Adventure Time: STRANGE WORLD

Strange World is Disney Animation once again returning to its least frequent mode: the cheery, red-blooded adventure film. We might get notes of that threaded through their usual animal antics or fairy tale musicals, but when they decide to go all out—the Atlantis: The Lost Empires, the Treasure Planets—the results can be quite entertaining. In the case of Strange World, we’re introduced to a family of explorers whose patriarch (Dennis Quaid) never returns from an attempt to cross the seemingly insurmountable mountain range that surrounds their expansive home valley. This leaves his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) to become a farmer instead. This is an imagined old world where electricity is grown on the vine, and thus allows an agrarian society to have sparkly sci-fi vehicles and gadgets run off of freshly harvested glowing orbs. Farming may not be as exciting as exploring, but it’s perhaps more important. Decades pass, and this farmer, who now has a son of his own (Jaboukie Young-White), is recruited to join an expedition. The crops are dying of a mysterious disease and a group is off in a hovering aircraft—that and the environmentalist bent make for a clear Miyazaki nod—to track down the source. And so off they go, reviving the old family tradition. The movie is told with a similar pluck, traipsing from one appealing cliffhanger to the next in true serial fashion, complete with a soaring heroic orchestra theme and a band of appealing characters.

There’s a Boy’s Adventure magazine aesthetic to the plot’s development, shot through with a refreshingly casual 21st-century diversity—there are men and women, with figures of every color and a couple orientations and it’s no big deal, which is, of course, the big deal. And the world the team discovers, deep in the roots of their prized crop, is a feast of vibrant colors and fluffy surfaces. They find towering Seussian trees and curling DayGlo cliffs, fields of koosh-ball tentacles and grasses, flocks of floating fish and herds of rolling blobs. There’s even a cute blue gummy glob that splats around with chipper personality and becomes the obvious critter sidekick. And guess who else has been trapped down there? In this swirling mystery world of topsy-turvy dangers, there is, of course, room for intergenerational caring and conflict as three generations of guys—a tough grandpa, a stubborn son, and a sensitive grandson—have to learn to work together and truly discover a new way to survive. (Having a great mom (Gabrielle Union) involved helps, too.) Writer-directors Don Hall and Qui Nguyen (Raya and the Last Dragon) weave this family story through the adventure quite naturally, in a charmingly busy picture of constant color and movement. By the end, it’s also brought into focus a parable of ecological collapse and a need to reform an economy around alternatives to destructive industries. All this and a breezy fantasy adventure with eye-pleasing visuals and the earnest ode to family togetherness? Why, that’s just about all you’d want from a satisfying family movie night.

Siren Song: AMBULANCE

I’ve never been disappointed in a Michael Bay car chase. Even when the movie around it is one of his lesser pictures, there’s nothing like the way he films the grit of the road, the burning rubber, the squealing turns, the crunching crashes, bone-rattling speeds, spraying debris, and geysers of fire and explosions. He takes low angles with a moving camera that goes faster and closer than you’d think possible, hurtling beyond or behind or spinning between the moving elements, filling the frame with light and motion, cutting so fast you just barely get your bearings. Think his debut Bad Boys or its outsized sequel sending cop cars careening through one obstacle after the next, or his sci-fi escape actioner The Island flinging a literal ton of construction equipment off the back of a trailer to slice apart vehicles crossing their concrete-slamming trajectories. Is it any wonder, then, that his enormous Transformers movies are something like an apotheosis of this style? What better protagonists than the cars themselves, all oil and spark and motion contorting around fleeting human interests. There’s always something exhilaratingly mechanical about Bayhem, where flesh and blood meet the cold logic of parts and gears—animated by the passion for obliterating the senses in aesthetic reverie of all of the above.

His latest, Ambulance, is an answer for anyone who ever wondered what an all-chase Bay movie could be. After a brisk setup, the action starts and never lets up. Just a few minutes in, I found myself asking: is this one of Bay’s very best efforts? The rest of the movie just keeps answering: yes, yes, yes. Somehow it flies by, but never loses its rooting interests, every image a gleaming, forceful work of propaganda for itself. The story hits the ground running, with an unemployed veteran (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), in need of lots of cash after his insurance denies coverage for his wife’s surgery, secretly meeting up with his bank robber brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a loan. Turns out, the criminal bro is just about to leave with his crew on a big heist, but they do need a driver. So off they go. This is cross-cut with an introduction to a paramedic (Eiza Gonzalez). We meet her saving the life of a little girl impaled on a railing that rammed through her mother’s car in an accident. The jaws of life spark, she cries as the EMT grips her hand, then the camera drifts down from high above the ambulance like a guardian angel as they spirit her toward the nearest ER. (Maybe it's the movie equivalent of the early pandemic days, when people would bang pots and pans out their windows in tribute to first responders.) You can tell right away that Bay’s giving this material an extra fluid grace, and some real tenderness, too. We also saw a glimpse of the brothers as children in an intuitive wordless flashback at the start, two innocents wandering down a sun-dappled Los Angeles street. All this sentimental rooting interest is sketched in with hard-charging shorthand in immediate gripping visualization. We get it instantly, the better to care just enough as the action picks up speed.

