Action Archives - Page 6 of 50 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 15, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Stallone, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 12, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Stallone, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada
screenplay by Matt Cirulnick & Sylvester Stallone
directed by Adrian Grünberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rambo: Last Blood, hereafter Last Blood, became irresistible to me the moment John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) decided to score his own climactic bloodbath with The Doors‘ “Five to One,” flooding his homemade tunnels with it to taunt and ridicule the small army hunting him. A Kevin McAllister move, one might say. Lyrics-wise, “Five to One” is a little on the nose (“Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now”), but it’s still a deep cut from a band in many ways synonymous with the Vietnam War’s acid-rock energy, making it a loaded choice indeed. This was probably the soundtrack to Rambo losing his innocence; what matters is that it could’ve been. There’s a certain frisson, too, that comes with hearing a pop song in a Rambo movie for the first time, at least diegetically. It makes for a set-piece that is, in the context of le cinéma de Rambo, unusually exuberant, and one begins to suspect that without music it would be merely nauseating, maybe unbearable. Indeed, the slickness of Last Blood is the only thing keeping it from being a snuff movie.

Guns Akimbo (2020)

February 27, 2020****/****, 2020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, New Zealand, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Natasha Liu, Rhys Darby
written and directed by Jason Lei Howden

by Walter Chaw One of my favourite stories–much-embellished, probably, by its author–is Fritz Lang’s account of being called into Propaganda Minister Goebbels’s office in 1933 to be told that Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was going to be censored, alas, but would Lang like to be in charge of Nazi-run movie studio UFA? It’s funny because Lang had bankrupted UFA six years prior with the colossal flop that was Metropolis–an event that made UFA vulnerable to its eventual takeover. For context, during those last days of the Weimar, Leni Riefenstahl was the freshly-installed head of the Nazi Film Commission and had that year shot the annual Nuremberg Rally on behalf of her greatest admirer, Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl was a genius-level filmmaker eventually given more resources–the support of an entire industrialized nation–than arguably any other filmmaker received before or since. She used it to coin new ways of looking at things. When you watch a professional football game now, well, Riefenstahl set the stage for that. Star Wars, too.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

February 14, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring James Marsden, Ben Schwartz, Tika Sumpter, Jim Carrey
written by Pat Casey & Josh Miller
directed by Jeff Fowler

by Walter Chaw At some point, Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog, based on the tentpole for the Sega Genesis video-game system, achieves a certain queasy, weightless critical mass of pomo fascination. The story elements, the graphics-I-mean-art-direction, the affable James Marsden boyfriend archetype and manic Jim Carrey capering–all of these elements are so familiar they’re almost subliminal, mashed together in epileptic flashes to tell an also intrinsically familiar story about a journey across the country with an alien buddy. Starman, Paul, E.T.–just the first references to register (and as soon as they register, make way for the next set). Sonic the Hedgehog is very much like encountering a Frankenstein’s monster constructed out of The Beatles. Oh god, oh Christ, I recognize this, I know from whence this abomination sprang. It is the well of our culture gone rank. The picture’s closest analogue isn’t other video-game movies, it’s Spielberg’s knowingly self-loathing Ready Player One, which doesn’t get the credit it should for being ashamed of itself. You might feel like Sonic the Hedgehog is “good,” but that’s you mistaking “good” for “Oh, I know all the words to this song at karaoke, it’s good!” Not necessarily.

