Self-Aware: BOSS LEVEL and KEEP AN EYE OUT

Boss Level is only the third film in ten years from Joe Carnahan. As more a fan of his work than not, it’s frustrating that, of all his potential major projects that don’t get off the ground, this is his second in a row that’s basically tossed off and ignored. His last film, the loopy, uneven one-crazy-night crime comedy Stretch, was unceremoniously dumped direct to DVD just before its supposed theatrical bow all the way back in 2014. This new one — yet another Groundhog Day riff, this one with assassins at its core — has slipped onto Hulu with a shrug. Sure, it doesn’t work as well as his grimy Detroit cop thriller Narc or steely survival thriller The Grey does. It’s not even quite up to his cartoony guns-blazing action extravaganzas The A-Team or Smokin’ Aces. But there are car chases and sword fights that prove he still has a terrific sense of pace and space, cooking up overheated action in simple broad strokes across a wide frame. Yet the final balance is underwritten and too snarkily exaggerated to really land. It stars dependable man of action Frank Grillo as a ripped guy who finds himself in a time loop wherein he’s murdered by assassins. So many assassins. (It’s an eccentric ensemble which somehow accommodates both Michelle Yeoh and Rob Gronkowski.) Our lead starts his day with a machete swung toward his bed. If he survives, a machine gun tears up his apartment. If he survives that, he might be gunned down in the street or decapitated on an escalator. You get the idea. Eventually, he realizes it has something to do with his ex (Naomi Watts) and her dastardly boss (Mel Gibson). There’s also a subplot involving a moppet (Grillo’s actual son) who needs a positive male role model in his life. Turns out, the real Boss Level…is fatherhood. So the movie is stuck in two modes, outrageous flippant jokey gory violence on the one hand, sweet stuff about reconnection and growth on the other. The movie is far too bloody for the sentimentality, and far too sentimental for all the blood. It has flashes of teasing genre fun, but trudging through a wobbly smirking tone to get there is a bit much to ask.

Speaking of directors with careers I’m puzzling over: idiosyncratic French auteur Quentin Dupieux. He’s an original for sure. Read about one of his movies and you know it’ll be odd. The experience of watching one usually has identical pleasures to reading the log line. You hear Rubber is a bone-dry slasher satire about a sentient tire that rolls around exploding human’s heads. Watching the movie back in 2010 or so, the main thought I had was: yep, that sure is what this is. Ditto his most recent, Deerskin, a movie about a man who becomes a serial killer at the behest of his new jacket. Yep. That sure is what that is. I like his work in theory, but in practice it wears a little thin on my patience. Just now arriving on our shores in virtual cinemas is the most consistent fun I’ve had with his work: his 2018 film Keep an Eye Out. It’s a loony Möbius strip of a comedy set almost entirely in a police department office where a blustery detective (Benoît Poelvoorde) is taking a statement from a man (Grégoire Ludig) who found a corpse. The cop pecks out the statements on a clattering typewriter, casually smokes, and stalks the room, at least when he doesn’t step out for a family thing for a few minutes. The other officer in the room is a nice one-eyed dope. (Hence the double duty title, ha.) The film is one long digression, squeaking out to feature length, as an unspoken tension (the result of an early splash of slapstick violence imperfectly stowed away) simmers softly under flat-faced absurd roundabouts of dialogue. The pedantic detective keeps falling down rabbit holes of irrelevant questions and details as the suspect’s exceedingly boring story slowly develops. Flashbacks reenact the night in question, but even the characters in these past moments get tired of the immediate details and start having conversations bouncing off other elements of the film’s narrative. (We’re in a flashback, a man explains to a woman he won’t meet until later, which is our earlier.) Dupieux plays it straight, which makes it all the funnier as the casual silliness accumulates. As the spare plotting and simple staging backs itself into a narrative corner, the movie pulls back the curtain in a meta flourish that pulls the whole thing together in a most pleasingly nonsense way. The experience productively riffs on and extends from Dupieux’s interest in fictions and stories within stories and the exchange, the unspoken agreement, between a storyteller and an audience. And it’s just plain funny on a line by line basis, too. Take an early moment: when the suspect is asked how he could tell he saw a dead body if he’d never seen one before, he responds, he’s seen live bodies before, so he just compared.

