Action Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Gladiator II (2024)

November 22, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Morocco, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, Denzel Washington
screenplay by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott

By Angelo Muredda Late in Ridley Scott’s woefully derivative sequel Gladiator II, the titular gladiator two, Lucius (Paul Mescal), comes upon a secret shrine for his thematic and–surprise–genetic predecessor, Maximus (Russell Crowe). Introduced both long after a perfunctory opening animated credit sequence by Gianluigi Toccafondo that paints Rotoscoped-looking images over a reel of Gladiator highlights and well into a tired narrative that retraces the thinly-plotted original, beat for tedious beat, the shabbily decorated hovel, adorned with Maximus’s armour and a silly English engraving of his catchphrase “What we do in life echoes in eternity,” feels awfully cheap–fresh from the imagination of ChatGPT. Its memorial-from-Wish-dot-com aesthetic only makes the concept of a reverential successor to the populist hit Gladiator, 24 years in the making, seem even goofier than it already does.

Red One (2024)

November 14, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Mystery, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw I’ve been waiting decades for a spiritual successor to Jingle All the Way, that repugnant ode to materialism gussied up in Yuletide cheer like a corpulent whore from a Victorian stroke-book. Remember that moment in The Rundown where Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief cameo to “hand off” his action-king crown to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Turns out it was a monkey’s paw predicting the foolhardiness of them pursuing cush gigs in comic-book franchises and immortality in beloved perennial family holiday classics. How many fingers do monkeys have, anyway? Jake Kasdan’s Red One casts The Rock as humourless man of action Callum Drift. Not humourless like fellow professional wrestler Dave Bautista’s brilliant turn as neurodivergent Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, humourless like a guy doing a tough-guy bit… and also a dull-guy bit, and, uh, dense, you know–disillusioned, too, because grown-ups don’t love Christmas anymore. Callum, you see, is head bodyguard to Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) and the leader of ELF, which stands for I don’t fucking know, go watch it yourself. Elite L-something and Fortification or someshit; honestly, we’re both diminished just acknowledging it. Wait, “Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification.” Fuck. This is humiliating.

Twisters (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

October 24, 20242024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Kiernan Shipka
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is the whistle next to the graveyard, a fascinating companion piece to Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: the one a spectacle designed to desensitize against our ongoing climate collapse, the other to deaden us against widely-broadcast images of an ongoing genocide. Its only two points of interest are Glen Powell’s sudden ascendance as matinee idol and the astounding majesty of natural phenomena fuelled by man-made climate change–meaning, in its simplicity, the goal is to leave audiences with the dazed satiation one associates with the aftermath of an ostentatious fireworks display: half-deafened, eyes bedazzled, the smell of gunpowder sulphurous in the air. A gut full of barbecued meats and sugared drinks in the American fashion, celebrating our liberation from a monarchy on the back of our God-sanctioned manifest genocide of an Indigenous population. We had fun, but that hangover is a sonofabitch. For me, the best part of Twisters is the extended prologue, where I thought it was going to be a Kiernan Shipka movie.

Danny Huston and Bill Skarsgård in The Crow

The Crow (2024) + Blink Twice (2024)

August 26, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasy, France, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE CROW
***/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Sami Bouajila, Danny Huston
screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, based on the comic book series by James O’Barr
directed by Rupert Sanders

BLINK TWICE
***/****
starring Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Alia Shawkat
written by Zoë Kravitz & E.T. Feigenbaum
directed by Zoë Kravitz

by Walter Chaw “Eric, I had this dark dream,” she says. She doesn’t know these are their last moments together, here and for eternity–that she’s been dead and that her lover has bartered his life for hers, and that whatever there is of mercy in this blighted place has briefly reunited them as they pass each other in purgatory. It certainly doesn’t feel like mercy. It feels cruel. Cruelty is all there is. When I was a depressed, moony kid, I believed in my heart there was a grand melodrama in which I had a part to play. A delusion of grandeur, a symptom of narcissism (should one fail to outgrow it): you dressed the part with eyeliner and black trenchcoats, Doc Martens and clove cigarettes–the borrowed identity, the illusion of disaffection in language affected by quotes pulled from Shakespeare, Wilde, and our patron saint Morrissey. Most of my childhood and adolescence was a dark dream. I lived in a fugue. I lived in the spaces where my brain needed to mature, and I didn’t know what I was doing from one moment to the next, not really. I believed I was responsible for not only the feelings but also the fate of others. I was always performing. I was never performative.

