Game the System: READY PLAYER ONE

Leave it to Steven Spielberg, once the wunderkind of exceptional blockbusters, now the grand master of elegant Hollywood craft (two sides of the same coin, naturally), to make a gleaming, watchable, propulsive, largely entertaining movie out of a screenplay that’s charitably a pile of schlock. Plus, he’s too good a storyteller to avoid uncovering some small complexity where a lesser filmmaker would find none. This is Ready Player One, loosely adapted from Ernest Cline’s junk sci-fi novel by Cline himself and Zak Penn, a movie set in a future overcrowded with people and problems. In mostly off-hand and off-screen ways, it imagines we stopped caring about everything wrong with our society – the climate, the class struggles, the over-commercialized corporate surveillance state, the shallowness – and just wallowed in a late-capitalist decay. That’s frightening enough, but it also sees the entire populace plugged into and swallowed up by a Virtual Reality world called The OASIS. Bouncing between a heightened reality and this over-the-top imaginarium, Spielberg finds his typically expressive mise en scene, energetically filmic camera, and crisp editing patter letting the screen overflow with digital mayhem while almost entirely avoiding the senseless repetitiveness of his knockoff sub-Marvel competition. Only he would think to stage a second act set piece inside a recreation of a famous 1980 horror movie (a fine extra-textual tip-of-the-hat to a fellow auteur) and not only get the set perfectly realized, but to get the grain right, too.

The OASIS is an entire digital hellscape traveled via vision-enveloping goggles, omni-directional treadmills with bungee straps, and gloves and suits for sensory input. The thing is a combination social media and video game. There are casinos, branded game worlds, VR vacations, battles royale, sports, arcades, zero-G dance clubs, libraries, chat bots, and avatars representing several dozen Brand Name Intellectual Properties meant to be greeted with grinning recognition. It’s a chaos – like an entire universe made up of a Facebook that was also endless-Las Vegas inside a Grand Theft Auto Disney World – presented at once naïve and ugly (with just one winking nod toward the world’s digital Love Hotel pointing to how dirty the corners of such a place would inevitably become). I often found it flatly horrific, but the screenplay seems to find it praise-worthy. The structure of the story rests on a quest for three Easter eggs hidden by the late game’s creator (Mark Rylance). These special, well-hidden prizes, once obtained, will give the winner ownership of The OASIS, and thus, considering how many manhours and economic activity take place in the fictional space, the future itself. Spielberg splits the difference between my cynicism and the source material’s slobbering, following a team of scrappy underdogs fighting to beat cold-hearted corporate goons to the Eggs, while still fleetingly recognizing that maybe they should just unplug and chill out, at least for a couple days a week.

So perhaps it’s a shade too acquiescent to its society – and, by extension, ours – taking a bland, gamified approach to pop culture. It's as visually clear as any Spielberg, but undoubtedly his most thematically incoherent. Our heroes – orphan Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his online friends (Olivia Cooke, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, and Philip Zhao) who don’t know they all live in the same towering future-Ohio slums – view art and pop culture as trivia to be acquired, points to be won, hardly ever interacting with them as experiences or creations unto themselves. The kids mine the taste of the game’s creator – a child of the 80’s obsessed with Atari, John Hughes, Back to the Future, Van Halen and so on – for clues on how to win the game. It echoes the hollow nostalgia listicles and empty snark of some of the worst contemporary discourse from people who want points for catching references instead of experiencing and interpreting. But, though Spielberg serves it up, he can also see this problem. For all his rah-rah bombast about the underdog protagonists – and cheery hissing at the corporate baddies, including a boardroom tech company shark (Ben Mendelsohn) who is all-too chipper announcing they’ve been able to pinpoint exactly how many ads can be in one’s field of vision without “inducing seizures” – he watches as all their checklist skill pales in comparison to fleeting moments of real-world connection. OASIS may find them fantasy heroes, but the real world is where you can meet eye to eye, shuck off artifice, really know someone, and maybe even kiss. Only sometimes does the movie see this as the better option.

