Taking Another Stab: SCREAM VI

Scream VI works on two levels, as befits an entry in this series of slasher meta-commentaries. The first is as a bloody mystery, a cast slashed to gory bits one by one as a way of ruling out suspects until a grand splattery finale reveals all. The second is slyer, as a movie about characters who are really tired of being in this series. When Jenna Ortega, a survivor from the last one, turns to her sister (Melissa Barrera), a fellow carryover from 5, to fatalistically ask when, or if, she can simply be a normal person again, I felt that exhausted sadness. She’s over it. Later, a victim bleeding profusely from the abdomen will turn to look practically straight down the camera and mutter, “fuck this franchise.” Oh, not this one, per se. In the world of the Screams, their real slaughters have been regularly turned into the series-within-the-series of Stab movies. Its a neat ouroboros, sometimes too neatly fan-flattering, here turned into something like a lament. The movie’s world is ever more full of costumes and posters, having thoroughly commodified the traumas our characters drag around with them. Talk about intrusive thoughts. Their whole world is intrusive, and this movie is sharp enough to realize, in our modern moment, the internet facilitates that. It hasn’t just made pop culture fandoms louder; it’s made true crime and conspiracy theories part of them, and a form of social currency among the know-nothings who flatter themselves amateur truth-tellers. It’s its own brand of hell those caught in the center of tragedy can’t escape.

Here’s a movie about survivors threatened once again by the Ghostface Killer, this time in New York City, with yet another villain’s elaborate plot to draw blood from the old familiar tropes. They’re menaced by the ghost of sequels present. It’s tense and twisty and violent and funny, and well-paced, balanced, and framed. It stands comfortably with the best of the series, albeit without the late Wes Craven’s human touch balancing mean-spirited cleverness with genuine feelings for its victims. Still, this one’s very best moments—of tender connection, of honest emotion, of sisterly bonding or genuine first-blushes of romance—hook into a similar place. Returning directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick redeem the worst routine dissatisfying notes of their previous attempt at sequalizing the once-dormant franchise by using this effort to turn their newer characters from stock repeats into something closer to understandable individuals. (Even the legacy characters who appear (namely Courtney Cox and Hayden Panettiere) and the fresh faces (Dermot Mulroney, Liana Liberato, and Jack Champion) step into something closer to believable focus akin to the series’ Craven efforts.) The movie runs them back through the machinery of its punishing plot, and wrings enjoyment out of it, even as it sees the whole slasher cycle as a curse its characters are doomed to relive every few years until the box office appetite for these cools off again.

Die Hard or Something Like It: WHITE HOUSE DOWN

Jamie Foxx cuts an Obama-ish figure as President Sawyer in White House Down, the second of two Hollywood action films this year to put the Die Hard template in the White House. Unlike Olympus Has Fallen, the terrible spin on this scenario from earlier this year which found an unlikely group of rogue North Koreans simply shooting their way into the building, this picture finds a far more insidious coalition of bad guys with richer and marginally more believable resonance. The president’s under literal attack here by an organized team of villains made up of hawks, Islamophobes, white supremacists, right-wing conspiracy theorists, and threatened corporate interests. They start by quite literally exploding apart the deadlocked legislative branch as a distraction before quickly moving to take over the White House, holding the cabinet secretaries and an unfortunate tour hostage.

But they didn’t count on one of the tourists being an off-duty capitol policeman played by Channing Tatum. He was there with his political junkie 11-year-old daughter (Joey King), but now he’s loose with the president, trying their best to make it out alive and regain control of the country. The script by James Vanderbilt borrows liberally from the Die Hard template, from the crisp setup that quickly moves the everyman lawman and team of villains (Jason Clarke, Jimmi Simpson, and more) into place, to the family member amongst the hostages, to the escalating stakes, time spent clambering up and down elevator shafts, a henchman who likes Beethoven music, and an only sometimes helpful collection of agents, officials and policemen (James Woods, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Richard Jenkins, Lance Reddick, Michael Murphy) communicating via walkie talkies and cell phones. Unfortunately, the sense of destruction feels slightly out of proportion for the rather modest little action film that’s developing.