Twister (1996) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

August 13, 20241990s, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

The film portion of this review was written when Twister made its Blu-ray debut in 2008. I stand by it and don’t have much to add. It seems funny to cling to “they don’t make ’em like they used to” about a movie whose reboot-quel just came out, but there are more years between Twister and Twisters than there were between Psycho and Psycho II, and the industry has been through a sea change. High-concept blockbusters–of which Twister was one–have virtually gone the way of the dodo, replaced by “IP” blockbusters (of which Twisters is one), where all the focus is on branding. This, along with the kind of “technological progress” that’s a euphemism for the dismantling of time-honoured industry practices, has left today’s tentpoles feeling ersatz, if not curiously bespoke. The passing of Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2017 and 2014, respectively, only makes the sense of loss that much more palpable, though it hasn’t, in my experience, translated to a higher opinion of Twister, which is far from either actor’s best work. (The movie might, however, be Jami Gertz’s finest hour. Hopefully, Film Twitter’s recent reassessment of her character and performance will result in the Gertz-aissance that should’ve happened in 1996.)

**/****
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin
directed by Jan De Bont

by Bill Chambers Jan De Bont’s Twister has a host of problems that mocking its physics–a common pastime among smartasses the summer of its release–doesn’t begin to address, though if the film were even one degree more earnest than it is, moments like the bit where a tornado powerful enough to hoist a tractor leaves two people clinging tenaciously to a wooden support beam under a rickety bridge unscathed would make for prime “MST3K” fodder. (That’s the thing about notorious pedant Michael Crichton, who co-wrote Twister with then-wife Anne-Marie Martin: he figures getting the technobabble right buys him more poetic license than it really does.) For starters, Helen Hunt doesn’t belong in this milieu–and by that I mean the film’s, not that of the blockbuster. (I actually thought she acquitted herself fine in What Women Want and Cast Away.) Blame the contemporary compulsion to spell everything out: The picture saddles her character, Dr. Jo Harding, with a Tragic Past™ so that she’ll have a psychological motivation for chasing twisters, something that is not only completely gratuitous but also forces us to consider her provenance in a way that would never be an issue had the film stuck to the present tense. It’s impossible to imagine the immutably bicoastal Hunt as the Midwest offspring of the rednecks who leave an indelible impression in the opening flashback, and as a result, she wanders through Twister a virtual impostor.

Borderlands (2024)

August 11, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis
screenplay by Eli Roth and Joe Crombie
directed by Eli Roth

by Walter Chaw Borderlands is what happens if you stop evolving as a human being when you’re a privileged, 16-year-old, cis-gendered, heterosexual male. When you are a mess of hormones and your prefrontal lobe has not finished growing–has barely even started growing, truth be known. Remember the uncontrollable and inexplicable boners? The constant fear and self-loathing that results in your actively seeking out groups you perceive to be vulnerable in order to predate upon them and make yourself bigger? You are violent and emotional and wrapped up in your melodrama. You might pretend that you wrote that song by Counting Crows because you are well aware you’ve done nothing of note and, based on the emptiness inside, probably never will. Yet you believe the world is for you, since you’ve never learned any differently from Dad, the doctor/professor, and Mom, the artist. I read somewhere that dolphins stopped evolving because there was no need: the food was plentiful, and they reached the top of the food chain. I believe certain people stop evolving in the same way because interpersonal and professional success was handed to them, so they didn’t need to develop curiosity, empathy, or humility. I’ve heard that dolphins, incidentally, are assholes, too.

