Sinners: WAKE UP DEAD MAN

Rian Johnson’s third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, is the least immediately appealing. Compared to the autumnal glow of Knives Out or the summery vibes of Glass Onion, with their pleasing puzzle-box structures to match, this new movie is darker, meaner, scarier, and heavier. It’s set largely in a rural Catholic Church in the middle of the woods during a muddy spring trending toward dark and stormy nights of weather and of the soul. That’ll also guarantee it’ll be the one that simpatico audience members will forever be saying, “you know which one’s actually the best?” I won’t be one of them, but I’ll know where they’re coming from. Here’s where the clever froth of the first two gets weightier, losing none of the sharp social satire while gaining a theological dimension. Its honest wrestling with faith and duty and denial of surface pleasures will resonate with people who tire of cozy mysteries and need that dark chocolate genre packaging of the Gothic. There’s a scene where Blanc asserts his doubts as the clouds blot out the sun, and as his innocent interlocutor loses himself in a spiritual rebuttal the sun returns full force through the stained-glass window behind him. Johnson’s playing in the light and dark more overtly here. The movie’s clearly got souls, not just lives, on the line in yet another expertly organized murder mystery plot. 

The small congregation’s charismatic right-wing Monsignor (Josh Brolin) has been murdered in a seemingly impossible way, and the new, more progressive, priest (Josh O’Connor) finds himself tagging along with Blanc (Daniel Craig) as he tries to untangle the suspects. We have a tense lawyer (Kerry Washington), a drunk doctor (Jeremy Renner), a wannabe influencer (Daryl McCormack), a wheelchair-bound cellist (Cailee Spaeny), a washed up sci-fi novelist (Andrew Scott), a recovering alcoholic groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church) and a scarily strict devout old woman (Glenn Close). The sort of broken people drawn to such a cultish devotion to a cruel man of the cloth are all likely culprits. And the religiosity of the setting matching the apparent irreconcilable facts of the case lend toward much talk of potential supernatural solutions. The movie’s verging on horror at times, and even though it doesn’t tip over into total fantasy, this picture has the series’ gnarliest and creepiest sights. The ensemble of suspects aren’t as finely drawn, and get none of the snappy punchlines we’ve come to expect from this series. They’re all guilty as sin of something, though almost none are guilty of murder. And the intensity of their beliefs means they’re all sweating it out under the glare of their crooked faiths. The tangle of violence and betrayal is weightier than ever. Even Blanc is subdued in the face of it, though his honeyed southern accent remains a delight. Johnson’s clearly finding something dark and searching in our current cultural moment and gets to use the elements of such a dependable genre’s scaffolding to express them. 

First Contact: ARRIVAL

Like all the best science fiction, Arrival uses heady ideas to illuminate humanity. In the movie, large black pods descend upon the Earth, hovering ominously above twelve, seemingly random, spots on the globe. We don’t know what they want. Armies mobilize. News media chatters endlessly about our anxiety. And with a grim, secret determination, small bands of researchers try to figure out a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Their silence is scary. But science just might find a way. We follow one of those teams, a linguist (Amy Adams) and a physicist (Jeremy Renner) recruited by a colonel (Forest Whitaker) to helicopter into the base around the UFO in the wilds of Montana. The object opens every 18 hours, a passageway into which they can climb and attempt to learn the aliens’ language. The mysterious beings hide behind a clear wall, spindly, spidery grey giants in milky off-white fog, uttering their inscrutable otherworldly tones. How we react to them, how we attempt to understand them, will determine the fate of the world. Is that kind of emotional intelligence, that drive to cooperate and understand, within the powers of the human race? After all, it’s so much easier to give into the fear of the unknown, to scapegoat, to shoot first and ask questions never.

Alien visitation narratives can take many forms: the campy, the exciting, the funny, the metaphorical, the ponderous. Director Denis Villeneuve, whose films like Prisoners and Sicario are pulp procedurals told with heavy deliberateness, treats Arrival with great seriousness. Austere, carefully composed images captured by cinematographer Bradford Young tell the story with patience, watching competent people doing their jobs in extraordinary circumstances. Maybe one of the most poignant effects of watching the military and scientists quickly get over their bewilderment and get down to the business of figuring out what to do next step-by-step is its fantasy of competency when faced with unprecedented events. Remember thinking our political and intellectual leaders could withstand such a test? But the movie isn’t safe fantasy. It interrogates the impulses with which mankind would greet such a moment. Some countries send researchers of their own into the UFOs nearest them, eager to share research with colleagues at other sites. Some countries lock down, militarize, and greet news of others’ discoveries with suspicion. One wrong move could bring unknowable consequences. Will one bad faith act wreck the planet for us all?

