Flash, Dance: MAGIC MIKE

With Magic Mike, director Steven Soderbergh continues to explore the ways in which society’s institutions can both enable and thwart ambition by turning people into products. Here he (from a screenplay by Reid Carolin) tells a story of an ambitious thirty-year-old man, Mike (Channing Tatum), working three jobs, none of them the one he most desires. He wants to make custom furniture, a way to take his passions and creativity and spend his time getting paid for something he loves to do. Instead, he’s working mostly low-paying jobs, getting paid all in cash. He can save up enough for a down payment on a loan for his dream business, but can’t get one with his bad credit. The economy has had him stuck in place for six years now in a vicious cycle of saving to no avail. Still he works. He has a mobile detailing business when he’s not haggling for better pay at his construction job. It’s there that he meets an aimless, mostly unemployed twenty-year-old guy, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is on his first and last day on the job. Mike feels sorry for Adam and invites him to come help out at his third job, where he works only weekend nights, where he makes most of his money: a strip club.

There, under the watch of drawling manger Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), Mike and his co-workers, guys with names like Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken (Matt Bomer), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), and Tarzan (Kevin Nash), perform goofy choreographed routines with silly props. Their performances look like nothing more than racy dance numbers until they slip off just enough clothes to scandalize and titillate the screaming audience of sorority girls and bachelorette parties. For their audience this is not about nudity or dirtiness so much as it’s about the naughtiness of escaping the norms of everyday life. Either way, it looks like easy money to Adam who is currently crashing with his older sister (Cody Horn), and so the movie turns into one of those melodramas wherein the older veteran, frustrated with his life but making it look so easy, takes the naive new guy into the fold of a business rife with temptations. Soderbergh takes it all in with his usual patient, clinically observant cinematography, which steers the film away from easy predictability.

Like Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, this is a film about people living under a cloud of economic uncertainty, trying to get by with the money they can get selling themselves. It’s essentially an R-rated backstage drama that starts as goofy fun of a sort and then grows progressively darker as the full implications of the business sets in. It doesn’t go exactly where you’d expect, tracking not simply the younger man’s descent from naivety into jadedness, but the veteran’s growing disillusionment as well. Here’s a guy who feels like he’s been doing everything right, getting a job or three, working hard, saving up, and still he can’t get ahead, can’t find a good foothold. There’s talk of moving the club to Miami, where, we’re told, the real money is. But would that really change the situations of these men in a significant way? More money for the same objectification may not be the healthiest thing, especially as several are already suffering from mostly well-hidden substance abuse issues. The first performance of the movie, one dancer ends up passed out backstage. Later, a groupie with a pet pig is eager to pass out ecstasy. “I’m not my lifestyle,” Mike protests to Adam’s sister, who is both charmed and repulsed by his flirtatiousness.

What’s best about Magic Mike is the generous way Soderbergh has of drawing terrific performances from the entirety of an ensemble. He finds exactly the right ways to use his performers to best accentuate their skills, to draw out aspects of their personas in interesting ways. The tension between Tatum’s charm and blockheaded athleticism is used to flesh out a portrait of a man who allows himself to be objectified despite larger goals, much like his own early film roles hid his deeper talent. McConaughey’s near self-parody “alright, alright, alright” becomes a sort of incantation of sleaze, his mostly shirtless wardrobe a form of wiry narcissism. The other actors, convincing all, even stand-up comedian Gabriel Iglesias as the club’s DJ, float in and out of the story, creating a vivid portrait of this world filled with details both funny (one dancer throws out his back and shuffles off the stage after a heavyset woman leaps onto the stage and into his arms) and sad (another dancer brings his wife to a party and urges the new guy to feel her up).

