ANGEL HAS FALLEN (US - 2019) Directed by Ric Roman Waugh. Written by Robert Mark Kamen, Matt Cook and Ric Roman Waugh. Cast: Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Danny Huston, Nick Nolte, Jada Pinkett Smith, Piper Perabo, Lance Reddick, Tim Blake Nelson, Joseph Millson, Ori Pfeffer, Rocci-Boy Williams, Michael Landes. (R, 121 mins) The third entry in a franchise so ridiculous that the only thing preventing Donald Trump from offering Gerard Butler a cabinet position is a presumed inability to correctly pronounce "Gerard," ANGEL HAS FALLEN dials down the raging "America! Fuck yeah!" boner of its two predecessors--2013's OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN and 2016's LONDON HAS FALLEN--which proved to be surprisingly popular mash-ups of the Cannon jingoism of the '80s with the dogshit CGI of the '10s. This time, Mike Banning (Butler), the head of Secret Service detail for OLYMPUS House Speaker, LONDON vice president and now President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), is in the running for a cushy D.C. desk job as a reward for his years of risking life and limb but is battling PTSD, chronic migraines, back pain, and a secret painkiller addiction that he's kept from his wife Leah (Piper Perabo, replacing Radha Mitchell). While on a routine detail on a presidential fishing trip in Pennsylvania, Trumbull's entire Secret Service team is wiped out by a drone attack, with Banning and the president barely escaping with their lives, the latter winding up in ICU in a coma. Banning awakens to find himself handcuffed to his hospital bed and informed by Secret Service director Gentry (Lance Reddick) and FBI Special Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith) that he's under arrest for the attempted assassination of the president and the premeditated murder of nearly two dozen Secret Service agents. His fingerprints and DNA were found in a van used to house the bat-like drones, and they've uncovered a secret bank account in his name with $10 million traced back to Russia.
With Trumbull incapacitated, Vice President Kirby (Tim Blake Nelson) is sworn in as acting president and, seeking revenge against the apparent Russian plot to assassinate Trumbull, immediately announces a return to the use of paramilitary contractors, namely Salient, a company owned by Wade Jennings (Danny Huston), Banning's old Army buddy who was really hoping that Banning could talk the anti-contractor Trumbull into offering him a lucrative deal. Meanwhile, Banning can't convince anyone he's been set up, and when Salient mercenaries take down his prisoner transport, he manages to escape and make his way to the isolated, rural West Virginia makeshift compound of his estranged father Clay (Nick Nolte), a grizzled, paranoid, anti-government mountain man who was so haunted by his time in Vietnam that he left his wife and young Mike and went off the grid. Realizing he's been set up by his old friend--and perhaps someone more powerful pulling the strings--and is now the most wanted fugitive in America, Banning reluctantly bonds with and gets some help from Clay before heading back to the hospital in Pennsylvania in an attempt to save the president's life and prove his innocence once and for all.
The last time Morgan Freeman played the US president was in 1998's asteroid-headed-toward-Earth opus DEEP IMPACT, and that was probably a more plausible film than ANGEL HAS FALLEN. The villainy of Wade is obvious from the outset, since he's played by Danny Huston, but the mid-film reveal of the real string-puller will only be a surprise if you've never seen a movie before. But relatively speaking, ANGEL is a bit less cartoonish than the two films that came before it, and is refreshingly devoid of Banning's smart-ass quips clanging to the ground, such as OLYMPUS' "Let's play a few rounds of Fuck Off...you're it!" and LONDON's "Why don't you boys pack up your shit and go back to Fuckheadistan?" That doesn't mean it's a gritty political thriller, but director and former stuntman Ric Roman Waugh (FELON, SNITCH, SHOT CALLER) has a knack for solid action and suspense sequences, including a striking late-film shootout over multiple stories overlooking a hospital lobby. There's also some--but not much--attempt at timely, nudging commentary with Banning being accused of Russian collusion and one key character being a dead ringer for (at press time and subject to change at any moment) Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, which should guarantee that actor's casting in the inevitable HBO miniseries chronicling the Trump presidency.
