Between The Rock and a Hart Place:CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

It’s one of the oldest action comedy tricks in the book. Pair a tall, muscle-bound action star with a shorter, smaller comedy star. After all, what’s a clearer signal of comedy than putting two people who represent obvious contrasts in the same frame? Once the visual gag is established, the filmmakers only have to let their stars’ combined strengths power the genres’ demands while their likability carries the rest. In the case of Central Intelligence, the leads are Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – bringing amped up physicality and easy charm to action and adventure all over the place, from big splashy studio fare like the Fast & Furious movies and Hercules to scrappier low-budget eccentricities like Faster or, better yet, Southland Tales – and Kevin Hart – one of the most popular stand-ups working today, and a motor-mouth comedy lead in a constant churn of mostly forgettable fare like Think Like a Man and The Wedding Ringer, with a few pleasant surprises like About Last Night. Who knew that putting them together would bring out the best in both?

Johnson and Hart each started their film careers as scene-stealers, filling bit parts with their own unique brands of charisma, and are consequently best when their bigger roles don’t sand down their individuality. The inspiration of Central Intelligence comes in allowing them each to play to and against type in enjoyable silliness given just enough weight to justify a few explosions. Johnson plays a big, bulky man who is effortlessly intimidating and capable, but with a sly sweetness bubbling through. We learn through an opening flashback (slathered in half-convincing CG de-aging and enlarging) he was a fat kid picked on in high school who now, twenty years later, is a ripped secret agent still carrying pain of that long ago bullying. Hart plays a former classmate, an admired hotshot football player who was the only one not laughing at Johnson’s teenaged humiliation. Now he’s the one feeling dumped on, overlooked at work in what is a boring accounting firm anyway. He wishes his life had more excitement. He’s about to regret that.

Johnson, delightfully dorky with a fanny pack and a wide-eyed eagerness to make a good impression, arrives in town for the class reunion and looks up the one person who was remotely nice to him at the time. Hart, sad and low-energy, agrees to meet him for drinks, and is delighted to have a blast: reminiscing, doing shots, beating up bullies, and riding a motorcycle. Hart has a new friend, but it turns out Johnson’s with the C.I.A., on the run for one reason or another, chased by his colleagues and villains alike, and he needs an accountant he cant trust. This brings out the personalities we’d expect from these men: Johnson turning into the strong man of action and Hart jumping into excited nervous patter. The cleverness comes in intermingling these new modes of behavior with the old. Johnson is an action hero and a shy kid wanting to impress the cool guy, while Hart is a fish out of water relying on some of his old ingratiating high school charm to talk his way out of this jam with no hard feelings.

The plot is the usual bunch of hooey hauled out for an action comedy. There’s a USB drive full of shady bank numbers, a mysterious no-good bad guy mastermind with a code name (The Black Badger), government agents hot on the trail, a handful of menacing black market professionals, and a red ticking clock counting down to the climax. It’s an excuse to invite in actors of the sort it’s always a pleasure to see, with small but enjoyable roles for Amy Ryan, Aaron Paul, Ryan Hansen, Kumail Nanjiani, and a few choice Big Names who are smartly revealed for big impacts. There’s nothing too terribly surprising about any developments herein (especially if you’re familiar with Ebert’s Law of Conservation of Star Power). The story is strictly pro forma, a sturdy staging area for its lead duo’s combustible combined charisma. They’re terrific fun bouncing off each other, alternately antagonizing and cooperating as they get deeper into a scenario that involves charming banter, slapstick fight sequences, and grave consequences narrowly avoided.

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber (We’re the Millers) is wise to keep the focus tightly on the hugely entertaining interactions between his stars. They make a good team, pushing each other, Johnson proving once more his facility with humor, here the best he’s ever been on the charm offensive, and Hart showing surprising dexterity with the physical requirements of an action effort, especially one that needs him to squirm and shout protests as he flails into accidental assists. One particularly funny scene has him apologizing to two C.I.A. agents by saying he’s as surprised as they were to find you could accidentally pistol whip someone. It helps that screenwriters Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen (The Mindy Project) leave plenty of room for amusing personality while still keeping the thriller mechanics moving along tight enough to have little use for the drifting improv sag that infects so many studio comedies these days. (There’s hardly any mean-spiritedness either, a nice change of pace.) It’s brisk, efficient, and has a real contagious charge between its mismatched leads, making for a breezy enjoyable good time.