The point, ultimately, is that the game’s creator, given a quiet, recessive affect by Rylance’s charmingly soft performance, was terrified of the real world. He hated his inability to connect with others and therefore built a digital simulacrum of his fantasy life and cultural diet to share, yes, but in which he could have complete control. All he wanted was to make people happy, but watched as people loved it so much it slipped out of his control, even as he was made into a tech god. (A slyly stupid faux-archival headline reads: “Bigger Than Jobs?”) His genuine, eccentric fanboy love and isolation is lost inside too much muchness. What to do with this tension in the larger context? Spielberg, similarly deified by many who see his creations as shallow entertainments and miss the real humanity in every frame, builds a film that’s a dazzling modern sci-fi construct (climaxing in a CG characters swarming a computerized battlefield) uninterested in the bigger picture. How does this world operate? What are its technological practicalities? What is its economic outlook? The movie doesn’t know or care. (This is no A.I. or Minority Report.) It’s simply attuned to the rhythms of the action bopping through eye-popping Janusz Kaminski frames – the washed-out reality intercut with a vivid, colorful, almost-real animated space. The performers are charming, the world is a constantly shifting fantasy of the creative and the derivative, and the spirited pace is zippy. Its vision of a fight to save a massive VR world is simultaneously Pollyannaish and cynical, twinkling Spielbergian touches over a yawning void. It’s exuberant celebration of shallow pop culture love, and a melancholy vision of the creator’s need to let go. It’s a busy visual explosion of an anything-is-possible tech-dystopia, and a recognition that no matter how fun a virtual world may be, it’s healthy to take a break. In the end, it’s perhaps the most excessive argument for moderation ever mounted.

Dark Side: ROGUE ONE

Rogue One takes what could’ve been trivial noodling around in Star Wars lore and turns it into a proficient sci-fi action movie building to intimations of grand space operatic tragedy. It’s the second film made after creator George Lucas sold his remarkable galaxy to Disney, who have thus far been studious, respectful, and cautious custodians. Instead of an idiosyncratic vision from one artist’s mind, it’s a committee polishing up effective fan service. (At least the emphasis is on “effective.”) For promising new narrative future, this latest film has nothing on last year’s The Force Awakens, with its immediately vibrant new personalities and their lingering unresolved promise: the simmering twisted villain Kylo Ren and fresh Force heroine Rey. But in staging Star Wars-ian action, Rogue One is the more complete experience, with a beginning, middle, and end, a style more efficiently beholden to what came before without strain, and a tone more willing to fit the enormity of the sacrifice in this conflict. It’s overly engineered to be a gleaming widget, fitting seamlessly into the larger franchise plan instead of springing from a singular revelation. But at least this is still a film that dreams a little bigger than most blockbuster product, playing in a hugely enjoyable and intricately imagined fantastical universe with some sense of the painful struggle to resisting brutal fascism.

This entry tells a big, confident tale of a dark corner of the galactic conflict we’d long known about but never seen: the process by which the Rebel Alliance discovered the existence of the super-weapon Death Star and stole plans that’ll end up given by Princess Leia to R2-D2 in the 1977 original’s opening moments. A self-contained – despite the endless references and offshoots into other areas of franchise canon – and admirably scruffy combat heist film – think The Guns of Navarone…In Space!! – it has a motley diverse crew of insurgents striking back against the forces of an evil empire. Better symbols than characters, the underwritten rebels make decent action figures. Through swooping, crashing, clamorous adventure sequences across all manner of terrain – deserts, villages, space stations, jungles, and tropical beaches – they fight. Reluctant rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) joins a spy (Diego Luna), a comic-relief combat robot (Alan Tudyk), an Imperial defector (Riz Ahmed), and two monk-like warriors (legendary Chinese action stars Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang bringing fun choreography). Their mission: contact her father (Mads Mikkelsen), an unhappy Imperial scientist who knows how to take the Death Star down.

