At the Movies with General Havoc

[General Havoc]

Hail, Caesar!

Alternate Title: That's Entertainment! VII

One sentence synopsis: A 1950s studio boss must track down the kidnapped star of his biggest production of the year, while simultaneously dealing with a series of other crises afflicting multiple movies.


Things Havoc liked: This project began with the Coen Brothers, many years ago at a western by the name of True Grit. Though it was the first film I ever reviewed on this project, it was hardly the first Coen Brothers movie I've seen, as they've been entertaining me and mine since the early 90s with everything from Fargo to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, to The Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men, and The Hudsucker Proxy (shut up, I liked that one). With a pedigree like that, a new Coen Brothers film is the sort of thing that instantaneously lights up my movie radar, and the fact that it was a classic ode to Hollywood of old, starring approximately half of the actors in the world only made it more appealing. I know that not all of you are as obsessive about watching movies as I am, but for a cinephile like myself, this was like the promise of power and riches. I was in.

It is 1951, the golden age of Hollywood, and Eddie Mannix, played by the imperturbable Josh Brolin, is the head of production at Capitol Pictures, a massive MGM/Warner Bros/Universal-scale motion picture studio simultaneously working on dozens of different projects. It is Mannix' job to play the fixer, to resolve the ten thousand and one impediments that arise each day at the various location or backlot shoots, and somehow keep the stars and directors of Capitol's various movies happy, alive, and out of the press, not necessarily in that order. Hollywood is, and always has been, an insane place, and Brolin plays the character like a devoted worshiper at the altar of moviemaking, mugging for the camera with a whole series of fifties-style "Good gravy, what will the boss say when he hears about this?!" over-readings, which is exactly the right choice for a movie this stylized. I've not always admired Brolin's work, but he's excellent as the perpetually frazzled lead in this, a romantic who plainly worships the magic of Hollywood, even as he dives regularly into the seamier sides of it.

Nor is Brolin alone here, for the Coen's have assembled a murderer's row of excellent actors to cast in an old-fashioned Hollywood romp. Front and center is George Clooney, playing a sendup to Kirk Douglas, a massive Hollywood superstar of great fame and few brains, the star of the tentpole film "Hail, Caesar!", a Romano-biblical epic in the style of Ben Hur. Clooney's character is a buffoon famous for being a famous actor, but nails the role perfectly, both in the overacting he indulges in on set, and the easily-led, shallow thoughts he leads with when off it. The plot of the film, such as it is, concerns Clooney being kidnapped by a semi-inept gang of Communist screenwriters, who indulge in pointless garbled debates concerning arcane points of Marxist dialectic, the sorts of things that sound profound and deep to people who can't parse together the fact that they are all talking through their hats. Meanwhile, back at the studio, a handful of other subplots are boiling over, including Ralph Fiennes, playing a David-Lean style veteran British director saddled with Alden Ehrenreich, a Gene-Autry-style singing cowboy whom the studios are trying to push forward as a movie star despite the fact that the film he's being pushed into is a costume drama and the fact that he can't act at all. There's also Scarlett Johanssen, doing a synchronized swimming send-up to Esther Williams, swimming gracefully in a fountained pool dressed like a mermaid before climbing out of the water and complaining about her "fish-ass". There is Christopher Lambert, doing a ludicrous send-up to Werner Herzog, a director who clearly has no idea what the studio boss is talking about when he storms onto the set, but feels that everything can be resolved with a hug and a pre-emptory command to go. There is Clancy Brown, doing... well Clancy Brown, by and large (I require nothing more than this), and best (and most surprising) of all, there is none other than Channing Tatum, who gets an entirely pointless extended song-and-dance number clearly inspired by South Pacific or similar musicals, in which he tries to turn himself into Gene Kelly, singing, dancing, and even tap dancing for no reason other than the fact that it's the 50s, and Hollywood believed this sort of thing would sell. The purpose of these sequences really isn't to service the plot, by and large, it's to simply showcase the glitz and glamour of a romantic period in Hollywood history, if only because we're now far enough away from it that we forget the truly awful dreck that came out amidst the Cleopatras and Sierra Madres.

And that's... more or less all there is to Hail, Caesar, an excuse for the Coen brothers to assemble a cast and have fun with them. Oh Brother Where Art Thou was no more than this after all, and Hail, Caesar has similarly absurd showcase moments that make little sense when sat down and pondered over, but seem organic from within the movie. An extended sequence wherein Channing Tatum is rowed out to sea to board a submarine, for instance, has nothing really to do with anything, save as an excuse for Tatum to mug for the camera shamelessly as he leaps dramatically for the railing and tosses his hair back to deliver a parting quip in the best tradition of a Golden Age setpiece. There's a slow-burn sequence of great length and determination as Ralph Fiennes tries desperately to find a line that Ehrenreich is capable of delivering reasonably, and the Coens even get everyone's favorite ubiquitous actress, Tilda Swinton, to play identical twin gossip columnists, trying to out-scoop one another for scandal stories for their respective tabloids, all while screaming that "the people deserve to know the truth!" If this is the kind of thing that you go to the movies to see, then Hail, Caesar delivers just that.



Things Havoc disliked: If, on the other hand, you go to the movies looking for things like plot, characters, or story, then you're in a bit more trouble.

The Coen Brothers have always made weird, quirky films, but those films usually had a point to them, even if that point was simply weird quirkiness (The Big Lebowski comes to mind). They had plots, of greater or lesser importance, and stories, and characters that populated them and were showcased to us by virtue of living in Coen-Brothers-world. But Hail, Caesar, to its detriment, has none of those things, no characters beyond the thinnest veneers, no plot to speak of, no surprises or twists beyond the most rudimentary of tactics, nothing, really, except the glamour of early Hollywood, and even for the Coens, that is not enough.

Consider Brolin, who is laden with a boring subplot concerning a job offer he is being pitched by Lockheed-Martin, for a position that pays extravagantly well, necessitates none of the crazy hours or absurd wrangling that his current position involves, and would reward him after ten years with sufficient stock and bonuses to retire for the rest of his life. And yet can he really turn his back on the crazy-but-glamorous world of movie-making with all its insane and loveable characters? Well I've got a better question, does anyone really give a damn? Brolin certainly doesn't, as he never seems more than slightly perturbed by the kidnapping, terrorism, and McCarthyesque flirtations with Communism that his actors and directors are up to. Without a sense of why he would take the job, why would we ever consider the possibility that he might take it to be a compelling one? After all, it's not like he's currently in a position lacking in money, power, or interest.

But then that's a minor issue compared to everything else. It may sound like there's a plot to this movie, with kidnappings, ransom demands, and the Communist threat, but that's all me trying to pull the movie together into some semblance of order. In reality, none of this amounts to anything, not the kidnapping, not the communists, not anything at all. Half the cast seems to have joined into the movie on a dare, and not because there was anything for them to do, including Johanssen, who gets one scene of any interest, and even that of no consequence, before falling for another character off-screen in a manner that conveniently absolves the film of any need to put her before us again. Jonah Hill, who I usually like, is in the movie for about thirty seconds and contributes nothing to it, and the same applies to Coen Brothers' regular Francis McDormand, who I don't recall even getting a single line of dialogue and who seems to have been placed in the movie for the purposes of a slapstick gag. This isn't cameo casting, or a stunt performance like Channing Tatum's from This is the End. Even seemingly-major characters like Ehrenreich or Swinton really have no purpose in the film. They exist, appear, say lines, and are gone. I've seen every Coen Brothers movie there is, and they do tend towards having weird characters for the hell of it, but in those movies, the characters in question exist to throw light on the world or the other characters that inhabit it. These characters have nothing to show us, and show us nothing for the runtime of the movie, before it finally ends, with nothing having happened, and nothing being resolved.


Final Thoughts: Hail, Caesar! is not a bad movie. It's not a particularly good movie either though, and when it comes to these directors and this cast, not being particularly good is damning enough. I am and remain a great fan of the Coens', and the fine movies they have given to us, such as No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, True Grit, and many others besides. As Roger Ebert used to say, I cite these fine films as an antidote to this one, a movie that came to be on a marketing sheet and never properly evolved from there, and one that proves conclusively that a handful of scenes, even when directed by great artists and performed by great actors, do not a movie make.

I have seen far worse movies over the course of this project than Hail, Caesar! But few had this pedigree and this potential, and did this little with them. One can only hope that the Coens remember what it is to make a movie in the near future, at which point we can put this minor misstep behind us, where it belongs.

Final Score: 5/10

[LadyTevar]

I did wonder what you would think of "Hail, Caesar!", because I knew your thoughts on the Coen Brothers.

[General Havoc]

Deadpool

Alternate Title: A Romantic, Heartwarming Journey of Self-Discovery and Love

One sentence synopsis: A mercenary suffering from inoperable cancer undergoes a radical procedure designed to cure him by making him a super-soldier.


Things Havoc liked: To say that Deadpool was a movie with a troubled history behind it is to say that Avatar made some money or that Battlefield Earth was poorly made: a description that is technically true in every way, and yet utterly inadequate to describe the thermonuclear scale of the problems associated with the character and his cinematic existence. Having made his debut in the execrable X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a movie in which the legendary "Merc with the Mouth" had his goddamn mouth sewed shut, the prospect of a full-on Deadpool movie seemed... remote. And yet, six years later, what has 20th Century Fox gone and done with the legendarily 4th-wall averse invulnerable mercenary, but made a movie about him. And then released it in the doldrums. With Ryan Reynolds still playing the lead.

In fact, let's talk about Ryan Reynolds for a second, because this situation is just too strange to gloss over. Reynolds has been jonesing to play Deadpool for a long time, at least since 2003 if the internet is to be believed. His dream came true back in 2009 only to implode into a singularity of near-perfect suck, in a film that not only took away the vocal chords of one of the most prominent talkers in comics, but did so in the midst of a film that was also a colossal trainwreck in several other dimensions. Origin's failure having left the prospect of a standalone Deadpool movie in tatters, Reynolds bided his time by making crap like Paperman, Turbo, Self/Less, The Woman in Gold, R.I.P.D., and yet another comic book disaster of a film, this time on the DC side of the spectrum, 2011's Green Lantern. Yes, Reynolds has had the occasional success in the midst of all that dross, but were it not for the inexorable rise of Marvel and the corresponding bonanza of Superhero movies that we are all in the middle of nowadays, there is strictly no chance that this thing could possibly have gotten made, let alone with the same damn actor attached to it, an actor who already presided over a $350,000,000 superhero flop. Coming off a string of something like nine consecutive bad movies, and with his last appearance as the character one of the low points of the genre, was there really any chance that Reynolds and first-time director Tim Miller could possibly come up with something good?

Well... it turns out that yes. Yes there was.

Deadpool is a good movie, veering on a great one, and that is a statement I was certain, to the point of wagers, that I would never say. And yet here I stand, saying it, and the credit for why I am doing so can really only go to Ryan Reynolds himself, the man whose labor of love this has been for more years than I have been writing these reviews, and who, given one final chance to get the character right, finally hits it right out of the park. Green Lantern was a disaster, yes, but what most people have forgotten is that Reynolds was actually pretty damn good in the movie, albeit unable to overcome massive deficiencies in the film's writing, directing, and scope. Unburdened at last from the chains of inferior filmmakers, Deadpool affords Reynolds a chance to finally break loose, and boy does he ever. His incarnation of Deadpool is just perfect, foul and crazy and demented and twisted up and vengeful and violent and bloody and utterly contemptuous of the very concept of the 4th wall, constantly stopping for outtakes, asides, and strange breaches of continuity that do not hesitate to satirize the less-than-shining path that Reynolds has walked to get to this place. As Wade Wilson, a goon for hire with a deranged sense of humor, who veers constantly on the edge of being an unlikeable douche but never quite jumps over the line, Reynolds finds his true calling, as if Van Wilder grew up to shoot and slice men for money and make sardonic jokes along the way. This is the kind of character that can quickly become unwatchable, requiring as it does a delicate balance between actor, writer, and director, and while there are wobbles at times, Deadpool's total disregard for continuity allows the character to become whatever is required for a given scene, be it a tender romantic scene with his girlfriend, screaming rage at the bad guy, orgiastic violence against a horde of mooks, snarky asides to the audience, or often, all of the above. I've seen a lot of movies try to make characters like this and fail, but Reynolds has the same robust lack of inhibition that characterized his work on Green Lantern here, and wordlessly softens the most assholish parts of the character while sharpening the others. The result is a lot of fun.

