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“Alien: Covenant" plays the hits, bitterly

The latest installment of a sci-fi franchise that is, perhaps, held in better regard than its output warrants, Alien: Covenant represents the latest and most overt attempt yet to recapture the magic of Ridley Scott’s petrifying 1979 film about a space serpent run amok aboard a stranded intergalactic freighter. That bare-bones thriller opened the gateway to one true-blue classic (James Cameron’s shoot-em-up Aliens in 1986), two movies where your mileage probably varies (David Fincher’s notoriously troubled Alien3 in 1992 and the weirdly Cormanesque Alien: Resurrection in 1997), a two-part crossover with the Predator franchise in the aughts and, most recently, a Scott-directed origin myth in 2012 called Prometheus that bowed to much general harrumphing, both over its overly philosophical plot (courtesy of Damon Lindelof – who, in his defense, is the guy you go to when you want ideas that are so big and knotty they almost can’t be untangled, so not sure what everyone was expecting there) or its lack of the series’ signature creature. 

That’s a lot to go through to just throw out the stew and start from scratch, but Scott has said the original idea for his prequel series – rather than delve into the origin of the monster, he would explore the world of the alabaster “Engineers” that created both the aliens and humans – was so ill-received that this time around, he is giving us explicitly what we asked for. In other words, Alien: Covenant is the Force-Awakening of the anthology: A well-acted, well-made and incredibly familiar set of story beats. There’s a crew of a spaceship, lured mid-voyage to a planet with a mysterious distress call (here, it’s a ghostly recording of someone singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which is a nice, creepy touch). A female hero (Katherine Waterston) with a bob. A rowdy space cowboy (Danny McBride). A bunch of famous folks to throw on some space suits and march dutifully to the meat grinder (no spoilers, suffice it to say that Jamal Lyon doesn’t make it). Some shady business with a robot (Michael Fassbender). And, finally, a confrontation with the alien itself both on land and on the ship, which is the literal definition of trying to solve the Alien vs. Aliens argument by having it both ways at once.

All that said, Covenant does have the added benefit of being directed by the original maestro, which The Force Awakens did not have. But unlike The Force Awakens, it’s nowhere near able to replicate the impact of the first time around. That’s hardly the fault of Scott himself, though. The truth of the matter is the only filmmaker to successfully tweak the Alien formula is James Cameron, whose Aliens was essentially a war movie between a squadron of jarheads and a hive of, well, aliens. Every movie besides has followed the same beats of the original and the same beats followed here, which is to say if you’ve never seen an Alien movie before you’ll probably be thrilled to bits at what Covenant churns out, but otherwise, what once cut primal terror through audiences has had its edges blunted by nostalgia. The Alien is cool. The Alien is iconic, to use current internet parlance. But the Alien hasn’t been scary for a long, long time.

That’s more or less what Scott has admitted led him to undertake Prometheus in the first place (he described the monster as “done” even after the movie came out), but a grim fable about pointless creation at the whim of a merciless god may have been asking a little too much. (I say this as someone who, generally, liked that movie.) So, Covenant is in the unfortunate position of both continuing a story nobody took to and course-correcting it back into something that everyone remembers fondly. That the script, credited to six writers, manages to expand on the themes of Prometheus throughout the nostalgia trip is Covenant’s biggest accomplishment. In fact, the movie’s most compelling scene is its first one, a flashback to a frank, chilling discussion between Prometheus’ duplicitous android David (Fassbender) and his maker (Guy Pearce, another returnee, though mercifully minus his old-man makeup) on the day of David’s creation. 

That scene sets the tone for a movie that doesn’t just expand on Prometheus but retroactively improves it, though that doesn’t mean you can’t see the skid marks when the hard left occurs. For all the compelling work Scott does with his character, there’s a whole middle section that veers awkwardly into fan-service, wherein Covenant yada-yadas away both the Engineers and Noomi Rapace before pivoting to the aliens in a way that is so painstakingly explicit you halfway get the sense that he’s doing it out of spite. It certainly feels a little deflating to watch, like you’re seeing an interesting, challenging idea being swapped out in real time for the low-hanging fruit everyone asked for.

That said, if Covenant is an explicit hymn to the devotees, at least it manages to string together the right notes. Waterston lacks the maternal rage of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, but she can string together some expletives and has her knack for weaponizing the nearest piece of construction equipment. Fassbender, playing both the returning David and a newer android named Walter, gives a whammy double-performance that’s the most compelling thing in the movie; it’s no exaggeration to say David might be the best role he has ever played. Billy Crudup delivers a kind, vulnerable performance as the ship’s captain. There’s a vastly entertaining sequence where the alien attacks two people in the middle of shower sex. (For a franchise that was always implicitly about sexual violence, it’s surprising it took this long for someone to get got in flagrante.) The alien itself remains cool, though for the most part it’s a distractingly CGI creation, a reminder that this franchise was always scarier before you could tell that the monster wasn’t really there.

Scott, meanwhile, is knee-deep in familiar territory, for better and for worse. You get the sense he isn’t overly wild about doubling back, but he at least skillfully pilots you through the trip. And, if he had to be cajoled into bringing back his most famous creation, he at least gets his kicks in with a blindingly contemptuous critique of humanity in the process. Covenant’s final scene is a little too obvious to be as chilling as it wants to be, but it crackles in a way no other scene really does besides the opening: It’s a meditation of power, and the contemplation thereof, and you get the sense that Scott might be exorcising some demons towards the viewers who forced his hand as it unspools. There’s a truly vicious movie lurking inside this piece of popcorn about who is fit to create, and Scott seems to want nothing more than to feed his cast into the heart of darkness and be on his merry way. I kind of hope, next time, that he does. If there’s one thing to take away from Alien: Covenant, it’s that mercy, both to the characters and the audience, is overrated.

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The 10 best movies of 2016 *subject to change*

What more needs to be said about 2016 than in a few short hours it will finally, mercifully come to its end, hopefully without dragging one last beloved celebrity/political system/gorilla into the void along with it. As eulogies go, that one’s a little harsh, but hey, it was just that kind of year. But before we trudge, beaten and bruised, into 2017, let’s take a look back to fire a middle finger in the direction of the year itself (which sucked) and shoot a “you’re cool” to the movies it produced (which were actually pretty good).

One caveat: Since I still haven’t caught a few of the late-year heavy-hitters just yet, this list is by no means set in stone. So, enjoy this list of the 10 best movies of 2016 (for now).

HONORABLE MENTIONS (Alphabetical order):

Captain America: Civil War – Drags waaaay more than you remember on a second viewing, but the third Cap flick manages to both pay off the previous eight years’ worth of Marvel Studios storytelling and set up the next eight, all while telling a self-contained story of an alliance coming undone. And, that airport fight is still the best action scene of the year.

Eddie the Eagle – The story of a lovable loser who’s only beloved because he lost with gusto is a fine line to walk, and this feel-good sports flick from early in the year manages to do so with juuuust the right amount of sardonic bite. 

Green Room – Or: PUNKS VS. NAZIS. This taught, 80-minute slasher gem about a two-bit punk band fighting their way out of a skinhead lodge sounds like a straight-to-DVD crapper; that it ends up being one of the most brutal horror films of the year is a testament to the taut intensity of the script and the rumbling presence of Patrick Stewart, playing against type as the big bad.

The Magnificent Seven – People slept on this throwback Western from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua in September. I found it to be a charmingly old-fashioned reminder that not every damn hero needs to have shades of grey. Sometimes they just gotta say a couple zingers, shoot the bad guys dead and ride off into the sunset.

Sausage Party – In a banner year for animation, the most underrated of the bunch took a one-note sight gag (hot dogs look like dicks) and spun it into a weirdly poignant metaphor about faith and mortality. Your mileage may vary on the atrocities of the final act, but, to borrow another food metaphor, fewer movies this year had the grapefruits this one did.

The Witch – Do you like your “thees” and “thous”? Then boy howdy is this movie for you. A grim, unrelenting “New England folktale” about a Puritan girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is accused of witchcraft when things start going bump in the night is a textbook example of earned thrills and atmospheric horror. Writer/director Robert Eggers instills the fear of God in his audience, largely because he waits until it’s too late for salvation to show the devil at work.

THE LIST:

10: Hail, Caesar!

Old Hollywood will come back into play a little later on this list in the realm of romance, but the Coen Brothers’ latest mines the life of a studio “fixer” (Josh Brolin) in the 1950s for screwball comedy and, oddly, a bit of divinity as well. If the movie’s various moving parts don’t ever entirely click into place, it’s forgivable on account of the acting and the individual set pieces, which include what may well be the funniest scene of the year. The movie caught some flack for maybe going a little too easy on some of Hollywood’s darker tendencies, but the Coens aren’t interested in punishment, just observation. They keep their distance and let the chips fall where they may, pausing to acknowledge that then, as it is now, even the most glorious among us are just trying to get by. We all want life to be easier, but would that it were so … well, you know.

9: Zootopia

“Racial tension, but with animals” sounds a little dumb on its face, or at least too ambitious for an early-year kids’ flick marketed as a caper starring a rabbit cop and a con man fox. But this surprisingly sharp satire from Disney managed to mine some solid social consciousness from a story that’s ostensibly about a bunny rabbit (Ginnifer Goodwin) who traverses and shatters several interspecies norms when she becomes a police officer in the animal city of Zootopia. It’s smart without being preachy, it’s clever without being smug, and it bites without leaving too many teeth marks.