This leads to varied action beats, like an ambush in a far-flung marketplace, a mountainous recon mission in a downpour, and a dizzying dogfight above a gleaming citadel. Along the way we learn a little more about the Rebellion than the earlier films had time to explore, with different factions of the Alliance debating battle plans and how to deal with extremists (like an under-used Forest Whitaker) in their midst. This mirrors the Empire’s side, as a commander (Ben Mendelsohn) fights off the life-and-death office politics of battle-station life. The script, pieced together by four credited contributors (Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, Gary Whitta, and John Knoll) juggles the movie’s hard-charging tough-minded warfare with hit-and-miss cameos, fun one-liners, smart retcons, terse exposition, and shorthand emotion. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air – and the strain sometimes shows, especially in the final product’s clearly tinkered dropped connections and foreshortened beats – but there’s fun to be had in the tactile look and crisp pace. There’s even a welcome commitment to feeling the losses, culminating in a staggering shot of good characters embracing certain doom knowing they’ve done all they could to win some small hope for their cause.

Although this is a side story, a spin-off, it’s identifiably Star Wars in its concern with family dramas writ large in galactic conflict and a sense of spirituality amidst tactics, plus gearhead love of spaceships taking off and landing and fantasy anthropologist appreciation of interesting creatures and beasties. (We get all the old familiar X-Wings and TIE Fighters and fish-heads and tentacle-haired beings, as well as slick new designs and goofy new aliens, like a massive Force-sensitive slug used as a lie-detector test.) Plus it has a key insight to style the cast like they’re actors from the 70’s – shaggy hair, groovy mustaches – playing the characters. Though cinematographer Greig Fraser shot gorgeous location photography and ILM filled it up with top-of-the-line digital fakery, it has the scuffed retro-future look of the original trilogy, like a modern re-creation of a 70’s vision. The much-ballyhooed lived-in universe aesthetic of Lucas’s original trilogy still draws visual appeal because it’s so densely designed. It proves there’s still a sense you could find a fascinating new story around every corner in every frame of this series. It also proves once more director Gareth Edwards (of 2014’s great Godzilla) is a master popcorn image-maker (despite many eye-popping shots featured in trailers ending up on the cutting room floor).

The movie works best when it has soaring spectacle clued into the enormity of its scale – a shuttle dwarfed by a planet behind it, the orbiting Death Star creating a solar eclipse, a city destroyed by laser-blast sending enormous shockwaves ripping up surrounding terrain in waves, and massive space structures colliding in the way everyone has played with the toys has dreamed about. But even in the moments when it’s merely workmanlike – or overworked franchise caretaking – it has some of the appeal the old Expanded Universe paperbacks did, varying in quality but consistently a drip, drip, drip of more, more, more for fans. It has all the bells and whistles, the immediately identifiable sound effects, music cues, and visual hallmarks of the series, even if it now has an over-polished committee’s recreation of what was once a singular personal pulp remix. The best thrills – a sensational final battle like something out of N64’s Rogue Squadron video game – feature dazzling effects and action better staged than Abrams’. It may still be imitation Lucas – or maybe imitation Kershner at this point – but it’s sturdy and entertaining nonetheless.

Searchers: SLOW WEST

Slow West is a smart synthesis of the mournful revisionist Western and the lightly appealing oater. In other words, it has a somber recognition of the Wild West’s brutish, senseless violence and pernicious prejudices, and yet retains the lean, bright pleasures of a simpler entertainment. This mixture has been attempted a few times recently – the Coens’ brilliant True Grit and Verbinski’s underrated The Lone Ranger, for two fresh examples. But we’re not exactly swimming in high quality (or any) Westerns these days, and writer-director John Maclean, a musician making his feature filmmaking debut, gives us a satisfying one. He stakes out a nice leisurely pace, trotting slowly westward towards an inevitable shootout, meeting a batch of eccentric characters and dryly evocative detail along the way.

We meet a pale youth (Kodi Smit-McPhee), traveling alone through Colorado territory in the late 19th century, searching for his love (Caren Pistorius), a young woman who left their home country to start a new life in America. The young man runs into a wandering stranger (Michael Fassbender), a far more capable cowboy who luckily agrees to ride along and help him to his destination. They fall into a comfortable relationship, suspicious but with easy rapport. The boy explains, “My girl and her father fled from Scotland.” “Take a hint, kid,” is the older man’s terse reply. It’s a nice crisp quip, but dark undertones creep into their dynamic as we soon learn what the boy doesn’t. The girl and her father are wanted dead or alive, and the helpful stranger is a bounty hunter being led to his prey.