Villeneuve, working in the shadow of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Contact, in which scientific process is diligently portrayed until leaping into pure poetry at the point of its most beautiful conjectures, imagines the events with cautiousness and precision. If this were to happen, this might be how it’d go down. There’s a tick-tock element of professionalism to the researcher’s routines. We see them pouring over data and fitfully sleeping before it’s time to go into the UFO again, hands shaking as they attempt new techniques of communication. The progress is slow. The stakes are high. Everyone moves as if in a daze, determined to get it right, too overwhelmed to register how mind-bending and world changing their position is. Villeneuve, so good at conjuring dread and awe, uses every ounce of his ability to give these events their full weight. We stare up at the massive edifice of the object, stare in wonder at its enormity, its unusual construction. It dwarfs the actors who move up into it. Clouds roll by. Below, the humans wait for its next move, if it will ever come. It’s a beautiful and terrifying unknown.

The impeccable craftsmanship of the film gives it its unshakeable mood, and its dizzying intensity. With a story like this one, equal parts mystery and reverence for what other filmmakers could’ve easily turned silly, tone is crucial. By maintaining tight control over the soft light and somber soundtrack, the eerie alien creaking and clunking and crisp man-made tools clicking and clacking, Villeneuve keeps the proceedings compelling in their stillness, their intellectual puzzling, and slowly accumulating power. The film begins with the story of Amy Adams’ linguist losing a loved one (earning weeping faster than any film since Up), associating the earthshaking discovery with death, grief and fear mingling as one melancholy unknown. This backstory is shuffled into the background as the film gets down to business, informing the emotional terrain subtextually. But as it bubbles back up, the film reveals its full intentions, melding a massive coldness with subtle warmth, tenderness invading the foreboding.

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s reverent expansion of the short story by Ted Chiang – one of our greatest sci-fi authors – faithfully recreates the full, breathtaking, head-spinning melding of real emotion and speculative fact. How fulfilling it is to be confronted with big budget sci-fi spectacle that actually grows more complicated and confounding as it goes along. So often these things start with provocative questions then funnel into a routine battle or cliché confrontation. Here, it’s a what-if scenario played out with respect for its characters’ weary commitment to facts and faith in the power of process. They aren’t gilded with subplots about interpersonal conflict. Instead, they have a job to do, and the plot is studded with smart suppositions and clever obstacles: an uncooperative foreign military, a soldier quietly radicalized by right-wing conspiracy websites, the adverse effects of little sleep and lots of stress. It asks a familiar question – what is one fleeting human life in the fullness of time and space? – in a gripping intellectual thought experiment procedural, and finds in the end not a puzzle-solving solution, but beautifully poetic answers in a way only this genre could find.

War of Superhero Agression: CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

Once more we return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where an ever expanding roster of superhero Avengers quip and spar and save the world across interlocking franchises and overlapping continuity. Captain America: Civil War is only the latest in this series to expend energy maneuvering the multicolored combatants around while teasing more stories to come. It’s nothing but sequels to a variety of its predecessors – in addition to the third Captain America it operates as Avengers 3 and Iron Man 4 – and setups for its own future entries, plus previews of coming attractions as a variety of new characters and conflicts crowd the screen. All MCU properties do this to some extent, but this one does it the most joylessly, playing out as a grinding plot conveyance system full of sound, motion, and incident, but little in the way of story. Much of grave import is muttered with flashes of dull wit and routine twists between blandly assembled and weirdly small-scale action sequences. And in the end, we’re basically right back where we started.