Killer Holiday: THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR

The Purge: Election Year is further proof there’s little scarier than rich white people who are afraid they’ll have to share a modicum of wealth and respect with others. It’s the third in a series of movies about an alternate universe America where one day a year is set aside as Purge Day, a twisted national holiday celebrated with 12 hours of lawlessness. “All crime,” the official warning blares, “will be legal, including murder.” It’s always amusing to hear that last clause, the system openly encouraging murder as the one crime to prioritize. As this is a horror franchise, that’s only natural, but couldn’t there be an interesting Purge movie made out of people taking advantage of the time to get in some tax fraud or indecent exposure? Anyway, this entry is once again a murder-fest with good people struggling to survive the night. There’s not much new brought to the concept, just a reiteration that doubles down on its political subtext.

The Purge is a great concept. The first movie disappointingly steered away from its implications to become a small-scale siege picture, but the second was a tense gory actioner with sympathetic characters caught in the crossfire and a smart sense of the night’s disproportionate effects on women, minorities, and the poor. Election Year takes that political thread and runs with it. An idealistic senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) is running for president on the promise of eliminating The Purge. The polls are close, so a cabal of powerful white guys – a conference table full of religious fundamentalists, corporate cronies, and crooked politicians – decides to take advantage of the upcoming holiday to eliminate this threat to their way of life. You see, they like the annual opportunity for consequence-free murder, especially as a means of consolidating their power and of population control. The senator’s head of security (Frank Grillo) catches wind of this just in time and narrowly escapes with the candidate out into the dangerous Purge Night.

It’d be hard to miss the message, with the wealthy backroom power brokers calling a team of mercenaries, white supremacists with Confederate flag patches and Swastika tattoos, after their target, and brave working class folks of all races rising up to protect her. A tough shop-owner (Mykelti Williamson), his loyal employee (Joseph Julian Soria), and their capable vigilante friend (Betty Gabriel) are protecting their neighborhood from looters and killers when they cross paths with the candidate and her rescuer. They team up to keep her shielded, and to track down a safe zone where they can rest. This is obviously easier said then done as they encounter around every corner murdering maniacs emboldened by the night’s evil permissive atmosphere. Memorable threats include affluent foreigners on murder tourism trips to “act like Americans” for the night and a group of teen girls who roll up in a car covered in ropes of white Christmas lights, Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” blaring from the stereo.

This sounds like some sick fun, and it sometimes is, but returning writer-director James DeMonaco cobbles together the setpieces with an unsteady camera, chaos editing, and a lack of cleverness. There’s little build in suspense or escalating action. Even its best moments are simply retreads of what’s worked before. Rather than improving on its predecessors or adding to the lore, it’s just more of the same. This time it’s taking the political subtext and, perhaps emboldened by its election year setting (and release), makes it simply text. Characters stand around discussing politics, making the implied points of other Purges right out loud without deepening or complicating them. If it feels like diminishing returns, it’s because the movie’s content to remake and repeat images and ideas while spelling out its point of view in broad, obvious terms. It’s an acid joke when the senator blames the night’s continued existence on it lining the pockets of the NRA and insurance companies. And the movie doesn’t play coy about the darkness of prejudice and mayhem in the populace that can be ignited by the right demagogue. But that’s also where the sloppiness of its construction starts to weigh on its moralizing.

It’s a movie ostensibly about how violence is never the answer, even ending on a triumphant note of one character convincing another that the ballot box is where the villains’ ultimate defeat will be. But this is also a movie that gets its reason for being out of the splatter moments. It’s hard to preach nonviolence mere minutes after a mass shooting is supposed to be read as some sort of catharsis. Is it seriously saying the only thing that can stop a bad Purge is a good Purge? And it’s hard to take its desire for interracial cooperation seriously when it includes several groups of Purging inner city youths coded as packs, shot in silhouette, speaking in exaggerated slang. Even our heroes get some cringe-worthy lines like, “Never sneak up on a black guy on Purge Night!” It leaves a bad taste, especially because it feels so inadvertent, an outgrowth of its well-intentioned hot-button emphasis mixed with flat dialogue and thin characterizations. It’s not fun or provocative, just mental pollution. At least the core concept of the series is strong enough and adaptable enough to survive a misfire like this one.