The bank robbery goes badly, a cop is shot, and the brothers escape by hijacking the ambulance that arrives for him. (Guess whose.) The rest of the movie, then, is in the same vein as Jan de Bont’s Speed or Tony Scott’s Unstoppable—wow, that’d be a triple-feature to make you hyperventilate—as a vehicle just can’t stop, can’t slow down, is always on the move. The movie doesn’t merely zoom by; it smashes, careens, swerves, drifts, and dips. We’re taken on a tour of LA at top speeds, as law enforcement assembles (Garret Dillahunt wrangles the team of cars and trucks and guns and helicopters with gruff cowboy charm) and the ambulance keeps eluding their grasp. (One imagines the screenplay could’ve been written by driving around town wondering: what would it be like to go really fast through here, or what if a car fell off that?) Bay goes all in on blue-collar process, balancing the cops’ procedures with the robbers’ clever quick thinking. He trusts his actors to sell the immediacy of the moments. Gyllenhaal is a live-wire, while Abdul-Mateen is sturdily in-over-his-head, and Gonzalez is probably Bay’s best heroine, capable and steady and thinking, defined entirely by being professional and skilled while never drooled over. We want her to survive, while the movie does a tricky two-step in keeping Gyllenhaal more purely villainous while letting Abdul-Mateen remain relatively more sympathetic. We want them to escape for his sake, but clearly see someone needs to stop them. It’s a situation out of control.

This is brute-force exhilaration and industrial-strength sentimentality wedded together in Bay’s typical eye-popping frames zipping past in pulse-scattering editing. The appeal, then, is entirely in the way the variables keep spinning around them all the way through the explosive ends. The camera is swooping and swirling, freed to hurtle along every which way, flying top-speeds along highways and under overpasses and around tight corners, peering up at the concrete canyons or spraying through puddles and fires. This is Hollywood action impressionism, a work of blurry momentum and movement in which each image is crystal clear and every shot swarms with visual interest, cut together in a smear of sparks and sounds. This is Bay at his most indulgent and yet contained, more of a piece with his early films (he winks at them in the early going as characters name-drop a couple) than the gargantuan spectacles of shape-shifting cars from outer space. He’s still excessive, but his excess (aside from a cartel gangster subplot that rides an awfully thin line of stereotypes) is committed to amping up the concept and the characters—its as out of control as its central vehicle and the guys behind the wheel. We’re hanging on for dear life like the hostages in the back. I watched it with the realization that the 57-year-old director has now passed from being a shock of the new, through a high-gloss studio pro, into something like an old master of the form.

DEMOLITION, Man

Jean-Marc Vallée is a filmmaker who tends to direct obvious emotional material by underplaying the overstatements and overplaying the understatements. This tendency can really sink a movie, trapping interesting performances, like Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyer’s Club, in a production that’s both too much and not enough in every moment. It takes a great talent with the right material to transcend that approach. (Look no further than what Reese Witherspoon did in Wild.) But this tendency of Vallée’s really works for his latest, Demolition, a story about a character whose life changes so quickly and profoundly that everything about him is off balance. He overreacts to small things – a squeaking door, a faulty vending machine – and finds the biggest problem he’s facing – the sudden death of his wife – hard to react to at all. He’s numb and oversensitive simultaneously, a perfect fit for Vallée’s too much and not enough approach.

As scripted by Bryan Sipe (The Choice) the film is a character study about a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) who doesn’t know what his character is. In the wake of a devastating car accident that viscerally and artfully gets things off on an upset note, he feels overwhelming grief that turns into gnawing emptiness. He just simply doesn’t know how to process his difficult emotions. It wasn’t a happy marriage, but it was what he knew. He can’t acclimatize to a life without his wife (Heather Lind), especially carrying the guilt he feels for doubting if he actually loved her. Worse still, her wealthy father (Chris Cooper) is his boss at the investment firm he suddenly finds hollow and meaningless. He skips work and wanders around, losing weight, skipping shaves, and taking apart annoyances – a leaky pipe, a glitchy computer – with the tools and precision he lacks in dissecting his raw, complicated feelings. He suddenly sees the emptiness of his comfortable life and is at a total loss as to how to go about filling it in with meaning.

Gyllenhaal sells this shell-shocked depression with wet-eyed hangdog blankness, yearning for connection and struggling to find release for his pain. (It’s the internalized opposite of his scary surface striving in Nightcrawler.) Maybe, he thinks, the only solution is more pain, smashing apart his belongings until they draw blood. He’s clearly in a bad place, lashing out with reckless and otherwise odd behavior when he can manage to rouse himself from a depressive daze. Idiosyncratic and moody, textured with fine grain and soft lighting, the film layers in flashes of memories as if to manifest the rattled headspace of its protagonist, explaining his obsessive behaviors and rootless drive to make a change or a connection while maintaining the trauma’s essential unknowable qualities. He alienates his wife’s family, his colleagues, and everyone else he’s known, simply because he know longer knows if the person he is is the person he wants to be.

