It’s not my intent to damn Wonder Woman with too much faint praise by measuring it favorably against the abysmal Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. After all, saying this movie is leagues better than that one is akin to lauding really good fast food over something you found in the dumpster because, well, at least it isn’t actual garbage. The comparison needs to be made, though, because both exist in DC’s attempt at a Marvel-style cinematic universe, and the character made her debut in that earlier film. Wonder Woman is a well-crafted action spectacle with its greatest strength (both the title character and the actress playing her) right at the center. The elements orbiting that center, though, keep it from being transcendent.
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A great thing about the early entries in the Alien franchise is that they are exciting and scary good fun. Alien: Covenant is too obsessed with its own mythology to be much of either. Director Ridley Scott had the perfect opportunity to pull a George Miller. That filmmaker revived his Mad Max series with the fresh and inventive Fury Road. Miller wasn’t concerned with what he did in the past. With Fury Road, he gleefully started from scratch, and as a result produced a rip-roaring action film, one of the best of the decade. Alien: Covenant is the first true Alien movie in 20 years. Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus was a sort of spiritual sequel to the franchise, taking place in the same universe, but centered on its distant origins. Covenant is a direct sequel to Prometheus. Instead of surprising us with the possibilities of a clean start, Scott and his writers, John Logan and Dante Harper, give us that sinking feeling with Covenant that this is someplace we’ve already been.
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The most enjoyable thing about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is exemplified in its very first action sequence. An alien race called The Sovereign have hired the guardians – Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket Racoon, and Groot – to protect some highly powerful and very valuable batteries from a giant space slug. An epic battle ensues as a backdrop to the opening credits. There’s plenty of razzle-dazzle special effects work and camera trickery in this sequence, to be sure, but the real focus isn’t the fight at all. Groot, the 12-foot tall extraterrestrial tree-creature, sacrificed himself in the first Guardians film, and regenerated as a tiny seedling now known as Baby Groot. Obviously, he’s not much help in this fight. Instead, director James Gunn has him avoiding danger by showing off some hilarious dance moves to Electric Light Orchestra’s classic hit Mr. Blue Sky.
It’s a clever, goofy way of launching directly into the oddball sense of humor that made the original movie from 2014 so entertaining.
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Free Fire is an outrageous little movie. It shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is. This hilarious gun-deal-turned-shoot-out is provocative and cathartic, with cartoonish violence aimed mostly for laughs. It’s Tarantino, but straight-slapstick.
It would be reasonable to think a movie that consists almost completely of people shooting each other would become tedious, not to mention a little hard to watch considering the unimaginable spate of mass shootings constantly featured in the news. Director Ben Wheatley and writer Amy Jump – who co-wrote the script together – pull it off, though. Set in 1978, the movie begins with two factions traveling to a Boston warehouse to complete an illegal weapons deal. An intermediary, Justine, represents the buyers: a group of IRA members, led by Chris, who want firearms for use against their enemies in The Troubles. Justine’s colleague, Ord, is bringing the seller, a South African gun runner named Vernon, who is accompanied by his own group of associates. An uneasy tension hangs in the air as all the interested parties, ten people total, attempt to exchange cash for guns.
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Since the beginning of the comic book movie’s modern era, arguably starting with Richard Donner’s Superman in 1978, the genre has fought for legitimacy. Critics and audiences alike would dismiss the majority of them as kid’s stuff – they’re fun and entertaining, sure, but not to be taken too seriously. The makers of these movies started challenging that philosophy in earnest when the number of comic book movies released per year ramped up, starting with Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was one major step forward. The superhero’s capacity for emotional and moral complexity got deeper even as the body count and onscreen carnage got bloodier and more overwhelming.
Director James Mangold’s Logan feels like a leap forward. There is an emotional resonance here that’s more profound than any comic book movie I’ve ever seen. It’s made more affecting because there are real stakes in Logan. Mangold – who co-wrote as well as directed – breaks through the usual pitfall of these sorts of movies by having his characters change in ways that can’t easily be reset for a next installment. Logan is a brilliant example of the heights that comic book movies are capable.