The Rhythm Section (2020)

February 12, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Revenge, UK

***½/****
starring Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Mays
screenplay by Mark Burnell, based on his novel
directed by Reed Morano

by Walter Chaw Over a black screen at the start of Reed Morano’s The Rhythm Section, we’re invited to think of the heartbeat as drums and breathing as the bass accompanying it. I would have swapped them, but either way it works as a symbolic framework to marry film to music, and perhaps the process of making a film to a collaborative endeavour like the frisson between musicians in a band–or the autonomous functions of the body that keep you going even when you’re unconscious. When I think about “rhythm” as a metaphor, I think of the various breathing methods and strategies devised to help women through labour. Blame Stephen King’s The Breathing Method, the only one of the four novellas from his Different Seasons anthology yet to be adapted for the screen. In it, a young woman has so prepared herself for the birthing process that her head goes through the motions of it even after being separated from her body. The thing to which The Rhythm Section aspires, then, appears to be to create something, or to indeed be something, so drilled and efficient that it operates purely on impulse and instinct.

Birds of Prey (2020)

February 10, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Superhero, Theatrical

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey
**/****
starring Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Ewan McGregor
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Cathy Yan

by Walter Chaw When I used to teach Hitchcock, I’d ask students what the term “bird” refers to in British colloquial slang. “Women,” yes? So, immediately, Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (hereafter Birds of Prey) carries with it an obvious secondary, didactic meaning, announcing itself as a piece about women who are predatory at most, not to be fucked with at least. I’m all-in. What kind of idiot wouldn’t be? The time is right for a film about women assuming agency, flipping the script on predatory men, and making a DC comic-book property into something very much like an extended rape-revenge horror movie. I love rape-revenge horror movies. Ms. 45 is seminal. Ditto the original I Spit On Your Grave. I even love Neil Jordan’s widely-derided The Brave One, which hung issues of assault and miscegenation on the framework of what is essentially a superhero origin story, years before it was stylish to do so. The time is right, too, for more female-led action films–what better than one starring a popular actress playing a popular antihero? Pity, then, that Birds of Prey is more Captain Marvel than Wonder Woman.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 27, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Spain

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate–the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity–where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she’s gone. It’s a small moment, and one that works to move the film’s exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. “He’s not here for you, he’s here for your womb,” says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)–but “he,” a killer robot from the future called a “Rev-9” (Gabriel Luna), isn’t. He’s there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah’s videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon–a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man’s attire even though a woman’s is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) + Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection – Blu-ray Discs

January 21, 20201980s, 1990s, 2011, 2020, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Eddie Murphy, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the “Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection”

BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984)
**/****
2011 BD – Image B+ Sound C+ Extras A
2020 BD – Image A Sound C+ Extras A
starring Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Lisa Eilbacher
screenplay by Daniel Petrie Jr.
directed by Martin Brest

by Walter Chaw I used to watch Beverly Hills Cop about once a week in regular rotation with other movies I bootlegged during those first delirious go-rounds with the VCR-connected-to-rented-VCR carousel. It was on an extended-play tape with two other movies (Desert Hearts was one of the others, Re-Animator the third; quite the triple-feature!); back then, quantity beat the ever-loving shit out of quality. (Bless Paramount, by the way, for always being too cheap to encode their VHS tapes with Macrovision.) For me, Beverly Hills Cop was, like its contemporary Ghost Busters, the ne plus ultra of comedy–my eleven-year-old self still a couple of years away from Monty Python–and the requisite throwaway scene in a strip club was enough to be the centrefold in this analog PLAYBOY that, huzzah, I didn’t have to hide between the mattress and bedspring. The picture had, truth be told, everything a pre-pubescent boy could want in terms of violence (but not freaky violence), sex (but not freaky sex), nobility (the easy-to-understand kind), and plotting (ditto). The hero was an African-American man I’d never seen on SNL (which was on too late for me to catch) and had likewise never seen in 48Hrs.. He was small and not particularly powerful, but he was lithe and had a quick wit and compelling improvisational skills, and he ably parlayed his minority status in a few scenes that aren’t the slightest bit threatening. Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley is, in fact, not entirely unlike cultural brother E.T.–the outsider hero with special abilities who, mission accomplished, can slink off to wherever it is he came from.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)

