Avengers: Endgame (2019)

The Low-Down: Statistically, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has achieved a great deal: over 11 years and 21 films, it has introduced dozens of relatively obscure characters into mainstream pop culture. More importantly, however, the franchise has proven that long-form storytelling can work in a cinematic context – as long as you balance plot with heart and humour, prizing character development over spectacle. That’s no small feat, and it’s even more remarkable that a movie with the gargantuan scale and ambition of Avengers: Endgame doesn’t fall apart beneath the weight of an unwieldy script or great expectations. In fact, this is the MCU’s crowning achievement: a heartfelt love letter to the Avengers, their stories, the actors who play them, and to the fans.

The Story: That damn Snap, eh? At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos wiped out half of the galaxy’s population with a snap of his Infinity-Stone-enhanced fingers. After bearing witness to teammates and loved ones vanishing in swirls of dust and ash, the remaining Avengers struggle to live with the crippling grief and guilt of surviving the Snap… and of failing to prevent it. Some characters spiral into darkness; others are frozen in place – a few even manage to move on. But hope is rekindled when Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) returns from the mysterious Quantum Realm, where the usual laws of physics, space and time do not apply…

The Great: Endgame is a storytelling triumph – not only does it bring together and pay off plots and ideas that were seeded over a decade ago, it builds solid, powerful, heartrendingly emotional narrative arcs for almost all of the original Avengers. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) must grapple with their pasts to figure out their futures, while Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) find themselves literally fighting to save their families. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) might provide much of the film’s comic relief, but both characters are also gifted with grace notes, growth and moments of true peace.

The Super-Great: The ability to juggle and create space for multiple perspectives and storylines in one film has been honed to a fine art by directors Anthony and Joe Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. But their narrative strategy feels virtuosic in Endgame, paired as it is with an ingenious plot device that allows the film to truly acknowledge the staggering depth and breadth of its own history. Suddenly, the emotional and narrative stakes are raised, as beloved characters are forced to re-examine their lives, stories and priorities. You might find yourself in tears and in stitches, frequently in the same scene, and this happens throughout the film – a testament to the Russo Brothers’ genius and their skills at anchoring even the most outlandish of storylines in humour and humanity.

The Not-So-Great: This is emphatically not a film for casual viewers – there is no entry point, no easing in, no exposition, to help you understand what the heck is going on if you haven’t watched most of the preceding films in the MCU. There are also a few logical fallacies and plotholes scattered throughout Endgame that will puzzle you the more you think about them – from the wobbly rules governing time travel to the fractured way in which the too-conveniently hyper-powered Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) pops in and out of the story.

Stan Service: This film, above all others in the MCU, feels like a heartfelt tribute to the very concept of Marvel itself, finding numerous ways to reward and delight true-blue fans. Naturally, it includes Stan Lee’s final appearance in the MCU, while folding in a host of other cameos and callbacks that reinforce the interconnectedness of the entire franchise – of all the stories that have been told before, especially the movie that started it all (Iron Man in 2008). There are even a couple of brilliant nods to comics lore, largely centred around the character of Captain America, that feel like the Russo Brothers are deliberately righting a few wrongs where some of Marvel Comics’ more controversial plot twists are concerned. (See: Nick Spencer’s run on Captain America: Steve Rogers.)

Cast-Iron MVP: Casting outside of the box has always been one of the MCU’s core strengths, with Oscar winners/nominees and character actors regularly popping up to play heroes and villains alike. That canny casting strategy pays off in spades in Endgame – especially when certain characters have relatively limited screen time but manage to make it count anyway. The undisputed stars of the movie, however, are the Avengers who started it all. Hemsworth continues to brilliantly dance along the knife-edge between comedy and pathos, while Ruffalo radiates charm and intelligence through ever-improving CGI as Banner and his not-so-mean, green alter ego: The Hulk. Johansson and Renner are given more to do in this film than ever before, and their combined efforts will shred your soul to pieces. Evans brings great warmth and strength to his stoic role, making it perfectly legitimate for you to weep and whoop for a man who’s – somewhat ridiculously – wrapped in an American flag. Above all, this double-whammy of Avengers films belongs, most fittingly, to Downey Jr. He still effortlessly injects Tony with snark and swagger, but also beautifully conveys every shade and layer of his character’s hard-won growth and maturity – giving us all the proof that we have never needed that Tony Stark has a heart.

Recommended? In every imaginable way. Endgame sets the bar as high as it can possibly go for superhero epics that balance enormous scale and jaw-dropping ambition with actual substance and genuine emotion. It’s the blockbuster movie event of our lifetimes, for very good reason – and it’s worth every minute you’ve invested in the MCU since 2008.

Deadpool 2 (2018)

Remember when the very concept of making a Deadpool movie was a risk that no sane person or studio would dare to undertake? That was just over two years ago. Defying naysayers and sceptics, Deadpool became a cultural phenomenon: a seriously silly, smart, self-aware comedy that merrily skewered the entire superhero movie genre (sometimes literally), while repeatedly shattering box-office records and the fourth wall. If you enjoyed Deadpool’s irresistible blend of satire, violence and irreverence, Deadpool 2 will be right up your alley. It’s more (literally much more) of the same – in a (mostly) good way: this is blithely rude, clever filmmaking, funny and fresh enough that you’ll be willing to forgive the movie its shortcomings.

Ryan Reynolds returns as Wade Wilson a.k.a. Deadpool – a super-dude (not quite a hero, almost certainly not a villain) blessed and cursed with the inability to die. When we meet Wade again, he is trying – and mostly failing – to come to terms with how his work as a mercenary endangers those whom he loves, particularly his girlfriend, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). The tragedy of Deadpool – both the character and this film –  is that his superpower can mend his body and his bones but, unfortunately, cannot put a broken heart back together again.

