VICE (US - 2018) Written and directed by Adam McKay. Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Jesse Plemons, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Fay Masterson, John Hillner, Paul Yoo, Joseph Beck, Tony Graham. (R, 132 mins) ANCHORMAN director and Will Ferrell BFF Adam McKay took the leap to "serious filmmaker" with 2015's THE BIG SHORT, an angry and irreverent autopsy of the housing market collapse. He takes the same approach and nets less consistent results with the Dick Cheney biopic VICE, which covers the life of George W. Bush's vice president from his days as a hard-drinking college dropout and all-around fuck-up in 1963, through the events of 9/11 to his heart transplant in 2012. Regardless of how one feels about Cheney and where you stand politically, the one thing everyone can agree on in these more-divisive-than-ever times is that Christian Bale completely disappears onscreen and all you see is Dick Cheney. Sporting Oscar-worthy makeup and an extra 45-50 lbs, the Oscar-winning actor, known for his startling transformations in past films like THE MACHINIST, THE FIGHTER, and AMERICAN HUSTLE, absolutely becomes Cheney. Bale carries VICE on his shoulders, and it's a good thing he does, because without the level of obsessive, Day-Lewisian dedication in his performance/metamorphosis, the film's shortcomings and inconsistencies would be a lot more glaring than they already are.
Counting Ferrell and Brad Pitt among its producers, VICE is entertaining, but McKay too often succumbs to Michael Moore agitprop with all the subtlety of a jackhammer or, perhaps, Ron Burgundy. Tonally, it's all over the place, with the grim seriousness of 9/11 juxtaposed with the kind of meta jokes that wouldn't have been out of place on something like MR. SHOW or FUNNY OR DIE (like a focus group stopping the movie to address its liberal bias). There's a ruthless, Lady Macbeth quality to Lynne Cheney, played here by Amy Adams, leading to Adams and Bale playing an entire scene in emphatic, scenery-chewing Shakespearean dialogue. McKay also takes the story into a hypothetical direction about 40 minutes in, just prior to Cheney accepting an offer to be Bush's VP where he, Lynne, and their extended family live happily ever after as historical footnotes, never to be heard from again as an inspiring score cue swells and the closing credits begin rolling before abruptly resetting and bringing the film back to reality. There's a scattershot, throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to VICE that's worked for McKay in the past (ANCHORMAN, THE OTHER GUYS) and has also completely backfired (ANCHORMAN 2). It splits the difference here because it is funny, but the comedy only spotlights the fact that VICE is never sure what it wants to be. Bale is diving into this and losing himself in the way he deftly captures everything about Cheney physically and psychologically, while Adams is stuck playing a one-dimensional Lynne Cheney who's defined almost exclusively by her shrewd opportunism and the Cheney image (when their daughter Mary, played by Alison Pill, comes out as gay, it's Dick who immediately embraces her and offers his support while Lynne stands there, already questioning how this affects Dick's political career). Others are doing convincing impressions that look like SNL on a good night, like Steve Carell's obnoxious and loathed-throughout-DC Donald Rumsfeld, Tyler Perry's Colin Powell, Eddie Marsan's Paul Wolfowitz, and Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush, seen here as an easygoing goofball who only seems to be in politics to earn his dad's respect.
There is a clever framing device involving an onscreen narrator (Jesse Plemons), and the story jumps back and forth through the years, chronicling Cheney's time as a protege of presidential adviser Rumsfeld in the pre-Watergate Nixon White House, and his eventual return as White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford (Bill Camp) in the 1975 "Halloween Massacre," a gig he gets after swooping in to scavenge for table scraps left by everyone tainted by the Watergate fiasco. He's also the Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush and the film glosses over his tenure as CEO of Halliburton before he's persuaded to be George W. Bush's running mate. Throughout VICE, Cheney is accurately depicted as a Machiavellian mover and shaker, fixated on finding loopholes and reinterpretations to skirt around the Constitution and the law to find ways to grant the executive branch previously untapped levels of power, secrecy, and unaccountability. He's always working behind the scenes, quietly plotting, and never drawing attention to himself, qualities that come into play when he manipulates the younger Bush into letting him take on a much more significant role in policy and day-to-day operations than VPs have historically played ("The president and I have an understanding," he says whenever someone asks him if he's overstepping his boundaries).
