Wrong Number: THE BLACK PHONE

There’s something particularly unseemly about a horror movie that dredges up deeply upsetting imagery and ideas only to let them wither without a scare in sight. I don’t mind, and even sometimes love, when this genre can be nasty, lascivious, mean-spirited. I can even excuse a poorly developed horror picture if it hits the right marks with enough pizazz. But to want us to care about the most vulnerable among us, in a grindingly simple scenario jerry-rigged with convenient outs and lazy logic to maximize syrupy sentiment over their pain, was too much for me. The Black Phone is unsuccessful, not because it’s too intense, but because it doesn’t know what to do with its bungled intensity. It should be better, given its potentially high-voltage concept. The movie traffics in imagery of brutally murdered children and an unfortunate mincing menace of a killer, and fumbles making from it frights of any sort, fruitful, frivolous, or at all.

It’s about a 13-year-old boy (a capable Mason Thames) who is abducted off his suburban street by a mysterious masked figure known around town as The Grabber. We’ve seen he drives a rattling black van, lurks in a billowy magicians’ outfit holding black balloons, and stares out of a devilishly grinning death head mask. (That it’s sometimes a frowning mask is a neat subtle touch that proves he has an underutilized flair for the dramatic.) The bulk of the movie finds the kid locked in a basement where a disconnected black phone occasionally rings with the ghostly voices of the kidnapper’s previous victims. (This is totally a Stephen King-like blend of childlike whimsy, suburban danger, and quotidian drama—ironic since C. Robert Cargill’s screenplay is based on a short story by King’s son, Joe Hill.) That should be haunting stuff, but director Scott Derrickson, who can certainly go for the throat, like with his career-best ghostly-snuff-film chiller Sinister, is here too much of a sentimentalist to let the unsettling ideas surface with any snap or bite. It’s ultimately as wispy and uninterrogated as the villain himself, played by Ethan Hawke with such vivid mystery that it’s a deflation to realize that he’s hardly a character at all. He’s just an obstacle in a movie where everything is exactly as simple as it appears.

The movie becomes a plain self-actualization parable wrapped in a simple A to B escape room mystery box, with each call giving the boy new objects and strategies to plot escape while his captor lurks around as a malevolent, but distant, presence. There’s also a queasy equivalence drawn between this criminal and the boy’s drunken abusive father (Jeremy Davies), with both eagerly using a belt as a whip. He goes from a home trapped in cycles of abuse to being literally trapped by a far worse figure of danger. This unsteady metaphor is further elaborated by the way the boy has a kind of psychic connection with his sister (Madeline McGraw). Her dreams seem to come true, and she prays for clues in her visions to save her brother. (It’s an excuse for fuzzy, fleeting flashbacks to the other victims from the sister’s perspective, a crass juicing of the underdeveloped story.) These twinned ideas of children in danger wobble with a melancholy that never quite activates. So it becomes a movie about a broken home and growing up, but shot through with a kind of lust for redemptive violence that doesn’t resolve well. We’re just waiting around until the dead boys drop enough hints for our lead to not just escape when he has the chance, but linger long enough to snap The Grabber’s neck, too. It’s sick, and not in a good way. It uses the deaths of children as mere impetus for a coming-of-age metaphor about responsibility for a final boy, and draws the deadening conclusion that an ability to create violence of your own—“standing up for yourself”—is a justifiable, and maybe even necessary, part of growing up. Now that’s scary.

Bloodline: THE NORTHMAN

"Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death." - Beowulf

There’s something tough and believable and ancient in writer-director Robert Eggers’ latest film, the red-blooded, thunderously entertaining The Northman. It’s set in the harsh, brutal world of Vikings, and on the road to revenge, which is harsher and more brutal still. Sure, it has shaman and visions and a warrior who catches a spear mid-flight and tosses it back at his enemy. But its potential Conan appeals are situated in a great sense of reality. If it weren’t such a gleaming work of modern craftsmanship, and harkening back to the great epics of Hollywood’s golden age with its pomp and circumstance in massive landscapes as backdrops to human dramas, one could almost imagine the camera had been plunked down in the year 900. As such, it continues Eggers’ anthropological commitment to historical verisimilitude in vivid genre trappings. Here the thrones and the boats, the swords and the helmets, all have the look of authenticity, and real care given to photographing them in all their textures and design. And Eggers co-wrote with Icelandic author Sjón, together crafting a narrative that plays fair with the historical record even as it’s a work of impressively imagined synthesis. We notice the attention to detail, matter-of-factly presented rigor, and that’s how Eggers grounds the fantastical in a material believability of the past. The film has the weight of a real time and place, and uses it as a stage for its bloody spectacle as a warrior prince (Alexander Skarsgård) is betrayed by a villainous uncle (Claes Bang). The young man flees into exile and slavery from which he vows to avenge his father (Ethan Hawke) and free his mother (Nicole Kidman). Yes, indeed, the film asks: what if Beowulf was also Hamlet? (The prince even shares a name, Amleth, with one whose rotten Denmark  is said to have inspired the Bard.) Turns out the answer is awfully satisfying.

