Live, Die, Repeat: THE OLD GUARD

For a comic book action film, The Old Guard keeps its scale smaller than you’d expect, the better to remain atypically attuned to its characters and the consequences of their actions. Adapted by Greg Rucka from his own comic book, the screenplay about a quartet of immortal warriors is relatively down-to-earth for its outlandish premise. The tone is set early when we see Charlize Theron, as the haunted leader of the group, gunned down, contemplating if this is the time she dies. Smartly, the movie knows we might not care if invulnerable characters get hurt, and so makes them vulnerable in other ways. For one, we’re told that at some point, centuries in, they won’t wake back up after a fatal blow. They just don’t know where and when. Worse, they’re not exactly dreading that day. After hundreds of years alive, doing great violence at little physical cost, the psychological cost is weighing on them. Not to mention having to see humanity’s patterns of ugliness cycle again and again. Theron, taciturn and chilled, seems particularly worn down by this. She and the others (Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, and Luca Marinelli) want to fight for justice, to make the world a better place. But one look at the news, and Theron wonders if all their fighting has actually made a difference.

Among these characters, there’s this palpable sadness and boredom with their long lives and strange powers; they’ve been there, done that. One spark of life comes from a potential new recruit (KiKi Layne), a solider who survives a surely fatal cut to the neck and starts communicating psychic visions with our lead quartet. That it's all new to her, giving her reluctance a different flavor, is a good contrast. When she marvels at their unflinching violence meted out against bad guys, she’s told Theron has “forgotten more about killing than entire armies will ever learn.” And yet, for all the action — blood and bullets spraying freely, at least when there’s not a battle ax around to do the job — the movie dreads it. How terrible that it has become old hat. How hard it is for our heroes to think all they’ve done is ultimately to little effect. Their newest member looks upon all this and wonders if she could ever be like them. After all, spectacular violence may come easy, but living with it is difficult. Credit for this unusual sensitivity to the effects of comic book violence surely goes to director Gina Prince-Bythewood. Up to now, she’s blessed us with warm, sensitive dramas like Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights, beautiful, romantic movies closely attuned to their characters emotions, every catch of breath, or shift of gaze. Here death may be old hat to her heroes, but it’s no laughing matter to the filmmaking. Every gun shot or blade slice hurts, even when it seals back up in time to keep the fight moving. She weaves in some horrific concepts in their backstories, and is keenly aware of how much they can lose in the present.

And yet the genre has its demands. The central action conflict of the film comes when an evil pharmaceutical company — led by a callow young tech (Harry Melling) — hires an investigator (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to capture these ageless warriors and drain them for research. That explains the waves of armored goons arriving periodically, and sets up a few fine set-pieces. But it all comes back to that mood, so well sustained throughout. Sure, the dialogue is frosty pulp, with a few terse one-liners sprinkled throughout. And the world it sets up has its intrigue. But it’s not in a hurry to balloon to apocalyptic stakes. Instead it sits with these characters and understands their reluctance, their pain, their confusion. It thinks somberly about the toll it takes to kill and be killed over and over and over. Sure, it’ll slay the bad guys with some style and choreography. But it’s committed to a low minor-key and small, contained sequences. In true modern comic book movie fashion, it sets up more than it knocks down, and even has a little teaser of a scene before the end credits that promises a sequel could be bigger, wilder, and deeper. What does feel complete is Prince-Bythewood’s vision, which extends her sense of thoughtful interiority to a genre that often lacks it.

