Dystopian Kings: THE LONG WALK and THE RUNNING MAN

When Stephen King first published The Long Walk and The Running Man in 1979 and 1982, respectively, they played as broad, heightened extrapolations of contemporary ills through classically satirical sci-fi pessimism. They’re stories about a callous American culture that sells its youth and its underclasses false hopes and delivers only violence. They’re stories about a society desensitized to cruelty and allergic to sincerity. They’re stories about a series of dead ends. It’s perhaps a sign of our increasingly dystopian present that as these stories return to us on the big screen in 2025 they seem a little less far-fetched. The movies preserve King’s sense of finely sliced pulp, with their origins in his shorter, more energetically nasty works under the pen name Richard Bachman. But they also cannily update their sense of doom. The former leans toward futility and despair. The latter gets a charge out of revolutionary violence. Both end up with endings that try to have it every which way, but they are totally earnest about the difficulty of exiting a social structure when every system is calibrated to keep you down. 

The Long Walk is the drearier of the two. It’s set in a desolated American landscape that looks grey and brown and dingy as far as the eye can see. A group of young men are called up to participate in the eponymous game. It’s a yearly contest done for propagandistic purposes. A grizzled military man (Mark Hamill) who carries about him a parody of tough masculinity barks out the rules. They’ll walk at a 3 mile per hour pace across the country. The last person walking wins. The others will die, shot in the head for the crime of pausing, or slowing, and giving up. If the idea of an annual death march sounds like a pulp fiction extrapolation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or an embryonic form of the themes that’d later come into fuller flower in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games, you’re on the right track. That this film comes from director Francis Lawrence, best known for adapting Collins’ series in several excellent dystopian thrillers, completes the comparison. This movie has none of that franchise’s impulses toward the epic or to revolution. Instead it’s a deliberate trudge, as an ensemble of young male actors (with such likable leads as Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, looking for all the world like a pair of sad-eyed, round-faced puppies) is ruthlessly winnowed down to a tragic final few. Because they’ve come to share some camaraderie with each other, it’s all the more gripping and gutting when they, and we, know all but one will lie dead in the street before the credits roll. It’s a look at the dark heart of a society’s anesthetizing fear of violence. In its original context it’s a clear Vietnam War allegory. Now it hooks into free-floating anxieties about state power and our willingness to give ourselves up into the gears of the machine in fleeting hope for a better life. It’s a bloody bummer. 

More vibrant pop art action thrills are to be found in Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man. Even the added participle in the title ought to signal the speed it has over the Walk. This one finds a bustling, glowingly dirty futuristic America that’s lost the fight against oligarchic takeover. Here the government and media conglomerates are basically joined in one corporate state. A permanent underclass looks toward exploitative game shows as the only way out, whether as mind-numbing entertainment or as a shot at fluke riches. The same basic premise made for a thuddingly obvious Schwarzenegger picture in the 80s. This new picture finds Glen Powell’s charms as a sly lunk giving the proceedings a more empathetic and energetic tone, a lightness of touch despite its grinning manipulations and toothsome media satire. He plays a desperate unemployed father with a sick child. Against his wife’s wishes, he tries out to be a contestant on any show and ends up sorted into The Running Man, a contest in which he must survive thirty days on the run from the show’s paramilitary hunters and the general public, too. Snarling producer Josh Brolin and slimy host Colman Domingo hype up the propaganda, hoping to get the audience at home hating Powell by smearing him as a criminal. But his runaway tour of action sequences through the backstreets and backwoods of New England finds eccentric helpers every step of the way, from a black market tech guy (William H. Macy) to a conspiracy theorist (Michael Cera) to an extremely reluctant hostage (Emilia Jones). The have-nots love to assist him in running; it’s the snitching haves he needs to watch out for. Wright doesn’t overwhelm the movie with his usual rhythmic editing and snappy transitions, nor does he push the pedal to the metal on his verbal cleverness or pounding pop soundtracks, a la his Shaun of the Dead or Baby Driver. Instead, that’s just a light pulse of personality in a totally proficient piece of genre craftsmanship that’s a little zippier and brainer than it needs to be, popping with color and movement and a cheeky sense of punk revolt. It doesn’t quite know how to get out of its crass, exploitative cultural mess of social issues with a satisfactory conclusion, but then again, we don’t either. 

