Two for the Road: THE HUNT and BLOODSHOT

With movie theaters closed in the face of a global pandemic, we are about to have a radical transformation of moviegoing for the next few months (at least). Us frequent moviegoers will feel the brunt of it in our habits. Personally speaking, I haven’t gone more than a week without seeing something in a movie theater since George W. Bush was president. This will be quite an adjustment for us all, with only VOD titles and whatever the streaming services upload for our amusement passing for current cinema. Multiplex employees will hopefully continue to get paid by the big chains (deepest shame for those companies that don’t), and if you can buy a gift card or membership to a local independent or nonprofit theater now, that’d be a good investment in making sure they stay around. These are strange times, and they ask much of us. Movies are the least of our worries, but as an already weakened (through competing forms, corporate consolidation, eroding interest, and streaming malaise) aspect of our culture, it’s natural to wonder about their long term viability in the face of all this disruption.

I, for one, will find some small solace in the ability to finally catch up on the unwatched discs my collecting habit has piled up over the years. I’ve already dug into the stacks for some long runtimes I’ve been putting off. Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981) — a finely textured cop drama that accrues more than it unfolds — and Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) and Nixon (1995) — divergent and yet complementary fevered midcentury epics, and reason enough to think the name Robert Richardson is one of those talents basically synonymous with cinema — have been recent highlights. Nonetheless, whenever movie theaters open up again, it’ll feel so good to see that big screen light up with a new movie. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. Tears of joy will follow, no doubt. Still, I saw a few movies last week before everything fell apart to social distancing and self-quarantine and working the day job from home. Given the state of world affairs, and the entertainment business, I’ll probably be among the small number who can actually claim to have seen these movies in their original release. Small bragging rights, to be sure.

One was the cursed release of The Hunt, a controversial Blumhouse horror effort that got its initial release scuttled by political forces last September. You see, the premise is that rich liberals have kidnapped a handful of conspiratorial red state folks to hunt them for sport. Some conservatives, the sort who love to play dumb and aggrieved to whip up gullible audience’s anger, claimed the movie was against them, irresponsible, and a totally inappropriate concept. This leaves aside, of course, the fact that the trailers and advertising clearly set up a film in which the hunters were the obvious villains and the heroes the plucky underdogs being hunted. If anything, the voices calling for its removal — up to the highest, dumbest levels of politics — would like this movie, if only because they’d misunderstand it the other way. Not that it’d be entirely their fault. No, director Craig Zobel (of the superior upsetting Compliance) and co-writers Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse (the showrunner and a writer on HBO’s brilliant, sociopolitically sharp Watchmen sequel) have made a movie so sloppily both-sides that it condemns ultimately only the discourse. It asks, aren’t we all angry these days? And never stops to interrogate why. Maybe the unactualized movie about the divide in this country being only superficially between right and left when it’s really between rich and poor that lingers unexamined behind this premise would’ve been better for being clearly stated. Instead we have heads blown off and limbs torn away — sometimes in jokey manners — for maximum splatter impact, and a fine lead performance from Betty Gilpin (Glow) as a Deep South wage slave who — surprise! — is an educated woman capable of taking on the big bad (Hilary Swank). There’s that sort of wishy-washy condescension all over the picture. Some of the action is passably done, but when your ostensible social commentary ends up only saying that people are too mean on Twitter — which, yes, but also, that’s a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem itself — then you need to go back for another rewrite. Instead of being actually provocative, it’s a shallow incitement, and as such, merely boring.

Better is Bloodshot, a dopey small-scale superhero movie of the kind you might’ve seen in the late 90s, maybe catching it between Spawn and Blade. It’s refreshingly throwback in its appeal in that way, proud of its few good visual tricks while mostly playing it safe as a modest mid-sized star vehicle for a man of rumbling stoic charisma. Based on a character from Valiant Comics (one of the competitors to the Big Two of Marvel and DC that arose in the peak comic book era three decades back), it follows a soldier (Vin Diesel) who is killed, then resurrected by a biotech startup. The head of the company (Guy Pearce), a doctor and inventor, is proud to move beyond artificial limbs into this new feat: tiny robotic nanites in the blood that gives his experimental patient nearly unlimited ability to regenerate tissue and bone in the event of injury. The poor muscle man awakes with memory of his death, and soon sets out to get revenge. It’s almost like this super solider idea is what the company had in mind all along (hmmm), as they do nothing to stop the newly alive solider from executing a plan that involves crashing head on into an armored car and walking straight into hundreds of rounds of gunfire from the private army protecting the bad guy (Toby Kebbel). That’s a fun sequence, shot under a red light and cloud of flour, with each digital squib on our hero a curlicue of instant robotic recovery, each blood cloud a swirl reentering and reconstituting him. Alas, as fun as it can be, the whole arc of the movie grows repetitive, as any reasonably alert viewer is miles ahead of the protagonist in figuring out the derivative plot twists, and the action sequences never quite figure out a way around the problem of a character that can’t be injured. Still, the filmmaking of the action is brisk and cut confusingly close, giving enough of a sense of energy and speed-ramped dazzle to approximate excitement. Director Dave Wilson is yet another alum of VFX house Blur, following Tim Miller (Deadpool) and Jeff Fowler (Sonic the Hedgehog) into a feature debut. (It’s the best of the three.) He crafts the central visual ideas well enough as the action becomes a swirl of nanite clouds and shrapnel amid powerful punches. And the character of Bloodshot himself benefits from the soulful stillness of Diesel. He’s unstoppable, but he’s not happy about it. There’s some unshakeable baseline appeal to his star persona in the terse, glum Riddick or Witch Hunter sci-fi mold. What we’re left with is a grindingly competent B-movie, totally forgettable and destined to be a passable time waster on cable or streaming. And yet, as the last theatrical experience I’ll have for a while, I’m fonder of it by the day.