One outgrowth of this erratic breakdown is unexpected friendship. Remember that faulty vending machine I mentioned he encounters? It’s in the hospital where his wife died, and it ate his money mere minutes after he received the bad news. He sends a letter to the vending company explaining the whole situation. Then he sends three or four more. It’s enough to get the sad, kind-hearted customer service representative (Naomi Watts, radiating empathy) to call him up and ask if he’s okay. This becomes not a romance, but an intimate exchange of sympathy. They lean on each other, becoming fast, close friends. She invites him into her life where he feels comfortable just hanging around, even sparking a big-brotherly relationship with her troubled teen son (newcomer Judah Lewis in a casually terrific performance as a sensitive troublemaker). This could be unbelievable, but the cast sells it. They all portray a desire for a low-key understanding person to hang out with, an unassuming vulnerable tenderness, a fragility beneath playacted toughness. It’s sweetly, warmly developed.

The film’s back half is loaded up with developments, sudden swerves into dramatic complications that weigh an already glum movie down. It’s manipulative, but not entirely unearned. The whole thing works under a melancholic existential panic, with people trying their best to look at the world in a way that makes sense. At one point Gyllenhaal sees an uprooted tree and muses, “everything’s a metaphor.” It’s both a too-obvious statement of the movie’s heavy hand and an acknowledgement of a man casting about for anything to help make sense of an all-encompassing tragic change in his life. It’d make a tidy double feature with Wild, two movies about lost souls setting their own terms for recovery and hoping against hope that a big gesture will accomplish just that. Demolition doesn’t know if anyone can easily launch themselves out of a bad emotional state, but is moving in its assertion that, when you’re at your lowest point, even fleeting kindness can help push you in the right direction.

Into Thin Air: EVEREST

It’d be easy to call Everest a man versus nature story, but that’s downplaying the extent to which nature dominates. It’s never a fair fight. Telling the true story of a 1996 storm that left a group of mountain climbers stranded at the world’s tallest peak, making the return climb treacherous and nearly impossible, the film creates an enveloping sense of natural danger. When the winds kick up and gusts of snow pummel the characters as they stumble along narrow paths, clinging to guide ropes near cavernous drops, there’s a convincing sense of disorientation and danger. One wrong step, one wrong decision, and it could mean certain death. In the film’s most haunting image, a struggling member of the group steps wrong, wobbles, and simply disappears, falling off the edge of the frame while a man in the foreground holds on for dear life. He glances back, notices with horror the empty hooks swinging in the storm, and then continues trudging foreword towards his ultimate fate. As one character ominously warns early on, “the mountain always has the last word.”

Shot with solid meat-and-potatoes sturdiness and completely convincing effects and stunts, director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband) indulges in a few sweeping spectacular vistas, but otherwise keeps the epic backdrop in the background. He chooses instead to focus on the people making their way through the landscape, as they joke, bond, argue, succeed, struggle, and die. William Nicholson (Unbroken) and Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours), no strangers to stories of remarkable survival, have written a screenplay interested in process and procedure, spending a great deal of time assembling the team and taking them through the steps of an ordinary climb up Everest, a fraught and fascinating prospect in and of itself. It’s clear how slow, difficult, and challenging it is to climb any mountain, let alone Everest. There are medical concerns, perilous heights, unexpected delays, deadly cold, and dwindling oxygen. And that’s before the storm even starts.

The main characters are a crew from New Zealand running an expedition up the mountain, a guide (Jason Clarke), a base camp supervisor (Emily Watson), and a doctor (Elizabeth Debicki). Their clients include a mailman (John Hawkes), a wealthy Texan (Josh Brolin), a journalist (Michael Kelly), and an experienced climber (Naoko Mori). Also on the mountain are rival groups, including one led by a brash American (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to reach the summit, and one (led by Sam Worthington) going up the shorter mountain next to it and can only watch in horror as the storm clouds roll in over their colleagues. It’s not always easy to tell all these people apart, especially once they have oxygen masks over their faces and ice-covered hoods pulled low over their goggles. We see only figures struggling up the mountain, and then feeling the panic kick in once they desperately need to get back down.

When a mask is pulled off, revealing the character actor beneath, it’s easier to tell who is where. But maybe the point is to mimic some of the disorientation of thin air and exhausted lungs. The performances are solid physical presences, filling their corners of the frame with a sturdiness and confidence that’s all the more difficult to see fade away. Some are unpersuasively overconfident. Others are understandably worried. There are token characterizations to flesh out the ensemble. We hear reasons for the trip – to be brave, to be accomplished, to be awed – and overhear sentimental calls back home to nervous wives (Keira Knightley cuddling a fake pregnant belly, Robin Wright corralling teens). But these biographical details are sparse, adding only reliable extra gloom as the camera contemplates the thunderous darkness encroaching.