To Kill a Mockingjay: THE HUNGER GAMES: BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES

If you needed a reminder that The Hunger Games remains a bracing and bleak blockbuster series with sharp-angled political ideas, here’s a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, to make its dystopian metaphors resonate anew. It takes us back to the world of Panem—a future United States where the gaudy one-percenters in the Capitol rule the rest of the country’s districts through intimidation. The centerpiece of their plan is the regular Hunger Games competitions wherein tributes chosen randomly from the youth of each district are forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat broadcast propagandistically, reality TV style. This new movie, once again based on a Suzanne Collins’ novel, is set in the early days of the Games, when their evil rules and cruel complications are still being codified. Where the later movies are vast sci-fi spectacles with high-tech arenas and a powerful undercurrent of rebellion fomenting in the districts, this one takes place in the shattered aftermath of a war. Freedoms have only recently been curtailed for the masses, and, despite their overwhelming victory, the wealthy capitol citizens still feel a poisoned, righteous anger at the violence incurred by the recently beaten-down people in the heavily-policed cities, open-air prisons effectively, that have become the tightly controlled and patrolled districts. This positioning relative to the original series of films gives the proceedings a sick, pit-in-the-stomach feeling of an inevitable slide into authoritarianism that won’t be substantially confronted for a few generations.

Making matters more morally complicated: the protagonist is an 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), who will grow up to be a central villain in the original stories. We meet him as an impoverished, disadvantaged capitol boy struggling to get a foothold in the elite of his society. To do so, he’s throws himself into a new job: mentoring a tribute in the year’s games. He’s quickly infatuated with his assigned player, a fetching, scrappy, singing underdog (Rachel Zegler), and the film’s tension is suffused with a stifled romantic tragedy. Will he cling to his sympathies for her, no matter how tinged with selfishness, and help her survive, or will he get lost in the dictates of the games as his only ticket to a wealthy life? The games here are simpler, harsher, more contained and personal for the players. Cruel gamemaster Viola Davis with an enormous frizzy grey wig, two different eye colors, and blood-red rubber gloves—she chews every line like it’s a bitter hard candy—just wants to put on a violent spectacle to keep the oppressed and oppressors alike hooked on the show. (The footage we see of the pre-game interviews looks like watching old American Idol clips on YouTube.) The school’s sharp-tongued, alcoholic dean (Peter Dinklage) semi-reluctantly serves up his rich students to guide the slaughter for a televised event (hosted by a perfectly smarmy Jason Schwartzman) for the first time. They represent a status Snow desperately wants, and though he has a close friend (Josh Andrés Rivera) who voices dissent about the morality of the games, we can see this flickering conflict in his conscience slowly ice over in his eyes. In his plight, we see how the institutions of fascism encourage a steady erasure of empathy. The cruelty is the point.

Returning director Francis Lawrence frames this in a familiar style, fitting the series’ usual slick imagination and populist Hollywood aesthetics. It’s gripping, exciting, propulsive stuff, but done with a slower melancholic sense of creeping despair. The prequel status runs the imagery back, though, trading the high-tech future metropolis of the earlier films for a more mid-century look—contrasting a bluegrass folksiness of the districts with a palatial dilapidated art deco decadence in the hyper-capitalist capitol. As the film stretches on, it starts to feel like a darkly doomed romantic epic, with scenes in backrooms and clandestine meetings, especially once out in the wilds of the rural hideaways, that start to gather shades of World War II resistance dramas and grey Soviet thrillers, a gnarled sense of a character study ground down in the inevitable march of historical forces beyond any one’s control. These figures are caught up in systems larger than themselves, in a world that takes their impulses to rebel, and to care, and turns it against them in service of the system itself. Betrayal and spectacle run the plot, and the world, in this dystopian vision that leaves hope a fragile, flickering flame that’ll wait decades to spark anew. We can see it in their eyes, and in the echoing screams resonating through the forest. Zegler sells the folkloric resistance pricking at the conscience of the capitol, while Blyth plays the creeping cruelty that threatens to thaw before growing all the colder. They both want the best, but fear, assume, the worst. Here’s a big-scale Hollywood entertainment about how difficult it is to stop an authoritarian noose already tightening. Would that we learn its lessons in time.