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Passengers is a great movie. At least, it’s a great movie if you hate thinking. The makers and marketers were clearly aware of this. Razzle and dazzle ‘em enough, they must have thought, and they’ll look past the fact that it's deeply flawed on a basic, storytelling level. It’s true enough. If you mentally check out, Passengers is a pretty enjoyable experience.
The tale of two interstellar space travelers, who wake up from hibernation 90 years too soon, is packed with gorgeous special effects and tense action sequences. The two leads have a heavy burden, and they pull it off in grand style. Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, semi-stranded like Robinson Crusoe, are on a lonely craft adrift in the vast ocean of space instead of on a deserted island. Almost the entire movie rests on their shoulders, and they prove themselves capable of the task. But they do all that in a movie so clunky and half-baked that it’s easy to forget; the film’s rightful destiny.
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The opening crawl is missing. The opening crawl is missing! Those famous paragraphs that follow “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” in every Star Wars movie – one of the most iconic things about the series – are absent in Rogue One. I don’t know if that set off shrieks of rage around the internet. I purposefully avoid that sort of thing, but it’s not hard to imagine the internet outrage machine losing their collective minds about this when the mere mention that the next James Bond might be portrayed by a black man nearly broke the internet forever.
Director Gareth Edwards took the opportunity of ditching this de rigueur element as a way to set his entry in the Star Wars franchise apart, while also including a sly nod to it, if you’re paying attention. The opening action is set on a planet like Saturn, complimented with a series of rings. Edwards’ camera drifts in space, looking at the planet, and tilting up to reveal the majestic rings above. In an ingenious touch, the special effects department gave a funny quality to those rings. In a way, they look just like blurry, upside down, and backwards text. We, and the film, Edwards is intimating, are just underneath the events of the official “Episodes” that make up the main story arc of the Star Wars universe. This movie doesn’t have an Episode number, after all. Its full title is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
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There’s a falseness to Hell or High Water that distracts from the quite potent visceral punch the movie delivers in its last act. The disingenuous vibe the movie gives off comes mostly from writer Taylor Sheridan’s heavily clichéd dialog and obnoxious character dynamics. The way Sheridan handles those attributes left me with the impression that Hell or High Water is his version of a Coen brothers movie, essentially a stripped down No Country for Old Men. But where No Country is full of delicate, nuanced character studies punctuated with nerve-shredding tension and bursts of violence, Hell or High Water eschews the rich character turns for a tired machismo that left me feeling bored.
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Oliver Stone liberally blends fact and fiction to create his portrait of the NSA whistleblower at the center of his film Snowden. The director, who co-wrote the script with Kieran Fitzgerald, admits as much, confessing that the way Edward Snowden secreted highly classified information out of an NSA facility was stylized for the movie. “[W]hen he lifted these materials and helped get them out to the public, it is not done in the realistic way that it was done. It was—we gave it a little juice, because it’s a drama, and because, frankly, it’s probably much more banal than you think, the way he did it.”
Stone is a filmmaker who is famous for using creative license to bring a bold streak of drama to real-life events. With Snowden, his amalgamation of truth and Hollywood spectacle is a magnificent success. Stone humanizes Edward Snowden, making him a guy with whom we can all relate, while portraying his actions and the events surrounding them as the tense, establishment-shaking moments they are.
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It’s not easy to overlook the many flaws of the new DC comic book adaptation Suicide Squad (and trust me, I won’t), but I have to admit that I did enjoy it more than I expected. The sole reason for that unexpected enjoyment is the cast. The producers of Suicide Squad put together a collection of actors who are not only charismatic individually, but whose chemistry as a team is about the only thing that makes the movie watchable at all. Without Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jai Courtney, and the rest, Suicide Squad would be an unredeemable mess of a movie. Grotesquely nihilistic, with a script that can most charitably be described as cobbled together, a possible subtitle for the film could have been The Plot that Wasn’t There.