Devils' Night: THE PURGE: ANARCHY

The Purge was a dumb movie, mostly for the way it took an ingeniously preposterous premise and made it a total bore. It imagined a near-future America where crime rates are low because of an annual “Purge Night” in which all crime is legal. (“Including murder,” the warnings hilariously remind.) With such a provocative smartly stupid premise, it was a shame that the movie became a dim home invasion thriller that thoroughly squandered an idea so gloriously pulpy. At least the new sequel, The Purge: Anarchy, has the wherewithal to explore its concept in some livewire ways, breaking out of its predecessor’s single-location stinginess to watch a Purge Night unfold across an entire city. This movie colors in details of The Purge, sketching a picture of a self-righteously judgmental society glorifying the rich, ignoring the poor, and worshiping at the twin altars of greed and guns. (Sound familiar?) The first Purge was a bungled sociological thought experiment, but the second doubles down on its social commentary, bluntly hammering out bloody metaphors. The execution is still fairly junky, but it steps past the inherent silliness of its premise and finds some timely resonances.

Returning writer-director James DeMonaco’s script finds a handful of disparate characters caught outside when Purge Night begins. There’s a struggling waitress (Carmen Ejogo) and her teenage daughter (Zoë Soul) who are forced out of their apartment in the projects. There’s a young married couple (Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez) whose car breaks down, leaving them stranded. Those four are sympathetic audience surrogates who were planning on hunkering down and waiting out the night peacefully. But then there’s a man (Frank Grillo, with perfect hoarse voice and steely determination) who strapped on his bulletproof vest, loaded his guns, and drove out into the night with the specific purpose of murdering one individual. Hey, why not get a revenge killing out of the way while it’s legal, right? His conscience gets the better of him and he ends up helping our stuck characters. They’re not the most complex of characters, but the simplicity of their goals – to stay alive – carries them through.

We cross the city with a feeling of danger and distress, the cheap dark digital cinematography blearily suggesting an ominous sense of citywide unrest. We see how robbery and rape is just as likely as murder, with packs of men (no women) swaggering around with bats, machetes, machine guns, flamethrowers, and dogs, eager to partake in their right to a night of mayhem. Some ride motorcycles, others drive big white murder vans, while still others roll up firing automatic weapons out of the backs of modified semis. Those Purging wear spooky masks, move menacingly, and perpetuate a feeling of frayed societal bonds at every step. We hear gunfire in the distance. It feels like an unusually intimidating Halloween party crossed with a riot. The chaos implied around every corner as our protagonists try to avoid running afoul of these nasty gangs is claustrophobic, but the variety of dangers and locations serves the concept far better than hunkering down in one place.

What works best about the film is the way it tightens the tension around its characters, even as it works to expand upon the world of The Purge. It uses the opportunity to make a biting critique of our own society’s bloodlust and staggering inequality by taking it to extreme and absurd ends. We get glimpses of a justifiably angry viral video star (Michael K. Williams) agitating for an end to The Purge, arguing that it disproportionately impacts the poorest in society. Late in the film we see a gaggle of rich white folks having themselves a black-tie dinner party, the entertainment being the poor people they drag in off the street and murder.

Although Anarchy is better at activating the promise of its premise, the execution is still wildly inconsistent. The dialogue is flat and clunky, as if it has been awkwardly translated, and conversations have a tendency to go sideways and circular, returning to the same ground over and over. It’s not fun to look at most of the time. It’s dimly shot and indifferently framed. The staging is choppy, edited around jolts without much sense of rhythm or style. Gunfire grows repetitive as stalking and hiding sequences grow rote. You flee from one band of attackers, you’ve fled from them all. A tighter script and direction that can more adeptly get off on the insanity while still condemning it (think prime Verhoeven) would be all this series needs to really satisfy. Maybe the third time will be the charm?

