This Anti-Hero Sucks: MORBIUS

People were down on Morbius since it was first announced, as if the idea of making a mid-tier Spider-Man villain the star of his own debut, disconnected solo movie was patently ridiculous. When superhero comics are strip-mined for every part that might make a movie or TV show, because they’re currently the only projects making huge bucks at the box office or drawing big audiences to streamers at a reliable rate (or so they say), one can’t exactly be surprised that a Marvel character who’s a living vampire wouldn’t make some executives’ pocketbooks perk up. This has to be especially true of the folks at Sony, who are riding high off the success of two Venom movies, which also spun non-Spidey stories out of that comic’s web of side characters. When fanboys scoff and meme about this particular movie, as if other Marvel movies aren't commercially minded brand decisions, well, they certainly are capable of massive cognitive dissonance.  

So here we are with Morbius. Shrug off the negative hype and see it for what it is: a decent little programmer, an unfussy little monster movie that plugs into the woe-is-me, tortured-creature thing that works well enough for it, even if it’s drowning in overfamiliar plot moves. Director Daniel Espinosa knows a thing or two about making derivative B-grade studio fare classed up with some fine casting and cleanly-cut action. His space-station-set sci-fi chiller Life is a cramped little Alien riff, and his Safe House lets Denzel Washington run circles around Ryan Reynolds in shaky bruising violence. Are they cliche genre pictures? Certainly. But they go down easy because Espinosa makes the elements play like well-oiled machines. So he knows how to make Morbius bubble to life with some attention to component parts—the tragic backstory, the fatal flaws, the dogged detectives, the arch-rival, the doomed lover—and casts well enough. The picture crawls to sufficient life, ambulating the cliches into something like minor popcorn pleasures.

The film finds Dr. Michael Morbius, genius inventor of cool blue synthetic blood, hard at work on a cure for his rare blood disease. One thing leads to another and, whoops, he’s a vampire now, sucking down his own invention until he sniffs out the superpowered benefits of the real thing. Jared Leto is awfully convincing as an aloof creep, who sometimes does good work, but also has everyone who is aware of him side-eying his decisions. His monster posture and pained expressions are a perfect camp match to his lunging for his blood bags and sucking them down like a Capri-Sun. The supporting cast includes Jared Harris as a conflicted older doctor, Matt Smith as a friend and fellow patient who turns villainous, and Al Madrigal and Tyrese Gibson as FBI agents hot on the trail of a rash of vampire attacks. Gee, who could that be? All involved elevate their stock material ever so slightly through sheer will, screen presence, and knowing how to sell the silliness.

The whole thing is too small to build to any real spectacle., but that’s almost refreshing in its dim, short, simple way. The basic story beats are hit with a steady plunk, and build to a reasonable one-on-one vampire fight. Along the way, effects like rippling sound waves and tendrils of supernatural senses pop in neat-enough comic book poses. And in the end, I did sorta care to find out if Morbius would get to save his love interest (Adria Arjona) from a fate worse than death and stop the villain from giving vampires a bad name. There’s some genuine poignancy to his dilemmas, and you can feel the better monster movie straining to get out. 

The screenplay may be a pileup on the trope highway, but there’s some actual feeling and imagination in its creaky premise. It’s worse the more it tries to be a standard modern superhero movie—never more so than its dire end-credits scenes nonsensically teasing surreally forced connections. And yet that’s what the people say they want? (Leave before you can see them unless you have morbid curiosity.) It’s better when it’s own little thriller, leaning into its own preoccupations, doodling in its own world. And it’s certainly a better bit of junk cinema than so many others of its ilk that mistake a traffic jam of cameos and references to a story. You know the ones.

Spies Like Thus: ALLIED

It is fitting Allied, a glossy new film from Robert Zemeckis, opens on Thanksgiving weekend, because its appeal is not dissimilar from a Macy’s parade. The movie is a shiny empty spectacle in which two performers of balloon-sized star power are paraded down a straightforward, unsurprising route. Zemeckis is too skilled a technician to make it badly, but for all the sharp, clear staging and gleaming period detail, he hasn’t thought through a way to make the screenplay jump into anything resembling life. It’s beautifully inert, handsomely dull. He’s clearly out to make a grand old-fashioned entertainment, a World War II spy picture that – colorful widescreen use of the R-rating aside – could’ve been made in the forties. It starts in Casablanca – a real statement of purpose, that – with two Allied spies (Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard) meeting on sand-swept streets. They are to play husband and wife Vichy sympathizers, get invited to the German ambassador’s upcoming party, and then kill every Nazi in the place. That’s a great hook, and afterwards it’ll spin out in what should be gut-wrenching consequences, but instead dwindle to boredom.

