UNDERWATER (US - 2020) Directed by William Eubank. Written by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad. Cast: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie, Gunner Wright. (PG-13, 95 mins) It's not going to score any points for originality, but UNDERWATER is a surprisingly engaging throwback to the undersea creature craze of early 1989, when we got DEEPSTAR SIX, LEVIATHAN, and the Roger Corman-produced LORDS OF THE DEEP in quick succession, all in a mad rush to beat the much-anticipated August release of James Cameron's mega-budget THE ABYSS (as required by law, obligatory Eurotrash knockoffs belatedly followed, like ENDLESS DESCENT from Spain and ALIEN FROM THE DEEP from Italy). UNDERWATER also wouldn't exist without the template provided by ALIEN, but director William Eubank (whose 2014 film THE SIGNAL showed some promise) has studied his economically-minded B-movies, diving right into the action within the first five minutes and keeping the pace so relentless and the stakes so high that you don't have time to think about any logic lapses or unanswered questions that the film either forgets about or just puts there to misdirect the audience. UNDERWATER is what it is, and that's not a bad thing. There's no dumb late-film plot twist, there's no deeper meaning, and there's only as much characterization as you need. It's an always forward-moving scare machine that seems so quaintly old-fashioned in the era of the IP/franchise/sequel/reboot/remake that you might wonder how it isn't premiering on Netflix.
With a fleeting shot of a newspaper headline that shows the year being 2050 (a rather optimistic outlook for print media), UNDERWATER opens in the Mariana Trench, six miles deep in the Pacific Ocean aboard Keppler Station, a massive, multi-billion dollar drilling installation. As mechanical engineer Norah (Kristen Stewart) brushes her teeth, the sound of water dripping on the floor from the ceiling above poses an instant threat. Almost immediately, walls collapse and parts of the structure begin caving due to what's presumed to be an earthquake. She manages to escape into a closed-off area, finds fellow crew member Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie), and in their search for a way out, encounter wisecracking Paul (T.J. Miller) buried under some rubble. The three make their way to the escape pod bay only to find Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel) with two survivors, Emily (Jessica Henwick) and Smith (John Gallagher Jr.). Lucien has sent 22 others up to presumed safety but the remaining pods are damaged. They're the only six survivors of a 300-person crew. With radio contact cut off and left completely on their own with the clock ticking and no other options, Lucien suggests they venture a mile down in pressurized suits and hoof it another mile across the ocean floor to Roebuck Station, the nearest drilling installation (Norah: "Can you just admit we could all die?" Lucien: "Can you just admit we might live?"). A crack in a helmet causes one survivor to make an abrupt exit, as the remaning five start their dangerous trek, only to find out too late that...something is down here.
That's it. There's your set-up. It's DEEPSTAR LEVIATHAN: UNDERWATER and the closest it gets to making a statement is Emily frantically stating "We've been taking from the ocean and now it's taking back...we don't belong here." The script by Brian Duffield (THE BABYSITTER) and Adam Cozad (JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT) sticks to a formula that's proven to work in the hands of the right director. Eubank wears his love of ALIEN and a ton of other movies on his sleeve, but in the process, focuses on the sense of isolation and claustrophobia in a way that's intensely effective at times. It's a physically demanding project for the actors, crawling through muck-filled tight spaces in the early scenes before the ocean walk, where Eubank and veteran cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (who got his start in the late '80s on several Abel Ferrara films) frame them in extreme close-up, often getting inside their helmets for POV shots where they can barely see anything in the murky depths and can't escape the strange sounds of something uncomfortably close to them. Obviously, UNDERWATER is a creature feature first and foremost, and it also doesn't disappoint on that front, with some nasty monsters that we only see fleetingly for a long time until things take a turn that can best be described as "Lovecraftian."