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There isn’t an ounce of flab on Matt Damon’s body. The same can’t be said of the latest installment in the Bourne series. Damon is reprising his role as Jason Bourne, the memory-deficient super spy, after a nine-year hiatus in which Universal Pictures attempted to expand the franchise with Jeremy Renner in 2012’s The Bourne Legacy.
The main problem with this series is that each movie essentially tells the same story. After suffering amnesia during an assignment-gone-wrong in the first movie, Jason Bourne becomes a spy that is forever trying to piece together his own past. In each successive picture, Bourne gets a new clue about the secretive program that turned him into an elite assassin. The saving grace of the Bourne movies is the tightly wound structure of each mystery. The plot always takes a back seat to the chase, as the CIA desperately tries to stop Bourne from revealing the disturbing truth he uncovers about the secret program that created him. In Jason Bourne, there’s frankly too much plot, and it detracts from the action.
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Star Trek fans did a lot of phaser clutching back in 2008 when director J.J. Abrams said he wanted to make his iteration of Trek more like Star Wars. “All my smart friends liked Star Trek,” Abrams said at the time. “I preferred a more visceral experience.” For Star Trek Beyond, Abrams handed the keys over to director Justin Lin, and he took a more hands-off approach as producer. Of the three Star Trek movies under the Abrams banner, Beyond is the one most like a visceral Star Wars adventure.
Lin is most famous for the four Fast and Furious films he directed, and his gifts for staging adrenaline pumping action sequences are on full display here. He also directed two episodes of the cult sitcom Community, so Lin knows how to handle ensembles and comedy as well. Amidst all the action is a script by Simon Pegg – who also plays Chief Engineer Scotty – and Doug Jung that honors the ideals and ethos of Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The end result is a movie that focuses more on the wow factor than it needs to, but is still immensely enjoyable because of it.
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It’s times like these that I wonder if Roger Ebert ever faced the problem I’m having. Does that make it sound like I’m putting myself in the same ballpark as Roger Ebert? I’m not. I am to Roger Ebert what Caddyshack II is to Caddyshack. (As per review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel currently stands at 4%(!) positive compared to the original’s 75% rating. So, yeah, that seems fair.) If anything, the higher rating isn’t high enough to properly gauge the late, great film critic’s skills. Still, did he ever review a remake of a movie he so beloved, and felt so close to, that he wasn’t sure if he could fairly assess the remake on its own merits? That was my worry going into the 2016 version of Ghostbusters.
If pop culture-obsessed children of the 1980s made a top ten list of movies that should be treated most like Lennie’s beloved rabbits in Of Mice and Men, the original Ghostbusters would be a heavy contender for number one. I turned five the summer it was released, and if you weren’t there, it’s impossible to overstate the absolute phenomenon that the movie was. A photo exists of my entire family wearing white shirts with the Ghostbusters logo emblazoned on the front, each of our names ironed onto the pocket. I vividly remember Ghostbusters being the very first VHS rental for my family’s freshly purchased VCR.
There’s a lot of history here is all I’m saying.
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Because the creative minds behind Keanu previously worked on MadTV before getting their own series, Key and Peele, it seems lazy to say that the movie feels like a five-minute sketch extended for 95 more. If the tired and worn out premise fits, though…
In the grand tradition of movies like A Night at the Roxbury and Superstar, Keanu sustains genuinely funny material for sixty whole seconds at a time before reminding you that the movie’s concept wore out its welcome after about twenty minutes.
The plot is set in motion by a kitten who escapes a grizzly shootout between rival drug gangs and finds his way to the doorstep of loser Rell Williams. Rell (Jordan Peele) is suffering a recent break-up with his girlfriend. She left because he’s basically a slob who is going nowhere in life. When Rell’s cousin Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) learns of the devastating break-up, he rushes over for consolation, but finds Rell is already taking solace in caring for the kitten, whom he’s named Keanu.