ATOMIC BLONDE Has More Fun

I like imagining Charlize Theron saw 2014’s slick, cool, expertly choreographed Keanu Reeves actioner John Wick and thought to herself, “I gotta get me one of these.” And get it she did. From that film’s stuntman co-director David Leitch comes Atomic Blonde, a stylish, knotty last-dregs-of-the-Cold-War thriller set against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall’s fall. German unrest is at a head, and into this mess strides Theron as an ice-cold, hyper-competent, platinum blonde secret agent who must plunge ahead into one last mission tangled up in Stasi, Soviet, French, British, and American spies fighting (and double-triple-quadruple-crossing each other) over a MacGuffin. There’s a potential defector and a list of undercover identities in the mix, and all the combatants want them for one reason or another. But is there any doubt it’s Theron who will emerge victorious? She has all the right moves. The movie is told largely in flashback. It opens with Theron’s pulling her naked body out of an ice bath, showing painful cuts and bruises dappling her skin. After dressing for her day, she smolders into a debriefing room where Toby Jones and John Goodman eye her suspiciously and ask her to explain what went down in Berlin. She proceeds to spin the tale – of seduction, sabotage, secrets, and surveillance accounting for each and every injury. It’s hard to keep track of the ins and outs of the byzantine plotting – at once pulp simple and complicated – but with Theron in the center of it all, our sympathies and source of awe are never in doubt.

Grooving on a frosted palate and the smooth New Wave cuts pulsating on the soundtrack, the film keeps its intoxicating placid cool. Leitch glides the proceedings easily through the complications of spycraft genre conventions – moles, listening devices, traitors, hookups – enumerated by the screenplay by Kurt Johnstad (300 and its superior sequel) from the comic book The Coldest City. It’s stock stuff, but elevated to pulpy pop art by its sleek exuberance, and by Theron’s fierce, believably outlandish performance – solid and steady, a human terminator who takes a beating and keeps going. Leitch has the good sense to center her in the telling and the frame, finding supreme entertainment even in the way she walks across a tarmac or slips into the back of a car. This is a woman who always knows exactly what she’s doing, how she’s carrying herself, and what to do to prepare to beat down any attackers. The variety of action – held in steady shots lovingly revealing the whole-body choreography from multiple combatants – is thrilling. She fights off two men from inside a speeding car armed only with a sharp red high heel. She grabs a length of garden hose to fend off assailants in a grubby apartment. In the film’s highlight, she goes up an elevator and down a staircase, in and out of a bunch of rooms along the way, punching, kicking, slapping, stabbing, and shooting a handful of formidable villains. By the time she and the last man standing are breathing heavy, bleeding from multiple wounds, and clutching throbbing muscles, staggering as they attempt to regain their balance, you’d think the fight is done. But there’s still a chase sequence to come.

Mostly a short and sweet genre riff done up in pleasing period burlesque and oozing casually ostentatious style in every frame, Atomic Blonde is committed to serving up memorable action beats. It takes what could be a hackneyed, played-out, half-comprehensible plot in more lugubrious, self-serious hands and just digs into its improbabilities as a clothesline for its visual tricks and exquisite action. Theron is the capital-S star, and she’s surrounded by dependable actors (James McAvoy, Eddie Marsan, Sofia Boutella, Bill Skarsgard) doing what they do best. It fills the downtime with enough eccentric flavoring without overpowering what Theron’s doing at center stage. Everyone’s just a piece of the puzzle – a cog in a conspiracy, obstacle to be run over, asset worth flipping or deceiving. Besides, it’s all about the sheer pleasure of the film’s posing and posturing. It’s in a gleaming pair of sunglasses, a shock of neon, a white trench coat, a car sailing backwards through a busy intersection, a seductive French photographer, a wily watch salesman, a wall standing ominously dangerous (for the last time) in the center of town. It’s in the thwack of a blow connecting, the snap of a sniper’s gun, the blast of pop from a car stereo, the crunch of boots in the snow. The movie’s pleasures are exactly this simple and surface and satisfying.