And part of the reason it's so much fun is because of the cast around Reynolds, which begins with Morena Baccarin, another actor I had given up on after she went on from Firefly to do approximately nothing. Yet here she's just great, a match for Reynolds' twisted humor and lunatic disregard for social mores, complementing Wade Wilson almost perfectly. If, as I am often told, some people just "make sense" together, then these two do, and the establishment of just what makes them tick properly (particularly a running gag involving ever-more ludicrous sob-stories about their awful childhoods) sets the tone just right. The villain meanwhile, played by the usually-useless Ed Skrein (see the latest Hitman movie if you want proof of that), takes a page from Spy, whereby if you wish to make your asshole hero more likeable, give them a villainous foil who is even more of an asshole by several orders of magnitude. Skrein isn't much of an actor and never has been, but he can play a smarmy British douchebag as well as anyone, granting the audience license to enjoy the catharsis of having a psycho like Deadpool inflicted on him and his plans. Supporting roles are generally strong as well, with particular accolades due to Brianna Hildebrand, playing Millenial X-man Negasonic Teenage Warhead (this is apparently a real character), whose signature is bored disinterest with Deadpool's antics, and T. J. Miller as Deadpool's friend and bartender, Weasel, who effectively plays a cross between his character from Silicon Valley and his character from Big Hero 6, a stoner slacker who accepts the insanity of Deadpool and his surroundings with nothing but snark, because what the hell else is he supposed to do?

And then there's everything else. Direction, writing, cinematography, not the best we've ever seen in a superhero film, certainly, but far from bad. In keeping with a lot of films from the last couple of years such as Ant-Man or Iron Man 3, Deadpool is a film with a limited scope, attempting to avoid superhero fatigue by means of concentrating on its strengths of comedy and action. Being one of the only R-Rated Superhero movies ever made certainly helps with this, as the action is crisp and bloody, if not spectacular, and the comedy, with a few exceptions, is right on the money. A standout opening scene gag, replete with layered jokes, references, and Easter Eggs, all set to the Juice Newton Adult Alternative staple Angel of the Morning, is one of the funniest things I've seen at the movies in a long time, and is easily the best credit sequence since Watchmen. Ditto a sterling after-credits sequence, about which I will say nothing beyond the fact that it takes place in the smoking ruins of the Fourth Wall and introduces the possible movies to come in a somewhat more... direct manner than most of us are accustomed to.



Things Havoc disliked: The plot of Deadpool is nothing to write home about, a standard origin story mixed with a formula threat from a generic bad guy and his army of disposable evil leather-clad gunmen. Given the disasters that attended heavy plot-laden movies like The Wolverine or X-men 3, I suppose playing it safe on this front was inevitable, but it is reasonably hard to generate much concern for the mechanics of the film when neither the characters nor the director seems tremendously interested in them. More important is the sidelining of several major characters as the plot goes on. Baccarin's character, after a strong beginning, fades into the background as the movie becomes more of a formula piece, as does the inventive humor, which never quite departs, but does get a lot less fresh. Perhaps the filmmakers thought they had to lead with the A-material, and they probably weren't wrong, but the result is that the second half of Deadpool is considerably less strong than the first. Not an uncommon failing with movies in general, to be fair, but one that does keep Deadpool from attaining the heights of its more lavishly-funded brethren.

Overall though, the problems with Deadpool aren't in the form of some terrible decision made by a studio hack, or a particular scene that misfires spectacularly, but rather a lack of audacity. I know this might sound strange given how audacious a prospect it was to bring this movie to the screen in the first place, and I'm not trying to pretend that there wasn't an element of risk that had to be weighed, but for a character like Deadpool, in a movie that frames itself as being very much bereft of taste, restraint, and common sense, there is a palpable sense that perhaps not everything that could have been done with this character and these settings, was done. Some characters, such as the blind old lady that Deadpool rooms with, seem to have been effectively left in as an afterthought, as they have nothing to do with any aspect of the plot, nor any particular element of interest that draws them. The fourth-wall breaks, while many, are mostly pretty standard 90s-era fake Indie fare, and don't quite live up to the promise that the film's marketing campaign (which involved outright trolling at points) seemed to make. Maybe I'm projecting too much, but I found myself filling the holes in the film with my own mental suggestions, hoping that it would push the envelope even further and reach even higher, but it never really did. The filmmakers seem to have intended to make a serviceable film, and did so, but great art is made by those who dare more.


Final Thoughts: Comparing Deadpool to great art is not going to do me any favors with the segment of my audience who thinks I don't spend enough time watching silent black and white films about sad clowns flipping pancakes by the illumination of a bare light bulb, but the point is justified, I think, by the fact that the movie Deadpool reminds me of the most, ironically, is last December's Star Wars Episode VII. Obviously the films are very different in tone and scale and budget and intention, but what links them in my mind is that they both felt like proofs of concept, attempts to justify to someone at their respective studios, or perhaps to the audience itself and critics like me, that films like them were even possible in the first place. And like Star Wars before it, Deadpool, whatever its failings, answers that implied question with an emphatic yes. It is not a great film, nor a great comic book film, but it is a damn good one, a better one than I expected to see from this actor and that director and these conditions that it was made in. Already green-lit for a sequel, Deadpool may yet prove capable of the potential I saw within it, or it may become yet another franchise to collapse under its own weight. But if nothing else, Deadpool has earned the right to exist, and that alone is justification enough.

Final Score: 7/10

[Steve]

What's this? You didn't give it an 8 or higher? MEDIOCRE.

[General Havoc]

What's this? You didn't give it an 8 or higher? MEDIOCRE.

Now now, Steve. If I gave an 8 to everything, it wouldn't mean much anymore.

[Steve]

What's this? You didn't give it an 8 or higher? MEDIOCRE.

Now now, Steve. If I gave an 8 to everything, it wouldn't mean much anymore.

I'm not asking you to give everything an 8 or a 9, just stuff that deserves it. Like Deadpool.

You can save the 7s for stuff like Batman vs. Superman.

[frigidmagi]

I think Havoc's score is fair, although I really enjoyed the movie. Part of the reason for the less punchy 2nd half was budget issues but hopefully that won't be a problem in the next movie.

[Josh]

Morena Baccarin, another actor I had given up on after she went on from Firefly to do approximately nothing.

What

V. Homeland. Gotham.

She's been working.

[General Havoc]

Morena Baccarin, another actor I had given up on after she went on from Firefly to do approximately nothing.

What

V. Homeland. Gotham.

She's been working.

Pardon me, I should have said "nothing good or useful".

[Lys]

Yeah unfortunately while Gotham is pretty damn a pretty damn good show replete with great characters, the only purpose of Morena Baccarin's Dr. Leslie Thompkins is to serve as an object of fixation for Edward Nygma. A waste I suppose, but it does mean more screen time for the main characters Fish Mooney and Oswald Cobblepot. Wait what? You thought the main characters were Detective Gordon and Bruce Wayne? Yeah, so did i, but then Fish and Penguin went and stole the show.

[Josh]

Maybe I'm biased because somewhere around Homeland she went from 'cute' to 'smoking hot' on my taste scale, but I've enjoyed her work.

Okay, definitely probably biased.

[Steve]

Yeah unfortunately while Gotham is pretty damn a pretty damn good show replete with great characters, the only purpose of Morena Baccarin's Dr. Leslie Thompkins is to serve as an object of fixation for Edward Nygma. A waste I suppose, but it does mean more screen time for the main characters Fish Mooney and Oswald Cobblepot. Wait what? You thought the main characters were Detective Gordon and Bruce Wayne? Yeah, so did i, but then Fish and Penguin went and stole the show.

....

Yeah, it's a good thing I don't watch Gotham.

[General Havoc]

Triple 9

Alternate Title: Atlanta Heat

One sentence synopsis: A crew of armed robbers decide to kill a police officer in order to buy themselves enough time to perform one last job for the Russian Mafia.


Things Havoc liked: Though a fair number of people regarded it as highly overrated, I've long held that Michael Mann's 1995 crime film Heat is one of the greatest movies of its genre and its decade, a tour-de-force crime drama starring some of the greatest actors in Hollywood at the top of their games, including Robert De Niro before he began phoning everything in, and Al Pacino at the height of his screaming-insanity phase. Heat was a spellbinding film, one that followed both cops and organized criminals through their lives, their careers, and the pressures they faced trying to do their jobs and defeat one another, and in many ways, Heat stamped its mark on all such films to come, most of which, as is common enough in Holylwood, were not worthy of the heritage they had been given. Still, the nature of film is that when one movie fails, another steps forth to try again, and I've continued to patronize organized crime and heist drama films in the hopes of finding something similar to the masterpiece I saw twenty years ago. With that in mind, this week I sat down to watch the latest offering of John Hillcoat, an Australian director whose credits include the underrated Lawless and the perennially miserable The Road, as he tried to recapture the magic with a new slate of excellent actors plunged into the dark worlds of organized crime and policing.

And excellent actors these are. Triple 9 stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, a man whom I shall one day learn to pronounce the name of, as Michael Atwood, the leader of a crew of organized criminals and corrupt cops, who engage in high-stakes, violent armed robberies of difficult, well-secured targets. Among his crew are crooks played by solid character actors Norman Reedus (Boondock Saints, Walking Dead), and Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), as well as a pair of crooked cops, played by Clifton Collins and one of my favorite actors of recent years, MCU's Anthony Mackie. Following a successful heist, a double-cross, and a need to perform the obligatory "one more job", the crew struggles with putting a plan together to allow them to break into a nearly-impenetrable DHS black-bag facility without being captured by the police task force assigned to do just that. Every one of these actors, whether I've liked them before or not, is excellent in this film, portraying hard, violent, frightened men, some of them holding things together better than others, trying to get ahead in their lives as both the cops and the Russian mob make their lives difficult. But the standout surprise here is the head of the Russian mob in question, an unrecognizable Kate Winslet of all people, playing the widow/wife of an imprisoned Russian mobster, willing and capable of any act of violent depravity necessary to getting her way. I've long-since forgiven
Winslet for Titanic, and I praised her earlier this year in Alan Rickman's A Little Chaos, but I legitimately did not even recognize Winslet in this role until the credits ran, so staggeringly alien is it to everything she has ever done previous to this, and so effortlessly does she embody a character one would normally associate with people like Kristin Scott Thomas.

But as with Heat, the crooks are only half of the cast, as we also have non-corrupt police, particularly Officer Chris Allen, played by Casey Affleck, younger brother of Ben. I was never the biggest fan of Casey Affleck, having assumed, as I imagine did everyone else, that he only rose to prominence on the coat tails of his brother. But then, about eight years ago, he began making movies like Gone Baby Gone (directed by his brother), Out of the Furnace, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, all of which were good movies, and all of which he was good in. And so he is here, playing not a fresh-faced rookie but a quiet, reserved cop who gradually begins to realize the magnitude of the events he is being enmeshed in when he becomes Anthony Mackie's (reluctant) partner. I was expecting something like Ethan Hawke in Training Day (not the worst model imaginable), but Affleck plays the character significantly cooler, as he struggles to figure out exactly what's happening in a situation that is rapidly spiraling out of control. It's an excellent performance overall, one that should flush away all concerns regarding nepotism in future endeavors.

Enough about the cast though, because the strength of Triple 9 is its direction and mood, a paranoid thriller that balances a vast number of competing agendas while giving us characters operating on partial information at best at all times. Normally this sort of thing is just annoying, as it relegates the audience to an hour or two of boredom while the characters slowly catch up to where we all are, but when the movie plays everyone as endangered and ignorant, regardless of their personal capacities, then things become much mo0re interesting. Ejiofor and Winslet's duel of wills, wherein he attempts to get paid and she attempts to extort more high-risk work from him, is compounded by all manner of complications, such as the fact that his ex-wife, with whom he has a son, is also her sister, a series of relationships that some of his crew know some elements of, and some do not. Characters routinely walk into rooms with double-agents that they don't know are double-agents, saved only by the fact that the double-agents have their own misconceptions about what the true dynamic is, and on and on. Meanwhile the gritty work of a police and crime procedural continues, and continues well. A standout sequence midway through the film involves Affleck, Mackie, and several other cops staging a high-risk arrest of a gang member by stacking up on a ballistic shield and systematically clearing an apartment building of threats. Shot in a single take, with minimal histrionics beyond the terse, quiet police code commands of professionals under intense strain, it's one of the best raw policing sequences I've seen in the movies, a testament to the skill with which Hillcoat and his crew have done their homework.