The peculiar tension of Zemeckis’s artificial approach is highlighted in the opening shot, a slow move around Pitt parachuting into the desert as he slowly, gracefully, lands upright on two feet with a soft puff of sand. It looks as if he’s standing still with scenery composited in around him, like a promo shot for a Virtual Reality headset. But it’s also a terrifically entertaining dose of stardom as Pitt – perfectly coiffed and tailored – is met by a car in the middle of nowhere. He’s driven to town where he meets Cotillard, who is wearing a glossy dress stunningly draped over her figure. Zemickis is in full command of his dazzling technique, letting the two spies get drawn into a real romance flowering under their cover story. Asked how she can be such an effective spy, Cotillard responds that she keeps the emotions real. Indeed, the same goes from the opening hour of the film, which features elaborate camera fakery and intimate collisions of charisma, climaxing in two moments. First, they finally make love in the back of a car, the camera spinning around the vehicle while a howling digital sandstorm whirls outside. Second, they gun down Nazis at a blood-splattered party. Fun times.

After a decade spent making (underrated) animated films, Zemeckis is now three films into his return to live action. He’s clearly enjoying the full CG complement of tools at his disposal to finally create complex camera moves he’s been working towards his whole career. Think about the trickery on display in Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, and Contact and watch how much bigger, longer, and more complicated the artifice can be in Flight’s wild plane crash or The Walk’s vertigo-inducing skyscraper tightrope. He’s not doing anything so elaborate here, instead concocting with cinematographer Don Burgess’s scrubbed smooth images a sort of vintage throwback spy movie, with patiently filmed polished backlots and wardrobe, perfect and shiny, the better to complement his movie stars. There’s just nothing like putting a real person in an elaborately imagined feat of moviemaking. (Perhaps it’s worth pointing out Zemeckis’s three post-animation films contain nude scenes. I suppose that’s making use of the live in live action?) So when sharply dressed people watch the sun rise over the sand dunes, Nazis get blown apart, or London’s skies light up with enemy fire, there’s a charge to seeing the layers of phony visual interest designed for our amusement.

But for such a good-looking film, it grows tedious the instant it introduces its most gripping complication. Pitt and Cotillard return from Casablanca to England, where they promptly decide to get married. A year passes, during which they have a child, born during an air raid in one of the movie’s best hyperbolic set pieces. Then, one fateful Friday, Pitt is called into a secret meeting where his superiors (Jared Harris and Simon McBurney) tell him his wife is most likely a Nazi spy. They’ll know for sure by Monday morning. He’s to act like nothing’s out of the ordinary, but if she’s found guilty he’ll be the one pulling the trigger. If he doesn’t, he’ll face indictment for conspiracy. This should be gripping material, like Mr. and Mrs. Smith in reverse, dazzling espionage funneled into a comfortable domestic life instead of the other way around. Every minute of this weekend should be loaded with portent. And yet writer Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) has designed a screenplay that separates the couple for large portions of this second half, sending Pitt on increasingly inane attempts at investigating that are both useless and fruitless. For such a great spy, it takes him a dreadfully long time putting the clues together.

Zemeckis has the right cast and crew to pull off a stylish WWII thriller, but the screenplay tunnel visions into its least interesting aspects. It privileges a limp mystery over a rich vein of emotional marriage metaphor lingering untapped below the surface. In sidelining Cotillard, it shoves the romantic tension and the questions of betrayal far into the background. In isolating Pitt it leaves him adrift in a plot beyond his control despite all attempts to gin up conflict to wander into. (A late breaking jaunt behind enemy lines is especially dunderheaded, adding nothing to the plot while separating him from where the entirety of the film’s dramatic interest sits.) As the movie enters its long, slow, concluding sequences, it finally succeeds in choking off personality and promise while snoozing through dull revelations and last minute attempts at shocking turns of events. After such dazzling artifice and dopey movie pleasure up front, it’s depressing to watch it all fade to nothing by the end. It’s simply a great idea – and some polished, confident filmmaking – going to waste.

Lost and Found: CERTAIN WOMEN

Kelly Reichardt is one of our finest filmmakers. Her keenly judged eye for detail and sense for powerfully felt interiority imbues her films with casual and precise empathetic observation. Her latest is Certain Women, a trio of gem-like short stories so patiently unfolded and deeply considered, each moment, each shot, each breath is used to further their gripping emotional trance. Like the best short stories – these are adapted from the works of Maile Meloy, whose direct prose is of such concision and power she reads to me like nothing less than an Alice Munro, or a modern woman Hemingway – they turn on small shifts of emotion or perception, tremble with unspoken or thwarted desires, and snap shut with satisfying finality nonetheless played with notes of ambiguity. These are stories of isolation and loneliness, of women who need to make connections, feel satisfaction in their lives of quiet desperation. Set in beautifully austere small towns and open spaces of the northern midwest, Reichardt visualizes the quotidian with a poet’s spirit, and understands her characters’ deepest yearnings down to a molecular level.

Here’s a movie that inhabits its characters lives. We don’t just observe their strife or contemplate a crisis. We live with them, understand the rhythms and dramas of their days, and become so closely attuned to their personalities it’s possible to feel the entire weight of a story change in a silence, a stillness, a pause. Reichardt sees these women with great warmth and understanding. We meet a lawyer (Laura Dern) whose troubled client (Jared Harris) is frustrated by lack of progress on his disability claim. Then we spend time with a woman (Michelle Williams) who is scouting limestone for a house she’s building out in the country with her husband (James Le Gros). A stone pile they find belongs to an old man (Rene Auberjonois) with an emotional attachment to the building it once was. Then there’s a young professional (Kristen Stewart) stuck as an adjunct night class instructor, driving hundreds of miles in the dark to and from the course no one else wanted to teach. One student (Lily Gladstone) comes in from tending horses all week looking for a fleeting moment of human connection.