Fast Past: THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS

No matter how ridiculous or improbable the Fast and Furious series became on its journey from humble street-racing Point Break riff to international heist pictures to blockbuster secret agent spectacles (what an evolution!), it always retained its emotional core. Until now. Even at peak jump-the-shark, when Seven had characters not only jump a sports car between the upper levels of two gigantic skyscrapers, but also survive multiple head-on collisions and a rollover accident down the side of a rocky cliff, it could still manage an emotional sendoff to the late Paul Walker. (Play the opening notes of “See You Again” and even the stoniest of gearhead hearts might melt a smidge.) They may have become unbelievable vehicular superheroes, but they still really cared about each other and even their most outlandish feats made sense in the context of the lengths they’d go to show that love. Alas, the eight installment in the seemingly unstoppable franchise, The Fate of the Furious, ditches its core consistency of character relationships for a misguided attempt to mix it up. It’s almost fun – starting with a silly street race prologue and some dark notes of discord – but then bungles the execution.

This time out Dom (Vin Diesel), the patriarch of the makeshift family, betrays them and joins forces with Cypher (the great Charlize Theron, a welcome if underutilized addition), a hacker bent on sending our team chasing her fetch quests. She wants the world to fear her, so she needs weapons of mass destruction. Makes sense. But the leverage she has over Dom to force him to help her, kept fruitlessly secret for the bulk of the runtime, only goes so far. Sure, it’s a tortured melodramatic twist, but the movie doesn’t milk suspense out of the betrayal. His friends pulled into the conflict (Ludacris, The Rock, Tyrese, Michelle Rodriguez, and Nathalie Emmanuel), chasing him down New York City streets and across frozen lakes, register only mild disappointment in his switch, and shrug when the truth of his double-double-cross is revealed. They’re too busy outrunning a nuclear submarine or avoiding fleets of technologically hijacked self-driving cars. Those are cool, goofy, over-the-top sequences full of revving engines, spinning wheels, and crashes both real and digital. But when director F. Gary Gray (who usually has decent thriller instincts; see The Negotiator or the chases in his Italian Job) simply cuts between careening car coverage and close ups of the people behind the wheels without thinking about what they’re thinking, it’s hard to care. The film has Idiot Plot in the extreme, keeping characters (and often us) outside important information while exhibiting no curiosity about how anyone would react in these topsy-turvy scenarios.

Screenwriter Chris Morgan has created a world in which every villain, no matter how horrible their actions, eventually becomes their friend. It made sense when undercover cop Walker fell in love with their ethos and fell in with their grey-area car culture back in the first movie. And it even (sort of) made sense that lawman The Rock would, despite chasing after them, begrudgingly call on their help in Part 6. Here we have Jason Statham, who has previously murdered one of their best friends and blew up Dom’s house, freed from prison by mysterious government suits (Kurt Russell and Scott Eastwood) to join the team. How do the characters feel about this? Other than a few joshing quips thrown his way and a one-scene threat of Rock-sized retribution, it fades away as he becomes just another familiar face behind the wheel. In this context, no wonder Dom can willy-nilly switch sides and its nothing more than a MacGuffin for the plot engine strung between the action. it hardly matters what anyone does because everyone can survive and anyone can be redeemed. 

Now the stakes can be nuclear war and the movie, aptly dropping the fast from the title, feels turgid and vacant and slow and, worst of all, just plain boring. This has been a series so good at retooling, I hope they can find a better route next time. They had such a good escalation going for six films, building on what works and pivoting before it got stale. But now it’s stuck in a futile need to top themselves with each outing, going bigger, dumber, louder, longer. The strain is showing. This one has apocalyptic stakes and yet nothing to care about. Characters and cars careen through cartoonish outlandish destruction without breaking a sweat, or an emotional beat that lands anything but false. To the extent it's watchable, it is because it's drifting off affection for its own past.