Grey Zone: THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 2

Hardly the victory march some will expect, I suspect The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 will surprise audiences unfamiliar with Suzanne Collins’ books with its glum, mournful approach. It’s a typical sci-fi dystopian setup involving an opulent fascistic regime controlling a population through violence and the common people rising up in rebellion. But what makes this concluding feature so potent and satisfying is the way it eschews easy moral binaries and the temptation to turn in a rousing finale of action and comeuppances. No, Mockingjay – Part 2 picks up where the previous feature left off, with the rebellious Districts of Panem preparing to invade the Capitol and depose evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and finds in the toil and terror of revolution only destruction and pain. It sits with our heroes and asks if their entire struggle was worth it. A quietly radical conclusion has us root for unrest and upheaval, and then explore the difficulties of putting a society back together, especially for those who blew it all up.

This is a series that’s gotten slightly better each time out, not because the overall quality has improved dramatically, but because it has complicated its character’s ideas and emotions. Now that we have all four films we can see the complete picture, a dim, cynical allegory with a glimmer of hope in the end. Our protagonist, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, fusing determination and uncertainty in one of her best performances), started as a pawn of the Capitol in their Hunger Games, a propaganda tool, gladiatorial combat to keep the masses intimidated and entertained. But, with her games partner, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), she managed to escape certain death in the arena, and in the process sparked a growing rebellion that soon conscripted her to be their symbol. How rare to see a hero who is confused about her role, who recognizes and bristles at her lack of control, and yet continues to struggle to do what’s right.

As Mockingjay – Part 2 begins, rebel leaders (Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman) allow Katniss to head to the front lines of the assault on the Capitol as part of a propaganda squad. With her old friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), a kind-but-tough commander (Mahershala Ali), and team of soldiers (including Sam Claflin and Natalie Dormer), their job is to follow behind the fighting, inspiring the troops, and scaring the Capitol citizens, with video reports. Unfortunately, Snow has ordered the Gamesmakers to spread traps throughout the city, turning a bombed-out urban setting – all grey pockmarked rubble and dirt – into an even more twisted Hunger Games. This is how the action proceeds, the team picking through a minefield of deadly contraptions while working their way to Snow, the man they want to assassinate to end the war, bringing a new, and hopefully better, government to Panem.

Screenwriters Peter Craig and Danny Strong smartly keep the focus on our characters, allowing most of the epic battle to take place off screen through suggestion. The violence we see isn’t the massive depersonalized clashes of CG armies. It’s up close, panicked, sweating, sudden. Horror movie mechanics are used to spring traps – like automatic weapons, oil slicks, and mindless sewer mutants – with jump scares jolting firefights and foot chases into action. Between flashes of chaos, director Francis Lawrence (who has capably, artfully helmed three of the four Hunger Games) uses stillness and quiet, as characters catch their breath, debate strategy, and let the traumatic events stop ringing in their ears, if only for a little while. There’s dread everywhere, not only in the probing close-ups, which capture every bit of fear and doubt, but in the sense that all this fighting may be futile.

This has always been a series that’s both action-oriented and deeply disturbed by violence. From the shaky-cam elisions of the first Games and the brutal executions of Catching Fire to the bruising civilian uprisings in the first Mockingjay (the series' high point), it’s a franchise the looks at bloodshed with great sadness, keenly aware of cycles of trauma, fear mongering, propaganda, and war. It treats even the enemy as people, this last film finding fleeing Capitol citizens and viewing them with compassion. What started as a satire of reality TV and conspicuous consumption has become a war zone, with refugees fleeing both rebel bombings and oppressive government retaliations. (Real world echoes are impactful and messy.) The violence of the Hunger Games becomes the violence of revolution. It’s a movie too engaged with its tragic elements to create action scenarios full of mindless villains to slaughter. Every kill is felt. The cast convincingly inhabits characters who are exhausted by the chaos, and throw themselves into it anyway.

Where will it stop? And if it does, how will Katniss ever feel normal again? Her nightmares are getting worse. Her sense of purpose is the only thing keeping her moving forward. But it’s hard to tell who has her best interests at heart – one old ally has been brainwashed; others may just as soon allow her to be martyred for their cause. Worse still is the question of whether what’s best for Katniss and what’s best for Panem are or can be one and the same. It doesn’t stop with defeating Snow. Revolution is hard enough. Filling the power vacuum that follows it will be harder. Here’s a movie actually interested in contemplating these tough questions, and in a slick, pop blockbuster package that’ll draw big crowds to see this four-part story wrapped up. It takes gut-wrenching twists, and allows time to slowly contemplate howls of sorrow and confusion. That it doesn’t find easy answers, and leaves an unsettled feeling lingering in a dénouement of tenuous hope, is to its credit.