Kormákur shoots the proceedings with a relatively restrained eye. He doesn’t amp up the action, provide CGI dazzle, or find room for unrealistic cinematic heroics. As small mistakes and nature’s fury combine, death comes quickly for some, slowly for others, and narrowly misses still more. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino’s wide lenses capture an immense sense of beauty and danger, while the sound effects crunch and howl. It never comes to life as a personal journey, the characters remaining too vague to really develop, but as a view of process – of a feat of mountaineering giving way to a struggle to make it back alive – it’s gripping. As it narrows to consider the tiny interpersonal moments that seal each one’s fate, there are moving moments of triumph and pain, flashes in a storm that wipes away all certainty. It’s a big Hollywood epic with a small eye, with stories of survival not through any grand action, but through endurance and chance. It has the trappings of a disaster movie, but none of the thrill. It starts with cautious excitement, turns scary, then left me feeling only sad.

Fight Night: SOUTHPAW

I suppose it was inevitable Antoine Fuqua would direct a boxing picture. The one thing that connects his diverse (and uneven) filmography – from fine genre fare like Training Day and King Arthur to lesser junk like Olympus Has Fallen and The Equalizer – is intense, gory, bruising violence. So when an early shot in Southpaw has Jake Gyllenhaal looking straight into the camera, howling in slow motion as blood and sweat rain off his straining muscles, it’s clear we’re in a place of macho intensity. Fuqua shoots the boxing matches with reasonable force, and wisely uses the camera to teach the audience how to read the strategies involved. But the story between the bouts is merely programmatic, a broad and bludgeoning collection of tropes. It’s a boxing picture. What do you want, a roadmap?

It starts with Gyllenhaal’s boxer at the top of his game – undefeated, even. Soon, he’s fallen on hard times due to a set of tragic circumstances and his own bad habits – temper, alcohol, and so on. He loses his wife (Rachel McAdams), is abandoned by his sleazy manager (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), and has his daughter (Oona Laurence) taken away. Now he has to rely on a tough-but-fair wise old trainer (Forest Whitaker) to help him get back in fighting shape. If you already think this all ends with a big comeback fight against a perfectly loathsome rival (Miguel Gomez), you’ve definitively seen a boxing picture before. Besides, Gyllenhaal’s surname here is Hope. You’ve got to know where the symbolism is pointing. Sons of Anarchy showrunner Kurt Sutter’s screenplay plays every note you’d expect, doing so with a swaggering clobbering melodrama, confident in its ability to use an audience’s emotions as its speed bag. It thumps away.

Fuqua obliges the formulaic intentions of the material while keeping the visual interest on the performer’s bodies. He focuses attention on McAdams’ relaxed sensuality, Jackson’s broad-shouldered business posture, and Gomez’s slippery fighting stance. But most of all Fuqua takes in Gyllenhaal’s ripped musculature, a painful display of tense tautness. He clearly worked hard for this role, and is eager to show off every bit of the gain from the pain. But it also serves a purpose in telling us everything we need to know about this boxer. He likes the pain. Thanks to the announcers helpfully shouting out the subtext during the fights, we learn boxing fans know it’s not a Hope match until he’s bleeding. His wife tells him he needs to retire before he’s irreparably punch-drunk. But we soon learn how desperately he needs to keep going.

We get plenty of Hope’s frustration with his situation, followed by training montages as he works his way back to some semblance of normalcy. With a daughter’s happiness imperiled, it’s easy to root for him. But I appreciated the film’s ability to look somewhat askance at its protagonist, wondering if his cyclical bad behavior is something that can be fixed. But of course it can, and he can learn to control his temper in everyday life by learning to fight better in the ring. Instead of settling into the reality of its characters’ lives, the movie hops to the next expected beat. It never feels like a real situation, but an artificial construct built to fit the needs of its subgenre. It doesn’t breathe like the best of its brethren, where Rocky or Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby (or even Real Steel) color in the specifics of their environments.

Southpaw is on a one-way track to the Big Match. It’s an athletic, well-coordinated display. Gyllenhaal can land convincing blows, and, because the emotions involved are so big, heavy, and unsurprising, the stakes are completely clear. The result is a good replica of a boxing match. It’s exciting and visceral, punches booming so forcefully in the sound mix I wondered what the Foley artists had to do, every jab timed to the usual orchestra of crowd reactions. It’s well made without being completely involving. I sat admiring the technique more than feeling the tension. Because the way there is so pro-forma, it’s hard to stay invested. The movie remains a glossy, well intentioned, but over-familiar narrative beginning to end.