Droning On: EYE IN THE SKY

War is hell. This is a constant truth. Drones are merely the freshest form this hell takes, innovation that serves to remove combat decisions from their immediate consequences by replacing a pull of a trigger with the click of a button. And yet it also enhances and broadens ethical questions and feelings of culpability when the actions of these flying death machines are the result of a large number of personnel debating, justifying, and ultimately enacting this new art of war. Eye in the Sky is not the first film to take drone warfare as its subject, but it’s the most effective and sustained look at the matter to date. This is a film clearly, cleverly committed to considering the methods and morality of modern war from several vantage points, watching as actions are slowly decided upon as the direct results of difficult questions. Is it reasonable to do a terrible thing to prevent something worse? Perhaps. But the variables aren’t so simple or easily predictable.

Director Gavin Hood, drawn to scenarios where means only justify the ends through cold calculation or strategic ignorance (from his War-on-Terror muckraker Rendition, to glum sci-fi Ender’s Game, and even the best moments of his studio-muddled X-Men Origins: Wolverine), here works with screenwriter Guy Hibbert to crisply and quickly focus on one dramatic moment with expertly sustained tension. There’s a house in Nairobi where high-value targets will be meeting new recruits. From a command center in England, a determined colonel (Helen Mirren) is watching a live-feed from the drone over the targets’ location. She’s sharing this with her commanding officer (Alan Rickman), who is huddled behind closed doors in London with a legal team. They’re all triangulating resources with Kenyan military, which has an operative (Barkhad Abdi) in the field. The drone itself is on loan from the United States Air Force, technicians (Aaron Paul and Phoebe Fox) flying it from Las Vegas, data processed from a cubicle in Hawaii.

The Eye in the Sky is the vehicle for much dramatic hand wringing as facts on the ground change and intelligence flows up and down the chain of command with every new wrinkle. By narrowing the scope of the film to one particular flashpoint, it grounds its ethical and moral questions in fine specificity. It’s not tackling the entire idea of drone warfare, instead merely finding a story to illustrate the structure by which it’s executed, and the limitations of this process. It’s a productive lens. We see a variety of military and political figures drawn into the decision-making as the drone spies suicide vests being assembled – a clear target for a pre-emptive strike – and innocent, blameless civilians walking past the house – a clear reason to hold off on raining destruction from the sky. There’s a mixture of wariness and weariness, urgency and caution to the proceedings, as tension slowly grows, escalating with thoughts of impending tragedy of one kind or another.

It’s a film of grinding workmanlike competency in subject and approach. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (Jack Ryan) uses simple shooting, which is cut together by editor Megan Gill (The Call) with tick-tock precision. The excellent cast inhabits blank professionals, flashes of personality tamped down by the severity of the events they’re confronting. They’re driven to do what they see is best for their jobs and countries, debating courses of action in clipped, terse, and tense exchanges. There’s a literal ticking bomb on the screens before them. The gravity of making the wrong call weighs heavily. But the movie never picks sides, allowing those outlining an argument for action and those advocating restraint to make good points. Yet a decision must be made. Hood blends simple dialogues with eerie aerial shots, floating from a drone’s-eye view over its targets. The source of so much conflict, the images it captures are of people simply going through their days, unaware their lives hang in the balance, their survival solely in the hands of military and diplomatic officials thousands of miles away.

There’s bleakly funny exasperation as the bureaucracy pulls ever more suits into the conversation, serious people with differing ideas and ideals nonetheless joined in figuring out how best to minimize the potential for explosions on the other side of the world. This disconnect is enhanced by the differences between Mirren and Rickman, full of gravitas as they sit in their chairs, and Paul, eye on the screen with his hand on the trigger, and Abdi, who sits across the street from the target warily sizing up the facts before him. There are varying levels of culpability, of engagement, all drawn together in an impressive and frightening web of surveillance, with data representing real human lives ping-ponging around a dozen monitors across every continent. Smartly done, Hood’s restraint makes the film all the more powerful and compelling, We don’t know much about these characters, and the filmmaking’s simplicity could probably do with a bit more deft density, but the unfussy declaration of its characters’ core humanity makes for a far more nuanced and troubling outcome. There are no easy answers and no good actions, only hard-fought reactions inevitably resulting in bad outcomes no matter what.