The film is, in contrast to its high-energy burlesque on-stage and its funnier moments, so low-key about its off-stage melodrama that by the end it feels uncommitted and, when the film ends with its thematic cards still up in the air, the lack of resolution is at once bracing and frustrating. Still, the film is so well acted and crisply directed that the characters’ (and, by extension, the film’s) uncomfortable tension between enjoyment and depression becomes notable. As the credits roll, some characters have made tentative steps towards self-improvement. Others are left, maybe to thrive, perhaps to wallow, in their disreputable career choices. Why shouldn’t the end be so unresolved? It fits right in with the sense of economic despair that hovers around in this story of easy money and uneasy decisions.

Ain't No Time? Baby, Bye, Bye, Bye: IN TIME

With In Time, writer-director Andrew Niccol, who once wrote The Truman Show as well as created the near-future gene-swap thriller Gattaca and the holographic actress comedy Simone, creates a world in which time is literally money. Science has made it possible to live forever, but obviously this would create an unsustainable population growth if everyone were allowed access to the miracle technology. To get around this, there is some kind of vaguely worldwide crypto-fascistic capitalist system (I can only assume, since the movie doesn’t help out much when it comes to comprehension) by which many are allowed to die so others can live forever young.

In this world, people live with free time until their twenty-fifth birthday, after which they stop aging, but a glowing green countdown clock on their forearm jolts to life. They have one free year. Any time after that must be earned. In this futuristic nightmare, time has become currency, traded, stolen, bought, and earned. Niccol has precisely one good use for a world like this, to create a striking metaphor for income inequality. After this has been acknowledged often, redundantly, and gravely, he and his characters have no idea what to do with this revelation. The film digs so quickly and carelessly into the concept that loose bits of narrative avalanche back down into the plot holes, blocking believability from escaping.

The story centers on Will (Justin Timberlake, who really should think about singing again), a factory worker in the ghetto living day to day with just enough minutes to his name to get him to next payday. He rescues a rich man (Matt Bomer) from a bar fight with a thug (Alex Pettyfer) who wanted to steal his century of life. The rich guy is over a hundred years old and wants to end it all. While Will sleeps, the wealthy man gives him his century and dies, or “times out” in the parlance of this picture. This is suspicious to the government, who sends a timekeeper (the always awesome Cillian Murphy) to investigate. He decides it’s a murder after having only seen surveillance footage of Will fleeing the scene, circumstantial evidence at best.

Will doesn’t know this, though. He thinks he can move his mom (Olivia Wilde) into a nice new home. What he doesn’t know is that his mom is about to time out when she can’t afford to pay for bus fare and consequently dies on her lonely walk, unable to find someone to spare a minute. Enraged, Will sets off across the time zones (I couldn’t say what these are, but they appear to be neighborhoods separated by toll booths to keep people of differing life expectancies from mingling) to stick it to the richest in their society. There, he almost immediately runs into a wealthy, nefarious banker (Mad Men’s supremely conniving Vincent Kartheiser) and his beautiful daughter (Amanda Seyfried).

That’s where the law catches up to Will. He beats up some cops and takes the banker’s daughter with him as he races away. (You see, she’s kidnapped, or maybe she loves him, or maybe both.) So, the movie settles into its true nature as a chase movie. Timberlake and Seyfried flee to the ghetto where they agree to become some kind of hot futuristic leather-clad time thieves, pulling off daring Robin Hood heists (we only see two fairly uncomplicated ones) to give time to those who need it most while trying to stay one step ahead of the timekeepers, and her father. There’s lots of movement in this movie but no momentum. It’s a curiously inert film for one that has people on the run bearing literal countdown clocks that illuminate every scene. I was constantly trying to remember how much time our characters are carrying with them (it seems the lower they get on time, the faster they can run to try and get more), even as I was waiting around for anything to take my mind away from trying to figure out how this world works.

One minor character laments her husband dying with “9 years on his clock.” In this world, is there no way one can leave inheritance in case you die before your time? We see countless banks with vaults full of time. Why would you bank your time? If you run out before you can get back to the bank, there’d be no way to revive you since, as we clearly see, dead people can’t receive any new time payments. After a while, I stopped contemplating questions like these and instead focused on how nice it is that the concept offers relatively young actors a chance to play roles they otherwise couldn’t have for decades. Murphy (35) is playing a grizzled veteran cop with over fifty years on the job. Kartheiser (32) is playing an elderly robber baron. Wilde (27) is playing a mother celebrating her 50th birthday as the film opens. Now, the film doesn’t do much with the discrepancies between the ages of the actors and the characters beyond the initial cheap visual gag, but at least it’s proof the concept could have worked if it either 1.) made more sense and/or 2.) were more exciting.