In an early example of one of the bits that genuinely made me laugh, Rell’s obsession with Keanu leads him to make the kitten the centerpiece of a series of photographs that he plans on making into a calendar. Each picture is a scene from a different movie (e.g., The Shining, Beetlejuice) with Keanu as the star. It’s as adorable and hilarious as you might imagine. I thought the pop culture influenced comedy would be something I could latch onto, but moments like these are too few and far between to sustain laughter throughout the picture.
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I never really got into comic books as a kid, so their stylistic elements in big screen adaptations aren’t a part of my artistic appreciation as an adult. It means quite a lot, then, that there is a sequence in Captain America: Civil War that even novices like me can realize comes from a powerful connection to the source material: the splash page. Put simply, a splash page is one big drawing that takes up a full page (or two) of any single comic. It’s meant to really catch the reader’s attention, a sort of aesthetic exclamation point in the middle of the story.
The directing team of brothers Anthony and Joe Russo create at least one moment that is on par with the grandeur of the splash page. In fact, the visual design of the whole film evinces a deep respect and love for their movie’s funny book origin, and its uniquely cinematic qualities. The script, by writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, offers up a fairly straightforward central conflict while successfully bringing together multiple subplots that are all in service of the larger story.
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There is a moral ambiguity to Eye in the Sky that acts wonderfully as a test for each person watching it. Depending on your feelings about the importance of maintaining a moral high ground relative to your enemy, it’s possible to have a very different experience with the film than the person sitting right next to you. Even if you agree with that person on how the so-called “war on terror” is prosecuted, it’s easy to read the message the movie is sending in a wildly different way. That is Eye in the Sky’s most powerful strength. It deftly presents opposing sides to the ongoing debate of the best way to stop terrorists, then forces you to think critically about the issue and pick a side. Dramatically speaking, the film is also an incredibly taut thriller; it’s expertly paced for maximum tension. The picture achieves this by taking the overused “ticking time bomb scenario” and adding an element that complicates what is usually presented as an easy call by films and television shows of this nature.
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Midnight Special is many things. It’s a moody science fiction throw back in the vein of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s an intense on-the-run movie which takes place over the space of a few frantic days. It shows the destructive force of religious cults, and the extreme measures true believers will go to in the name of their convictions. Ultimately, Midnight Special is a tightly wound tale of a father and mother who will do anything for their child, who is at the heart of it all.
Director Jeff Nichols’ first two films, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, are both meditations on American families in the process of breaking down. In the former, years of uneasy pressure between two sets of half-brothers in Arkansas come to a boil when the patriarch of the two clans suddenly dies. The latter examines a man in Ohio whose family must face the consequences of his slow descent into mental illness. So it’s no surprise that family is at the core of Nichols’ fourth and latest film, as well.
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Well, it was as bad as I expected. Whenever I make the decision to write about a movie (being extremely selective in what I review is the ultimate perk of writing as a hobby), I do my absolute best to avoid the critical response around a film before I have a chance to see it myself. I don’t want to be swayed by anyone else’s opinion but my own. I want to react to the movie with an open, unbiased mind. That was near impossible with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I saw it on opening night, but I was still inundated by headlines on social media, not to mention every website starting with “www” having an opinion about how terrible the film was. The internet even graced me with the Sad Affleck meme. That was particularly delicious, in a “worst angels of our nature” sort of way.
When I sat down in the theater, waiting for the lights to dim, I steeled myself against all I had seen that day. I’m willing to give any movie a fair shake and Batman v Superman was no different. I did my duty as a critic to leave any preconceived notions I had at the ticket counter, so it’s without any reservation that I write these words: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is an utter mess. There are a few elements worthy of praise, to be sure, but they are so few and far between that they are essentially inconsequential to the overall effect.
