THE 15:17 TO PARIS (US - 2018) Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Dorothy Blyskal. Cast: Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone, Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer, Tony Hale, Thomas Lennon, P.J. Byrne, Jaleel White, Ray Corasani, William Jennings, Bryce Gheisar, Paul-Mikel Williams, Vernon Dobtcheff, Steve Coulter, Mark Moogalian, Isabelle Moogalian, Chris Norman, Jeanne Goursaud, Alisa Allapach. (PG-13, 94 mins) THE 15:17 TO PARIS, the last and easily the least of Clint Eastwood's unofficial American Heroes trilogy (following AMERICAN SNIPER and SULLY), tries to get by on the stunt casting of the real heroes involved in thwarting a terrorist attack aboard a Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015. US Air Force staff sergeant Spencer Stone, US Army National Guard soldier Alek Skarlatos, and their non-enlisted childhood buddy Anthony Sadler were aboard the train to their final stop on a European backpacking trip when Ayoub El-Khazzani (played here by Ray Corasani) opened fire, leading to Stone, then Skarlatos and Sadler leaping to action to subdue him and tend to passenger Mark Moogalian (also playing himself), who was shot in the back and the neck trying to stop El-Khazzani before he made it to the car with the three Americans. It's a riveting story of heroism, adrenaline, and making split-second decisions, but does it warrant a 90-minute movie? Eastwood ran into this situation with 2016's SULLY, which took a five-minute incident and padded it out to feature-length and even had to manufacture its own drama in the process by inventing a vengeful head of an investigatory panel who did everything short of twirl a non-existent mustache to show his seething contempt for Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and his obsessive desire to nail the heroic pilot's balls to the wall. That never happened, even by Sully's admission. The closest thing to a villain in the Sully Sullenberger story is a flock of birds in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Stone managed to overpower El-Khazzani fairly quickly thanks to terrorist's gun jamming. This takes up about a minute of screen time. To fill the remaining 90-odd minutes, Eastwood spends the bulk of the movie on Stone's and Sadler's selfie-filled trip to Italy before meeting up with Skarlatos in Germany and then going to Amsterdam. This allows the three friends to re-enact parts of a trip they took three years ago and makes THE 15:17 TO PARIS a de facto travelogue for much of its running time. Prior to that, the film goes into their childhood in Sacramento, with Spencer and Alek being regularly bulled and struggling with authority issues, which their Christian school condescendingly blames on them being raised by single moms (Judy Greer plays Spencer's mom, Jenna Fischer plays Alek's). The Euro travelogue stuff may be like watching boring, digitally-shot home movies (I wouldn't be surprised if Eastwood farmed the whole midsection of this film out to the second unit), but the opening section is embarrassingly heavy-handed and atrociously-acted, not just by the child actors but by Greer and Fischer, both experienced professionals who look completely defeated by the terrible dialogue in Dorothy Blyskal's script, which reads like a rough draft at best. When the moms are informed by a snotty teacher that Spencer and Alek might have ADD and should be medicated, it's hard to tell what's worse: the teacher saying "Statistics show that if you don't medicate them now, they'll only self-medicate later!," Greer responding "My God is bigger than your statistics!" or Fischer angrily reacting to the principal's (Thomas Lennon) ludicrous suggestion that "perhaps Alek should live with his father" with an outraged "The absurdity of it all!" followed immediately by a shot of her dutifully packing Alek and his belongings into his dad's minivan just like the principal told her to do. The stunt casting isn't limited to the three stars: almost every school authority figure--Lennon, P.J. Byrne as an asshole teacher, Tony Hale as a snide gym instructor, and Jaleel White as a kindly history teacher ("Those boys!" he chuckles to himself as they leave class)--is played by someone known for their comedic skills. It's nice to see Urkel getting a paycheck, but the sight of him and Buster Bluth in bit parts as teachers is even more distracting than the obvious discomfort of the non-actors in front the camera. At least they have an excuse for their stilted line deliveries and deer-in-the-headlights expressions, but when people like Fischer, Greer, Hale, and Lennon come off like amateurs, things are not going as planned.