And yet, despite all of my reservations, The Purge: Anarchy works on a fundamental sloppy downbeat B-movie level. The film engages with its concept far more successfully than it engaged me. But the plot is simplicity itself – the characters just want to survive the night – moving quickly and confidently. It has a couple of big ideas, lots of bloodshed, and a concept that’s some kind of dumb genius. The Purge itself makes little sense in theory or in practice, but as a brutal reflection of our modern ills, it resonates.

Boys in Blue: END OF WATCH

In many ways a fairly standard cop movie, End of Watch follows two Los Angeles policemen through harrowing shifts in South Central, cutting glimpses into their personal lives between the episodic job-centric moments. That’s not a whole lot more than what you’d get on, say, an episode of the far-too-little-seen TNT show Southland, but this film differentiates itself by being violent and aesthetically muddy. It starts with the pretense that what we’re seeing is shot on consumer-grade video by the two men as part of one’s night school project. That’s dropped soon enough, though, hopping into conventional wobbly-cam style that still jumps into subjective shaking footage from time to time. The weaving, spinning camerawork charges right into every dangerous situation, moments that are filled with dread as sudden bloody messes can crop up around every corner.

Written and directed by David Ayer (he wrote Antoine Fuqua’s electrifying cop thriller Training Day, for which Denzel Washington won an Oscar), this film sticks to a ground level point of view. It’s narrow, filled with characters that are barely more than cliché on the page, but this visceral B-movie burrows into the chemistry between the two leads in a satisfyingly casual way. It’s convincing and occasionally riveting. The two cops at the center of it all are played with nice commitment from Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, who joke with each other commiserate about women, and tense up heading off on a new call. Ayer’s writing and the actor’s total ease in their roles leads to an absorbing sense of what it must be like to go to work each day not knowing if you’ll have a dull day of office hijinks and hanging out with a friend or if you’ll be in a situation where you’ll be wondering about the next horrible thing you’ll be witnessing.

It all seems scary and tense to me, but as two cops driving every day through rough neighborhoods, they’re kind of used to it. Though there are drive-by shootings, missing kids, fires, murders, and cops and criminals alike jostling for turf, this is essentially a hang out movie. We follow Gyllenhaal and Peña as they drive around, the camera sitting on the dashboard, pointing back at the two of them. They talk and joke and drive, waiting for the next call to action. They’re funny without being overwritten, flawed in relatable, human ways without becoming fascist monsters, crooked cops, or overzealous frat boy policemen. They’re just two ambitious, but unhurried, guys trying to do their jobs. They have fun being with each other, but they take their jobs seriously.

When they’re not working, we see their personal lives. Gyllenhaal’s sweet on his latest girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) while Peña and his wife (Natalie Martinez) are getting ready for the birth of their first child. There’s an instantly sympathetic portrait of duty and matter-of-fact romance in these scenes, a sense that these men are as committed to their relationships at home as they are to their relationships on the job. In addition to strong performances from the leads and their significant others, the film is much benefited by a supporting cast of co-workers (Frank Grillo, America Ferrera, David Harbour, and Cody Horn among them) that can quickly sketch in professionalism and world-weary banter that helps makes this world feel grounded. There’s a sense of reality to the way these characters behave and interact for which all the handheld camerawork in the world can’t substitute.

Unfortunately, Ayer stumbles on his way to a conclusion. Though entertaining and involving throughout, the episodic nature with discrete, unrelated moment police business, eschews a natural endpoint. Creating one can’t help but feel forced. Ayer has threaded throughout the picture a severely malnourished parallel story about dehumanized gang members who scowl and rant in Spanglish and glower at authority. Unlike the kindness with which the leads are drawn and the sympathy with which the somewhat-clichéd supporting characters are fleshed out, these criminals are cut-and-dried bad to the bone. It makes for a sense of dread that imbues the film’s final moments with white-knuckle sensation, but the visceral moment feels a little empty. It’s the emptiness of a promising movie ending in a conventional shootout.