There’s a thrilling sturdiness to the film’s inspirations, and not simply the look and tone of the picture that unfurls historicity. Although Eggers’ films have thus far been well-researched period pieces, they just as importantly draw on a literary tradition from the times. Because they play tonally and structurally like stories from the period in which he’s setting his films, they feel all the more real. It’s not that they’re true stories of a bygone time; it’s that they feel like stories of that bygone time. His debut The Witch drew its woodsy colonial folklore fears from contemporaneous journals. He followed that with The Lighthouse, a two-man oddity which matched its turn-of-the-20th century setting by being a boxy black-and-white modernist freakout in squared-off silent-horror aesthetics. It’s only natural, then, that The Northman is built from the bones of Nordic legends and Old English epic poetry. Its dialogue—spoken in gruff barks and silky growls by a game cast—is built on the sturdy syllabic construction of Seamus Heaney’s translations. Its sense of lineage and honor is all knotty myth. Its structure, though, is pure five-act Shakespearean. It builds beautifully and ponderously, each new act slotting in the next step on the road to inevitable conflagration. It’s at once familiar and strange; like the past, they do things differently there, even if we can recognize the composite materials. It earns our investment by believing fully its own, in confident steady style that rumbles like thunder and proceeds at a deliberate pace.  

Along the way, Eggers conjures battle sequences and murky magic in striking measures. Action plays out in elegant lateral tracking shots through frenzy and violence. An enchantment in the world sneaks in through vividly imagined ambiguities—a prophesying, pale, blind Seeress (Björk); a fortune-telling skull; a woozy psychedelics-induced ritual, and a vision of Valhalla. And the throughline of revenge carries us through a long, bruising and bloody picture set against staggering natural beauty of fjords and fields, cliffs and volcano. The scenes unfold with a heaviness, a bold booming in the bass as details accumulate and our hero gets closer to his goal. The enormous vistas fill up their foregrounds with ominous plotting and intimate vengeance. The project thrillingly splits the difference between folk tale and folk horror, epic poem—brusk kennings and brute strength thematic construction—and family tragedy. It’s a film about blood and bloodlines, about passing on the honor of one’s names and gains, and maintaining in the face of so much wild danger. Not uncritical of the violent impulses, by the end, with its moonlit massacres, lava-dodging swordfights, and love with a beautiful young woman (Anya Taylor-Joy) who just might represent a better future, it clearly inhabits the intoxication and futility of revenge—the nobility and gnarliness of Viking life, and the wonder that anyone survived to tell the tale.

Spaced: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets blasts off with more invention in one sequence than many blockbusters manage in their entire runtime. So chockablock with dazzling gee-whiz whiz-bang sci-fi detail and swooping techno-swashbuckling space opera derring-do, it’s an overload of pulp eye candy. Spaceships soar through the skies, asteroids pelt planets, energy pulses from being to being, viewscreens and robots light up with commands, a multitude of creatures jostle side by side in a universe cascading every direction in and out of the colorful 3D frame, and a hero and heroine pose in rippling red-blooded choreography. Too bad the movie slowly runs out of steam, hitting its peak around the midpoint, then slowly dragging to an underwhelming climax, each sequence a little less involving than the last. But, goodness gracious, how eye-boggling the film is from top to bottom and beginning to end, worth marveling at even after the rote plot and clunky dialogue’s throwback novelty appeal wears off. What preposterously dorky-cool retro-future space serial silliness! It’s good enough to make me wish for a whole bunch more of these, a big, glowing, fully-inhabited fantasy universe worth exploring. After all, marry the look and movement to a tighter, wittier script consistently involving throughout, and you’d really have something here.

Springing from the mind of French trash-master Luc Besson, inspired by a classic French comic book, the writer-director steers into his strengths. Always a tonal eccentric with a brilliant design sense, he’s made a career out of stretching and pulling at genre conceits in unexpected ways. His films aren’t always worthwhile enterprises – he’s made more than his fair share of clunkers – but there’s an earnest appeal to his attempts. Valerian, like Besson’s best films – from the similarly colorful sci-fi Fifth Element to hallucinogenic super-lady actioner Lucy – is built around enjoyable visual tricks and hurtling energy. Familiar in the best sense of the word, here’s a gleaming CG space movie built around geometric ships, rocket suits, laser guns, and glowing screens, and with striking figures – our leads with features more delicate and movements more fluid than we usually get out of stock brutes and babes – flying and posing in elaborately constructed phoniness and quick, chaotic, episodic cliff-hangers. Here we follow interplanetary secret agents Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), a flirtatious working partnership played with low-chemistry, flat-footed, dopey love/hate obviousness, as they get pulled into a conspiracy involving duplicitous colleagues, secret redacted information, and a bevy of nasty underworld characters on sidetracks and side quests. 

