIGHT (US - 2015) Directed by Tom McCarthy. Written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy. Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian D'Arcy James, Billy Crudup, Len Cariou, Jamey Sheridan, Paul Guilfoyle, Gene Amoroso, Neal Huff, Elena Wohl. (R, 128 mins) "We've got two stories here: a story about degenerate clergy, and a story about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry. Which story do you want us to write? Because we're writing one of them."
As much a chronicle of the Boston Globe's breaking of a cover-up of systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic church as it is a document of a dying profession, SPOTLIGHT is a film that dives deep into the nitty gritty of newspaper reporting. What's refreshing is that it does so without the sense of heroism, martyrdom, and apologia that TRUTH, another recent journalism drama, rather shamelessly wallowed. In TRUTH, 60 MINUTES II producer Mary Mapes is crucified for rushed and sloppy work on a story about George W. Bush's days in the National Guard, but the film wants to make her a saint anyway, and an uncharacteristically grating Cate Blanchett's overwrought performance has her barreling through it doing everything short of wearing a "For Your Consideration" sandwich board to get awards attention. SPOTLIGHT goes in the opposite direction, immersing the audience in the daily grind of hardworking reporters. A lot of the film has them talking on phones, jotting down notes, and fumbling for a pen when theirs runs dry. They leave messages, check sources, meet interview subjects in coffee shops, sit outside offices waiting for an appointment, dig through files and old newspapers, and thumb through dog-eared reference books and directories chasing every tip, lead, and theory they get. They go where the story takes them as each new development opens up another Pandora's Box of paperwork and legal hurdles. A smart film that makes the boring minutiae of the job riveting, SPOTLIGHT may just be a notch below the great modern-era journalism films like Alan J. Pakula's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) or, to an extent, David Fincher's ZODIAC (2007), but it's easily the best film about investigative reporting since Billy Ray's SHATTERED GLASS (2003).
After a prologue set in 1976, where a molesting priest is quietly ushered out of a police station by Boston Archdiocese officials, the story moves to the summer of 2001 with Globe's hiring of new chief editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), a man known for his bottom-line concerns during stints in New York and Miami. Baron thinks there might be a story in an alarming number of allegations against that 1976 priest, which got a brief mention in the Metro section some time back, but was never pursued with any vigor by the paper. Wanting to re-establish the Globe as the local paper of record with a focus on Boston concerns, Baron directs the Spotlight team--a four-person crew of reporters who work on months-long investigative pieces--to chronicle the paper trail of accusations against the priest. Led by editor Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton), the Spotlight team--Mike Rezendes (a jumpy Mark Ruffalo), Sasha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian D'Arcy James)--go to work, butting heads with lawyers, victims, church officials, rival papers, and concerned city big shots among others, not to mention the whole effort being jeopardized when Baron makes them put the story on the backburner for six weeks after September 11, 2001, during which time the Spotlight team is temporarily split up and assigned to other 9/11-related beats. Boston is a strongly Catholic community, and there's a concern that such talk may not rest well with the devout churchgoers. But when old Archdiocese guides show that many of the molesting priests--they eventually uncover 87 of them in Boston alone--were classified as "on sick leave" during times that coincide with the accusations, the Spotlight team correctly hypothesizes that it's a status given to priest reassigned to other parishes or sent away after an abuse incident that's settled privately and promptly buried by Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), the head of the Boston Archdiocese who's known of the plethora of incidents that have been going on for decades, with the cover-up trail leading all the way to the Vatican.
Directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy (THE STATION AGENT), who somehow made this and the career-worst Adam Sandler movie THE COBBLER in the same year, SPOTLIGHT boasts one of the year's strongest ensembles, headed by a resurgent Keaton on the heels of his triumphant BIRDMAN comeback. Keaton's been down this road before in Ron Howard's underrated THE PAPER (1994), and he's perfectly cast as the driven, quick-witted (when told by a lawyer friend that he read an article about Baron being the Globe's first Jewish editor, Robby replies "Really? Must've been a slow news day") Spotlight leader. McAdams and James are fine, but don't really stand out like Keaton or, for better or worse, Ruffalo, whose mannered performance takes some getting used to but is said to be an accurate portrayal of Rezendes. The actors also get sterling support from Billy Crudup and Jamey Sheridan as tight-lipped, big-shot attorneys behind a series of abuse case settlements, John Slattery as the Globe's managing editor Ben Bradlee, Jr. (whose father was executive editor of The Washington Post when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story), and Stanley Tucci as victims' advocate Mitchell Garabedian, an eccentric, crusading lawyer who's been representing a number of abuse victims in their cases against the Archdiocese. SPOTLIGHT is as no-nonsense as its characters, a methodical and matter-of-fact grinder that tells its story as effectively as the Spotlight team pursued theirs. It doesn't make Baron, Robinson, and the writers into glory-seeking heroes--they're just people doing their job and doing it with commitment and tireless determination. TRUTH was about glory, but SPOTLIGHT is about the guts.
