Anti-Hero: BLACK ADAM

Here we are again. Black Adam is another walloping might-makes-right superhero power fantasy. It mistakes noise and movement and non-stop violence for excitement, and assumes loud frantic explanations can pass for story. It has some good visual designs and an atypical setting that engages some novel ideas, but it’s also cloaked in a dour, murderous tone and a pace that’s so quickly cut there’s no room to catch a breath. Yet I’ve also come to appreciate the DC movies for their willingness to go overboard, for their sense of careening out of control with more characters and world-shaking developments than one cluttered feature film could contain. That seems to suit the mythological dimensions of even the lesser efforts in this particular cinematic universe. Unlike Marvel’s tidy decades-long planning and homogenous style, DC has been more often than not a chaos of outsized comic book visuals and nonsense plotting that’s concurrently too thin and overstuffed. This one locates a potentially provocative story of exploitation and imperialism—and the need for the enslaved to rise up and take over their own destinies—and buries it in a hurry-scurry plot that gets nowhere fast amidst breathless exposition and cheesecloth characterizations. It’s unsatisfying in its miss, but not in its swing.

After an endless prologue, it introduces a Justice Society (not to be confused with the Justice League) that apparently works with the Suicide Squad’s leader (Viola Davis) to tackle superpowered problems. In this case: Black Adam. He’s an ancient protector of the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom Kahndaq. He was a slave granted god-like powers by the same wizard (Djimon Hounsou) who gave the kid in Shazam his boost. Adam was asleep for thousands of years. Now awoken in modern day by a freedom-fighting professor (Sarah Shahi), he mostly just wants to bring death and destruction to the imperialist gang that rules what was once his city. They fly around on their sci-fi jet bikes and amass an entirely undifferentiated and vaguely defined army. Adam, played by Dwayne Johnson with a stony edifice and rumbling monosyllabic pomposity, floats like an indestructible block through these armies of Bad Guys, exploding them in surprisingly intense ways given the ostensible bounds of the PG-13. He loves killing those who get in his way. But instead of a simple fight for his country’s freedom, the conflict for most of the movie is that the team of shiny heroes sent in to get him under control would rather he not indiscriminately murder people with his lightning hands and speed and strength and flight. Sure, the enemies are bad, the likes of Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) tell him. But that doesn’t mean you can just blow them apart.

So Black Adam fights these and other heroes—invincible action figures who slam power into power over and over beyond all reason—until they agree that they instead need to agree to disagree and stop the real bad guys together. The villain who basically sits out the first chunk of the movie suddenly, and literally, turns into a demon from hell, complete with devil horns and a pentagram on his puffed-up CG chest, inaugurating a whole new round of super-punching. It’s all a deadening too-muchness of a repetitive spectacle. The performers are game, and director Jaume Collet-Serra (the B-movie expert in his recent, less effective, A-budget phase) manages to whip up some appealing bombast here and there amidst the otherwise fuzzy, muddy visuals. (I especially liked the fractal planes through which Brosnan travels.) But the swirling frenzy deadens and dominates more than it entertains. I could imagine a version of the movie where it had a slightly sharper take on its politics. Coding the Justice Society as clueless American interventionists is already a step in a clever direction. Explaining their existence even a little bit might’ve been nice. The movie would still need a better shape to its story, though. There’s so much repetition of plot and action beats that one wonder why they wasted their time doing it all so quickly the first time. It may have suitably outsized potential—and a huge, booming orchestral main theme that promises a grander adventure than we get—but it’s just a bludgeoning experience to which you either begrudgingly surrender or give up on entirely.

Call of the Mild: JUNGLE CRUISE and VIVO

Jungle Cruise is a throwback to a throwback to a throwback. It’s Jaume Collet-Serra’s Stephen Sommer’s Steven Spielberg’s homage to adventure serials. And then there’s a whole lot of other recent(ish) live-action Disney adventure movies — Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure — thrown in on top of the fact it’s loosely based on an attraction from Disneyland et al. The wonder is that it works at all. The jaunty opening has much promise. It’s 1916, a time when a story like this would’ve made fine pulp magazine reading. We find a scrappy woman explorer (Emily Blunt) infiltrating a stuffy old boy’s club scientific association in jolly old London in order to heist an artifact that will lead her to a magic flower deep in the Amazon. There’s some clever sneaking and light fisticuffs, ending with a near-pratfall involving a window, a ladder, and a double decker bus. Neat. From there, the whole set up is archetypal adventure fun as it goes through some stunt-show paces. To the plucky woman we add her persnickety posh brother (Jack Whitehall) off to the jungle where they hire a punning, slumming skipper (Dwayne Johnson) willing to hire his ramshackle boat for their purposes. Hot on their tail: the Kaiser’s U-boat-captaining son (Jesse Plemons) who speaks in a loopy accent and talks intently with wild animals; and some gloopy undead conquistadors who look like rejected designs from Verbinski’s Pirates.