It’s not as bloody and ugly as Olympus, but seeing thousands of rounds of ammunition expended during a rather silly car chase on the lawn of the White House dulls the impact of the violence. It’s one thing to see the dome on the Capitol Building collapse, an event that feels too real in presentation, but then why back into punches and punchlines then cut away to linger on an unseemly shot of an airplane disintegrating? It’s so often so juvenile and small it feels insensitive to ratchet up the massive damage elsewhere. The stakes often feel very real and personal, but the excessive bombast of it all distracts. But excessive bombast is what director Roland Emmerich is all about. It works in his big splashier disaster movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow and here he proves that he can still scale things back to a more contained set piece when he wants to do so.

But it's hard for him to stay small with a script like this. The film is patently preposterous right down to its literal flag-waving conclusion and Emmerich’s such a straight-faced spectacle showman that it almost works. He blew the whole White House up with one swift alien blast in Independence Day. Now he returns to the scene of the crime to spend over two hours torturing the poor place. Grounding the film is Foxx and Tatum, who keep the ridiculous on some recognizably human terms as they race around the house engaging in an almost-all-business relationship that has time for both bonding over the hardships of fatherhood and firing off the occasional snappy one-liner. They’re charming actors and the chemistry between them is natural, easy, and appealing, which is good, since they spend most of the movie alternately hiding from and shooting back at bad guys together. In a nice touch, Foxx puts on his reading glasses before shooting down his first bad guy. It’s like what might’ve happened if Reginald VelJohnson was stuck in Nakatomi Plaza with Bruce Willis instead of stranded outside.

I liked White House Down best when it gave in to its dumbest, broadest impulses, letting reasonably diverting action or genial banter carry it all along. At one point during the climactic action, a big red countdown clock reads 8 minutes until Very Bad Things happen, but characters scramble around for what felt like easily twice that length while the clock slowly ticks down its eternal seconds. That’s funny in an enjoyable stupid blockbuster way. But every time we get bogged down in the increasingly apocalyptic stakes outside the building, some energy gets sucked out of the plotting. Add to that the constant need to yo-yo Tatum’s daughter in and out of danger and the back half of the film grows increasingly grating and uncomfortable.

Around the 100-minute mark I would’ve been ready to enjoy a cathartic climax, but after another half hour ticks by, I was just ready to leave. I was rolling with the ridiculous, but every time I was asked to take the events seriously, I felt myself sinking in my seat. I did like how the inciting incident of the plot seems to be the president’s proposal of peace in the Middle East, the prospect ironically getting all the baddies riled up, but so much of the film is playing with politics in awkward ways that get blown all out of proportion by the damage on display. A shorter, less trigger-happy version of the film would’ve been better, but at least in its current form it’s still the year’s best Die Hard movie in a year that had an actual Die Hard movie. That’s less of a compliment than it sounds.

With Great Power: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

At last, a big budget superhero movie that doesn’t seem to be holding anything back for the sequel. Unlike the planning and groundwork that consumed so much of even the best of Marvel’s pre-Avengers films – those films were all leading up to the admittedly spectacular climax that was all two-hours-plus of this summer’s biggest hit – The Amazing Spider-man tells a good story all the way through. There are peaks and valleys with escalating, relatable stakes every step closer to a spectacular, surprisingly moving action finale. It’s a film that takes it’s time to build characters, lives with them, thinks through the impact of the plot’s events on them, and creates a wholly convincing fantasy world in which superpowers can come along and be the biggest blessing or the most horrible curse.

It’s only been ten years since Sam Raimi helped kick off the superhero blockbuster craze with a buoyant, charming, action film, only eight years since his Spider-man 2, quite possibly the greatest superhero movie ever made, and only five years since his Spider-man 3 was a modest disappointment to fans like me. That series, with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, the teen nerd who gets bitten by a radioactive spider to become the titular hero, is still so fresh in my mind that the biggest problem I had with this new version was clearing the old out of my mind. It didn’t take too long before I had and soon enough I was swinging right along with this fresh take. It may not contain anything as iconic as the rain-soaked upside-down kiss, but it has plenty of emotional heft to call its own.