Every role is perfectly cast, sensitively observed, and naturally performed. Watch as Dern sneaks back into work after a long lunch with her lover, her shirt untucked on one side. We can tell that’s unusual, but there’s something about the way she goes about her exasperated day that tells us it’s not the first time she’s let a small detail slip. Later, as her case files are used in a way loaded with danger, we wonder if her drive toward honesty is going to lead her to a bad outcome. (She confides she wishes she was man, but only so her professional life would be easier since a client would listen to her and say, “okay,” instead of continuing to debate.) Williams sneaks in a smoke before meeting her husband, then watches as he presses the old man to make a sale a little farther than she’s comfortable with. This is hardly a showy drama. It’s a story about the subtle pushes and pulls of an awkward encounter. They’re not saying all they could, or maybe should. Everyone has little secrets, small competitions, carefully tentative lines of inquiry.

The thematic strands of the first two stories coalesce in the last, and best. As the inexperienced teacher, Stewart looks uncomfortable with the gaze of the class on her. She shifts and squirms, consults her notes a bit too faithfully as she avoids direct eye contact. (She is cautious and self-conscious about opening up, as evident in a scene in a diner where she wipes her mouth with the napkin without unwrapping it from the silverware.) Gladstone – her open expressions and clenched voice, a shyness barely cracking open in the presence of what she feels, or hopes, is a kindred spirit – is desperate for someone to talk to. Her job isolates her in the fields and the barns, hard work for poverty wages. She looks forward to the class not because she’s passionate about the subject – truth be told, she’s not even technically enrolled – but because she likes exchanging small talk with the instructor. It comes to a head with a long drive, and an agonizingly heavy pause.

Here’s a film with its key capstone suspense sequence simply a long silence while the audience – if on the right wavelength – stretches in rapt engagement wondering if someone will close the gap and say what they need to say. All three stories patiently consider hushed, routine, repetitive lives into which sudden emotional surprises build slowly to small shifts in approach or understanding. It’s an entire feature spun out from a recognizable, relatable, small but fraught instant: the tremulous moment where you’re standing across from a person you’d like to know better and just can’t find the words to bridge the distance. Reichardt has cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt frame the proceedings with a calm camera, aware of the vast the landscapes and the psychological distances between people. She is a tender filmmaker whose restraint has a relaxed rigor. She tells stories of everyday life for people on the margins – at a forest retreat (Old Joy), in poverty (Wendy and Lucy), on the Oregon Trail (Meek’s Cutoff), and in an eco-terrorist enclave (Night Moves). In each, her close attention to the smallest of shifts in mood and demeanor subtly and respectfully draws out the profundity of lived experiences. Certain Women is her best work to date.

Spy Game: THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.

Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a sparkling big-screen adaptation of the 1960s’ spy show, is a super dry espionage spectacle. Its director is at his best when he’s playing with wide-frame action (shown off wonderfully in his Robert Downey Jr-starring Sherlock Holmes adaptations), intricately convoluted plotting (in Holmes and his scrappy British gangster pictures), and long winding scenes of circular dialogue that simply enjoys the pleasures of hearing pretty people speak barbed banter. It all comes together to make an U.N.C.L.E. oozing charisma out of each impeccably designed, handsomely photographed shot. It’s slight and knows it, content simply to groove on a 60’s spy vibe, like Le Carré lite, or Diet Fleming. Other than some computer-assisted camera swopping and gliding, it’d be pretty much the same thing if it were the long-lost hippest spy movie of 1963. (Well, second best. It’s no From Russia With Love.)

Ritchie and co-writer Lionel Wigram have cooked up a capering jaunt through Cold War tensions, used for little more than their vintage analog throwback appeal. They find a swaggering American spy, an ex-thief turned master of misdirection named Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill), clashing with a Russian spy, a powerful Soviet bruiser named Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). The two antagonistic national forces are forced to work together when British intelligence (personified by Jared Harris, then Hugh Grant) uncovers word that a horrible nuclear MacGuffin is in the hands of a dastardly aristocratic European couple (Elizabeth Debicki and Luca Calvani). The device will give whoever controls it power over the entire globe. That’s bad enough to get the Americans and Russians on the same page.

The following espionage and heist tomfoolery allows plenty of room for Cavill and Hammer to create a prickly competition. They never work together, exactly. It’s more like parallel missions reluctantly leaning on the other when things get diciest. Between them is a beautiful German woman (Alicia Vikander), a pawn smuggled out from behind the Berlin Wall in order to get the agents closer to her ex-Nazi uncle (Sylvester Groth), a key to finding the whatchamacallit and saving the world. She’s more charming than both men put together, and more than eager to stand up for herself and provide advice as to how the mission could be better executed. What starts as a standard damsel role wrests control over the proceedings before falling back into victimhood for the slam-bang action-based ending. Ritchie finds satisfyingly peculiar ways to show off the film’s adventure, often in the background, like my favorite moment, a boat chase that happens almost entirely off screen while a character takes a breather, dryly regarding the chaos from the vantage point of his impromptu picnic.