The film's second half focuses almost entirely on the post 9/11 era, with the the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, "enhanced interrogation," Cheney's vengeful outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and other decisions that resonate to this day (the infamous incident where Cheney shot a guy in the face is also shown, along with a reminder that the only apology that ever came from it was from the victim to Cheney), but therein lies the core problem with VICE: you're not going to leave the theater knowing anything you didn't already know going in. And to that end, it's rather shallow and superficial, and lacking the focused rage of THE BIG SHORT (the most vicious jab is aimed not at Dick Cheney, but at the apathetic and easily-distracted general public, and it comes at the very end, so stick around for that stinger that comes early in the closing credits). It's a triumph of makeup and a testament to Christian Bale's many gifts as an actor and his complete devotion to his craft. He makes efforts to show Cheney's human side and doesn't play him a cartoonish Bond villain, but a long, "no apologies" monologue near the end might make you wonder if this wouldn't have made a more insightful film if it was a one-man show like James Whitmore as Harry S. Truman in 1975's GIVE 'EM HELL, HARRY! or Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's 1984 film SECRET HONOR.
GONE GIRL (US - 2014) Directed by David Fincher. Written by Gillian Flynn. Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Scoot McNairy, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Emily Ratajkowski, Boyd Holbrook, Lola Kirke, Casey Wilson, Sela A. Ward, Missi Pyle, Jamie McShane. (R, 149 mins)
"You only hurt the one you love" is a saying that's appropriate for David Fincher's version of Gillian Flynn's bestselling 2012 novel. Flynn scripted the adaptation herself, but the end result is very much in line with Fincher's cynical worldview. Over the last 20 years, Fincher has built a reputation as an auteur's auteur, and comparisons to cinema giants like Stanley Kubrick have been made for quite some time. There's no doubt that some of those comparisons are justified, especially in Fincher's mercurial nature and his methodical, meticulous, and sometimes fussy style. He's been known to do an exorbitant amount of takes like Kubrick did, and both display signature styles to ensure their films feel like no one else's. This has been especially the case with Fincher over the last few years, as GONE GIRL marks his third consecutive teaming with score composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, and the fourth overall with Cronenweth, who also shot Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (1999). Over the course of THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011), and now GONE GIRL, Fincher and that team have forged a unique style in cold, clinical detachment, and perhaps that's where the Kubrick analogies really started to gain traction, though if any comparisons are to be made, he's more in line with the non-fantasy side of David Cronenberg.
While the mere mention of Fincher's name is enough to elevate expectations and get cineastes salivating, his pursuits are generally more commercial than either of those legendary filmmakers, and they exist in different eras that make comparisons a moot point: while Kubrick and Cronenberg also made film versions of wildly popular, bestselling novels (THE SHINING and THE DEAD ZONE, respectively), Kubrick never would've made a film about Facebook. And even as an auteur who's probably given more wiggle room than most of his contemporaries, Fincher still has people he reports to, and with today's "$50 million opening weekend or it's a flop" mindset, there's no way a major Hollywood studio would give Kubrick complete autonomy and a blank check to make whatever he wanted and then leave him unsupervised to take all the time he needed to do it. And Kubrick, while possessing a cynical outlook, pointed his finger mostly at established power structures (the military in PATHS OF GLORY and FULL METAL JACKET, the government in DR. STRANGELOVE, the aristocracy in BARRY LYNDON, the supernatural in THE SHINING, the perverse upper class in EYES WIDE SHUT) and their cruel and frequently dehumanizing nature. Kubrick wasn't quite the misanthrope that Fincher is. Fincher doesn't like people, he doesn't trust people, and in his world, they're largely inherently unhappy and looking for a way out, and no matter how successful they are and what they achieve, happiness is perpetually elusive. Matt Singer pointed in a pre-release Dissolve piece on GONE GIRL that it's the first Fincher film to put the impossibility of romantic relationships front and center. While GONE GIRL may form a loose stylistic trilogy with the two Fincher films that precede it, it's really not some thinkpiece-worthy truth bomb blowing the doors off the psychology of relationships, misogyny, feminism, and the state of marriage in America. Anyone who was a child of divorce, saw their parents have a huge argument, has gotten divorced or been around when married friends have a meltdown in a social setting or been in any kind of romantic relationship at all knows that marriage and relationships can be ugly. How many single people have had a married friend tell them "Don't ever get married"? There's certainly room for discussion over its conclusion and the decisions and compromises that certain characters make and the ways they manipulate those around them, but for the bulk of its sometimes bloated two and a half hours, GONE GIRL is a riveting, top-notch thriller by a director at the top of his game. Fincher isn't the second coming of Kubrick. He's a more stylized, high-end Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack. And that's still pretty great.