Not quite able to put himself out his misery, Wade keeps staggering through the land of the living. During a mission with some third-string X-Men, he encounters Russell (Julian Dennison), a troubled young man with a fiery temper. It’s a fateful meeting, for it sets Wade right in the path of Cable (Josh Brolin), a grim, grizzled bounty hunter who’s determined to take a life to change a future he cannot accept.

It may sound like a dismal experience, but it’s very much not. Deadpool 2 is easily one of the funniest, weirdest films you’ll see this year. Emboldened by the runaway success of its predecessor, this sequel dials up the wild, wacky humour to an almost overwhelming degree. Every frame of this film is crammed with jokes: from puns and pop-culture gags to sassy quips and meta references. This is story-telling by way of pastiche and spoof, which allows the film to flit from Celine Dion to ’80s cult classic Say Anything and back again. At one point, Deadpool even refers to Cable (grumpiness in half-man, half-machine form) as Thanos – a perfectly pointed nod to Brolin pulling double-duty as the huge-chinned purple antagonist in Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Infinity War.

The undeniable highlight of Deadpool 2 is Wade’s ill-advised attempt to stop Cable by creating X-Force, his own band of morally ambiguous super-powered individuals. Everything about this endeavour is hilarious: from selecting candidates like Terry Crews’ Bedlam and Rob Delaney’s schlubby Peter, to leaping into the great unknown with them on their very first mission. It allows for a brilliant sequence demonstrating how Domino (Zazie Beetz) gets by on her powers of extraordinary good luck, as well as a genius split-second cameo that works precisely because it’s so damn brief.

Not every joke lands, however – which is unsurprising considering how many are flung in the direction of audiences. There are several moments that are clearly meant to be hysterical but fall flat, which suggests that the script (credited to Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Reynolds) could have benefited from some judicious editing. An extended scene centred on Deadpool’s fairly gross regenerative abilities – let’s just say it involves a fresh pair of legs – goes on too long and belabours a joke that just barely works the first time around.  

With a couple of exceptions, the film doesn’t manage to do justice to the supporting characters in Wade’s orbit. Beetz’s Domino may swagger through scenes as a human blast of cool, breezy fun, but lacks anything resembling a backstory or personality. Russell also feels more like a walking plot point than an actual human person – that’s a huge shame, considering the depth of Dennison’s talent (cf. Taika Waititi’s Hunt For The Wilderpeople). Even Brolin’s Cable doesn’t get much in the way of characterisation until the final act.

It’s a really good thing, then, that the movie manages to stick its surprisingly emotional landing. At every step of the way, this raucous, knockabout comedy chooses the giddy over the grave, the satire over the drama, the caricature over the character. And yet, there’s a genuine emotional darkness at the heart of Deadpool 2. The film doesn’t shy away from examining the demons that haunt Wade and Cable, which lends real weight to their choices when sh*t finally gets real and sacrifices have to be made. (In a manner that will delight fans of this pairing in the comics, by the way!)

There’s a palpable joy, as well, to Reynolds’ performance that is delightful to watch. His own love of the character shines through – and no doubt helped during the film’s troubled pre-production process, when creative differences prompted original Deadpool director Tim Miller to leave. (He was replaced by David Leitch, aptly referred to in the credits as ‘One of The Guys Who Killed The Dog in John Wick’.) Reynolds is wonderfully adept at the Looney Tunes-style comedy that peppers Deadpool 2, somehow managing to emote even through a mask that completely covers his face. But he also sells Wade’s heartbreaking connection to Vanessa, one that he spends the entire film desperate to recover.  

At this point in the evolution of superhero movies, we’ve truly seen it all: from the gritty existentialism of The Dark Knight Rises to the soaring hope of Wonder Woman. Marvel Studios alone has produced a host of films in different genres: spy thrillers, political dramas, crime capers and more. But, in a day and age when special effects can accomplish the impossible, the Deadpool films still stand apart as something entirely different. There’s a giddy, unrestrained joy to them that recalls the wild, unchecked imagination of comic books – where anything can happen and nothing is off-limits. That Deadpool 2 manages to fold so much heart into its humour is icing on the cake.

Basically: So wildly funny and irreverent that you’ll forgive the film its flaws.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Over the past decade, Marvel has earned itself the benefit of the doubt. The studio has consistently delivered smart, funny, brave films that both embrace and transcend their comic-book origins. The 18 blockbuster movies produced since Iron Man first blasted off into the stratosphere in 2008 have not only reinvented superhero films as a genre – they’ve helped to legitimise it. Indeed, Marvel’s two most recent films – Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther – have received the kind of accolades usually reserved for edgy arthouse flicks.

And yet, it’s perfectly reasonable to be apprehensive about Avengers: Infinity War. This is a blockbuster film that’s been ten years in the making, its plot hinted at and scattered throughout 18 other movies. It features 30 or so characters, each with their own complex backstories and motivations. And all of them are coming together in a bid to stop a giant purple alien dude from destroying the universe. It sounds ridiculous, and feels impossible.

But that’s precisely what makes the final product such a monumental achievement. Masterfully directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, Infinity War is bold, brainy filmmaking at its very best: the kind that will lift your spirits, blow your mind and shatter your soul – occasionally in the same scene. It demonstrates on an epic scale what Marvel has known all along: that special effects and tightly choreographed action are there to serve the story. For all its blockbuster spectacle (and there’s almost too much of that), the film is anchored by the heart, humour and humanity of its characters.