Fantasia Festival ’24: A Samurai in Time

July 31, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Time Travel

***/****
starring Makiya Yamaguchi, Norimasa Fuke, Rantaro Mine, Yuno Sakura
written and directed by Junichi Yasuda

by Walter Chaw Jun-ichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time is a lightweight, nostalgia-streaked, deceptively sad little flick in which a bedraggled Edo-period samurai named Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi) finds himself, at the moment of his most meaningful duel against the evil Kyoichiro Kazami (Ken Shonozaki), finds himself transported to the present and mistaken for an extra on a samurai television show. Guided by old-world decorum and generally astonished as a fish-out-of-water, he falls under the kind auspices of script supervisor Yuko (Yuno Sakura), who takes him under her wing and helps him get progressively better roles as the sort of fight extra–a kiraeyaku–who “gets slashed” in jidaigeki productions like hers. A Samurai in Time doesn’t break any new ground, but it trods those worn boards with a spring in its step. I loved a moment where Kosaka tastes a little dessert and, in horror, asks if they made a mistake giving it to someone as lowly as he. When told that anyone has a right to eat such miracles in modern Japan, he weeps and declares his relief that a country he left in war and on the brink of collapse would become such a generous, egalitarian society as to treat all its citizens, from top to bottom, as royalty. I appreciate science-fiction that’s aspirational rather than apocalyptic. It’s hard to see sometimes how far we’ve come.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

July 26, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen
written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells & Shawn Levy
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw What’s legitimately fascinating about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is how much of its humour is based on idiotic producer’s notes and franchise-killers. It’s essentially the manifestation of the concept of irony, and it relies entirely on an individual’s knowledge of the last twenty years of “Access Hollywood”/TMZ culture: the public and private failures of the rich and famous, like who Jennifer Garner’s ex is and how Marvel hasn’t figured out how to launch another Blade movie even though Wesley Snipes and Guillermo del Toro are both right fucking there. You don’t need to have watched all of these latex flicks and their television spin-offs or to have read the comics, but it helps in appreciating the Shrek-ness of it all, I suppose, absolutely the lowest form of endorphin-mining. We have reached tentpole filmmaking as micro-transactional phone game: 99¢ to unlock a new costume, another $1.99 to play as Lexi Alexander’s Punisher–you know, the good one. It works to the extent it works because you’re like me and you watched the X-Men cartoon in its first run and have always lamented that they couldn’t figure out how to make Gambit cool in the live-action universe. The entire midsection of Deadpool & Wolverine, in fact, takes place on The Island of Misfit Toys for nerd detritus (remember that appalling multiverse sequence in The Flash? Like that, but with living actors), more or less, and manages, against every expectation, to be a little bit touching. The film works like a roast/eulogy for thinking we wanted a Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s as if we’re all Regan waking up with a bad Pazuzu hangover. What the fuck did we do? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Twisters (2024)

July 18, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Kiernan Shipka
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

July 7, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Eddie Murphy, Streaming, Thriller

*½/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Will Beall and Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Mark Molloy

by Walter Chaw Two things about Beverly Hills Cop IV, or Axel F if you’re nasty: 1) it’s so exhausted, there’s plenty of time to think through what these films are really about, and 2) there’s an existential horror attached to watching ageing idols trapped in endless iterations of themselves always, of course, but especially when they’re asked to continue to do the things they are no longer capable of doing. I’m thinking in particular of how sad it is to feel patronizing towards Harrison Ford after spending a lifetime in awe of him as an Übermensch in galaxies far, far away, booby-trapped tombs about to be robbed, or the Japanese-colonized Los Angeles of an eternal tomorrow just a few days away. Seeing him attempt to be young Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny is…pathetic? I’m not saying I could do better; I’m saying in my glorious prime, I could never have given performances as perfectly physical as Ford did, and today, still 30 years his junior, I can’t get off my sofa without noises erupting from every part of my body. I’m saying it would be like if Michael Jordan suited up again to attempt one more NBA season at the age of 61. It’s like breaking up a brawl at the old-folks’ home. They say the toothless get ruthless, though in my experience, they get brittle and out of breath. The Eddie Murphy of Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills Cop was lithe and dangerous, echoing the Eddie of 48Hrs., who could fight a hulking Nick Nolte to a draw. Of the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I watched Beverly Hills Cop, the image of Murphy in it that persists for me is of him swinging around in the webbing on the back of a trailer during the opening sequence. He’s quick, strong, dangerous. Now? Now Eddie’s 63 and in amazing shape–but amazing shape for a man who is 63.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