Bursting with star charisma, the lead trio of capable undercover agents flirtatiously needles each other about malfunctioning gadgets, critiques wardrobe choices, and withholds key information from one another. In true spy movie fashion, they all have their secret motives. But with so much buried intent in the characters’ behaviors, the film’s pleasures are nonetheless all surface. Joanna Johnston’s costumes are perfectly tailored. Daniel Pemberton's score is swinging sixties' frothiness. John Mathieson’s cinematography has an unnatural CGI flow, but a vintage crispness to its symmetries, eventually bursting forth with zippy split-screens instead of crosscutting when the action reaches its zenith. It’s all about showcasing handsome people in beautiful clothing, luxuriating in trading innuendoes and teasing insults, and enacting clockwork double-crosses with zigzagging spycraft. It’s fizzy and fine, an undemanding aesthetic delight.

They're Here. Again. POLTERGEIST

A marvelous horror movie, 1982’s Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg Poltergeist is a terrific entertainment, and one of my favorites of its kind. It’s a sustained piece of slowly mounting haunted house tension, with warm family dynamics and small creepy details eventually erupting in a spectacular crescendo of special effects-driven freak outs. A quintessential portrait of early-80’s suburbia wrapped up in skillful metaphor about expanding without regard for unintended consequences (or evil sprits) unchecked sprawl might kick up, it’s one of those films that has a time capsule quality, but has enough evergreen genre elements to make it timeless. When it came time to remake Poltergeist, building an entirely new film on the bones of the old was out of the question. Most of Gil Kenan’s remake is a bland updating, content to riff on the original’s most famous moments, finding new and slightly worse ways of doing everything.

The result is a contemporary Poltergeist of high competence, but little interest. It only works because its inspiration is still a good movie, and following it closely is a good way to make an effective little horror picture. This one plays like a passable tween-friendly summer diversion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can almost imagine heading home for s’mores and giggles around the campfire afterwards. Kenan’s film is brighter and lighter, with 3D and CGI taking the place of practical effects, and rounder edges on the frights. It runs nearly 30 minutes shorter, adds an awfully conventional arc for a young boy from coward to hero, and by and large keeps threats and moments of wit in a lower key. It’s both a little more and a lot less than what you’d expect. Unfortunately a bunch of clown dolls isn’t significantly creepier than one. Grown-ups sneaking a sip of liquor isn’t as interesting as sharing a joint. Nor is ditching a realtor as funny as pushing a TV for a concluding punchline.

But there’s entertainment value here, and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (of Rabbit Hole) does some smart updating. Now the neighborhood isn’t new. It’s hollowed out with foreclosures. The family moves into the house because of layoffs constraining their finances. There’s a recessionary sadness hanging over the opening. How were they to know their house was built on a cemetery? Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt play the parents, in a likable pair of performances. Their kids, sullen teen (Saxon Sharbino), nervous boy (Kyle Catlett), and little girl (Kennedi Clements), are the first to discover the haunting in their house, like electric disruptions and strangely menacing trees and clown dolls. Then the threat becomes very real when the youngest daughter is snatched by malevolent spirits and held hostage in their ghostly realm.

Who they gonna call? A paranormal researcher (Jane Adams) and a TV host (Jared Harris), of course. It all builds to flashes of nightmare hallucinations, a portal to the spiritual plane opening up in a closet (and looking a lot like Insidious on the other side), and a suburban home barfing up its supernatural secrets. It’s predictable button pushing, with fluid camerawork tracing digital intrusions through an eerily normal house pulsing with malevolent creepiness. Never particularly scary, it at least isn’t a desecration. It’s just barely enjoyable enough, I suppose. Kenan manages a brisk trot through some shivery concepts, efficiently deploying fine effects while finding a good deal of charm in the actors. The kids are sufficiently freaked out, and the adults get some dry one-liners to cut the tension. It’s not a bad time at the movies, with some moderate chills over before you know it.

As a fine example of what it is, I suppose you can shake off the déjà vu and find comfort in familiar rhythms. But why settle for a competent, but lesser, vision unless you absolutely have to? It’s hard not to wish the exact same cast and crew had been put to use on a wholly original movie. Not only has this been done better before, but Kenan’s even done a better family-friendly 80’s horror throwback before, his 2006 animated debut feature Monster House, a fast, funny, creepy good time. (Rent it and the original Poltergeist and have yourself a good double feature.) Here’s hoping this big budget remake allows the filmmakers opportunity to do more interesting original work in the future.

Outside the Box: THE BOXTROLLS

The Boxtrolls is a marvelous stop-motion family film with all the twisted macabre charms of a Roald Dahl book or an Edward Gorey drawing. It conjures a wondrously imagined storybook Edwardian village of crooked cobblestone streets and leaning buildings clustered up one side of a skinny seaside hill and down the other. Deep below the town’s sewers live squat grey-green trolls clad in cardboard boxes. They’re harmless, kind-hearted beings who only come out at night, scavenging for bits and bobs they cobble together into steampunk creations that form their cavernous lair. But the humans fear them, leading to a storyline about the boxtrolls’ persecution. So, yes, this is a movie about learning to accept yourself and understand others. That’s like any number of family films. But this one has dastardly shifty villains, adults who cruelly marginalize children, and a society that willfully and mindlessly oppresses. You know, for kids!

