Cruise Control: TOP GUN: MAVERICK

The secret sauce of Top Gun’s appeal is that it’s hard and soft, mechanical and sentimental, gear-headed and soft-hearted. There’s militarism and macho posturing among students at a Naval flight academy, with as much attention to glistening bodies as the planes’ chassis. But it is balanced out with a cocky young pilot’s attempts at wooing a woman out of his range, and his wing-mate’s loving relationship with a doting wife and son. Sure, a mysterious Other is out there, and the military needs to train these men to fight it. But there’s the homeland to be tended in the meantime, too. Tony Scott made this movie of fast planes and smirking retorts drip with montage and soft rock, an extended advertisement for itself. But the sneaky romantic core is surely what made it popular. And embracing that is what makes the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick even better. This time around, director Joseph Kosinski—whose great resume is a perfect preparation for the task, with a belated and much-improved sequel to an 80s favorite, Tron: Legacy; a Tom Cruise action spectacle, Oblivion; and a men-at-dangerous-work, process-oriented tearjerker Only the Brave—precisely calibrates the requirements and delivers a movie that’s muscular, delicate, and relentlessly, manipulatively satisfying.

The 36-year gap between the original and this sequel has necessitate a more mature approach. I’m glad they didn’t try to claim Cruise’s hotshot pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is still a youthful paragon of gleaming, arrogant precociousness. That was the typical Cruise role at the beginning of his stardom, but Maverick finds him willing to admit to his age. Much like the Mission: Impossibles’ later entries really took off once Cruise was willing to make his hero small in the frame, a perpetual underdog just scraping by in, well, impossible tasks, this sequel finds Maverick at the other end of a long career. We hear that, after graduating Top Gun, he served overseas multiple times, and is now working as a test pilot for experimental planes. He also still bristles at authority, which means he remains a Captain after all these years. He knows he needs to placate the brass (Ed Harris, Jon Hamm) just enough to keep him in the cockpit of really cool, really fast planes. But he’s also enough of a hotshot to want to push the limits wherever he can. This brings him back to Top Gun as an instructor, a punishment, perhaps, for one more clash with a direct order, or salvation, perhaps, on the part of an old friend (Val Kilmer) who sticks up for him one more time. Is there still room for a hero like Maverick, in a program for a kind of air combat that’s less a pressing issue in a world of drones and insurgencies? And does he have what it takes, not merely to prove himself, but to prepare the best-of-the-best for a dangerous mission that’d be certain suicide if they can’t master his techniques?

This allows for a movie that’s a more relaxed and gentle story about fathers and mentors and hoping to make up for old mistakes and prove one’s relevance to a new generation. (The movie’s definitely self-aware there.) The youthful energy of the first picture is now off to the sides, and centered on others. Throughout it leans on Cruise’s age by letting him play something like a normal person instead of a gleaming hero. He’s surrounded by younger trainees, including one (Miles Teller) who is the son of a fallen character from the original. This complicates the emotional valances of the training. Cruise wants to help these students survive by teaching them to pull off nearly-impossible maneuvers—tight, vertiginous dives and steep, face-melting climbs. But his understanding of the costs of this job, and this mission, makes him reluctant to put them in danger at all. He feels like he owes it to his late friend’s son. But here’s a movie about making things right from your past, and finding people to help along the way. It’s most expressive in the warm middle-aged romance on the margins, as Maverick reconnects with an old fling, an admiral’s daughter who is now a glowing, bar-owning, single mother (Jennifer Connelly). This is just one more way the movie sets up cliche and diverges into unexpected heart. What in the previous film would be a quick flirt is now a slow smolder, and where the lovemaking montage should be is instead a montage of small talk. How sweet. Later, as he sneaks out, the woman’s teen daughter stares down the old man and, right when you think she’d snark, instead says, “Don’t break her heart again.”

