Outgunned: JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2

John Wick, the 2014 directorial debut of stuntmen Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, had cool, impeccably choreographed action sequences. The film’s considerable appeal is in the smooth Keanu Reeves spinning and shooting in blissed-out sequences of zen gun-fu. But it wasn’t just the sweet, sleek look of the thing that made it a cult classic. It was the brutal, elemental motivations involved. Malcontents killed this ex-hitman’s dog. What else could he do but exact revenge? He systematically dismantled a whole shady kingpin’s operation over the sight of a bloody puppy corpse. It makes pure action movie sense. Now, though, John Wick: Chapter 2 must labor to bring the ex-hitman out of retirement again, layering more mythology on top of what was already a neatly cracked video game world in which a whole secret society of assassins carries its own currency and code of conduct, rules and regulations controlled by the dispassionate hoteliers and coroners who cater to this select clientele. There’s an agreeable B-movie vibe to the enterprise, but the convolutions of this sequel lead to a muddier set of motivations, and eventually even the well-staged gunplay started to wear me down.

There’s simply too much of a good thing. Reeves is still perfectly poised, and director Stahelski (alone this time, since Leitch was off making his own solo outing) can stage effective fight scenes. But the story – ballooning to slightly over two lumpy hours – is stretched thin, and the emptiness is filled with nauseating gun love. Wick is back in action, pulled, after a roaring car-centric demolition derby of a curtain raiser, into the hitman game once more when a debt from his past comes due sending him off to Italy to off an heiress. Already we’re removed from the clear emotional lines of the original, but Derek Kolstad’s script finds reasons to keep upping the stakes. As the film moves along, more and more factions in the hitman world turn against Wick, until a whole host of rivals are out to claim a bounty on his head. That should be fun, but it gets tiresome, leading to endless rounds of gun fire, punctuated with kicking and stabbing and punching, each blow considered and crunchy. But even more time is given over to loving shots of Wick’s endless array of weapons, with lengthy sequences involving his procuring of these weapons, examining them, hyping up their qualities for maximum deadly impacts. It’s queasy to watch the film making drooling admiration over the tools of death. 

It’s one thing for a bloody actioner to get off on violence. That’s par for the course. But here it goes too far for my taste, slobbering in glee over the arsenal, talking up the benefits of machine guns and automatic weapons as essential for anyone planning on mowing down a crowd. There’s no moral counterbalance provided, or consideration given to collateral damage. One scene finds Wick going up against an assassin (Common, who, after the far superior Run All Night, seems to be making a habit of these roles), both men armed with silencers. They’re walking parallel on two separate platforms in a subway station, taking potshots at each other through the crowds. We’re meant to realize they’re such good shots no innocent is wounded or worse. This is a throwaway detail, intended humor in how cavalier and dispassionate their demeanors. (They share a drink during their down time, professionals off the clock.) But I couldn’t shake the nastiness of the staging. Many scenes play out like this – one in an art museum had me cringing as blood splattered paintings on the walls – and though it might be fun watching a gory shootout in a Lady from Shanghai hall of mirrors conclusion, I was by then thoroughly displaced from caring, or even enjoying the surface visual pleasure. There’s a case to be made for the amoral action movie. Plenty of downbeat, messy, grim, or exploitative genre pictures provide low pleasures. But here I just couldn’t get on board.

The Shop Around the Corner: BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT

It has been twelve years, but now the shaggy hangout vibe of the Barbershop comedies is back for a third time. It’s also the best one yet. Set in the same small independent black-owned barbershop on the south side of Chicago, Barbershop: The Next Cut gives up on being a movie and instead brings the charm as a big screen sitcom. This frees it up to be a comfortable location for staging sharply observed and warmly felt social commentary comedy, sparkling with smart sociological sentiment and compassionate character work. It’s written by veterans of TV comedy Kenya Barris (Black-ish) and Tracy Oliver (Survivor’s Remorse), who recognize the film’s strength is in making the barbershop a place we want to relax in, enjoying our fly-on-the-wall status as the various barbers, customers, and neighborhood regulars wander through. It’s a big-hearted welcoming movie with serious topics on its mind, but a light touch making it all go down easy.