January 18, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

***/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Vanessa Hudgens, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Chris Bremner and Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

by Walter Chaw Rumors of Will Smith’s death were greatly exaggerated as, in reprising one of his most vile characters, he finds in this third Bad Boys flick the pathos-leavened vitality that had been missing since his last third instalment, 2012’s Men In Black 3. Between: a string of bathetic misfires of varying levels of foul, wherein the once and future superstar struggled to regain his stride. Truly, only a Will Smith could survive a concentrated period such as his last eight years of genuine calamities like Winter’s Tale, Suicide Squad, Collateral Beauty, and Max Landis. Here, again, the irrepressible charisma that made him a bona fide A-list action hero long about Independence Day (if not the first Bad Boys the year before) busts off the screen like a physical thing. It’s a ballsy choice, then, that the directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Black) choose to sideline him for a while immediately after a bombastic opening car-chase sequence. Even that’s a fake-out, as our rogue cops Marcus (Martin Lawrence) and Mike (Smith) are just rushing to Marcus’s daughter’s side as she gives birth to Marcus’s grandson. Everyone’s growing older. Bad Boys for Life gets that.

Gemini Man (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 14, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Will Smith

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we’re attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film’s prologue, it’s stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee’s Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It’s kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories–like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It’s considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that’s stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it’s poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the “you just need an egg!” explanation. Better if said explanation were that they’d figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

Underwater (2020)

January 11, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwyck, T.J. Miller
screenplay by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad
directed by William Eubank

by Walter Chaw Wasting absolutely no time and not interested in talking to you about it, William Eubank’s Underwater is both a model of efficiency and a prototypical post-modernist piece wholly reliant on your familiarity with this genre for its depth and backstory. A seasoned viewer knows that this film is going to be about a small group of survivors picked off one-by-one; that the real bad guy will be corporate greed (or Russian greed, depending); and that if you’re African-American or, God forbid, Asian, you’ll very likely be the first to go. Curiously, it’s in these aquatic thrillers that key exceptions to that rule–Ice Cube in Anaconda, for instance, or LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea–seem to make their appearance. Maybe the trick to surviving the monster is being a late-’80s rapper. Alas, Mamoudou Athie is not a late-’80s rapper. He plays Rodrigo, friend of plucky engineer Norah (Kristen Stewart), and it’s at his urging that Norah saves their deep-sea drilling platform to initially survive a mysterious event–and then through his noble sacrifice that Norah gets to continue to be heroic. It’s worth dwelling on this conceit, but there’s no time: once the dust settles on the disaster that opens the film, several other disasters follow in rapid succession.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

December 18, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Star Wars: Episode IX -The Rise of Skywalker
*/****
starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Billy Dee Williams
written by J.J. Abrams & Chris Terrio
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker (hereafter The Rise of Skywalker) is a breakneck, National Treasure-style quest flick so intent on the prize that it takes its eyes off the goal. It’s slick and frictionless, offering nothing to hold on to and holding on to nothing in return. In it, our heroes rattle off facile one-liners and play around with childish surface emotions as though they were experiencing them for the first time. There aren’t any stakes, and because of that most of the dialogue centres around how everything is very desperate and the Last Time and run! hurry! don’t look back!, but looking back is really all it does. By turns dishonourable and irritating, it plays on fond nostalgia with invasive, clumsy fingers, undoing the considerable goodwill engendered by a trilogy series that began with the same director, hitting the right notes to resurrect the franchise in The Force Awakens–and continued with a genuine auteur piece in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi that seems a unicorn in an increasingly fearful marketplace. Those films, whatever their flaws, were for fans that had grown up in the last forty-two years: the one for their remembered joys, the other for their grieved losses. This one’s for an algorithm.