Because the movie so genuinely believes in the emotions of these cardboard types, it sells the stakes. It builds setups and pays them off with aplomb. The training sequences, shot in convincing aerial stunts, are a beguiling mechanical spectacle. And even if the ultimate mission is geopolitically preposterous, it’s still a gripping and tense spectacle of planes and missiles for an extended action climax. It comes down to a militaristic fantasy of faceless bad guys from a nameless country to whom consequence-free violence can be committed without larger global complications. (This is the way it has to be for our global film marketplace, but recall the original was similarly cagey; they both have all the specificity of a recruitment ad.) But because the picture is so elegantly manipulative, with its gooey warm sentiment powering the interpersonal dynamics, and the hard-charging dogfights and explosions of the finale so muscularly deployed and crisply cut, that it’s hard not to get swept up in its concussive artifice. All that and a soaring power-ballad pounding over the end credits, too? That’s the perfect combination of hard and soft for which you go to a movie like this.

Rainy Day: NOAH

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is abstract and literal, bombastic and tender, reverent and perverse, overwrought and undercooked, vindictive and compassionate, spiritual and silly. That may make it tonally and thematically more authentically Old Testament, but it also makes for a rather uneven movie. Aronofsky’s vision is one part Biblical epic, two parts digitally enhanced fantasy, both informed by an occasionally fevered approach to a quasi-environmentalist message. All of the above is then filtered through the Hollywood expectation machine, where you can’t be given over $100 million dollars and not throw in a third-act fight, an easily recognizable antagonist, and CGI rock giants. It’s nothing if not serious in the execution, faithful to the Biblical story about a righteous man told by God to build a massive ark to save animals (two of every kind) from an imminent worldwide flood meant to wipe out sinful hordes of humanity. The result is a film too glum to be of much camp value and far too ridiculous to take it all that seriously, but lingers with an odd power all the same.

At the center of it all is Russell Crowe, wearing the burden of Noah heavily on his shoulders. He trudges with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and sons (Douglas Booth, Logan Lerman, and Leo McHugh Carroll) to get advice from his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). The old man gravely helps him to interpret his vision of the world underwater, corpses floating by, animals swimming up towards the sunlit ark above. It’s a nightmarish image that gives Noah the strength to move forward and do what must be done. As the plot moves forward, the film addresses some of the tale’s most preposterous elements with answers that seem at once gloriously symbolic and thunderously inane. How did Noah and his family get the wood to build the ark? It was a magic forest they grew from a seed grandfather gave them that ancestors saved from the Garden of Eden. How did the animals show up, two by two no less? They followed a magic stream that bubbles up from that same seed. How did the family deal with the animals once on the ark? They put them into deep, peaceful comas with a magic potion. Later they wake them back up with the antidote.

These elements are treated so seriously, with much weight and overworked awe that it’s hard to know how we’re supposed to take it. Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel wrestle with this simple story by turning the symbolic literal and back again. With cinematographer Matthew Libatique, he’s quick to sketch vivid, epic imagery and slow to synthesize coherence. It’s a clear labor of love, but that’s what also makes it a bit of a mess. This pre-flood world is a sparse, fallen fantasy world, a sort of Lord of the Rings-esque place of magic and monsters, sin and scares. It’s all so serious despite those rock giants (voiced by the likes of Nick Nolte and Mark Margolis) who are fallen angels cursed to walk the Earth who decide to help Noah build his ark, magic stones – strike them and they become fire – and Hopkins made up to look like a white-haired cave-dwelling wizard.

The mythic fantasy Aronofsky constructs appears meant to be partly a vaguely historic reality and an obvious abstraction for us to think through the notion of the relationship between man, the environment, and the divine and the obligations they have to each other. The intent is serious. No kid-friendly animal antics here. (Would you expect it from the director of The Wrestler and Black Swan?) But in striving for both reality and fantasy, it’s often neither, a colossal bore that no amount of dramatic imagery and intense emoting from the cast can cure. It’s no help that the film has some real transcendence within it, rubbing up against cheap drama that feels out of place.