The film’s basic plot is simple: Thanos (played via motion-capture by Josh Brolin), intergalactic purveyor of death and destruction, has long been on the hunt for the six Infinity Stones that will give him complete control over the elemental building blocks of the universe. He dispatches his acolytes to Earth to retrieve the Time Stone, currently in the possession of Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), and carve the Mind Stone out of the forehead of Vision (Paul Bettany). It’s a literal existential threat so terrifying that all the heroes we’ve come to know and love – from the Avengers to the Guardians of the Galaxy – must put aside their differences and unite against a common foe.

From the outset, it’s immediately clear that neither the film’s directors nor screenwriters (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) are interested in playing it safe. Most other superhero films are bled of high stakes – the hero in the title might suffer untold trauma, but it’s a super-safe bet that he or she will make it to the end alive. There’s no such guarantee here. Within the first ten minutes, we are confronted with the dark, twisted depths to which Thanos and his acolytes in the Black Order will sink in order to achieve their goals. Death, as well as genuine loss and sacrifice, is intrinsic to the narrative drumbeat that drives Infinity War ever forward, and the film is all the better for it.

That’s not to say the movie is a morbid and depressing experience. What’s so impressive about Infinity War is how it expertly juggles its constantly shifting tones and moods. When it’s funny (and it very often is), it’s deeply, truly funny. The film finds maximum joy in flinging characters together with merry abandon, mixing and matching ones you’d never have expected to share scenes or trade banter. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is floored by Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) godly muscles. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is charmed by the wit and intelligence of Shuri (Letitia Wright). And it’d be impossible to not be utterly delighted by Peter Dinklage’s inspired cameo. It’s a blithely tongue-in-cheek sensibility shared by Marvel’s best comic books, which understand that humour can make you care when it really counts.

And, boy, does Infinity War make it count. There are many heartbreakingly human moments threaded throughout the film: from the charming surrogate father-son dynamic shared by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and Peter Parker (Tom Holland), to the undeniable love that ties Vision and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) together. In many ways, the film stands as a testament to the human capacity not just to love, but to love fiercely and beyond all logic. It’s right there when the unfailingly noble Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) declares, “We don’t trade lives”, even when giving up one could save billions.

There’s even a chilling echo of it in Thanos himself. A lesser film would have turned Thanos into a one-dimensional villain, much the way he’s all monster and maniac in the comic books. In Infinity War, however, Thanos’ end goal is surprisingly relevant when it comes to thinking and talking about the staggeringly overpopulated world in which we live today. There is, as it turns out, method to Thanos’ madness. It makes the tragic twists and turns in his relationships with his estranged adopted daughters, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan), all the more unsettling.

For the most part, Infinity War does justice, too, to the many heroes who have been assembled for the film. The Russo brothers displayed great skill at interweaving multiple perspectives and character trajectories in Captain America: Civil War, and they do so again here, with twice as many characters. Even the most minor of supporting players, like Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes/War Machine, are given story beats that land. It helps that Marvel has always taken care to cast genuinely good actors in roles that might otherwise come off as silly and slight.

Even so, there are a few standouts amongst this enormous and enormously talented cast. Emotionally speaking, this is Downey’s film. He plays every note of Tony’s reluctant courage and bone-deep trauma, as he embarks on what he’s convinced is a suicide mission. He’s ably matched by Cumberbatch, who finds vulnerability even in his character’s most cunning and calculative move. Hemsworth, meanwhile, is given free rein to import the big-hearted comedic swagger of Thor: Ragnarok into this film – while also layering it with a deeply-felt, jagged grief for the losses he has suffered at the hands of Thanos and the universe.

In a film with so many moving parts, some elements don’t work quite as well. A couple of characters that you might have expected to be right at the forefront – including an original Avenger or two – fade into the background. The film tumbles from dizzying fight scene to dizzying fight scene, and while most of them are fantastically choreographed, there are some purely dumb moments that literally revolve around attempts to prevent Thanos from clenching his fist. In effect, this is a superhero mêlée that’s part over-the-top and part overkill, and might prove too much for those who don’t already care for this franchise and the characters in it.

Minor quibbles aside, though, Infinity War is yet another step in the right direction for Marvel. It continues the studio’s tradition of placing a premium on rich, complex storytelling that respects both its characters and its audiences. But it also refuses to make things easy for itself. The film ends even more bravely than it began, with a final ten minutes that will haunt and horrify you in equal measure. It’s a stroke of bold, brilliant genius – a narrative risk so audacious that you’ll want to follow Marvel wherever it goes next.

Basically: This movie will blow your mind and break your heart – and make you desperate to go back for more. Brave, brilliant and better than it has any right to be.

 

Inherent Vice (2015)

There’s something to be said for movies that refuse to make things easy for the viewer – films that almost proudly meander through their plots, focused more on capturing character, atmosphere and ideas than spoon-feeding audiences brought up on a steady diet of predictable blockbusters. That is, of course, precisely the kind of work writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson produces. His latest film, Inherent Vice, is no exception. As usual, it’s a complicated, complex beast of a film that defies description and categorisation. But, occasional bursts of brilliance aside, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, this time around, Anderson has taken one left turn too many – leaving his behemoth of a film truly accessible to only his most devoted loyalists.

In the haze and smoke of a drug-fuelled Los Angeles, way back in 1970, private investigator Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) finds himself dragged into a number of confounding mysteries. Shasta (Katherine Waterston), a former flame, begs him for help: Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), her current lover, has vanished, possibly committed to a mental asylum against his will. As Doc pries into the nebulous facts of the matter, he clashes frequently with ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), the cop assigned to the case. Doc also stumbles upon another mystery: grieving widow Hope (Jena Malone) is convinced that Coy (Owen Wilson), her musician husband, isn’t really dead. As Doc soon discovers, Coy might very well hold the key to resolving Shasta’s dilemma.