Like the best kids’ films, it’s smart and involving on a level that can be appreciated by any audience. This one is tremendously imagined, creepy and cute in equal measure. The sophisticated, funny, and deeply felt script by Irena Brignull and Adam Pava, from a book by Alan Snow, moves briskly, cleverly deploying its moralizing in a parade of grotesqueries. The villain is an ugly, greedy man with spindly legs and a pendulous belly. His name is Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), and he leads the town’s crusade to eradicate the boxtrolls. He spreads propaganda accusing the trolls of eating children and leads his team of exterminators (Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, and Tracy Morgan) out every night to capture the creatures. It’s all in hopes of being promoted into the town’s elite White Hat club.

It is not all twisted. Our hero is a boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright), apparently orphaned before the film starts, and raised by the boxtrolls as one of their own. He alone understands their adorable guttural babble, but he’s picked up human English as well. He thinks he’s a troll, but soon learns he’s a bridge between the town’s worlds. The boxtrolls fear the humans, who are controlled by leaders obsessed with hats and cheeses. They’re more than happy to delegate troll suppression to a creepy striver like Snatcher, the better to give them more time to devote to cheese. The mayor (Jared Harris) barely acknowledges his daughter (Elle Fanning), allowing her to sneak off and explore the world of the trolls. Both locales, above and below, are filled up with charming details and throwaway gags. You get the sense man and boxtroll would get along fine if only they could get over fears and prejudices.

A charmingly cracked story, the film features bouncy slapstick, clattering gadgetry, and a compassionately lumpy design. Painstakingly detailed in the way only stop-motion animation can be, the characters move like gangly puppets and interact with the world in a tangible way. Directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi oversee enveloping 3D environments that enliven terrifically staged dollhouse sets. It feels both real and not in the same instant, in the way all stories do when you’re young. There’s childlike wonder in these frames. Movements carry a weight and presence, even as the events zip off confidently down whimsical alleys.

It's beautifully ugly, eccentric in every detail. This is a movie that features a man monstrously allergic to cheese who gobbles it down anyway, his face and limbs swelling with flabby pustules as it breaks out in bulging hives. (He’s cured by being covered in a writhing mass of leeches.) Henchmen have discussions about whether they’re “the good guys.” A little girl has a sense of morbid curiosity her father finds distasteful. The town is enamored of a secretive French warbler coming to town, one Madame Frou Frou. And then there are the trolls, who tinker, dance, and waddle around, then fold back into their boxes every night, stacking themselves gently into one big family cube. They mean well, and we want to see them coexist peacefully.

This is the third film from Laika, an Oregon-based stop-motion production company. The Boxtrolls fits in nicely with Coraline and ParaNorman in style and tone, forming a lovely set of richly imagined and fantastically clever movies to delight and thrill children of all ages. I think we can safely say they’ve become as dependable and singular an animation studio as Ghibli or Pixar. We know what to expect from them visually and emotionally – something skillfully dark and sweet. These are films with personality and feeling. When so much of Hollywood’s animated product is programmatic and conventional CGI homogeny, there’s definitely room for creative people willing to make earnest stories with sharp statements and distinctive imagery. How wonderful to have Laika. We can trust their heart and intelligence and retain the capacity to be surprised and charmed by their generously overflowing delights.

Do You Like Movies About Gladiators? POMPEII

Hardly the first bit of fiction to spin a yarn about the final days of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city infamously swallowed up by its nearby volcano’s eruption, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is a sturdy evocation of old B-movie energy and pleasures. Its ties to cinema past – a little prestige Roman epic here, a little trashy sword-and-sandals actioner there – are earnest and sometimes exciting. This is a film with actors walking around lavishly fake sets in flowing togas and militaristic leather, speaking in vaguely English accents to denote their existence in the past. It features a love-at-first-sight slave boy/rich girl romance, Ancient Roman Empire intrigue, plots for revenge, threats of slave revolt, gladiatorial combat, and a subplot involving the funding for a new construction project. There’s something for everyone. Because Anderson never condescends to the material, throwing himself into making fine use of widescreen spaces and crackling effects work, it’s an empty diversion that comes by its schlock honestly and unpretentiously.

In the past fifteen years or so, Anderson has become one of our most reliably vivid visual storytellers, whether it be in a horror film (Event Horizon), an actioner (Death Race), a swashbuckler (The Three Musketeers), a sci-fi splatterfest (Alien vs. Predator), or all of the above (the Resident Evils). Now, those aren’t all great films or even good films, though I have a soft spot for some of them. But what they have is commitment to style and design that turns out terrific genre imagery and occasional fluid sequences of impressive action. They’re hardly what you’d call prestige pictures. They're the kind of mid-range studio fare that’s easily ignored or written off indiscriminately as nothing but garbage. But there’s a difference between lazy trash and artful trash and Anderson almost unfailingly brings the spirit of artful visual play to any project. In Pompeii, he designs a gloriously fake ancient city, a mix of shiny CGI equivalents of matte paintings and studio sets not too far removed from the kind Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper used for their Last Days of Pompeii in 1935. Within this overtly movie-ish setting, he lets his framing and staging pop with enjoyable momentum, pleasing symmetries, and striking shots.