Things Havoc disliked: Not everyone makes off with kudos this time, as the film also stars Woody Harrelson as an alcoholic police lieutenant with assorted familial and professional connections to everyone involved (this is par for the course). Harrelson isn't awful, but plays the character way too far over the top, drawing far too many acting points from Al Pacino's detective in Heat without realizing that Triple 9 is a much more subdued movie, and that a red-eyed fanatic screaming at the top of his lungs while running people over doesn't quite fit the tone that the movie is going after. Pacino could get away with that sort of thing in Heat because Heat was that sort of movie, set in Los Angeles, a town accustomed to casual lunacy, and because the screaming that he engaged in was plainly an artifice designed to shock people into compliance. The film also has a bad habit of giving Harrelson what appears to be psychic powers and the capacity to teleport into situations he had no way of feasibly getting to, so as to allow him to save the day in a "cool" fashion. Not traits designed to endear a character to me, particularly not in a movie where the limitations of what particular characters know about each other at any given moment is so integral.


Final Thoughts: Despite all the comparisons I've been making, Triple 9 is not as good a movie as Heat was, but that's faint criticism if ever there was any. What it is, is a damn fine cops and robbers movie in the style of Heat, one with good actors and good direction underlying a story of crime and murder as compelling as any I've seen recently. Such flaws as mar the landscape don't serve to do more than push the movie down to a simple "good" rating, but a good movie is nothing to be ashamed of. Particularly in Doldrums Season, one takes what one can get.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

Eddie the Eagle

Alternate Title: I Believe I Can Fly...

One sentence synopsis: A hapless, would-be British Olympian decides to become a ski-jumper, the first for Britain in 70 years.


Things Havoc liked: Those of you who remember my list of the best films of 2015 (which was not that long ago), will remember the movie Kingsman, the Secret Service, which was a demented, insane, bloodfest of a Matthew Vaughn movie which I adored to a degree that probably speaks poorly of my general character. Among the many, many virtues that Kingsman had was its lead actor, an unknown (to me) young man named Taron Egerton (who, I kid you not, grew up in a Welsh town called Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch). Egerton was absolutely fantastic in a role that should, by rights, have been insufferable, and has since garnered other awards for roles in movies I did not see such as Testament of Youth and Legend. I'm an actor's critic, as you all well know, so when a good young actor shows up, I like to track their career throughout the project, and lo and behold, his next film was, of all things, a feel-good sports movie about one of my favorite people of all time.

For those who do not know, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, was an Olympic Ski Jumper from Great Britain notable for being bereft of any shred of Olympic-grade talent for the sport, who nonetheless contrived (due to the fact that there were no other Ski Jumpers from his home country) to make it to the 1988 Calgary Olympics, which also played host to the Jamaican Bobsled team from Cool Runnings. Edwards had no particular aptitude for the sport of Ski Jumping (or for sport in general), but competed nonetheless, becoming a fan favorite on the back of his utter haplessness, self-effacing humor, and British Daring-Do. The role is a far cry from that of Egsy, from the aforementioned Kingsman, but Egerton is once again spot on with it, playing a particularly British type of myopic nerd, who dreams of becoming an Olympian and cares very little for what he has to do to get there, even if it means making a complete fool of himself, and sustaining the horrific bodily injuries that come with failing at a sport like Ski Jumping. These injuries are not minor, as we see in the best line in the film, where Eddie's coach watches with him as another ski jumper shatters every bone in his body while failing a moderate-sized jump, and then leans in to the horrified Eddie to comment "And he knew what he was doing..."

Ah, but the coach is very important in movies like this, isn't he, and Eddie the Eagle's coach is the, far as I can tell fictional, Bronson Peary, played by everyone's favorite wolverine, Hugh Jackman. Jackman is a sardonic, alcoholic bastard, in the wonderful style of these movies since time immemorial, who must gradually warm up to Eddie's innocent-if-ungainly earnestness. It's an old story for a sports movie, yeah, but Jackman has fun with it, gargling booze from everything in sight and seemingly growing to relish the opportunity to troll the entire establishment of Ski Jumping (which apparently exists) with an athlete who is not an athlete by any definition of the word. Long-time character actor and first-time director Dexter Fletcher (of Band of Brothers and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels), takes on the director's chair with a style that seems to play around with the conventions of the sporting movie a bit, from comical overuse of slow-motion-uplifting-music shots to a truly trippy set of scenes involving the so-called "Flying Finn", Matti Nykänen, who rambles semi-coherently about the philosophical "meaning" of ski jumping like a cross between George Mallory and The Dude.



Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is all stock sports cliches, and not just that, but practically a re-tread of the aforementioned Cool Runnings. We have everything here, from the team of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic winter athletes (Norwegians, this time), who inexplicably hate our hero and resent his presence in the Olympics, to the fussy, over-proper British bureaucrats determined to prevent Eddie from doing anything so tremendously unorthodox (HARUMPH!) as competing in the Olympics. One of them even goes so far as to deliver a sneering, twirl-of-the-mustache remark about how the Olympics are not for amateurs, and how people with dreams should have them dashed so as to preserve propriety. Eddie, meanwhile, also has to deal with his father, a working-class plasterer who regards his sporting dreams as irrelevant, and who refuses to support him. Will Eddie's dad see the light in time for the big jump? Might he share a knowing nod with his son while acknowledging that he was right to follow his dreams all along? Perish the thought that I should spoil such mysteries of existence to you, but if you've seen a single film in the last thirty years, I have a feeling you'll work it out for yourself. Fletcher seems to have decided that the best way to make his movie would be to take all four of the plotlines that the four main characters in Cool Runnings had and merge them together into one, which is not precisely the decision I would have made. The result is a movie with a schmaltz and saccharine level that is high enough to carry a diabetes warning.

I also question what in the world several of the more prominent actors who lent their names to this film were thinking beyond the need for another paycheck. The wonderful Jim Broadbent is barely in the film at all, with maybe three minutes of screentime tops as the British broadcaster for the games, a role which requires him to do very little. He does, however, manage to do more than Christopher Walken, who somehow earned himself third billing in the movie for a total of roughly forty-five seconds of screentime, playing (in another nod to Cool Runnings) Jackman's former coach from his own days as a ski jumper, who is terminally disappointed in his once-promising pupil, and regards him as having embarrassed himself and his sport in fostering Eddie. As before, I shall refrain from revealing whether or not this ends with a tearful reunion at the end where bygones are allowed to be bygones and the former student is finally acknowledged by the master who once despaired of him, but I shall rely on the good judgment of all of my readers to determine what they think might come of all this.


Final Thoughts: Eddie the Eagle is a perfectly harmless movie in the style of a hundred other sports films, livened by a couple of good performances and the novelty of its source material, but required viewing by all fans of cinema it is definitely not. What you as a viewer are likely to get out of the film is going to be highly dependent on your tolerance for schmaltz, as well as your ability to excuse the fact that a film's plot is one you've seen many, many times before. I will confess to having enjoyed it, not as a masterpiece or a great work of art, but as a fun little story told reasonably well by a couple of actors I just like watching. There have been worse excuses for movies made.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[General Havoc]

Zootopia

Alternate Title: Hop Fuzz

One sentence synopsis: A rabbit police officer and fox con-man team up to solve a mysterious series of violent assaults by the "predator" minority of the animal metropolis Zootopia.


Things Havoc liked: Disney has been on something of a tear in recent years, a full on third Renaissance for a studio which seems unable to do wrong either in whole or in part. The recent burst of quality includes a whole host of top quality animated films such as Tangled, Frozen, and Big Hero 6, all the of which were excellent films worthy of being considered alongside the best work of their counterparts at DreamWorks and Pixar. And so it is that this year, during a period generally bereft of quality for film in general, Disney has graced us with another would-be masterpiece, a light-hearted children's animated romp involving such fun, wacky subjects as racism, police brutality, and the ways in which politicians can use the media to engender fear and hatred.

Yeah...

Zootopia, a fun animated film in the traditional style of modern Disney movies, is a film with a whole lot going on, a mish-mash of styles, themes, and genres including everything from 80s caper flicks to classical Disney fare like The Fox and The Hound. It's a towering edifice of a film, packed with in-jokes and subtext, thematic complexity and high-velocity situational gags. Directed by Rich Moore (of Wreck-it Ralph) and Byron Howard (of nothing in particular), it is, without mincing words, a staggeringly good movie, one that tackles a whole series of complex issues in all their glorious complexity and makes an engaging, funny, compelling story out of them, all without simplifying the situation down for the kids in the audience or preaching dogmatically to the adults. It's not unusual to see animated movies tackle difficult subjects these days, nor is it some kind of revelation, in a post-Pixar world, to discover that kids movies can have something to say to adults. What is both unusual and revelatory, is a movie by a major studio that manages to do these things this well, and wrap it all together in a Disney-style animated romp full of humor, adventure, wonder, and engaging characters.

The premise, familiar to anyone who's seen the trailers, is relatively simple. Mammalian species of every type are, sentient, bipedal creatures, who live in and around a gigantic, modern metropolis known as Zootopia, a fully modern city with assorted amenities to cater to the vastly different sizes and preferred climates of its denizens. Arriving in this megalopolis of purported peace and tolerance is Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) a newly-minted ZPD police officer, the first rabbit to become a cop in the history of the city. Struggling against prejudice against a rabbit as a policeman, she winds up embroiled in a complex missing persons (animals?) case, roping a con-artist fox named Nick (Jason Bateman) into the investigation through threats and blackmail. If this story sounds familiar to you, it may be because you remember the 1982 Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte action-comedy 48 Hrs, the movie that essentially invented the "buddy cop" genre as we know it today, and which Zootopia takes, of all things, as its clear plot inspiration. Given the purpose the movie puts this plot to, which is to explore the dynamics of prejudice and racism in more or less explicit detail, this is an odd place to draw from, but then Zootopia is an odd movie, part screwball comedy, part crime mystery, and part somber message movie on the need for tolerance.

By now, I'm sure everyone is aware that I have very little tolerance for message films, particularly polemical ones raging about some worldview that is proper and showcasing the various ogreish personality flaws of those who do not abide by it. It therefore comes as a surprise to me as much as anyone that Zootopia, the animated Disney film about bunnies and foxes, is one of the most rational, nuanced, and even-handed movies on the subject of prejudice that I have ever seen. In a film that, for all its weird premises, is clearly based around our modern society, the movie dispenses with cheap villains, mustache-twirling racists, and even the easy lure of simple allegory, wherein elephants would equate to black people or whatnot. The primary dynamic at work in Zootopia is one of Predator and Prey animals, with intersecting elements of prejudice based around size or species, and yet nowhere in the movie can one draw a direct parallel, though references to the real world abound. At one point it seems like the dynamic is that of the larger and more powerful Predators exerting societal dominance over their Prey counterparts, only for the film to shift subtly around to where the majority Prey population exhibits fear and hate towards the Predator minority, all while the film navigates a blisteringly complex web of interconnected stereotypes, prejudices, and racial (speci-al?) hangups. Yet unlike a movie like Crash, whose message was that everyone is an equally noxious racist who should be condemned for their lack of enlightenment, Zootopia's position is far more nuanced, recognizing that everyone is capable of judgmental, even prejudiced actions, particularly when there exist people willing to suborn our baser fears so as to generate division, mistrust, and power vacuums.

But if all of the above sounds like a particularly well-made after-school-special about racism, then don't worry on that account, for despite all of the social complexity that the film carries, at its core, it is a superlative Disney adventure-mystery film. Both of the leads are sharp, well-drawn characters, wickedly funny in their own right, with spot-on voice acting and perfect character design, giving them unparalleled expressiveness, whether in a layered dialogue scene or a frenetic chase. The film is layered with puns (*groan*) in-jokes and background gags, most of them too funny to spoil here, and further comes with a superb supporting cast, including the incomparable Idris Elba playing the "stern black police chief" as a Cape Buffalo and the immortal J.K. Simmons bringing his J. Jonah Jameson best to the role of Zootopia's mayor, while lesser parts go to everyone from Alan Tudyk and Maurice LaMarche (playing a Vito Corleone-style crime lord who is also a shrew), to Bonnie Hunt and Tommy Freaking Chong. The film's animation is spotless, with the animals' movements a perfect blend of actual animals and Disney archetypes, with the shots of even the most action-packed sequences easy to follow, while the style of the metropolis of Zootopia itself is dazzling in its futuristic-utopian grandeur. Even if you care nothing about the societal value of a particular movie, Zootopia can be enjoyed as nothing more than another classic Disney comedy, and that, most likely, is the secret to its success.