I don't want to oversell UNDERWATER. It's too beholden to its influences to really take itself to the next level, but it serves its purpose as a well-done genre rollercoaster ride. And sometimes, when it's done right, that's sufficient (you'll also spot shout-outs to THE DESCENT, some always-unnerving garbled audio transmissions straight out of EVENT HORIZON, some Overlook-esque corridors before all hell breaks loose, and one of composer Marco Beltrami's catchier synth cues sounds a bit indebted to Vangelis' end credits theme for BLADE RUNNER). Stewart's Norah proves to be a quietly resilient graduate of the Ripley school, and the rest of the cast acquits themselves generally well, with Cassel a dutifully heroic leader, Gallagher cast radically against type as second-string John Krasinski, and Miller providing the smartass comic relief ("I'm getting dangerously close to shitting myself"). Admittedly, UNDERWATER has some red flags: it's a horror movie hitting theaters in the doomed dead zone of January after three years on the shelf, with 20th Century Fox attributing the long-delayed release to a business decision tied to their acquisition by Disney. I guess that's possible, though one can't help but wonder if maybe execs wanted to let some time lapse following T.J. Miller becoming a #MeToo poster boy when sexual assault allegations from his college days resurfaced some time after shooting wrapped in 2017, a situation that he followed with a 2018 encore that saw him reporting a fake Amtrak bomb threat after he was kicked off a train for being intoxicated (his ongoing implosion also cost him his job as the Mucinex booger, and Dreamworks also replaced him with Justin Rupple as the voice of Tuffnut Thorston for 2019's HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD). Regardless of the reason--Fox restructuring under the Disney regime or the cancellation of Miller--UNDERWATER being left in limbo for so long isn't an indication of its quality. We can always use more genre offerings like this that cut the shit and just do their thing. It probably won't do well in theaters, but this will enjoy a long and frequently-viewed life on streaming and cable.
JASON BOURNE (US - 2016) Directed by Paul Greengrass. Written by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse. Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Ato Essandoh, Gregg Henry, Scott Shepherd, Vincenz Kiefer, Stephen Kunken. (PG-13, 123 mins) After sitting out 2012's disappointing THE BOURNE LEGACY--the TOKYO DRIFT of the BOURNE franchise--star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return for the fifth entry, JASON BOURNE (they really should've called it BOURNE AGAIN). It's been nine years since THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and the Damon-Greengrass duo basically stick to the formula, opting to not fix what isn't broken and, naturally, including a new closing credits remix of Moby's "Extreme Ways." Not participating is screenwriter Tony Gilroy, a key component to the success of the first three films who failed to find a spark when he was promoted to director in Greengrass' stead for LEGACY. Greengrass' hyper-kinetic, shaky-cam style is, for better or worse, so inextricably linked with the BOURNE franchise that it's easy to forget he wasn't involved with 2002's THE BOURNE IDENTITY and only came onboard when Doug Liman (SWINGERS, GO) wasn't invited back for 2004's THE BOURNE SUPREMACY after clashing with Universal on the first film. Gilroy's focus on exposition and dialogue turned LEGACY into a bit of a bore, and without his presence here, Greengrass has taken over scripting duties for the first time on a BOURNE film. It's telling that he shares credit with his usual editor and first-time screenwriter Christopher Rouse, who won an Oscar for his editing work on ULTIMATUM. With that in mind, the focus is on action, with many of the more intricate details of plot, characterization and motivation left fuzzy, probably because that just isn't their chief concern. Trotting all over the globe at a breakneck pace, JASON BOURNE keeps your attention and is a definite improvement over THE BOURNE LEGACY, whose existence it completely ignores, but there's no denying that the freshness is waning and that neither Damon nor Greengrass seem as inspired this time out.
CIA operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the agency's database from Iceland, stealing damning files on the Treadstone and Blackbriar programs that turned all-American David Webb into superagent Jason Bourne (Damon). Bourne is living off the grid in Greece, picking up pocket money in brutal street fights and still coming to terms with his past. Parsons' hack is traced by ambitious cybersecurity official Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who talks new CIA director Robert Dewey (a craggier-than-ever Tommy Lee Jones) into making her point in the trackdown of Parsons, who they're sure will lead them to Bourne. Of course she does, though Parsons is killed by Dewey's covert agent "The Asset" (Vincent Cassel), which sends Bourne all through Europe trying to get to the bottom of Parsons' claim that the death of his State Dept honcho father Richard Webb (Gregg Henry in newly-shot flashbacks) in a Libya car bombing in 1999 was actually a CIA hit disguised as a terrorist attack. He forms an unholy alliance with Lee, who works closely with Dewey but seems to have her own agenda. Dewey, meanwhile, wants to keep a lid on anything related to Bourne and is preoccupied with his own secret dealings with billionaire social media tech mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), who's been paid a huge amount of money for his work in a new agency project called Ironhand, an advanced surveillance program that will track the whereabouts and actions of all users of Kalloor's Facebook-like app Deep Dream.