NOLTE!
Look, like the entire HAS FALLEN trilogy, ANGEL is dumb. But unlike OLYMPUS, it doesn't show a series of establishing second-unit shots of the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, and the White House accompanied by the caption "Washington, D.C." (it was shot at London's Pinewood Studios and in Bulgaria, with the interstate highways of Pennsylvania and West Virginia looking strangely Eastern European). And it is amazing how Banning has managed to have the kind of career he's had, being the human shield for two presidents, with no one ever finding out about his crazy, off-the-grid, government-hating dad, or how every new-looking truck he manages to steal while on the run is somehow lacking in GPS or anyone reporting it stolen, or how Salient goons manage to get into Banning's house despite cops, Feds, and the media camped right out front. It is what it is, and the digital effects by the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX are as amateurish as ever, but Butler does his thing, Freeman's dignified presidential gravitas comes natural and is curiously comforting, and Huston is as smug and sneering as ever, which is the reason you hire Danny Huston. But never mind all that. What's really key in making ANGEL HAS FALLEN the most entertaining of the trilogy so far is Nolte. The 78-year-old living legend doesn't turn up until the midway point, but from his first appearance, he steals the film from everyone and instantly reminds you that he's a goddamn national treasure. Notoriously eccentric enough that his casting as a grizzled old mountain man seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Nolte gives this everything he's got, reveling in some hilarious one-liners ("You're welcome!") and back-and-forth bantering with Butler ("What is this, your manifesto?" Banning asks when he sees a stack of papers on Clay's table). Clay delivers an emotional, gut-wrenching monologue about how he felt chewed up and spit out by his country after his time in Vietnam that's so good that I wouldn't be surprised if Nolte wrote it himself. ANGEL HAS FALLEN is pretty standard as far as these formulaic things go, but it comes alive and steps up its game whenever Nolte is onscreen. When it's all over, you might ask yourself if every movie could benefit from having a madman-bearded Nick Nolte muttering, grumbling, and being a conspiratorial, cantankerous, and shotgun-toting old curmudgeon. The outtakes on the eventual Blu-ray have to be gold.
THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (US - 2018) Written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen. Cast: Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Zoe Kazan, Harry Melling, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jonjo O'Neill, Chelcie Ross, Saul Rubinek, Tom Waits, Clancy Brown, Jefferson Mays, Stephen Root, Willie Watson, David Krumholtz, Ralph Ineson, Jesse Luken, Sam Dillon. (R, 133 mins) There's a loose, shaggy dog vibe to THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, a six-part western anthology from the Coen Bros. Erroneously reported to be a planned Netflix series retooled as a Netflix Original film, it still feels like a feature-length pilot for a potential series that could be hosted by Buster Scruggs, the protagonist of the first segment, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs." Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) is a singing cowboy of the Roy Rogers/Gene Autry sort, but with a ruthless streak that's incongruous with his affable, folksy demeanor. He rides into the town of Frenchman's Gulch and crosses paths with the fearsome Çurly Joe (Clancy Brown), which starts the first in a series of showdowns. It's an amusing piece that's short enough to not overstay its welcome, and is a fine display of the kind of absurdist humor that defines the Coen Bros' funniest work. That same tone is apparent in "Near Algodones," with James Franco as an outlaw who messes with the wrong teller (Stephen Root) in a bank in the middle-of-nowhere desert town of Tucumcari, sending his day on a quick journey from bad to worse.
The Coens have been sitting on some of these ideas for years, and indeed, first two stories are briskly-paced and funny, almost like short sketch concepts that wouldn't have had a place in any of their other projects. BALLAD takes a much darker and almost macabre, SANTA SANGRE-like turn with "Meal Ticket," with Liam Neeson as a grubby, hard-drinking impresario traveling from town to town with Harrison (Harry Melling), an armless, legless "artist" who recites pieces of Biblical verses, poetry, and the Gettysburg Address into a sort of still-life performance art that plays to decreasing attendance as they venture to more distant areas until the impresario finds a new act and has to make a decision about what to do with his old one. "All Gold Canyon," based on a Jack London story, stars Tom Waits as a grizzled old prospector who finds a gold deposit (which he names "Mr. Pocket"). It's mostly a one-man show to a certain point, but while Waits is entertaining, this is probably the least interesting of the stories.