8: Hell or High Water

The setup seems a little been-there-done-that (two brothers, one good, one less so, rob banks in order to buy back their foreclosed land), but the execution of this modern Western is so sneaky-good that you don’t realize all the pieces have clicked into place until you’re hurtling, white-knuckled, towards the final showdown on a roadside ridge. Jeff Bridges anchors the whole thing as a walrus-like Texas Ranger, giving what might have otherwise been a slight shooter a much-needed dose of true grit.

7: Finding Dory

As good as Pixar is, sequels are an iffy proposition for them, especially ones that hand the keys to breakout supporting characters from the original. (The Toy Story sequels remain the sole exception to this rule.) But the 13-year gap between Finding Nemo and Finding Dory apparently allowed the creative team to crack the code of telling the story of everybody’s favorite amnesiac tang (Ellen DeGeneres) while also finding a way to build upon the themes that made the original so resonant. By leaning out of the nostalgia traps that doom many a sequel and building a whole new world instead, this movie doesn’t just escape the shadow of its predecessor: it casts a pretty long one all its own.

6: The Lobster

Seeing this horrifying movie once would largely be enough for most self-respecting viewers, myself included. Nominally a comedy about a single sad sack (Colin Farrell) in the dystopian future who will be turned into an animal if he doesn’t get wifed up in 30 days, the movie gets grim fast and doesn’t let up, putting its characters through the emotional ringer en route to a, well, pointedly ambiguous ending. If you can get past the brutality, though, its ideas about love, and what we do to ourselves in order to feel it, are as compelling as they are difficult to stomach.

5: La La Land

So, yeah, your enjoyment of this one might depend largely on how much you’re into seeing Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling hoof it like Fred and Ginger while singing about romance and dreams in modern Los Angeles. For me, at least, I found it charming. Writer/director Damien Chazelle (miles away from the dogged punishment of Whiplash) mines the traditions of the Old Hollywood musicals for this contemporary story about an aspiring actress and a struggling jazz pianist who meet and fall in love over the course of a year in L.A. Bolstered by the year’s best soundtrack, the movie is directed in a mesmerizing series of uninterrupted takes and stylistic flourishes, culminating in a bittersweet ending that may well have even the hardest-hearted moviegoer on the verge of tears.

4: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

“Star Wars, but as an actual war” sounds a little dumb on its face, or at least a little too ambitious for a 40-year-old franchise largely built on a profoundly uncomplicated dichotomy of Good vs. Evil. And while the ideas of exposing the iffy morality Rebellion and the bureaucratic hell of the Empire in the days leading up to the original Star Wars are interesting cornerstones, the script doesn’t do nearly enough work with its characters (especially nominal lead Felicity Jones) to justify the jet-setting first half. But once the pieces are in place and director Gareth Edwards goes full Saving Private Ryan in the film’s bananas final act, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t converted into a true believer. While the future of the franchise is suddenly in question for the worst possible reason, this particular movie ends on a note of hope in more ways than intended: The parameters for what constitutes “A Star Wars story” have just been blown wide open, figuratively and literally.

3: Silence

At three hours long, Martin Scorsese’s dark-night-of-the-soul epic about two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) searching for their lost mentor (Liam Neeson) in Japan is certainly an endurance test. But the long-gestating passion project delivers on its promise on the back of powerful acting, a paced, patient script and the hand of its director, whose dogged determination to deconstruct his own Catholicism guides the story past some thorny imperialist terrain and some hard lefts into the supernatural towards an ultimate, devastating, payoff. Perhaps because of its accursed production schedule and the tightness of its deadline (it wasn’t even confirmed to be released until October), precious little has been said about this movie in the year-end conversation. It’d be a shame if it were to come and go without so much as a peep.

2: Everybody Wants Some!!

Bros: They’re just like us! After tracking one kid’s inevitable, step-by-step march from boy to man in Boyhood, writer/director Richard Linklater turns his eye to a bunch of nominal adults who cheerfully refuse to put away their childish things. Ostensibly about the exploits of a college baseball team in the dog days of summer, this “spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused” (oy) is far more interested in the relationships between young men and women, the struggle of the little fish in a big pond, and the uncertain leap of faith we all must take into adulthood – or, more crucially, whether we choose to take it at all.

1: Arrival

Aliens show up, and only Amy Adams can talk to them. That’s the basic premise of director Denis Villeneuve’s dreamy parable about the power of language that, ironically, features the first of two indecipherable Forest Whitaker accents this year. But Arrival has some bigger themes on its mind, few of which I can get into without spoiling the mind-bending third act. Suffice it to say, this movie doesn’t just turn the alien-invasion genre on its head, it’s the only movie in 2016 that ultimately says what we were all thinking, no matter what the language, in and out of the theater: Can we just fucking get along already?

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The throwback simplicity of ‘The Magnificent Seven’ (plus Denzel!)

Even a cursory glance at the movies in 2016 shows that irony is still the order of the day. You can’t trip over a hero or heroine, anti or otherwise, who isn’t self-depreciatingly aware of their role in the slog of good vs. evil. They’re either tired of the fight (Ben Affleck in Batman v Superman; Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America), taking their bumbling first steps into it (Key & Peele in Keanu; the embattled Ghostbusters gals) or openly mocking their role in it (Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool; Chris Pine in Star Trek Beyond). Creative as that kind of storytelling can get in the right hands, it’s also become a bit of an albatross for a cinematic audience who’s getting more than their fair share of self-aware public figures tip-toeing across the good-and-evil divide outside the cinema. Commentary is all well and good, but we don’t need the movies for commentary all the damn time. Sometimes we just need an uncomplicated hero. We need a true-blue savior. Dammit, we need DENZEL.

And we get him, in a cowboy hat no less, plus six other do-gooders in The Magnificent Seven, a Western that’s sometimes disappointingly slim but also as refreshingly old-school as it gets, going about its business in a way that’s so understated it would pass for subtle if not for all the explosions. The direction, by Antoine Fuqua, is no-nonsense and to the point; there are very few stylistic flourishes here save for the wide, panoramic shots that define the genre (he does love a wide view, but mercifully spares us the five-minute vistas Quentin Tarantino scattered throughout The Hateful Eight). The performances are, for lack of a better word, perfect; each actor fills their designated Western archetype perfectly and, by the way, seems thrilled to be doing so. The villain (Peter Sarsgaard, who should really be in more movies) is a high-pitched ham. This is a movie that could have come out in 1962, or even the jingoistic back end of the ‘90s, and been a hit. That it’s coming out now is both kind of a shock and kind of perfect – if there’s one thing modern audiences aren’t accustomed to but could probably use more of, it’s these unique, uncomplicated tales of heroism and redemption set at the edge of the world, a story in which good unabashedly conquers evil with a healthy sense of professionalism and ruthlessness.

There are few actor/director pairs better suited to the task. Fuqua’s movies – Training Day, The Equalizer et. al – have always presented a fairly straightforward view of morality with just enough wrinkles to keep things interesting (Denzel’s Training Day character being chief among them). Washington, meanwhile, is one of the last icons of true American masculinity; the sight of a black cowboy isn’t something one’s accustomed to (maybe outside of this), but when you first see Denzel sidling up to a saloon in the black hat, you know damn well some justice is about to be served. Sadly, he’s, less dynamic of a performer here than he usually is; his Sam Chisolm is an ephemeral bounty hunter with minimal moral complexions, and the script (co-written by True Detective impresario Nic Pizzolatto) doesn’t give Denzel a lot of room for the flourishes – a line here, a glance there –that tend to elevate both his dialogue and performances. Happily, the rest of the seven pick up the slack just fine, mainly Chris Pratt as a drunken gunfighter with a knack for card tricks. There’s also Ethan Hawke as a Confederate sharpshooter who’s gone gun-shy, Byung-Hun Lee as his knife-wielding compatriot, Vincent D'Onofrio as a hysterical mountain manchild, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as a Mexican gunslinger (“Oh goodie. We got a Mexican.”) and Martin Sensmeier as a bow-and-arrow toting Native American.

All of them are funny (Pratt especially), quirky (D'Onoforio especially), and, as you may have noticed, very diverse. That’s Fuqua’s big concession to the times and, to his and the movie’s credit, it doesn’t feel remotely like the thirsty grab for woeness it could have been. Rather, the background of the cast ends up serving the movie and providing a few unexpected character beats; a poignant exchange between Washington and Hawke is made all the more meaningful by the race difference between the two actors and Fuqua, who directed both to the Oscar dance in Training Day, simply gets out of their way while they bring it home. And then the big gunfight comes, Fuqua choreographs the action so no character is forgotten, no thread is left tied up. Even the local widow (Haley Bennett, all piss and vinegar) gets her shots in, literally and figuratively.

The staging of the showdown is enough to make up for the slightness of the rest of the move, which seems to pull back each time it veers towards significant character development in favor of a more archetypal view of its heroes. There’s one showdown in particular between Sensmeier and a Native on the villain’s side (Jonathan Joss) that could have carried a lot more heft than it does; it’s disappointing that the movie only plays it up for a tomahawk fight given some of the subtext that it might have explored had it bothered to look.

But then again, subtext might be asking too much for what is, essentially, a throwback feel-good movie. Westerns gonna Western, and, in the end, our heroes ride off into the sunset, in search of more wicked men to punish. The terrorized town rebuilds. A swelling score (one of James Horner’s last) blares over a line of graves. Good has triumphed. Wicked men have been shot down. It’s a little earnest for sure, and you can be forgiven for leaving The Magnificent Seven thinking that, for better or worse, they don’t make 'em like this anymore. But dammit, maybe they should.