The shop’s owner (Ice Cube, the series' nice center) is continuing in his father’s footsteps, making the establishment a gathering place for its employees and clients to shoot the breeze while getting their hair done. It’s a great location for a comedy, allowing a variety of characters to interact, talk out their differences, engage in funny banter, squabble and argue, fret and worry about the issues of the day, and find a way to work together. The barbershop is a stage for debates and riffs, parallel stand-up sets in progress punctuated by teasing chitchat. It now shares space – and rent – with the neighborhood beauty shop, which lends the proceedings an element of battle-of-the-sexes, but not in any reductive way. The result is merely one more outlet for a joking collision between various points of view, where the film draws its energy as an appealing clash of charismatic personalities.

The men (like old irritable Cedric the Entertainer, grayed and wrinkled by talented artists, and younger guys like Common, Lamorne Morris, and Utkarsh Ambudkar) and the women (including Regina Hall, Eve, and Nicki Minaj) have an interesting dynamic, dredging up usually unspoken resentments and deconstructing modern gender dynamics from surprising angles. The film lets them have their disagreements, finding common ground where it can and respecting their differences where it can’t. It’s fair that way, a safe space that allows them to discuss beauty standards, race relations, gang activity, gun violence, police misconduct, respectability politics, small business struggles, and more. It’s an amiable peacekeeping movie, not afraid to get serious when it needs to. The film finds a Chicago in pain, wracked with problems – homicides, poverty, broken institutions – people seem at a loss to fix. And yet there’s hope, positing that even small gestures of goodness can make a difference.

You can think of it as Chi-raq’s little cousin, and not because that’s what director Malcolm D. Lee is to Spike. Funnily enough, though it is less cinematically ambitious or angrily satirical, Barbershop: The Next Cut is a more consistent film, and no less politically engaged. It doesn’t take big swings, but it connects every time. Malcolm D. Lee is skilled with juggling tones and tracking motivations across a wide ensemble. (His Best Man Holiday, for example, is one of the better comic melodramas of late.) Here he weaves a deft dance of stereotype and insight, following not so much a story as it is loose strands of subplots woven together – romances, relationships, parenting problems, jealousies, business moves, and gang violence. He allows the characters to express a range of opinions, doubts, and conflicts, examining them in a casual, low-key, often-amusing tone well balanced with seriousness.

Though the look is sitcom bright and simple, there is heavy drama here. One dramatic subplot finds Cube’s son (Michael Rainey Jr.) drawing close to a gang leader (Tyga) who wants a new recruit. But there is also the lightest of light touches. Cut to J.B. Smoove as a smooth talking one-stop-shop with the kind of patter only he can bring, Anthony Anderson as a loud food truck entrepreneur, or Deon Cole as a daffy customer who seems to never leave, and we’re in a much sillier range. Like Black-ish, currently finishing its terrific second season on ABC, The Next Cut comes from a clear perspective, with great specificity to its humor and wearing a social consciousness on its sleeve. This animates and bolsters its attempts to present honest conversation in a way that keeps the comedy flowing without short-changing its important topics. The movie's appeal is best represented in the wheezing bluster of Cedric the Entertainer, whose elderly barber loves to mix it up with the youngsters and never seems to have a customer. (That memorably changes in a priceless scene in the end credits.) He just loves hanging out in this barbershop, and it’s easy to see why.