It Bleeds, It Leads: NIGHTCRAWLER

Nightcrawler is a slow burn thriller that gets the entirety of its suspense out of the electric sociopathy of its lead role. We first meet Louis Bloom stealing metal to sell for scrap. He’s desperate for employment, but possesses an eerie confidence, having pumped his head full of free online business courses, DIY sloganeering, self-help mumbo jumbo, and faux-MBA jargon. A chance encounter with a news crew starts the wheels in his head spinning. Soon, he’s roaming the Los Angeles night, police scanner running and camcorder at the ready, charging hard towards the first rung in the news business: collecting footage of accidents and violent crime for sale to the highest bidder. Because it’s clear that he’ll do anything to get ahead, and views people only as tools to either take advantage of or cast aside, this bottom-feeding can’t be good news for the rest of us. He’s a danger.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Bloom in an intense, unforgiving performance that takes everything appealing and earnest (sometimes overly so) about his screen persona and turns it rotten. His driven, desperate mania is scary. This man is capable of the same Gyllenhaal ingratiating puppy dog eyes and easy grin, but they are made creepy by his intensity of focus and the vacant space where his ethics and empathy should be. With an arresting, unblinking calm, he walks through the picture with big bug eyes, a gaunt wiry frame, and stringy hair pulled back. He’s part Gordon Gekko, part Travis Bickle, greedy with delusions of grandeur. We don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s awkward, and that’s darkly funny, until it’s clear he could very well hurt someone.

It starts with sneaking past police tape into a home, the better to film the bullet holes in the fridge, right between the family photos he slides around to get a better shot. At a later scene, having arrived before the police, he drags a dead body into a smashed car’s headlights to get a better angle. He’s not a murderer, but that’s the only thing separating him from the serial killing cameraman of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. He grins as he films the bloody messes he scavenges the scanner for, sees the violence of man only as a way to make a buck. Luckily for him, the culture is ready to abet his efforts. He meets a night shift news editor for the lowest rated local news station in the area. They just might be able to help each other.

She (Rene Russo, as a shark we’re never sure whether to fear or pity, maybe both) is desperate to increase station ratings, but not so interested in hiring a new freelance film crew, until he brings her gory footage of a mugging victim bleeding out on a gurney. “Call us first,” she tells him, asking specifically for footage of rich white people wronged by people of color. (It’s what really gets the audience scared, and ready to tune in to hear more.) That’s all the encouragement he needs. He hires an assistant, a poor street kid (Riz Ahmed) who takes $30 a night under the table, to help navigate and identify crimes in progress. Together they roar down dark streets, swerving down highways and residential areas alike, chasing the sound of sirens and the distant sight of flashing lights. Their goal is to get as close as possible, as early as possible. Bloom wants better footage than his competitor (Bill Paxton). Ideally, he’ll get there before the cops to ensure that perfect, untouched, lurid Red Asphalt-style fearmongering for the morning news.

Screenwriter Dan Gilroy, who co-wrote Tarsem’s The Fall as well as such gleaming, polished Hollywood product as Real Steel and The Bourne Legacy, here makes his directorial debut. He has written and directed a spare, unsettling character study that bristles with the uncomfortable danger of madness that can sit within the hearts of desperate men, especially those warped by the American dream into monsters of capitalism, who hear “pursuit of happiness” and think “pursuit of profit,” then add “at any cost necessary.” It’s a picture of symbiotic, parasitic dynamics, a business that relies on relaying human misery that makes more money the bloodier and more frightening the footage. It’s the right place for this sociopath to make a mark. Gyllenhaal commits to the ugly irredeemable monster and Gilroy builds a world for him to stalk.

Gilroy has cinematographer Robert Elswit shoot L.A. from unflattering angles, finding strip malls, barren expressways, and rundown parking lots to stage their crime scenes. In between we pass streetlights, stoplights, headlights, briefly providing light to the dark. It’s an unsparingly nocturnal movie, the nighttime shot in the same digital haze Michael Mann’s been working with for a decade, detailed blackness and glow. Daytime is bright, filmic textures, a different world entirely. Bloom doesn’t fit there. He’s a creature of the night. Violence is framed through Bloom’s camera, keeping it largely just off screen, mediated by screens within screens. It emphasizes the disconnectedness this character feels, and emphasizes the eerie, disturbing dispassion. We’re pulled so swiftly into an uneasy worldview that as we’re inexorably moved deeper, tumbling down the slippery slope towards exploitation and obstruction of justice, it feels only natural. And that’s what makes the suspense so effective. How far will he go? How far will we let him?

His Own Worst ENEMY

Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled college professor. We don’t know the source of his anxiety, but he enters Enemy distracted and a little jumpy, his hair slightly mussed, his posture defensive and slouched. He’s on edge, ignoring calls from his mother and behaving inattentive in his encounters with his girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent). Life doesn’t get any easier for him when he spots an extra in the background of a movie he happens to watch one night. He rewinds and pauses. The extra looks exactly like him. Rattled, he googles his way to the extra’s headshot. Why, he’s identical. Adam calls the actor. They have the same voice. Adam stalks the man until finally he sees him. The actor’s name is Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s kind of freaked out about their doppelganger status, too. His wife (Sarah Gadon) suspected him of having an affair, but this is a whole lot weirder.