So the variables are there for a fine adventure, every cog in place. Even the thin, vaguely African Queen dynamic plays off some light crackling dialogue at first. Johnson does sturdy, unsurprising work as a steady rock, while Blunt wears the pants in the transaction, and the character actors spin around the margins to keep the plot and the comedic relief puttering along. There’s a baseline competency here, surely courtesy director Collet-Serra, who, with smaller genre efforts from the disturbing adoption horror story Orphan and economical shark attack picture The Shallows to a string of Liam Neeson’s best thrillers, often does more with less. Here, though, in the grinding machine of the biggest studio around, he ends up doing less with more. As the movie goes on, the stunts get less focused on charming old school pleasures like dangling from ropes and swinging off boats, and more on endless CG haziness and weightless peril that drags on and on. By that point the characters have never really sparked with personality beyond the surface appeal. Even the increasingly boring puzzle that is the central quest — it’s both too simple to care about, and too complicated to figure out without arbitrary exposition — never generates more than a token amount of suspense. The fizz goes out of the confection way too early and then you’re just stuck watching the animatronic figures passing for people as the screenplay’s stiff hydraulics makes them herk and jerk. The whole thing is dopey and baggy and corny and chipper and artificial. In other words: it’s a theme park ride. Guess that’s the point.

Somehow Sony Animation has been more consistent about letting the distinct personalities of its filmmakers shine through their projects. Earlier this year was the charming, hectic, sharply funny The Mitchells vs. The Machines, which definitely fits the Gravity Falls sweet-and-silly creepy-and-clever mold from which its makers hail. Other high points include Spider-Verse making comic panel sense out of CG swoops. Even the Hotel Transylvanias have been an interesting push-pull between the cartoony look of animator Genndy Tartakovsky and the hangout vibe of star Adam Sandler. The studio’s latest is Vivo, the story of an adorable kinkajou, a small critter that looks like a cross between a monkey and a raccoon. He performs with an old busker on the streets of Havana. If you didn’t go in aware this was a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, you’d know the instant the animal opened its cute little mouth to sing-rap his way through an introductory song. It gives the movie that distinct wordy patter and lilting melodies that made Hamilton and In the Heights such good song scores. Sure, Miranda’s seemingly been everywhere the last six or seven years, and sometimes crosses over into the omnipresence that invites backlash — or at least people growing tired of his formula — but I still get a little musical theater lift out of his syncopated enjambment and complicated rhymes. Vivo feels like his work through and through, from its loners longing for belonging, to families struck with loss, and communities coalescing around what makes them special. That the screenplay is credited partially to Quiara Alegría Hughes, Miranda’s Heights co-writer, makes that continuity all the more apparent.  

The plot here is pretty standard kids’ movie stuff, but it’s done up in pleasant style and set to a fine beat. Vivo’s elderly owner gets an invitation to attend the final concert of his old unrequited love, a famous singer who moved to Miami when they were younger. He can’t make it, for sad reasons, but Vivo gets his hands on a love song the man wrote for her explaining his true feelings. So it’s up to the kinkajou to get it to Miami himself, reluctantly tagging along with a rambunctious tween Floridian to get there in time. The simple story jets through the Everglades, meeting other animals along the way, while the girl’s mother gives chase, and the big concert draws nearer. The whole thing has the hurry-scurry energy of some Pixar-style moves, without working up to that level. And there’s never much sense that the ending’s in doubt. But, however thinly drawn, the designs of the characters are cute, and the look of the animation is painted in popping primary colors. And there’s a zip to its plotting that seems to understand the story is simple and the motivations are broad. Even when it leans down hard on sentimentality, there’s plenty of time spent in a sweet spot of cartoon silliness and unexpected little gags. (I liked a despondent love-sick bird, and, elsewhere, some overzealous Girl Scouts in pursuit of our leads.) There’s also the bouncing energy from consistently apportioned musical numbers keeping the project afloat. They may not be top-tier Miranda compositions (maybe the Moana vet is saving his really great stuff for his forthcoming return engagement with Disney Animation), but there’s a certain charm and cleverness to the Latin rhythms in music and lyrics. I couldn’t help but grin when an imaginative girl spins a swirling hallucination out of a dance track about following the beat of her own drum, or at a climactic number in which a speedboat zooms toward a neon Miami as different characters sing about running out of time. And in the end it’s a sweet-hearted all-ages movie about appreciating family you have and what talents you can share. It’s nice.