WILD CARD (US - 2015) Directed by Simon West. Written by William Goldman. Cast: Jason Statham, Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Anne Heche, Sofia Vergara, Jason Alexander, Max Casella, Francois Vincentelli, Chris Browning, Matthew Willig, Davenia McFadden. (R, 92 mins)
Jason Statham's peak days as a solo box-office draw appear to be hitting a valley with recent under-performers like KILLER ELITE (2011), SAFE (2012), PARKER (2013), and HOMEFRONT (2013). Even the third EXPENDABLES entry did significantly less business than its predecessors, and all of that has combined to damn WILD CARD to a limited release/VOD burial from Lionsgate, who've apparently lost faith in Statham's ability to open a movie. None of this means the 47-year-old action hero is done: he's still got his Liam Neeson action icon rebirth to look forward to in a decade or so, and in the immediate future, he's playing the villain in the upcoming FURIOUS 7, and teams up with Melissa McCarthy in the slapstick comedy SPY, due out this summer. WILD CARD is a remake of the forgotten 1987 Burt Reynolds box-office bomb HEAT, based on a novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman (BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, MARATHON MAN). If HEAT is remembered at all today, it's for being the movie where an irate Reynolds infamously punched director Dick Richards in the face after an on-set disagreement. Scripted by Goldman himself, HEAT was so plagued by production problems that Richards was actually the film's second director, a replacement for Robert Altman, who quit after one day of shooting. After the altercation with Reynolds, Richards quit and was then replaced by veteran journeyman Jerry Jameson (AIRPORT '77), who finished the movie without incident, with final credit going to a semi-pseudonymous "R.M. Richards."
HEAT was Reynolds' first film back from being sidelined for two years by a jaw injury sustained on the set of 1984's CITY HEAT, when he was shooting a fight scene and was hit in the face by a real chair instead of a breakaway prop chair. He had to have reconstructive jaw surgery and was on a liquid diet for months, leading to a drastic weight loss and rumors that he was dying of AIDS. Reynolds looked fit and healthy in HEAT, but by that point, audiences stopped caring. Just a few years earlier, he was the biggest movie star in the world, but by early 1987, HEAT was in and out of theaters in two weeks. The film itself is a noble failure, but it's better than its reputation, with a solid performance by Reynolds, and unlike most of his 1980s work, he's actually trying. HEAT was more a character study than an action thriller--probably why Altman was involved in the first place--and Reynolds took it seriously, but the few who saw it wanted an action movie.
Since so few people remember HEAT (and it's been slightly overshadowed by another, much more revered HEAT), it should be easy for audiences to take WILD CARD on its own terms. Goldman, now 83 and with his first screenplay credit in 12 years, essentially dusts off his HEAT script and adds a few modern touches, but it's largely the same film in terms of plot. However, its most unexpected element is that it only succeeds in making one appreciate HEAT. WILD CARD offers Statham in mostly serious mode (like the similarly dumped REDEMPTION) and while his acting chops are better than he's even given credit, he just looks bored here and can't enliven this bland, lifeless story. Statham is Nick Wild, a Las Vegas "security consultant" reduced to letting clients deck him to impress their girlfriends. He's trying to put together a $500K nest egg to pack up and move to Corsica, but even he knows he'll just be counting the days until he's back in Vegas. Like HEAT, WILD CARD gives Nick two stories that never really come together: his prostitute ex Holly (Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Andy Garcia's daughter) is brutally beaten and raped by sniveling brat mob scion Danny DeMarco (Milo Ventimiglia) and his two dudebro goons, prompting her to beg Nick to help her exact revenge; and Nick is also pestered by wealthy computer genius Cyrus Kinnick (Michael Angarano), a likable but spineless sort who wants lessons in standing up for himself and facing his fears.
And that's pretty much it. A number of familiar faces turn up in brief roles--Anne Heche as a waitress, Hope Davis as a blackjack dealer, Jason Alexander as Nick's lawyer/business partner Pynchus "Pinky" Zion (played by a scene-stealing Howard Hesseman in HEAT), Sofia Vergara as a woman impressed that her weakling beau handled Nick (she's gone before the opening credits), and Stanley Tucci as a flamboyant, god-like, mob-connected casino boss who tries to mediate the dispute between Nick and DeMarco while acting like a slightly toned-down version of Dean Stockwell's Ben in BLUE VELVET. Director Simon West (CON AIR, THE EXPENDABLES 2, and the Statham remake of THE MECHANIC) tries to keep things low-key, even attempting that sort of juxtaposed, jump-forward-then-backtracking with overlapping past/future dialogue editing style frequently (and much more successfully) used by Steven Soderbergh in films like THE LIMEY and OUT OF SIGHT, but coming from the School of Bruckheimer, he's utterly lacking in the nuance and the sense of fluidity required to make tricks like that work. Brian De Palma was signed on to direct this when it was announced but he quit the project during pre-production. One can only imagine how much differently WILD CARD might've turned out with the split-screens and the split-diopter shots and Statham really getting to show his range for one of cinema's all-time great filmmakers. The possibilities, even with De Palma not at the top of his game and in the self-parody phase of his career, are more exciting to ponder than anything that ended up in the finished product.
The worst part of WILD CARD is the distracting and clumsy insertion of elaborately-choreographed fight scenes overseen by veteran martial-arts coordinator Cory Yuen (director of THE TRANSPORTER). This is clearly intended to be a character-driven drama for Statham, but the occasional outbursts of quick-cut martial-arts mayhem as Nick breaks out the JOHN WICKstrionics are jarringly incongruous to the rest of the film and are obviously only there to prevent this from completely turning into the Statham equivalent of KILLING THEM SOFTLY, the kind of dialogue-heavy, misleadingly-advertised mood piece that would've sent die-hard action fans bolting for the exits. But WILD CARD's dramatic elements don't work either, the film ends with an almost anti-climactic shrug of surrender, and when it's all said and done, it's just a tonally confused DOA dud that can't reconcile giving its star a chance to stretch with the expectation that he be a one-man wrecking crew. It does nothing to correct the mistakes of HEAT--which were due more to its messy production than anything else--and instead just ends up making more of its own that are totally unique to this pointless remake of a film that absolutely no one was demanding. Statham's having a really off-day here, and while it's likely that the declining box office of his solo actioners in the last couple of years might've a hand in the stealth release of WILD CARD, there's also no way of getting around the fact that it's his worst film and that's the more likely reason why Lionsgate opted to sneak this into as few theaters as possible.