Our heroes’ journey begins in an action sequence with the movie’s coolest idea – an inter-dimensional bazaar where a stakeout turns into a chase sequence that phases in and out of different planes of reality, an inventive transporting genre idea – before returning to Alpha base, where a thousand planets have built a hodgepodge floating city in deep space. They’re meant to be working together in harmony, but amidst the bulkheads and geospheres and capsules of this galactic Zootopia, darkness grows. This leads to Valerian and Laureline’s encounters with their stern commanding officers (Clive Owen, Kris Wu, and Herbie Hancock), heartless robots, a ruthless alien gangster (John Goodman), gossiping duck-billed beings, massive aquatic beasts, memory-unlocking jellyfish, a sexy shapeshifting blob (Rihanna) and her bejeweled cowboy pimp (Ethan Hawke), a tiny rodent that poops magic pearls, and an ethereal race of doomed blue androgynous stowaways (Elizabeth Debicki and others). Through it all, Besson keeps his images spinning with elaborate expensive detail. It’s like the best sci-fi paperback cover paintings you’ve never seen. He had a huge budget and a good imagination and is intent on displaying as much as he can. The heroes crash through dazzlingly rendered visual delights, lingering mere minutes or even seconds in environments so rich with possibility that you could set up shop in just one for an entire feature. But we’re always rushing to the next episode, the next dramatic escape, the next conflict in an unfolding mystery. By the time the plot forces itself to congeal and resolve, petering out in rote villain monologues and tedious flashback explanations, it’s not only with the sad sense of a narrative running out of steam, but with the deflating knowledge that that’s how we’ll have to leave this memorable world.

Seven Up: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven is a rare sight: the straightforward all-star Hollywood Western. That alone is almost enough to make it fun, as the film gets down to business fulfilling every basic core comfort its designation promises. That it is also a glossy high-budget big studio movie that’s slickly competent, highly efficient, uncomplicated, completely confident in its easy genre pleasures and totally solid in its narrative drive heightens the fun. This is an energetic, red-blooded action movie leaning hard into a Wild West fantasy of righteous violence, in which gunplay and good intentions are enough to win the day. Fuqua has made a career out of movies about violent men – Training Day, King Arthur, Shooter, Southpaw. Here, though, the violence is pure sensation above all else, satisfying and enjoyably expressive. Remaking John Sturges’ sturdy 1960 Western, itself inspired by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he tells a firm, old-fashioned oater in amped-up and appealing 2016 style.

The setup is familiar. A small frontier town is beset by an evil robber baron (Peter Sarsgaard, who all but twirls his mustache as the slimy villain). The narcissistic land-grabber is determined to run the townsfolk from the place, the better for him to expand his mine and get richer. He shoots some of them and burns their church to the ground, throwing in the insult-to-injury offer of $20 each if they skedaddle. Obviously this doesn’t sit well with the kindly townspeople, so a freshly widowed young woman (Haley Bennett) heads out to find the help they need to fight back. The first chunk of the movie is devoted to her search, introducing a grand total of seven men willing to lend a hand and a weapon to this noble cause. The next chunk involves the posse wrangling up a plan. Finally, there’s the big blowout gunfight as rounds of ammunition blast back and forth in creatively staged bouts of battle. There’s no surprise to the outline, but that’s to the film’s credit. The fun is in the reliable old narrative working again, and in the fine, unfussy character work that fills in the details.

It helps that the lead hero is Denzel Washington, as great a hero as we could hope for. Here he fits the wide-brimmed cowboy hat that shadows his tough-but-kind eyes in mystery. He sits in the saddle or struts down the dusty street with the complete and total moral and physical self-confidence with which he’s become synonymous. He plays a marshal roaming the west hunting bad guys. Of course he’s willing to help a nice little town defeat their wannabe corporate despot. (Co-writers Richard The Expendables 2 Wenk and Nic True Detective Pizzolatto’s chewy dialogue gives the villain a speech up top where he explicitly conflates profit with patriotism.) Of course he’s also driven by revenge, as we eventually learn his own sad reason to hate the man. But because he’s Denzel we have all the faith in the world that he’s on the side of truth and good, lassoing a diverse group of misfits into following his lead and rescuing this town from its looming doom.