Shark Night: THE SHALLOWS

The Shallows is a survival story of the highest order. Intense and expressive, it deserves mention in the same category as The Grey, Life of Pi, The Revenant, 127 Hours, or certain Jack London stories. It’s a woman versus nature thriller stripped of all but the most necessary components, wasting no time in setting up her terrifying predicament while supplying the exact right amount of character development to help us understand her skill set and her mental state. It’s lean, visceral, and convincing, introducing us to a young woman (Blake Lively) taking a break from med school to go surfing at a remote Mexican beach. Soon tragedy strikes, leaving her stranded 200 yards from shore, clinging to a rock for dear life. A large shark has attacked, leaving one of her legs ripped and punctured, bleeding and infected. The animal’s ominous fin continues to circle between her and the beach as night falls and no one is around to help. It’s a crisis shot through with a palpable sense of weary helplessness. How could she possibly get out of this?

Running a trim 87 minutes, this is a spare, minimalist, and artful mainstream thriller of uncommon focus and intensity. Every second is there for a reason, from early sunny nature photography and surfing stunts that paint a portrait of an idealized getaway, to the sudden cloud of dark red blood in the water as the shark attacks, to the methodical approach Anthony Jaswinski’s screenplay takes to playing fair with the setup and payoff. There’s nothing here to strain credulity overmuch; it simply takes in a smart, capable person’s one-step-at-a-time drive to problem solve and stay alive. It becomes a struggle of wits and persistence. As the woman tries to stop her bleeding and take stock of her surroundings and the shark lurks, often unseen, it’s a tossup as to which being will outlast the other. The film plays out in mostly wordless passages of tense close-ups and medium shots, piecing together its protagonist’s mental process in intuitive edits helped along by occasional moments where she’s muttering or talking to herself. When the camera cuts back wide and long, emphasizing her isolation, it’s abundantly clear how alone she is, and how necessary her self-reliance becomes.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, one of our finest B-movie practitioners, excels at these expertly contained genre exercises, from wax museum slasher House of Wax to airplane-set thriller Non-Stop. With The Shallows he meticulously creates a relatively small natural space defined by obvious and memorable landmarks clearly and consistently positioned. She’s stuck on a rock, high tide and low tide bringing certain death near and far on a predictable – but hardly comforting – ebb and flow. Collet-Serra’s frequent cinematographer Flavio Martinez Labiano frames the action to always triangulate the geography. There’s the beach, the open ocean, a rock, a buoy, a whale carcass. Every image carries the facts and weight of her situation and location, and how little she has to work with. We know how far she must swim to reach safety, and can see the slowly dawning trial-and-error strategy she deploys to think her way to safety. It helps the movie has so effortlessly and off-handedly introduced her skills. She’s an expert surfer, and therefore knows her way around the water. She’s a world-traveler, and thus able to adapt to foreign situations. She’s a med student, and so naturally can rip a makeshift tourniquet off a sleeve and assess the damage of a bruising and potentially gangrenous leg.

As soon as there’s blood in the water it’s a film of tension, released only in quiet foreboding and contemplation of existential panic. In widescreen framing simmering with a John Carpenter approach to eerie classical discomfort and convincing, restrained effects work, Collet-Serra allows shadows and waves to hide and reveal sources of danger. These, and shots straight out of Jaws staring up at bodies and boards in motion from deep below the water, form a patient escalation as her situation becomes more and more desperate. In one particularly upsetting moment of violence – as a potential source of rescue is devoured – the camera holds on Lively’s face, her reaction the clue to the gore that’s later merely glimpsed. The film is so precise, building thrills bit by bit, emphasizing key details through effective focus pulls, simple shot/reverse shot, and in confident shifts of perspective. Use of a GoPro, for example, transcends potential found-footage wooziness or gimmickry to be an integral puzzle piece, and careful insert shots reveal the tools at her disposal with perfect casual deliberateness.