The fifth segment, "The Gal Who Got Rattled," based on a story by Stewart Edward White, is the longest and most substantive, with a devastating gut-punch of a wrap-up. On the arduous Oregon Trail, Alice (Zoe Kazan) is left to fend for herself when her older brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) dies unexpectedly. Trail boss Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines) and his right-hand man Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) offer their condolences and bury Gilbert but they're a day away before Alice realizes their money was on his person and is now buried with him. Potential Indian attacks make it too dangerous to go back, but as they continue on the trail, a bond forms between Alice, who has no money and no one else in the world, and Billy, who wants to settle down with a family and not grow old and alone like Mr. Walker. "Gal" meanders and takes its time and doesn't seem to be headed anywhere in particular, but it sneaks up on you, and it gets a lot from a trio of outstanding performances by Kazan, Heck, and especially Hines, a guy who's been around in bit parts (he's credited as "Emergency Room Aid" in ROCKY II) and minor supporting roles for decades but has never before gotten a chance to shine like he does here.
The final segment, "The Mortal Remains," could almost pass for an old-west version of DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS, with five stagecoach passengers barely tolerating one another: Irishman Clarence (Brendan Gleeson), Englishman Thigpen (Jonjo O'Neill), Frenchman Rene (Saul Rubinek), society matron Mrs. Betjeman (Tyne Daly), and a scurvy, unkempt, and extremely talkative trapper (Chelcie Ross). Disagreements abound and barbs are traded, and Mrs. Betjeman is worked into a state of apoplexy, but as its pointed out, the driver never stops. Like "Gal," "The Mortal Remains" engages in some clever misdirection by seemingly going nowhere, especially in the hilariously rambling monologue delivered by the trapper, which gives veteran character actor Ross more dialogue than he's ever had in a movie. But then Clarence calms down Mrs. Betjeman by singing an Irish ballad and the story becomes something else entirely. Its final destination may not come as a surprise, especially once O'Neill starts acting like he's auditioning for a Vincent Price biopic, but in spite of that, it becomes oddly moving.
THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS feels too cobbled together and scattershot to be top-tier Coen Bros., and despite their claims that this was its intended format all along, it really does play like the two-hour premiere of a TV series. But even in a weaker segment like "All Gold Canyon," there's joys to be had. Shot digitally by Bruno Delbonnel, the film has some stunning shots of desert and canyon vistas along with some--perhaps intentionally--dubious CGI visuals. THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS has too many positives to say it's only for Coen completists, but when their bio is written, this will be one of the peculiar outliers in their filmography. It's by no means the place for newbies stumbling upon this on Netflix and impulsively deciding to begin their Coen studies, but having said that, it's a good sampler appetizer for their unique style and the themes that have run through their work over the last four decades.
One of the most audacious and inventive films of the year, COLOSSAL is so offbeat and bizarre that its eccentricities are enough to carry it through its infrequent sections that don't work, like its uneven tone and its heavy-handed metaphors conveying its underlying themes. In a riff on her RACHEL GETTING MARRIED character, Anne Hathaway is Gloria, a hard-partying alcoholic who's been let go from a job at an online publication and has tested the patience of her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens) one too many times. He dumps her and kicks her out of his apartment, and she heads back home to the small midwestern town where she grew up. She gets reacquainted with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who runs his late father's bar and clearly still nurses a lifelong crush on her. Gloria doesn't change her ways, working at Oscar's bar and staying up all hours with Oscar and his buddies Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and Joel (Austin Stowell). After sleeping off a bender on a bench at a local playground, she gets online and is horrified by breaking news and terrifying footage of a giant, Godzilla-like reptilian creature appearing in Seoul. When she sees the creature mimicking some of her own gestures, Gloria realizes that if she stands in a certain spot on the playground at 8:05 am, the creature manifests itself in Seoul as her sort of kaiju avatar. If she dances, it dances half a world away. If she scratches her head, it scratches its head. She reveals the secret to Oscar and the guys and when Oscar steps in the spot, a giant robot appears next to the creature in Seoul. When they start playfully horsing around and Gloria falls, several hundred people are killed when the creature falls and crushes them in Seoul. When Gloria sleeps with Joel, Oscar quickly goes from hurt to angry, using their newfound powers over the events in Seoul to guilt her about the deaths she's caused and keep her under his control, especially when Tim arrives in town to try and patch things up now that Gloria has made serious attempts to get sober.