Three is a Magic Number: KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS

The best parts of Kubo and the Two Strings are its textures. A soft-spoken fantasy film, this latest feature from stop-motion animation studio Laika has gorgeously tactile creations. That’s a feature of the form, where the characters look like stunningly molded action figures and dolls posed against striking dollhouse spaces. But the craftspeople and artisans at Laika (now as much a consistent high-quality brand as Pixar, Aardman, or Ghibli) are thorough imaginers, able to create a sense of magic in movement and sturdiness in worldbuilding. They also can mold their house style to a variety of tones and moods. Look at their works: dark Gaiman fable Coraline; family-friendly Carpenter-influenced horror ParaNorman; whimsical Dahl-meets-Dickens-meets-Monty-Python allegory The Boxtrolls. With Kubo, the company has a project that takes on the flavoring of ancient Japanese legend, from samurai tales to paper lanterns and a sense of fluid boundaries between the mortal and the spiritual, the fated and the created. It’s a very different sort of family fantasy: hushed, gentle, simple, spare.

Its widescreen story begins with Kubo, a one-eyed young boy (Art Parkinson) alone with his mother in a cave at the edge of a small village. He earns money for food by performing stories for the villagers, with heroes, villains, and monsters he animates by making origami puppets come to life with his magic stringed instrument. He strums and narrates while the art acts out his tales. Soon, though, he’ll be in a real hero’s journey of his own. His mother always says never be out at night. They have a tragic backstory. Kubo’s grandfather and aunts on his mother’s side are cruel moon spirits who stole his eye when he was a baby, killing his noble samurai father in the process. His mother has since hidden them to protect the other eye, which they still crave. If moonlight spots the boy, they will return to collect. Alas, this is what happens one night. Kubo is attacked, and his mother uses her last bit of magic to spirit him away and conjure a protector. What follows is a journey for the items that will save his life, told in a mood as delicate and involving as the origami tales he tells.

This is fascinating and intriguing fantasy setup, patiently and slowly unfolding its world. It’s less about its simple story, but more about how rich its visual opportunities are and how consuming its tone is. The boy awakes to find his monkey figurine is now a real monkey (with the voice of Charlize Theron), maternal, stern, and skilled in martial arts. She’s his mother’s final gift. Together they must go on a fairly standard quest set up in threes. There are three travelers: the boy, the monkey, and a man-sized beetle (Matthew McConaughey) they meet along the way. Their goal is finding three mythical objects to help them defeat the enemy: an unbreakable sword, impenetrable armor, and a golden helmet. Getting those involves three deadly obstacles: a giant skeleton, underwater eyeballs around a reef-sized toothy maw, and a dragon. And there are three villains to be confronted: Kubo’s twin porcelain witch aunts (hauntingly voiced by Rooney Mara), and his grandfather, the evil Moon King (Ralph Fiennes). Screenwriters Marc Haimes and Chris Butler, with story credit to Shannon Tindle, use these threes to structure a movie of repetitive rhythms, like an easy-to-recall bedtime story with exciting incident and imaginative sights told in a comforting pattern.

In typical Laika fashion, director Travis Knight allows the movie to move at its own pace, and take on its own distinctive character. It’s a story of melancholy and loss, with real life-and-death stakes and a reverence for the fragile line between the living and the dead. An early sequence finds villagers earnestly communing with the spirits of relatives who’ve passed on. This makes Kubo jealous, but as his journey brings him closer to memories of his parents, he draws on their example as well as the inner strength (and magic) they’ve left in him to do right. This is quite a somber topic for a family film, and it’s allowed its due seriousness. It informs the movie’s whimsy without trivializing the ambiguities and mysteries it works through. This is still, after all, a movie in which a talking monkey has a dazzling swordfight with a ghostly moon spirit who comes gliding in on spooky CG fog, a sailing ship is made out of twigs and leaves, and a beetle-man scurries to the top of a giant skull to pull out a sword imbedded in it. There are magnificent and creative sights used for quiet, minor key effects. It’s fun, but slower and sadder than you might expect. It's like a spell. No wonder the movie begins the same way Kubo starts his origami tales, as the paper folds itself into delicate astonishments: "If you must blink, do it now."