A sure-footed and confident film, narrative and character are pared down to bare essentials. We learn a little about these two men, but not much. We’re simply along for the ride, a short, melancholy little Western with clear blue skies and blindingly bright sun, moving towards certain tragic ending for someone. Indeed, when the violence comes it’s swift and scary, sorrowful with only the faintest glimmer of hope. (There’s even literal salt poured in the wound.) But the journey there is one of constant danger. There are robbers, rival bounty hunters, con men, and Natives. Death hangs heavy over the proceedings, if only for its constant presence in the minds of anyone heading their way. What’s west? “Dreams and toil,” one man says. Kids are orphaned. A campsite floods. A skeleton lies crushed underneath a fallen tree. A German writer (Andrew Robertt) laments Native Americans’ deaths. “One day…this will be a long time ago,” he says.

Fassbender and Smit-McPhee develop a close relationship, seemingly forged out of nothing more than a need for human connection, two lonely travelers taking some comfort in knowing that at least they’re not as bad as others they meet along their slow journey. There’s a sniveling bounty hunter on their trail (played with reliably great villainy by Ben Mendelsohn), eager to pull up next to the campfire and share some absinthe and a cigar, but just as likely to hang back on the edge of the horizon. He’s sizing them up, ready to pounce once the target is in sight. The foreseeable conflict between our two leads once they reach their destination stretches out as distant suspense – disjunction between the men emphasized by split diopter effects – in favor of the toils and dangers both man and nature present along the way.

Maclean, with cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s steady camera, finds gorgeous natural sights – New Zealand standing in quite nicely for the American west – as our characters’ paths converge on the climactic endpoint. It’s a contemplative little picture, and yet happy to provide genre pleasures, galloping horses, gun-loading procedures, wanted signs, the welcome sight of a lone building in the center of a vast stretch of natural beauty, and the sudden terror as shots ring out. It’s all as comforting as it is foreboding, as striking as it is familiar. Maclean’s terse script contains lines like woodcarvings out of thick pulp, and draws conclusions ripe and bloody, predictable and sad. We may not get a lot of Westerns these days, but it’s always nice to see another good one.

Heart of Dullness: LOST RIVER

Ryan Gosling makes his directorial debut with Lost River, an impressively controlled artful nothing. It’s 95 minutes of misfiring aesthetic signifiers coming from the same impulses that led him to work with Nicolas Winding Refn twice (in the good Drive and awful Only God Forgives). Here Gosling loves to provide striking images, woozy with neon and darkness, blood and fire. There are slow motion tracking shots to nowhere, lingering on hardships, and long looks at extreme violence real and imagined, literal and figurative. Dripping with empty visual interest, it lays out its graphical approach quickly, and then grows monotonous. As for character and story, his screenplay regards them as just more elements of design rather than features unto themselves. As a result, the film is a static, uninvolving slog, shorn free of narrative momentum and symbolic importance alike.

That’s not to say the movie is devoid of ideas. It’s a vague statement on the decrepit state of the American dream at its lowest points. Finding his story among the marginalized and impoverished, Gosling films Detroit’s ruins as a stand in for a fictional city, Lost River, drowned by economic disaster. Residents are fleeing. Structures and infrastructure are crumbling. Exploitation and arson are common activities. A nearby dam was once a promise of progress, but has only left an underwater neighborhood to show for it. In all this decay we meet a single mom (Christina Hendricks) about to lose her home, unable to pay her predatory mortgage. Gosling piles on miseries and films them with a surface beauty, taking aesthetic pleasure in pain.

