Back in Action: NOBODY and WRATH OF MAN

The lizard-brained appeal of the shoot-‘em-up Nobody is a little misjudged. It stars Bob Odenkirk, the great sketch comedian of Mr. Show turned wry and soulful character actor star of Better Call Saul, as a suburban family man in a rut. An early montage shows us his daily routine of coffee and commute and office work filling spreadsheets. His wife won’t sleep with him. His son doesn’t respect him. Day after day. This is interrupted by a pair of semi-bumbling thieves who break into his home and steal just a few trinkets. Feeling emasculated for failing to stop the robbery, he roams the city looking for trouble, eventually beating up some shady characters on a city bus with surprisingly adept combat moves. Turns out he’s a former secret agent retired in protected obscurity. Also turns out he just beat up some guys connected to a Russian mobster, who sends dozens of anonymous goons after him, leaving this humble middle-aged dope no choice but to send his wife and kids away while he goes full John Wick. (That the screenplay is from Wick scripter Derek Kolstad should be no surprise.) The result is a movie in which a mid-life crisis of masculinity is solved by violence—waves and waves of shootings and stabbings and all sorts of things to make a faceless, personless baddie’s body go splat. I’ll admit the action, staged by director Ilya Naishuller (whose previous actioner, the woozy POV-shot Hardcore Henry was repellently violent), takes on a passable jolt, and the dumb retribution logic plays out with some dopey spirit. But I couldn’t shake the fact that the whole amoral shape of the thing was like someone traded American Beauty’s portrait of male-pattern ennui’s sex fantasies for violence, then dropped the clumsy satire for overplayed needle drops and self-satisfied slow-mo. Odenkirk is smartly restrained and underplayed throughout, though. And the shoot outs and explosions and car wrecks have a stupid satisfaction to them. But the whole arc of the picture — better living through mass murder — leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Far better to see a movie that knows how deadly serious its pulp plotting is. I’d be loath to say a thriller as unremittingly dark and unsparing as Wrath of Man is a moral work, but it has a code and a perspective that understands there is no such thing as good violence or a righteous kill. It’s too stark and unflinching, lean and mean, to be anything but impressed by the emptiness with which it leaves every character involved. There’s something ominous to its undertow, crisp crime plotting that will be drug under by its poisonous grasp. Here men’s schemes are what opens that Pandora’s box. They’re pitiless; their crimes run cold; blood oozes and splatters like tar. It stars Jason Statham in one of his chilliest performances, his tight musculature crafted into a stone-faced determination. He’s a new hire at an armored truck company that has recently been targeted by a team of robbers who blocked off a road, blew out the side door, and gunned down the drivers. Statham is silently hyper-confident, keeps to himself, and seems to be way more talented than the job requires as the movie’s introductory passages draws him into his co-worker’s world of jargon and joshing. You can tell he’s up to something. As the movie steadily widens its scope, sidestepping to show us other groups of men, we see this armored truck depot is the hub of criss-crossing plots: two teams of thieves looking for a big score, a man-on-the-inside working to help one of them, some cops who may or may not be onto something. And Statham? He’s on his own, out for revenge. You can tell when he calmly, precisely guns down some potential robbers without breaking a sweat, and then follows it up with the faintest flicker of disappointment. These weren’t the thieves he was looking for. The movie’s unflinching grimness and deliberate forward motion matches Statham’s, as his vengeance works itself into mythical, or perhaps Old Testament, dimensions through the dark rumblings of fatalism, the taciturn brutality of its sparingly deployed concussive violence, the score full of low, slow strings and thunderously rolling drums.

The film untangles its deceptively knotty plot with razor-sharp simplicity and focused tension. Revelations drop into  a sturdy structure that thuds each new variable into place with equal parts inevitability and surprise. Moving backwards and forwards in time, and moving in different groups of dangerous men on a direct collision course with each other, the heat steadily builds to a boiling point, spilling over in a clever and tragic escalating climax. The way there finds in its long set-up and clockwork payoffs a merciless logic and calculated futility. We get the sense all of these guys need to take action in response to their circumstances (they were wronged, or greedy, or bored), but know deep down all this danger won’t get them much of anything in return. It’s a fallen neo-noir world past saving, but something must be done anyway. The big ensemble of enjoyable character actors (Holt McCallany, Josh Hartnett, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, and on and on) keep the personality on a low simmer, the kind of hard-bitten pulp dialogue that curlicues with just enough flair, a mixture of hollow macho posturing and gruff molasses-drip dialogues of heavy seriousness. The film matches this tone with its own self-seriousness: chapter headings, drawings of snakes and devils in the open credits, a well-deployed use of a gravely Johnny Cash lament in a violent montage, restraint in patient wide-shots and smartly withheld reveals. But that seriousness finds a good match in the mood and craft of the picture, which imbues what could be affectations with a level of tightly controlled artfulness that elevates what could in lesser hands devolve to mere shoot-‘em-ups. Here every shot counts, and hurts.