It’s never clear why the two men are so disturbed. They behave immediately as if they’re in a thriller, skulking about, looking over their shoulders, nervously circling each other. At one point they decide to meet up in a hotel and for a brief moment I wondered if the movie would be about the perils and attractions of dating your doppelganger. No such luck. Apparently Adam and Anthony have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day or, even better, Tatiana Maslany’s great work on the TV series Orphan Black. The point is, there are plenty of reasons to suspect nefarious somethings are afoot when you’re confronted with your exact duplicate, down to the same scars. There’s some unidentifiable connection there that’s so painfully obvious on a visual level. It remains unanswered, a mystery to them and to us as they slowly freak out while spying on each other. Each even covets the other’s significant other. Both women are similarly proportioned blondes, so I guess the men’s tastes are duplicated as well.

It’s all so very creepy for sure, and the film takes on a nervous, fuzzy vibe that moves lugubriously through waking nightmare territory as reality bends around these men and their mental states. We’re talking full on nervous breakdown, the kind where you hallucinate a naked woman with the head of a spider walking on your ceiling. There’s some undiluted nightmare fuel here. The final sequence, with a sudden shift in the boundaries of all we think we know about the world of the film represented by one very wrong thing is an especially great shock. The film has jolts of imagery that in their suddenness and eerie calm recall the terrifying person stepping out from behind the dumpster in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a far superior film involving doubles and disintegrating reality. Enemy doesn’t go far enough. It kicks up so much unease that’s it’s hard to ignore, but remains so straight-faced and dull that I found myself cherishing it’s surreal interjections all the more for their infrequency.

Director and co-writer Denis Villeneuve (loosely adapting a José Saramago novel with the help of screenwriter Javier Gullón) worked with Gyllenhaal in last year’s Prisoners, a solid dread-soaked missing-child mystery. Enemy has some of the same sustained intensity of tone, but often seems to miss how funny it plays. The Gyllenhaals glower at each other, alternately intrigued and terrified, jealous and repulsed by each other. It’s never clear why they feel the way they feel, their more intense outbursts cause for suppressed snickers, at least from where I was sitting. Only a cameo by Isabella Rossellini, as one of their mothers, seems to have a sense of humor, and even then it’s only funny in the way she appears to puncture the film’s self-serious pulpiness. He explains the doppelganger predicament and she calmly waves off his concerns with a stop-being-so-silly shrug. Maybe this overburdened germ of a good idea would’ve played a bit better with a stronger pair of performances from the lead. Gyllenhaal is a fine actor, but here gives a one-and-a-half note performance stretched across two characters, like a blanket that’s just short enough to leave a limb hanging out no matter which way you contort yourself.

The experience of watching Enemy is not unlike stumbling across a yellowed used paperback with a great cover and a fun hook in the blurb on the back, then actually reading it and discovering a slow slog of motifs and incidents, wrapped up in sensational luridness that’s too little and too rare. Repeated spider imagery runs throughout, from the spider-face woman to a dream of a monstrous arachnid floating over the city and the opening context-free scene of men watching a stripper methodically crush a tarantula under her high-heels. This underlines the ickiness of it all, but doesn’t seem to come to much beyond conflating spiders with women in a way so half-formed it’s neither potent nor offensive. As I left the theater, I overheard an elderly couple solemnly discussing their bafflement. “Seems to me,” the man told his wife, “if you figure out those spiders, you’ve figured the whole thing.”

Captive Audience: PRISONERS

The tension in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners slowly descends like a ton of bricks arriving methodically in the pit of your stomach. It’s nominally a thriller, but the thrill is more of a sick dread that creeps and lingers. Shots are still, the soundtrack is hushed, and the pace unhurried. When the central question the mystery turns upon is the whereabouts of two missing little girls, a sense of patience is the worst, ominous development. This film – eventually stretching out over two hours and thirty minutes of screen time – is not in a hurry. It makes you sit and wonder as the parents fret and mourn and the police go down the checklist, calling out searches, knocking on doors, chasing down the few leads they can scrounge up.

At the start, all is normal. We meet two families, friends and neighbors who are sharing a Thanksgiving meal. While the parents (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello, Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) chat after dinner, their respective teens (Dylan Minnette and Zoe Soul) watch TV, and the two little girls (Erin Gerasimovich and Kyla Drew Simmons) play outside. Later, when they can’t be found, one of the teens notices that a camper parked outside a nearby house has vanished as well. It’s the only clue they have. A detective (Jake Gyllenhaal) is called in to start the investigation. Each day that passes, the chances of finding the girls at all, let alone alive, diminishes. The stakes couldn’t be any clearer, or more severe. The events are told clearly, with compact images that tell a story of crisply and quickly escalating tension.

What follows is a work of strong acting and filmmaking, ready to dig around in the darkness of its subject matter without a hint of prurient interest. It’s humorless, dour, and unrelentingly gray. Unlike the typical abduction-revenge template, the film does not devolve into mindless vigilantism and easy answers. In fact, it struggles with those questions, playing around in a darker, marginally more realistic register. Bello, Howard, and Davis are convincing in the details of feeling helpless and mournful, hoping against hope that the little girls will be found safe and alive. But they fall to the sideline somewhat as Jackman’s frustrated rage, clenched jaw and steely eyes, and Gyllenhaal’s anxious professionalism, complete with a blinking nervous tic, take center stage. This is no head-smashing revenge fantasy a la Taken no matter how many times Jackman shouts, “Where’s my daughter?” It’s icy and slow, full of frustrating dead ends.