We pick up shortly after the events of last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, a film criticized in some corners for its overstuffed qualities. I found it entertaining, carried over with a light tough by Joss Whedon. He, like Jon Favreau, who had the bright idea to play Iron Man and Iron Man 2 with the pace and charm of fizzy comedy, knew how to juggle the demands of these massive spectacles with something approaching relaxed ease. That’s largely gone here, as Civil War powers forward weighed down with something serious in mind. Captain America (Chris Evans) leads the new Avengers (Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, and Paul Bettany’s Vision), who, in an opening action beat, stop a villain, but accidentally blow up some civilians in the process. This is the last straw for many people around the world, so 117 nations sign accords demanding these super-beings be given governmental oversight. I mean, if you saw lawless beings smashing apart buildings to get at supervillains, you might be concerned, too.

When various characters from previous films gather to sit around a table and talk this out, the magic computer man Vision makes a good point. Since the Avengers have been public, calamitous world-threatening events have increased exponentially. Maybe they’re drawing this negative attention. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) agrees, and demands the others sign up to work under government supervision. Cap’s not so sure, and demands he be allowed to stay a free agent. This is the conflict, such as it is, amplified by Cap’s old pal Bucky (Sebastian Stan), the brainwashed supersoldier, who is framed for an explosion that kills several foreign leaders. Cap wants to go outside the law and save Buck to prevent him from taking responsibility for a crime he didn’t commit. Sure, he’s been assassinating and bombing plenty of people for decades, but he didn’t do this one. I get his loyalty to his scrambled friend, but this is some hard logic to follow. It creates one big misunderstanding the Captain and the Iron Man can’t seem to deescalate.

The first forty minutes or so are brisk enough, filled with colorful and loud conflict, as well as some mildly intriguing questions. What’s a superhero’s obligation to society? What happens when doing good means different things to different people? When is intervention more dangerous than helpful? There’s a certain amount of superhero melodrama as various players line up on different sides of the issue, straining relationships and casting doubt on tenuous friendships. But the whole operation grows monotonous as characters exchange increasingly hollow barbs, taking the whole thing Very Seriously even as we know the eventual fighting won’t be too consequential. There are too many sequels and spin-offs that need them. By the time we’ve been introduced to Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland) – pausing for extended sample scenes for their forthcoming features – it’s easy to know the Civil War will be more like a scrimmage, everyone simply stretching their powers before their next solo outings.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo, sitcom vets who helmed the last Cap, keep things brightly lit and blandly staged, pulling up tight on good actors, some more invested than others, trying to put real feeling in phony dialogue and then bouncing into action that’s a jumble of frenzied editing and blurry effects. Curiously small – only a few brawls and a chase or two – for running well over two hours, it’s a movie with elaborate hand-to-hand choreography (John Wick’s directors worked second unit) photographed with shaking, swooping cameras cut together to often deemphasize the impact. Sure we have War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Ant Man (Paul Rudd) and the rest lining up to show off their moves, throwing balls of light and color at each other in ways that fleetingly resemble cool comic panels – Spidey crawling over a giant’s mask; Vision shooting light from the jewel in his forehead; Ant Man shrinking and enlarging. But there’s nothing here to get invested in. It’s just not the sort of movie that’ll allow its major figures to hurt one another, not when their hurt feelings animate only this slapstick-adjacent goof-around scuffle on the way to tearful revelations. It’s tediously busy.

With nods – more like thin posturing – to serious disagreement tossed aside in favor of colorful action and bad quips, the screenplay by series regulars Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely cops out by making it all about personal grudges. Instead of actually engaging with intriguing inciting ideas about power and authority, it becomes digital shadowboxing drawn out between endless empty rounds of the kind of double-talking political Rorschach test corporate spectacles are best at. The Marvel machinery can’t afford dislike of these characters, and unconvincingly lets the ones in the wrong off the hook. After a poorly developed plotter (Daniel Bruhl), I’d call Captain America the closest thing this movie has to an antagonist, pushing along the conflict by refusing to accept responsibility for his actions, but this sure isn’t the movie willing to take a stance like that. He embodies the movie’s fight against consequences and for the status quo, demanding we care about morality of hero work and then distracting us with so much movement marking time we’re to forget they ever brought it up, let alone fail to resolve it in any way. It’s all left dangling, just a big prelude for the next one, and the next, and the next.