Because the film so easily brings the audience to an understanding of who and where this woman is, it has believably airtight plotting that allows her to arrive at decisions in understandable ways. This isn’t a thriller that’s ahead or behind its lead; she behaves exactly how you’d think a reasonably smart and prepared individual would when faced with such incredible and harrowing circumstances. Inhabiting these trying moments, Lively does career-best work in a performance of pain and despair, finally arriving at grim resolve. She’s not sure she’ll live. But she’ll fight as long as she can, the best that she can. Lively spends the film in a swimsuit, shivering on a rock, wincing in pain, screaming in agony, talking to herself and a seagull, shouting at distant figures, timing tides and the shark with her waterproof watch, and having one horrifying setback after the next. She holds the movie’s every frame with captivating everywoman appeal, pushing forward despite the odds with raw survival instinct.

Collet-Serra begins the film introducing elegantly simple and essential backstory by superimposing her phone’s screen in the corner over her arrival – perhaps the first movie to quietly, seamlessly integrate exposition via texts and Instagram. Through a quick FaceTime call we glimpse her father and younger sister, and surmise from her insistence on finding the same obscure and mostly pristine beach her mother did many years ago that she’s mourning a death. She’s contemplating dropping out of med school. She’s isolated from everyone she knows, at a loss as to what her life will become, dealing with grief. And so getting attacked by the shark and stuck in the shallows becomes a moving metaphor for depression. She’s close to safety, but for the toothy unstoppable natural force making saving herself a difficult prospect. It seems impossible, and yet she fights on, determined to reunite with her loved ones and return to solid ground. The simplicity of the film’s construction makes the subtext far more moving than a showier approach could manage, and maintains a gripping, exciting, and nerve-wracking focus on her plight.

After Hours: RUN ALL NIGHT

Like all the best Liam Neeson action/thrillers of late, Run All Night taps into a deep well of depression and sadness. It’s brisk and exciting, but suffused with reluctance, concerned with matters of broken homes and beaten psyches. Neeson brings a certain amount of dignity to these man-of-action roles, a great actor refusing to coast in material others might view as merely paychecks. He can see the tragedy here. It’s a big part of what makes The Grey, Non-Stop, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the best bits of Taken such crackling entertainments. They’re elevated by solid direction smartly focused on Neeson’s weary gravitas, a man fighting through existential sorrow to do what he feels must be done.

In Run All Night, he plays an alcoholic ex-hit man trying to wrestle with the demons of his past. He’s estranged from his grown son (Joel Kinnaman), who knows the truth about him and has run towards respectability, working two jobs to make ends meet for his young family. When complications arise and the shooting starts, we find ourselves in an exciting actioner about bad dads and shattered sons trying their best to heal understandably troubled relationships. It’s gruff tough-guy poetry, family melodrama through car chases and shootouts, a gripping violent thriller lamenting the difficulties in breaking cycles of violence.

Neeson’s boss (Ed Harris) has a son (Boyd Holbrook) the same age as his. This young man is the opposite of Kinnaman, trying to be even half the gangster his father was. This leads him to killing a rival drug dealer, a crime Kinnaman happens to witness. Talk about your bad coincidences. So Neeson must scramble to save his son as the full weight of his old criminal friends’ organization swings down to silence the witness. This time, it’s personal. Neeson and Kinnaman race around a New York City night, illuminated by scattered thunderstorms to enhance the drama, trying to stay alive. Around seemingly every corner they find crooked cops, trained killers, and old friends who are suddenly, reluctantly, new enemies (an ensemble full of small roles for Bruce McGill, Vincent D’Onofrio, Common, Genesis Rodriguez, and Nick Nolte).

What’s so satisfying about this set-up is the way screenwriter Brad Ingelsby and director Jaume Collet-Serra make the pulp melodrama as crackling as the action. Terrifically tense scenes of suspense and violence turn into moments of interpersonal conflicts, atonement, and reconciliation as great actors sit and work out characters’ problems. Collet-Serra, who has been grinding out clever and blindsiding impactful genre fare for a while now, quietly becoming one of our most reliable B-movie auteurs with the likes of Orphan and Neeson’s aforementioned Non-Stop, makes space in a film of hard-charging grit for quiet emotional beats. These moments in which characters engage in off-the-cuff soul bearing one-on-one exchanges play just as effectively as the hand-to-hand combat, vehicular mayhem, and discharging firearms.