Flynn's novel utilized dual unreliable narrators in Nick and Amy Dunne. Flynn keeps structure here but in ways that obviously need to be made cinematic, along with other incidental changes to suit the medium. On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears and her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) comes home to find their house a shambles, with signs that a struggle ensued. Fincher repeatedly cuts between present, anchored by Affleck, and past, represented in flashbacks with narration by Pike from Amy's journal. She's the daughter of famous children's book authors (David Clennon, Lisa Banes) who based their beloved Amazing Amy character on Amy herself, with Amy constantly feeling like the let-down version of a fictional character who never disappointed her parents and got all the things Actual Amy wanted. In Nick, she finds the first person who understands and accepts her and doesn't want Amazing Amy. But domestic bliss slowly begins to unravel: Nick and Amy lose their jobs in the recession, Nick's mother is diagnosed with cancer and his father with Alzheimer's, the bills aren't getting paid, and Amy's parents get dropped by their publisher and need to use Amy's trust fund to get out of debt. Nick and Amy move from NYC to his childhood Missouri suburb where Amy feels adrift and left out when it comes to Nick and the bond he has with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Tensions escalate in Amy's journal, and in the present, evidence mounts that suggests Nick may have killed his wife. Nick isn't being upfront about numerous things with the cops or with Margo, and then Fincher pulls a daring bait-and-switch at just past the one-hour point that provokes a palpable buzz of energy among the audience and forces you to view everything you've just seen in a completely different fashion.
To say any more would involve divulging massive spoilers, but the performances of Affleck and especially Pike, a very difficult role, are outstanding. They get tremendous support from one of the year's best ensembles, particularly in the unlikely casting of Neil Patrick Harris as one of Amy's ex-boyfriends who's still hung up on her, and Tyler Perry as Nick's lawyer, a big-money celebrity attorney known for defending husbands accused of killing their wives. Coon is excellent, as is Kim Dickens as the increasingly incredulous detective investigating Amy's disappearance. Fincher and Flynn spend quite a bit of time examining the notion of media hype, deftly represented by a shrill, shrieking, over-the-top harpy of a cable news broadcaster (Missi Pyle), clearly based on the loathsome Nancy Grace. They also take aim at the culture of fleeting celebrity and the idea that everything is entertainment. Witness how Nick is accosted by a flirtatious woman who aggressively takes a selfie with him against his wishes, and of course the photo ends up on cable news as "proof" that he's a callous, remorseless wife killer. A bar--called The Bar--owned by Nick and Margo becomes a destination for gawking rubberneckers as Fincher pays subtle homage to Billy Wilder's bile-soaked ACE IN THE HOLE (1951). Like many filmmakers before him, Fincher has frequently cited Hitchcock as an influence, and that's on display here as Pike's Amy isn't too far removed from the blonde and "complicated" heroines played by Kim Novak in VERTIGO, Janet Leigh in PSYCHO, and Tippi Hedren in MARNIE (Margo: "Nick! Don't you know 'complicated' is code for 'bitch?'"). There's also one fleeting shot where a character hastily exits a room in a way that's identical to "Mother" leaving the motel room after the shower murder in PSYCHO.
Nothing is what it seems in GONE GIRL, and even if you've read the book (I haven't), it works as exemplary storytelling as Fincher punches the narrative forward in the same hypnotic, matter-of-fact fashion he did with his 2007 masterpiece ZODIAC, a damn-near-perfect thriller that opened to great acclaim at the time but for some inexplicable reason, seems to be a lesser-mentioned Fincher film that's fallen through the cracks in just a few short years. It's rare these days to see a provocative adult thriller that gets the audience talking and opens the floor for post-viewing debate. That doesn't necessarily warrant the "deeper meaning" thinkpieces of the sort that seem to permeate review sites and blogs every week (and really, if GONE GIRL hasn't opened this past weekend, we'd be getting similarly pretentious, diarrhetic essays on ANNABELLE), but perhaps the flood of such thinkpieces is actually a damning critique that too few intelligent films for grownups are getting any exposure in the current cinematic climate.