Things Havoc disliked: Of course, some bits of the film work better than others. The addition of Shakira, embodied as a pop-singer gazelle named (creatively) "Gazelle" isn't used for much beyond a cheap joke or two, and the cutaways to her benefit concerts and protest sit-ins regarding prejudice and racism are far more on the nose than the movie requires. Without spoiling too much, the entire coda to the movie is taken up by one of the aforementioned concerts, and while I usually refrain from criticizing a film for its credits sequence, the song in question isn't that good, and the entire affair feels like stunt casting to appease a performer's ego, rather than something derived from the movie internally.


Final Thoughts: In an age full of polemic, Zootopia is a marvel, a movie that neither sells out the seriousness of its allegorical premise, nor weights itself down with sermonizing. I cannot possibly do it more justice than the Daily Telegraph, which described it as "the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year," albeit in a review that managed to fall all over itself in missing the point by declaring that Zootopia somehow "proved" that girls who like frilly dresses or girly things should be publicly shamed for being everything that is wrong with society. Indeed, despite my minor nitpick above, the main thing I would complain about with Zootopia is the reaction it seems to have engendered from the rest of the critical set, with large numbers of critics managing to read it as a full-throated endorsement of every noxious, divisive, stereotyping opinion that they choose to slather onto their review pages, from a claim that it will "finally put the PC-thought police set in their place", to arguments that it represents a call to "sterilize the brainless zombie-hordes of Trump supporters" (though admittedly, the Chinese Army's declaration that the movie represents a Western plot to overthrow traditional society is kind of amazing, as is the Globe & Mail's claim that the movie is sexually perverted because it doesn't explicitly address cross-species romance). Only in Hollywood could a movie about the complexities inherent in our quest for equality and tolerance be interpreted as an excuse to air the most vile assumptions about millions of people we don't know, but I cannot, in all good conscience, hold the film responsible for that. The world is, as the film reminds us, imperfect, as are we all, and yet it keeps on spinning.

Ultimately, Zootopia is a fine movie, a worthy successor to the many other fine movies that Disney has graced us with. And whatever the reactions of the rest of the world, a timely, well-crafted, and entertaining reminder that it is everyone's responsibility to try and get along is no bad thing.

Final Score: 8/10

[General Havoc]

And now, a note from The General

So over the last few weeks, I've been struggling with competing priorities, an illness or two, and general chaos that circulates at any given moment around here. As many of you have consequently noticed, I have therefore fallen somewhat behind in my weekly reviews of the films that I subject myself to for your amusement. As such, rather than continue to struggle with catching up on the backlog that I have amassed for movies this spring, and consequently render all of Blockbuster season's releases late as well, I have decided that it is best to catch everything up in one fell swoop, by providing capsule reviews of the various films that I have seen over the last month and a half. With luck, these will still provide all of the information that you all require when making determinations about what movies are worth seeing, as well as the standard cathartic enjoyment you all get from my pain and anguish. And so, without further ado, I present to you all:

The General's Post Spring Roundup

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The Lady in the Van

Alternate Title: Downton Garage

One sentence synopsis: A homeless lady living in a broken-down van parks it in the driveway of a writer's house and stays there for fifteen years.


The Verdict: Let's get things started with a movie none of you have heard of.

Between 1974 and 1989, a woman named Mary Shepherd lived in a dilapidated van on the property of British author Alan Bennett. That... effectively is the plot of the movie before us here, a quintessentially British film from acclaimed director Nicholas Hynter, previously of The Crucible and The Madness of King George. If this sounds like a boring time, I can understand why, but I went to see this one for one reason and one reason alone: Maggie Smith. I said before in my Quartet review that I regard Smith as a gem (this is not a controversial opinion), one of the few actors for whom I will go see a movie largely regardless of its subject matter, and she is, as always, excellent herein, playing a role that could not be more removed from the wizard professors and dowager countesses that she typically portrays on screens large and small. Her character is a dotty old lady of questionable sanity and togetherness, and considerable aggravation, remarked upon as smelling awfully and being utterly ungrateful to those she accepts the charity of or tremendously inconveniences. And yet she gets away with this because her earstwhile landlord (sort of), is Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings), a gay author and playwright who is also one of the most British men alive, and who avoids conflict like no man I've ever seen, either with his neighbors (who are horrified that he has permitted her to take up residence), or with Ms. Shepherd herself (who walks all over him). The film goes so far as to have Bennett spend much of the film talking to a Charlie Kaufman-esque vision of himself (his 'writer' self or some such) who berates him constantly for not taking a more active line with such people as annoy him.

As you can tell, we are dealing with a strange film here, but it all works... mostly, and the artifice is generally capable of disguising the fact that there isn't much to the plot of the story beyond the old woman continuing to exist despite the efforts of the entire neighborhood to will her out of existence. The film does break down at its margins, whether from a completely forgettable turn from Jim Broadbent, playing a crooked policeman who shakes down penniless old women for money (that can't be a terribly lucrative racket), to Cecilia Noble's role as a social worker whose job appears to consist of berating Bennett periodically for not sufficiently permitting the old woman on his property to ruin his life as opposed to performing social work. The film's navel-gazing gets a bit tiresome after a while, but Smith and Jennings are very good in it, separate or together, and as an excuse to watch one of the grand old dames of the cinema work, I've certainly seen worse. Not a film to run out for unless you're desperate or as thrilled with Indie British theater as I occasionally am, but hardly a bad time.

Final Score: 6/10

[hr]

Midnight Special

Alternate Title: ET: The Branch Davidian Cut

One sentence synopsis: The father of a boy with unexplained powers struggles to hide him from the government and the religious cult he grew up in.


The Verdict: Actors and directors sometimes just hit things off together. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, John Ford and John Wayne, Wes Anderson and a quarter of Hollywood, these pairings have existed since the dawn of movies, and have been responsible for some of the greatest films in existence. And while indie director Jeff Nichols has only made a handful of films in his career to date, he seems to have already found his counterpart in celluloid for the foreseeable future in the form of Michael Shannon, one of my favorite working actors, whom he has directed in most of the movies he has made to date, including 2012's Mud, and the strange, apocalyptic psycho-drama Take Shelter, which was just weird enough to be a work of near-genius. Nichols' trademark has always been of existential uncertainty and gritty violence in a hyper-realistic context, and this time he brings the same style to a genre film, which is a novel idea if nothing else.

Michael Shannon plays Roy, a former member of a religious cult in West Texas that has formed around the pronouncements of his son, Alton, a strange kid who has exhibited unexplained powers of precognition and telekinesis since birth, who spends the movie trying to safeguard his son from the dual threat of the FBI, which is searching for Aldon after he managed to psychically decrypt their satellite communications, and the rest of the cult, who believe that Aldon will herald the rapture in a few days and will stop at nothing to retrieve him. This is the sort of premise that could easily have turned into an action blockbuster, but Nichols keeps things relentlessly close-cropped and focused on Aldon, Roy, Roy's friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton, in one of the first good turns I've ever seen him make), and the people they cross as they try to figure out what is coming, and what role Aldon will play in it. Shot mostly at night, with a claustrophobic and paranoid feel that never crosses the line into thriller territory, the movie is extremely well-made, and Shannon is fantastic in it, as he is in everything I see him in.

Indeed everyone is fantastic in Midnight Special, whether I normally like them or not, from the immortal Sam Shepard as the quiet-spoken leader of the Waco-like cult, to Kirsten Dunst, who has retreated into indie fare for the last decade, playing Alton's estranged mother, to Adam Driver, of Star Wars and Girls, playing an FBI agent trying to put everything together in the wake of the increasingly disturbing events transpiring in Roy and Alton's wake. Unfortunately, the plot is not quite up to the same level, fraying around the edges before collapsing entirely near the end. Nichols' movies always seem to be more interested in the setup than the punchline, but this time he's working with a genre piece, and his inexperience with the conventions of sci-fi shows in an unfocused conclusion that wound up confusing the hell out of me in all the wrong ways. Still, the tone and feel of the film is spot on, and while I wouldn't call Midnight Special one of the best movies I've ever seen or anything, it's a solid enough piece to be worth a look if you have any interest in the indie side of scifi. Keep an eye on this Nichols kid. He's going places.

Final Score: 7/10

[hr]

Hardcore Henry

Alternate Title: I Wanna Be The Guy, The Movie, The Game, The Movie

One sentence synopsis: A man is revived from death as a cyborg super-soldier, and must save his girlfriend from an evil maniac and his army of killers.


The Verdict: Experimental cinema is a dangerous place to hang around, but this movie was a concept that I basically had to see. Hardcore Henry, for those who've never heard of it, is a Russian-American action movie produced by semi-legendary Khazakh schlock-meister Timur Bekmambetov, purveyor of such fine films as Wanted (ugh) and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (which... if I'm being honest, has aged a lot better than it should have). The gimmick, this time, is that the entire movie is shot from a first-person perspective, thanks to a pair of GoPro cameras mounted on the heads of a whole series of stuntmen and parkour athletes used to portray the titular Harry. Add in a bunch of game actors and a bunch of action and blood, and we have a concept that could fail miserably, but one that I simply had to see.

So does this ludicrous excuse for video-game cinematography actually work? Well... kind of. If (like all right-thinking individuals) you have a problem with Shaky-cam, then this film is not going to please you overmuch, as the first-person camera is honestly distracting for the first hour or so of runtime, and the schizophrenic editing style does the movie no favors in that department either. It's not quite nausea-inducing (though in fairness, I didn't see the movie in 3D), but it certainly made several of the earlier fight sections very, very hard to follow, something not helped by the movie's plot involving crazy, fantastical elements, such as a character (played by Neil Blomkampf's favorite actor Sharlto Copley) being killed and re-incarnating multiple times with no explanation given. As with any kind of shaky-cam-like style, the result is to effortlessly obscure the wonderful work that the director, stunt coordinators, actors, and stuntmen put into producing a visual wonder, wasting much of the enterprise.

And yet... weird as the core conceit and gimmick are, you do get used to it, and by the midway point of the movie, my eyes had adjusted to the frenetic pace and the strange perspective, and fortunately, the midpoint of the film is where first-time director Ilya Naishuller decides to A: Slow the movie down a bit so that we can get some sense of what the hell is going on, and B: Start introducing the real meat of the action in the film, cored around two particular extended sequences, one in an abandoned apartment complex, and another atop a Moscow skycraper. Both of these sequences rock, and are shot with a bit more restraint and maturity to them, resulting in truly orgiastic spectacles of artful violence and death (eventually to the accompaniment of a Queen soundtrack). The overall effect is still a bit video-game-cutscene, particularly the final confrontation with the big bad (an inexplicably telekinetic Danila Kozlovsky), but if you're used to the conventions of the genre (and if not, research is in order), then it won't be too distracting. Overall, while I can't call Hardcore Henry an unqualified success, and I certainly don't want its style to sweep through action movies and change everything (though in fairness, anything is better than actual shaky-cam), the movie does justify its existence with a showcase of excellent stuntwork and violent action. Would it have been better as a normal movie? Probably. But then would I have even heard of it? Hard to say.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[hr]

The Jungle Book

Alternate Title: Now With Actual Indians!

One sentence synopsis: Mowgli the Jungle Boy is menaced by the tiger Shere Khan, and taken to the nearby man-village by his friends Baghera and Baloo for his own safekeeping.