One striking shot occurs right at the beginning, when a young Celtic boy wakes up after being knocked out cold while Romans slaughtered his entire village. He finds the corpses of his father and other rebels dangling by their feet from a lone tree in the center of a vast field. The boy grows up to be an enslaved gladiator (played by Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington) who is taken to Pompeii to compete in their tournament. He’s the slave who’ll catch the eye of the rich girl (Emily Browning). She’s the daughter of Pompeii’s leaders (Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss), and spends her time fleeing the unwanted advances of a Roman senator (Kiefer Sutherland). That senator happens to be the man who led the massacre of the slave boy’s village (small world) and happens to now be in Pompeii to pay an imperially threatening visit to the town which is simmering with potentially rebellious undercurrents.

These plots are all stock elements put together by screenwriters Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler, and Michael Robert Johnson with dutiful coincidences. After all, how better to make us care about the town that’s about to get buried in lava than populate it with characters engaged in colorful cardboard historical melodramas? I haven’t even mentioned the champion slave (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who will get his freedom if he kills the boy in combat. There’s a lot of conflict in this little town. Something bloody was going to go down here even without the volcano blowing its top.

The characters and plots are engaging in a rote way, but what really makes them click is the casting. Harington walks into the picture abs-first, swaggering down a dungeon corridor and into the arena in a fine entrance. He’s a chiseled hero and good match for his foe, who Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays as a tough guy you just know will come to team up with the man he’s forced to fight and attempt to get back at their enslavers. It’s a long time coming, but fairly satisfying when it does. Then there’s the romantic co-lead, Browning, who doesn’t speak so much as breathes every line from between perpetually parted lips. Harris, all gravitas, and Moss, all tough caring, lend a fine sense of parental authority to the proceedings, while Sutherland is all patrician slime. They do good work with thin material, much like their director, who makes them look great and, working with cinematographer Glen MacPherson in their fourth collaboration, brings his considerable visual interest.

It’s the rare movie that’s never fully convincing, sometimes almost laughable, and yet grows more urgent and involving every step of the way. It ends on a high downer note as the gladiator movie turns into a rumbling disaster movie. Rolling walls of acrid smoke, oozing lava, collapsing pillars, crumbling ground, and crashing waves fly off the screen (the 3D is flinchingly good in this department) as extras stumble around, smacked by debris, spilling down cracking staircases, and flailing about in flames. Pompeii is falling apart like there’s no tomorrow, but there’s still plenty of time for the stock subplots to finish off in predictable but largely satisfying ways in sword fights, chariot chases, thundering comeuppances, sacrificial acts, and a kiss. There’s not much to Pompeii in the end – or much to Pompeii in the end, come to think of it – overall nothing more than shiny schlock. But because Anderson stages the material earnestly, confidently, with a nice cast and visual appeal, it’s endearing schlock all the same. 

Franchise Nonstarter: THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones had all the raw material for a decent fantasy spectacle, but somehow managed to fumble putting it all together. Based on the first of many books in a series by Cassandra Clare, the story follows a young woman who learns that she has secret powers and is drawn into a world of Shadowhunters, an elite race of beings who are sworn to protect the world from demons. It’s a full mythology full of theoretically interesting paranormal lore, but the film gives off the distinctly flat feeling of presenting only the tip of the iceberg. Much like Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters from earlier this month, Mortal Instruments seems like the work of a studio desperate to start up a Harry Potter­-style franchise without feeling the need to put forth the effort needed to properly set up the world. It plays like a movie that may require a read of the book to decode, or at least to see what all the excitement is about.

The plot that’s built to rocket an audience into this fantasy world takes off right away, launching into fantasyland before even orienting us in the “normal” character’s “reality.” A teenage girl (Lily Collins) finds that her mother (Lena Headey) has been kidnapped by mysterious forces. A young man (Jamie Campbell Bower) that only she can see steps in to welcome her into the world of the Shadowhunters, introducing her to the Institute, New York City’s branch of the worldwide organization of demon hunters, armed with magical weapons, dressed in leather, and tattooed with powerful spell-casting runes. The group decides to help her track down her missing mother, who, it turns out, was actually a Shadowhunter who years ago fled the group, hiding a supernatural artifact (a “mortal instrument”) from the villainous Valentine (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who had been in hiding, but is now back and causing trouble. Collins is a great every-girl at the center of all this, cute and capable, totally in over her head but willing to sit patiently while the much-needed Jared Harris (late of Mad Men and Fringe) steps in as the requisite Older English Exposition Machine to explain all of the above and provide a dose of appealingly-accented gravity.