Director Marc Webb made his debut three years ago with (500) Days of Summer, one of the best romantic comedies in recent memory. He may not be the most obvious choice to helm such a colossal effects-oriented undertaking, but he handles that showy, explosive material quite well. The impact of his first film can be felt in the nicely observed early stretches of this film where we’re introduced to our new Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) as he shuffles and mumbles his way through his average life with his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field). It’s been said many times before, but bears repeating, that Spider-man is the best of all superheroes precisely because of his everyman qualities. He has problems with family, with school, with girls. For him, being bitten by that spider (the exact details of the new version need not be recounted here) is both an exhilarating puzzle of an athletic workout, puzzling over new skills and powers, and a deeply dangerous worry.  Swinging from building to building may be fun, but once you start to take on greater responsibility, danger to himself and the ones he loves become all too real.

The plot of the film (the screenplay is from James Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent, who worked on Raimi’s Spideys and Steve Kloves, who adapted the Harry Potters) involves Dr. Connors (Rhys Ifans), a man without an arm who is desperately trying to find a way to regenerate tissue in humans by crossing with a patient’s genes the DNA of animals like lizards, who can grow back lopped off limbs whenever they please. Peter’s late father used to work for Connors, so he’s drawn into the scientific plot fairly early, and is soon after committed to help fix things after they, of course, go wrong, as they must in a superhero movie. One thing leads to another and the good Dr. becomes a slimy villain. At least his schemes doesn’t grow too outlandish and, though his own physical attributes gain something like superpowers, he can’t exactly be called a supervillain, He’s a mad scientist who becomes a force of nature. Complicating the issue is that his intern is one Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), a pretty girl from Peter’s school who picks up on his Spidey confidence and asks him out. Their relationship develops tenderly, in beautifully played scenes that dance between comedy, romance, and awkwardness. Peter woos her, even confides in her, to a point, despite the tension of her police chief father (Denis Leary), who is currently on the hunt for both Connors and the masked vigilante known as Spider-man.

As you can tell, the movie tells a fairly routine superhero origin story, but it tells it with such a depth of feeling and passion. The effects are convincing, yes. But the real attraction here is the warmth and emotion behind the suit and mask, the real sense of physicality and danger in the chases and confrontations. The cinematography from John Schwartzman is nimble and acrobatic, swinging through New York’s concrete caverns and slipping with clean, clear movements through fast-moving, mostly comprehensible action sequences. The actors are uniformly terrific, from the parental compassion in Sheen and Field, to the beautiful brainy Emma Stone and her pragmatic, funny tough-guy dad in Leary. And Garfield, for his part, carries the movie, selling the transformation from socially paralyzed underdog to superpowered, sometimes overconfident, underdog as well as his soft romanticism, sharp smarts, and heavy guilt.

I never expected to like The Amazing Spider-man to the extent I did, loving as I do two-thirds of what Raimi did with this classic comics’ character over the past decade. (As much as I liked it, Amazing has nothing on Raimi's first two Spider-man films.) And yet this happens all the time in comics where one writer or illustrator ends his or her run on a series and a new artist (or group of artists) comes on board to make the character new again. That’s what happens here, thrillingly, refreshingly so. Marc Webb has made a terrifically compelling superhero movie with genuinely tense action set pieces, many with vertiginous heights and scary drops, and a welcome focus on characters that helps ground it all in very high stakes. What a thoroughly enjoyable spectacle. At the risk of sounding too corny, this Spider-man is amazing, indeed.

Quick Look: THE LOSERS

The Losers is the KFC Double Down of action movies. It’s dumb, impractical, greasy, and messy. It’s also sporadically fun to look at, even if it’s never a particularly compelling or necessary experience. Director Sylvain White gives his men-on-a-mission actioner some style, bathing the screen in inky primary colors, but ultimately can’t keep the film enjoyable or entertaining. It’s forgettable. I found moments enjoyable, but I would find myself quickly drifting off into boredom. As the villain, Jason Patric has some underutilized charisma, but it’s unfortunate that, combined, the entire team assembled to take him down (including Zoe Saldana, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, and Chris Evans) can’t scrape up the same modest level of personality. Of course, no one involved is helped by being forced to speak the truly awful would-be banter credited to Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt. The fast pace and sporadically enjoyable style is no match for the thuddingly dumb and unceasingly sloppy screenplay. The elements for a fun action flick are here, but, just as the Double Down could sure use less chicken and more bread, the movie needed more rewrites before filming to be less bad.