This Montreal-shot fugitives-on-the-run thriller from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky (ANATOMY, THE COUNTERFEITERS) offers an intriguing set-up but quickly gives way to cliches and contrivances before completely collapsing in the third act. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are siblings who pull off a day-before-Thanksgiving Michigan casino heist before wrecking their car on a snowy rural road. With Detroit cops and highway patrol in hot pursuit, they split up, Bana finding refuge with a family at a cabin where he kills the abusive stepfather, and Wilde with ex-con Charlie Hunnam, a disgraced boxer who may have accidentally killed his crooked manager about ten minutes after being paroled that morning. Hunnam and Wilde have some drinks at a bar and have sex in a motel room, so of course, they're in love the next morning and he takes her home to the family farm to meet mom Sissy Spacek and dad Kris Kristofferson. Naturally, an injured Bana is already there holding Mom and Dad hostage, and he's not very happy that his sister, for whom he harbors controlling and probably incestuous feelings, is in love with Hunnam. So with local deputy Kate Mara and her sexist, asshole sheriff father Treat Williams (why do the filmmakers make this character even more hateful than Bana?) closing in, an increasingly wild-eyed Bana decides to gather everyone for Thanksgiving dinner and poke them with sticks by getting into their heads and re-opening family wounds. Because hey, why not? It's not like the clock's ticking or anything.
It's too bad Ruzowitzky and debuting screenwriter Zach Dean gather all of these fine actors around a table only to have them go through some really tired soap opera melodrama. DEADFALL has some OK moments and there's snippets of genuine suspense, but the whole thing is so rote and hackneyed that it rarely rises above the level of strictly average. Most of the cast can't win playing such implausible characters (Wilde and Williams, in particular), but Kristofferson and Spacek do some really nice work here, convincingly conveying the strong sense of familiarity of a hard-working couple who've been together forever and can communicate in their own verbal shorthand or with just a look. DEADFALL feels most real in these few quiet moments with these two. (R, 95 mins)
ALEX CROSS (US - 2012)
Tyler Perry steps out of his comfort zone and into Morgan Freeman's shoes in this reboot of the wildly popular "James Patterson"® bestsellers that previously spawned the films KISS THE GIRLS (1997) and ALONG CAME A SPIDER (2001). Judging from the film's paltry box office, audiences weren't really interested in Tyler Perry: Action Hero. It's easy to mock Perry and make Madea jokes, but while he gets some points for trying, he's really not good here, though a lot of it is just bad writing. Maybe Freeman can sell the whole Sherlockian awareness of everything going on around him and being able to "tell that you had scrambled eggs for breakfast at 100 yards," but where Freeman plays authoritative and dignified, Perry glowers, growls, and overacts, turning Cross into more of a gun-toting, vengeance-obsessed, action-movie badass. It doesn't help that Cross is squaring off against a cartoonish supervillain in Matthew Fox's hired assassin "Picasso," on a spree at the behest of a corporate benefactor and so-called because he leaves clues to his next killing in intricate charcoal drawings at the murder scenes. Fox lost an alarming amount of weight for the role and turned what he had left into pure muscle. It's an unusual level of dedication for a film so silly and inconsequential, and he might've been more effective if his performance didn't rely on so many cliches (bulging eyes, wicked grins, calling Cross and taunting him, etc). There isn't one surprise here, unless you count how the filmmakers give police psychologist Cross a pass for breaking almost every law in the book, justifying it with Picasso killing Cross' pregnant wife (Carmen Ejogo). The film moves the novels' setting from D.C. to Detroit, presumably for production tax incentive purposes, though most of the film has downtown Cleveland filling in for Detroit, at least until Cross and Picasso's climactic showdown at the old Michigan Building, in the theater refurbished as a parking garage.