Crowded Party: NEW YEAR'S EVE

New Year’s Eve is a cinematic Wal-Mart, crowded, cavernous, filled with cheap versions of exactly the products you’d expect, and no one seems particularly happy to be there. Like Valentine’s Day, also inflicted, albeit with less pain, by director Garry Marshall, the new film is a massive ensemble romantic comedy built around a holiday, a slickly produced product, nothing more than an excuse to see dozens of celebrities, or at least recognizable faces, playing just about everyone on screen but the extras. It used to be that when this many name actors showed up in one place the boat was capsizing or the skyscraper’s ribbon-cutting party was going up in flames. Now, all that happens is precisely what you’d expect in the form of predictable, plodding sitcom pandering and plots thin to the point of breaking. The only disaster is how exhaustingly cliché and dispiritingly unimaginative it is.

There are 31 recognizable faces (at least when I counted them just now on the cast list from IMDb) in New Year’s Eve, which zips around New York on December 31, 2011 as people fall in love (never out, this is one aggressively happy movie) and find their soul mates. It seems pointless to try and point out individual characters and motivations as the film is so cluttered and static that by the time we’ve met everyone and learned their main conflict, there’s barely time to resolve them before the ball drops and Times Square explodes in confetti. Besides, the characters barely registered in my head as anything but the person playing them. It’s like a bad school play in which you can only think about little Bobby when you’re meant to see the man supposedly on his deathbed.

Of course in this case little Bobby’s last name is DeNiro. His nurse is Halle Berry and his doctor is Cary Elwes. Then there’s Hilary Swank directing the Times Square festivities, fretting about the ball drop with security guard Ludacris. When, much to the dismay of Ryan Seacrest (as himself), there’s a technical glitch, Hector Elizondo shows up to fix it. There’s also Sarah Jessica Parker who says daughter Abigail Breslin can’t go downtown with Jake T. Austin. Stuck in an elevator in their apartment building are Ashton Kutcher and Lea Michele. Jessica Biel and Seth Meyers are about to have a baby and are competing with Sarah Paulson and Til Schweiger to have the first baby of the New Year. OB/GYN Carla Gugino is not amused. Mousy secretary Michelle Pfeiffer convinces bike messenger Zac Efron to help her finish her list of resolutions before midnight. Executive Josh Duhamel catches a ride into the city with Yeardley Smith and family. And Katherine Heigl and Sofia Vergara are catering Cherry Jones’s fancy party at which Jon Bon Jovi (not playing himself) will perform.

As you can see, it’s a little ridiculous. It got to the point that, when Ludacris tells Hilary Swank that “Mr. so-and-so is here,” I was only pondering which famous face would step out of the back of that limo. (Matthew Broderick). Rather than bringing all we know about the personas to their roles to serve as some kind of insta-character, the overloaded cast only points out the thinness of it all. Not a one of these plotlines could stand by itself. Worse, the way Katherine Fugate’s script stumbles from one scene to the next refuses to allow the characters to thematically interact. This is a movie that has nothing to say and little idea of how to even make that fact entertaining. We’re supposed to be delighted when, say Efron answers the phone “hey, sis,” and we learn which big name has been – gasp! – his sister this whole time! If the film were packed with too many Meet Cutes and sweeping smooches, it would still reach a point of diminishing returns well before the film’s credit cookies but at least it wouldn’t be quite so empty. For all of these actors present, so many dumb threads of plot, there’s just not enough to sustain two hours. Why couldn’t someone find something interesting for someone, anyone, in the cast to do? New Year’s Eve is a celebration of the superficial without the energy or the trashy pleasure such celebrations could provide.