There's some fleeting attempts at topicality with Kalloor's parallels to Mark Zuckerberg, and one of Dewey's flunkies (Ato Essandoh) gravely intoning that Parsons' hack is "worse than Snowden," but Greengrass isn't really concerned with the confusing plot, instead keeping a relentless forward momentum as Bourne goes from one action set piece to the next. This culminates in a ridiculous but nonetheless entertaining car vs. SWAT truck chase in Las Vegas that's more CANNONBALL RUN than BOURNE. Mainly, the bulk of the action is a more propulsive-than-most travelogue of Damon briskly walking through scenic European cities and train stations while looking over his shoulder, intercut with the obligatory scenes in a CIA crisis suite filled with rows of surveillance monitors on the walls, with a steely-eyed Lee demonstrating an almost Spidey Sense of where to spot Bourne in a crowd ("Stop...back up two seconds...pause...enhance the image...it's HIM!"). In the most apparent sign of the shift in writing focus, Damon has very little dialogue here, and Vikander doesn't have much to other than look really grim and serious, her Heather Lee coming across like the least fun person on the planet (she's essentially a young version of Joan Allen's Pamela Landy). Jones relies on a lot of his stoical Sam Gerard routine, periodically barking "Find him!" and stopping just short of ordering Cassel's "The Asset" on a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse in the area. Damon's three previous BOURNE films were smartly-plotted thrillers with intense action sequences, while JASON BOURNE just dispenses with the notion of a story making much sense, but works as an over-the-top action movie, albeit one you've seen several times before. It's not so much a dumbing down as it is giving people what they want. To that extent, it's a good time, but certainly a step below the first three films, particularly the two Damon-Greengrass collaborations.
Since taking a decade-long sabbatical from directing and returning with 2007's YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH and 2009's TETRO, the legendary Francis Ford Coppola has essentially abandoned Hollywood and the mainstream and made it a stated point that he's only making personal films for himself. While the commercial appeal of the ponderous YOUTH and the intermittently-interesting TETRO were limited, they admirably avoided the self-indulgence that normally accompanies such endeavors, and while both are little more than interesting curios by a fabled filmmaker, the uneven TWIXT is Coppola's most satisfying effort of this post-comeback "experimental" phase. Recalling the low-budget B-movies Coppola cut his teeth on as an assistant to Roger Corman back in the early 1960s, TWIXT more often than not feels like an old-school horror movie that you used to find on late-night TV, at least until it starts taking esoteric, art-house detours as it goes on. In his best role in years, Val Kilmer stars as hard-drinking horror novelist Hall Baltimore, once hailed as a fresh, next-big-thing literary talent but now "the bargain-basement Stephen King," reduced to holding unattended book signings in small-town carry-outs. He finds a fan in gregarious Swann Valley sheriff Bobby LaGrange (an enjoyably hammy Bruce Dern), who wants to collaborate with him on a book where they solve a series of brutal stakings that LaGrange believes are the work of some goth kids who hang out across the lake. Initially apprehensive, but with mounting debt, his wife (Kilmer's ex-wife Joanne Whalley) threatening to sell his priceless, bound-by-Walt Whitman-himself copy of Leaves of Grass, and needing to move on from the recent death of his 14-year-old daughter in a boating accident, Baltimore pitches the idea to his publisher (David Paymer) and gets an advance...that he conveniently keeps secret from LaGrange. Meanwhile, Baltimore is visited by a strange girl named V (Elle Fanning) that no one else sees, and while out wandering through the Swann Valley woods, he nearly falls off a rope bridge but is rescued by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin), who takes him under his wing and shows him the dark secrets of the town. As Baltimore struggles with the book, he comes to terms with the guilt over his daughter's death and with Poe's help, starts uncovering the truth about what happened to V and how it ties into the serial stakings that are occupying the sheriff's time.
Coppola financed TWIXT out of his own pocket and when it failed to land a US distributor, he ended up arranging a scant few screenings himself before setting up a VOD distribution deal. Look, I realize the commercial prospects for an artsy endeavor like this are limited, but can someone explain to me what kind of bullshit state of cinema we're in where Francis Ford Fucking Coppola has to personally schlep his latest movie to individual theaters? He even shot a couple of sequences in 3-D! Some may find TWIXT meandering and obfuscating, but it feels a lot like an old Corman or William Castle flick, or sometimes like a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, especially since a good chunk of it is shot in black & white. It its more accessible sections, it occasionally feels--perhaps because of the presence of THE 'BURBS and THE HOLE co-star Dern--like the kind of throwback film that Joe Dante might make. Coppola's script never really ties everything together all that securely and the ending is a bit too abrupt, but it really captures the feeling of those old low-budget movies without doing so ironically. Coppola keeps it legit because he came from that school. He's not a young filmmaker paying ironic homage to it--he was actually there. That's just part of the personal touch Coppola brings to TWIXT. Baltimore's overwhelming grief over the loss of a child is something Coppola knows all too well: he lost his 22-year-old son Gio in a 1986 boating accident that's identically recreated in the way Baltimore's daughter is killed. Gio's wife was pregnant at the time of his death, and their daughter Gia worked on TWIXT with her grandfather. Knowing the story behind TWIXT and how it brings together a grandfather who lost his son and a granddaughter who never got to meet her father adds a powerful subtext to the film.