Also with Edward Burns and Rachel Nichols as Cross' partners, Cicely Tyson as Nana Mama, Jean Reno as a French billionaire targeted by Picasso, John C. McGinley as Cross' boss who's always reading Cross the riot act even though he's right 100% of the time, numerous scenes with Cross revealing key plot information to his clueless associates while the camera urgently circles around them, and one of the least-convincing CGI explosions ever seen in a major theatrical release. The one-sheet's tag line reads "Don't ever cross Alex Cross." Well, it's probably a good idea to not ever watch ALEX CROSS, either. (PG-13, 101 mins)
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (US - 2012)
Sometimes a really ambitious and inventive film can get made when nobody's paying much attention, and UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (the fourth film in the franchise, sixth if you count two made-for-TV movies) is anything but another by-the-numbers action outing. Its VOD and limited theatrical release in late 2012 got some unexpected praise from some serious critics, and the film displays a level of depth and intelligence that demand it to be taken seriously. Director/co-writer John Hyams made 2010's UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION and returns with original UniSols Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, essentially supporting characters with the focus on John (Scott Adkins), who sees his wife and daughter brutally murdered in a home invasion led by UniSol Luc Devereaux (Van Damme). Awakening from a coma nine months later, John struggles to figure out who he is and why he's haunted by these painful memories. It turns out Devereaux is rounding up a rogue army of former UniSols and implanting a chemical that makes them consciously aware of their status as mind-controlled government killing machines. John discovers Devereaux is living deep in the Louisiana bayou, a messianic cult leader to a band of rogue warriors acting on their own volition, away from a government that can no longer control them. Is John one of these UniSols? Is Devereaux the real Devereaux?
US: DOR has Christopher Nolan-sized ideas on a DTV budget and you'd have to possess the ability of psychic premonition to have expected a film like this from Hyams (son of veteran director Peter Hyams), whose efforts to date have been unimpressive, to put it mildly. While some plot elements may borrow liberally from INCEPTION, THE TERMINATOR, and APOCALYPSE NOW (it's an intentional homage as John's journey down a river to Devereaux's camp even has a nearly-identical repetitive music cue heard when Martin Sheen arrived at Marlon Brando's compound), Hyams creates a surreal, disorientingly harsh, horrifyingly violent (30 seconds of splatter were cut to avoid an NC-17 rating), and potentially audience-alienating atmosphere throughout US: DOR. At times, the film feels like a waking nightmare that's being secretly directed by Gaspar Noe. It's almost experimental in the way it uses sound and visuals (particularly a dizzying strobe effect), and even with the impressive action sequences, there's no doubt that some people will absolutely hate this. Hyams even says as much on the commentary track, stating the script is admittedly "a little far off the reservation." It occasionally bites off more than it can chew and it goes on a bit longer than it needs to, but Hyams deserves a lot of credit for not going the easy route, and attempting--and very often succeeding--to create a significantly more unique, daring, and thought-provoking film than anything you'd expect something titled UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING to be. An instant cult classic. (R, 113 mins)
HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (UK/Japan - 2011; 2012 US release)
Originally shot in 3D, Takashi Miike's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 classic HARAKIRI examines the same themes of honor and hypocrisy and retains most of the major plot details while deviating quite a bit in the third act. Miike, who's not quite as prolific and eager to shock as he was in his AUDITION, VISITOR Q, and ICHI THE KILLER glory days, fashions his HARA-KIRI as a dramatic companion piece of sorts to his excellent 2010 remake of Eiichi Kudo's 13 ASSASSINS (1963). Where 13 ASSASSINS finds unemployed samurai overjoyed at finally having a way to go out in a blaze of glory, this film has warriors on the other end of the spectrum: broke, jobless, without purpose, and struggling to survive in a world that no longer requires their unique skills. Miike's HARA-KIRI is one of his most restrained films, a samurai story with powerful drama, emotion, and tragedy at its core. In feudal Japan of 1630, peace has led to many unemployed samurai attempting suicide bluffs, where, in the name of honor, they request to commit seppuku in the courtyard of a feudal lord, usually resulting in a small job, a meal, or in the best cases, a financial handout from the sympathetic lord. The lord of the House of Ii is away when penniless ronin Hanshiro Tsugomo (Ebizo Ichikawa) requests to use the courtyard for ritual suicide. The lord's chief counsel Kageyu (Koji Yokusho) tries to talk Tsugomo out of his decision by telling him the story of Monome (Eita), who similarly requested to commit seppuku in the courtyard, resulting in Kageyu and the Ii samurai calling Monome's bluff and making him go through with it despite not even having a real sword, instead just one made of wood for show. Monome had a sick wife and child at home and heard about the suicide bluffs and decided to use it as a last resort. Tsugomo then informs Kageyu that he indeed knows Monome, and tells his own story about how the two are connected, and why he's really at the House of Ii. Ichikawa turns in a devastating performance as Tsugomo, often rivaling the finest work of Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai in the samurai classics of old. Miike's film is leisurely paced but never dull, and there's a bizarre finale with long takes and intricate choreography that feels like a Kurosawa samurai battle restaged by Blake Edwards. (Unrated, 128 mins)