May 22, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
written by George Miller, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw In matters of vengeance, the Greeks had it all figured out. Their God of such things was a tripartite Goddess: Alecto (“unceasing”), Megaera (“grudging”), and Tisiphone (“avenging murder”), collectively called the “Erinyes.” Hesiod gave their parentage as the Titan Ouranos and Gaia: When Ouranos was castrated by his son, Cronos, three drops of Ouranos’s blood fell to the fertile soil of Mother Earth, impregnating her with his resentment and rage. Other sources describe the Erinyes’ parentage as Night and Hell. The Romans renamed the goddesses the Furiae, and now George Miller houses them in the slight frame of his Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Furiosa, who births herself from the dirt and, over the course of a too-short 150 minutes, pursues her vengeance like the “darkest of angels” her nemesis, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), dubs her. He asks her, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” He already knows she does. Furiosa is the very definition of epic. It’s a treatise on how archetype remains the blueprint for our behaviour, and in its absolute simplicity, it has a sublime power. Furiosa is born of our rage to avenge the death of the world. She reminds me of a Miyazaki heroine, and the film itself is as obsessively detailed, thought-out, and functional as a stygian Miyazaki fantasia. If it’s opera, it’s Wagner. As a film, it may be George Miller’s best.

'Cause I'm the Unknown Blunt-Man: Gosling and Blunt in The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy (2024)

May 4, 20242024, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham
written by Drew Pearce
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I watched David Leitch’s The Fall Guy the same way I try to spot a particularly well-camouflaged insect in a terrarium: with a little disgust, a little fascination, a little fear of the uncanny. You know when you know something’s there but you can’t see it? Could be the terrarium keepers are playing a trick, though, right? Could be there’s just a stick in there. By all accounts, real people made and executed The Fall Guy, but who can tell these days without some kind of Voight-Kampff detector? The film is ostensibly based on the classic five-season run of a Lee Majors television show I watched religiously as a kid, though I only retained the theme song (“Unknown Stuntman,” performed by Majors himself), so naturally, I rewatched the entire first season of it to rekindle my crush on Heather Thomas and confirm there’s no real connection between it and the film. The movie does seem to share some elements with Richard Rush’s cult classic The Stunt Man (1980), but it eschews the naked paranoia and strident social commentary. It shares some cosmetic elements with Robert Mandel’s F/X (1986) and its underestimated sequel (F/X 2 (1991)), too. Ultimately, the best analogue in terms of how weird it feels is John McTiernan’s meta-movie Last Action Hero (1993), only without the relative cleverness of a concept higher than “stuntmen do stunts.”

Civil War (2024)

April 5, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw Haskell Wexler’s seminal 1969 film Medium Cool opens on a car accident. A woman in a grey-and-black striped dress has been thrown from the passenger side and is lying in the road. The car horn is stuck and blaring, and in the rearview mirror two figures approach: a man in a tight black T-shirt toting a 16mm camera, and his soundman, trailing behind with a directional microphone. They stalk around the wreckage. They find the best angles. The guy with the camera–the hero of the piece, John (Robert Forster)–spares a moment of pity for the woman after getting his footage. He and the soundman leave, and we hear distant sirens. They’re travelling, John and his colleague (Peter Bonerz), across a country torn by unrest at the end of the last progressive period in the United States–the wasteland our season of assassinations left behind, in which any vestiges of hope would soon curdle into the filth of Altamont and the Manson Family. They’re chroniclers, not participants. What is a single human lifespan compared to the life cycle of the perfectly eloquent photograph? What if you could keep telling your story after you died? What if the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where the party fractured over disagreements about how to handle an unpopular war and sent Chicago’s stormtroopers to beat students and protestors… What if this happened and no one was there to record how far we had fallen? What if the powerful were allowed to operate in the dark?