A magical sequence has Crowe intone the story of Genesis while Aronofsky cuts to a Malickian Tree of Life time-lapse creation of the universe, the Big Bang sending the cosmos rapidly spinning down to Earth, evolution, Eden, exile, and, finally, the flood. Elsewhere, much is made out of Noah’s middle son’s preoccupation with finding a wife. His older brother already has a woman (Emma Watson, quite good) and he thinks he better get one while he still can. This subplot takes up a fair amount of energy, although the film doesn’t seem too preoccupied with how humanity will grow post-flood. Still elsewhere, conflict comes in the form of a villainous Ray Winstone who wants to kill Noah and his family for being so holier-than-thou, then leads armies to attack the ark once the rains come.

What is all this conventional interpersonal melodrama doing in a movie about spiritual crisis and the end of the world? That’s where the film is best, growing poignant and provocative. Aronofsky, echoing his 2006 ambitious philosophical sci-fi film The Fountain, is best at locating the real test of faith and emotional strain in his characters. The first night the family spends in the ark, the howling screams of those left to drown are carried in on the buffeting winds. The weight of morality weighs heavily upon them. Who are they to choose who lives and who dies? Perhaps they, too, should perish, the better to let nature take its course unblemished by human hands.

The entire flooding sequence, as the wood creaks, the door slams shut and the water crashes down, is effective and stressful. Aronofsky cuts to a wide shot of their boat in the distance, a craggy rock closer to the camera covered in a mass of people, clinging for their lives before slipping, washed off the face of the world. It’s a harrowing image articulating the great paradox at the center of the Noah story, as scary and searching as a pious Renaissance painting. But the great paradox of this Noah is how deeply strange and yet how weirdly conventional it manages to be. It’s not particularly good, often straight-faced silly in its loosely Biblical fantasy. (When the snakes slither up to the ark, Noah’s wife gives him a look that says, “Snakes are coming, too?”) But it’s so ambitious and thought provoking it is hard to dismiss entirely.

Endless Love: WINTER'S TALE

Winter’s Tale is a movie that’s big, open, and earnestly sentimental in a way that films rarely are. It’s also so very bad that it’s enough to make you wish movies were big, open, and earnestly sentimental a little less. Based on a novel by Mark Helprin, it is written, directed, and produced as a passion project by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who in his career has had a hand in glossy studio schlock of one kind (A Beautiful Mind) or another (Batman & Robin). Here he brings all the tools of industry to a film that’s nothing more than self-satisfied hogwash, supremely dopey in its story about a scrappy New York thief (Colin Farrell) who falls in love with a beautifully sickly girl (Jessica Brown Findlay) and has an enemy in a demon (Russell Crowe) who petitions Lucifer (Will Smith) to let him squash the couple. Or something like that. As the drippy voice over that starts and ends this mess says, the story postulates that the universe bends over backwards to help each and every person fulfill their Destiny, find True Love, perform Miracles, and other types of capital-letter cornball metaphysical hooey.

Yes, you read that right. It says every person gets to experience this, but, the film stipulates, only the very luckiest among us get the chance to glimpse our lives’ patterns in their fullest and most twinkling expression. In this case, Farrell loves Findlay so intensely that after she dies the bounds of mortality are slipped free, but only for him. He wanders New York City for 100 years with no memory of his past , waiting for his True Purpose to be reawakened, and to perform his one great miracle and be turned into a star and placed in the heavens forever next to his beloved. We don’t get to see more than a time-lapse montage of the skyline changing to signify the passing of years. One minute it’s 1915 or thereabouts, then here we are in 2014 and a memory-less Farrell spends his days drawing with chalk in public spaces and bumps into Jennifer Connelly and, later, Eva Marie Saint. It’s all for a Reason. It’s all trembling with Importance. It’s all so very satisfied in its coincidences and insistence that everything happens for a reason. I don’t know. I think I’d rather life be cold, empty, and meaningless than have it mean any of this.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s a magical horse that appears and helps Farrell out of a jam now and again, sprouts ethereal wings whenever convenient, and might be an earthly manifestation of the Pegasus constellation? It’s the kind of movie so convolutedly confusing in its inanities that to describe it makes one seem to be devolving into a raging lunatic. On the one hand it’s dealing with complicated and almost entirely unexplained fantasy rules of treaties between angels and demons and Crowe has to ask Will Smith’s goofily creepy Devil to bend the rules and stop a miracle in progress or something. On the other hand, the whole thing is motivated by a kind of pseudo-spiritual romantic martyrdom so feverish and swooning that it’d probably make Nicholas Sparks cringe. It starts with Farrell entering the life of the girl who grows more beautiful as she nears her death from consumption as her worried father (William Hurt) frets. It ends with a child dying of cancer as Connelly worries close by. Consumption and cancer makes for quite a heavy pairing to be treated so twinklingly in a film that shoots for magical realism and arrives somewhere much closer to magical thinking.