That may sound like a fairly simple plot, but anyone familiar with Anderson’s films – and the labyrinthine Thomas Pynchon novel upon which Inherent Vice is based – should know not to take anything at face value. Indeed, Anderson’s latest effort is more an exercise in mood than method. Its tale loops in and around itself, plot points disappearing into the ether as quickly as new ones emerge – none of which is necessarily resolved in a conventional way. Just as Doc wanders through his investigations in a cheerful marijuana-induced haze, so too is the film peppered with bursts of chaos and lapses in logic. It’s a heady, compelling experience, to be sure, but also a curiously disengaging one that occasionally makes an ordeal out of its hefty two-and-a-half-hour running time.

Surprisingly, given Anderson’s penchant for dark, rich character studies, Inherent Vice plays far better as a comedy. He takes an almost gleeful delight in plunging Doc into ever more peculiar situations, surrounding him with characters sporting odd names and even odder motives. It’s here that the eclectic supporting cast springs into action: Benicio del Toro oozes obfuscation as attorney Sauncho Smilax, and Martin Short delivers a deliciously barmy performance as horny dentist Rudy Blatnoyd. There’s a particularly silly electricity to the byplay between Phoenix and Brolin, too, as Bigfoot – screaming in pancake houses and stringing Doc up as the culprit behind Mickey’s disappearance – does his very best to confound Doc’s efforts at every turn.

Whenever the film threatens to meander away from its point (which is most of the time), Phoenix holds it all together. It may not be as outwardly transformative a part as he played in The Master, but is arguably more challenging for the dreamy elusiveness of his character’s emotional trajectory. Phoenix hits all the right notes, even when the film doesn’t – he finds an odd quirk of humanity in Doc’s determination to help Shasta, an opaque femme fatale of a character (with one devastatingly and literally revealing scene), but also remains just the right touch of befuddled when the case spirals out of his control.

Not many films manage to be intriguing and off-putting all at once, but Anderson pulls it off with Inherent Vice. The plot is left deliberately incomprehensible, propped up by outlandish twists involving drug cartels, secret cults and neo-Nazis. Logic is, more often than not, a secondary consideration. But the film is also a strangely effective look at a bygone era, served up with seductive slabs of Pynchon’s difficult prose and an irresistible soundtrack of folk rock. The final product can’t really be called a success – it’s too languid and peculiar for that – but it does boast quite a bit of oddball charm in its funnier, more surreal moments.

Basically: Languid, illogical and uber-weird, but not without its own surreal charm.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (2014)

In 2005, director Robert Rodriguez treated the entire world of cinema-goers to something the likes of which they had never seen before. Somehow, in rich, sombre black-and-white, dotted with bursts of extreme colour, he brought to vivid cinematic life the hard-boiled noir feel of Sin City, the depraved setting for Frank Miller’s cult series of graphic novels about crime and, almost poetically, punishment. Close to ten years later, Rodríguez and Miller – now co-directors – return to this same crime-ridden universe to tell a batch of new stories. At its best, the film is quite compelling and looks truly fantastic. But what was undeniably fresh and original in 2005 often feels silly and ripe today – the visuals no longer able to distract from the occasionally ridiculous plots and dialogue Miller heaps upon his characters.

As with the first film, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is a patchwork affair, sewn together from four different tales – the characters stumbling into one another’s stories every once in a while. We first meet tough, leather-faced Marv (Mickey Rourke), as he tries to piece together his memory on Just Another Saturday Night.  The film plunges into the seedy gambling underworld in The Long Bad Night, as improbably lucky gambler Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sets himself against the powerful, cruel Senator Roark (Powers Boothe). The centrepiece tale, A Dame To Kill For, features Eva Green – pinch-hitting in full-on sultry mode for Angelina Jolie – as Ava Lord, the titular femme fatale whose grip over Dwight (played by Clive Owen in the first film and Josh Brolin in this one) holds more sinister connotations than he could ever suspect. Finally, we watch as sweet stripper Nancy (Jessica Alba) descends into a pit of despair and addiction after the suicide of her paramour, John Hartigan (Bruce Willis).

When the film works, it does so with plenty of style and flair. The mumbled threats and lurking depths of its characters and crimes are perfectly matched by the velvety visuals, a beautiful, odd blend of dark and light. There’s a lot to enjoy – and wince over – in Johnny’s determination to prove himself a better gambler than Senator Roark: he trades his physical integrity for a chance to tear down a little of Roark’s sneering, superior manner, and it’s electrifying to watch. Parts of Nancy’s downward spiral are affecting, as she – once the oddest, most magical ray of sunshine in a city bled dark by crime – becomes trapped in her own sins of hatred, bitterness and vengeance.

But other parts of the film feel, frankly, overwrought. Green looks absolutely smashing as Ava, but her character slinks through a frustrating storyline that’s riddled with easy clichés and stereotypes. She trades ripe, silly dialogue with Dwight, and his obsession with and lust for her body draws laughs more often than it provokes thought. In fact, most hints of romance – whether between Ava and practically every male who gets within her orbit (including Christopher Meloni’s smitten cop), Dwight and former flame Gail (Rosario Dawson), or Nancy and the gloomy ghost of Hartigan – fall almost gallingly flat.