That’s indicative of the whole experience, though. Ayer has created a film content to do routine things competently rather than stake out new territory of its own, serving up cop movie cliché with slight shadings through tense vignettes and capable acting. The film is often effective and affecting despite considerable drawbacks. It’s more emotion and sensation than pure narrative (which has a distinct feeling of been-there-done-that about it) and either way it’s grubbily told, but it’s narrow, small-scale approach and focused performances keep it from falling apart too much.

Wild vs. Man: THE GREY

The Grey is an icily tense survival story about a plane full of Alaskan oil riggers that crash-lands in the middle of a wintry forest populated by some ferociously territorial wolves. It’s a grim story stripped down to its essential elements, with characters drawn in brisk, macho shorthand. At the center of it all is a man who we first see the night before takeoff shuffling around the camp. We learn that his job is to shoot wolves if they come near the other workers. But that’s not what he’s using his gun for this night. He places the barrel in his mouth and closes his eyes. He can’t go through with it. When the plane goes down, he’s the one with the gruff no-nonsense, clear-headed thinking. The small group that has survived the crash unknowingly put their lives in the hands of a suicidal man.

But who wouldn’t want to follow this man, so tall and gravely serious? He’s Liam Neeson, enjoying his career resurgence on the heels of successful action outings like the 2009 film Taken in which he punched his way through Paris to find his kidnapped daughter. His steely gaze and easy gravity are wholly convincing. Yet in The Grey, around a campfire one night, Neeson admonishes a fellow survivor (Frank Grillo) for his grating bravado, asking instead for a dropping of pretense and an embrace of some honest fear. “I’m scared,” Neeson says. That’s not exactly the Neeson we’re used to, the confident man of action. Here he doesn’t let his doubt show – he always seems to know exactly what they should attempt next – but his fear comes through with a cold, honest blast of survivalist pessimism.

Like Neeson subtly subverting his persona of recent years in this performance, writer-director Joe Carnahan sets out to subvert expectations with this film. His two most recent films were colorful and self-conscious efforts: Smokin’ Aces, a grungy, gory mock-Tarantino actioner, and The A-Team, a colorful 80’s action throwback. Those were films that were to a large extent knowingly goofy. The Grey is anything but. It’s knowingly serious with life-and-death stakes played grimly and downbeat. (It’s like Carnahan’s best film, 2002’s Narc in that way). It’s a destabilizing film that uses genre conventions only to slowly erode them out from underneath the characters.

The steady rock of a man at the center of the film is afraid, and so too are those around him. There is no comfort to be found here. The other men are at varying levels of acceptance of their situation. One (Dallas Roberts) wants to say some words for the deceased. Another (Joe Anderson) just wants to get another chance to find a nice girl. Yet another (Dermot Mulroney) slowly realizes he may not be made of the same survivalist stock as the others. And yet they all soon come face to face with their limitations. The forces of nature are coming to take them out far faster than hypothetical rescuers could come to take them to safety.

It all takes place in a convincingly dangerous setting, the starkly beautiful winter fields and forests covered in a pristine snow that is soon to be sullied by burns and blood. The soundtrack is filled with the sounds of whipping wind and howling plumes of stinging snow mixing with the puffing clouds of ice-cold breath, overlapping with shouted dialogue. The theater was nice and warm, but I felt a chill. Nature dominates the feel of the film, thwarting the characters at every turn. And there are, of course, those wolves. Neeson hypothesizes that the plane crashed into the middle of the wolves’ territory. The night air is filled with the sounds of howling wolves, their snarls drawing closer until the faint glow of their eyes reflected in the campfire proves to be too late a warning.

This is an aggressively downbeat film that moves forward with a deadly efficient sparseness. At times it fleetingly seemed to me to be nothing less than the filmmaking equivalent of Hemingway’s prose, so clean and uncomplicated, so interested in the ways man is defined, at least in part, by his relationship to the wilderness. This unexpectedly artful film is a shock of icy pop nihilism with a bunch of tough guys (defined in the film’s opening as marginalized members of society) reduced to sitting around contemplating death. No matter what they do, they just can’t seem to improve their situation. These men take plenty of actions in the film, planning and scheming and desperately trying to find new ways to escape wolf territory and find civilization, but the central feeling of a dangerous lack of progress, the creeping sense of the overwhelming inevitability of death, is potent.