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

March 29, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry
screenplay by Terry Rossio and Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Maybe this is how it starts, though I know we must be in the middle if not at the end. More to the point, maybe this is when we notice how close we are to the door to the processing house–to the slaughter. I want to be clear, for posterity’s sake, that I believe we are at the very edge of it. I want it to be on record that I’m afraid. I think we may even be inside, in the stench of its fear and blood and shit, pop-eyed with the too-late realization that all this time, we were waiting in this line for this outcome, and we’ve known it all along. We have been conditioned to be surprised every single time it swims to our attention for a few minutes (which used to happen infrequently, first years, then months, then days, then hours apart; soon it will be seconds) that our lives hold no value to the machineries running us save for the material weight of our flesh. We have been conditioned to forget this every time we’re accidentally confronted with it again. They did it by teaching us to question–and discount–the suffering of others. Not completely; not everyone and not yet. But mostly, and some of you are making me a little worried. I feel like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, although I’m not as sure I’m who I used to be anymore, either.

"What would really get me hot is a ceasefire." K-Stew and Katy O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

March 16, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris
written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska
directed by Rose Glass

by Walter Chaw Love is like a lamb and love is like a sledgehammer. Love crawls into your head and fills the empty spaces, the canyons and tunnels and holes in between, making it so full of noise it makes you fucking nuts. It’s too big, but it keeps growing. It kills you, but it won’t let you die. Love makes every love story a tragedy. Everyone writes about love, but the only person to ever do it right was Maurice Sendak, who wrote a survival guide for the fury called Where the Wild Things Are. Therein, a little boy named Max threatens to leave his friends, monsters on an island where they all jamboree. They beg him to stay: “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.” And they will, you know, because they have fangs and dangerous desires and horrible appetites. Love growls and gnashes its teeth. Love’s claws rattle like castanets. Love roars. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a love story about two terrible women and two terrible men who do bad things to one another and for one another because love is the fire in which, happily, we burn.

Dune Part Two (2024)

February 29, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw

“And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of they life:”
–Genesis 3:14

Fanaticism is a closed circle, maddening because it’s impregnable, maddening because it destroys everything in the process of building itself. It’s a riddle without a solution, and once you’ve drunk deep the plasma spring, it’s a long way back–if you ever get there. There are people who “deprogram” cult members, but I don’t buy it, you guys. I’m of the belief that when you’re gone, you’re gone. You went by choice, after all. You denied your ears the beeswax but didn’t tie yourself to the mast. My mom bought into a cult for the last several years of her life. She held on to it tightly, and it gripped her right back. I suppose that’s one of the appealing things about cults: when you find the right one, you join the company of a great many people who agree with you. If you’re broken in some way, if your awareness of that has made you lonesome and alone, that must feel good. I take a little bit of the blame for her susceptibility to such things. I was a terrible son to her. Maybe she needed something to hold that would hold her back; I did, too. I found it in a wonderful wife and kids. She found it, some of it, in a cult that finally accepted her. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know what I believe. Maybe this is just narcissism–mine or hers, I don’t know either. But she’s dead now, and I’m the only one left to wonder about what happened between us.

Madame Web (2024)

February 17, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor
screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
directed by S.J. Clarkson

by Walter Chaw S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a rare and specific variety of disaster, which is interesting because it’s largely centred around a rare and specific variety of spider. That is to say, not “interesting” so much as unintentionally ironic or something. Rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, you know? The mass-appealing, notes-driven, “for dummies,” not-entirely-accurate pop-cultural definition of a literary conceit. This reminds me of the swoony, heartthrob moment where Ethan Hawke defines “irony” perfectly in Reality Bites. I don’t actually remember what he says, though, because I haven’t seen that movie since its 1994 release–about ten years before the events of Madame Web, the screen debut of Marvel mutant Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who’s named after the Greek archetype who can see the future but no one listens to her and Marc Webb, director of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. Just kidding. She’s named Webb because spiders spin them, with an extra “b” to throw you off the trail but not so violently that you don’t know it’s fucking with you. Madame Web (one “b,” because the picture is more invested in making sure you know it’s related to the lucrative Spider-Man franchise than in being such a tedious asshole) opens in 1973, with Cassandra’s super-pregnant mom Constance (Kerry Bishé) tromping around the South American rainforest like Sean Connery in Medicine Man in search of a super-spider when…okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, 30 years later, Cassandra is a paramedic who can sometimes see the future, but nobody believes her. You might have deduced that by her name is all I’m saying.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