The cast is a blast to watch, at least. Green chews the scenery with grim, sultry determination – the script is never quite up to her efforts, but it’s a genre and a character for which she’s very well-suited indeed. Gordon-Levitt and Boothe deliver an excellent double-hander, the former cocky in the face of the latter’s ego-powered calm. Rourke and Brolin march through their scenes, and Christopher Meloni and Lloyd turn in small, but memorable, supporting performances. Even Alba acquits herself quite well as Nancy sinks ever further into a depression she has no desire to fight.

Shorn of the novelty factor that suffused the first film, however, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For – thrilling as it is to watch and quite good on occasion – never really gels into a coherent viewing experience. The characters exchange quips rather than dialogue, their motivations and concerns barely able to invoke any kind of emotional response in audiences. Where the first film felt almost effortlessly cool, this one sometimes feels a little foolish – quite unable to transcend and revitalise its genre, it often feels stuck within it instead.

Basically: Entertaining enough, but commits the cardinal sin of being trapped within – rather than transcending – its genre.

Labor Day (2013)

In 2005, Jason Reitman made his directorial debut with the breathlessly acerbic Thank You For Smoking – a dark, funny comedy laced with politics, satire and humanity. He’s since produced several excellent films – Juno, Up In The Air and Young Adult – in the same cheeky, intelligent vein. That’s why Labor Day – adapted by Reitman from Joyce Maynard’s novel – comes as such a surprise. Stripped of his trademark snappy banter and over-the-top characters, the film is Reitman at his quietest and least showy. Unfortunately, it’s also Reitman at his most melodramatic: his excellent cast of actors only just manage to help him drag the film back from the brink of cheesy soap opera.

Adele (Kate Winslet) is a depressed, broken single mother suffering from agoraphobia. Shutting herself up at home with her precocious, dutiful son Henry (Gattlin Griffith), she ventures out to pick up food and clothes as infrequently as humanly possible. One fateful day, she and Henry encounter Frank (Josh Brolin), an escaped convict, in a department store. Wounded and desperate, Frank finds his way into their car – and, over the course of the Labor Day weekend – into their house and hearts.

The resulting film is a curious blend of hasty romance and psychological drama, twisted around a plot that makes little emotional sense. How could someone as terrified of strangers and new situations as Adele find it within herself to so quickly trust a man she doesn’t know at all – someone who disturbs the sanctity of her home, and threatens, however obliquely, the safety of her son? Sure, Frank is unfailingly kind, considerate and handy around the house, but he’s also a criminal serving time for murder: a crime he doesn’t even really talk about until considerably later in the film. Quite frankly, it’s the kind of rushed, clumsy plotting and character work that you might expect in a soap opera – or, worse, a porn movie.

What makes this ill-advised drama worth watching – despite its many problems – is its cast. Reitman has waxed lyrical about securing Winslet for the title role, and he’s absolutely right to have been so overjoyed. She delivers a beautifully sensitive performance as Adele, making you want to believe that her character is a hopeless, wounded romantic rather than an unhinged, over-trusting madwoman. Brolin, too, lends Frank a soul and heart that the script occasionally denies him, while Griffith is wonderfully natural as a boy who begins to worry what it means when his mother finds happiness that’s seemingly independent of his efforts and existence.

Of course, there’s another reason to watch Labor Day: the infamous scene in which Frank takes a bucket of peaches and teaches his hosts/hostages to make the perfect peach pie. The moment he guides Adele’s hands into the pie batter is a moment that will either convince you that these two lonely hearts belong together, or that something has gone quite oddly wrong with the entire film. It’s a dilemma that presents itself at many points during Labor Day, and one that rarely resolves itself in the way that Reitman clearly wants it to.

Basically: A peach of a cast, but the plot is the pits.

Oldboy (2013)

Hollywood remakes of Asian films are always an iffy proposition. How will the nuances and culturally-specific references translate across oceans and continents? Generally, however good the remakes, they rarely – if ever – eclipse the original films. In recent memory, perhaps only Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, based on Infernal Affairs, has managed to find a life of its own. Other remakes, like The Lake House and Shall We Dance?, have sunk into ignominy. Spike Lee’s Oldboy isn’t completely terrible, but it does lose quite a bit of the dark, bruising, ambivalent flavour of Park Chan-Wook’s 2003 Korean classic.

Josh Brolin takes centre stage in Lee’s version. He sinks credibly into the abrasive, drunken skin of Joe Doucett, a slimy guy whose wife and daughter Mia have left him. Nevertheless, Joe continues to merrily offend everyone around him, until he is abruptly kidnapped and trapped in a hotel room for twenty years. During his arduous time spent in solitary confinement, Joe ponders the mystery of his captor. When he finally gets free, he resolves to seek revenge and re-connect with Mia – a mission that becomes increasingly fraught with complications as horrifying secrets  from his past are unearthed.

On its own merits, Oldboy – the title as obtuse as ever – is passably gripping. It entertains and horrifies in equal measure, packing in a great deal of bone-crunching violence and torture that runs the gamut from physical to psychological and everything in between. The relationship that develops between Joe and charity worker Marie (Elizabeth Olsen) is well-acted, if a little forced. Lee even cooks up a pretty disturbing face-off between Joe and Chaney (Samuel L. Jackson), the guy in charge of locking up people for his clients – no questions asked.

What works rather less well is the deliberate dilution of the twist in Oldboy‘s tale, presumably because American audiences can only handle so much moral and emotional ambiguity. Where Park’s version sees the revenge mission warped with a horrifyingly emotional dilemma, Lee’s film shies away from the conundrum. As a result, the film becomes far less subtle and considerably more melodramatic. There’s a flashback sequence towards the end of the film that’s ridiculous enough to make audiences laugh rather than gasp, even as blood splatters across walls and families are torn apart.