Let My People Go: EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Only a third of the way into Ridley Scott’s 150-minute Exodus: Gods and Kings, I was already feeling like Mort Sahl who, legend has it, impatiently stood up in the middle of the 1960 premiere of Otto Preminger’s 208-minute Exodus and shouted, “Let my people go!” Gods and Kings takes one of the most vital enduring stories in all of world history and literature and tells it in a manner that’s dull beyond belief. It hits familiar beats – Moses’ secret identity, exile, encounter with a burning bush, plagues of Egypt, and parting the Red Sea. But the telling is drained of passion, wonder, or intrigue. The flavorless screenplay is depressingly literal minded, and the characters are flat and thin. Nothing makes an impact, or follows an inner drive. It’s simply one boring sequence after another, not even rising to the level of kitsch DeMille’s Ten Commandments musters at its worst.

Scott is often associated with period epics, but he’s rarely made good ones. When you get right down to it, his best films are either sci-fi pictures (Alien, Blade Runner, Prometheus) or thrillers (American Gangster, Matchstick Men, The Counselor). For some reason, the canvas of historical sweep makes his usually striking set design go flat, even ugly. Worse, he often takes our interest in the main character for granted, as if content with the knowledge most will arrive well aware of who he is and what he did. Scott’s Christopher Columbus and Robin Hood movies suffer the same problem, and Gods and Kings follows suit. It provides cold shots of CGI crowds and crane shots devoid of personality, filling in ancient Egypt without stopping to make us care about what’s happening in it. Every bit of this film is perfunctory, almost apologetically shrugging about its source material’s familiarity.

Playing dress up amidst this boredom is a cast that’s to a person ill suited for what’s asked of them. As Moses we have Christian Bale, who behaves constipated throughout, gritting his teeth and staring in mock awe at the enormity of his situation. Pharaoh Ramses, the man raised with Moses and is now the stubborn ruler who won’t free the slaves at his former brother’s request, is played by a shaved, heavily made-up Joel Edgerton, who appears visibly uncomfortable most of the time. The supporting players are familiar faces (John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Ben Kingsley, Hiam Abbass, Sigourney Weaver) who pose in Egyptian dress and speak maybe two or three dozen lines combined. Funniest is Ben Mendelsohn, whose look here appears vaguely inspired by Michael Palin in Life of Brian. I just felt bad for everyone involved as I felt the pull of sleep tug me lower in my seat.

The screenplay, credited to four writers who’ve done good work in the past, clunks along with dismaying thuds where the drama, the emotion, the excitement, and rooting interest should be. Dialogue is painfully surface level exposition. There’s no “let my people go!” But its equivalent is met by Ramses saying, “From an economic standpoint what you’re asking is problematic.” See what I mean about the boredom? The film attempts to put new spins on old moments and iconography. Instead of talking to a burning bush, Moses gets knocked on the head in an avalanche, and then sits in the mud hallucinating a little boy speaking on the bush’s behalf. It’s certainly different, but I hesitate to call it an improvement. Also reimagined are the gross plagues, now presented in a moderately more realistic manner. Crocodiles attack, filling the Nile with blood, which drives out the frogs, who die and attract flies, which draw the locusts, and so on and so forth.

Scott and his writers get too tangled up in wanting to make gritty origin story detail out of broad archetypes and oft told legend, a blend of modern 3D pyrotechnics and reverent Bible Movie earnestness. What they end up with is neither here nor there, a big waste of time with no sense of character, pace, or atmosphere. There’s just no sense of perspective. They didn’t find a great new angle with which to tell the old story, or have a good handle on some point of view or clear throughline. Character relationships remain half-formed, setpieces are on auto-pilot, and the plot develops for no clear reason other than that’s the way it’s supposed to go. The Bible told them so, except for the parts where the swords and arrows come out and goose the action elements. It’s one big, phony faux-gravitas machine whirring away at one droning pitch for so long it simply sounds like white (very white) noise after awhile. I struggled to pay attention, stay awake, and keep my eyes from glazing over. It doesn’t work as drama. It doesn’t work as spectacle. It just doesn’t work.