Confused in the details and dunderheaded in the grand sweep, Winter’s Tale is a misfire on all levels. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel somehow manages to make every shot look like it’s taking place inside a knockoff Thomas Kinkade painting, too-perfect snow and glowing hearths underneath a lens flaring night sky. The screenplay is stuffed with syrupy hippie dippie dialogue that’s at once overwritten and overtly simple. No prop – be it a bed, a flower, a plaque, a drawing – goes without immediate transformation into broad Symbolic Importance. It all works to anesthetize a cast of usually compelling performers. It might’ve been easier to take if even one relationship was something more than irredeemably unbelievable. It’s not easy to make William Hurt, Eva Marie Saint, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, and Colin Farrell all complete nothings, communicating not a single moment of emotion or interest amongst them. With an ensemble like that, you could and should be well on your way to a terrific movie. Instead, in its endless slog through soggy sentimentality, self-important stupidity, and blatantly thematically schematic design, it grows interminable. It can’t even scrape up some unfortunate campiness. It’s just awful through and through. 

Funny Business: THE DILEMMA

The funniest thing about The Dilemma is that, despite being sold as director Ron Howard’s return to comedy, it’s not very funny. In fact, every time it tries to be funny in a broad, silly way, it falls embarrassingly flat. The comedy seems jammed up into the corners of a somewhat serious drama. If it weren’t for all the straining for laughs in Allan Loeb’s screenplay, this could be a much better film.

It stars Vince Vaughn as a man who plans on proposing to his longtime girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), following the advice of his happily married best friend (Kevin James). As he scopes out the perfect spot to pop the question, a lovely botanical garden, he notices his friend’s wife (Winona Ryder) making out with some younger guy (Channing Tatum). He takes it upon himself to learn more and ends up sneaking around town peeping in windows and trying desperately to avoid revealing anything before he’s sure of all the facts.

Now saddled with secrets and questions, he squirms about and ends up making each and every social situation more and more difficult as he struggles under the pressure of being the only person in the room tuned in to all of the nasty subtext. So many comedies draw their laughs from the unspoken comedic tensions between characters, that it’s strange, but not entirely unpleasant, to see one throw away the comedy to focus solely on the tension.

After wading through deadly dull scenes of formulaic comedy windup, especially a nonstarter of a subplot involving an awfully miscalculated use of Queen Latifah, things get interesting. For the majority of its runtime, the film functions well as a compelling, wild-eyed melodrama, a darkly depressing look into seemingly normal relationships with deep dysfunction hidden just below the surface. Funnily enough, there are some genuine laughs found amidst the pleasurably agonizing drama in sequences of acute social discomfort. As the web of secrets that supports these characters’ interactions grows more prominent, the romances and friendships involved threaten to collapse altogether.

And then, the movie deflates the tension quickly and clumsily. Tension falls away in favor of a queasily pat and tonally odd ending that feels like it belongs to the opening attempts at comedy instead of the moments it follows. It’s a movie that recovers very nicely from an opening stumble only to fall back into the same traps by the end.