To be fair, the attack aboard the train is very well-done and this is where Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler really come alive. They lived it, they know exactly how it went down, and Eastwood wisely let them do their thing. But that's a few minutes of an otherwise misbegotten misfire. Eastwood's worked with non-professional actors before on GRAN TORINO, and the results were still occasionally awkward but the entire film didn't rest on the shoulders of Bee Vang and Ahney Her. Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler are true heroes, but they're not actors, and prior to the thwarted attack on the train, they aren't even remotely convincing as buddies even though they've known each other since childhood. This is hardly their fault. Eastwood is a laid-back director, but he's notoriously impatient even with professional actors, and it's well-known that he gets annoyed if he has to do more than two takes. This is how he always comes in under budget and ahead of schedule. I'm sure he extended some leeway to the trio of stars, but a lot of this film looks like first or second takes, and the semi-improv travel bits don't even look like they're the work of Eastwood. THE 15:17 TO PARIS keeps coming back to Spencer's feeling that he's destined for something of great purpose (which is more than you can say for THE 15:17 TO PARIS), and it's a premonition reiterated by Alek's mother. But the way it's presented here, it's just a hackneyed plot device clumsily foreshadowing their heroism. It's hard telling what Eastwood wanted to accomplish here. He could've made a documentary short subject if he found the story that interesting. But at feature-length, he's scrambling for things to pad the running time but can't even be bothered to show the three guys reuniting after years apart: Spencer and Anthony are in Italy about to head to Germany to meet with Alek, and in the very next shot, they're dancing in a club packed with wall-to-wall people, and Anthony's buying Alek a drink. Wait...they're in Germany? And they already reunited with Alek? Wouldn't that be worth showing instead of Anthony taking a pic with his selfie stick for the 37th time?
He works at the speed of Woody Allen, but Eastwood hasn't made a memorable film in ten years (be honest--when's the last time you thought of INVICTUS, HEREAFTER, or J. EDGAR?). He's been on this hagiographical course since JERSEY BOYS, and whether it's getting facts right or even something simple like establishing where characters are, he just doesn't seem concerned. Mark Moogalian, an American who long ago relocated to France and is a professor at the Sorbonne, was one of the first to confront El-Khazzani, getting shot and almost bleeding out on the train, but he's not even an afterthought here, not even worthy of the end-of-film "Where are they now?" captions that the three Americans get. Is it because he doesn't fit the profile of the "America! Fuck Yeah!" narrative of Eastwood's American Heroes trilogy? British businessman Chris Norman was also on the train, helped disarm El-Khazzani, and plays himself in a few fleeting shots, but we never even get his name.There's no way UNFORGIVEN-era Eastwood would've made a film this shruggingly indifferent. It's insensitive and incorrect to chalk this up to his mental faculties (though talking to an empty chair in support of Mitt Romney a few years ago wasn't a good look) or a declining ability to handle the workload. He's almost 88 but I don't believe that's the case. I do, however, believe his being almost 88 is a reason he simply doesn't give a shit like he used to. His films are getting sloppier and he's more concerned with getting them done than getting them right (remember that baby in AMERICAN SNIPER?). Maybe he's earned that privilege after seven decades in the business, and maybe he continues working because it keeps him going and maybe he feels he can keep time at bay for a little while longer if he stays busy. But if THE 15:17 TO PARIS is any indication, he'd need to put forth more effort to even reach "coasting." It's because Eastwood is such an iconic legend of cinema that watching him half-ass it in his emeritus years is so distressing.