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The satisfying sleaze of ‘Don’t Breathe’

Even with horror going through a little bit of a not-unwelcome arthouse phase lately (witness the atmospheric, throwback dread of It Follows or the proto-feminist brouhaha of The Witch), it’s refreshing to see there’s still some impressive offerings of skeeziness out there. Case in point: Don’t Breathe, a home-invasion thriller with a neat twist (it’s told from the point of view of the robbers) and impressive, kinetic direction by Fede Alvarez, who did the Evil Dead remake a few years ago. 

Now: What you won’t get here, sadly, is anything resembling a fully fleshed-out character; these two-bit burglars are basically trembling eyes and pumping tear ducts with feet, despite the noticeable efforts of the actors playing them. What you will get is some incredibly skilled scene-setting, camerawork and foreshadowing, and a hell of a villain in the form of Stephen Lang, who played the genocidal military guy in Avatar, and now plays a homicidal military guy who’s both sitting on a small fortune and blind, which supposedly makes him an easy mark for the trio of jabronis (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto) who try to fleece him. Turns out the old man can still do plenty of damage even without his eyes, and Alvarez (who also co-wrote the script) has plenty of fun tweaking the cat-and-mouse, monster-in-the-house trope for the duration of the movie’s hour-and-20-minutes. (His favorite variation on an old scare, wherein Lang bursts into a room and strolls obliviously past his withering targets, never gets old.)

That length is both a strength and a weakness when it comes to Don’t Breathe; it’s hard to imagine the movie extending its premise beyond such a slim running time, but the movie still manages to exhaust its bag of tricks (which turn out to be very extensive – there’s a nice mid-plot twist and a veer into gloopy body-horror in the third act) long before it’s time for the credits to roll. At least there’s a compelling main character, though only in the most basic sense of the word: Levy’s plucky pickpocket has dreams of leaving her dead-end Detroit town with her towhead sister in tow by any means necessary, which is easy to root for but not entirely novel (swap Detroit for Jersey and she’s a Springsteen character; swap her gender and she’s Eminem in 8 Mile), even for a genre that thrives on convention. Given that she’s the only one the movie takes any real time developing, it’s on her shoulders to keep the audience invested in what happens. In that regard, she succeeds. It’s hard not to root for her, and even if the movie doesn’t match its tools to her potential like, say, Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane, it’s hard not to see her breaking out with a meatier role down the line.

As for Lang, he adds a surprising dash of humanity to what could have easily been a monstrous cliche of a role, and the throaty, Bane-has-a-cold voice he affects is a nice touch that makes full use of the theater’s subwoofer capacities. Alvarez’s script trips up when it comes to some basic human interactions, but he deserves due props for not taking the easy way out when it comes to pigeonholing his two main characters. (Minnetti and Zovatto, not so much: The acting is impressive, but as characters they’re basically cannon fodder with a fuse delay.) As for the scares themselves? They’re fine. Alvarez has a lot of fun with an early long take and a second-act scene entirely in night vision, and he keeps finding novel ways to exploit the old scare when the villain pops up from behind the door, with the added wrinkle of him not being able to see the kids he’s trying to kill. 

As with all wafer-thin horror flicks, however, you may find yourself enjoying Don’t Breathe more while you’re watching it than after it’s over; it’s the kind of movie you admit to seeing with a small degree of embarrassment, even if you know you kinda-sorta liked it more than you’re letting on. As a sense-pummeling thrill ride, it’s a keeper. But it’s one best observed on a Sunday matinee or a late-night rental with buddies. You know, the way these things should be.

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The addled mayhem of ‘Suicide Squad’

Suicide Squad is a hot mess. It lacks finesse, patience or basic understanding of a narrative payoff. It misuses promising performances. It either forgets to make good on its big moments or blows most of the ones it remembers. It is ADHD in celluloid form, unable of following any interesting thread it begins for more than two minutes before its attention is diverted elsewhere. It barrels through obstacles without mercy or regard, like a drunk plowing his way through a hedge maze. It is constantly on the verge of redemption, or at least some kind of decency, only to relapse into its less-savory habits. Its musical cues are relentless and routine. (If I never hear “Spirit in the Sky” over an airborne scene again, I will die a happy man.) It feels like two movies edited into one (if the reports are to be believed, it is), one of which is dour but honest, and the other full of forced humor and trailer-ready reaction shots to villainous people doing villainous people things. As a result, it lacks identity. It feels nothing, demands nothing, and earns nothing beyond a weary disappointment that they blew it. Again.

And yet, like all hot messes, it is beautiful in the right light. The visuals are impressive if overwhelming, the shaky story redeemed slightly by a refreshingly brisk pace. The plot – the supervillain collars of Batman, The Flash et. al are forced to carry out a kamikaze government mission – is interesting, at least before it overthinks itself to death by turning one of the Squad (I won’t say who. Fine, it’s Cara Delevingne) into the villain. The performances are promising; the movie is acted with great commitment, or at least greater than it deserves. It’s the most effort Will Smith’s put into a non-Men in Black role since at least Hancock. There’s a weird little love story that lands better than you think it does as you’re watching it. You can feel the bits of DC’s accursed cinematic universe project creak agonizingly into place (Ben Affleck shows up as Batman again, while Ezra Miller flits in and out as The Flash). Suicide Squad wants to be the Hot Topic Avengers, or at least a dark-comedy Magnificent Seven. It is, of course, neither of those things, but like all of DC’s recent big-screen misfires, it is something.

For a DC movie offshoot that’s had no trouble selling tickets but zero luck in terms of a quality product, something will likely be enough. The movie’s outstanding (and numerous) trailers have guaranteed it a big opening weekend, which will likely lead to Part 2 down the line. At the very least, we can expect a spin-off for Deadshot (Smith, who powers through a belabored arc on sheer charisma alone), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, show-stealer) and The Joker (Jared Leto, underused), and maybe an appearance for the drunken Aussie Captain Boomerang (a delightfully disheveled Jai Courtney) down the line in Aquaman or something. They’ll likely save the grotesque Killer Croc (a campy Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and the underused Katana (Karen Fukuhara) for the straight sequel.

That’s just Marketing 101 (Suicide Squad is basically a soft debut for all of DC’s second-tier villains), but truth be told, they’ve earned the screen time. It’s remarkable to see Smith succeed despite everything working against him here (Deadshot is a flawless marksman with a paint-by-numbers soft spot for his daughter), and a refreshing reminder that the guy is still a true, blue, once-in-a-generation movie star. The movie wisely returns to the perky, petrifying Robbie every time it needs a pick-up (it helps that her chemistry with Smith is strong), but each time it brings Leto in, you wonder why it bothered to include him at all. The Oscar-winner famously went full Kirk Lazarus for The Joker, and for what it’s worth, it worked. Leto disappears entirely into the character, but the movie swallows both of them whole in response. The Joker isn’t part of the Suicide Squad, rather, he’s attempting to retrieve Harley from it, so he pops up every half-hour or so to shoot some people and deliver his hyena-on-Valium cackle. He’s meant to be a lurking wild card until he finally arrives to throw a monkey wrench in the narrative, but he never does much to change the stakes or the story. It all adds up to a painstakingly acted cameo; Bill Murray was in the new Ghostbusters for longer than this. It feels like there should have been more to it, and sadly, there probably was at one point.

Despite all this, unlike Man of Steel or Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad is a lot closer to its mark. It wants to be a quirky action comedy about dangerous people, and much of what kills this goal doesn’t lie in the story or acting, but in the absolutely nonsensical way in which it is edited. Its characters threaten each other with a violent death, then share a manly nod of understanding within a two-second span. This happens on numerous occasions, and it only gets more irritating as it does. It’s one thing to say the movie has a dumb plot (I’ll buy it), but writer-director David Ayer, who has done gritty street-level violence (End of Watch) and band-of-brothers drama (Fury), seems to forget that the whole appeal of an ensemble movie is the interaction among the damn ensemble. Even the Avengers films, which primarily exist to promote future Avengers films, understand this; nobody paid to see Thor whack a guy with his hammer in Age of Ultron, they paid to see Iron Man get drunk and try to pick it up.

Suicide Squad, as I counted, has exactly one moment like that, when the antiheroes have taken a hit and decide to drown their sorrows in a bombed-out watering hole. It’s not a bad setup – group of supervillains walks into a bar – and even a solid counter to the famous Marvel shawarma scene. The movie, luckily, knows it’s an important moment, so it slows down just enough to let the performances and characters breathe, but not enough to make it last. In a better movie, it would have made the whole thing. Here it’s just a deep breath before it dives back into the breach.

Oh, did I mention this movie was loud? It is, and not just in actual sound. True, the score swells from second one and doesn’t stop from there, but each moment is played and acted to the absolute hilt; much like Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad does not trust the audience to understand anything of reading between the lines. So, instead of allusions to its characters’ backstories, we get actual glimpses of them as they’re run down in the film’s opening scenes. (If you love flashbacks, boy howdy is this the movie for you.) It’s neat in the beginning, and a good way to get Batman and The Flash out of the way, but the movie keeps returning to the device at crucial moments to stop the action cold, most unforgivably in the middle of that bar scene when flamethrowing cholo El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) regales the crew with his tragic backstory.