Let It Go: THE HUNTSMAN: WINTER'S WAR

The 2012 summer spectacle Snow White and the Huntsman took a fairy tale and turned it into a fantasy adventure with striking visuals, a muddy Dragonslayer look, welcome weight to matters of life and death, and a feminist snap in letting its heroine fight her own battles. If we absolutely must have fairy tales run through a Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones tone, then that movie was the way to do it right. Alas, now it has also been done wrong in The Hunstman: Winter’s War, a combination prequel and sequel that doodles all around its predecessor with extra intrigue, loud noises, and hectic action, but never arrives at a reason to exist. It’s an afterthought looking for box office. Last time the title characters (Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth) teamed up to defeat the Evil Queen (Charlize Theron). This time there’s new threats and old threats and new plot that suddenly wraps around the old as if the one we’re given now is the real story that’ll bring it all together. As if.

The story starts with the old cheap ah-but-the-dead-villain-had-a-sibling trick. It introduces us to another evil queen, the original’s sister (Emily Blunt), a nice enough young woman who goes full Ice Queen when her lover turns on her. She retreats way up north into the mountains where she makes herself an Elsa-style frozen fortress, then kidnaps local kids to make an army of child soldiers. One of the kids grows up to be Chris Hemsworth, in love with a fellow soldier (Jessica Chastain) despite attachment being forbidden by their icy master. This comes to a tragic end, of course, so this is an explanation as to why he was a loner and such a good fighter in the last movie. Skipping over the events of that story with a tidy “Seven Years Later,” we pick up the thread as the Ice Queen decides she wants her dead sister’s mirror. I suppose I’ve seen worse attempts to find new conflict where it was previously well resolved the last time, but they aren’t coming to mind.

The shiny gold mirror (of “mirror, mirror on the wall” fame) was left behind when the Evil Queen died. Being a tool of evil, it sits in the castle leaking malevolence – killing wildlife, browning grass, that sort of thing. We hear from a messenger (Sam Claflin in a cameo) that it has poisoned Snow White, leaving her incapacitated for the duration of the runtime. (This is screenwriters Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin’s best effort at writing out Stewart, who doesn’t return. It stinks of a movie hobbled by contracts, schedules, and other disputes as it bends over backwards pretending that this is a story worth telling.) Snow sent the mirror to be destroyed, but it disappeared. So it is up to the heroic Huntsman and some warrior dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon, digitally shrunk) to track it down and stop the Ice Queen from swooping in and destroying everything they accomplished.

The idea of dealing with power vacuums and loose weapons of mass destruction in a fantasy context is interesting, but the movie is too thin and empty to do anything with it. There’s nothing here new, surprising, or interesting. It’s a reworking of the first film’s plot – bad queen must be stopped by band of misfits, the leader of which has a tragic history with her – mixed with action beats – fighting goblins, swirling gobs of magic – we’ve seen in every other fantasy film for decades. Helmed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, a visual effects artist making his directorial debut, the thing looks fine and has some fleeting moments of visual interest. I liked a gold-plated Theron, tricky ice walls, tendrils of tar, and a porcelain spy owl, but that’s not much to hang two hours on. This isn’t a particularly rich or novel fantasy world, and it is certainly not enriched by this new experience.

There’s a tremendous cast involved, but they have nothing to work with. Blunt and Theron sell a sniping sisterly chemistry, but of course they have the big goofy camp-adjacent parts decked out in resplendent shimmering gowns and arching eyebrows. The rest of the performers merely fit the tailored leatherwear and look competent swinging old weaponry as the predictable plotting accumulates around them. A passable diversion at best, and thudding boredom at worst, Winter’s War plays like a movie that had to be made before the public forgot about the earlier hit and consequently never figured out what story it wanted to tell or why anyone should care. The irony is that its bland action, routine story beats, and trite love-conquers-all theme is precisely what its predecessor could have been but for the spark of imagination that kept it distinctive. This is the sort of sequel that misses the point of its inspiration entirely.