Written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo (TIMECRIMES,
EXTRATERRESTRIAL, OPEN WINDOWS), COLOSSAL is like a Toho kaiju if conceived by Charlie Kaufman. It initially approaches the concept as an inspired black comedy, but things gradually turn serious as Oscar grows more angry, more possessive, and even physically abusive toward Gloria, taking out his rage over the perceived betrayal of sleeping with Joel and threatening to flatten Seoul and kill all of its citizens if she doesn't submit to his will. As a metaphor for pulling one out of destructive and self-destructive situation, it's rather large-scale, but the entire film has such a WTF? sense of originality about it that it helps get over some of the less graceful passages. There's an attempt at an explanation to it all--a flashback to a childhood incident in the park, a map that shows a straight latitudinal line drawn from their town and Seoul--but it's still a little foggy and nonsensical. But in the end, these issues matters less than they would have in less imaginative hands. Even with its flaws, COLOSSAL is a film that earns its cult cred the old-fashioned way, and the performances of Hathaway and especially Sudeikis, who's a revelation here, are quite impressive. A strange one, for sure, and unlike anything you've seen before. (R, 109 mins)
BOYKA: UNDISPUTED (US - 2017)
Only in the world of DTV does a gritty 2002 Wesley Snipes/Ving Rhames boxing drama directed by Walter Hill and featuring a hilariously profane rant from Peter Falk morph over the course of 15 years into a Bulgaria-shot Nu Image franchise about a Russian MMA fighter who wasn't even in the original movie. The fourth entry in the UNDISPUTED series, and the first since 2010's UNDISPUTED III: REDEMPTION, BOYKA: UNDISPUTED continues the spiritual quest for redemption for hardened Russian convict Yuri Boyka (Scott Adkins). Boyka was introduced as the villain in 2007's UNDISPUTED II: LAST MAN STANDING but turned into a hero for the third film thanks to Adkins' colorful performance and powerhouse screen presence stealing the film from II star Michael Jai White. After emerging victorious in III's BLOODSPORT-style prison fighting tournament and escaping over the border into Georgia, Boyka has been living in Kiev, Ukraine, scraping by in underground MMA fights and using his extra cash to donate to a local church. He's now deeply religious and wants to prove himself a legitimate fighter and put his murderous past behind him for good. Consumed by guilt after killing opponent Viktor Gregov (Emilien De Falco) in the ring, Boyka gets a fake passport and crosses the border into Russia to give his fight earnings to Gregov's widow Alma (Teodora Duhovnikova) and ask for her forgiveness. Gregov owed money to Russian mob boss Zourab (Alon Aboutboul), who essentially enslaves Alma in order to pay back her late husband's debt. After several run-ins with Zourab's goons, Boyka reluctantly agrees to three fights in order to buy Alma's freedom. Of course, Zourab foolishly attempts to screw over Boyka, threatening to turn him in and have him sent back to maximum security Chornya Cholmi if he doesn't agree to a fourth fight with superhuman killing machine Koshmar the Nightmare (Martyn Ford).