True Stories: NOWHERE BOY and CONVICTION

When making a film based on a true story the easiest and biggest problem is failing to find the compelling story within the facts. Especially when dealing with a figure like John Lennon, the temptation to go sprawling into unfocused hagiography must look pretty appealing. In Nowhere Boy, director Sam Taylor-Wood and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh wisely focus on the coming-of-age years in which Lennon was an older teenager, forging his identity and falling in love with rock and roll while experiencing some turbulent family conflict. The film is nothing spectacular. It’s awfully conventional and sometimes falls into biopic pitfalls, like including scenes that only resonate for viewers already aware of the history being told, but the nice period detail and fine acting really carry the picture.

Aaron Johnson, last seen as the lead in Kick-Ass, capably channels Lennon’s teen angst while showing hints of his developing musical talent. In the film, Lennon is torn between the maternal love of two women, his mother (Anne-Marie Duff) and the aunt who raised him (Kristin Scott Thomas). While Greenhalgh’s screenplay can get a bit too melodramatic at times, Wood’s unmemorable direction tends to balance it out so the family drama mostly works on the strength of the performers. The great Kristin Scott Thomas, most of all, delivers an excellent performance, inhabiting a strict, stiff-lipped, matter-of-fact woman who seems to take bad news all too well. Her barriers are strong, but it’s easy to see the strong emotions behind her sad eyes and pursed lips.

Running parallel to the family plot is Lennon’s increasing musical ambitions that give the movie its drive and pulse. I particularly enjoyed the scenes between Lennon and McCartney (Thomas Sangster), though they are imbued with the kind of vague weight that would easily puzzle those not already familiar with who these characters become. But who doesn’t know Lennon and McCartney? When the film ends, Lennon goes off to Germany to play some gigs with a new band. His aunt can’t remember the name.

This is a film that contains not one measure of The Beatles music, ending with Lennon on the precipice of ubiquity. It’s a film with young men stumbling towards the limelight, but when the credits roll it’s still nothing but a glint in their eyes. This is a solid film that remains tightly focused on a short period of time, a factor that’s key to its modest success and to its slight feeling of incompleteness.

Also based on true events is Conviction, which is a film that has no difficulty finding a narrative through-line. This is not a biopic. This is a legal drama about Kenny Waters, a wrongly convicted man (Sam Rockwell) who is imprisoned for years. No scene goes by without relating directly to the core plot. We get some flashbacks that feature childhood troublemaking with his sister, Betty Anne. The two kids, who lived with a neglectful mother and subsequently in a handful of foster homes, would break into houses to pretend they had a normal life. They would also stand up for each other, fighting ferociously and determinedly to right wrongs perceived to have been done to them. So of course, when Kenny gets life without parole for a crime he didn’t commit, Betty Anne springs into action. She gets her G.E.D. and then goes to law school, hoping to become a lawyer and argue on his behalf.

Rather than letting the story just speak for itself, veteran television director Tony Goldwyn, working from a script by Pamela Gray, spells out the inspiration we should all be feeling by indulging mawkish dialogue and pouring over nearly every scene an insistently sentimental piano score. Hilary Swank, as Betty Anne, is presented as a heroine of the Pyrrhic victory. With the case, she makes a little progress and gets pushed back a little further from her goal with regularity. In her personal life her single-minded pursuit of justice plays a part in her divorce and in her strained relationships. Swank puts on a distracting accent and appears to be perpetually on the brink of tears. I suppose it’s what the presentation asks for, but it’s far from her best performance.

These mildly disappointing elements don’t quite manage to fully distract from the inherent interest the story supplies. When the film works, it’s not always as an inspiring against-all-odds true story, though I am easily won over by a competent courtroom scene. Instead, the film works best as a showcase for character actors. Rockwell brings a humor and vitality to the role despite being limited by the material he has to work with. Smaller roles for the likes of Minnie Driver, Peter Gallagher, Juliette Lewis, and Melissa Leo are even better: total bite-sized delights. Driver has some genuinely fun one-liners, Gallagher is always a welcome presence, Lewis chews some scenery and Leo gets to deliver a nice bit of menace as a small-town cop.

Conviction is a film of good intentions, but it’s mostly one-note and one-dimensional. The tone and style is all TV-movie-of-the-week with a dull creakiness to its predictability. If it weren’t for the fine acting from the supporting cast, it would be easy to write it off entirely while urging those interested in the facts of the case to put Google to good use. As it stands, it’s a just-barely serviceable drama. It eagerly and unrelentingly hits its marks, but it doesn’t do much more than that.