Games Over: THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY-PART 1

With each installment, The Hunger Games series gets more complicated and more interesting. The latest, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, based on the first half of the last novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, finds Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) regrouping after a rebel cell sprung her from her second Hunger Games, a position she found herself in after inadvertently inspiring a revolution with her first win. In this film, she’s confused and distraught. Her friend and ally, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), is captured, a hostage of President Snow (Donald Sutherland) in the ostentatious Captiol. She’s hunkered in an underground bunker in the wilds of District 13, helping the rebels plan how best to use her popularity to galvanize the whole Panem country and foment open warfare against the tyrants who’ve oppressed them for so long.

Returning director Francis Lawrence, this time with a screenplay adapted by Peter Craig and Danny Strong, turns this dilemma into the stuff of potent political allegory. The series has grown increasingly ideologically fascinating, starting as a surface-level jab at class conflict and reality TV competitions and evolving into what is now a radicalized story of class warfare waged through propaganda battles, lopsided bombing campaigns, and surprise attacks. It’s a grab bag of geopolitical reference points, but the central image of downtrodden working class folks rising up against wealthy tyrants is a stirring one. This feature, which picks up right where the last left off and builds towards yet another cliffhanger, extends the conflicts’ emotional damage while gearing up for the grand finale to hit theaters this time next year. It plays upon our sympathies built up in previous installments and our understanding that there’s more to come.

The film devotes most of its runtime to Katniss struggling with what the movement needs her to be and the conflicted feelings roiling inside her. She never asked to be a leader. In the first film, she was a symbol for the Capitol. The second film found her a symbol for Panem. In both cases, she had no say in the matter. Now, the leaders of the burgeoning rebellion expect her, the Mockingjay symbol incarnate, to appear in their stirring propaganda campaign, smuggled over the airways into the tinderboxes that are the increasingly violently oppressed districts ready to explode. It’s a movie about how heroes are not just born to lead, but built and shaped for their movement’s needs. We’re introduced to a team of commando cameramen (lead by Natalie Dormer) intent on following Katniss into guerilla warfare, capturing great galvanizing images to broadcast. These dispatches look an awful lot like an ad campaign for a Hunger Games movie, so you know they’re effective.

As the rebellion gets ready to make their next step, Katniss talks with familiar returning characters. She sees a friend (Liam Hemsworth), a mentor (Woody Harrelson), her image consultant (Elizabeth Banks), her sister (Willow Shields), and fellow Games’ victors (Sam Claflin, Jeffrey Wright). They’re a collection of great character actors involved in scheming, debating, giving orders, and delivering speeches. Most poignant is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final roles as a canny political operative strategizing the rebellion’s next move. The rebel leader (Julianne Moore, sporting long grey hair) is a new addition, another forceful but sympathetic voice echoing in Katniss’ head.

This could all be static, marking time until the real action can ramp up for the presumably fiery climax of Mockingjay – Part 2. Indeed, it grows cramped and a little repetitive at times. (Tell me why Katniss needs to take a nearly identical tour of ruined District 12 twice?) And the emotional journeys the characters take are mostly minor adjustments that leave them better ready to launch into the next film. But with such great actors involved, especially Lawrence, Moore, and Hoffman, the political calculations of a growing rebellion feel meaningful. Most effectively, the filmmakers have an even greater sense of the world’s details. The spaces feel lived in and thought through. There’s a sense of weight and import to characters’ discussions, real meaning to the sporadic splashes of violence. It’s best when opening up the contained bunker dramas, showing us other parts of Panem carrying out strikes against the forces of Capitol-ism. In one moving scene, a folk song becomes a rallying cry in one of the more unblinking representations of uprising I’ve seen in recent years. There’s real impact to their decisions.