After Hours: RUN ALL NIGHT

Like all the best Liam Neeson action/thrillers of late, Run All Night taps into a deep well of depression and sadness. It’s brisk and exciting, but suffused with reluctance, concerned with matters of broken homes and beaten psyches. Neeson brings a certain amount of dignity to these man-of-action roles, a great actor refusing to coast in material others might view as merely paychecks. He can see the tragedy here. It’s a big part of what makes The Grey, Non-Stop, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the best bits of Taken such crackling entertainments. They’re elevated by solid direction smartly focused on Neeson’s weary gravitas, a man fighting through existential sorrow to do what he feels must be done.

In Run All Night, he plays an alcoholic ex-hit man trying to wrestle with the demons of his past. He’s estranged from his grown son (Joel Kinnaman), who knows the truth about him and has run towards respectability, working two jobs to make ends meet for his young family. When complications arise and the shooting starts, we find ourselves in an exciting actioner about bad dads and shattered sons trying their best to heal understandably troubled relationships. It’s gruff tough-guy poetry, family melodrama through car chases and shootouts, a gripping violent thriller lamenting the difficulties in breaking cycles of violence.

Neeson’s boss (Ed Harris) has a son (Boyd Holbrook) the same age as his. This young man is the opposite of Kinnaman, trying to be even half the gangster his father was. This leads him to killing a rival drug dealer, a crime Kinnaman happens to witness. Talk about your bad coincidences. So Neeson must scramble to save his son as the full weight of his old criminal friends’ organization swings down to silence the witness. This time, it’s personal. Neeson and Kinnaman race around a New York City night, illuminated by scattered thunderstorms to enhance the drama, trying to stay alive. Around seemingly every corner they find crooked cops, trained killers, and old friends who are suddenly, reluctantly, new enemies (an ensemble full of small roles for Bruce McGill, Vincent D’Onofrio, Common, Genesis Rodriguez, and Nick Nolte).

What’s so satisfying about this set-up is the way screenwriter Brad Ingelsby and director Jaume Collet-Serra make the pulp melodrama as crackling as the action. Terrifically tense scenes of suspense and violence turn into moments of interpersonal conflicts, atonement, and reconciliation as great actors sit and work out characters’ problems. Collet-Serra, who has been grinding out clever and blindsiding impactful genre fare for a while now, quietly becoming one of our most reliable B-movie auteurs with the likes of Orphan and Neeson’s aforementioned Non-Stop, makes space in a film of hard-charging grit for quiet emotional beats. These moments in which characters engage in off-the-cuff soul bearing one-on-one exchanges play just as effectively as the hand-to-hand combat, vehicular mayhem, and discharging firearms.

Collet-Serra’s camera swoops through New York streets, connecting scenes with a CGI Google Street View aesthetic, but Anton Corbijn collaborator Martin Ruhe’s cinematography settles into dancing grain crisply cut together by editor Dirk Westervelt. The filmmakers know how to make a weighty action contraption look great and really move. It starts slow, but once it takes off it builds an irresistible momentum grounded in slick crime drama stoicism, the kind that has as much fun conjuring the dread of violence as the act itself. Whether we're running through an evacuating apartment building tracking multiple deadly cat-and-mouse games, or sitting behind a curtain hoping a bad guy won't think to look there, the film builds its tension out of what might happen, even as it gets satisfaction setting off the fireworks when happenings do erupt.

There’s a moral gravity here, of a deadly sort, that emphasizes the terror as well as the thrill. The filmmakers are wise to key into Neeson’s form, the weariness and grief conjured up by a slump of his shoulders, or in a soft gravely sigh. He’s playing a man clearly skilled in the art of effective violence, and yet can now only summon up the power to put those skills to use to protect those he loves. It’s a dependable formula, and in the hands of such skilled practitioners of the craft, it’s a fine example of its type.

A Change is Gonna Come: SELMA

Whatever their individual merits, or lack thereof, Hollywood reflections on the Civil Rights Movement from the likes of Driving Miss Daisy or The Help tend to conclude by putting on a happy face. They’re viewing the tribulations of the time through a historical distancing complex that takes great pride finding history in the past. How terrible racism and its effects, they say. And yet situating a story as vital as a fight for human rights through the view of sympathetic white help, told firmly from a supposedly more enlightened present, provides only uplift. One whose knowledge of history comes only from Hollywood could be excused for thinking the story of Civil Rights is the mission-accomplished post-racism lie sold by the willfully ignorant.