In Time is a difficult film to write about because it’s a difficult film to care about. It’s a straight-up-the-middle, two star mediocrity and more or less a bore. It’s a movie in which no aspect in particular goes terribly wrong. It’s more a matter of no aspect in particular going especially right. Not even the great cinematographer Roger Deakins could help things along. It’s a high concept picture (a concept that, in theory, I absolutely loved) that never gets nearly as good, or as entertaining, as it should be.

Teenagers from Outer Space: I AM NUMBER FOUR

D.J. Caruso is a capable director who has helmed several middle-of-the-road efforts, none better than his 2007 Disturbia, an enjoyable suburban Hitchcock riff. He returns to suburbia for I Am Number Four, easily one of the worst of his films. It’s a dull, rote sci-fi thriller for the Twilight crowd. (Indeed, it’s based off of a teen novel by James Frey and Jobie Hughes). Here’s a cheap film that feels cobbled together entirely out of generic parts that have been shipped unaltered from the cliché factory.

It features a charisma-free performance from bland blond Alex Pettyfer as a teenage alien who was one of nine children sent from his planet to escape genocide at the hands of some things called the Mogadorians. He and the others were to be raised separately on Earth to become warrior defenders of all that is good (or something like that). His older alien protector (the usually reliably entertaining Timothy Olyphant) keeps him moving around so that humans don’t get suspicious. There’s not much on the surface to suggest that suspicion could be a big concern. Are they worried about the fact that they look exactly like normal humans?

When the movie starts, Pettyfer is flipping around on a jet ski and having a great time with the human teens until a weird symbol starts to glow underneath the skin of his leg. That’s the sign that another of his alien brethren has been killed. You see, these Mogadorians have come to earth and have apparently spent around sixteen years or so hunting down these other aliens, the last of the kind. For some never explained reason, these refugees can only be killed in a certain order. How is this order decided? Who knows? They’ve just killed Number Three. Any guess as to the identity of Number Four? Hint: check the title.

Anyways, these Mogadorians, who look like Voldemort with gills and are almost exclusively shown under the cover of darkness, are on the hunt for our protagonists, as is a mysterious blonde (Teresa Palmer) who is on her own separate search. On the run, Pettyfer and Olyphant (what a couple of surnames!) end up crashing in Paradise, Ohio where, of course, the best way to blend in is to send the alien teen to high school. There he meets cartoonish archetypes that have marched straight out of the nearest teen comedy including the inevitable romantic alluring artistic girl (Dianna Agron), the nerdy sidekick kid (Callan McAuliffe), and the antagonistic bullying jock (Jake Abel). For some reason or another, they’ll all inevitably be drawn into the looming intergalactic conflict that will play out on a depressingly small scale.

This is a movie that is never more successful than in its moments of empty-headed spectacle, but that’s mostly because it means the characters have a chance to remain silent while the plot slips even further into autopilot. It is yet another superpower metaphor in the coming-of-age story. It’s yet another low-key genre effort that’s so sleepily dull that it only makes all the more obvious its status as mere pretty product. It’s yet another achingly predictable plot that descends into a conclusion that consists of a shootout, a few explosions and the threat of a sequel.

I was so incredibly bored watching this all play out in front of me that little could be done to rouse my interest. I could not have cared less about the Mogadorians and the special numbers, the magic rocks, the stupid symbols and the plodding teen romance, though I suppose coherent exposition would have made it all go down a bit smoother. Actually, that’s probably not true. This is a movie so impersonally assembled out of prefabricated parts that little could be done to spark it to life without a complete and total overhaul featuring a bit more imagination and energy.