So, yeah, it’s a mess. But like all messes worth seeing, it has one unassailably redeeming factor. This time, it’s Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, the government wheeler-and-dealer who puts the Suicide Squad together and lords over them like Big Brother as imagined by Shonda Rhimes. Her number two man, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, who’s very good) refers to her at one point as “the voice of God,” but Davis’ swaggering performance makes even that seem like an undersell. Waller’s role in this particular story is, like the rest of it, vaguely defined and poorly executed, but her omnipotent place in the DC canon (all together now: stay through the credits, folks!) ensures we’ll be seeing more of her down the line. In fact, since DC’s whole M.O. seems to be mid-stream course correction these days, let’s just recut Justice League into two hours of Viola Davis dressing down Batfleck, Wonder Woman and the rest of the crew while Robbie cackles in the corner and hits Henry Cavill with a giant mallet. Hell, bring Leto too. He can drink the blood of a dead rat or something. Maybe they won’t cut his scenes this time. Everybody wins.

[downinfront]

The addled mayhem of ‘Suicide Squad’

Suicide Squad is a hot mess. It lacks finesse, patience or basic understanding of a narrative payoff. It misuses promising performances. It either forgets to make good on its big moments or blows most of the ones it remembers. It is ADHD in celluloid form, unable of following any interesting thread it begins for more than two minutes before its attention is diverted elsewhere. It barrels through obstacles without mercy or regard, like a drunk plowing his way through a hedge maze. It is constantly on the verge of redemption, or at least some kind of decency, only to relapse into its less-savory habits. Its musical cues are relentless and routine. (If I never hear “Spirit in the Sky” over an airborne scene again, I will die a happy man.) It feels like two movies edited into one (if the reports are to be believed, it is), one of which is dour but honest, and the other full of forced humor and trailer-ready reaction shots to villainous people doing villainous people things. As a result, it lacks identity. It feels nothing, demands nothing, and earns nothing beyond a weary disappointment that they blew it. Again.

And yet, like all hot messes, it is beautiful in the right light. The visuals are impressive if overwhelming, the shaky story redeemed slightly by a refreshingly brisk pace. The plot – the supervillain collars of Batman, The Flash et. al are forced to carry out a kamikaze government mission – is interesting, at least before it overthinks itself to death by turning one of the Squad (I won’t say who. Fine, it’s Cara Delevingne) into the villain. The performances are promising; the movie is acted with great commitment, or at least greater than it deserves. It’s the most effort Will Smith’s put into a non-Men in Black role since at least Hancock. There’s a weird little love story that lands better than you think it does as you’re watching it. You can feel the bits of DC’s accursed cinematic universe project creak agonizingly into place (Ben Affleck shows up as Batman again, while Ezra Miller flits in and out as The Flash). Suicide Squad wants to be the Hot Topic Avengers, or at least a dark-comedy Magnificent Seven. It is, of course, neither of those things, but like all of DC’s recent big-screen misfires, it is something.

For a DC movie offshoot that’s had no trouble selling tickets but zero luck in terms of a quality product, something will likely be enough. The movie’s outstanding (and numerous) trailers have guaranteed it a big opening weekend, which will likely lead to Part 2 down the line. At the very least, we can expect a spin-off for Deadshot (Smith, who powers through a belabored arc on sheer charisma alone), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, show-stealer) and The Joker (Jared Leto, underused), and maybe an appearance for the drunken Aussie Captain Boomerang (a delightfully disheveled Jai Courtney) down the line in Aquaman or something. They’ll likely save the grotesque Killer Croc (a campy Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and the underused Katana (Karen Fukuhara) for the straight sequel.

That’s just Marketing 101 (Suicide Squad is basically a soft debut for all of DC’s second-tier villains), but truth be told, they’ve earned the screen time. It’s remarkable to see Smith succeed despite everything working against him here (Deadshot is a flawless marksman with a paint-by-numbers soft spot for his daughter), and a refreshing reminder that the guy is still a true, blue, once-in-a-generation movie star. The movie wisely returns to the perky, petrifying Robbie every time it needs a pick-up (it helps that her chemistry with Smith is strong), but each time it brings Leto in, you wonder why it bothered to include him at all. The Oscar-winner famously went full Kirk Lazarus for The Joker, and for what it’s worth, it worked. Leto disappears entirely into the character, but the movie swallows both of them whole in response. The Joker isn’t part of the Suicide Squad, rather, he’s attempting to retrieve Harley from it, so he pops up every half-hour or so to shoot some people and deliver his hyena-on-Valium cackle. He’s meant to be a lurking wild card until he finally arrives to throw a monkey wrench in the narrative, but he never does much to change the stakes or the story. It all adds up to a painstakingly acted cameo; Bill Murray was in the new Ghostbusters for longer than this. It feels like should have been more to it, and sadly, there probably was at one point.

Despite all this, unlike Man of Steel or Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad is a lot closer to its mark. It wants to be a quirky action comedy about dangerous people, and much of what kills this goal doesn’t lie in the story or acting, but in the absolutely nonsensical way in which it is edited. Its characters threaten each other with a violent death, then share a manly nod of understanding within a two-second span. This happens on numerous occasions, and it only gets more irritating as it does. It’s one thing to say the movie has a dumb plot (I’ll buy it), but writer-director David Ayer, who has done gritty street-level violence (End of Watch) and band-of-brothers drama (Fury), seems to forget that the whole appeal of an ensemble movie is the interaction among the damn ensemble. Even the Avengers films, which primarily exist to promote future Avengers films, understand this; nobody paid to see Thor whack a guy with his hammer in Age of Ultron, they paid to see Iron Man get drunk and try to pick it up.

Suicide Squad, as I counted, has exactly one moment like that, when the antiheroes have taken a hit and decide to drown their sorrows in a bombed-out watering hole. It’s not a bad setup – group of supervillains walks into a bar – and even a solid counter to the famous Marvel shawarma scene. The movie, luckily, knows it’s an important moment, so it slows down just enough to let the performances and characters breathe, but not enough to make it last. In a better movie, it would have made the whole thing. Here it’s just a deep breath before it dives back into the breach.

Oh, did I mention this movie was loud? It is, and not just in actual sound. True, the score swells from second one and doesn’t stop from there, but each moment is played and acted to the absolute hilt; much like Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad does not trust the audience to understand anything of reading between the lines. So, instead of allusions to its characters’ backstories, we get actual glimpses of them as they’re run down in the film’s opening scenes. (If you love flashbacks, boy howdy is this the movie for you.) It’s neat in the beginning, and a good way to get Batman and The Flash out of the way, but the movie keeps returning to the device at crucial moments to stop the action cold, most unforgivably in the middle of that bar scene when flamethrowing cholo El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) regales the crew with his tragic backstory.

So, yeah, it’s a mess. But like all messes worth seeing, it has one unassailably redeeming factor. This time, it’s Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, the government wheeler-and-dealer who puts the Suicide Squad together and lords over them like Big Brother as imagined by Shonda Rhimes. Her number two man, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, who’s very good) refers to her at one point as “the voice of God,” but Davis’ swaggering performance makes even that seem like an undersell. Waller’s role in this particular story is, like the rest of it, vaguely defined and poorly executed, but her omnipotent place in the DC canon (all together now: stay through the credits, folks!) ensures we’ll be seeing more of her down the line. In fact, since DC’s whole M.O. seems to be mid-stream course correction these days, let’s just recut Justice League into two hours of Viola Davis dressing down Batfleck, Wonder Woman and the rest of the crew while Robbie cackles in the corner and hits Henry Cavill with a giant mallet. Hell, bring Leto too. He can drink the blood of a dead rat or something. Maybe they won’t cut his scenes this time. Everybody wins.

[downinfront]

‘Ghostbusters’ is bold, deferential and kind of disappointing

In the end, the solution wasn’t “cast dudes.” In fact, of all the problems that plague the ballsy but joyless remake of Ghostbusters, the chromosomes of the cast rank way, way down on the list. It’s pretty much impossible to make a movie starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones and not get a few LOLs out of it, even if some of the seedier comments section might call sacrilege (among other, less repeatable terms) that the four aforementioned ladies were recruited to replace Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, the late Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson as the faces of a 30-year-old franchise that began by happy accident in 1984. 

No, this very, very 2016 Ghostbusters goes wrong at a far more basic level in that while it is occasionally funny, it forgets, for the most part, to be fun. The characters don’t gel. A few one-liners aside, the actors never seem comfortable in their roles except for McKinnon. Its New York is very plainly Boston, so you don’t even get a sense of place. There’s a lot of stuff about how girls rule and boys drool, but only the lowest of Redditors would have disputed that claim at this point. (Here we pause to note that, at a key moment in the movie, a 40-foot, living manifestation of the Ghostbuster logo is shot in the dick with proton packs; enough already, we get it.) The movie barrels along with a chip on its shoulder, but hasn’t much in the way of finesse. There are jokes, but not great ones. The actors all crack up at one point like someone caused them to break, but it seems performative, like they want everyone to see how much fun they’re having. Ghostbusters has the feel of a movie that everyone knew needed to be made, but nobody could figure out how to make.

The weight of destiny will do that to you. The original, very legendarily, came to be almost as a fluke, and the bizarre circumstances of its creation were reflected in the random union of the three schlubby academics and Average Joe who somehow bundled their way into a blue-collar ghost-wrangling business. This new Ghostbusters is an origin story, gravitas and repetitiveness (and post-credit sequel tease) and all, so it affords its leading ladies all the pedigree of the world-saving heroines they will become: Erin (Wiig) is a tenured Columbia professor; Abby (McCarthy) is an eccentric genius; Holtzman (McKinnon, whose bizarre performance steals the movie cold) is the mad scientist who invents the proton packs; and Patty (Jones) is a streetwise New Yorker with encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s history. These are clearly people who are meant for bigger and better things, and bustin’ has become that bigger and better thing. The movie’s low-key subtitle is Answer the Call, for Chrissakes.