UNDISPUTEDs II and III were directed by DTV action auteur Isaac Florentine, who gets a producer credit here but passes the torch to Syfy vet Todor Chapkanov (MIAMI MAGMA, CRYSTAL SKULLS), whose execution of the fight sequences does a mostly solid job of replicating Florentine's master touch, but the big showdown between Boyka and Koshmar is over way too quickly and isn't put together as well as it should be. Of his three turns as Boyka, this gives Adkins the most space to act, but his arc is a bit predictable and cliched and it's pretty dumb how the film has Boyka fighting for Zourab under his own name in public when he's a wanted man in Russia. Still, in an era when VOD/DTV action is defined by guys like Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, and now Jean-Claude Van Damme coasting through doing as little as possible, the 41-year-old Adkins has genuine star quality, busts his ass time and again and has more than paid his dues over the years. He really should be headlining bigger movies by now (I seem to say this every time I review a new Scott Adkins movie), and while BOYKA: UNDISPUTED is a notch below the Florentine sequels (does anyone even remember the Hill movie anymore?), it's still way above average for this sort of thing. (R, 90 mins)
UNFORGETTABLE (US - 2017)
A throwback to the '90s "(Blank)-from-Hell" thriller, UNFORGETTABLE marks the directing debut of veteran producer Denise Di Novi. Di Novi's career kicked off when she shepherded the 1989 cult classic HEATHERS and served as Tim Burton's producing partner during his 1990s glory years on the likes EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, BATMAN RETURNS, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ED WOOD, and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. She went on to have a long association with Warner Bros., where she produced several Nicholas Sparks adaptations and both installments of THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS. In other words, Di Novi is a pretty major player who's generated a ton of money in Hollywood, and the acknowledgment of that appears to be the only reason something as uninspired and thoroughly generic as UNFORGETTABLE managed to get a nationwide theatrical release from a major studio in 2017. Headlined by the best star teaming that 2008 had to offer, UNFORGETTABLE centers on online publishing editor Julia Banks (Rosario Dawson) moving to SoCal to live with her fiance David (Geoff Stults), who left his job at Merrill Lynch to open a craft brewery. Everything is going smoothly until the inevitable clash with David's uptight and unstable ex-wife Tessa (Katherine Heigl, in between her annual heavily-hyped new TV series that's inevitably cancelled after three episodes), who's convinced she and David are getting back together and is doing everything she can to turn their daughter Lily (Isabella Rice) against her future stepmother. Tessa starts by criticizing Julia's cooking, then escalates to stealing her phone and digging into her past, uncovering a restraining order against an abusive ex (Simon Kassianides) and luring him by pretending to be Julia online. Then she breaks into the house while Julia's taking a bath, stealing lingerie and sending it to the ex, giving him Julia's new address and inviting him to show up after sexting with him as Julia (Heigl's masturbation scene is hilariously intercut with Julia and David going down on each other in the men's room at a restaurant after Tessa tells Julia how much he used to like public sex, meaning that both women are basically obsessing over the other while they're getting off). Of course, things veer into mayhem and murder as the ex-wife-from-Hell stops at nothing to reclaim what she believes is hers.
Basically a Lifetime movie with a few F-bombs, some splatter, and a great view of Rosario Dawson's body double's butt (Di Novi doesn't even competently match the shots of Dawson and the double, whose presence would be painfully obvious even if she wasn't listed in the closing cast credits as "Rosario Dawson's body double"), UNFORGETTABLE is lethargically paced and never really cuts loose. Even the big catfight between Julia and Tessa seems to be over as soon as it starts. It hits every trope and cliche and the genre, it does nothing with Whitney Cummings as Julia's wisecracking best friend who helps her uncover dirt on Tessa (UNFORGETTABLE is so going-through-the-motions that it doesn't even bother killing off Cummings' pointless character), and it really only comes alive for a couple of scenes where Cheryl Ladd turns up as Tessa's chilly, perfectionist mother, who's even more of an ice-cold bitch who only speaks when she's got something negative to say to Tessa ("You didn't bake scones?" she scoffs at Tessa's store-bought pastries; "You're dragging your knife...and your