In the extended, explosive and violent finale, Washington, seemingly without effort, slides off the saddle and hangs on the side, using the horse as cover while firing at baddies, then jumps back up and gets off another perfect shot as the horse rears back. I wanted to applaud. He’s that cool. The rest of his gang are an enjoyable bunch as well, and the movie’s smart not to load them down with intergroup conflict or subplots about grudges or romances. It’s lean, and straight to the point, allowing the invited actors to have fun with Western types while bringing the personality required of them. There’s Ethan Hawke as a doubting sharpshooter, Byung-hun Lee as an expert bladesman (styled like Lee Van Cleef), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as a Mexican bandit, Martin Sensmeier as a Native American archer, and best is Vincent D’Onofrio as a burly mountain man he plays with a funny, soulful high-pitched roughness. Bringing the total to seven is Chris Pratt in another of his slanted Harrison Ford impressions, bringing a sly grin and unexpected/expected dusting of goofiness to his quips. Within the first second they appear, we quickly know who they are, what they’re good at, and how the action will rely on them.

Though Fuqua amps up the speed, volume, and violence in his Magnificent Seven, stripping away all but the essential story beats and drawing the character’s distinctions quickly in broad strokes, he still knows how to provide what a Western needs to really get cooking. He lets the downtime breathe with an awareness of just how long it takes to gallop from one place to another. When Washington and crew stroll into town, after doing battle with crooked deputies (including Cam Gigandet), they tell the worried citizens they have a week to prepare – three days for the stooges to ride back to the boss, a day for them to plan, and three days for their army of deplorables to ride back armed to the teeth. Add to that the time spent putting their own group and plan together, and that leaves a lot of good quality time with the pistols, buttes, baked beans, campfires, church meetings, poker games, and swinging saloon doors that sell the genre setting between High Noon shootouts.

Fuqua knows the long setup earns a sharp and cleverly staged crescendo of action. My favorite bit, outside of Washington’s cool horse stunt, was a scowling baddie gunned down falling back into an empty open coffin outside the coroner’s. But Fuqua, with his frequent cinematographer Mauro Fiore, also makes the violence with some attention to horror. This won’t end with all seven standing, and the townspeople really are outgunned. Shots of terrified children huddled in a basement, or farmers nervously clutching rifles under cover as bullets rattle by, are welcome splashes of perspective in a movie that’s otherwise shooting for the iconic with cowboys astride faithful steeds silhouetted against the sunrise and dastardly villains squaring off against those whose purity of intention should win in the end. It’s this balance – Movie Stars and character actors; brilliant iconography and intimations of humanity – that make for a compelling, enjoyable, and satisfying entertainment beginning to end.

Life. Time. BOYHOOD

The magic of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is that he breathes new life into the coming-of-age story, a form that can easily feel overfamiliar, by supplying an epic sweep through nothing more and nothing less than a life lived before our very eyes. It’s not an isolated moment in a boy’s life that forever changes the character’s path and personhood. It’s a boy’s life, earnestly and compassionately allowed the time and space to grow on screen. A linear progression of naturalistic scenes follows the boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), from age 6 to 18. He’s inquisitive, artsy, loveable. He’s growing, learning, evolving, in a constant state of discovering more about the world and about himself.

Filmed over the course of 12 years with the same cast, the final product has the visual effect and emotional connection of watching in one go all of the Harry Potters – explicitly referenced here, read as bedtime stories and featured in a scene at a midnight release party – or Apted’s Up series or Truffaut’s Doinel films – implicit inspirations. Over the course of nearly three hours, the film sees Mason age, his face, posture, hair, and physicality a guide to the passage of time in this loosely played but rigorously plotted experience. The story of its filming would be a gimmick if it wasn’t so effective. It’s quiet and thoughtful, moving in its breadth of observation. This isn’t a film concerned only with this boy, or boyhood, but about being alive, about now.

For the first stretch of the film, we watch Mason, his single mother (Patricia Arquette), and his slightly older sister (Lorelei Linklater), observing their working-class suburban Texas life, school, work, play. On rare visits, their dad (Ethan Hawke) takes them places – bowling alleys, fast food joints, baseball games. He talks to them, inadvertently revealing strains of conflict in the estranged parental relationships as he advertantly speaks candidly with fatherly advice and about his politics and philosophical worldview. Though side characters come and go, these four remain constant, a portrait of a modern family living and loving through good times and difficulties. Mason’s boyhood is just one part of their story.