The power of a film like Ava DuVernay’s Selma comes in its restoring to history its devastating immediacy, while refusing to obscure the direct line from then to now. It takes as its subject the 1965 marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. That was a mere 50 years ago, when brave peaceful protesters were beaten by eager police in riot gear, in front of news cameras for the entire world to see. In this film, each blow feels fresh, the bruises still painful. It keeps the focus of a heroic, historic moment rooted in the humane details, presenting key figures as complicated human beings confronting the worst of humanity with hard-fought grace and determination. It’s a film that plays on your historical knowledge – you can’t watch an opening scene of little girls in their Sunday best walking through a church without a sick feeling of dread suspecting their fate – without taking it for granted or softening historical horror with the benefits of hindsight.

Every choice made by the filmmakers is rooted in immediacy and intimacy. They take our usual view of history – of Great Men, Important Speeches, and Big Moments – and restore a sense of the masses to a movement. The Civil Rights Movement was, after all, made up of people, hundreds and thousands of individuals whose collective voice was heard. The marches at Selma may have been organized and inspired by, among others, Martin Luther King Jr, but he needed the passion and commitment of the people who made up the crowds. DuVernay’s film’s most powerful moments are in its crowd scenes, when King (played brilliantly and convincingly by David Oyelowo) is simply one of many marching towards crowds of cops and hecklers, determined to draw attention to their cause.

Placing the crowds and King on similar levels of focus, the film draws a lively and humane reenactment. We come to recognize faces (Oprah Winfrey, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Tessa Thompson, Stephan James, and more). We can pick them out in the crowds. We know a little of their stories. We see their eagerness, their idealism, their pragmatic planning. Then we see them shoved, hit, shot at, and bludgeoned. Their faces are bloodied as they limp to safety, ready to head out and march again the next day. At its best, Selma is history written with lightening, sharply revealing and an electric burn. It burns for the ferocity of the facts, and the sad recognition in them of so many concerns that linger still. When an unarmed black man is gunned down by white cops who will never be punished, it’s hard not to read echoes of current events in the pain and sorrow on the screen.

Writer-director DuVernay’s previous films were small-scale intimate dramas, tenderly studying the emotional currents between her characters. You can see that skill in Selma’s portrait of King’s relationship with his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and closest advisors (Wendell Pierce chief among them). Not just the easily appropriated, endlessly quotable symbol to which he can so often be reduced, we see King at a recognizably human level. He heads to the streets, ready to face death threats and worse as he delivers sermons with fire and conviction, no matter his private troubles and doubts. But we also see in the small, quiet moments of his life as husband, father, and friend, soft intimate spaces over which hangs the import and danger of his righteous calling.

The film is more diffuse than a biopic, and the time with the supporting cast doesn’t allow for any one standout amongst them. King still dominates the proceedings, drawing focus even when not on screen. He’s a figure of inspiration and conflict amongst everyone, but it’s always clear he’s only human. It’s a picture of a person, and of a movement, that manages to be honest without tearing anyone down. Following backroom negotiations, strategy sessions, and heartfelt speeches between moments of extreme racial tension and sympathetically drawn character moments, Selma is best when it’s witnessing the crisis points of the conflict, and when sitting back with the activists in casual moments of camaraderie, eating, praying, or singing while planning the next move. In those cases, DuVernay makes a film most clearly interested in the human experience first, not just the Big Important moments.