This is one of those fantasy movies in which a seemingly average person experiences wildly fantastical events with a surprising sense of calm. It’s bad enough the girl’s mother was kidnapped, but learning that she’s now been drawn into a centuries-old conflict between Shadowhunters and demons, complete with various neutral factions of vampires, werewolves, and warlocks, among other legendary beasts, seems to be something that should at the very least surprise. All things considered, she takes it in here with a remarkable degree of calm, especially when she learns her downstairs neighbor (CCH Pounder) is really a witch and her mother’s boyfriend (Aidan Turner) is a wolfman. She’s willing to go with it. Her best friend (Robert Sheehan) gets drawn into all this as well and seems to be more or less agreeable to what’s going down around him, matter-of-factly asking a veteran Shadowhunter (Jemima West) how to kill a zombie. (Turns out they don’t exist in this fantasy world. That’s a nice joke.) The sense of urgency drains away along with the characters’ sense of surprise.

It’s all so blandly presented. Director Harald Zwart doesn’t try anything too cinematic, simply capturing the production design in a flat, unadorned and inexpressive way. He fills the screen with appropriately gross CGI beasties and assorted worldbuiling paraphernalia, but it’s basically the CliffNotes version of the YA series. There’s a lot of backstory left on the table, inelegantly excised or clumsily shoved in. I appreciated a funny little moment in which we discover Johann Sebastian Bach was a Shadowhunter, but that’s a rare moment mythology is allowed to take a breath before zipping along to the next plot point. (It also doesn’t matter much in the long run, aside from providing a rare bit of poking fun at its own premise.) The screenplay by Jessica Postigo grows muddled and slow, even as it rushes along. It avoids overheating romance subplots and keeps its expansive backstory strangely small. The movie ends up feeling cautious and generic, unsure how to bring forth its source material’s best assets.

There’s no good sense of the size or scope of this fantasy world. How many Shadowhunters are there? We hear references, but it’s unclear how the organization operates. Why does the fate of the world seem to come down to a small group of teenagers hiding out in New York City? The movie is filled with the kinds of questions that I’m sure fans of the books could answer for hours, but that’s the kind of stuff that could have and should have ended up on screen. I’m not asking for a movie that sits around explaining its world for hours at a time. But wouldn’t it be nice if the world unfolded with the narrative instead of clumping along, introduced only when necessary to get us to the next scene with as little context as absolutely needed? The main thrust of the narrative frays until the movie becomes less of a story and more a collection of events recreated from the source material in more or less the appropriate order. It’s not always clear what the connective tissue is from one scene to the next, because the world feels half-realized.

In the end, it all comes down to a typical climactic conflict of good versus evil, but because the world has been so sketchily built and the ensemble so vaguely characterized it’s hard to tell what exactly is at stake. What are we to make of a warlock (Godfrey Gao) who sails into the story, speaks a few lines that conveniently push things along, and then disappears from the film without a trace? (“Oh, by the way, you’re being invaded,” he basically says, before never appearing again.) Or what about a pack of werewolves that speak ominous references to “breaking the accords” and then proceed to scamper around helping our heroes despite having no introduction and who disappear before the dénouement? The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones seems like it knows what it is talking about, but maybe next time (if there is a next time) it should figure out how to tell it in an entertaining way.

Outwit, Outlast, Outplay: SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

I remember being surprised by how much I found myself enjoying Guy Ritchie’s take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes when it showed up two years ago. It was the kind of big holiday season spectacular that rolled in, made a bunch of money, and rolled away leaving nary a trace. I remember only the sensations, the charm Robert Downey Jr. brought to the title role, and the surprising score. I looked back on what I wrote about it at the time and found that I called it “a mostly enjoyable experience, a big-budget, slightly goofy, action-thriller-mystery driven forward, and kept afloat, by its cast, its production design, and the charmingly off-kilter score by Hans Zimmer that recalls The Third Man’s zither in its unexpected instrumentation.” So, there you have it. It was a fun movie, but, aside from distinctive aspects of design, casting and score, not especially memorable on the plot level.

Going into Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I was ready to be disappointed. Once again, I emerged surprised. It’s a fun, slam-bang adventure in the spirit of its immediate predecessor, hardly the patient mystery of past Holmes, but still a rush, and I mean rush, of deduction that often leads to loving photographed destruction. It’s a slicker follow up to a film that was itself very slick. Ritchie directs with a bit more of a more confident style and a wider screen, speeding his characters through a convoluted, yet ultimately simply twisty, plot set amidst fantastic production design. The 1890’s bric-a-brac is lovingly presented as it sits ready and waiting to be blown to bits. The costumes themselves are sheer delight. This is a movie that has an old-school period-piece glamour that it zips through with action sequences sped up, hacked up, or slowed way down. It’s a collision of approaches that can be quite bracing.

The plot this time around concerns Dr. Watson (Jude Law) checking in on his good friend Holmes (Downey Jr.). The detective has been consumed with his research into a series of bombings that have plagued Europe in recent months. The opening sequence, involving the beguiling Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) from the first film, causes Holmes to start drawing connections. These bombings, blamed in the press on anarchist groups, must be circuitously connected to the devious Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris, most recently found on TV in Mad Men). But before the investigation can continue, it’s Watson’s wedding day. Too bad the poor bloke won’t get much of honeymoon, though. Moriarty is onto Holmes’s investigation and targets the two men in order to take them out of the equation. No loose ends can be had, you see.