Mason is an observer of his family’s dramas, best represented by early scenes in which the little boy stares at a dead bird in the yard, giggles at the lingerie section of a catalog, watches cartoons, listens to the muffled sounds of his mother’s voice in the other room, and spies his parents arguing in the driveway. He’s soaking up the story unfolding around him, a narrative he was born into. The boy is buffeted by the dramas of the adults in his life until he’s old enough to generate some drama of his own. By his teen years, he’s become a more active participant, clashing with his mother’s new romances, finding puppy love, navigating drugs, alcohol, sex, part-time jobs, and artistic impulses. Friends come and go. Years pass; schools change; conflicts bubble up and retreat. Life is lived.

It’s absorbing, built from 12 years worth of filming on and off and yet able to maintain a consistent mood and tone. Linklater and his team – cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly, editor Sandra Adair, production designers Rodney Becker and Gay Studebaker, costume designer Kari Perkins – create a consistent, believable space. The homes feel lived in. The clothes fit like the actors wore them from home. It’s a convincingly real place and time, filled with apt signifiers of the time. Linklater surrounds his characters with current events and pop culture, everything from the obvious hit songs on the soundtrack (Coldplay, Britney Spears, Sheryl Crow, Gnarls Barkely, Soulja Boy, and more) to the evolving technology – from flip phones to iPhones, from Oregon Trail to Wii – to the Iraq War, the recession, and the election of Barack Obama. These time-capsule moments flavor the background and the atmosphere while the focus remains tightly on the experience of moving through time with this family.

Generously portioned, Linklater removes the typical catalysts for coming-of-age change, no wild misery or traumatic death or disease. Instead he supplies a variety of situations that acknowledge the way people and problems drift through life, characters and conflicts important for a time and then gone, perhaps returning later, perhaps not. The film unfolds patiently and pleasantly at its own unhurried pace. Typical home movie and family melodrama landmarks both big – weddings, divorces, births, moves, graduations – and smaller – birthdays, holidays – play out off screen, time moving forwards through suggestion and implication. What we do see are slice-of-life situations that play out with a powerful empathy deeply felt and tenderly portrayed. That’s not to say the movie is devoid of conflict or dramatic turns. It has break-ups, alcoholism, big decisions, and emotional discoveries. But it’s situated between movie-ish construction and realist document in a thrillingly relaxed way.

Linklater uses long takes and smooth cuts, trusting us to fill in the story between the passing years with context clues. He’s a great screenwriter with a fine ear for dialogue and a director with a fine guiding hand with performers of all kinds, veteran actors, children, and non-professionals alike. Here conversations play out shaggily, laughter and melancholy mingle as scenes becoming story, small details build to a big picture. There’s an ease to the performances and scenarios that feels just right, key moments crystallized as memories, fleeting remembrances. It’s not Tree of Life stream-of-consciousness, but instead a present-tense waking life, potent and evocative in its gentle immediacy, living in the moment each moment. The small revelation: “It’s always now.”

In movies as diverse (and yet so clearly from the same artist) as Dazed and Confused, the Before Sunrise trilogy, Waking Life, School of Rock, and Bernie, Linklater’s intelligent and empathetic approach to moments and lived experiences creates films with modest, appealing surfaces and deep wells of emotion and truth. His visual clarity and sympathetic understanding of nuances in his characters behaviors and environs is so confident and unselfconscious it’s easy to take for granted. But its effect is overwhelming, and his style cannot be dismissed. In Boyhood, Linklater covers a lot of ground, but the project hangs together, incident and character alike, because it converts the small and intimate everyday moments into an epic that uses time as its landscapes, and ordinary life as its grandest adventure.

It’s a movie about how slow the process of growing up and maturing can be, how the cumulative effects don’t guarantee you’ll figure everything out. It emphasizes the importance of timing to both setbacks and serendipitous moments of beauty, clarity, and transcendence. It’s about change. We watch it quite literally, written across the actors ages, and as scenes add up to a portrait of a family as well as a childhood, dynamics changing, relationships evolving. But it’s also in the way people change, places change, situations change. People move. People reconsider decisions. People grow apart. Throughout his boyhood, Mason is confronted with people who represent different paths, different ideas, different outcomes. By the end, Boyhood movingly looks upon all this change and possibility and says it’s okay. It’s natural. It’s a part of life. You'll grow, change, move on.

Smartly constructed, the movie starts from its irresistible gimmick and gets deeper, more complicated and moving until it feels full to the bursting with heart and compassion. There’s the weight of a real life in this film, in its making, its structure, its story. It’s a movie of deep truths about the way we live, balanced and beautiful in its humane approach that finds compassion for everyone on screen, recognizing their individuality, their struggle, and their personhood. The actors, from the kids on up to Arquette and Hawke’s astonishingly nuanced work, give extraordinarily consistent performances so fully inhabited and pitched so warmly and effectively on a lively naturalistic level that they appear simply, movingly, as ordinary people in ordinary lives. There’s a genuine emotional intelligence at work here.