The Verdict: Twice now, in less than six weeks, I have seen a film wherein Idris Elba voice-acts as a ferocious animal, first as a Cape Buffalo/Stern Police Chief in Zootopia, and now as Shere Khan, the famous man-killing tiger from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories. I have strictly no objection to this state of affairs, of course, as my mood at the cinema rises and falls in no small part based on the amount of Idris Elba I am able to acquire. Nor is Elba alone in this one, as director Jon Favreau (you really should not need me to tell you who that is) has assembled a hell of a voicecast, including Ben Kingsley as Baghera the panther, Bill Murray as Baloo the Bear, Christopher Freaking Walken as King Louis the Gigantopithecus (a gargantuan orangutan), Scarlett Johansson as Kaa the snake (whose role is quite truncated from the 1967 animated film, and a whole slew of cameos and smaller roles for everyone from Lupita Nyong'o and Giancarlo Esposito, to Russell Peters, Sam Raimi, and the late Gary Shandling. Granted, most of these additional voice-roles don't amount to much beyond stunt-casting (though a sight-gag involving Walken's character is to die for), but still.

There've been quite a few versions of the Jungle Book on screen, most of them animated, some not. But among them all, this one stays closer to Kipling's original stories than is typical, combining a couple of the Jungle Book anthology pieces together into a more or less coherent whole, and mixing it with elements from the Disney animated version. Mowgli himself is played by then-10-year-old Neel Sethi, an Indian-American kid who does a... passable job, let's say, if not an inspired one, particularly given that it could not have been easy having to act entirely on a green-screen with puppets and motion-capture icons for sightlines. Sethi is fine, honestly, and I don't like beating on kids for uninspired acting performances anyway, particularly in a children's film where the intended audience will likely not even notice.

What they might notice is the seams between the better-done aspects of the film that are mostly drawn from Kipling's stories, and the... other... sections of the film which are drawn from the animated movie. I love the 1967 film, of course, but the decision to transplant a couple of the songs from the original over into the live action film was not an inspired one, on several levels. For one thing, musicals work under their own logic, especially Disney animated ones, and while you can have a movie full of singing, or a movie that has no singing, it's really difficult to get away with a movie that is mostly non-musical except for a couple of songs awkwardly inserted. None of this is helped by the fact that neither Bill Murray nor Christopher Walken (who get the two songs in the film) can actually sing, something made worse by the fact that I, at least, remember the original songs (Man Like You, and Bear Necessities) quite well, and can compare them to these renditions, which sound like amateur hour at the Lake Woebegone talent contest by comparison. None of this "ruins" the movie or anything, but it does expose the entire procedure as a flawed one, that may not have been thought through sufficiently.

The Jungle Book is a perfectly decent movie, ultimately, but it's not one that I'm going to remember as fondly as its predecessor. But then again, it hardly has to clear that bar in order to be worthwhile.

Final Score: 6/10

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Criminal

Alternate Title: Paycheck

One sentence synopsis: A sociopathic criminal has his mind switched with a dead CIA agent so as to stop an anarchist from destroying the world.


The Verdict: In 1991, Gary Oldman, Kevin Costner, and Tommy Lee Jones all got together with Oliver Stone to make JFK, a ludicrous but extremely well-made movie about the trauma and conspiracy wrangling that attended the JFK assassination. In 2016, all three actors got together with Israeli director Ariel Vromen and perpetual underachiever Ryan Reynolds to make a generic spy movie involving body switching technology. The world is sometimes a cruel place.

I can't pretend that I didn't know what Criminal was likely to be, but a cast like that is something I have a lot of trouble resisting, even if Tommy Lee Jones has made a habit of phoning it in recently, Gary Oldman doesn't seem to read his scripts before selecting them, and Costner... well... I mean I do like Costner more than I probably should, but let us not pretend that he is a great actor or has been in nothing but amazing movies here. Criminal supplements these three veterans with what is, honestly, an excellent turn by Ryan Reynolds, who lights up the screen for five or six minutes before being summarily killed off and removed from the movie for the rest of its run-time, and with respected Spanish actor Jordi Mollà, who plays a radical anarchist straight out of the Mission Impossible 4/5 school of villainy, an evil villain of evil who has no actual motivation beyond evil, despite the movie's almost-desperate efforts to hint at one. It features a lot of shooting and blowing up of things, occasionally with some degree of skill, such as a strange three-way gun battle between the terrorists, the CIA, and a Russian snatch-and-grab team sent in just to complicate things. It also features movie-hacking in all its glory, including the inevitable scene where a hacker causes a submarine to launch a nuclear missile despite the frantic and desperate efforts of the helpless crew to countermand their own computers. I do not understand why it never seems to occur to directors or screenwriters that nuclear submarines are not able to launch their missiles remotely for this very reason.

Ultimately, Criminal is one of those movies that would have been very difficult to write a full-sized review for. Not only is it a bad film, but it is bad in entirely generic, uninteresting ways. By no means is it the worst thing I've ever seen, but that almost serves to make it worse. Criminal is just a generic, boring movie, the likes of which nobody will ever think about ever again, another piece of flotsam to be tossed onto the rubbish heap and forgotten.

Final Score: 4/10

[hr]

The Huntsman: Winter's War

Alternate Title: Upgrade Complete

One sentence synopsis: The Huntsman must find the evil queen Ravenna's magic mirror before her sister, the Ice Queen of the north, locates and uses it to rule the world.


The Verdict: Like everyone else in the world, seemingly, I thought that 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman was a film with some good ideas weighted down by bad actors and bad decisions, resulting in a mediocre experience. And yet here we stand some four years later, with a sequel in-hand to a movie I didn't care for. Like its predecessor, it is pretty damn stupid, with a plot that falls to pieces as soon as you look at it for too long, and characters that seem to have been assembled by random sortition. Like its predecessor, it is fairly badly written, passing off the simplest of concepts ("LOVE IS GOOD AND FASCISM IS BAD!") as revolutionary notions that nobody in the audience will have ever thought of (and don't give me the kids' movie excuse here. Not only is this a violent action movie, but even kids are bored of this stuff.) Like its predecessor, it a fair amount of dead weight, as well as some of the worst accents I have ever heard in film (Jessica Chastain's idea of a Scottish accent is staggeringly inept). Like its predecessor, it is consequently not a very good movie.

Unlike its predecessor, I really liked it.

So how did this come to pass? Well for one thing, the filmmakers managed to zero in on the elements that worked in the original film (Charlize Theron's madness, Chris Hemsworth's charisma, the scenery), and ruthlessly eliminated everything else, reducing Sam Claflin (whom I liked in Hunger Games, but not in Snow White) to a cameo role and eliminating Kristen Stewart, the previously-titular Snow White, entirely. Given that Stewart is one of the worst actresses alive, that's an immediate improvement, but they doubled down on the matter by replacing her with Emily Blunt, a wonderful actress whom I adore, playing the role of the Ice Queen in a role half-derived from Frozen and half from Conan the Barbarian. Put simply, replacing Kristen Stewart with Emily Blunt is sort of like replacing Adam Sandler with Lawrence Olivier, to say nothing of the fact that the movie supplements this addition with Jessica Chastain, an actress I have said many unkind things about, but who, I am beginning to realize, is not so much a bad actress as one of limited range. In movies like Interstellar and Zero Dark Thirty she is miscast, as she cannot convey serious business to any real effect. But when called upon to deliver campy, over-the-top snarling-and-fighting sorts of fantasy performances, she's actually much better than I was prepared to expect. Toss in a handful of legitimately funny comic relief supporting characters (Dwarves all) played by Nick Frost, Alexandra Roach, and Sheridan Smith, focus heavily on Theron and Blunt being crazy in all the right ways, and in some honestly pretty legit fantasy action, and the resulting movie, while probably not objectively "good", is actually a surprising amount of fun. I not only liked it, I liked it considerably more than its predecessor. And that, dear friends, is not something I ever expected to say about a sequel to a Kristen Stewart vehicle, but this is the world in which we live.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[hr]

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Alternate Title: ...

One sentence synopsis: ...


The Verdict: ...

...

...

...

...

...

....... no.

No... you know what? This one... this one's gonna need a full review...

Stay tuned.

[frigidmagi]

Oh... Hold on to your butts.

[LadyTevar]

Yeah... the BvS is going to be a really interesting one to read.
Hopefully he follows it with the CapAmerica: Civil War, as a compare/contrast

[rhoenix]

Yeah... the BvS is going to be a really interesting one to read.
Hopefully he follows it with the CapAmerica: Civil War, as a compare/contrast

That's kind of like comparing a week-old crusty pile of dog feces between two leaves to a proper sandwich, but yeah - this should be fun to see.

[General Havoc]

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Alternate Title: You Either Die a Hero...

One sentence synopsis: Manipulated by the evil Lex Luthor, Batman and Superman clash over contrasting ideologies to crime fighting.


Things Havoc liked: In a world filled with internet outrage culture, and the raging anger of fanboys galore, 2013's Man of Steel was one of the most contentious movies I have ever seen cross the cinema. I have had multiple violent arguments over the qualities of that film, watched grown men devolve into fistfights over the question of whether it was a faithful adaptation of Superman, or a disgusting betrayal of all that is right and good in the world. As those who remember my review can attest to, I liked the film, for its visual splendor, for its iconography, for the titanomachy-grade action that was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I liked it despite many glaring flaws as to tone and characterization and unfulfilled promises from the best trailer I have ever seen, but I liked it nonetheless. And yet in retrospect, the vitriol directed at Man of Steel by the many, many individuals who did not like it, not one little bit, served to taint the entire enterprise in my mind looking back. Perhaps my opinions are more malleable than they should be, or perhaps I was wrong initially and came slowly to see the light, but while I never came to hate Man of Steel, its star has definitely dimmed in the years that have passed from that moment to this one. With the raging hatred of those who abominated the first movie undimmed, and indeed increased, as we closed on the release date of its sequel, I decided to make a concerted effort to be objective with this one, above and beyond my customary disposal of preconceptions. Come Hell or High Water, there was a large segment of the internet that was going to hate this movie, and I refused to let that color my impression of Warner Brothers' go-for-broke attempt to have The Avengers' lunch.



Things Havoc disliked: All in vain...

If I have skipped over the "things I liked" section, understand that it is not because there was nothing in this movie that I liked. There was. I liked Jeremy Irons' turn as Alfred Pennyworth, a performance that is less rooted in Michael Caine and more in Michael Gough. I liked small touches that the movie introduces almost as throwaways, such as the fact that Batman, in this movie, eschews Christian-Bale-voice in favor of an actual vocoder. I liked Holly Hunter's turn as a wisecracking senator from Kentucky who chairs a senate committee charged with clarifying Superman's legal status. I even liked the effrontery with which Zack Snyder chose to hypothesize, rather than tone down, the christological parallels that the movie is riven with when it comes to Superman, explicitly including sequences where worshipful throngs of people kneel before his advent as though he were the second coming, while desperate encyclicals from the Vatican and other religious leaders declare that Superman is not actually Jesus Christ incarnated. The Christ parallels with Superman are inevitable, and were enormously thick in Man of Steel, but by calling them out explicitly, Snyder turns the subject around into a discussion of how people might actually react if an invulnerable alien god representing good and righteousness were to descend upon the planet. I liked this and all the other things I have cited, and yet I did not lump them all together within the "Things Havoc Liked" section, as is my usual wont. And I did not do that, because they are all ultimately irrelevant next to a single, impenetrable fact.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is a piece of shit.

Not merely a piece of shit, but a huge, steaming, foul-odored piece of intestinal filth, enormous in scope and terrifying in impact. We live in an age of cinematic superheroes, not merely the shining lights of the MCU, but also the other great movies that have traveled in its wake, the Deadpools and X-men and all of the rest. And yet, confronted with the ranks of angels that have graced our screens for a decade and more, what has DC, Warner Brothers, and Zack Snyder, the man I have defended for years and years, done? They have produced the cinematic equivalent of a war crime, a movie that is and was and will remain one of the most cataclysmic misfires in modern history. For all the patience I have laid upon this collection of would-be dignitaries, forgiving Green Lantern, forgetting Catwoman, defending Man of Steel in the face of withering criticism, this is how I am repaid? This putrid abomination of a comic book film? This wholesale, willful negation of not just superheros but film as a medium and narrative as a concept? This is what they presented to me, in the expectation that I would lay praise at their feet and number them among my sainted elect? This was truly the best they could do?

Well they have sown the air, dear readers. Let them reap the whirlwind.