Kevin Smith's 2014 man-surgically-transformed-into-walrus horror film TUSK was the result of Smith talking about a prank classified ad on his podcast and his listeners tweeting "#WalrusYes" if they wanted to see a movie about it. The TUSK spinoff YOGA HOSERS (the second of Smith's planned "True North" trilogy), released on just 140 screens, has an even more flimsy foundation, a horror comedy built around two minor characters: the Colleens, eye-rolling, can't even BFFs who work at the Canadian maple syrup convenience store chain Eh-2-Zed. Smith conceived YOGA HOSERS as a movie for his daughter Harley Quinn Smith (as Colleen McKenzie) and her friend Lily-Rose Depp (as Colleen Collette), and flat-out told the crowd attending its Sundance 2016 premiere that he wasn't making movies for audiences anymore. Mission accomplished. Possibly the worst horror comedy since 1987's BLOOD DINER, YOGA HOSERS is an unwatchable Kevin Smith home movie that manages to go 88 minutes without a single humorous moment, with the once-relevant and respected writer-director having no clue how teenage girls talk and pretty much relying on punchlines about Canadian accents that wouldn't have made it past the first read-through of the STRANGE BREW script 33 years ago. Did he think just having the Colleens repeatedly say "Soo-ree boot that!" would suffice? He haplessly tries to turn things like "yoga hoser" and "This is so basic" into the new "snoochie boochies," and by the time Jason Mewes shows up as a cop (!), it's pretty clear that Smith has turned into an embarrassing dad trying too hard to be cool around his daughter and her friends. Even Colleen McKenzie shouting Dante-from-CLERKS' oft-invoked "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" only serves as a depressing reminder of what Smith used to be. Other things Smith found funny enough to include in YOGA HOSERS: every character getting a hash-tagged "InstaCam" intro accompanied by '80s video game music; Justin Long as a yoga instructor named "Yogi Bayer," who says things like "Yoga Fett, soo-ree not soo-ree!"; everyone talking about hockey and snacking on "Pucky Charms"; the Colleens singing Styx's "Babe" and making Colleen Collette's dad (Tony Hale) cry like a baby as his girlfriend (Natasha Lyonne) refers to her cleavage as a "bouncy-house"; SNL's Sasheer Zamata as their no-nonsense principal Principal Invincible; Stan Lee as a 9-1-1 operator who answers "9-1-1, eh!"; a villain who speaks in Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Adam West impressions; and Lily-Rose's dad Johnny Depp, under a ton of makeup, looking like a syphilitic Kurt Vonnegut and with a bizarre French-Swedish hybrid accent, reprising his not-even-remotely beloved Guy LaPointe private eye character from TUSK.
What happened to Kevin Smith? It takes a good half hour for some semblance of a plot to form, and it seems at times like it's trying to go for a YA version of Don Coscarelli's JOHN DIES AT THE END sort-of thing, minus the ambition, creativity, and comedy. The Colleens, after getting some info from LaPointe, are targeted by Satanists working with the reanimated Andronicus Arcane (Ralph Garman), a cryogenically frozen Canadian Nazi stirred awake by the sounds of GlamThrax, the Colleens' band with 35-year-old drummer Ichabod (Adam Brody), a character named as such for the sole purpose of calling him "Dickabod" immediately after his introduction. Arcane is a protege of evil Adrian Arcand (Haley Joel Osment in flashbacks), the leader of the Canadian Nazi party in WWII whose "La Solution Finale" involved putting Canadian Jews on ships in Hudson Bay and deliberately sinking them. Integral to Arcane's nonsensical scheme are the Bratzis, 12-inch-tall PUPPET MASTER-looking Nazis made of bratwurst and with concentrated sauerkraut for blood. The Bratzis attack by burrowing up the asses of their victims and out the mouth, when they exclaim things like "Wunderbar!" and "Das Boot!" The Bratzis are played via prosthetics and CGI trickery by Kevin Smith himself, and I'm done here. (PG-13, 88 mins)
ELIMINATORS
(US/UK - 2016)
Arriving not long after the entertaining sequel-but-actually-remake HARD TARGET 2, ELIMINATORS--not a remake of the 1986 Empire Pictures cult favorite--is the latest Scott Adkins actioner, casting him as Martin Parker, an American widower living in London with his young daughter Carly (Lily Ann Harland-Stubbs). Martin leads a quiet life and works a boring job as a parking garage security guard, but his mysterious past is out in the open after a home invasion leads to him killing the intruders and being placed under arrest with his face all over TV. This catches the attention of Charles Cooper (James Cosmo), a powerful arms dealer who knows Martin's true identity: he's really Thomas McKenzie, an FBI agent who infiltrated Cooper's operation and was eventually placed in witness protection and shipped off to London. Cooper heads to London and hires Bishop (WWE star Wade Barrett), the most dangerous hit man in Europe, to find Martin/McKenzie and take him out. A Universal/WWE production shot in the UK and with a plot that makes it a sort-of B-action version of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, ELIMINATORS looks a lot more polished and big-screen-ready than most of Adkins' work for Millennium/NuImage, though director James Nunn (who previously worked with Adkins on the dismal GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS: UNDERGROUND) doesn't quite have the skills that an Isaac Florentine would've brought to the proceedings. After an engaging opening act, ELIMINATORS bogs down into one predictable plot development and contrivance after another, and for being Europe's most lethal hired assassin, Bishop sure seems to screw things up a lot and prove not very adept at getting the job done. It's pretty dumb and offers nothing new, but it's entertaining enough on a slow night as far as by-the-numbers Redbox and Netflix-ready action movies go. Adkins brings his A-game to this and once again shows he's ready for bigger things, and while he's been getting supporting roles in high-profile projects like DOCTOR STRANGE, it's really time for Hollywood to realize that its next big action star has been busting his ass in B-movies for at least a decade now. (R, 94 mins)
SIREN (US - 2016)
A feature-length expansion/spinoff of the "Amateur Night" segment of the 2012 horror anthology V/H/S, SIREN isn't always successful but proves to be more engaging than its overrated source film and its two sequels. "Amateur Night" dealt with three dudebros whose plan to get a hooker and shoot an amateur porn video in their hotel room backfires when the woman turns out to be a demonic, monstrous succubus. SIREN thankfully jettisons V/H/S's found-footage angle and has four guys on a wild bachelor party weekend for Jonah (JOHN DIES AT THE END's Chase Williamson), which leads them to a private strip club/sex dungeon in the middle-of-nowhere at the mansion of wealthy Mr. Nyx (Justin Welborn). Nyx is a collector of things supernatural, with many seductive non-human freaks imprisoned as sex workers and staying in their human form for his adventurous customers with disposable income. Of course, among his girls are "Amateur Night"'s nympho demon Lily (Hannah Fierman reprises her role). While Jonah's douchebag brother Mac (Michael Aaron Milligan) and his more laid-back buddies Rand (Hayes Mercure) and Elliott (Randy McDowell) party and fall victim to drinks laced with hallucinogenic leeches, Lily takes a shine to Jonah, who decides to be a hero and break her out of what he assumes is some kind of sexual slavery/human trafficking operation. A grateful Lily repays the favor by declaring Jonah hers with a chirpy "I like you" even as she shapeshifts, sprouts wings and lets loose a long tail that she uses for some unpleasant ass-play on the groom-to-be in a memorably twisted sex scene. Even at a brief 83 minutes, SIREN still doesn't have quite enough to justify its expansion to its own movie, but it gets a lot from Fierman going all in with an admirably fearless performance. Director/co-writer Gregg Bishop finds his voice late in the game as SIREN becomes increasingly demented and starts to take on a vintage Full Moon quality, suddenly bearing a strong resemblance to the kind of quietly unsettling horror film someone like Stuart Gordon would've made in the 1990s, like CASTLE FREAK. Not a start-to-finish winner, but SIREN gets better as it goes on, and ends up being a not-bad little horror sleeper. (Unrated, 83 mins)
Over her legendary career, Meryl Streep has demonstrated that she's capable of pretty much everything, so while it may seem like a stretch to imagine her as an aging rocker, it doesn't take long to accept her in the role. Streep is Ricki Rendazzo, who's more or less a D-list Bonnie Raitt in the grand scheme of things: her classic rock cover band Ricki and the Flash have a loyal following as the house band at a Tarzana bar that draws the same crowd every night of the week, but after one unsuccessful album over 20 years ago, she never came close to hitting the big time. Ricki's pursuit of fame and fortune came at a price: in the late '80s, she walked away from her life as Indianapolis housewife Linda Brummel, and though she's made sporadic appearances in the lives of ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and their children, her job as a mother has been fulfilled by Pete's second wife Maureen (Audra McDonald). Now, Ricki has been summoned back to Indianapolis after her daughter Julie (Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer) attempts suicide when her husband leaves her for another woman. Had RICKI AND THE FLASH kept that dysfunctional family dynamic as its focus, it would've been a lot better than the film that screenwriter Diablo Cody (JUNO) and the great director Jonathan Demme (STOP MAKING SENSE, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) ended up making. For a while, it goes along similar lines as the Cody-scripted YOUNG ADULT, even resorting to some well-done scenes of squirming discomfort, as when Ricki and Pete confront Julie's estranged, dickhead husband at a bar. I also like the approach Cody takes with Kline's Pete, who's happier with Maureen, has made peace with the past and, surprisingly by Hollywood standards, has moved on with his life and honestly harbors no resentment toward his ex-wife. Even more against convention, he may still have feelings for her but stops himself from acting on them. And Ricki's presence--and her tentative reconnection with her daughter and her sons, one sympathetic and forgiving (Sebastian Stan), the other bitter and resentful (Nick Westrate)--does manage to pull Julie off the ledge and get her taking steps toward rebuilding her life.