BvS suffers from kitchen sink syndrome. In an effort to wow the audience, as well as get their own cinematic universe kick-started, DC Comics and screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer packed any and everything they could think of into an interminable two-and-a-half-hour assault on the senses. Hell, there’s even a literal kitchen sink. Used as a weapon during the titular hero-on-hero battle royale. Actually, if memory serves, it was a bathroom sink. So the movie gets one half credit for avoiding complete cliché.
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Last week I wrote about Richard Linklater’s film Everybody Wants Some, his “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused. 10 Cloverfield Lane could very easily be described similarly alongside its 2007 predecessor, the found footage monster movie Cloverfield. But producer J.J. Abrams has instead taken to calling the film a “blood relative” of the original, which he also produced. Think of the two Cloverfields as feature length, big budget anthology entries in a show like The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits. Their connective tissue is a sci-fi milieu, and a rich atmosphere that envelops you in dread.
The film’s official synopsis is, “Monsters come in many forms.” That is a supremely superb and succinct sketch – an excellent example of the Shakespearean proverb, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” The set up to the film, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, is equally simple. A young woman named Michelle survives a car crash and wakes up in her rescuer’s underground fallout shelter. The man, named Howard, tells Michelle that some invading force has poisoned the air, and that it’s not safe to go above ground for a year or two. Michelle and Howard aren’t alone, though. An acquaintance of Howard, a young man named Emmett, saw that the older man was acting strange, and convinced Howard to let him into the shelter before sealing it.
The next hour and a half plays out as an incredibly tense chamber drama. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a masterclass in paranoia filmmaking. Even though Emmett believes everything Howard says about the danger above ground – the older man claims he saw atomic-like blasts – Emmett didn’t actually witness anything himself. Complicating matters, Howard proves to be unstable at best, kind and fatherly but capable of exploding into bouts of rage when contradicted. So, Michelle isn’t sure who to trust or what to believe. In addition to Howard’s erratic behavior, Michelle can’t be totally sure he didn’t run her off the road in the first place. She also awoke in the concrete bunker with her leg chained to the wall. That early scene is evocative of a movie like Saw, and it succeeds in producing the uneasy feeling that at any moment the movie could shift into torture porn.
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a dramedy that isn’t funny enough to make it memorable as a comedy, and it isn’t moving enough to make it memorable as a drama. It’s muddled, not really sure what it wants to be. The movie suffers immensely from this lack of commitment. It also actively refuses to take any meaningful stance on the issues central to its plot – journalists covering the American invasion of Afghanistan – leaving the picture like a news story that fails to inform or entertain.
The story revolves around real life American journalist Kim Baker and her adventures while covering the war in Afghanistan. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (the military phonetic alphabet translation of the letters WTF, so the title is a joke on the popular shortened version of the expression “What the fuck?”) is based on Baker’s memoir, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shepherded through the book-to-screen process by star Tina Fey’s production company Little Stranger, the movie transforms its war-torn backdrop into a self-discovery tale with a splash of romantic comedy. It’s an unlikely setting for such a story, one the filmmakers would have been wise to avoid.
There is a scene in the middle of WTF when an Afghan woman asks Baker what made her decide to travel half way around the world to cover the war. Fey, as Baker, sums up her need to escape her life using the exercise bike at her gym to illustrate her point. Baker tells the woman that one day she noticed an indentation in the carpet just in front of her regular stationery bike. She realized it was where the bike used to sit before a gym employee moved it for one reason or another. In that moment, Baker says, she understood she had spent countless hours on that bike, only to move backward three feet. “Wow,” her interlocutor observes, “that’s the most American white lady story I’ve ever heard.”
It’s a funny moment to be sure, and it’s a sly attempt at winking at the audience. We know exactly what kind of story we’re telling, the movie says, and our effort at being up front about it will hopefully earn us some points with you, the audience. It doesn’t, though, because despite this self-awareness by the filmmakers, the rest of the movie is as predictable as you would expect. WTF is Eat, Pray, Love goes to war, and that’s just as disappointing of an exercise as you might expect.
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