It’s present in every scene. I saw it in the mischievous punch a brother sends a sister in the backseat. I saw it in the smile of a little girl passing a note to a little boy in class. I saw it in the fear of kids left behind with an alcoholic. I saw it in the eyes of an elderly couple proudly gifting a Bible and a rifle to a step-grandson who fakes enthusiasm, a delicate empathetic moment, tender, beautifully sad, full of love. (The next scene the boy is taught to shoot and likes it, a warm complication.) I saw it in the tears of a mother sending a child off to college. Life moved too fast. “I thought there’d be more,” she says. A lesser filmmaker might have viewed these scenes and more like them as moments for jokes or judgments, but Linklater balances perspective through mirrored moments, reflections of characters in others, simple gestures with complicated meaning, actions that resonate and return.

For a film so long and rich, it’s deftly shaped, arriving with great power at simple truths. Linklater found in Ellar Coltrane a boy whose open face and intelligent eyes communicate great curiosity and thoughtfulness in a performance that adeptly grows with the young actor. Its no wonder Mason becomes interested in photography. The movie he’s in exhibits a fine eye for casual visual resonance. The opening shot is of the sky, bright blue with perfect clouds rolling by. A six-year-old boy is on the grass, looking up as far as he can see. In the last shot he’s 18, and the vast expanse he’s looking over is the future. Coming of age isn’t an event; it’s a process, a work in progress. We’ve lived this far with his family. Now is now. It’s always now.

Distracted Driver: GETAWAY

The short, high-velocity car chase picture Getaway has as its premise one of those villainous plots that make little sense in the moment and even less afterwards. A mysterious voice (Jon Voight) calls a former professional racecar driver (Ethan Hawke) who has just discovered that his wife (Rebecca Budig) has been kidnapped from their home in Sofia, Bulgaria. The voice tells the driver to steal a car – a Shelby Super Snake that has been outfitted with armor and a dozen surveillance cameras – and take off careening through the streets. He must drive as directed or he’ll never see his wife again. Throughout the movie, much is made about puzzling through the bad guy’s motives and outsmarting his evil plans, but it never really makes sense. By the end, one wonders why anyone – no matter how improbably deranged – would go to such lengths for anything, let alone be able to (mostly) pull it off.

The movie is built out of such silliness, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been entertaining if the movie wasn’t so consistently undermining its sole reason for being. The car chase sequences make up just about every single second of the runtime, with the exception of brief flashes of flashbacks (and by brief, I mean no more than a minute total) and the occasional quickly spoken bout of strategizing and negotiation. I appreciated the directness and simplicity of the movie in this regard. There’s no wasted time and absolutely no reaching beyond its means for plot, theme, or character that would hit the breaks. But the chase is built out of choppy chaos from which we only grab glances of presumably impressive stunt driving and real crunchy crashes. Why go to all the trouble of driving real cars down real streets, really crashing them into each other, if the footage will be shot and cut indiscriminately?

Director Courtney Soloman (the man who most notably brought us the disastrous 2000 fantasy adaptation Dungeons & Dragons) keeps the in-the-car action suitably claustrophobic, with tight close-ups of Hawke sweating it out behind the wheel while the voice drones out his instructions – avoid the cops! run over that Christmas tree! blow up that power plant! – over the car’s hands-free phone system. The script by Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker even adds a nicely ridiculous, but wholly necessary, addition when the car’s owner, a computer-nut, gearhead teenager (Selena Gomez) tries to steal back her car and gets trapped in the whole crazy situation with the driver. The voice seems to have directed her there to help Hawke. I’d explain more, but I’m not sure the script quite understands why, so what chance do I have of getting it? Maybe they realized Hawke needed someone to talk through the problem with. Or maybe the addition of a cute girl really helps out the marketing department. The characters’ terse chemistry under pressure is actually rather enjoyable in a way that matches the movie’s abundant absurdity. They underplay it nicely, leaving overplayed entirely to the plot.

It’s everything outside the car that’s the problem. In a movie that only exists as an excuse to get cars zooming fast, careening around and through obstacles, narrowly missing pedestrians, and smashing and crashing into each other, the visual style has very little need for speed. It’s all about the smash, not the hurtling. The characters wince and shout in close-up, tires squeal and motors roar on the soundtrack, and the camera spastically bounces around catching motions and consequences haphazardly. There’s no flow, no momentum, and certainly no coherence. It’s a jumble of cheaper low-res images, some beamed in from the cameras on the lead car, hurtling through the stunts at a high-impact speed mixed in with shinier, more polished digital imagery capturing the characters. It’s all bleary and blurry, making it difficult to appreciate the hardworking stunt drivers. A lot of work went into designing these chases, but little care was shown in deciding how the audience would see them.