The cast assembled is impressive, even though they’re not really given a lot to work with in the frequently stilted, over-blown script. Brolin anchors the film with admirably stony determination, but his Joe never seems to really feel the weight of his twenty years without human contact. Olsen, too, stumbles around a bit, as if never quite sure how to play her part, and Sharlto Copley comes close to overplaying his hand when he emerges from the shadows to drop a few hints about the reasons behind Joe’s ordeal.

There’s enough on display in Oldboy for the film to jog by at a fairly quick clip. Lee pays tribute along the way to a few iconic elements of the Korean film – an octopus in a tank, a prolonged battle in a corridor – and the cast tries its hardest to make it all work. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that something a little deeper, richer, sadder and weirder was lost in translating the film into a vernacular more pleasing to Hollywood audiences.

Basically: A remake that’s just about adequate on its own merits, but is hardly a patch on the film on which it was based.

Gangster Squad (2013)

Everything about Gangster Squad looks hopelessly cool. The no-holds-barred title. The concept: cops who veer off the straight and narrow to fight gangsters on their own turf. The ridiculously amazing cast – featuring white-hot character-actor-who-looks-like-a-matinee-idol Ryan Gosling, and Gwen Stacy togged out as a 1940s glamour girl. Guns. Gangsters. Gals. This movie should be a slam dunk. Well, there’s no denying that Gangster Squad is almost as cool as it promises to be… but it also suffers somewhat from a pedestrian script and surprisingly safe direction from the man who brought us the wildly inventive Zombieland, Ruben Fleischer.

Flash back to 1940s Los Angeles. The city is ruled by criminal kingpin Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), who doesn’t need to be above the law because he pretty much re-writes it to suit his own nefarious purposes. He controls key members of the judiciary and most of the police force. It seems like there’s no one who can stand in his way – until righteous Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) forms a special task force of renegade cops who come together to make as much trouble for Cohen as they can.

For the most part, Gangster Squad is a decently entertaining watch: it flits from brutal to funny and back again, often within the same scene, and Fleischer handles the tonal shifts well enough. He allows Cohen’s seedy universe to expand and deepen around the man, who is depicted at his most terrifyingly volatile and violent (Penn is clearly having the time of his life playing a giant slice of snarling, menacing ham), but also injects moments of levity into the titular squad’s fumbling attempts to penetrate Cohen’s criminal empire. What’s refreshing – albeit occasionally frustrating – about the film is that the six men who take on Cohen outside the law aren’t superheroes. They don’t succeed right out of the gate, because they’re just folks like you and me – people who are sometimes rash, sometimes stupid, and sometimes downright idiotic.

There’s much fun to be had as the stoic O’Mara gathers his squad around him. Despite Brolin’s best efforts, O’Mara himself isn’t particularly exciting – he’s the one-note good guy saddled with a pregnant wife (Mireille Enos) who desperately wants him to stay alive. But his gang is a different story: sharpshooter Max (Robert Patrick) teases his Mexican sidekick Navidad (Michael Pena) mercilessly; bookish surveillance expert Conway (Giovanni Ribisi) finds his way into Cohen’s house; and unorthodox beat-cop Coleman (Anthony Mackie) demonstrates an impressive skill for knife-play. The star of the whole enterprise, of course, is the sexy, laidback Jerry Wooters (Gosling), who initially resists joining the gang even after he’s struck up a dalliance with Cohen’s main squeeze Grace (Emma Stone). Together, the six are electric and their chemistry is the best thing about the film.

Unfortunately, Gangster Squad‘s largely unspectacular script keeps it from scaling greater heights. The movie could have been better than okay, except that the dialogue fizzles as often as it fizzes, and the unfolding narrative sometimes calls for greater suspension of disbelief than even a completely cooperative audience can muster. (No self-respecting crime boss would live in a house as easily infiltrated as Cohen’s is in the movie.) Fleischer can’t quite seem to recreate the dazzling cheekiness he brought to Zombieland, instead producing an occasionally very good, mostly okay movie that won’t be re-inventing the genre anytime soon.

Basically: A movie that looks this cool should feel a little bit dangerous – but Gangster Squad plays it disappointingly safe. There’s still fun to be had though.

 

 

Written for F*** Magazine

No Country For Old Men (2007)

Right up until the debut of No Country For Old Men, writing-directing wunderkind brothers Ethan and Joel Coen had been having a rough time of it – their last couple of films, released over three years ago, had been savaged critically. Savagely funny remake The Ladykillers and quirky take on a conventional rom-com Intolerable Cruelty had been deemed disappointments and commercial sellouts – neither of which is a point of view I necessarily agree with – especially compared to the quirky genius of their earlier works. The genre-defying NCFOM couldn’t have come at a better time – part Western, part crime thriller, part character study, and thoroughly infused with the Coens’ trademark brand of wry, subversive humour, this film has garnered the kind of critical reception most film-makers can only dream of… not to mention a Best Picture Oscar just a week ago.

War vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon the bloody scene of a shootout – surrounded by gunned-down Mexicans and dogs, he finds one last man, still breathing and begging for agua (water) and a suitcase full of money. He brings the cash home, which he shares with his bewildered wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), but doesn’t yet realise that he has on his trail Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a cold-blooded psychopath armed with a taste for death and a handy pneumatic air-gun. The cat-and-mouse game that ensues, as Llewelyn evades the relentless Anton as best as an ordinary man can, is traced by aging sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), whose wistful voiceover – remembering the sheriffs that came before him and the duty they’re all pledged to carry out – provides the film a narrative thread that goes beyond the pure thrill of the chase. Which man will be left standing, bloodied and broken, at the end of this bruising showdown?