But then Demme abandons that, almost completely. Pete, Julie, and the rest disappear for a long stretch as Ricki returns to Tarzana and gets serious with her guitarist/boyfriend Greg (Rick Springfield) before heading back to Indianapolis for her son's wedding. It's here where Demme sees fit to turn the film into a less caustic version of his own RACHEL GETTING MARRIED before letting it careen into full-on feelgood bullshit with a cast sing-along as Ricki and the Flash boot the wedding band off stage as the uptight onlookers sneer their disapproval but are eventually won over, get up and start dancing. Yes, a blunt and honest film about fractured family dynamics and decades-old wounds turns into a movie that ends with everyone getting over hating Ricki (and her far-right politics, which are introduced and promptly forgotten) and joining her onstage for a big, triumphant jam session at her son's wedding reception. Streep, Springfield (who's quite good here) and the band playing the Flash (featuring guys like keyboardist Bernie Worrell and drummer Joe Vitale) are really playing the songs, and Demme seems more interested in letting Streep show off her rhythm guitar skills and her singing voice in full-length Tom Petty, U2, and Bruce Springsteen covers. RICKI AND THE FLASH just utterly collapses in its second half to the point where it's not out of the question to wonder if Ricki is imagining the whole thing. The first half is honest, smart, and occasionally scathingly funny (Julie to Ricki: "Do you have a gig or do you always dress like a hooker from NIGHT COURT?"), but it just skids to a halt in the second half with one endless song after another and that godawful finale. And why is the bartender from Tarzana dancing at the wedding in Indianapolis? The band making the trip is silly enough, but the fucking Ricki superfan bartender? Was Demme shooting the movie and realized Cody only had 50 minutes of script, so he decided to wing it the rest of the way? (PG-13, 101 mins) AMERICAN ULTRA (US/Switzerland - 2015)
A one-joke comedy that plays like a mash-up of screenwriter Max Landis' DVD collection, AMERICAN ULTRA initially seems like one of those movies that's trying too hard to be an instant cult classic until you realize it isn't trying to be much of anything at all. A splattery, stoner take on THE BOURNE IDENTITY, AMERICAN ULTRA takes place in the fictional West Virginia town of Liman, where pot-addled slacker Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) works at a carryout and spends his free time getting baked with his live-in girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). But it turns out Mike is a CIA sleeper agent in the top-secret Ultra program and only becomes aware of his abilities as an unstoppable killing machine when he's activated by Agent Lasseter (Connie Britton), who's trying to save him from the machinations of Yates (Topher Grace), an ass-kissing agency douchebag hellbent on eliminating all traces of the Ultra program. As CIA agents and covert assassins converge on Liman, with the media being fed a story about the town being quarantined, Mike and Phoebe try to stay alive, with Mike instinctively--though he's too perpetually high to figure out how--using anything at his disposal to kill the assets sent to make him vanish.
I'm not sure anyone was demanding a BOURNE movie filtered through HALF-BAKED, but the results are neither as goofy as you'd expect nor as funny as Landis (son of John and writer of the overrated CHRONICLE) thinks. The weed angle is eventually abandoned altogether as ULTRA becomes a lot like a conventional thriller with only the cartoonish, PUNISHER; WAR ZONE-level splatter and would-be CRANK-style gonzo attitude to indicate that it's supposed to be played for laughs. Eisenberg and Stewart fared much better together in ADVENTURELAND, and director Nima Nourizadeh (the found-footage teen comedy PROJECT X) has a great supporting cast at his disposal but doesn't do much with them: Grace, not the most plausible casting for the head of a secret division of the CIA, can play this kind of unctuous turd in his sleep, Bill Pullman has a few scenes as a CIA big shot, John Leguizamo pops up as a strip club owner who's also Mike's dealer, Tony Hale does his umpteenth variation on Buster Bluth as a needy, nervous Lasseter underling, and only Walton Goggins makes a memorable impression as a constantly-laughing assassin named (wait for it) Laugher, whose comedic demeanor masks a depressed cognizance of his autonomy and individuality being stripped from him by his CIA brainwashers. That's as close as AMERICAN ULTRA comes to making a statement about anything. In the end, it's a lot of noise, a lot of CGI (even the exhaled pot smoke is CGI'd!), and not much funny. THE BOURNE LEBOWSKI, it ain't. (R, 96 mins)