Batman v Superman is a disaster on every level of filmmaking I can cite and several others still waiting to be invented, a calamity that recalls parallels to the Hindenburg disaster, before which a critic and cinephile such as myself can do nothing but weep and lament the humanity that was lost in devising and producing it. It is a sour, bitter thing, a vindication to all of those who insisted to me that I was wrong to defend Watchmen, wrong to defend 300, wrong to defend Man of Steel, because they all led straight to this twisted, broken failure of imagination, creativity, and thought. No one, no one touched by this enterprise escapes it unscathed, certainly not Henry Cavill, whom I appreciated in the last movie for his earnestness and physicality, but who here has become a mopey, depressed un-character, shunting about almost robotically from scene to scene, as if he has read the script of the film and knows that nothing awaits him here but bitterness and ash. Superman is a character designed to embody our best natures, optimism, strength, courage and justice, and if Zack Snyder sought to do nothing more than piss on all four concepts through this portrayal, he succeeded. Ben Affleck meanwhile, who is an Oscar-winning director in his own right of great skill and talent, plays Batman like a man under the influence of several particularly dangerous steroid-PCP cocktails, a grunting, sweating dude-bro whose plotline through the movie is possibly the single stupidest plotline I've ever seen for a major superhero, and I remember both Spiderman 3 and Superman 4. In grotesque violation of the core tenets of the character, Snyder turns a hero famous for his legendarily inflexible prohibition against killing, into a cowled version of the Punisher, who slaughters his enemies with machine guns while obsessing over the possibilities of murdering Superman for no reason at all. I remember reading Frank Miller's All-Star Batman & Robin, a comic in which Batman referred to himself as "The Goddamn Batman", gloried over breaking his enemies' spines, and forced a small child to scavenge sewer rats for food, and this movie is still the worst version of Batman I have ever seen realized in any form, a character assassination so complete that no actor, be he Affleck, Keeton, or Lawrence freaking Olivier, could possibly have salvaged it.

And yet even with all of this, Affleck and Cavill are probably the best parts of the movie, for the true depths of awfulness on display here belong not to them but to Jesse Eisenberg, who is so staggeringly miscast as Lex Luthor that I considered seriously the possibility that the entire movie was arranged by a conspiracy of his sworn enemies. There have been many versions of Luther over the years, from Kevin Spacey and Gene Hackman's goofy versions to the more serious take Clancy Brown put on the character in the Justice League animated series. But Eisenberg, presented with infinite possibilities, is absolutely unable to make his mind up, switching motivations at least a dozen times throughout the movie, in some cases in mid-scene, from an arrogant tech-god in the (inevitable) Steve Jobs style, to an abused child lashing out at his dead father, to an atheistic terrorist desirous of literally killing God, to a mad scientist seeking the coolest toys, to a twisted harbinger of some terrible threat yet to come, to another thing and another and another. Eisenberg has no character except annoyance, no standard traits except stupidity, and his "evil plan" is not only one of the stupidest I have ever seen committed to film (a key element of his plans involves a jar of his own piss), but is additionally layered with redundancies, elementary mistakes, continuity-shattering plot holes, and utterly baffling decisions not just from him but from everyone he interacts with for any length of time, be they hero or not. But for all of his many, many flaws, Eisenberg's Luthor is at least occasionally entertaining to look at, if only from the sense that baffling stupidity may arise at any time while he is on the screen. The same cannot be said of Gal Gadot, an unknown Israeli actress and model who is called upon to finally, after infinite screaming by comic fans, to portray the most famous super-heroine in comics, Wonder Woman. She sucks. Gadot cannot act to save her life, not that the screenplay does her favors in this regard, relegating her to a handful of cameo appearances so nebulous that I seriously mistook her for a different comic character altogether. Shoehorned into the movie for no reason other than franchise maintenance, she has nothing to do with anything, and the tiny collection of scenes she appears in, either as Diana Prince or as Wonder Woman herself are nothing more than cheap fan-service, hoping to keep people hanging on until next year, when DC finally intends to release the Wonder Woman movie they proclaimed to be impossible so many times.

And yet, to simply call this or that actor's performance bad or even terrible does not even come close to the baffling anti-thought that permeates this movie like a miasma, afflicting everything from the derivitive, over-bombastic Hans Zimmer score to the godawful cinematography and world design, to the plot and effects, which are so lackluster that they would not have appeared out of place in a mid-00s X-men spinoff. One of the few undeniable high-points of Man of Steel was the thunderous scale of the thing, a movie in which Olympian gods vented destruction and wrath upon their enemies in staggering, awe-inspiring spectacle. And yet of all the things from the original film to discard, the filmmakers chose not the fractured storytelling, not the stupefying plot contrivances, not the mutilation of beloved, century-old characters, but the sense of wonder that they had managed, against all odds, to produce. The action in Batman v Superman is almost uniformly some of the most boring action I have seen from a superhero film, a factor not helped by the "big bad" that our heroes must punch repeatedly being the laziest rendition of seminal Superman villain Doomsday that I've ever seen. The movie's version looks like someone crossed a troll from Lord of the Rings with The Scorpion King, and has CGI that would have been laughed off the set of Catwoman. There is no sense of scale, not to the final fight nor to the movie as a whole, as most of the titular Batman v Superman fighting takes place in an environment of Kryptonite gas, turning the entire thing into a battle between a meatheaded, drunken bully, and a depressive head-case who just wants the entire thing to stop. Not one fight has a sense of interest, of stakes, of personal agenda or emotion or even wow factor, but then neither do any of the dialogue or exposition scenes either, so why should I be surprised. This includes an extended sequence in the middle of the film where Wonder Woman is given a thumb drive containing top secret information from Luther's corporation, which turns out to be a series of trailers for future DC continuity movies. Which she watches. For five minutes. Yes, that means the movie stops dead in its tracks for five whole minutes so that it can advertise other movies to you that have not yet come out. I know some people think Marvel congratulates itself too much, but at least they usually save their ads for the next movie until after you have finished watching the current one!

But all of this, all of this, I might have forgiven (might), if it weren't for the final, damning element of this colossal misfire, the fact that the movie is so goddamn ugly. I don't mean ugly in the visual sense, although it absolutely is that, with a visual style that washes out the primary colors these characters are so well known-for into a dour faded mockery of themselves, shot primarily in what appears to be a Detroit junkyard at night. No, I mean the ugliness of the sensibility that would lead to someone making a movie like this, a movie where Batman is a grotesque caricature of the sort Frank-Miller used in his more militant, crap works such as Holy Terror, a grunting parody of a "real man" who spends his time crossfit training before running out to murder people for no reason other than his own ego. I mean the ugliness required to produce a movie in which Superman, a character so defined by his moral sense that many people consider him boring and arrogant, undergoes an existentialist crisis before picking up the idiot ball and refusing to put it back down. I mean the ugliness and cynicism required to produce a movie ostensibly starring Wonder Woman after literal decades of denying women a place at the table, and then effectively whisking her off-screen like Charlie Brown's football and demanding that we go see another movie next year if we actually want to see her. I am talking here about a movie that reduces Lois Lane to a complete idiot with nothing better to do than find her way into death traps, that turns Lex Luthor into a simpering asshat whining about how unfair it is that people like superheroes, that turns the very notion of catharsis into a cruel joke, and then has the gall to turn around and mock Marvel's films for being too "unrealistic". I am talking about a movie that is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel, not merely in its worldview but in its active actions towards fan-base and casual film-goer alike. I am talking about a movie so irredeemably awful that I, comic book fan that I am, instantly wrote off every other movie in the DC canon from here on out, including this year's Suicide Squad. Because if this is the sort of product that the flywheels at DC and Warner Brothers believe is worthy of me and mine, then I suggest that they take a good solid look in the mirror, and then proceed to literally fuck themselves to death.



Final Thoughts: One of the great mysteries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beyond the fact that it exists at all, is the consistent level of quality that it has maintained, such that weaker movies like Iron Man 2/3 or The Hulk still maintain a sense that serious people tried to make a good movie through the best methods they knew. The results are not always excellent (though the majority definitely are), but they are never the sorts of gross insults that a truly awful movie can feel like. But while I generally resist the temptation to describe bad or even terrible movies in such hyperbolic terms as "slaps in the face", Batman v Superman leaves me with little choice, made as it seemingly is by people grasping and jealous of the MCU's success, who could not stop themselves from voiding contempt for all those who supported Marvel in their endeavors instead of indulging in the "grim and gritty realism" that they offer up like offal disguised as ambrosia. As such, what is staggering about this film is not that it is bad, for a whole slew of DC-comics-related failures have adequately prepared me for that possibility, but that its badness comes in forms so ugly and hateful to myself and others, particularly given the fact that I was never a great fan of DC's characters in their comic form, and consequently have no fond childhood memories for them to stomp upon. Consider my rage then a cathartic thing, channeled on behalf of others, whose childhoods were spent between the pages of a Batman or Superman comic, and who have come to see their heroes realized on screen only to be confronted with one of the worst superhero films I have ever seen.

Where this series, for it is explicitly intended as one, goes from here, I cannot say. At time of writing, Batman v Superman did indeed make the hundreds of millions of dollars that superhero movies are wont to, and yet a steep and pronounced drop-off in second-day and second-week receipts point to something more than a handful of highbrow critics raging that their theaters have again been taken over by "teenager" fare. The deep apathy with which this movie was received by a public which may have bad taste but resents being spat upon does not speak well for the cornucopia of DC-comics movies that Warner Brothers has planned for the immediate future. I do not know if the lessons of Batman v Superman can be metabolized by a production unit so debased as to loose it upon us in the first place, and if I'm being entirely honest, I could not care less whether they can or not. Batman v Superman stands as a repudiation of the very reasons why I began this project, a cynical, slimy exercise in contemptible arrogance and shocking stupidity, a movie that hates you for liking superheroes, and hates itself for containing them. A studio capable of producing such a thing is one that I have no intention of supporting further by any means, and thus, in keeping with my stated policy of only going to see movies that I suspect have a chance to prove worthwhile, consider this my preemptive rejection of the entire DC cinematic universe. I do this project for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to let my readers know what films are worth seeing and what ones are not, but there is a limit to even my cinematic fortitude, and in consequence, I am afraid that if you wish to know how the future movies in this series will turn out, you shall all have to find out for yourselves.

And if, in doing so, you discover that the followup movies are nothing but cynical exercises in nihilistic defecation, thinly excused by wild gesticulations towards terms like "gritty realism" and "hardcore", then, in one way at least, I will be able to say that Batman v Superman told me the truth.

Final Score: 2.5/10

[frigidmagi]

I can't say I disagree with Havoc here. Batman was like a guy undergoing a Psychotic Breakdown to the point I wanted Alfred to drug him and drag him off to therapy. Cavil was so wooden I thought someone was standing off screen with a gun pointed at his loved ones to ensure he showed no emotion. The story was a mess and the action subpar.

No, I can't disagree with Havoc and I do not blame him for washing his hands of DC here. It is sad but they have made this bed and Havoc is entirely in his rights to demand they lay in it.

[Steve]

Ah, good.

Well, Hav, now that you've gotten the trash out of the way.... I'm waiting with intense interest for your Cap 3 Civil War review.

[Lys]

Batman v Superman is a disaster on every level of filmmaking I can cite and several others still waiting to be invented, a calamity that recalls parallels to the Hindenburg disaster, before which a critic and cinephile such as myself can do nothing but weep and lament the humanity that was lost in devising and producing it. It is a sour, bitter thing, a vindication to all of those who insisted to me that I was wrong to defend Watchmen, wrong to defend 300, wrong to defend Man of Steel, because they all led straight to this twisted, broken failure of imagination, creativity, and thought.

This is bullshit. You were right to defend Watchmen, 300, and Man of Steel even if they are the direct cause of a dozen more abortions like Batman v Superman. Just like how I will defend Tom Clancy's early work even in the face of the abominations that are damn near everything he published after 1993. Yes the early stuff lead directly to the latter stuff, but the fact that the President Ryan series is a giant steaming pile of shit doesn't retroactively make The Cardinal of the Kremlin stop being one of the best spy thrillers ever written. Zack Snyder cannot possibly make a movie so bad that one can no longer enjoy 300 in all its over the top ridiculous glory. Art must stand on its own, independent of anything that came before or after.

[General Havoc]

Keanu

Alternate Title: You're a Kitty!

One sentence synopsis: Two suburban friends impersonate deadly gangsters so as to retrieve their pet kitten.