The bulk of NCFOM is devoted to Chigurh’s hunt for Llewelyn, and what a hunt it is – weighed down by a tracking device he doesn’t at first realise is hidden among the bills, Llewelyn sends Carla Jean off but goes on the run anyway. Ducking through motels and crossing the American border doesn’t get him away from killing machine Chigurh, however: but what a thrilling escape it is. Having never really devoted much attention to the action thriller genre, the Coens go all out here to recreate moments of utterly heart-in-moment tension: though Llewelyn and Chigurh hardly ever share the screen, the scenes when they go head to head with each other are nailbitingly suspenseful. Whether it’s Chigurh bursting into Llewelyn’s motel room and gunning down everyone in his way, or Llewelyn ducking down behind a car to hide from a rain of pneumatic gunfire before putting his own gun to work – and actually nicking some of Chigurh’s flesh. There is nothing more terrifying than sitting in the dark alongside Llewelyn, heart in your mouth as you hear Chigurh stump up the stairs and his shadow flits across the light streaming through under the door. Chigurh’s choice of weapon, one of the most innovative and devastatingly quiet in film assassin history, adds only to the frisson of horror that slides up and down your spine every time he heads toward a hapless victim, nozzle in hand and death on the mind.

In fact, the film is at its best when it focuses on Llewelyn and Chigurh – on the one hand, you’re painted a picture of the most stubborn, extraordinarily innovative ordinary man alive, pitted against a sociopath who has never failed in tracking down his prey and collecting all kinds of cannon fodder along the way. Llewelyn will not rest until he wins or tragedy catches up with him, a fact made abundantly clear to his beleaguered wife… to the extent that his dogged success at eluding Chigurh impresses even the mysterious vigilante-for-hire Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), who is hired to bring Chigurh to heel when it becomes clear that the latter’s bloodthirstiness is spiralling out of control, and is one of the few men who have survived an actual face-to-face encounter with Chigurh. Brolin, who’s been in an impressive run of good films recently (e.g., Death Proof), has turned in another superlative performance, mixing Llewelyn’s determination with the few brief moments demonstrating his humanity – he is, after all, damned because his guilt for not providing a dying man with water leads him back to a crime scene that gives Chigurh the first clue to tracking him down.

Powerful presence though Brolin may be, the film undoubtedly belongs to Bardem, resplendently evil with a haircut reminiscent of a demented friar. When I said NCFOM is a character study, I meant that it was really an examination of Chigurh – which is something rather fascinating and unusual, since who else but the noir-minded Coens would devote so much attention to the study of a psychopathic serial murderer? Well, we get a really artful portrait here, all guts and gore and bloody-mindedness: the camera delights in focusing on Bardem’s creepily emotionless face as Chigurh offers life and death in a coin toss to the owner of a gas station who’s rubbed him the wrong way, a poor innocent old man who has no idea what kind of choice he’s being given. When he is finally confronted on the way he has always lived and hunted, with an utter disdain for the value of human life, Chigurh’s inability to articulate his guiding principles echoes the sense of tortured destiny (yes, even for a character who is essentially a serial murderer) that underpins the entire film. This, of course, is brought into stark relief by the fate Chigurh meets at the end – for what could bring him to his knees but the careless, blind hand of Providence? Bardem is fabulous as Chigurh, possibly the scariest and most chilling film presence I’ve seen outside of a horror movie – whenever he arrives onscreen, whether limping from the wound inflicted by Llewelyn which he painfully (and memorably!) patched up by himself, or stalking with purpose, air-gun in hand, he is black as pitch and just as mysterious. Without a doubt, one of the most deserving acting triumphs at the Oscars in recent years.

Jones’ segment of the film is a little more difficult to appreciate, and probably the only part of the film that can be said to be somewhat flawed. I enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong – Sheriff Ed’s folksy, spot-on humour is on occasion a welcome ray of light as he traces the dusty paths beaten down by Llewelyn and Chigurh: whether he’s admonishing his charmingly naive deputy Wendell (Garret Dillahunt) on how criminals commit crimes or commenting on the state of the world these days after reading a particularly distressing article in the paper. He forms the counterpoint to the other characters in the film – the righteous lawman who’s still trying to live his life by a moral code long lost to people like Chigurh, Llewelyn and Carson. It’s the character of Ed that makes the film a Western as well, as he joins in the chase but never quite manages to catch up to the bad guys – unfortunately, the air of wistfulness he adds to the mix, a crucial point thematically, is rather jarring in the context of the heartstopping confrontations that pepper the rest of the film. Except when he comes breathtakingly close to Chigurh in one scene, most of his appearances, especially in the latter part of the move, have an almost elegaic feel that you’ll either enjoy or feel frustrated by. That it’s Ed’s story that ends the movie means you’re going to either love it, hate it, or be completely confuzzled by it.

But, taken as a whole, NCFOM is unbelievably involving – you get quickly lost in the shadows and darkness of this not-quite-noir world the Coens have conjured up with the help of Cormac McCarthy’s source novel. Here it’s a look at the darker side of Americana, a Wild West chase set not in the rural wilderness but nevertheless featuring gunfights and showdowns in the nameless streets of a nameless American town. Boasting the Coens’ usual acerbic wit, grittier and smarter than the dialogue that graces most Hollywood films these days, this is a thoroughly deserving winner of the Best Picture Oscar – arguably not something that can be said of every film that’s won the same award in the past decade.