Still, okay, let’s go with it. On paper, director Paul Feig, who made both the supposed Great Feminist Hope (Bridesmaids) and the actual one (Spy) is the ideal man to steer the ship. But given the boldness of ousting Murray & Co., one of Feig’s most persistent, and ironic, missteps is that he keeps tripping over himself to kneel at their altar. Minus an MIA Rick Moranis, everyone from the original movie gets a cameo here, including but not limited to Slimer the ghost, a big Twinkie and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (Ramis, obviously, is not there, but he receives a dedication that is both subtle and charming, a rarity in a movie that mostly has time for neither). In the age of fan service, that’s certainly one way to earn brownie points. Murray even gets two scenes, which is the rough equivalent of his entire cinematic output in the early 2000s. And yeah, it’s good to see the old guard give their cosign. But for a director, and a cast, who are more than capable of making something their own, it’s a big disappointment that their Ghostbusters doesn’t so much land in the shadow of the original as choose to set up shop there.

In that regard, it gets what it wants. The ghost (drink) of the source material hovers over the entire proceedings here, and it can’t help but do so when the movie’s efforts to become its own creature mostly lead it to middle-of-the-road retreads of material that’s been done better before. The vengeful ghouls steer the movie a bit harder into horror than it maybe needed to go. The script doesn’t so much foster chemistry among its characters as fire off an endless string of vaguely-scientific-gobbledygook-reaction-shot-repeat. A lot of the banter goes nowhere fast. (There’s a bit about a cat in a bag that felt, roughly, five hours long.) A lot of it feels like it would have been better as an R-rated movie, since McCarthy, who is the nominal lead – she’s first-billed at the very least – thrives in the realm of the obscene. Jones seems on the cusp of a string of profanities, McKinnon is visibly chomping at the bit to get weird, and Wiig, as the straight (wo)man, only works when she has something truly outrageous to play off of.

If nothing else, the move goes big at the end: The villain has unleashed spectral pandemonium on Times Square, and our four ladies start kicking ghostly ass with all the doohickeys, slow-mo shots, and spectacular special effects money can buy. It’s a gorgeous scene, kind of exciting if the very definition of low-hanging fruit, and more than any other point in the movie, it feels like Feig and his cast really wanted to at least get that part right. In that moment, you realize there’s a reason this movie felt like it needed to be made: It kind of did, and not just for nostalgic value. 

The truth is, the landscape of storytelling, in Hollywood and elsewhere, has begun to shift. Actors and characters that wouldn’t have gotten a chance to shine before are now being given the keys to some relatively (some might say overly; Ghostbusters II did kind of suck, after all) beloved properties. (Here we pause to acknowledge this Ghostbusters’ one bullseye in the realm of social commentary, wherein the ladies hire a hot moron played by Chris Hemsworth to be their receptionist. He’s very funny, and game to be skewered as a doltish himbo.) The image of the four women striding fearlessly into the eye of the storm is not one easily forgotten. All of which is to say it’s great – great – that little girls can now definitively say they see themselves growing up to be the Ghostbusters and not just the secretary. But they don’t have a better movie to point to yet. You can’t lose if you’re the only game in town, so if Ghostbusters is a win for them, and flaws and all, I think it is, it’s the most backhanded kind you can get: By default.

[cjmarano]

The world is hers.  #thebadcat #imincharge #meow

[downinfront]

You people are nuts: ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ was fine

There’s a bit in X-Men: Apocalypse that will definitely make you laugh, whether you’re a garden-variety comic-book fan, a drooling fanatic or a lapsed believer feeling the weight of one too many superhero movies: The setting is a mall in 1983, and a #squad of young mutants – mopey psychic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), jockish, laser-eyed Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), devil-in-a-Thriller-jacket Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and glam-fab wallflower Jubilee (Lana Condor) – have just partaken of Return of the Jedi. Proving that this sort of thing never really went out of style, the foursome is engaged in a spirited debate of ranking the Star Wars movies. Jubilee tosses out Empire, citing its willingness to knock its heroes down a peg; Cyclops rides for the original (“Without that, none of this would be here”), but it’s Jean who has the last word.

“We can all agree,” she snarks, “that the third one is always the worst.”

As Homer Simpson would say, it’s funny because it’s true. And applicable! X-Men: Apocalypse is, by a wide margin, the weakest movie in the prequel/retcon trilogy that began in 2011 with Matthew Vaughn’s Bond-homage First Class and continued in 2014 with the time-travel epic Days of Future Past. I hesitate to call it “worst” becaue it’s only that by default; taken on its own merits, the movie’s not bad at all. If anything, it suffers the pressure of having to follow Captain America: Civil War after only three weeks and, yes, the overwhelming weight of being the fourth superhero blowout in as many months after Deadpool lit up February and Batman v Superman reared its ugly head in March.

That’s market saturation to be sure, but if Apocalypse is destined to go out as a drop in the bucket, the splash it makes is impressive. An inherent need to escalate the conflict does fly in the face of what were, minus all the bells and whistles, two relatively small stories (First Class is, at its core, about a fractured friendship, while Days of Future Past is rooted in the pros and cons of a single decision), but director Bryan Singer, who did Future Past, and writer Simon Kinberg are wise to ground the story in the development of their core characters for as long as they possibly can before the explosions start.

Give them credit, then, for knowing where the bread of this new trilogy has been buttered. One remarkable thing about the recent films, which have each taken place across three different decades, is how naturally its characters have been allowed to age. Of course ‘60s playboy Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) would grow into a fuddy professorial type in the '80s; meanwhile, twenty years of militant fighting has left Magneto (Michael Fassbender) war-torn and living off the grid in what turns out to be the movie’s most gripping, underexplored subplot. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) who began the series as Xavier’s docile pseudo-sister before being radicalized and abandoned by Magneto, now runs a mutant Underground Railroad. Most amusingly, dickish hellraiser Havok (Lucas Till) has grown into a buttoned-up stiff with a mullet. Seeing their reintroductions is more than a little remarkable, not just because the acting remains much better than it needs to be, but because we’ve literally followed these characters since their formative years. Their current iterations feel less like a plot contrivance than a development that has been planned, groomed and earned.

It’s not long, of course, before trouble comes a-brewin’ in the form of Apocalypse himself, an omnipotent windbag from ancient Egypt who boasts the power of God, the skin of a Smurf and the acting prowess of Oscar Isaac. Awakened after a thousand-year slumber that’s set up in a very-cool prologue, he stumbles into a world ripe for the taking, sets about recruiting followers to his cause and eventually comes into conflict with Xavier, who possesses the one power he has yet to amass.

Much has been made of the character dampening Isaac’s natural charisma, which was so prominently displayed in Star Wars and Ex Machina last year. Not so. It’s true that he doesn’t have anything nuanced to play (Apocalypse aspires to – wait for it – rule the world), but Isaac compensates by going big and he’s kind of great at it. His Apocalypse is gargantuan in the most cartoonish sense; you think the performance will end in the consumption of a still-beating heart, but it turns out the scenery is more than filling enough. Sure, he’s a ham, but no more so than he was in this. This is Isaac’s Brando-in-Superman moment and it ends up being the sort of thing The Dark Knight Rises’ Bane might have been if Tom Hardy didn’t take himself so seriously. Apocalypse’s powers remain undefined throughout his namesake movie, but chicken shit into chicken salad is clearly among Isaac’s.

The same, to be fair, can be said of Singer, who’s behind the camera for his fourth X-outing and has the benefit this time around of paying off the ensemble he spent the last two films building. (Part 3 of the original trilogy was passed to Brett Ratner.) He does so mightily, if occasionally futilely, finding enough space between the noise for the all-important character beats needed to keep a threequel afloat. If these bits aren’t as banter-filled as the ones in Civil War, they still ring just as honest to what came before, and his actors seem far more game to deliver them than you might expect. Of the big three, only Fassbender looks lost, and only because he’s shunted to the side immediately after his biggest moment.

The movie does have a few genuine slip-ups. Zippy, quippy Quicksilver (Evan Peters) stole the show in Days of Future Past with a slow-motion rescue sequence and he does so here with another, but the movie struggles giving him a reason to stick around beyond that. There’s a 30-minute detour that almost stops the entire movie cold for the sake of a five-minute appearance by a feral Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, as ever). Rose Byrne is back as the same CIA agent she played in First Class, and she’s even more underused than she was then. (at least she got to shoot something last time around.) The too-long final battle finds room for family drama, widescale destruction and an Inception-style fistfight of the mind; only that part is truly exciting. Of Apocalypse’s followers, Olivia Munn and Ben Hardy are around to basically showcase the film’s astounding special effects. (As the new Storm, however, Alexandra Shipp all but erases Halle Berry from the canon. She’s great.)

In the end, yeah, it’s all sound and fury for the sake of nothing. Cities are leveled, the expendable characters die, and untold devastation is rained upon the innocents of Earth, all so four or five kids can finally throw on some lycra jumpsuits from a '90s cartoon. It’s hard to feel like it’s as worth it as the movie wants it to be. The last two movies were predicated on the idea that people can change, for both good and evil. Apocalypse pretty much leaves its characters where we found them, just in different time zones. Xavier is the professor; Mystique is mother hen to a new generation; Magneto is in the wind.