silver needs polished!"), making it clear why Tessa is the way she is, almost generating a little sympathy for her in the process. But UNFORGETTABLE can't be bothered with multi-faceted character complexities. Dawson seems to know this is junk, the bland-to-the-point-of-transparency Stults looks like a third-string Peter Krause who's just biding his time until his perpetual stubble gets a little grayer and he can take over as the Trivago pitchman, and in the right hands, Heigl could've had some self-deprecating fun with the parallels between her character and her image as a difficult diva with a stick up her ass, but UNFORGETTABLE just coasts by doing the bare minimum. With the help of overqualified cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (THE BLACK STALLION, THE RIGHT STUFF, THE NATURAL, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST), who likely wouldn't be involved with something this junky if not for Di Novi, UNFORGETTABLE at least looks polished and professional on the surface. It's marginally better than the INCONCEIVABLE, another recent "(Blank)-from-Hell" '90s throwback thriller, but all these glossy retro potboilers end up demonstrating is that these things were a lot more enjoyable 25 years ago. (R, 100 mins)
EVERY THING WILL BE FINE (Germany/Canada/France/Sweden/Norway - 2015)
One of the major voices of the 1970s New German Cinema who reached his pinnacle in the next decade with the classics PARIS, TEXAS (1984) and WINGS OF DESIRE (1987), Wim Wenders has enjoyed his biggest success in the latter half of his career with documentaries like THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999), PINA (2011), and his contributions to the PBS series THE BLUES. His first narrative feature since 2008's surreal PALERMO SHOOTING (one of Dennis Hopper's last films, and still unreleased in the US), EVERY THING WILL BE FINE plays more like an homage to SWEET HEREAFTER-era Atom Egoyan, from the crux of its story being a tragedy uniting several people, to its cold, wintry Canadian setting. Judging from the end result, Wenders can't do vintage Egoyan any better than Egoyan can these days. Making superfluous use of 3-D, which is limited mostly to some falling snowflakes for the six people who managed to see this in a theater, EVERY THING WILL BE FINE offers the most somnambulant cast this side of Werner Herzog's HEART OF GLASS, headed by James Franco as Tomas Eldan, a struggling Quebecois novelist whose marriage to Sara (Rachel McAdams, with a distracting and stilted Swedish--I think--accent) is in a rough patch. It gets worse when Tomas is involved in a freak accident on a snowy rural road where he thinks he narrowly averted hitting a young boy in a sled but realizes too late that there were two boys on the sled and the other died, pinned under his SUV. This scene, where Tomas thinks he and the surviving kid had a close call but slowly realizes, when the boys' shell-shocked single mother Kate (Charlotte Gainsbourg) asks where the other boy is, that he's accidentally killed the unseen second child, is by far the best in the film and it's all downhill from there.
Of course, even though it was a tragic accident, Tomas is plagued by guilt and half-heartedly attempts suicide, demonstrated in a trite montage where Wenders shows him crashing in a cheap motel, empty booze and pill bottles and torn up papers strewn about the room. The film repeatedly jumps through a few years at a time. Tomas and Sara have split up and he feels compelled to help the devoutly-religious Kate in some way. She's forgiven him and doesn't blame him and though they seem drawn to one another through their mutual grieving, Wenders and screenwriter Bjorn Olaf Johannessen don't indulge anything further, since that would mean something happening. The film takes place over an 11-year period, and every time Wenders seems to be building to something, he calls a time-out and jumps ahead four years. It's especially frustrating in the last section, when Tomas gets a letter from troubled, 16-year-old Christopher (Robert Naylor), who was five when he survived the accident that killed his little brother. Tomas has become a bestselling author, channeling his pain into prose and becoming rich and famous, and while Christopher is a fan of his work, he feels his brother's death has somehow worked in Tomas' favor while his mother has never really recovered. While Tomas and his second wife Ann (Marie-Josee Croze) are away on a brief book tour, someone--obviously Christopher--breaks into their house and urinates all over their bed. Just as EVERY THING WILL BE FINE seems poised to turn into a thriller of some kind, the film abruptly ends in the most enraging way possible, with Franco--who's about as believable a Quebecois novelist named Tomas as you'd expect--turning to the camera and