Only one staggering shot – a climactic extended long take from the POV of the Super Snake’s bumper that weaves in and out of moving traffic in hot pursuit of a villain’s vehicle for over 90 uninterrupted seconds – shows off what the movie could’ve truly been capable of delivering. The shot’s so good, I laughed a few times out of sheer disbelief and grew disappointed when we finally, inevitably cut away. If only that much suspense, danger, coherence and imagination had found its way into the rest of the picture. I didn’t much mind watching the movie. It’s thin and single-minded, but the leads are appealing, the plot ludicrously stupid in a largely inoffensive way. It knows what it is, but without the good sense to be a better than middling version of what it is. It’s the kind of dumb actioner with a glimmer of a good idea that’ll play a lot better if and when you catch it on TNT or somewhere like that on a lazy weekend afternoon. 

Love. Life. BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Richard Linklater is one of the best directors working today, a fact often easily neglected simply because he never seems to be showing off. His films are so expressive and confident that they have no overtly showy facets. And yet, hopping genres effortlessly, in films as diverse as Waking Life, School of Rock, and Bernie, he creates films with gorgeous visual subtlety, sparkling dialogue of ever-so-heightened naturalism, and casually rigorous observational power. Unlike a Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino, or Coen brother, Linklater doesn’t wear his virtuosity on his sleeve. He doesn’t and doesn’t have to. He’s simply that good.

His latest film is Before Midnight, a follow up to his 1995 masterpiece Before Sunrise and its just-as-great 2004 sequel Before Sunset. The first film, tender and romantic, introduced us to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). In their early twenties, serious and impulsive, they happen to meet on a train crossing Europe and strike up a flirtation. On a whim, Jesse decides to ask her to get off with him in Vienna and spend some time getting to know each other before he has to catch a flight back to the States. Celine, who is on her way back home to Paris, agrees. Together they wander the streets the whole night, engaging in one long winding conversation that’s hopeful and hesitant, offhand and playful. They part without exchanging numbers, left with only memories of one chance connection.

They meet again nine years later. Now he’s a writer on a book tour. His last stop is Paris. She read about his book signing and shows up. They spend the next several hours walking and talking, catching up and wondering what might have been. There’s a moment in Before Sunset in which Hawke looks away and Delpy reaches out to touch his head with her hand. She hesitates, then moves her arm back to her side. It’s an echo of a scene in Sunrise that finds the two of them sitting in a record shop listening booth, shifting their positions and gazes ever so slightly to look at this new person without getting caught doing so and risk letting on just how interested they are in the other. These are films filled with lovely gestures that catch the experience of hesitation in romanticism, where the potential for love eludes for no particular reason other than a pause between total connection and complete comfort.

It has been nine more years, for them and for us. Before Midnight finds them once again spending time together, this time in Greece. Because part of the fun of this new film is finding out what has transpired between them since we last saw them, I’ll avoid specifics and instead focus on the emotions of it all. When they were first on screen together in 1995, they were young, their lives ahead of them. The connection they made was based on philosophies and personalities. When they met again, they still enjoyed talking art and politics, but now as adults in their thirties, experiences, insecurities, and practicalities entered the picture. Now their conversations are richer and longer, not better, but the product of passing time.

Their relationship has changed, even as they engage in conversations around the topic of change, around what they have done with their lives and how much time may be left. There’s a mortality and morality added to their decisions that youthful romance had no time for. These exceedingly truthful films have not grown smarter, but more knowledgeable as these characters have aged. This is a rare Hollywood romance that’s swooningly sensitive, prickly and intimate, in full acknowledgment that a relationship is an evolution that must be cared for and maintained. Differences grow, and so do commonalities. Jesse and Celine, smart, articulate people, have devolved both comfort and conflict so that, as we listen to them, we can watch rhetorical missteps and argumentative fallacies rise up on both sides, and fade away, or not, as the conversations continue.

Unlike the earlier films, relatively trim 80-minute affairs, Midnight runs nearly thirty minutes longer. Rather than one long conversation, this one is loosely structured around three: the first in one unbroken shot through the dashboard of a car, the second around a dinner table with friends, the third down the streets of a Grecian village and into a more private space. What we see play out is nothing less than a virtuosic duet between two actors who have lived with these characters for almost their entire careers and allow their characters’ histories and personalities to fully inform each and every exchange right down to the diction. Hawke and Delpy co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater, who, in his direction, unobtrusively sits with these characters and lets them puzzle through deep thoughts, shallow reactions, ambiguous emotions and complicated concerns. It’s a patience few films allow and which reaps only rich rewards here.