The guy in the camper (Paul Dano) is caught and detained for questioning, but is let go when no evidence is found connecting him to the disappearance. Frustrated, Jackman howls at the police and roughs up the man, who looks and behaves odd enough that it’s hard for him to seem innocent, even if he is. The script by Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband) becomes an intricate web of clues and plot turns at times as cumbersome as it is satisfying in a grim, intensely felt procedural. The plot has all the pulpy makings of a revenge thriller, a missing-person mystery, but in the seriousness of intent and high quality shine of every aspect of the production, it avoids the easy pleasures of the genre, thwarting catharsis by sticking close to wounded performances of frustrated characters kept for long stretches without a clue. Prisoners becomes a title that takes on metaphoric weight for every character, every one a prisoner of duty, pride, mourning, circumstance.

Sequences of great dread find dim light pouring through dark doorways, flashlights illuminating crime scenes. There’s specificity and a spare hard-bitten beauty to the imagery that’s tactile. Master cinematographer Roger Deakins shoots crisp, chilly images that crackle with late autumn shivers. I could almost feel the dampness of an early December drizzle, smell the decaying leaves crusted over with a tentative layer of frost, sense the chill as a misting rain shifts into snow flurries. There’s a scene late in the film involving a car speeding through traffic during a late night rainstorm that sends stoplights, headlights, cop lights, and raindrops glowing and smearing in frames that are as tense and gorgeous as any I’ve seen on film this year. It’s a clear case of expert craftsmanship elevating a screenplay that in lesser hands could’ve fallen into flabbiness and silliness.

The story takes on more weight than it can handle. Coincidences pile up and by the end it’s nearly too much. It resolves all-too neatly, falling into Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters by the end. But it’s so well made in every other respect, it’s better than it is. It’s a movie that starts great and ends merely solid. The intensity and consistency of Villeneuve’s approach, the tough performances, and steady framing keep the story engaging and absorbing. I simply needed to see how the mystery resolved, even if by the end it was a matter of encroaching impatience mixing with genuine curiosity on my part. This is an overwhelmingly tense, deliberately paced thriller that’s ultimately a bit more familiar than the foreboding opening and morally muddy middle suggests. It’s not as good as it looks, but it’s more than good enough, judging by the gasps rolling through the theater at key twists, to hold an audience captive the entire time.

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.

Strangers on a Train: SOURCE CODE

Duncan Jones’s directorial debut, 2009’s Moon, was a sci-fi study in loneliness and isolation anchored by a wonderful performance by Sam Rockwell as the one-man crew of a lunar mining platform coming to the end of his three-year shift. He slowly finds cracks in the corporate messages and, though he’s more than ready to go home, discovers that it might not be so simple. I didn’t see the film during its small release and didn’t catch up with it until it had been on Blu-ray for a few weeks. But when I had caught up, I found myself wishing I could have seen it on the big screen. It’s a strong effort, a quiet, grey film with which Jones manages to evoke an epic sense of endless emptiness on a relatively small budget.

Now here comes his sophomore effort, Source Code, another sci-fi effort focusing on a man stuck in a difficult job. Jake Gyllenhaal is that man, a soldier who wakes up on a Chicago-bound commuter train in the body of another man. The woman sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) seems to know him, or rather know that man that he sees when he spies his reflection. Before he can figure out what kind of displacement has befallen him, an explosion rips through the train.

But Gyllenhaal does not die. Instead, he wakes up in some kind of dark clammy capsule, receiving instructions from a mysterious military officer (Vera Farmiga) who has a suspicious-looking scientist (Jeffrey Wright) looking over her shoulder. They tell him that he is wired into a program they call Source Code. It is explained that he has become part of a baffling experiment that enables a person to relive the last eight minutes of a person’s life (making use of the brain’s post-mortem afterglow and some parabolic calculus, along with quantum mechanics, naturally).

It might not make a lot of sense but it enables the film to engage in narrative loops that send us spiraling back into the same time span with plenty of variation. The bomber must be found and identified since, Gyllenhaal is told, the explosion was only the first of a wave of attacks that have been threatened. The Source Code, however, is not time-travel. It merely creates an alternate space within reality for the participant to relive the past. What happened happened; there’s nothing that can be done to stop the explosion, to avert disaster. This is a prevention program, not a cure. This causes problems for Gyllenhaal, especially as he starts to fall for the woman on the train.