That’s not anyone’s ideal capper to a trilogy so predicated on moving its characters forward, but it ain’t the end of the world, either. Plus, as a post-credit scene indicates, there’s probably gonna be another one. After two trilogies, a pair of Wolverine spinoffs and Deadpool, even the most ardent of believers might find that pitch stretches the bounds of goodwill, but Apocalypse does enough to earn the benefit of the doubt. There’s even precedent for holding out hope: As Star Wars recently proved, the third one might be iffy, but the seventh is usually pretty good.

[downinfront]

‘The Nice Guys’: Never heard of ‘em, and that’s okay

The Nice Guys is not based off of anything; it is not a sequel to anything; it is not a reboot, a spinoff, a “blood relative” or a second cousin to any existing property currently staking claim on the multiplex landscape. It stars a couple big names – Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling and Kim Basinger – but even those stars are more known for stuff they did ten years ago (Gladiator for Crowe) or five (Drive for Gosling) or twenty (let’s go with, oh, L.A. Confidential for Basinger). It’s got a well-known director and co-writer in Shane Black, but unless you bothered to check the credits on Iron Man 3 (which he directed) or Lethal Weapon (which he wrote), you probably heard that name and thought of a second-tier pro wrestler. Point is, The Nice Guys is that rarest of commodities: An Original Idea, bereft of studio expectations, a ravenous fan base, or constricting source material. If you didn’t see the trailer, you probably didn’t know about it. 

This doesn’t, of course, necessarily make it good – similarly source-less Money Monster debuted a week ago to a resounding “Meh” – but it does make it refreshing. Equally so when you consider that The Nice Guys actually is really, really good. Not necessarily in a “redefine the genre” way or even “revitalize a career” way, but in that “I’m overwhelmingly glad that I chose to spend $15 on a ticket for this” kind of way.

That’s a rare kind of good these days, and while I’m well aware that statement makes me sound like an art student bemoaning The Death of Cinema, I assure you that isn’t the case. I love me a good tentpole picture, and Civil War is among the best you’ll ever see, but enjoying a movie like that is different. There are expectations. Benchmarks to set. Fans to appease. The new Spider-Man has to be good. The fight has to deliver. The post-credits tease has to land. The goal is less “make a good movie” than “stick the landing,” and simply being relieved that they didn’t blow it is a backhanded compliment to bestow upon a movie, no matter how happy you are to give it. The Nice Guys really just has to be worth your time, and Black, who’s either feeling unshackled from his one-and-done Marvel stint or emboldened by the success it brought him, guides the whole thing  with a loopy, whacked-out ease, seeking adventure and finding it by, mainly, placing utter trust in his leading men to carry the film even when the story – as all detective yarns do – inevitably gets too twisty to make sense.

And carry it they do. As their press-tour banter has shown, Crowe and Gosling have chemistry, and it’s apparent from the very first scene they share, where Crowe’s monosyllabic leg-breaker Jackson Healy punches his way into the home of strung out P.I. Holland March (Gosling) and breaks his arm. March is looking for a girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley from The Leftovers). Healy’s been hired by her to keep March away. Neither of them really knows why until the girl goes missing, then they’re both hired to find her. 

Pleasantly R-rated shenanigans ensue, as the movie winds its way through a kinda-too-dense plot that somehow finds room for a dead porn star, the automotive industry and a government bigwig (Basinger) who is also Amelia’s mother. If you’ve seen the trailer you know the broad strokes and potentially think you know the intricacies too, but the movie has a gratifying amount of tricks up its sleeve that the clips didn’t spoil. True, a lot of that is on the back of the revitalized Crowe (why did they cast this guy as a conqueror all those years when he’s so much better as a goon?) and the firing-on-all-cylinders Gosling, who takes his endlessly meme-ified hey-girl hotness and buries it under a quivering mass of terror; he’s half P.I., half possum in this movie. But the remaining credit for The Nice Guys’ surprises goes to Black’s script, which throws in a lively supporting cast (hey there, Keith David, Beau Knapp and Matt Bomer) ping-pongs between Roger Rabbit-style slapstick (a running joke involves March continuously falling off of roofs) to Lethal Weapon-esque action comedy on a dime, while finding room for character beats and quirks that help propel his heroes along. Proving his genre influences know no bounds, Black even throws in a Fear and Loathing hallucination for good measure. 

That particular sequence, which features a talking bee, is the only one in the movie that kind of seems out of left field, but Black is smart enough to keep it going just long enough, before pivoting back to reality and paying off the detour in a matter of minutes. It’s the kind of movie where there isn’t a lot of wasted movement, and even the parts that seem superfluous (I could have done without the subplot involving March’s daughter, even if Angourine Rice is delightful playing her) carry a payoff at the end. An ending, which, ironically enough, sets The Nice Guys up for a sequel. In a perfect world, at least within the context of my pontification a few paragraphs back, they’d cap off the story and call it a day. But if they were, hypothetically speaking, to make another one? That wouldn’t be so bad either. Hell, they might even make it a tentpole this time around.

[downinfront]

‘The Jungle Book’: If you liked it then, you’ll like it now

Confession: As far as Disney movies go, The Jungle Book was never my jam. It held a constant presence in the VHS bin, sure, but ‘90s chestnuts like The Lion King and, well, more The Lion King, meant Mowgli, Baloo, King Louie and the rest got shuffled way, way down the rotation. So at least half of the nostalgia/awe combo that director Jon Favreau summons with his new live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book is tragically lost on this particular Disney kid.

It almost doesn’t matter because the movie looks beautiful. Next to James Cameron’s Avatar, it’s tough to think of a movie that conjures up this lush of a computer-generated world. This Jungle Book is a visual feast, rolling out photorealistic animals and expansive, jaw-dropping vistas every other minute. Before seeing this movie, I watched a fan-made video that cut together the best single shots of 100 years of the movies from 1915 to 2015; I counted about four or five early contenders for 2016 in this one alone, especially when “man’s red flower,” aka fire, comes into play for the big finish.

But given that we’re in the midst of a Disney remake renaissance (The Jungle Book follows last year’s Cinderella; Beauty and the Beast is up next) where nostalgia is both creative cornerstone and promotive marketing point, your enjoyment of The Jungle Book will largely rest on your relationship to the animated original. 

For me, that’s not much. Seeing man-cub Mowgli (lively newcomer Neel Sethi) snuggle up with adoptive wolf mother Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o)? Nope. Looks cool but no pangs of childish yearning. Hearing Idris Elba snarl his way through a genuinely terrifying performance as Shere Khan? Impressive, but that character has long since lost his place in my nightmares. Watching Baloo (Bill Murray) yawp out “The Bare Necessities” as he drifts down a stream with Mowgli on his belly?

Okay, I’ll admit that one got me. I’m only human (though that might make me a villain in this story), and truth be told, I didn’t dislike the movie. Having made two Iron Mans (Iron Men?) Favreau knows his way around a thriller. This one is fast, it’s funny and the voice acting is more or less spot on (it did take me about 15 minutes to remember Giancarlo Esposito is voicing one of the wolves, though). But it’s tugging at very specific heartstrings that I’m simply not tuned to, and the effort sometimes shows.

Effort, you say? Unlike Cinderella, which looked pretentious but went down easy, this seems like it was a hard movie to make. Sethi, for instance, is compelling enough, and far be it from me to level criticism at a kid actor whose entire debut movie was done on green screen. He’s plucky and charming and he’s got an actual swagger in his step by the end that’s well-earned. But the interaction between him and the animals that comprise Mowgli’s world is awkward bordering on forced; a lot of times it feels like the characters sharing a scene are from two different movies, or it at least seems like what it probably was: Sethi acting against nothing. 

Distance seems to give the process a boost. The most memorable sequence is the introduction of King Louie (Christopher Walken), here imagined as a massive grotesque with the streetwise patois of your average wiseguy. It works, one, because of Walken’s casting (hilariously, Louie has his exact face). Two, because cinematographer Bill Pope’s camera has a lot of fun with Louie, teasing the reveal of his enormity in fits and spurts – an arm, then a head, and then whoa, his entire body – and three, because Mowgli never interacts with him directly the same way he does with Baloo, or, say Bathera (Ben Kingsley), the wise old panther who provides the story’s narration.

That’s a tough pill to swallow given that the story’s central tenet involves Mowgli striving to prove himself as a member of a pack. The resolution of that story – the “man cub” is forced to decide between an uncertain life among the humans or the comfort of his jungle brethren – is pretty much pre-ordained the moment the movie starts. Potentially because you’ve seen it before, but that’s a danger inherent in remakes. The challenge comes with finding something new to say about the story. I’m not entirely sure The Jungle Book does that. But does have a singing grizzly bear with Bill Murray’s face. Whether or not that’s a bare necessity, I can’t say. But it’s nice to have. 

[downinfront]

RETRO REVIEW: ‘Tropic Thunder’ predates the PC Era, but just barely

Rewatching Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder (streaming now on HBOGo) for the first time in years, only one thought kept flashing through my head: They didn’t really do that, did they?

In the age of cultural appropriation, microaggressions, and the rise of social media as a PC pulpit for both the allegedly and legitimately oppressed, this movie could not and would not get made. It would have been torn apart from the get-go and writer/director Ben Stiller would have been chained to a rock to have his innards plucked by the Twitter bird. It’s a little jarring that Tropic Thunder is very distinctly a product of its time and a little depressing that its time was only eight years ago. Viewing it today with all the baggage that accompanies nearly every piece of entertainment produced makes it, retroactively, a very Complicated movie that borders on (sigh) a Problematic one. It’s also a very Good one, but watching it back, you can’t help but think that would be the last thing anyone cared to learn about it.