Universal Soldier (1992) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 25, 20191990s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Ally Walker, Jerry Orbach
screenplay by Richard Rothstein & Christopher Leitch and Dean Devlin
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bryant Frazer You might expect an early-1990s T2 knock-off starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren to be a bit of a romp, but Universal Soldier is pretty dark from the get-go. It opens with a cut-rate Vietnam War-movie pastiche that has Sergeant Andrew Scott (Lundgren) going on a My Lai-style rampage, stitching human ears into a necklace, executing innocent civilians, and decrying the horrified American soldiers around him as traitors before shooting them, too. Private Luc Devreux (Van Damme) manages to jam his bayonet into Scott’s gut, ending his murderous spree but earning a lethal volley of return fire in the bargain. Both men end up bleeding out in the mud before the U.S. military spirits their bodies away and declares them AWOL. Fast-forward 20 years or so, and the government has figured out a way to revive and power up dead soldiers and repurpose them as an unbeatable tactical force. We see these so-called “universal soldiers,” including Scott and Deveraux, working as a unit to take out a group of terrorists in an action set-piece that was, impressively, shot at the Hoover Dam. All goes well for a while, until both Scott and Deveraux start recalling their former lives–and remembering they don’t like each other very much.

Red Heat (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 6, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O'Ross
screenplay by Harry Kleiner & Walter Hill and Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Walter Hill

by Bryant Frazer The first, pre-credits scene of Red Heat takes place in a Russian banya, a steam bath where hulking, Vulcanian workers in grimy T-shirts labour to shovel wood and coal into massive stoves that keep the water hot and the room steamy. The camera follows a blue-eyed man as he steps into the room, assuming his POV as he surveys the tableau. A whole section of the space is dedicated to barely-clad muscled men pumping iron, and the camera lingers on them. It pans slowly across the room before finding a group of nymphs bathing au naturel, zooming in and reframing, finally deciding it's not interested in them. The blue-eyed man turns his head, catching sight of a figure across the room. It's Schwarzenegger, about one square foot of fabric shy of nudity, striding confidently past the bathing beauties before stepping up into a side chamber and disappearing again into the haze. The next shot catches Arnold in medium close-up, tilting lazily from his calves all the way up his chiselled torso, until it frames him in flattering low-angle portraiture. He is squinting, and he is scowling, and he has an Ivan Drago flat-top. This is peak Arnold. The reverse shot lands, almost hilariously, on a group of a half-dozen nude and nearly-nude bathers, all pink and vulnerable in their skin, gazing back at him, excited or terrified or maybe both. It's as if a god stands before them.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

November 3, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical

***/****
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate–the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity–where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she's gone. It's a small moment, and one that works to move the film's exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. "He's not here for you, he's here for your womb," says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)–but "he," a killer robot from the future called a "Rev-9" (Gabriel Luna), isn't. He's there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah's videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon–a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man's attire even though a woman's is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.

Gemini Man (2019)

October 10, 20192019, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

**/****
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we're attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film's prologue, it's stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee's Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It's kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories–like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It's considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that's stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it's poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the "you just need an egg!" explanation. Better if said explanation were that they'd figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

Telluride 2019: The Aeronauts

September 7, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Anne Reid
written by Jack Thorne
directed by Tom Harper

by Walter Chaw If you would’ve thought that a film about the early days of meteorology would be deadly and ridiculous: good call. Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts imagines plucky meteorologist James Glashier (Eddie Redmayne) as a starry-eyed dreamer certain that one day humans will predict the weather badly in front of bluescreens. In pursuit of this, he enlists the aid of tragic hot-air balloonist (well, not hot air at that time–gas of some sort) Amilia Renne (Felicity Jones), a fictional character standing in for the real James Glashier’s erstwhile ballooning companion, Henry Tracey Coxwell. See, all the names are hilarious: the Glashier that will not melt damn the torpedoes, the pretty flying “wren,” and in real life there was a “Coxwell.” Anyhow, Amelia, named after the other woman pilot you know the name of, is a showman, arriving late to the launching grounds riding on top of her carriage (can you imagine!) with her trick dog and her magic voice that carries several football pitches in every direction with no magnification. You can tell from the start that James doesn’t approve of her showboating, except that the way the film is structured–as a series of flashbacks detailing their relationship–it’s clear that James has sought her out because of her draw as a public attraction. You can tell from the start, too, that the real vertical ascent is the friends they’ll become along the way.