Perhaps we’ll eventually be better off thinking of Francis Lawrence’s three Hunger Games films as one three-part story instead of discreet units. For now, though, it’s fun to simply be back in an engaging world with smart ideas and some stirring action bouncing around a well-constructed blockbuster. I was pulled into the film’s space and enjoyed occupying it for a couple of hours, even if by the end I would’ve much rather watched another couple hours right then and there instead of having to wait a whole year to see it reach an actual conclusion. What’s most exciting about the story told here is the way the filmmakers – and Collins, in her books – are not afraid to change the dynamics, alter the scenario, and do things differently. Here, the games are over, the characters are on the run, with no hope of safety until they see things through to the end. And that’s where they leave us, eager to see where that end will be.

The Capitol Strikes Back: HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE

It’s always a pleasant surprise to see a sequel not only learn from the mistakes of its predecessor, but to move forward exploring the aftermath of its initial narrative. In the case of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire it is a modest improvement, but improvement nonetheless. I suppose when you make nearly $700 million dollars worldwide, you can afford an upgrade in the scale and believability of your special effects. But more than that, director Francis Lawrence, taking over for Gary Ross, brings a clarity of vision and the script – adapted this time by Simon Beaufoy and Michael DeBruyn – finds a leaner and tougher approach to plunging us into the tangle of potent sociopolitical allegory. The filmmakers have, of course, the novel by Suzanne Collins to work from, but the film’s sequel represents a step up in quality, something not represented in the books. I get the feeling that the ideal director for this material would be the violent satiric Paul Verhoeven of Robocop or Starship Troopers, but Lawrence, having directed Constantine and I am Legend, is no stranger to character based spectacle. He gets the details and surface excitement right and the adaptation keeps character and politics balanced.

When we last saw The Hunger Games, an annual children’s fight-to-the-death put on by the Capitol to keep the 12 Districts of dystopian future nation Panem in line, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) became unprecedented double-victors. They managed to finagle a fake love story for the Capitol’s cameras that caused a rule change when the gamemaster balked at televising the Games’ first double suicide conclusion. Catching Fire picks up as Katniss and Peeta are sent on a victory tour in advance of the next year’s Games, a tour that ignites tremors of rebellion throughout the country. News of the Capitol’s loosening grasp, as represented by these two kids who beat the system, only brings down the violence of the state all the harder. Because Lawrence (the director, not the star, no relation) holds the camera steady as the screenplay allows the film to let the mournful anguished aftermath of the first to linger, it’s impactful in its stillness.

Transparently evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland) feels so threatened by these victors, he commissions a new gamemaster (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to devise a set of rules for the upcoming Hunger Games that’ll leave the Districts shaking and complacent with fear once again. These two actors spend their screen time chewing over every evil growl as they scheme a way to eliminate Katniss from the situation. So it’s back to the arena again, only this time the tributes competing are not kids, but former champions, some still young, like our heroes, others elderly, unfairly thrust back into the battle. Katniss and Peeta, plagued by guilt and post-traumatic stress dreams, are forced to fight once more. But now the Captiol’s men behind the curtain seem determined to kill them all. The arena – with its man-eating monkeys, poison fog, and other disasters that make for good CGI spectacle – is as deadly as the competitors, who feel betrayed by the society that’s coddled them in the years since their victories. It’s a volatile situation, vibrantly dramatized in a sequel that’s unafraid to complicate its premise and slowly radicalize its characters.

The first film was about a girl learning to game an unfair system to survive. The sequel is a film about how she responds to finding herself an accidental symbol of burgeoning revolt. She agrees with the ideas she has come to represent, but can’t figure out how to best position herself (if at all) as the savior the people crave. Lawrence (the star, not the director, no relation) lets us see her fear and resolve as she feels her way towards becoming the rebellion she represents. She doesn’t want to hurt those she loves, like her sister (Willow Shields) and best friend (Liam Hemsworth), but as the Capitol conspires to restrict her choices, she’s left with only her own resilience to guide her as she must decide who to trust.

Woody Harrelson, as a drunken mentor, Elizabeth Banks, as a flibbertigibbet slowly growing a conscience, Lenny Kravitz, as a charitable designer, and Stanley Tucci, as a teeth-flashing talk show host, reprise their roles. New to the scene are Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer as techie middle-aged tributes, Sam Clafin, as a handsome young tribute who may be an ally, and Jena Malone as an entirely fearless tribute furious about her situation and ready to tear down the Capitol on live broadcast if possible. It’s a whole lot of character and situation storming about the film, but because the world of Panem has ever so slightly grown more complicated it can more than accommodate the additional interest.