The story is about the botched filming of an Apocalypse Now-style Vietnam movie, but the characters are Hollywood personalities turned inflated and monstrous; the worst parts of the rich and the famous made flesh. What’s shocking to realize now is that, back then, that sort of thing was the movie’s selling point. Its big headline was that Robert Downey Jr. played an Australian Method actor who undergoes skin pigmentation surgery in order to play a black Sergeant … and it ended up getting him an Oscar nomination! (He lost to Heath Ledger.) Its ace in the hole was that an un-promoted Tom Cruise showed up under a pound of makeup as a cretinous Jewish studio head who’s more chest hair than man … and that role kicked off his comeback!

It speaks to the quality of the movie that the jokes landed then and still land now, but it speaks also to the freedom afforded moviemakers only eight years ago that Stiller got to make them at all. Whether that freedom is a sign of some kind of cultural primitivism or a wistful reminder that everyone was a lot less touchy back then is kind of your thing, depending on where you land in the Twitterverse these days. I’ll be the first to admit 2008 wasn’t exactly the Best Year Ever, but in the case of Tropic Thunder I’m inclined to cut it some slack: The other thing that kept flashing through my head during the movie was that it’s a shame it’d never get made today. The movie is, was, and will always be very goddamn funny, because it’s a satire of Hollywood and Hollywood will never really change.

Sure, diversity will improve and women will build a presence in the studios and call sheets (it won’t happen tomorrow, but it will happen, and this is a good thing), but Tropic Thunder’s through line that nothing is sacred in Tinseltown will hold constant until the end of time. Race, creed, religion, even life itself. In Stiller’s movie, all of it pales in comparison to the almighty dollar. At one point, it’s suggested that a character who’s taken hostage be allowed to die because the studio would actually turn a profit from setting up a charity in his name and recouping the life insurance.

Money, the movie says, is the only God that matters, save perhaps good publicity or an Oscar. (Here we pause to acknowledge Downey’s “full retard” monologue, which was kind of shocking even then. It’s one of the few times the movie is crass for crassness’ sake and would never have happened in 2009, let alone 2016.) In real life, that doesn’t seem too far off. Would the Academy have kick-started a diversity initiative if the last two Oscars didn’t become one giant whitewashing controversy? Would a gender-swapped Ghostbusters even exist if Hollywood’s dearth of female opportunities hadn’t come to the forefront over the last two years? Does doing the right thing even matter if you don’t have the box office receipts to show it?

On the surface, Tropic Thunder is a wacky meta-comedy (Nick Nolte with a flamethrower! Steve Coogan stepping on a landmine! Pyromaniac Danny McBride!) that doesn’t seem to concern itself with such questions, but that is, at its core, the very thing Stiller is asking. What’s remarkable is the level of trust must have taken to make this movie. As writers, Stiller and co-scribe Justin Theroux don’t pull their punches, but they also trust the audience to figure out who their target is. As the director, Stiller is smart enough to fill his cast with people willing to send up the machine that made them stars (including himself as a fading action hero making one final play for respectability) because they’re all smart enough to understand that same machine also robbed them, in some fundamental way, of their decency (the Hollywoodification of one’s soul is played out here by a very funny Matthew McConaughey, in curls and a proto-Kanye pink Polo, as Stiller’s agent). There’s a reason the only character with a lick of sense is the fresh-faced newbie (Jay Baruchel) making his big debut: He’s the nicest, most genuine guy out of all of them, and the only one unsullied by the movie business. It’s probably the same reason nobody else in the movie knows his name.

That’s another thing: The movie is more sensitive than I remembered, too. Brandon T. Jackson’s rapper-turned-actor Alpa Chino (still funny) is revealed by a slip of the tongue to be gay, but his unrequited love of Lance Bass is handled with surprising delicacy and understanding by both the filmmakers and characters (minus one killer line from Downey). Jack Black, too, gives the best performance of his career as a comedian with Eddie Murphy’s penchant for playing multiple characters and Chris Farley’s penchant for drugs. He’s so good in part because the movie affords his character some dignity even when his circumstances don’t; not once does anyone lecture or chastise him. He asks to be tied to a tree, so they tie his ass to a tree until he’s ready to go.

I have a hard time believing anyone would get past the optics of the whole thing today to even realize all that that; it’d be Downey in blackface and that’s all she wrote. If this movie came out tomorrow, it’d come with a trigger warning. Tropic Thunder triggers something, all right: Nostalgia.

[downinfront]

Contrivance v coherence in ‘Batman v Superman’

There’s a lot to be frustrated about in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but the most hand-wringing, head-banging thing about it is that, dammit, there’s something here.

Whether it’s the paradigm-shifting superhero movie director Zack Snyder thinks he was making is another story. But even taking the requisite world-building and stage-setting into account, there are enough solid performances, interesting ideas, and luminous visuals (like Snyder’s 2013 Superman reboot Man of Steel before it, this is, if nothing else, a gorgeous movie) to suggest the skeleton of a better, more intelligent movie here than the sledgehammer to the face we’re getting.

Actually, sledgehammer is too subtle a weapon to describe Batman v Superman. Much like its Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), this movie seeks nothing less than total annihilation. Not of the world, though the box office receipts may give it a shot. Of the senses, of the tear ducts, of the mind itself. There is no fireball unfilmed in glorious slow-motion, no pained visage unlingered upon for what seems like half of the movie’s two-and-a-half hour (kill me) running time, and absolutely no scene that goes unpulverized by Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL’s apocalyptic score. You do not merely watch this movie. You kneel before it.

Which would be fine. I’ve heard worse sales pitches. But, also much like its Luthor, you’re not entirely sure what its plan is all in service of. The movie ends up being sound and fury for its own sake, or, really, the sake of the next thing. That’s an outcome both ironic and sad because the setup for Batman v Superman is actually a pretty good one. 

Via a clever bit of retconning, BvS posits that a long-in-the-tooth Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) was on the ground in Metropolis during the battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod (Michael Shannon, collecting a solid paycheck here as a corpse) that closed out Man of Steel. The clash made Superman a big-picture hero in the public’s eyes. A divisive one, yes, but still a hero. For Wayne, who moonlights as the nightmarish Batman of Gotham City across the bay (nice touch) and was forced to survive the fallout himself, it made Superman a liability. How can anyone trust in a person, a thing, really, who could destroy the world unopposed if the mood strikes him?

Even if it takes a rehashing of Master Wayne’s origin story (darkness, no parents, etc) and reframing this Batman as a literal monster (his intro is the stuff of a most excellent horror movie, which is a Batman I’d love to see) to get there, it’s no small feat that BvS doesn’t make Bruce’s worldview seem outlandish. He was shaped by pain and fear and conditioned to believe the worst in people, so if we must have a Batman, surely he’s the kind of man who would spend the 18-month interim between Man of Steel and BvS quietly preparing for a way to take Superman down.

That’s good, understandable character work. The other guy is less lucky. For all the ground work Batman gets, BvS undoes Man of Steel’s painstaking Christlike foundations by making Superman – and, unforgivably, Clark Kent – both something of a misanthrope (to be fair, I’d buy it as character development, but something, either Cavill or the script, can’t close the gap) and a guy who is fully aware of, and okay with tapping into, the extent of his powers. At least two major characters are implicitly threatened with death by this Man of Steel, or at least made to understand it’s on the table.

That’s been the dealbreaker for the comic crowd since 2013. Personally, the killing aspect of this version of the character doesn’t bother me. It’s an intriguing and, if we’re being honest, much-needed wrinkle for the flying slice of Wonder Bread (remember, they made a wholesome Superman in 2006 and nobody liked it). Given the trail of bodies Affleck’s Batman leaves in his wake, it’s also one that both evens the playing field when the big marquee showdown comes and grounds it in some sense for the audience. Batman kills because he has to. Superman kills because he can’t help himself.

So far, so good, right? Well, the sense stops there, because the movie spends an hour and a half building to its big fight and yet somehow the bout itself manages to come absolutely out of nowhere. There is, as in the comic book that partially inspired BvS, a very definitive winner of the fight, but the slugfest itself is less a battle of Batman v Superman than contrivance v coherence, and coherence gets walloped soundly. I knew why these two didn’t like each other, but apart from a bizarre series of plot twists that awkwardly bring them head-to-head, I had no idea why they were actually fighting. I had no idea where and when Batman assembled the suit of armor he dons for the showdown. I had no idea how the world’s greatest detective allowed himself to become Lex Luthor’s puppet (one of those contrivances). And, as a result, I didn’t really care who won.

For a movie that literally has the fight in its title, that’s unforgivable. Part of this, yes, lies at the feet of the director. Nobody has ever accused Snyder of subtlety, but at least his previous movies were understandable. Even the most intriguing and important plot points here are presented without context. We know Gal Gadot is playing Wonder Woman (she’s great, by the way), so of course she’s lurking in the shadows every time Bruce Wayne does his gumshoe routine, and when she shows up at the end, everyone just sort of takes it as a given. We know Lex Luthor is Superman’s archenemy, so of course he finds a way to become so, despite the fact that his motivation – he’s a survivor of domestic abuse and, unable to take revenge on the God who never saved him, has decided Superman is the next best thing – is only partially explained.