Things Havoc liked: After the end of That Mitchell and Webb Look in 2011, my favorite sketch comedy show (an award nearly as prestigious as the Emmys) became that of Key & Peale, two veterans of Mad TV who decided to strike out on their own with a series considerably less restrained than the above. Television (obviously) isn't my primary source of entertainment, but I made time for those two, and when I heard there was to be a full length movie made from them, I... immediately wrote it off. Why? Because movies based around sketch comedy bits almost invariably suck, as anyone who has watched the dismal parade of post-Wayne's World Saturday Night Live movies can attest to. Still, it has been quite a while since SNL decided to try their hand at the sketch-turned-movie genre (the last one was MacGruber, in 2010, which itself was the first one in a decade. Maybe things had improved since the days of It's Pat or The Ladies Man, or maybe Key & Peale, being far better comedians than the average denizens of SNL, would have a better shot at making something watchable.

Keanu stars Key and Peele as two suburban, middle class black men in Los Angeles, the former an uptight family man with a wife and kids, the latter a slacker who has just been dumped by his girlfriend, and who comes into possession, through strange and convoluted circumstances, of a tiny kitten which he names Keanu for reasons I don't pretend to understand. Once the kitten is kidnapped by the leader of a nearby street gang (Rapper and periodic actor Method Man, who is better at this than most of his peers), the scheme that Key and Peele come up with is to impersonate a pair of mysterious, lethal gangster/hit men (The "Allentown Boys") and pretend to be thugs so as to fool the gangsters and rescue their beloved pet. None of this is that unusual as sketch comedy movies go, indeed if anything, it's basically a remake of the execrable 2001 Orlando Jones/Eddie Griffin comedy Double Take, a movie that is slightly more funny than child molestation, but only just (then again, Double Take was in turn based on the 1957 British film Across the Bridge, so perhaps this rabbit hole is deeper than we know....) Keanu, on the other hand, does not have two blithering idiots as its lead actors, and does much better with what amounts to the same material, as the hapless Key and Peele try to maintain the fiction that they are actually hardcore gangsters. Indeed, there is some actual fun to be had here, particularly an extended sequence with Key managing to explain away the George Michael CDs in his car by convincing the unknowing gangsters that George Michael is actually a hardcore gangster, and that his songs are the epitome of thug life. Key and Peele also pull double duty as the real Allentown Boys, disguised in thick wigs and dark glasses, whose gimick involves picking up and putting down the instruments with which they intend to torture their victims to death so many times that even the orchestra gets tired of providing endless suspenseful stings.

Nor does the supporting cast let the film down overall. Anna Faris, of all people, takes on an Entourage-style role as herself, only as a version of herself who is also a drugged out lunatic who unhesitatingly pulls swords on armed gangsters when they try to collect their payment for the drugs she is buying and leave (this may not be such a stretch). Method Man, meanwhile, plays what amounts to the straight man in the ensuing insanity, enabling his character to be the punch line for a whole series of in-jokes relating to his work on The Wire. Other venerable character actors, such as Luis Guzmán and and Will Forte, take on smaller roles, generally in the form of extremely serious gangsters and killers who become highly attached to the kitten in question and are ready to pile bodies to the skies to ensure that they get to keep it. The film also features, as was probably inevitable, the vocal stylings of Keanu Reeves himself, who plays the titular kitten in a sequence of outstanding trippyness, wherein one of our heroes takes a hit from a new designer superdrug called "Holy Shit", and hallucinates not only conversations with Ted Theodore Logan, but does so as part of the least strange element of many different hallucinagenic events, including appearing inside the 1997 Music Video for Faith.

Yeah, it's one of those movies...


Things Havoc disliked: The problem with sketch comedy characters elevated to a full length feature film is that what works as a five minute gag-scene does not typically work as a 98-minute feature, either because the joke becomes too belabored, because of the need to include an actual plot, or, more commonly, both. Key and Peele start ahead of the curve in this regard, as the movie is not based on a particular set of characters from the show, but around new ones (best I can tell) made up for the purposes of the film, studding them with elements from famous bits from the show (including a discussion of "the Liam Neesons"). But even with that, it has to be said that the material here feels a bit thin, as though despite coming in at less than 100 minutes, the authors, which include the leads as well as showwriter Alex Rubens, could not think up enough to tide the film over. The joke of these two dorks pretending to be gangsters starts to run dry about the 2/3s mark, despite the movie making active efforts to spice things up with more and more over-the-top violence and gratuitous slo-mo sequences.

Granted, none of the above is the death knell of the movie or anything, but it forces the filmmakers to find filler to get the movie to its ordained end. Unfortunately, that filler tends to come in the form of either completely unnecessary sub-plots or poorly-written characters. The former takes the form of Key's wife, played by Nia Long, who takes the weekend off with a neighbor and calls in periodically to ask how things are going with her husband's "weekend fun". A sub-plot involving her being propositioned by the neighbor is never fleshed out, and goes nowhere, serving nothing but the burning up of a couple more minutes of screentime. Other minutes are consumed with Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish), the token gangster girl in the street gang, with whom the recently-single Peele begins an obligatory relationship founded on deception, etc, etc... It's not that Haddish is particularly bad in the role, but there's really no reason she's there, as the film already has several serviceable straight men (or women), and the relationship angle is poorly-crafted and a distraction from the funny elements. Of course it's hard to call this much of a pity given that a distraction was the exact purpose for which the character was added, as a desperate attempt to get the movie to feature-length runtime before they ran out of jokes.


Final Thoughts: Still, I'd rather see a movie half-filled with full-power jokes than fully-filled with half-power ones, if you know what I mean, and when Keanu works, it really does work, far better than the damp squibs that are the mainstay of this sort of film. The movie does sort of race out the door before anyone can realize that it has no encore material, but again, that's probably better than overstaying its welcome.

Overall, I would not call Keanu a must-see movie or anything, but for those who are fans of the show, as I was, there's nothing here that's going to convince you that you were wrong to like them in the first place. And given the month I've had, that's not as minor a victory as it sounds.

Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

And now, a second note from The General

The struggle continues, ladies and gentlemen, but we are finally approaching the point, halfway through this damnable year, where we will, at last, be all caught up. And so, for those who have been waiting patiently, let us present, in no particular order, the remaining movies of the spring of 2016, preparatory to making a clean, fresh start, for Blockbuster season. Without further ado, I present:

The General's Post Spring Roundup, Part 2

[hr]

High-Rise

Alternate Title: Brutalism: The Movie

One sentence synopsis: A single doctor moves into a high-rise luxury apartment complex in the early 1970s, and watches as it disintegrates into lawless anarchy and class war.


The Verdict: The 70s have a lot to answer for. Not just in terms of architecture or politics, though there is that, but also in the sensibility of a time in which most people legitimately thought that the world was actively falling apart and that all was soon to be lost in a pestilent gyre of madness, violence and death. Not an uncommon sense, to be fair, indeed there's more than a few people who still think this today, but the 70s were the period when the appropriate response to the impending end of the world was to settle scores, real or imagined, with a host of one's own personal or class enemies, real or imagined. It was, here in America at least, the age of Nixon, of the Weather Underground, and of Jonestown, a period in which the impending end of civilization provided justification for any number of heinous atrocities, because decency itself was evil, and one's enemies undeserving of humanity. It scared the right so badly that they built a bunker among the religious establishment and never left it, and scarred the left so profoundly that they suffered through a decade-and-a-half of impotence before being dragged back to prominence by main force. It was, at least to a vocal minority, the age for fulfillment of the millennarian prophecies implied by the 60s, a decade of sound and fury, signifying little beyond arrogance, greed, and the baser instincts of a generation that imagined itself revolutionary.

Why do I bring up all of this in what is intended to be a movie review of a recent release? Because by the standards I have spoken of above, High-Rise is the most 70s movie I have ever seen.

Based on a 1975 novel by British sci-fi author J.G. Ballard (author of Empire of the Sun), the movie version of High-Rise is a baroque ode to the 70s in the same way Rock of Ages was to the music of the 1980s, save that the focus this time, rather than on music and culture and fun, is on the dystopian collapse of civilization within English society, something Ballard, as well as largely everyone else, thought was imminent in the mid-70s, whether because of the decadence of the upper classes, the degraded criminality of the lower ones, or the general misanthropy of the times, take your pick. High-Rise consequently posits that once people are encased within the titular building, a brutalist monstrosity of dark concrete and hard angles, everyone will immediately get their Lord of the Flies on and start butchering one another in the squalid ruins of their homes, because this is the natural state of man. The movie stars people I like, including Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Marcus Antonius (James Purefoy), and Scar (Jeremy Irons). I would explain to you who these people are actually playing, but I will be damned if I can figure out who anyone is in this movie, really, for it's the sort of indie film in which the characters are intended to represent not characters, but archetypical deformations of the human psyche or some damn thing. Suffice to say the movie has the services of quite a few fine actors to portray its story.

And it suuuuucks. Not because the politics are so antiquated, though to be sure there is that, but because having taken such a misanthropic view of mankind as a base premise, the only the way the movie can function is by making no fucking sense whatsoever. There is no reason given why everything goes to hell within the apartment building, it simply does, and having done so, nobody is allowed to react as though such a thing is in any way strange, because you see, it is the nature of man to butcher one another for no reason in a drunken orgy, as the steadily dropping crime rates since the late 70s in every society around the world clearly attest to. It's only fair to take a movie's premise at face value, but in a case like this, the premise is so alien, and treated as so self-evident by the filmmakers (headed by British advertising director Ben Wheatley, who has never done anything of note before this), that it's actually quite difficult to figure out what the hell is going on. Characters get in one another's faces, put on parties while dressed like Versailles fops, paint themselves grey and stalk dogs through the hallways, and windily discuss how overpopulation is soon going to reduce the world to a cinder, and so murdering children is only the right way to go, all without any sense of what the hell the director is trying to say with all this madness. A movie that used these kinds of strange behaviors in an artistic fashion might well have worked, but this film, beamed in from 1975 as it is, simply assumes that this is what all disaffected intellectuals actually think of the world, and so does not bother to justify itself in any way, to the point where the movie even fails to give us a reason why anyone stays within the high-rise, even as it turns into Ramadi crossed with The Last of Us. The reason the movie gives us no such reason, of course, is because in the movie's worldview, there is no difference between a blood-soaked abattoir wherein people cannibalistically devour one another and stash their bodies in a swimming pool, and the rest of the world.

High-Rise was, predictably, praised by all the same people who praised Under the Skin and Elysium, because if you want to impress indie film critics, nothing works like claiming they're the only ones that can see the impending downfall of civilization at the hands of vast hordes of people that are not like them, even if you have to dig up the mindset of forty years ago to do it. Being a critic who does not hold the 60s and 70s as some kind of sacred period of true freedom before "the youth" ruined everything, I have a lot less patience with the film. And even if you regard my viewpoint on history and politics as nothing but hot garbage, ask yourselves how much you enjoy the prospect of watching an indie movie in which nobody acts in a comprehensible manner for two and a half hours?


Final Score: 3.5/10

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X-Men: Apocalypse

Alternate Title: The Same Old Shit

One sentence synopsis: The awakening of the world's first mutant, who aspires to become a god, forces the X-Men and their enemies to unite to try and stop him.


The Verdict: I was really hoping that this movie would be excellent, and can you blame me? The first movie of the rebooted series was the incomparable X-Men: First Class, one of the first films I saw for this project of mine, and one of the finest Superhero movies I've ever seen, period. The second film, 2014's Days of Future Past, while not the equal of its predecessor, was still a superb movie, one that merged both the old and the new canons together, and prepared the way for a future of infinite possibility. Combine that with the news that one of my favorite actors of recent years, Oscar Isaac, would be playing Apocalypse himself, and I was stoked for this one.

Of course I shouldn't have been, but I still haven't managed to train myself entirely to give up hope.