And it's great to see guys like Kilmer and Dern getting meaty, starring roles for a change. Kilmer's performance as Doc Holliday in 1993's TOMBSTONE is one of the most beloved and oft-quoted in modern cinema, but he's spent much of the last decade in a stunning career free-fall that found him starring in some of the worst of the worst in the world of DTV with unwatchable garbage like MOSCOW ZERO, THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT, PLAYED (where his character's repeated "You are not gonna taco!" failed to become the new "I'm your Huckleberry") and several ill-advised collaborations with 50 Cent. Kilmer is an eccentric actor who's frequently been labeled difficult (THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU director John Frankenheimer: "Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer") and has a tendency to run amok in some of these DTV films where he's only on the set for a couple of days and is given room to riff and improv. Coppola successfully reins him in here, but does give him some leeway in an amusing scene where an increasingly intoxicated Baltimore struggles to get a single sentence written, allowing Kilmer to once more bust out his famous Marlon Brando impression in addition to an impeccable James Mason. I've long maintained that Kilmer still has some real work and maybe even an Oscar left in him, and it was an admirable and perhaps conscious decision on Coppola's part to give Kilmer--a guy who can probably relate to the sorry state of Hall Baltimore's career--the lead role in this project. These three most recent Coppola films probably won't even make his career highlight reel, and of course I don't mean to imply that it's on the level of THE GODFATHER or its first sequel, or APOCALYPSE NOW, or THE CONVERSATION, but for a more thorough understanding of him as a filmmaker and as a still-grieving father, there's a strong argument that TWIXT is essential Coppola. (R, 88 mins)
TRANCE (France/US/UK - 2013)
Even after the crowd-pleasing Best Picture Oscar winner SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008), the grueling Best Picture Oscar nominee 127 HOURS (2010), and supervising the razzle-dazzle of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, TRANCE, the latest from director Danny Boyle, didn't inspire much confidence from distributor Fox, who only rolled it out on 443 screens at its widest release. It's easy to say TRANCE, a remake of a 2001 British TV-movie, is Boyle's attempt at a Christopher Nolan mindfuck, but the head games here seem too contrived and complicated just for its own sake, eventually devolving into trying-too-hard misdirection and incoherence. Boyle's direction is as stylish as ever, but the plot's intriguing twists and turns and the eventual revelation that what you thought the film was about isn't what it's about at all probably seemed clever on the page, but it grows tiresome on the screen.
Working with screenwriter John Hodge (SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING, A LIFE LESS ORDINARY) for the first time since 2000's THE BEACH, Boyle's TRANCE gives us mid-level London art auctioneer Simon (James McAvoy), who takes a nasty blow to the head during a museum theft where a priceless Goya is ripped off by Franck (Vincent Cassel) and his crew. Franck discovers the canvas has been sliced from the frame and once Simon, hailed as a hero by the media, is released from the hospital, he and his gang endlessly hassle and torture him, believing he stashed the painting somewhere. But Simon is suffering from amnesia, and can't remember anything during the robbery itself. Franck sends Simon to hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), hoping she can put him in a trance and extract the information from wherever it is in his memories. Elizabeth figures out what's going on and wants a percentage of the take. Then a love triangle develops. And then things get really twisty. The thing is, the more twists that Boyle and Hodge pile on, the more absurd TRANCE becomes, though I'm sure it's some kind of snickering joke on their part that a major element of the plot hinges on Dawson's shaved bush (the actress does some nudity here that leaves nothing to the imagination and should make her a frontrunner at the next Mr. Skin's Anatomy Awards). By the end, when all the pieces are (I think) in place, the reaction is less "Whoa!" and more "Really?! All that for this?" Some of those pieces have to get forced in place for the puzzle to be complete, and even in a film with this many acceptable implausibilities, it's asking a lot for an audience to buy a body decomposing in the trunk of a car for months and no one--least of all the people riding in the backseat--realizing it. TRANCE is never dull or uninteresting and McAvoy and Cassel are good, but Dawson feels a little miscast, despite her instantly legendary nude scene. Initial reaction might be mild disappointment, but something about this feels like it might be one of those movies that play better when viewed again in a year or two. (R, 101 mins)