This is a swift, engaging film that’s a nice twisty puzzle that has a solid level of craftsmanship behind it, cleanly photographed, featuring some nice special effects and a using a likable score. I enjoyed its surface pleasures – it’s filled with pleasingly displayed technological gadgetry and, at times, a cool demeanor of confusion – but it’s hard to care too much about the situation. The ticking-clock is ill defined and the characters aboard the train were already dead (nothing can change that, we are often told) so every failure to stop the explosion was just like watching a friend fail a level on a videogame.

What imbue the situation with dramatic weight are the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan and the growing frustration he feels with the futility of his mission. There’s a sense of dismay to be found in the pattern of events that make up the action of this thriller. It’s brisk and energetic but also fundamentally sad. Jones, working from a script by Ben Ripley, may not have equaled his debut feature but he’s managed to make a film that works fairly well on its own terms.

Quick Look: LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS

Love and Other Drugs is as bad as it is ambitious. Here’s a sexy romance, a goofy comedy, and a disease-of-the-week tearjerker with aspirations of being a semi-satirical commentary on pharmaceutical companies. It’s basically a duller Up in the Air with an extra layer of pretensions ladled on top and it comes out looking too cluttered for its own good. The various competing ideas cancel each other out. The script, from director Edward Zwick and co-writers Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskovitz, follows Jake Gyllenhaal as a young, wide-eyed pharmaceutical representative and ladies’ man. In the course of his travels, he meets Anne Hathaway, and the two fall into a relationship fairly quickly. Hathaway, despite a severely underwritten role, acts circles around Gyllenhaal. Though the film is preoccupied with his job and family life, we barely see what she hopes to do with her artistic talents, how she’s living with her early-onset Parkinson’s disease, and why she can afford to pay for her medical care in rolls of big bills. These elements are brought up and dropped at the whims of the plot. She’s a moody cipher, meant to bring love and drama into the life of a charming-but-cold yuppie. It’s a shame. Hathaway does so much with so little that it would have been nice to see her in a role that respected her talents. The film is more or less dead when she’s off the screen, little more than a collection of moments that engendered little more than eye rolling from me. I particularly loathed a subplot involving Gyllenhaal’s sloppy brother (Josh Gad) that’s so miscalculated that it seems to have stumbled in out of an even worse film. Also disappointing are the cruelly underused talents of Oliver Platt and Hank Azaria who could have turned their small roles into gems of character acting if given just a little more screen time. Edward Zwick, usually at work leaving me unmoved with big somber epics like Glory and Blood Diamond, finds little of visual interest in the film, carries along the blandly sloppy mess with just enough skill to make me wish it were better. When, in the span of a few scenes, you’re careening from a serious look at the ramifications of Parkinson’s into overextended gags about Viagra side effects, you know the film is simply adrift beyond repair.

Catching Up on 2010: Epic Yawn Edition

There’s no good reason for Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood to be so dull, with the exception of copious development problems and the decision to make an overlong origin story that pushes all that is fun about the character past the end credits and out of the picture entirely. There’s also the thudding predictable epic-battle stylistic rut that Scott has found himself in (he’s basically recycling his own Gladiator) that cannot lift the tattered script. And, of course, there’s the fact that Russell Crowe, an actor with some nice range, is woefully miscast. On the scale of screen Robin Hoods, Crowe’s better than Kevin Costner, but he’s no Errol Flynn (or even Cary Elwes). This is a turgid epic that looks like little more than a high-priced game of dress-up as extras clop around muddy forests looking as grim and miserable as I was watching them. Not even the combined talents of Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Danny Huston, Max von Sydow, Matthew Macfadyen, and Mark Strong (a “how could this go wrong?” kind of cast) can scrape up more than a little entertainment value. Don’t get me wrong, this is as slick and dumbly watchable as empty failed epics get. The money was well spent on the production values. Where the film is bankrupt is where it counts: story, emotion, character, and excitement.

Another failed summer epic at least has the dignity to go a little crazy. It’s not any better than Robin Hood, but Mike Newell’s video game adaptation Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time at least has Alfred Molina racing ostriches and Ben Kingsley as a man who knows all about procuring poisoned cloaks in between his mustache twirling. Oh, and a miscast Jake Gyllenhaal’s hanging around too, though despite his status as the lead of the film, he leaves very little impact. He’s the orphan-turned-prince who stumbles into possession of the Sands of Time that are conveniently held inside a goofy dagger. They turn back time, but they can only turn back as much time as there is sand in the dagger. (I think). So, for a convoluted set of reasons, the prince marches around the desert with the blank beauty love-interest Gemma Arterton while they figure out how to conquer the forces of evil and protect the world from the villainous forces that would use the sand to…I don’t know what exactly, but let’s assume it’s bad. Though, really, I spent about as long wishing they would use the sand to go back to a time before the movie started and try again. The film’s all red-blooded matinee fun, or at least it would be if it weren’t so frequently incomprehensible in the action scenes. Not only does CGI cloud any sense of physical space in the acrobatic flips and spins, but the magic is oddly rendered and decidedly hokey. The characters are bland, the plot is cardboard, and the filmmaking is just flat and affectless. I was bored or confused for most of the movie. It’s bland, but at least it’s not entirely without flavor.