X-Men: Apocalypse is a great disappointment, not a disaster or the worst movie ever made or anything so dramatic, but a mediocre movie veering on a bad one that takes the infinite possibility afforded by its predecessors and cast and does exactly nothing with it. That Brian Singer, one of my favorite directors, and a man who directed not only Days of Future Past but also the original X-Men 1 and 2 (to say nothing of things like The Usual Suspects), created this thing only serves to deepen the disappointment for me, as X-Men: Apocalypse is the kind of movie that I assume all superhero movies look like to people who hate superhero movies. Though it retains the same raw materials as the previous films, particularly the services of James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence as the characters of Charles Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique respectively, it has no idea what to do with any of it, relegating Magneto to an one-note off-screen role that employs little of the character's fascinating depths, while giving Mystique nothing to do but exposition and the occasional punch. Only McAvoy gets some actual acting to do, and his part is shortchanged by being stuck on a rock on the outskirts of Cairo for half of the runtime, in the company of Isaac's Apocalypse, who looks like a Luchador, and who exhibits none of the amoral, sinister menace that the comic character evidenced back in the day. Returning roles by Rose Byrne and Nicholas Hoult as Moira McTaggert and Beast are equally useless, as the characters in question have been (in one case literally) prevented from moving forward in any interesting way from the previous movie. But the worst idea relates to Quicksilver, whose glorified cameo in the last movie was one of the greatest things ever committed to film, and for whom the filmmakers had so few ideas that they simply repeat it, almost shot for shot, in this one. The decision to upgrade this character to a supporting cast member could have been fine, if they had bothered to give him any sort of developmental arc. But this is not the movie for such things.

And why not? Because X-Men Apocalypse is simply bloated with too goddamn many characters, and I say that in full recollection of my praise for Avengers 2, which had nearly as many. In addition to all of the returning cast, we have Psylocke, Storm, Nightcrawler, Angel, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Jubilee, Colonel Stryker, to say nothing of the obligatory Wolverine cameo shoehorned into the movie in one of the most transparently crowbarred sequences of recent memory. Attempts are made to give some of these characters life, with mixed results. Former child-star Kodi Smit-McPhee actually does a very serviceable job as my favorite blue German teleporting mutant (Nightcrawler, for those plebeians who don't know), while Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) is just embarrassingly unable to embody Jean Grey at all. But ultimately it doesn't matter if any of these actors are able to portray their characters well, because the film gives us so little of substance with any of them. They could all be played by actors of the pedigrees of Lawrence Olivier and Peter O'Toole, and it would likely make very little difference.

Ultimately, I didn't hate X-Men Apocalypse, but it hardly represents what I had in mind when I saw the ending to Days of Future Past. And while I refuse to punish a film for not enacting my exact desires in front of me, I also refuse to have mercy for a film that fails to enact anything of substance whatsoever.

Final Score: 4.5/10

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Weiner

Alternate Title: Art from Adversity

One sentence synopsis: Disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner attempts to make a comeback by running for Mayor of New York when another scandal hits him.


The Verdict: If I live to be a thousand years old, I will never forget Anthony Weiner, the man at the center of one of my favorite scandals of all time. Once a fiery congressman from New York, Weiner's promising career was destroyed in 2011 when it came out that he had been texting pictures of his penis to random women on the internet. The combination of transgression and name were too delicious for anyone to resist, and some of my favorite headlines of all time resulted from this hilarious debacle. So much for Weiner the man. Weiner the film, however, is a movie made two years later, in 2013, chronicling Anthony Weiner's efforts to stage a comeback through the 2013 election for Mayor of New York. And to document his attempt to do just that, Weiner invited documentarians Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg to chronicle his campaign, neither of whom probably knew what was about to happen.

Political campaign documentaries are a dime a dozen nowadays, as every campaign announces that there will be a "behind the scenes" documentary created as they run for office, generally as a way of appearing to be "hip, and with the youths". But the nice side effect of this barrage of documenting is that it means the cameras are on-hand for when everything falls completely to pieces, as happened here. Weiner, you see, was not done with his sex scandal behavior, and midway through the mayoral race, was hit with the revelation that he had continued to text pictures of his penis to anyone with an internet account, including a young woman named Sydney Leathers, who went explosively, wonderfully public with the allegations, a decision which ended with her and Howard Stern attempting to ambush Weiner at his own campaign headquarters on the night of the election, forcing him to take shelter by fleeing through the bathroom of a nearby McDonalds. It is rare, even in this day and age, to be able to watch a trainwreck like this transpire live before our eyes, but this is what Weiner, the film, consists of, the damage control and tearful press conferences, the meetings with shocked staffers and frenzied media sharks, all the glorious schadenfreude of something as stage managed as a modern political campaign misfiring dramatically before our very eyes, it's all here. And things get oh, so wonderfully ridiculous, until at the end, the shell-shocked documentarians are reduced to asking Weiner, in something of a sympathetic tone, "why did you let us film all of this?"

And honestly, it's hard to blame them, documentary ethics be damned, because the fact is that in bearing witness to Weiner and the disasters, all of his own creation, that overtake him in the course of this campaign, one actually begins to feel for the man, not as a punchline or a politician, but a person. A sharp, clearly principled political figure who just happens to also be opportunistic, ambitious, and as dumb as a bag of hammers, Weiner may be a sleazy figure, but over the course of the insanity that erupts in his wake, he starts to feel like a character from a Coen Brothers movie, a semi-coherent guy who fundamentally does not understand why he is where he is, but is attempting in his own way, to make the best of it. We also get to know his wife, Huma Abedin, one of the most powerful people in the Democratic Party, and currently the vice-chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Weiner and Abedin's relationship is... well strained probably doesn't do it enough credit, and feels rather like the arranged political marriage between two up-and-coming young Democrats that it originally was (Bill Clinton officiated their wedding). They speak frankly of having considered separating back when the first scandal hit, and both myself and all of my companions assumed (wrongly as it turns out) that they had divorced in the aftermath. Though they never scream at one another Jerry Springer-style on-camera, there is a palpable tension between husband and wife that feels entirely real, undercut only on rare occasions, such as when Weiner angrily confronts a man who takes him to task for having "married an Arab".

I don't see a lot of documentaries, mostly because I can't stand polemics, but even by the admittedly strange standards of the documentaries I do go and see, Weiner is one of the strangest documentaries I've ever seen, and it definitely profits from it. That it exists at all is a point in favor of the voyeuristic side of political life in this country, something I never thought I'd ever say for any reason. I would hardly call the film a must-see, but for those who have any interest in what it must be like at the center of a maelstrom like the one that Anthony Weiner conjured up for himself, there is no finer resource than this, other than running for office yourself while trying to conceal an addiction to barnyard animals.

Final Score: 7/10

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Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Alternate Title: This is Beiberlake

One sentence synopsis: Connor4Real, formerly of the Style Boyz, attempts to recover from the failure of his second solo album amidst fears of irrelevance.


The Verdict: If you don't know who the Lonely Island are, then open up a new browser tab to Youtube and go find out. I'll wait.

Back? Good. So having sampled the Lonely Island's wares, what would you say if I told you that Popstar is a full on Spinal Tap-style mocumentary which changes out Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne for Justin Bieber and One Direction. Some of you might, no doubt, run screaming for the hills, but those who do not are in for a treat, because Popstar is goddamn glorious.

Andy Sandberg, SNL and Brooklyn Nine-Nine alum, stars as Connor4Real, a Justin Bieber/Justin Timberlake analogue who was once a member of a group called The Style Boyz, which resembles nothing if not the fake boy band that the protagonist of Rock of Ages was forced to be a part of by his unscrupulous manager. Now a solo act with a massive, MC-Hammer-style entourage (including a Unicorn Trainer), the story, such as it is, involves Connor's second album (Connquest) flopping, sparking a crisis of confidence and ever-more-desperate acts on Connor's part to recapture the limelight, of a sort that would be familiar to watchers of reality television or VH1 documentary shows. If this all sounds familiar, then there's a reason, for we're in solid mockumentary territory here, a cross between Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (typing that title makes me want to set my computer on fire), and a Christopher Guest movie. As such, the plot isn't the point. The point is to pillory everything and anything in the music industry, which means that the only question that matters is whether the movie is funny or not.

Well... yes. Yes it freaking is. Sandberg is accompanied here by Lonely Island veterans Akiva Shaffer (who doubles as the film's director), and Jorma Taccone, playing his former bandmates, the former of which has become an embittered farmer in Colorado (whose woodworking skills recall Billy Joel's "Classical" work), the latter of which has become Connor's DJ, hiding under a helmet that Daft Punk would reject for being gimmicky. All three men are credited as writers, and fill the movie with blink-and-you'll-miss-it in-jokes and gags, such as Connor one-upping Justin Bieber's infamous gaffe at the Anne Frank house (just watch it), or a quick-change act that ends just about as disastrously as such acts can possibly end. All along there are a horde of funny people in support, from Emma Stone, Bill Hader, Sarah Silverman, Mike Birbiglia (you'll live Sleepwalk With Me down someday, buddy), Joan Cusack and Will Arnett (who tries vainly to satirize something as stupid as TMZ), to an unpublishably huge list of cameos from basically every musician ever, including Ringo Starr, Usher, Pharell, Carrie Underwood, Adam Levine, Akon, Snoop Dogg... there's just no end. Highlights for me include Seal (back from palling around with West Asian dictators) getting eaten by wolves, and none other than Martin Sheen punching Sandberg in the face before running around the room chanting "ATTICA! ATTICA!" The songs are no less awesome, from a satire of pro Gay-Rights anthems like Born This Way or Same Love more interested in assuring the audience of the singer's heterosexuality than any message, to an Insane Clown Posse ripoff called "Incredible Thoughts".

Enough. Suffice to say that Popstar, while hardly a movie for everyone (you do kinda need to understand the modern state of Pop Music to get 90% of the jokes) is a hell of a thing, a short, sweet, rapid fire movie that doesn't overstay its welcome and is worth the price of admission. One can always do worse at the movies than that.


Final Score: 7.5/10

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The Man Who Knew Infinity

Alternate Title: Show Your Work!

One sentence synopsis: Mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan works at Cambridge with English Professor G. H. Hardy during World War 1.


The Verdict: I want to like Dev Patel. I want to like him because he tries so hard to be likeable, in Chappie, in The Newsroom, in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, he's just a... peppy figure for lack of a better word, and so I suppose it was only a matter of time before he played the brilliant and eager young student struggling to fit in at the prestigious institution of higher learning that has been seen in a thousand movies from Monsters' University to Harry Potter. Most of those movies have a wise old teacher who takes the student under his wing and helps him achieve his potential, and when it comes to wise old teachers, one could do a lot worse than Jeremy Irons, I suppose. And Cambridge is, after all, the ur-example of stodgy old learning institutions steeped in history. So why the hell not?

The Man Who Knew Infinity is based on the real life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an poorly-educated laborer and clerk who also happened to be an intuitive mathematician of staggering productivity and insight, author of thousands upon thousands of wholly self-made theorems, many of which continue to baffle the world today. The film focuses on his life in Cambridge, after having come to the attention of several Mathematics professors there, one of whom (Irons) sponsors him to come to Britain and revolutionize the world of numbers. In Britain, he must deal with all the usual suspects, racism, overt and shuttered, both by bitter draftees on the streets and sneering ponces in the classrooms, a climate and diet that is like nothing he is used to (if I had to eat nothing but British food from the 1910s for five years, I might try to dig back to India with a spoon), and, of course, the rigid codifications of a system that is not kind to intuitive geniuses, and seems to exist only to put young men in their places...

... yeah, so there's nothing really revolutionary here from a plot perspective, and yet I did like The Man Who Knew Infinity. Not as much perhaps as I've liked some other movies this year, but I liked it nonetheless, for the movie does do a few things differently from the typical "smart kid makes good" films you see every so often. I liked, for instance, that Ramanujan's insistence that proofs are a waste of time being forced upon him by a racist western establishment that doesn't "get" the numbers (maaaan), is rewarded in a very un-cinematic way when it turns out that his primary theorem, which he never bothered to mathematically prove, is completely wrong. Having seen roughly a billion movies where proper testing and academic rigor are treated as the last resort of dopey, smelly losers out to crimp the genius main character's style, I appreciate a film that is aware of the fact that Math does indeed have to add up in order to be correct. I liked Patel in the movie, liked his growth from naive student to seasoned Mathematician, liked the frustration and anger he let himself express (not always in the most productive ways) at the racism and the boorishness he was faced with. I liked Jeremy Irons (but then I always do), and I liked Toby Jones, who is finally given a chance to play something other than a weaselly villain.

There are things I didn't like of course, like the obligatory love interest shoehorned into the movie with a crowbar, or the fact that Steven Fry, who got third billing in the movie, has roughly eight seconds of screentime throughout the thing. But those are minor points. The Man Who Knew Infinity is a decent-to-good movie, and if sedate biopics about men who should probably be more famous are your thing, then I doubt you'll have much to complain about here.


Final Score: 6.5/10