That it comes from writer-director Guy Ritchie marks potentially a new era in his filmmaking. After all, he began in the 90s as part of the post-Tarantino fast-talking genre movie crowd, with jumpy and jumbled crime pictures like Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels that rattled chronologically and pictorially. Those early films of his are energetic and youthful, but also empty, callow contraptions. His exercises in style were then well-served as directorial eccentricities in massive Hollywood branded blockbusters — two Sherlock Holmes, a Man from UNCLE, a King Arthur, an Aladdin. He often enlivened what duller hands would’ve turned out perfunctorily, taking his quick-cut flashiness and scrappy chatter to glossy spectacles. With Wrath of Man, he’s come full circle with a sense of an aged master, older and wiser, confident in his narrative chops and control of tone. He entrusts a thick layer of menace to a talented cast and crew of ace craftspeople. Every shot is well-judged and clear. Every sequence is economical and thrilling. He rarely goes out of his way to accomplish in two shots what could be done in one. Thus it becomes an exercise in control, taking his interest in underdogs and rivalries, ambition and deception, fatalism and determination, and drawing them out in a mechanically impressive scrambled chronology told with an atypically heavy pace. It’s a two-hour crescendo of sustained suspense and dread, promising and delivering clever realizations and anyone-goes violence. It builds. It escalates and modulates. It finds new depths to dig as it wrestles with the darkness at the heart of these men’s plans, the way wrath animates yet hollows out everyone around it. Here’s a film that look on the evil men do — in so many forms — and feels sick from the weight it carries, before exploding outward in intense genre thrills.

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.

Man of Action: JOHN WICK

The set up is standard revenge action stuff. A dangerous guy has put aside his history of violence, but then a bad thing is done to something he loves. Violence ensues. In the case of John Wick, the dangerous guy is John Wick (duh), a retired contract killer. His 1969 Ford Mustang is stolen and, to make matters worse, his dog is killed by the stupid son of a mob boss. This makes John Wick very mad. Not since 2005’s martial arts picture The Protector sent Tony Jaa looking for his stolen elephant has so much violence followed a wrong done to a beloved pet. In Wick’s defense, the dog is a great movie dog, perfectly behaved out of the box and cute as all get out. I wanted to wipe off the fake blood and take it home myself. But Wick’s especially ticked off because the dog was the final present from his recently deceased wife. And since he can’t very well get revenge on the disease that took her, the punks that clubbed his dog will be the next best thing.

The entire film is devoted to Wick’s attempts to get to the mob boss son, killing his way through set pieces in which the bad guys line up to stop him and end up shooting galleries. Sometimes one of the anonymous muscled guys holds his own for a moment and we get some tight, bruising hand-to-hand gun fu combat. There’s really not much to the plot beyond these nicely done spurts of violence involving guns, knives, cars, and the occasional random object deployed for clever effect. There’s no frills, no fat, just lean, efficient, bloody action filmmaking that takes time to linger on the pain and confusion of the violence. Wick stops to get patched up after one particularly close scrape, asking the doctor doing the stitching how active he can be with such an injury. The doc casually hands him some pills and warns him that he’ll tear if he overdoes it. But, hoo boy, is he about to overdo it. He’s only halfway through the runtime!

It’s a pretty dumb action movie, but awfully smart about its dumbness. It starts with a solid center, casting the always-reliable, often unfairly underrated, action movie centerpiece Keanu Reeves as Wick. It’s not entirely coincidence he’s ended up in so many memorable actioners over the last twenty plus years, from Point Break and Speed to The Matrix and Constantine. He specializes in characters who keep their cool, are stoic, sardonic, professional, and seemingly unflappable, making it all the more impactful when he’s flapped, as he often is at some point. Here stuntman Chad Stahelski, making his directorial debut, is guiding the project. He works Reeves’ spacey distance for dramatic effect, making us feel the hyper-confident man beneath his mournful, detached, and determined present state. It could easily be a role filled by Liam Neeson (if he wasn’t making A Walk Among the Tombstones at the time) or Denzel Washington (ditto The Equalizer), but Reeves make it something uniquely his own. He has an eerie calm and smooth remove bubbling over with pain as he grits his teeth and goes back to work.

As Reeves races through the film’s action paces – a gunfight in a nightclub here, an attack on his glass-filled home (the better to shatter during a fight) there – he encounters an ensemble of familiar faces in bit parts. They’re the kind of small flavoring performers who turn up a few times throughout and only need to show their faces to suggest richer inner lives and backstories than the movie has time or need for. There’s the mob boss (Michael Nyqvist) and his son (Alfie Allen), their lawyer (Dean Winters), their hitmen (Willem Dafoe, Adrianne Palicki), and other assorted helps and hindrances (Ian McShane, Clarke Peters, Lance Reddick, John Leguizamo). They add distinctive spices to their scenes, which are propelled along by Reeves and his sense of mission, which Stahelski smartly foregrounds every step of the way.

I liked the film’s straight-faced goofy B-movie conception of New York-based contract killers as a chummy clubhouse society with codes of conduct, secret doorways, and where everybody knows each other’s name. They even use the same shady industrial waste company to quietly clean up the bodies. That’s a dryly funny detail. So is the hotel that seems to cater exclusively to their kind. They all know what's coming. Before the action kicks in, Nyqvist asks Leguizamo whom his son has wronged. At the sound of the words “John Wick,” his face falls as he quietly prepares for the shoot-‘em-up he can see forming before his very eyes. Stahelski and crew deliver on that promise, Derek Kolstad’s uncomplicatedly effectual screenplay providing a variety of contexts for proof of John Wick’s deadly competence. It’s a modest, effective, action flick that hits the right buttons. Its style is simple digital photography, slick but unadorned, catching every well-choreographed kick and shot. Its every action hits with impact. It knows what it wants to do and does what it does well.