January 30, 20242023, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Jackie Chan, Japan, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Jeff Rowe and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit
directed by Jeff Rowe

by Walter Chaw There’s a flair to the design of Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (hereafter Mutant Mayhem)–a joy, an edginess, an energy that reminded me instantly of those halcyon MTV days of “Liquid Television”, when things like “Beavis & Butthead” would give way to “Aeon Flux”. It’s outlaw stuff, verging on the experimental, and the images are so vibrant they occasionally feel as if they’ll bounce outside the edges of the screen. I love how the colours behave like they’re refracting through a prism, like neon off the wet pavement of New York City, where the film is set. For as fresh and as the animation feels, as innovative, it’s not so ostentatious as to deviate from considerations of physics and space. It doesn’t draw attention to itself at the expense of character and story. Its hyperreality, its gloss on the new, merely lends urgency to the picture’s quotidian reality. Consider an early scene in which our heroes watch a public screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the middle of Brooklyn. Taught to be afraid of the prejudice of others, they’re hidden in the dark of a rooftop across the way. Seeing Ferris perform in a parade, they dream of what it must be like to go to high school, even of the simple camaraderie of sitting with friends on a humid summer night with a future laid out before them full of possibility rather than a life’s sentence of paranoia and rejection. Having had their fill of longing, they leave the scene, pausing before their descent into the sewers to take in the full tableau of a flickering image on a screen illuminating the crowd gathered before it.

The Bricklayer (2024) + The Beekeeper (2024)

January 13, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, Greece, Theatrical, UK

THE BRICKLAYER
***/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Nina Dobrev, Tim Blake Nelson, Clifton Collins, Jr.
screenplay by Hanna Weg and Matt Johnson, based on the novel by Noah Boyd
directed by Renny Harlin

THE BEEKEEPER
**½/****
starring Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Irons
written by Kurt Wimmer
directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw We live in a blizzard, a brutal ice storm, a maelstrom of jagged information–and rather than bringing us any closer to a collective mean, the weight of what we know shoves us back into our balkanized bunkers. Knowledge can be scary; the truth about who we are and our relative inconsequence is terrifying, humiliating. I don’t think we’ll ever recover our sense of, if not unity, at least whatever progress we made towards unity. No, not without bloodshed. Not without a reduction in the noise. We weren’t designed for this onslaught. We don’t have the sorting mechanism for it. It’s not like drinking out of firehose–it’s like drinking out of Niagara Falls. We are a species bent into the fetal position: from fear, for protection. It’s made us mean and mistrustful. “How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.” Sophocles nailed it centuries ago. Perhaps that’s why movies like the John Wick and Mission: Impossible franchises remain so popular: they exist in worlds where there are discernible rules, populated by men who are good at more than manipulating information for personal gain. We like the idea of that, you see–of expertise and righteous purpose, even if it seems like competence is a myth designed to ensnare children and radicalize the gullible. Didn’t we used to be a nation of capable people? Didn’t we used to do things that were for the greater good and not merely profitable (and at someone else’s expense)? Didn’t we used to have causes that weren’t only predatory?

Napoleon (2023)

November 19, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK, War

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett
written by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw I wish Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was weirder, kinkier, as perverse as it seems like Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the diminutive emperor, wants it to be. I wish it had more time for his relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), who, in this incarnation, is cast as a kind of succubus: a barren nymphomaniac who pulls up her bloomers and spreads her legs during her courtship with Napoleon and tells him if he looks at her holiest of holies, he’ll never stop wanting it. It’s deeply weird, is what I’m saying, and there’s a version of this film that is just ninety minutes of these two actors, ready for anything, going full-tilt boogie. Maybe he puts on a dog collar, and she steps on him; then he goes out and murders a few tens of thousands of Egyptians while firing cannons at the Great Pyramids. In that Napoleon, however, we wouldn’t see the million-dollar battle sequences, but instead a series of disturbing tableaux vivant of codependency and sadomasochistic sex play ending in the same title card tallying up the number of people who died (over three million) because of this creepy little freak. “Him?” we would marvel–and then consider that maybe it’s only damaged men, damaged in exactly this way, who would consider the military conquest of the world a thing to be desired, possible to accomplish, and more, possible for them to accomplish. But, alas, that’s not the sort of movie Ridley Scott makes.