The film becomes a continent-crossing adventure that takes Holmes and Watson from London to Paris, from Germany to Switzerland. They even pick up a helpful gypsy (Noomi Rapace, so good in the otherwise awful Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) who sneaks them across borders and helps them decipher some crucial clues while Sherlock’s brother (Stephen Fry) helps them decode the treacherous political climate that has Europe on the precipice of war. For most of its run time, the script by Michele and Kieran Mulroney keeps the set pieces big and action-heavy. The rapport between Holmes and Watson still shines at times, but more often than not they’re getting involved in shootouts and fisticuffs that occasionally turn into chase scenes and extensive use of explosives.

But right before I was about to declare myself warn out by the film’s bigger-is-better attitude, it pulls back. The climax thrillingly foregrounds the mind games that Holmes and Moriarty have been playing over the course of the last couple hours or so. Theirs is a game of wits and skill, misdirection, obfuscation, and surveillance. I wish the film could have let us in on the game a little earlier, giving us clues instead of relying on rapid-fire flashback inert shots that show us all the little details, even moments of earlier set-up, that only Holmes saw earlier. Downey Jr. and Harris are a good match, though. They’re believable charming and intelligent and bring to their roles a nice amount of playful danger. They clearly hate each other, but are relishing the opportunity to clash intellect with their equal and opposite.

It all provides a good time at the movies. The movie is a light, accessible romp through late-1800’s Europe, and a thunderous, stylish, red-blooded adventure with little comic flourishes. There are even some good set-ups and pay-offs and some nice winks at original Holmes lore. (I particularly appreciated the use of a waterfall late in the picture). It’s hardly essential, but with both of these Sherlock films Ritchie’s doing some of the best work of his career. These are stylish, reasonably well done crowd-pleasing popcorn films, with mostly satisfying mysteries, puzzles worked out with some degree of wit amidst the gunfire and explosions. 

New Carpentry: THE WARD

This is the first in an intermittent ongoing series in which I'll be catching up with some films from 2011 as we begin the end of the year.

An insane asylum can be a great setting for a horror movie, especially one doubling as a period piece. Straitjackets can be creepy enough, but when you add jolts of painful electroshock therapy and sharp, swift lobotomies, the whole atmosphere of the place is downright threatening. Rarely are we relieved of these threats, put in the shoes of the doctors and nurses. We’re always right there with the inmates, struggling against the ever-present struggle between sane and insane.

This is the location of The Ward, John Carpenter’s return to the big screen after a decade of absence. Once upon a time – the 70’s and 80’s – he made with great classicism and terrific style some of the most memorable horror films around with Halloween and his remake of The Thing, even his silly-but-creepy killer car flick Christine. The Ward isn’t exactly a return to form, it’s not good enough for that, but it’s still refreshing to see him working again.

A fine group of young actresses portray the inhabitants of the 1960’s ward that serves as the film’s claustrophobic setting. As the story begins, a runaway turned arsonist (Amber Heard) is carted into the place deeply convinced of her sanity. The other girls (Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Laura-Leigh, and Lyndsy Fonseca) are sure she’s crazy, just like them. Why else would they all be here? They sit under the stern, watchful eye of clichéd mental hospital employees, the stern nurse (Susanna Burney), the brutish orderly (D.R. Anderson), and the mysterious doctor (Jared Harris). It’s awfully strange that the inmates seem to be disappearing one by one at the hands of a ghost and the staff doesn’t want to talk about it. Creepier and creepier.

Unlike his earlier work, Carpenter has less of a sole responsibility for this film, serving as only director, working from a screenplay by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen. As director, he brings his precise visual sense. It’s not as refreshingly classical as one might hope. He amps up some of the moments with some of the standard visual tricks and gimmicks of modern horror. The camera moves more than his past work, but the editing within the shots often remains refreshingly restrained and tightly controlled.  When the camera does slow down, even stops, there are impressively static compositions that allow characters to move within them. A scene in the common room of the ward in which the girls decide to bounce around to a record playing gains a quiet tension through the patience with which it unfolds. On it’s surface, the scene has no overt scares, but it has a sneaky build beneath the ordinary.

It’s a movie that works best in moments like those, when the ordinary operations of the ward are allowed to simply happen. A patient coolly refusing her medication, a doctor calmly discussing therapy, inmates sitting around talking, these simple moments become the stuff of creeping unsettling. When the ghost shows up, it’s often the kind of gotcha jump scares that caused my heart to leap but then almost immediately settle down, as I felt a small measure of sheepishness for falling for such tricks. That’s the essential nature of the film, scary in the moment but it just doesn’t stick. For all its patience, it’s also kind of predictable. And that twisty conclusion’s a bit of a cheat isn’t it? I hope this is an example of Carpenter stretching his artistic muscles, getting back into the kind of shape that will lead him to once again direct a great film. This is more or less a good B-movie (more like a B-minus), but in the end it’s as inconsequential as it is promising.

The Ward is now available on Blu-ray and DVD.