Hendricks’s sons, a young man (Iain De Caestecker) and a toddler (Landyn Stewart), are smudged and sad. Their neighbors, a mute old woman (Barbara Steele) and her granddaughter (Saoirse Ronan), live amidst stacks of hoarded garbage. There’s a depressed feeling hanging over it all. Where’s the hope, when they’re the last remaining people on the block? Those who’ve remained can barely scrape out a living. A sleazy bank manager (Ben Mendelsohn) sees how desperate Hendricks is to make payments and offers her a job at a macabre nightmare burlesque run by a horror-loving madam (Eva Mendes) quick to splash fake blood. Meanwhile, her older son makes money selling copper scavenged out of abandoned buildings and runs afoul of a self-proclaimed scrap metal kingpin (Matt Smith).

This villainous presence – a howling buzzcut weirdo driven around in a vintage car with an easy chair attached in the back – is just one of many oddball elements presented entirely straight-faced.  (I didn’t even mention his habit of cutting off people’s lips with scissors.) There are strange rituals, dreadful recurring symbols, talk of a town curse, a scene where a woman slowly cuts her face and peels back the skin, and a musical interlude involving a creepy rendition of an old Bob Nolan western song. There’s certainly a dreamy animating spirit behind this, tumbling from odd sight to surreal aside. But there’s never a coherent worldview aside from how cool it’s supposed to look and how seriously we’re to take it, sub-Lynchian bafflement without a point.

The actors are mostly left to their own devices, doing as much as they can with as little as they’re given. Gosling doesn’t appear to be interested in using actors for anything other than how his cinematographer Benoît Debie (Spring Breakers, Enter the Void) can place them in the frame. The result is a movie of moments and images without connective tissue logical, emotional, narrative, or political. There are feints towards all of those, but no actual strikes. Gosling proves himself a filmmaker of terrific aesthetic control. He could be a great director someday. But this is a most enervating start. He’s proven he can conjure an interesting look, if one borrowed from Refn, Cianfrance, Malick, and even some directors he hasn’t worked with. If he gets behind the camera again, let’s hope he can find something to say.

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.

Locked In: STARRED UP

Starred Up is a tough sentimental father-son reunion story set entirely in a prison. It’s an unusual fit, the caged brutality grabbing peculiar tenderness while leeching menace into its softer spots. In terms of other contemporary prison-set entertainment, it’s not nearly as softhearted and diverse as Orange is the New Black or as hardnosed and pained as A Prophet. It carefully occupies a tricky middle ground, balancing between a desire to hang back and observe a prison’s inner workings and a plot-driven need to push emotional buttons with currents of conflicts. It’s a surprisingly effective mix.

The film opens on a teenage inmate (Jack O’Connell) transferred from a UK juvenile facility into a bigger, more dangerous adult prison. He’s been moved – “starred up” is the term for this transfer – because of his violent temper. Sure enough, the first thing we see him do, after a strip search and walk to his new cell, is carefully turn a toothbrush into a shiv and hide it in a light fixture. It’s not long at all before he’s knocking fellow prisoners unconscious and picking fights with guards, who storm into his cell in full riot gear. He still manages to get the better of them, beating them with the legs of a table he’s flipped over, pinning one against a wall with a makeshift weapon. This encounter ends with the boy needing to be talked out of biting a guard, paused mid-chomp.

We soon learn the boy’s now in the same prison as his estranged father (Ben Mendelsohn). His old man is a shifty character, well connected with the prison’s underground politics. The boy’s violent unpredictability is making him a target from administrators and vicious criminal elements alike. A mixture of fatherly frustration, machismo, jealousy, and fear animates the older man’s relationship with his son. There are years of resentment and damage between them, but as they try to reconcile in such an extreme context, there’s real poignancy to their fumbling. The boy is pushed into an anger management group run by a kind psychotherapist (Rupert Friend). It might help. His father wants him to succeed. But it’s hard to tell if the man has his son’s best interests at heart. There’s no trust there, from either side.