Crawl (2019)

July 14, 20192019, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Serbia, Thriller

***½/****
starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson
written by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Walter Chaw Haley (Kaya Scodelario) swims in college. She's good. But Alexandre Aja's economical, fierce Crawl opens with Haley coming in second in a freestyle leg. Although she takes it in stride, while talking to her sister and infant nephew a little later she makes snapping gestures with her mouth that hint at some intensity driving her and perhaps seeping into her familial relationships. A quick flashback shows a younger Haley being coached by dad, Dave (Barry Pepper), who tells her not to give her competitors the pleasure of seeing her cry. He reminds her that she's an "apex predator." The script, by the team of Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, is a marvel of spartan efficiency. It's a bear trap. The prologue sets up in just a few brief strokes that the film will be about perseverance, programming, family…and apex predators.

Bumblebee (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

July 9, 20192018, 2019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Teen

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Travis Knight

by Walter Chaw Travis Knight’s Bumblebee is a tone-perfect amalgamation of The Love Bug and The Iron Giant. It is, in other words, both a throwback summer programmer (perhaps mistakenly released during the Christmas season) and a sophisticated parable about coming of age in a divided America. It casts Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a gearhead who loves her car more than she’s interested in fielding the advances of the awkward neighbour kid pining after her. And then it has her dealing with the loss of a parent as she finds her way through an already-difficult period in a young person’s development. It wisely hires Knight, who at Laika Studios produced the unexpectedly sensitive and introspective ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings (the latter of which he directed), and screenwriter Christina Hodson (the woman entrusted with upcoming films about Harley Quinn and Batgirl), with uncredited contributions from Kelly Fremon Craig, writer-director of the sensitive The Edge of Seventeen, which also starred Steinfeld. In placing gifted, effortlessly diverse people before and behind the camera and then watching as the lingering hostility around the misogynistic, racist, xenophobic Michael Bay cock operas that have made the Transformers franchise to this point disgusting and toxic just melt away, Bumblebee becomes a prototype for the modern reboot. It’s amazing how the right choices among topline talent make all the work of not only avoiding offense, but also providing uplift, seem a magical side-effect rather than some laborious and arcane undertaking. (It’s the difference, for instance, between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.) Knight’s Bumblebee is the Transformers franchise as it should have been from the start: on the one hand a nostalgic, sometimes exciting, often hilarious story about the coming to earth of sentient machines engaged in perpetual war who can camouflage themselves as terrestrial vehicles and appliances–and on the other, a clever parable about how the toys (and cars) we grow up with sometimes provide the guardrails for how we view accountability as we get older. By the end of Bumblebee, the girl and her ‘bot arrive at the mature–and, more importantly, healthy–decision to move on from each other. Another franchise after The Last Jedi making the daring suggestion that living in the past is death.

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

June 28, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

*/****
starring Tom Holland, Samuel L. Jackson, Zendaya, Jake Gyllenhaal
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw Burdened by the need to be the epilogue to Avengers: Endgame, Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Far From Home (hereafter Far from Home) trundles along awkwardly, lurching like an overburdened, top-heavy beast of burden bearing an unwise payload of poorly-packed goods. Its pacing is atrocious-approaching-deadly, and there's a notable lack of chemistry and timing between the leads made that much more glaring for the gloriously fleet and endlessly inventive Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which immediately precedes this film on the Spidey timeline. Compared to the most leaden entries in the MCU, Far from Home doesn't look any better, either. It leans into the teen comedy of Spider-Man: Homecoming with little success and, like it, can only be a teen comedy for half the time anyway–the other half given over to world-building in an endless slog of soapy Act 2s.