Collet-Serra’s camera swoops through New York streets, connecting scenes with a CGI Google Street View aesthetic, but Anton Corbijn collaborator Martin Ruhe’s cinematography settles into dancing grain crisply cut together by editor Dirk Westervelt. The filmmakers know how to make a weighty action contraption look great and really move. It starts slow, but once it takes off it builds an irresistible momentum grounded in slick crime drama stoicism, the kind that has as much fun conjuring the dread of violence as the act itself. Whether we're running through an evacuating apartment building tracking multiple deadly cat-and-mouse games, or sitting behind a curtain hoping a bad guy won't think to look there, the film builds its tension out of what might happen, even as it gets satisfaction setting off the fireworks when happenings do erupt.

There’s a moral gravity here, of a deadly sort, that emphasizes the terror as well as the thrill. The filmmakers are wise to key into Neeson’s form, the weariness and grief conjured up by a slump of his shoulders, or in a soft gravely sigh. He’s playing a man clearly skilled in the art of effective violence, and yet can now only summon up the power to put those skills to use to protect those he loves. It’s a dependable formula, and in the hands of such skilled practitioners of the craft, it’s a fine example of its type.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop: NON-STOP

In 2005 and 2006, we had a small post-9/11 glut of thrillers set on airplanes, all largely excellent in one way (United 93) or another (Red Eye, Flightplan), or another (Snakes on a Plane). It’s a subgenre I’m happy to return to yet again in Non-Stop, especially when it’s done well, and even better, when we’re seated next to Liam Neeson. He has such likable, intimidating intelligence on screen. Using his height, his gravely accent, and his piercing eyes to communicate a soulful determination and confident capacity for handling any situation in which he finds himself, he anchors and makes compelling even the junkiest of thrillers, like Taken 2. For very good thrillers, like The Grey, he helps make them into terrific suspenseful evocations of existential anguish. Non-Stop’s entertainment value falls somewhere between those previous pictures. It’s a relentless entertainment that constantly tightens the situation around Neeson, constraining options and narrowing his ability to maneuver until the panic reaches a crowd-pleasing intensity.

In this slow boil thriller of slickly increasing and enjoyable suspense, he plays an air marshal aboard a late night transatlantic flight from New York to London. Not long after takeoff, he receives a series of texts from a blocked number. Each new message flashes on the screen, the silence of the midnight flight turning ominous as the texts reveal an ultimatum. A passenger will be killed every 20 minutes unless $150 million is transferred to a specified account. It’s a hostage situation, but only the marshal knows, at least at first. Who is the hostage taker? It’s someone on the plane, but he or she is doing an awfully good job staying hidden. (Could this be the first organic and well-executed use of texting for the purposes of cinematic anxiety?) Director Jaume Collet-Serra, of the skillfully upsetting horror film Orphan and the Neeson-starring actioner Unknown, uses the darkened nighttime interior of the plane to heighten the drama and keep the stakes intensely enclosed.

A cleverly contained mystery, the film is smartly not a whodunit, but a who-is-doing-it. Any one of the people hunched over their tablets and smart phones could be doing the threatening. It’s a high-flying locked room mystery, Agatha Christie by way of Speed. The screenplay by John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, and Ryan Engle respects the audience’s intelligence as it follows Neeson looking around the plane, hunting for anything suspicious. The appealing ensemble is loaded with familiar faces playing passengers (Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, Corey Stoll, Omar Metwally), flight attendants (Michelle Dockery, Lupita Nyong’o), and airline officials (Anson Mount). All of them can ably appear suspicious and innocent in the same instant. Neeson is desperately searching amongst and around them for a clue when events suddenly conspire for a corpse to turn up exactly on schedule. The threats are no mere prank. They are deadly serious.

As events on the plane grow increasingly desperate, curiosity escalates in the passengers and crew. Information and rumors spill out in dribs and drabs of context-free worry, eventually making their way to the ground where authorities, like Shea Whigham in a good voice performance as a security official calling the plane’s phone, and news media assume Neeson is the one doing the hostage-taking . That only makes solving the case harder for the poor guy. It’s a credit to the inexorable forward momentum of the film and the welcome shades of complexity to this Hitchcockian wrong-man panic that I found myself desperately wanting Neeson to be right, but half-prepared for a twist that would put him in the wrong. It sure looks like he’s being framed, but in this situation everyone is a suspect. The plane keeps cutting through the night sky, too far to turn back to America, still too far away from Europe to make a landing. But as the threat of violence looms, casualties slowly pile up, and Neeson’s behavior grows increasingly desperate, it’s agonizingly clear they’re eventually heading to the ground one way or another.