Director David Mackenzie creates an enclosed sense of verisimilitude, free of many jokes and tropes more openly exploitative prison films fall back on. Instead, there’s an unflinching tension as the inherent ugly reality of the location becomes the backdrop for a pulpy, nakedly emotional story of a broken pair of men, bound by blood, hesitantly, tentatively, forging an understanding. Shooting in a real decommissioned prison from a screenplay by Jonathan Asser, who once worked as a prison therapist, the film takes on a close feeling of loud noises and clanging ambient echoes as the dangers of a location built on systematic struggles of violence and power become palpable.

But it’s the powerful and convincing performances that truly bring the world to life. The ensemble of rough men speaks in thick accents with sometimes-impenetrable slang vocabularies. (The press notes include a “Prison Speak” glossary.) They’re lively and convincing, uncomfortably intimidating presences surrounding our leads. O’Connell and Mendelsohn bring a forceful history to their roles. I bought them as a long distant father and son pairing, uneasy about their new positions, forced into close quarters by their legal circumstances and into competition by competing places in the prison hierarchy. O’Connell, in a compellingly charismatic wounded smolder, brings a livewire violent possibility to his scenes, which makes his humbled silences and quiet revelations all the more surprising. Mendelsohn delivers another of his dangerously squirrely weirdoes, but there’s a pained compassion here as well.

Because the characters are as convincing as their world, it’s easier to go along with its moments of same-old-same-old prison process and father-son tension. I believed in the reality, this place, and these people, which helps sell the truth of their emotions as the realism gives way to elements both pulpy and sentimental as the story resolves. I’m not generally one to go for prison movies, though A Prophet seemed like something of a masterpiece at the time, and is due a revisit by me. But Starred Up has a good hook and uses it to tell a solid relationship drama in an unusual setting, letting some fresh emotions into what could’ve been only a suffocating cell of cliché.

Criminal Minds: KILLING THEM SOFTLY

Killing Them Softly is a tense, talky little thriller, shot through with obvious arty nods towards oblique, gritty crime movies of the 1970s, the kind where glowering character actors talk all around their conflict between moments of bloody consequences. Writer-director Andrew Dominik, adapting the novel Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins, moves the setting from 1970s Boston to late-2008 New Orleans, the better to suit his thesis that connects American capitalism to the robbery and retribution that powers the film’s plot. The connection is made early and often, most obviously and effectively in the film’s crackerjack inciting incident in which two low-level criminals (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) stick up a card game organized by a mid-level criminal (Ray Liotta). While cash is forced into a pair of briefcases at gunpoint, the TV in the background breaks into regularly scheduled programming, filling the room with the sounds of George W. Bush explaining the need to bailout Wall Street.

It’s immediately obvious that Dominik is going to hammer home his thematic intent with all the subtlety of blunt force trauma, throwing a sharp elbow into the audience’s side shouting “Get it?” To say it has subtext would be too kind. Luckily, the film, a small, tough work of quiet tension, is just good enough to sustain itself in the face of its auteur trying a little too hard. Besides, I far prefer a film that’s trying a little too hard to a film that’s too lazy to leave much of an impact. Here, the ultimate entrepreneurial criminal is represented by Brad Pitt playing a dark, smoking, and professional hitman. He rides into the picture to the tune of Johnny Cash on the soundtrack, ready to clean up the mess caused in the underworld by this first-act robbery. Negotiating with a lawyer for shadowy interests (Richard Jenkins), Pitt agrees to bring in a big-shot out-of-town killer (James Gandolfini) to help take down three conspirators and one scapegoat. Nobody’s going to stick up a card game in this town and think they can get away with it. Not on his watch, not as long as he gets his money.

Pitt’s performance is controlled, unshowy work that forms a quietly dangerous center around which the other characters can turn. The film is structured around scenes of men glowering across tables and cars at each other, talking through long-winded monologues and dialogues about what they’re about to do or what they’ve just done. The writing in these moments is alternately humdrum and prickly, occasionally finding laughs so easily that if it weren’t such a carefully scripted picture you’d think it was by accident. In roundabout discussions and unexpected twists of language, the movie works. In between these scenes of tightly wound wordiness are directorial flourishes of fades, slow motion, jarring edits, and surprising jolts of sound design. Much like last year's Drive, this is a kind of distillation of crime movie tropes built back up with self-conscious moodiness and stylishly upsetting splashes of violence.