The film falls into some conventional docudrama patterns, like unnecessary time-stamped text and a few clumsy integrations of full names and position statements, orienting the audience at the (brief) expense of immediacy. So, too, the scenes in the White House with LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) or the State Capital where George Wallace (Tim Roth) growls and spits slurs, sequences which sit at a remove from the street-level interest. But when the story and the filmmaking sits powerfully close to the planning and the protests, it is too vitally alive to be held back entirely by such predictable based-on-a-true-story message movie moments.

Bradford Young’s cinematography finds glowing skin tones in cozy interiors that crackle with dimly-lit beauty reminiscent of Gordon Willis. But then we head outside with the protestors, where under the bright light of the sun, angry, violent racism must inevitably meet non-violence. The emotions of real people who somehow muster the courage to put themselves in harms way for what they believe are beautifully realized in a present tense, shorn from the usual feel-good conclusions. This is a hard-hitting view of these events, sympathetic and inspiring, but also pragmatic and clear-eyed about how hard-fought the battle, how real the accomplishments, and yet how ongoing the conflict.

Magical Thinking: THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN

It’s not always promising when a movie starts with the central characters sitting down and saying that their story might be hard to believe. That’s what happens in the opening scene of The Odd Life of Timothy Green, when the Greens, a just-south-of-middle-aged couple (Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton), sit down across a conference table from an incredibly patient adoption official (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and begin to tell their tale. We go back about a year to find them reacting understandably sorrowfully to the news that they will be unable to conceive a child. That night, they channel this type of mourning into an activity. They write down dream attributes for their child, place the list in a box, and bury it in the garden behind their picturesque small-town-Americana home. That night, between a magical thunderclap and the rain falling upwards, something emerges from their garden. Not only that, it gets in their house. Needless to say, they’re a little confused when confronted with a muddy little boy (CJ Adams) who calls himself Timothy and has a handful of healthy, green leaves growing out of his ankles.

Back in the framing device, the adoption official doesn’t quite believe them, but since there’s still most of the running time to go, she allows them to continue telling their story. Happy to have the chance, the Greens tell all about their time with this son, a precocious 10-year-old boy who just appeared. Writer-director Peter Hedges specializes in films about families and, though this one’s not as good as his Pieces of April and Dan in Real Life, it’s ultimately a very quiet, very low-key little movie about how a child can change a family dynamic, sometimes for the better. The Greens casually accept Timothy into their lives, introducing him to their family as a “sudden, miraculous” son. The family members, for their part, react to the child in much the same way that they’ve responded to his parents. Garner’s high-strung perfectionist sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) is skeptical, but their loving, elderly Aunt and Uncle (Lois Smith and M. Emmet Walsh) take to him write away. Meanwhile, Edgerton’s distant dad (David Morse) is standoffish and hard to connect with. In these ways, the film is a little allegory about how dealing with children can be a way for people to relive or reject the ways they’ve been treated in the past.

Hedges’s film has all the simple force of a thin storybook of magical thinking. It works on its own off-handedly bizarre terms, but the extent to which it works on you will completely depend on how far you’re willing to suspend your disbelief. I found myself holding the film at arm’s length for a good long while. It’s so intent on pushing emotional buttons. Here’s where the boy goes to visit a sweet old man in the hospital. Here’s where the boy interacts with the stuffy businesswoman (Dianne Wiest), the interesting, slightly older girl (Odeya Rush), the frustrated soccer coach (Common), or the local pencil factory foreman (Ron Livingston). Each scene has a clear thematic or plot point. Each moment of uplift or mysterious, mystical mumbo jumbo is scored to an insistent piano-heavy score that over-underlines the intended emotion. And that kid, he goes around behaving vaguely childlike and slightly alien, bright and quick-witted on the one hand and a total blank slate on the other, while his parents try their hardest to be parents to him. Even though they make mistakes, they really aren’t mistakes because it’ll still be okay in the end. It’s a twinkly-eyed wishful-thinking version of parenting.