It becomes, at times, a fairly moving picture of resistance and defiance in the face of sickly opulent fascism that’s willing to put the underclasses to work and, when they won’t, put them down. The metaphor of sociopolitical traps – have-nots violently encouraged to submit to the haves – is potent, as is its mass mindless entertainment as purposeful distraction of serious injustice. Like its predecessor, Catching Fire largely separates its ideas and its action, forcing the audience to think and feel through an hour of politics and satire sitting tantalizingly on the surface, before plunging into crisp, relentless action and danger in the back half. The bifurcation works, loading up the back half with busy thrills after slowly pulling tension out of scenes in which some of our finest character actors in sometimes silly costumes say serious and goofy things surrounded by spare sci-fi future chic.

It’s all anchored so strongly in Katniss, her journey, and her determination that it doesn’t get lost in the precision campiness of the Capitol, the constant – and coherently photographed – action of the Games or the sometimes misshapen narrative. For in true middle-chapter franchise fashion, Catching Fire, for all its melodrama and movement, doesn’t begin or conclude. It starts in the aftermath of the first and ends by excitingly trumpeting into a cliffhanger teasing more story to come. But it has enough surprises along the way that it doesn’t feel like a cheat so much as the exciting promise of escalation to come. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS

Water for Elephants is based on a bestselling novel by Sara Gruen that has been recommended to me on a handful of occasions. For all I know, it’s a good read. The movie adaptation scripted by Richard LaGravenese, however, is a total snooze. I felt myself leaning closer to the screen, trying desperately to connect with the movie and yet enjoyment stayed frustratingly out of reach. The story seemed to be of interest but the telling muddles it.

It’s an awfully pretty movie, though, featuring gorgeous cinematography from Rodrigo Prieto who has also contributed his skills to such other (better) pretty features as 25th Hour, Brokeback Mountain, and Broken Embraces. It’s also a fairly charming throwback, a circus picture, or to put it even more accurately, a run-away-and-join-the-circus picture. To get away with this narrative, the story is set in the Great Depression. Star Robert Pattinson plays a young man who drops out of college due to tragic circumstances within his family and hops the rails, ending up on a train carrying a circus from town to town.

This particular circus is struggling, but luckily Pattinson has just the skills necessary to help them out. He didn’t drop out of just any college; he dropped out of a veterinary program. This endears him to the abusive owner and ringmaster (the great Christoph Waltz) who hires him to take care of the menagerie of animals, including a difficult new acquisition in the form of an aging elephant. The trick rider in the circus is the owner’s younger wife (Reese Witherspoon), who grows to love the elephant almost as much as she does its new caretaker.

I thought this kind of Hollywood filmmaking had gone extinct after it peaked somewhere between Disney’s 1941 Dumbo and DeMille’s 1952 Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth. This new film is a handsomely mounted romance set against the danger and spectacle of an equally extinct form of showbiz. They just don’t make the circus like they used to, which was dangerous and a bit of a rip-off. They just don’t make these kinds of movies anymore, either. I guess that Hollywood has forgotten how. Or more accurately, this specific collection of talent can’t make it work this time.

The stiff script buries its leads under its underwhelming leadenness. Pattinson, who has been stuck in the Twilight series, has yet to prove his acting chops and is given no help here. Witherspoon, without her typical bubbly charm, barely registers. Waltz, Hans Landa himself, is quite good but muted as the film’s source of menace. There’s a tepid love triangle that develops between the three of them, but it barely registers. It’s a plot that’s acted out rather than felt.

The blame here would have to fall to director Francis Lawrence. He can stage a good-looking film but he doesn’t do anything to elevate the script he’s given and doesn’t do much to help his cast navigate it. The film’s a bit of a departure for him, though, with his previous feature being the good 2007 Will-Smith-is-the-last-man-on-Earth thriller I Am Legend. In that case, Lawrence used a simple, gripping plot, created a nice tone and had basically one actor to work with. Here he has a larger cast and a duller script. It’s a film of pictures and moments rather than momentum and emotion. It wants to be a three-ring middlebrow melodrama but I could barely muster up one ring’s worth of interest.