smiling. Did Wenders just feel "Hey, it's been a while, I should probably make a drama again"? There's some beautiful cinematography by the venerable Benoit Debie, but EVERY THING WILL BE FINE is a film that keeps stopping itself dead in its tracks. Scenes crescendo into nothing and collapse, actors appear and disappear (Peter Stomare has one scene as Tomas' publisher; frequent Wenders actor Patrick Bauchau plays Tomas' dementia-addled father). It seems to be actively avoiding being about anything. The actors seem to be partially sedated, even more so as the film goes on. When a remarried Sara has a chance meeting with Tomas at a Patrick Watson concert (yes, time-killing concert footage) and slaps him, it seems less out of anger than to simply revive Franco. A comatose Wenders misfire like 2001's THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL moved at the pace of plate tectonics but at least had an insane performance by a neck-braced Mel Gibson to occasionally liven things up--there's nothing of the sort in EVERY THING WILL BE FINE. Life is filled with disappointments, regrets, and unresolved issues--which can make for compelling cinema but not when it's done the way Wenders does it here. It seems like a sincere enough film, but what's the point? (Unrated, 119 mins)
THE CONFIRMATION (UK/US/Canada - 2016)
The kind of slight, low-key character piece that goes over like gangbusters at film festivals but plays to crickets and tumbleweed in general release, THE CONFIRMATION is the directing debut of Oscar-nominated NEBRASKA screenwriter Bob Nelson. As in that film, we have a story set in a blue collar town where most of the residents have seen better days. Anthony (MIDNIGHT SPECIAL's Jaeden Lieberher) has it pretty good other than his ambivalence about being prodded into confession and confirmation by his church-going mom Bonnie (Maria Bello) and stepdad Kyle (Matthew Modine). Bonnie and Kyle are going away to a church-sponsored couples retreat for the weekend, leaving Anthony in the care of his alcoholic, sporadically-employed carpenter dad Walt (Clive Owen). Slumped-shouldered Walt has been dealt some shitty hands and is beaten down by life, but he's trying to make things work. He's on his latest attempt to quit drinking and isn't sure what to do with Anthony over the weekend, but that soon becomes a moot point as the pair encounter one obstacle after another. Walt gets a lucrative job lined up for Monday morning, but his expensive and sentimental (they were his dad's) specialty tools get stolen from his truck, his truck breaks down, a trip to drop a huge jar of change into a Coinstar machine at the grocery store to get some quick cash is all for naught when Anthony accidentally hits the "Donate" button, and they get locked out of the house when Walt gets an eviction notice. Borrowing Bonnie's SUV--Anthony neglects to tell Walt the brakes need replaced--the pair spend the weekend tracking down Walt's tools BICYCLE THIEF-style, getting help from a variety of odd folks both helpful and dubious, ranging from Walt's fatherly friend Otto (Robert Forster), drunken gun nut Vaughn (Tim Blake Nelson), and eccentric drywaller Drake (Patton Oswalt) whose claim to have the inside info on Walt's tools is negated by the fact that everyone knows he's back on meth.
THE CONFIRMATION is basically a standard redemption saga, with Walt and Anthony bonding and everyone realizing Walt's not such a loser after all. Nelson gives the story time to breathe and find its way, even with the trite symbolism of carpenter Walt "building" a relationship with his son. Walt tries to keep his temper in check as the deck is constantly stacked against him and and does everything he can to not cave to temptation and disappoint his son (after a bad withdrawal episode the first night, the first thing out of Walt's mouth in the morning is "Are you OK? Did I hurt you?"). Though he's hardly a textbook role model, Walt tries to dispense life lessons to the boy, and of course, he learns just as much from the wise-beyond-his-years Anthony. There's some legitimate surprises in the development of some of the characters: Anthony forms a friendship with Vaughn's sensitive son Allen (Spencer Drever); when Walt finds out who stole his tools, he feels sympathy rather than anger; and after constantly hearing from Walt what a useless tool he is, we're surprised to find that Kyle is actually a genuinely nice and sincere guy once we meet him. There's no big scenes or huge plot reveals in THE CONFIRMATION. It's a quiet, working-class indie film where the actors probably wore there own clothes and packed their own lunches for Nelson's heartfelt labor of love. It's not much to get excited about, but Owen and Lieberher make a good team, and fans of the actors will definitely want to check it out. (PG-13, 101 mins)