By the end, I was surprised that I was more or less okay with all of that. It’s not exactly The Boy with Green Hair or anything, but it’s still pretty hokey. Still, the movie is so straight-faced and earnest about its mildly perplexing fantasy conceit, so insistent in its magical-child-provokes-the-best-out-of-people plotlines even when they dead-end or remain half-formed. By the movie’s final moments, which I won’t spoil here, I was sort of happy with it and glad I saw it. It’s not a total waste of time. This is a harmless, gimmicky movie that has a pretty terrific cast of character actors lending weight to what is a sweet, if difficult to warm up to, mild fantasy. I get that it’s a tough sell. I’m not exactly sold on the whole thing myself and if you’re one to scoff at the very idea of earnestness I’d advise you to stay far away. Is it corny? Are you kidding? It’s off the cob. But for families looking for a fairly gentle matinee with some well-intended lessons about accepting people, standing by your family, telling the truth, and other such things, it might be just the late-summer movie of choice.

DATE NIGHT: It's a Date!

Date Night is what we tell ourselves Hollywood used to create more consistently. It’s a high concept blockbuster with big stars and a big budget. It’s an action-comedy that’s genuinely exciting and more than a little funny. It moves at a fast pace with a light touch. It’s a perfectly enjoyable night at the movies, even though, as it was winding down, I found myself mildly disappointed that it wasn’t just a little bit better.

After all, the movie stars two of the funniest people working today. Steve Carell and Tina Fey play a married couple whose weekly date night takes a screwball turn when a case of mistaken identity turns their night into a wacky and dangerous race through New York City in order to stay alive and clear up the misunderstandings. Their madcap adventure contains plenty of capably staged action and plenty of laughs. They come into contact with a host of funny characters who are played by a host of funny, talented performers. There’s a hunky security expert (Mark Wahlberg), a mob boss (Ray Liotta), a policewoman (Taraji P. Henson), two shady tough-guys (Common and Jimmi Simpson), and a couple of goofy lowlifes (James Franco and Mila Kunis) who are the real couple that should be at the center of the mess. Needless to say, Carell and Fey are far removed from their suburban-family existence and their circle of friends (which include the always welcome Kristen Wiig and Mark Ruffalo).

Carell and Fey have enjoyable presences on funny sitcoms (The Office and 30 Rock, respectively) and here create an easy rapport. They seem like a real married couple. They have complications and frustrations, sure, but they seem to truly love each other. And when the action movie kicks in, they don’t discover hidden depths in each other, or suddenly become butt-kicking action superstars. Their relationship is a little touching and sweet as their characters remain consistent throughout: likable and relatable. With lesser leads, the movie would be nowhere near as good, even with the excellent supporting cast that has been assembled.

Certainly, the story would not be as memorable if it weren’t for the people acting it out. The plot keeps a lot of thriller and screwball elements in the air, and there’s a feeling that it doesn’t ever develop the ideas more than the plot requires. But what a plot! I’m sure there are plot holes. It’s not complicated, or even particularly distinguished, but it’s certainly enjoyable and involving as it sends the characters racing through ridiculous scenarios and it managed to keep me smiling and chuckling for almost the entire run time. Sure, it retroactively bothers me that the underlying theme about marriage is never fully explored and that the great supporting cast is seriously underused. But the movie was fun enough at the time.

The director is Shawn Levy who ruinously remade The Pink Panther and wasted a perfectly good premise in not one but two Night at the Museum movies. Here, he finally makes a movie that works all the way through. It’s a film that’s energetic without seeming manic while funny without seeming to stretch for laughs. The timing is excellent, the leads are well-deployed, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. In fact, it all seems to resolve too easily and quickly. If anything, I wanted the movie to go on a little longer. There needs to be just one more turn of the screw, one more unexpected complication. The plot resolves a bit too quickly and easily. Then again, I should be careful what I wish for. This is just an easy, uncomplicated, and enjoyable experience. It's a fun, slick entertainment that’s, at the risk of sounding too willing to be quoted, just right for date night.