American Gangster (2007)

With Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, arguably two of Hollywood’s top-flight leading men, having previously starred together only once in their whole careers (in 1995’s forgettable flop Virtuosity), it was probably about time for them to get into another production together – one that, this time, reeks of production value and class, an Oscar-baiter from the outset. With director Ridley Scott attached to the project that finally became American Gangster, could it be anything but that rare beast: an intelligent crime drama that’s critically acclaimed but also rakes in big bucks at the box office?

Scott has blended an impressive cocktail in this true-life crime drama set in the 1970s. Frank Lucas (Washington) is a rising crime lord, making a name for himself on the streets with the best-quality heroin lowlifes have had the chance to enjoy – at rock-bottom prices too. Even as Frank strolls the streets of the Big Apple, dressed professionally and smoothly as if he were running a perfectly legitimate business, he has no qualms taking out his rivals in broad daylight. Detective Richie Roberts (Crowe), meanwhile, is probably the lone honest cop on the entire NYC police force; he’s even ridiculed for turning in one million dollars in unmarked bills when he could have kept the loot for himself, with nobody being the wiser. His reputation at work, however screwed-up and messy his own personal life gets, soon allows him the opportunity to run his own semi-clandestine crack squad, out to bring Frank and his family-run cartel down. This, of course, is a clash between titans, and surely things cannot end well for both men…

As expected, given this cast and this director and a story that’s ripe with possibilities for character development, AG is undoubtedly a class act. Though Frank and Richie hardly ever meet throughout the course of the film, their rivalry – unbeknownst to Frank and all Richie can think about – yields palpable tension, for example when Richie sets traps for the people in Frank’s inner circle, his brothers. There’s plenty of room here for plumbing the depths of both characters too – sure, supporting players like the slimily corrupt Detective Trupo (Josh Brolin, suddenly in every film made in 2007) and Eva (Lymari Nydal), Frank’s clueless Cuban wife, get an occasional look-in. But they’re not the point here: it’s a two-man show, and Scott takes great delight in drawing out the differences between the criminal and the cop who’s hellbent on hunting him down.

For Frank is a great family man: in his interactions with his aged mother and his brothers, it’s clear that family comes first for him. Richie, on the other hand, is an emotional train-wreck, diving into affair after affair to the point that he loses his wife and son and isn’t even sure if he deserves to get them back. At work, however, Frank is dealing in the hard currency of human lives, and he treats his employees and rivals with equal brutality and disdain when they cross him. Richie, by contrast, refuses any and all bribes, and abides by his own strict moral code – even when it comes to a local gangster who also happens to be the godfather of his own children. This is, predictably, done well: scenes of Richie desperately humping his blonde female lawyer, Frank leaving his family behind at the breakfast table as he calmly guns a rival down in full view of everyone on the streets: all of these mix with other moments that show Frank and Richie to be what human beings are – flaws, bundles of contradictions, people. Between them you could scrape together the perfect human being: but on their own, neither of them could comfortably lay claim to that title.

Scott’s film pulses also with seediness and the grit that was life lived, fought and won on the streets in those days: there’s a visceral emotion to an early scene in which Richie is called to the scene of shooting by his desperate partner Lou (Ted Levine), and is forced to literally cover up a death to avoid being mauled by the angry crowds outside, baying for the blood of a white cop who’s just murdered a black man. Trupo’s scenes with both leading characters are also brilliantly executed: whether he’s attempting to blackmail them, or being cleverly given the run-around, he provides a dramatic tension in the film that sometimes ebbs away when it lingers just a little too long over a particular moment in either Frank or Richie’s lives.

That, of course, is the biggest problem from which AG suffers: an insistence on spinning out a plot that shouldn’t support its 2.5-hour running time. After a while, the points that the film wants to make – a family man need not be a good man in every aspect of his life, nor does a truthful man a good father make – become annoying through sheer repetition. Scott never lets up on drumming these ideas into the audience… and while this is tolerable enough on a first go-around, I can’t imagine having the patience to sit through the various scenes of Frank eating and having fun with his family, or Richie facing down snide but unfortunately true remarks from his wife as they battle for custody of their son. We get the point, okay? Scott could have been far more judicious in pruning his film down to a manageable size – he wouldn’t have lost much of its richness, and extending the metaphor and the ideas only makes them lose their power after a while. There are only so many times, after all, that we can be pounded in the head with the same thought before the characters start to look like caricatures: why is Richie so relentlessly honest? His character, in particular, feels somewhat underwritten after a while – Frank, at least, continues to demonstrate volatility in the way he treats a family member who comes just close enough to almost landing Frank in jail. But after a while, it does feel as if the characters have stalled, and the movie hasn’t realised this as it barrels on to an ending that is so puzzling that it has to be based on a true story. (Which it is, duh!)

The performances are excellent, however. Crowe does his best with a part that becomes a little one-note after the first hour – managing to parlay Richie’s determination into something approaching nobility, while still clearly demonstrating the deeply flawed nature of his character. Washington is fantastic, as always: his Frank is at once smooth and professional, to the point that you can almost believe that he’s a proper businessman doing proper business (that being, of course, the point of maintaining such an image). But he’s at his best in the moments when Frank flares into heated anger, and it becomes clear that there lies beneath his collected surface a boling anger that has driven him in a direction that some would say surely leaves him no chance of salvation. And certainly Brolin is again impressive as Trupo. His character is even more one-dimensional than Crowe’s, but this at least the script knows, and Brolin gives his all in playing a slimeball with no discernible redeeming qualities.

AG starts out with a great premise: a crime drama that, while it has its share of thrills, is really a psychological drama about two men pitted against each other in a game of cat-and-mouse. But, when the differences start to fade a little into silliness as the film wears out its metaphors, the one thing that salvages the entire enterprise is a raft of truly exciting performances from a very seasoned cast.