Though Dominik gets fine performances out of his cast and puts them through tough, crisp crime plotting of a fairly satisfactory kind, the film is in the end only an argument for itself. The closed loop of plotting leaves it all feeling empty, like drab pessimism for nothing more than the sake of drab pessimism. The coldly cynical underpinnings that reverberate throughout the film are often electrifying, juxtaposing speeches by then-candidate Barack Obama or news reports about the freefalling economic conditions with the story’s matter-of-fact preparations and negotiations leading up to theft and violence. But such stabs at weightier intent and broader implications are as exasperating as they are electrifying, both too obvious and too muddled. Cynicism comes cheap, something made especially clear when a general air of disaffected, inconclusive unhappiness is really all this particular film is up to in its grumbling thematic content.

It’s a good thing that Dominik just about makes up for the thematic mud underneath his glossy images and appealingly (type)cast group of sad, violent, greedy men. Even if by its conclusion, the film comes up emptier than you’d expect, it’s still a competent genre exercise, suspenseful and engaging all the way through. Its characters are unapologetically looking out for nothing more than reasons to advance in their criminal occupation of choice, to get the job done and get paid. As such, it’s a small film that only steps wrong when it tries to act bigger than it is.

Lights On, Nobody Home: TRESPASS

Trespass is what is known as a bad movie, plain and simple. It’s phony to its core. The movie comes from director Joel Schumacher who has made some good movies and some bad ones over the course of his career. This is definitely a bad one. It’s a home invasion thriller that’s only the slightest mood shift away from being a flat-out comedy. It’s a film of stupid criminals and lousy hostages that keeps inventing new reasons to keep the characters in the same place well past any kind of logic, internal or otherwise.

The movie starts when the rich man (Nicolas Cage) comes home to his wife (Nicole Kidman) and daughter (Liana Liberato). We know he’s rich because we hear the sound of Cage rapidly negotiating the price of a diamond accompanying the opening aerial shot that tracks his convertible down a long winding road leading to their beachfront steel-and-glass mansion that’s tucked away in the forest. Once there, he continues to negotiate while he tries to help his wife make sure their willful teenage daughter doesn’t get to the local bad girl’s house for a party.

The girl huffs upstairs and the husband and wife prepare for their evening, which is soon interrupted by a home invasion. A group of thieves barges in and waves around their guns while barking for security codes. It turns out they know about the diamonds and would really like them. There’s the conflict. It’s a good thing that the daughter snuck out of the house and sped away in a friends car just a scene or two earlier.  

What follows is filled with yelling, whining, cajoling, pleading, and frustrated barking from all of the characters all of the time. It’s monotonous. As the head of the gang, Ben Mendelsohn stalks about while his gang members wander around looking mean, constantly waving around guns that make clickety-clack noises at the slightest touch. These crooks are so obvious that you can size them up in a second, like the henchman played by Cam Gigandet who will pretty clearly end up being the criminal with second thoughts since he gets so shifty eyed in his every reaction shot. Collectively the gang seems to be pretty dumb. They keep changing their demands and producing different threatening objects. It’s like they want to hang around this house for some time.

Have they even thought this plan through? Sure, they have electrical tape around their fingertips, but their masks are so porous I was identifying the actors underneath them almost immediately. And all Cage has to do is start poking holes in their scheme and the characters get to sit around and threaten each other all night. At one point the daughter sneaks back into the house and walks straight into the danger. Why? If she were smart enough to call for help the movie would be over.

Karl Gajdusek’s script does everything it can to keep the movie rolling forward beyond all plausibility. The homeowners are able to take their captors off task with such skill that I found myself hoping for some ultimate ludicrous twist that never materializes despite the ever-growing pile of ludicrous twists and diversions. This is the kind of movie in which the intelligence of any given character at any given time is dependent solely on what the plot requires at that point. These aren’t characters. These are barely caricatures. It’s all one big phony construct. This is barely a film. It’s a feature-length stalling tactic that keeps the characters, and the audience, locked up in this house well past any reason they should be.