But is it all Snyder’s fault? You get the sense that this was both exactly the movie he wanted and somehow not enough. Affleck’s performance won’t erase Christian Bale or Michael Keaton from your memory, but Snyder shoots his Dark Knight either in low-camera angles or wide shots so the breadth of his body fills the frame; he successfully does what no filmmaker has but many probably should have and turns Batman into a monster (a particularly haunting touch is his tendency to brand the victims he leaves alive). Eisenberg makes a marvelous psycho; he’s the hammiest thing here and one of its chief highlights. From the trailers you wouldn’t even think Amy Adams is back as Lois Lane, but she is, and she runs away with the whole thing on the back of a disciplined, straight-arrow performance. Laurence Fishburne (as Perry White), Jeremy Irons (as Alfred), Diane Lane (Ma Kent) and Holly Hunter (a Senator who’s right in the middle of the pro-con Superman debate) are all great. Wonder Woman’s intro at the end of the movie elicited some well-earned cheers from the audience I saw it with. The last battle is entertaining as hell. That stuff’s all great. Great, great, great. Or at least good.

But something gets lost. Snyder’s made no bones about having to cut up the movie a bit to avoid an R rating, and it’s hard not to wonder if the stuff he cut might have tied it together better. More to the point, it’s hard not to wonder if the stuff he had to keep cut it off at the knees. Cool as it is to see Ezra Miller and Jason Momoa cameo as The Flash and Aquaman, and as great as that post-apocalyptic dream sequence is, that’s all setup for Snyder’s Justice League movie that’s due to start shooting any minute. Beyond fan service, it does nothing for the movie we’re watching now.

Which, fair point, is par for the course as superhero movies go these days. Almost every Marvel movie builds to another. But they can each stand on their own, even the bad ones. Batman v Superman, or at least this version of it, is a stopgap in every sense of the word. At least it boasts some good writers to its name: Chris Terrio won the Oscar for Affleck’s Argo and David S. Goyer penned The Dark Knight, which means that the same guy who did this once wrote that the night is darkest just before the dawn. Which also means, that, hey, the optimistic coda of Batman v Superman is applicable in more ways than one: Maybe things really are about to get better.

[cjmarano]

Video: Obama Dances the Tango

The president took to the dance floor at a state dinner in Argentina.

;)

[downinfront]

For animal adventures, ‘Zootopia’ is a bird of a different feather

A race/class metaphor disguised as a talking animal caper, Zootopia is a sneaky bit of social commentary that’ll still manage to move a truckload of merch. Pin its appealing nature, in part, to the breathtaking design of its world, based around a glittering metropolis built by and for animals. The rest of it is due to the fact that Zootopia, tasked with threading a very delicate thematic needle (surely a moviegoer in the age of Twitter can be forgiven for wanting to leave social commentary at the door of a talking animal movie), does so with a steady hand and clear purpose. It avoids feeding kids more than they can handle, and it keeps things light enough for the adult crowd they won’t feel talked down to.

Not so light that you don’t miss the point. It’s pretty stunning to see small-town bunny cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin, awesome) converse with a fox (Jason Bateman) and choose to display her open-mindedness by complimenting him as “articulate.” It’s even more surprising that the script, and Bateman, play his reaction perfectly; in Zootopia, foxes are apparently looked down on, so this is a character who’s been told he’s no good all his life and he knows lip service when he sees it.

The plot itself is the kind of fast-moving storytelling that will keep the tykes glued to their seats: Judy and Nick Wilde, the con man fox, become unlikely allies in an attempt to uncover why several of the predators in Zootopia are “going savage.” (an important plot point is that predators and prey have long since evolved past their need to eat and fear each other, so it really is dogs and cats living together.) The cast of characters is diverse both in species (the mayor is a lion, his assistant is a sheep) and race (Idris Elba is the police chief bison; Shakira plays a pop star/activist gazelle), but the Disney factory that produced Zootopia is too smart to reduce their creation to a pander. Even when the plot stalls or the self-referential bits get too heavy – I could have done without all the Frozen shout-outs, though the first one hits big – directors Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush keep things humming along.

Whether this will lead to a sequel is a bit of a non-issue. It definitely will. And it should. t’s fun, it’s good, and everyone involved seems to be having a great time. Whether that sequel will dilute the triumphs of the original is a bit of a murkier matter. But that’s a question for another year. For now, it’s refreshing, for once, to see a talking animal flick that’s mercifully light on bullshit.

[downinfront]

‘10 Cloverfield Lane’ shows what’s in a name, and what isn’t

Given its tantalizing, six-month lead-up that began with an unannounced, untitled teaser trailer that promised little more than a release date, more than a few people seemed disappointed to find out that 2008’s Cloverfield was, in the end, just what it appeared to be: A found-footage movie about a bunch of overwhelmed yuppies scurrying in fear from a giant sea monster. Never mind that the movie has aged into a pointed disaster allegory on par with the original Godzilla and helped make stars out of at least four of the people involved – director Matt Reeves (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), stars Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex) and T.J. Miller (Deadpool) and writer Drew Goddard (Oscar-nominated for the screenplay of The Martian). The consensus seemed to be that producer J.J. Abrams had sold audiences a bill of goods, capitalizing on his flair for mystery (at the time, the Abrams-created Lost was rolling full steam ahead) with a promotional campaign meant to divert attention from the fact that, hey, it’s just a monster movie.

For the record, I liked Cloverfield. A lot, actually. And I liked the new quasi-sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane, too, though the absolute worst thing about this movie has turned out to be its marketing. Originally an unrelated thriller called The Cellar and, later, Valencia, Abrams (also a producer here) swapped the title without warning, dropped the trailer and rechristened it a “blood relative” of the first Cloverfield without ever really elaborating what that means beyond a shared sense of mystery. What gives?

Well, there are a couple Easter-eggy narrative connections between the two films, but this one really has nothing to do with the 2008 movie. If anything, it’s more an anthology counterpart, which is pretty great in its own right. (the idea of an Abrams-shepherded Twilight Zone is not an unappealing one.) It’s also a decidedly smaller one, one that drops three people in a room and puts you in the shoes of the one character who seems to question why they’re there. That’s Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who flees home after a fight with her boyfriend (Bradley Cooper in a phone-voice cameo) only to get run off the road in an accident. She wakes up some time later in a doomsday bunker built by a garrulous farmer named Howard (John Goodman). He says the world’s ended and the Russians have come to collect. Or the Martians. Or the Chinese. Either way, everyone outside is a goner, but he managed to save her life before the bombs fell, so how about some damn gratitude, lady? She doesn’t believe him. But her roommate – cellmate? – an affable hayseed played with aww-shucks charm by The Newsroom’s John Gallagher, Jr., says it’s the real deal, so much so that he broke his arm attempting to fight his way into the bunker.

And … that’s about it. The majority of the movie takes place in the bunker, and it’s left to Michelle, and the audience, to decide whether Goodman’s character is just a truther or telling the truth. There’s enough to suggest either possibility. Certainly something’s causing that ominous rumbling overhead. Winstead, as an ordinary woman who’s pushed to her limits, does a good Sigourney Weaver in Alien (the movie even has her crawl through a duct at one point), but the real star of the movie, in a lot of ways, is the original Cloverfield, and that’s where the problems come in.

Unlike the first Cloverfield, which more or less promised what you got, this one turns out to be built on a red herring. It almost doesn’t matter because the movie is really good, but it mattered to me more than I’d care to admit. And that’s a shame, because the finished product is impeccable by almost every measure. The direction by first-timer Dan Trachtenberg is tight and relentless, the script (credited to three writers including Whiplash’s Damien Chazelle) is solid and the performances are great, which I have to think is a product of the cast not knowing they were doing a Cloverfield until after the fact. The tension in the movie really lives and dies with Goodman; you’re meant to wonder more about his true motivation than what’s outside the bunker and his rumbling, twitchy performance keeps you guessing until the film finally shows its hand. But the movie does, eventually, have to get out of the bunker, and that’s where, for a large number of people, it will become make-or-break.

What’s outside of the shelter? Is it Russians? Martians? The Cloverfield monster itself? (I’ll save you the suspense on that one: No.) It’s … something. I’ll say the movie definitely has a trump card to play beyond answering the question of Howard’s motivations. And unlike the first Cloverfield, it doesn’t entirely capitalize on what Abrams has promised.

Part of that is a difference in both tone and design. The original movie used 9/11 as its allegorical foundation (“People are going to need to see this,” was Miller’s money line), but it was pretty straightforward. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a lot less rooted in metaphor – if anything, it risks being too heavy-handed by placing its heroine under the stewardship of an imposing white man who insists he knows what’s best for both her and the world itself – but the other part is a difference of intention of what to do with that design. That Abrams chose to add to an already promising mystery by linking it to one of his more divisive creations was a masterstroke of promotion that will certainly put butts in the seats. But, upon an immediate viewing, it turns out to also be misdirection that hurts the ending more than it helps.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so down on it. This is a damn good movie that will almost certainly play better on repeat viewing. It will make a star out of Trachtenberg. It will, Lord willing, lead to a renaissance for Goodman and meatier roles for Winstead, who can and should do better than plucky action heroine of the week. And, in a post-Lost age, it’s refreshing to see that people are still hungry for a good mystery. But despite the kinship of marketing, to label this movie a “blood relative” of anything is a stretch. True to its franchise, 10 Cloverfield Lane is exactly what it appeared to be: Adopted.

[cjmarano]

Hangin with my homey. #nofilter #girlpower #thebadcat