The product of generous collaboration, Before Midnight draws upon a rich fount of subtext and backstory to sketch out another period of time with these people. What started as one affectionate, extraordinarily literate and perceptive indie picture has grown into a three-part small-scale epic about two lives that have intertwined over a nearly twenty year period. It’s a film that’s unblinkingly honest and achingly intimate, and yet all the more romantic for it. It is as funny as it is sad, as warm as it is raw, as comfortable as it is candid. It feels honest and real because Linklater is so humane a filmmaker and his actors so flawlessly genuine. Here’s a film that doesn’t look away for one second in considering the messy emotions between two people who’ve known of each other for a long time. And here’s a film that makes the work of a relationship look worth pursuing. Find people, find someone, you like talking to, the film seems to be saying, and your life can’t be all bad. Great conversation, like great films, like great art, is worth finding and cherishing. This is a great film.

Panic Attack: THE PURGE

The Purge is a sociological thought experiment in the guise of a home invasion horror movie. That wouldn’t be so bad if the central thesis weren’t so ridiculous and obvious. The film imagines that by 2022, the United States will have dropped crime rates down to record lows by instituting an annual catharsis. For the next twelve hours, as of the start of the movie, all crime is legal. (“Including murder,” the emergency alert broadcast helpfully (?) reminds.) And just what does writer-director James DeMonaco think would result from this hypothetical time of total immunity? Nothing good, that’s for sure. This imagined world accommodates a night of chaos in return for a completely peaceful 364 days. The movie posits not so controversially that a society without rules of any kind would probably be bad.

Ethan Hawke stars as a wildly successful home security salesman. That makes sense. I guess if the country is going to explode in looting and murder one night a year, the sales of home security installations would naturally skyrocket. As the movie starts he and his wife (Lena Headey) have holed up in their large home with their daughter (Adelaide Kane) and son (Max Burkholder) to wait out the purge. It’s an issue of class. Those who can afford the protection ride out the night just fine. Those who can’t afford to keep themselves safe – the homeless, the poor, and the marginalized – are the ones who end up dead by dawn. Talk about class warfare. As you might suspect, things inevitably go wrong for Hawke and his family.

It all starts when the son shows some compassion and opens the steel barricades to let a homeless man (Edwin Hodge) hide from a roving band of purging youths. The clean cut, prep schoolers stride up to the front door and demand the return of their prey. Their blonde, blue-eyed leader (Rhys Wakefield) presses his face into a security camera and says it’s their right to kill the man. He’s not contributing to society and they have pent up violent impulses. Win-win. The young man speaks with the entitled swagger of a spoiled kid who it’s easy to imagine thinks reading Ayn Rand has explained the way the world actually works to him. The crowd stalks around the mansion’s perimeter, banging on windows and steel doors. They shout an ultimatum: give up the homeless man or they’ll come in and kill them all.

The tidy plot quickly grows tedious as DeMonaco tries to wring much tension out of the power getting cut and the family and their unexpected guest wandering around in the dark, hiding from each other, getting separated, and fretting about what to do. It feels like much of the runtime is given over to Hawke and Headey apparently getting lost in their own home running down dim hallways, waving flashlights, and shouting endlessly for one or both of their children. Charlie! Zoey! After awhile I felt like maybe if I shouted too we could find them and get on with it. (Only a sense of good theater manners kept me quiet.) The danger should feel real. It would be terrifying to be trapped in your own home with a total stranger hiding somewhere in there with you, consequence-free violence and certain death awaiting you just outside your own front door. But the whole thing feels so ephemeral, a clearly ridiculous concept embraced only as an inciting incident without thinking through the total implications of the central idea.

What kind of government would set up this purge? We hear fleeting references to “the new Founding Fathers” and see widespread acceptance of the purge. How did we get here? Whose purposes does this really serve? There’s all kind of intriguing political allegory that could easily be found, but instead the whole thing grows muddled. Hawke grabbing increasingly more powerful weaponry to fend off the purging hooligans gathering outside feels like a stand-your-ground apologia, where armed good guys struggle against, well, armed bad guys, and no matter what anyone does, the cops won’t care come sunrise. Meanwhile, the us vs. them, haves vs. have-nots subtext that rapidly becomes simply text reads as a hyperbolic argument against total deregulation. This is nothing more than a dimly lit, repetitively dumb little thriller that fails to satisfy politically or on its own genre terms.