Car Talk: NEED FOR SPEED

Need for Speed is never better than when it spends time hurtling along in and around cars going top speeds down city streets, country roads, highways, and byways, racing and chasing in reckless and exciting ways. Luckily, those sequences feel like they take up just about the entire movie. It’s a fairly preposterous plot full of posturing archetypes, the kind who can’t handle much of an emotive burden and are never as funny as the movie thinks they are. They’re there only to help create enough of a story to string along scene after scene of cars zooming, providing just enough downtime and modulations of noise to prevent the whole movie from becoming a monotonous squeal of tires. When those cars peal out down the road, with burning rubber and roaring engines, it’s a visceral kick. With a movie like Need for Speed, based on a series of racing video games and advertised as a nonstop chase, what more do you need to see? It’s important not to cheat yourself out of simple movie pleasures such as these.

Director and co-editor Scott Waugh worked for many years as a stunt coordinator and stuntman on all manner of big exciting action sequences in films for the likes of John McTiernan, Michael Bay, and Doug Liman. He knows his way around a car chase, shooting them at top speeds with crisp, smeary digital photography that catches a motion blur off the gleaming paint as the sound design works with a bass kick of gears shifting and tires sliding. The star of the movie is a modified Ford Mustang. Waugh is always sure to let the camera linger on car logos, giving each new vehicle entrances that are usually reserved for starlets and special guest stars. The Mustang is tricked out to go fast; its top speed is somewhere just north of 230 miles per hour. A financially struggling mechanic (Aaron Paul) does the job for a snobby and insecure professional racecar driver (Dominic Cooper). They may be the humans that make the cars move, but their interpersonal struggles are sublimated at every turn into the action of the vehicles through the aggression of their driving.

And Paul certainly has reasons to be angry with Cooper, who cheats him out of millions of dollars, causes a drag racing accident that kills a close friend, and then flees the scene leaving him to take the blame. After a couple years in prison on manslaughter charges, Paul is ready for some macho car culture vengeance. He wants to reclaim his good name and expose Cooper as the smug villain he is. Paul is so good at playing the good-hearted criminal in over his head and paying for it through palpable emotional pain. He did it for five seasons on Breaking Bad, after all. Need for Speed calls on him to play a similar emotional range, but lighter, pulpier. He’s surrounded by a gang of smiling gearheads (Rami Malek, Scott Mescudi, Ramon Rodriguez) eager to help him, and a pretty car-loving girl (Imogen Poots) willing to ride shotgun. The plan is to zoom from New York to California in 45 hours, getting the attention of a webcasting drag race tycoon (Michael Keaton) along the way so he’ll give them an invitation to his infamous race and meet the enemy behind the wheel once more.

Does that make a whole lot of sense? I’m not so sure. But the screenplay by George and John Gatins uses it as an excuse to send the Mustang flying down the highway at over 100 miles an hour most of the way. Every few states, there’s a new obstacle. They appear with all the regularity of video game villains. In Detroit, there are cops who pursue them. In Nebraska, a state trooper spots them. In Utah, there are greedy bounty hunters. In California, there are other racers, still more cops, and, of course, Dominic Cooper, who would be twirling his mustache if only he had one. Most of the action takes place in broad daylight, the better to appreciate the impressive stunt work on display. The camera sits on the side of the road, hangs off of cars, flings forward into crashes, and stands back to take in spinning debris. It’s clearly and energetically cut together, ready to show off its best assets.

Waugh has grown as a filmmaker since his debut film, the military actioner Act of Valor, showed a glimmer of promise buried under a self-serious plot, stiff tone, and muddy action. Need for Speed takes itself the right amount of serious, which is to say not enough to be a drag. Waugh lets the scenes between the action get carried along by fine actors in thin parts before plunging back into the well-choreographed excitement of cars going very fast. He knows exactly what kind of movie it is, a throwback to films like H.B. Halicki’s Gone in 60 Seconds and Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit, B-movies directed by stuntmen who reveled in sending real cars careening down real roadways. It’s a movie where the hero gets right up in the face of the villain (so close, watching with the sound down might make you think they’re about to make out) and threatens to prove who is the better man by winning the big race. It’s a movie that is bookended by a symbol (first abstract, later literal) of a lighthouse standing erect at the beachside finish line, to really hammer home the masculinity at stake. It’s a movie where inarticulate characters feel big emotions, anger, love, joy, and express them all by driving as fast as they can.