WASP NETWORK (France/Spain/Belgium - 2020) Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Cast: Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Ana de Armas, Wagner Moura, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Tony Plana, Nolan Guerra Fernandez, Osdeymi Pastrama Miranda, Julian Flynn, Anel Perdomo, Julio Gabay, Amada Morado, Carolina Paraza Matamoros, Omar Ali, Carlos Leal. (Unrated, 128 mins) French auteur Olivier Assayas has dabbled in a bit of everything over his acclaimed career, from 1996's filmmaking satire IRMA VEP to the corporate espionage of 2002's DEMONLOVER and 2007's BOARDING GATE to heartfelt interpersonal pieces like 2008's SUMMER HOURS and 2019's NON-FICTION (both with frequent star Juliette Binoche), and a pair of dramas where he found a muse in Kristen Stewart, with 2014's CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (also with Binoche) and 2016's PERSONAL SHOPPER. His latest film, the Netflix-acquired WASP NETWORK, finds Assayas mining tangentially similar territory as 2010's CARLOS, his epic, five-and-a-half hour chronicle of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, made as a miniseries for French TV but acquired for the US by IFC in both its unedited version on the festival circuit and a truncated 166-minute cut for its brief US theatrical run and VOD (the Criterion Blu-ray edition only has the long version). Based on the true story of the "Cuban Five," WASP NETWORK details--and not always in the most coherent fashion--a Cuban espionage ring that set up shop in Miami in the early '90s, posing as dissidents and defectors fed up with Castro's communist regime having expecting things to change after the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, they were staunch Castro loyalists looking to infiltrate well-funded Cuban revolutionary groups based in Florida that were often working in conjunction with the FBI, and report their gathered intel back to government officials in Cuba.
The opening hour of WASP NETWORK follows two of the Cuban agents as they make their way to the US and settle in Miami. The first is pilot Rene Gonzalez (Edgar Ramirez, reteaming with Assayas after his career-best performance in CARLOS), who spends three months plotting the theft of a plane and flies under the radar all the way into Miami in 1990, leaving his wife Olga (Penelope Cruz) and their daughter Irma (Carolina Paraza Matamoros as a 6-year-old, then Osdeymi Pastrama Miranda as a teenager) behind in Havana. He doesn't need to worry about being granted asylum, since he was born in Chicago and his family returned to Cuba when he was a child. In 1992, Juan Pablo Roque (ELITE SQUAD and NARCOS star Wagner Moura, the Brazilian Mark Ruffalo) is a revered Cuban Air Force pilot who swims all the way to Guantanamo Bay to declare his intent to defect. He's an instant celebrity with TV interviews, a book deal, and glad-handing from the anti-Castro groups in Miami, and a whirlwind romance with Cuban-born divorcee Ana Margarita (Ana de Armas), who doesn't take long to realize something's up with all of his secrets, his expensive jewelry, and his $2000 suits. Rene keeps trying to get Olga to move to Miami, but his assignment was so top secret that she's still under the impression that he's a traitor and that his skills as a pilot are being used for drug trafficking.
Assayas jumps around quite a bit, and many of the details of the maddeningly confusing--apparently by design--first hour don't become clear until some extensive "get you caught up" narration by Carlos Leal, an abrupt "Four Years Earlier" card, and the midpoint introduction of Manuel Viramontez, aka "Gerardo Hernandez" (Gael Garcia Bernal), the spymaster behind the whole operation, which is codenamed "Wasp Network." The timeline is never really crystal clear--we just know some years have passed when Irma is played by an older kid--and much of the second half gets sidetracked with the machinations of rogue CIA agent and anti-Castro terrorist mastermind Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a string of Cuban hotel bombings committed by Cruz Leon (Nolan Guerra Fernandez) that keep Cruz, Ramirez, and Garcia Bernal offscreen for long stretches, the latter two mostly confined to clandestine lunch meetings at Miami restaurants.
WASP NETWORK isn't really able to gain any momentum since Assayas lets scenes end abruptly and goes for frequent and seemingly random fade-outs, almost as if this was cut down from a longer, CARLOS-type project that was intended for TV at some point. Indeed, it more often than not feels like the two-hour Cliff Notes version of a ten-hour miniseries. Such a format might've been more beneficial, considering the amount of time the main stars aren't around and that both Moura and de Armas abruptly exit during the second act. Assayas also indulges in a little Scorsese worship with a brief "last half hour of GOODFELLAS" vibe when de Armas' Ana gets wise and realizes too late that her husband was leading a double life and her world starts falling apart and all that's really missing in Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire." WASP NETWORK has a fascinating story to tell, but there's simply too much going on here for a two-hour movie to sufficiently handle and effectively tie all of its disparate plot and historical elements together. Months and years go by an in instant, characters appear and disappear, like Jose Basulto (Leonardo Sbraglia), the head of the Cuban exile outfit Brothers to the Rescue, who's set up as a major character but then doesn't really figure in at all. And can anyone explain the FBI agent played by an actor who has no idea how to pronounce the word "alias?"
Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, William Fichtner, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, Wagner Moura, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Emma Tremblay, Faran Tahir. (R, 109 mins)
South African writer/director and Peter Jackson protégé Neill Blomkamp follows his acclaimed 2009 hit DISTRICT 9 (does anyone recall that actually getting a Best Picture Oscar nomination?) with another politically-charged sci-fi epic. ELYSIUM is definitely indicative of a Hollywood blockbuster side of Blomkamp, and the points it makes are much less subtle. But it's still an engrossing film that shows a slightly more disciplined director (the biggest flaw of DISTRICT 9 is that he never seemed to settle on shooting documentary-style or as a straight narrative) and other than one fight scene that briefly utilizes some ill-advised PS3 camera moves, it's the kind of relentlessly-paced, hard-hitting sci-fi actioner that someone like a James Cameron or a John McTiernan would've made in the 1980s. Like his mentor, Blomkamp is a director who knows how to use CGI so it doesn't draw attention to its artificiality. ELYSIUM looks great, the action is non-stop, and while its metaphors are a bit simplistic and not everything in it stands up to hard science logic, it's one of the most entertaining films of the summer.
ELYSIUM opens in a 2154 Los Angeles that makes the 2019 L.A. of BLADE RUNNER look like the good old days. Sometime in the early 22nd century, Earth became such an overpopulated, crime-and-disease-infested shithole that the world's wealthiest people (read: the one-percenters) headed to the space station paradise of Elysium, which hovers above the planet. The privileged of Elysium live in a safe world where there's no crime and things like cancer are easily detected and eradicated upon signs of the first trace by in-home MedPods. Elysium is off limits to the people of Earth, essentially populated by one massive underclass who live in shantytowns and bombed-out buildings. Any attempts by refugees to enter Elysium's atmosphere--usually to get to a MedPod to cure a terminal illness--result in immediate apprehension and return to Earth. That is, until one day when intolerant Elysium defense secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) decides to make an example of three ships trying to get to Elysium by having them blown up with drone missiles activated by her psychotic Los Angeles-based Elysium sleeper agent Kruger (DISTRICT 9's Sharlto Copley), which gets her on the shit list of Elysium's President Patel (Faran Tahir). Meanwhile, in L.A., ex-con Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) is trying to live a normal life, working on the assembly line at the Elysium-owned Armadyne factory, which manufactures robot security drones to keep order on Earth. Due to a bullying manager and workplace negligence, Max is exposed to a massive dose of radiation while on the job, and a robot medical tech gives him some painkillers to stay somewhat functional and informs him "You will be dead in five days. Thank you for your service."
Knowing he can be cured if he can get to Elysium, Max teams up with old crime cohort Julio (Diego Luna) to pull off a job for powerful, fast-talking smuggler/hacker Spider (Wagner Moura). A gravely-ill Max is fitted with a surgically implanted neurological exoskeleton, wired into his spine and head, which gives him strength and allows him to receive data directly into his brain. Spider wants Max to retrieve data from Armadyne boss Carlyle (William Fichtner), who possesses a "reboot" code for Elysium that Delacourt wants to use to stage a coup against the sympathetic Patel and run Elysium her own way. Spider has his reasons for wanting the reboot code, and Max just wants to get to Elysium to cure the cancer rapidly growing inside of him, and both have to deal with an enraged Kruger, who just wants everyone dead.
As you can see, you've got your unsympathetic, selfish one-percenters, the war-mongering defense secretary, critiques of workplace abuse and lack of access to quality health care, and a revolt of the disenfranchised. Blomkamp's politics are pretty obvious (if, for instance, you think Delacourt is the hero, you might not be Blomkamp's target audience), but he never lets things get too polemical once the action kicks in. DISTRICT 9 immediately elevated Blomkamp to the big leagues, and he delivers with impressive set pieces, masterful handling of visual effects, and managing a much bigger cast of established actors compared to his previous effort, and it's nice that he brought his pal Copley along with him. Damon is in fine BOURNE mode once things get serious, and Copley and ELITE SQUAD's Moura (a huge star in his native Brazil) really have some fun chewing the scenery. Only Foster seems uneasy, due mostly to her performance being re-looped in post-production. It's her voice, but apparently test audiences didn't like the accent she was using. Despite her above-the-title billing, Foster doesn't have a lot of screen time, and it's glaringly obvious in some of her close-ups that she's revoicing herself because there's several bits where the words are out of sync with her lip movements. Maybe there was a script change that necessitated changing some of her dialogue, but it's very uncommon for dubbing in a big-budget American movie to be that sloppy (this was also the case with Svetlana Khodchenkova's performance as Viper in THE WOLVERINE), especially when it involves someone of Foster's stature. She certainly looks the part, but she just doesn't seem comfortable in the role. Maybe it's that she probably didn't get to work with most of the major stars except for one brief scene with Copley and Alice Braga--Damon and Foster have no scenes together, and their characters never meet. It's ultimately a minor quibble about an otherwise fine film--with its release date delayed multiple times by Sony after being shot two years ago--from someone who's all but guaranteed to become a major genre leader in years to come.