Non-Stop stays at a consistent height of peril, compelling and involving throughout. Neeson grounds it all with a weary humanity as an alcoholic ex-cop with sad family problems, a token amount of backstory that would seem cheap if a lesser actor was in his position. He reluctantly finds himself the center of this madness, and the one with the best chance of bringing it to a safe conclusion. Collet-Serra makes great use of Neeson’s height and broad shoulders in contrast to the tight aisles and low ceilings of the setting, finding ways to use every bit of the plane in clever ways, even sending the vehicle into sudden turbulence to punctuate dramatic moments. The raw material is nothing inherently special, but in its execution it rises to the level of superior craftsmanship. It is a solid, exciting, and satisfying thriller.

Guess Who: UNKNOWN

Unknown is a nice, chilly thriller that’s so pleasantly confounding for so long that the biggest shock of the last act is to find how dull and routine it becomes. I enjoyed the film, but only to a point. The mystery is tantalizing, but the big twist left me disappointed. It’s a real shame, considering how much enjoyment I had been getting from the moody opening which finds a biologist and his wife landing in Berlin for a big scientific convention of some kind. The biologist is Martin Harris (Liam Neeson, in the same ballpark as his surprise hit Taken), an imposing figure with a soft-spoken demeanor. His wife (Mad Men's January Jones) is an alluring frosty presence. The happy couple threads through the airport and end up in a taxi that cuts through the snow and slush taking them to the fancy hotel and conference center. When they arrive, Neeson discovers that he has left his briefcase at the airport. Rushing back to retrieve his important files, his taxi driver swerves to avoid an accident and ends up plunging off of a bridge and into the ice-cold river below.

Four days later, Martin Harris wakes up in the hospital. His only problem is his newfound sense of disorientation. He learns his wife wasn’t searching for him. That’s odd. When he shows up at the hotel, she claims she doesn’t know him. That’s odder. What’s more, another man (Aidan Quinn) is claiming to be the real Martin Harris. The camera tilts and the focus pulls. What’s going on here? The sense of confusion and impenetrable mystery kicked up by this development is intriguing.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, who last directed the disturbingly effective 2009 horror film Orphan, keeps the atmosphere heavy and slick. The wintry Berlin wind kicks off-white snow down endless mazes of grey concrete and imposing architecture. There’s a chill in the air as Neeson makes his way through a crisis of identity. The existential dilemma is balanced nicely with the sub-Hitchcockian silliness of the plot. For quite some time, it’s a nice little B-movie with A-list talent.

As Neeson sets out to discover the truth behind his situation, the plot thickens. He searches for his cab driver (Diane Kruger) and, when he finds her, discovers that she doesn’t want to talk to him. Hit with a dead end there, he talks to a kind nurse who tells him about an acquaintance of hers, a former Stasi agent (Bruno Ganz) who likes to keep his mind agile by doing some light investigation on the side. Intrigued, he agrees to help.

After several enjoyable chases and surprising murders that force Neeson to team up with Kruger to find the truth behind the mayhem, the elderly agent makes a breakthrough. This leads to the greatest scene in the picture, a case of when very good scenes happen to mediocre movies. It involves Bruno Ganz’s investigator coming into contact with a shady gentleman played by Frank Langella. For this one brief scene, the two world-weary men converse easily and warily while revealing some Big Secrets about the upcoming plot twist. It’s an example of accomplished, dignified actors elevating their material.

But, unfortunately, the movie goes downhill from there. Once Martin Harris realizes the true nature of his reality and the full ramifications of what is about to happen, the film turns into a series of fairly standard action beats. While still technically accomplished pieces of action filmmaking, all the central tension of the film has gone missing. I could not care less about the late breaking MacGuffin. What hooked me into the film were the nice chilly thrills with a suitably rattled protagonist. It begins as a movie of icy blondes, mysterious strangers, and wise old men. It ends as a rote action thriller with a ticking time bomb of a threat. The questions the film sets up made me curious for answers and when they arrived I wish they hadn’t. It’s a shame that the long-awaited answers end up killing the tension. When a thriller about a man who doesn’t know who he is turns into thriller about a man who simply has to save the day, that’s kind of a letdown.