Choose to Accept It: MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE-ROGUE NATION

An efficient and engaging thrill machine, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is further proof Tom Cruise’s signature franchise is one of the most consistently high-quality adventure series we’ve ever had. It accomplishes this by delivering strongly on a set of appealing and entertaining recurring excitements – vertiginous stunts, complicated heists, amusing spy gadgets, convincing masks, and dastardly double crosses. But no matter how cleverly the filmmakers deploy these elements, the glue holding them together is Cruise himself, racing along with hard-charging star charisma born out of hard-working determination motoring a constant forward momentum. Much has been made about his running, in which he appears to throw every ounce of his being into a hurtling mad dash across the frame. If anyone could accomplish the impossible, it would be his Ethan Hunt.

With appealing action and a megawatt star, the franchise has an ability to allow each director to play to his strengths. The result is a series of five films with a welcome familiarity in its recombination of its best parts, and yet never grows too repetitive. Each entry has its own flavor. De Palma first brought complicated pulp, then Woo had swooning balletic action, Abrams injected throat-grabbing emotional stakes, and Bird performed a juggling act of buoyant one-thing-after-another action. Now writer-director Christopher McQuarrie has the reigns, steering an endlessly enjoyable action movie into his twisty construction and clever control. He brings the mystery and the weighty violence of his last film, Jack Reacher (an underrated Cruise vehicle), and the shifting allegiances and slow realizations of his first script, The Usual Suspects.

Once more, the milieu of Ethan Hunt and the agents of the secret Impossible Missions Force is familiar, but the tone has something new. Unlike madcap MacGuffin chases of the last few entries, Rogue Nation plunges us into spy movie mechanics, with shady dealings and uneasy alliances. In D.C., the new head of the CIA (Alec Baldwin) talks a confidential Senate hearing into dissolving the IMF, using the near-miss missile and smoldering Kremlin from Ghost Protocol as his evidence. This leaves familiar faces (Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) behind desks, while Hunt (Tom Cruise) disobeys orders by staying in the field. He finds himself in hiding, trying to track down The Syndicate, a terrorist organization only he seems to know about. Connecting isolated tragedies with a conspiratorial mind, he seems crazy to the CIA, who are desperate to hunt him down and take him in.

But because an early scene sees an unknown bespectacled Brit (Sean Harris) gun down an IMF agent and attempt to kill Hunt, who barely escapes thanks to a mysterious woman (Rebecca Ferguson) and her helpful punches, it’s easy to see he’s right. So he’s on a globetrotting chase away from the CIA while attempting to track down proof of the group to clear his name, and then take them down and save the world. McQuarrie keeps things ambiguous. What is The Syndicate? Who is the Brit and the woman? What’s the IMF’s role? All is answered in sensationally staged setpieces pleasingly varied and orchestrated. Instead of the usual action beats strung along by rote connective tissue, they grow thrillingly out of an involving set of mysteries and complications. It never overwhelms or exhausts, maintaining consistently pleasing tension and thrills.

Rogue Nation is structured as a nesting doll of action, each setpiece a more compact, concentrated, and intricately designed moment than the last. It starts with big, grinning, highflying stunts, before narrowing through heists and car chases to close on bruising one-on-one combat. The movie moves quickly, enjoying a good one-liner or a perfectly timed look of skepticism just as much as it does putting Cruise on the side of a plane during takeoff, tossing him down an artificial waterfall, throwing him through a plate-glass window, and rolling his car end over end. The action is satisfying, bright, clear images (from cinematographer Robert Elswit) whipped up with crisp cross-cutting and elegant design. A gorgeously designed sequence set around an opera house backstage and on catwalks during a performance is one of the series’ best, with other highlights here including a high-velocity motorcycle chase down a desert highway, a trembling time-bomb bluff, and shootouts and knife fights kept PG-13 despite teeth-rattling sound effects.

McQuarrie stages these thrilling moments with the oomph of impact and the elegance of clockwork construction. But he never loses sight of the human-level interpersonal drivers behind the chaos. This allows Tom Cruise’s intense determination and eager motion to take appealing center stage while the terrific ensemble is allowed to be simultaneously essential team members and great comic relief, fun without diluting seriousness. (Best may be Baldwin, as a serious obstacle cut with a bit of Jack Donaghy bluster.) Meanwhile, Ferguson is great new character, complicated and an unknowable variable. Is she a foil, prey, a secret help, or a manipulative mastermind? It’s fun guessing, but even better is the realization she’s Hunt’s equal (or better, in some ways). If she’s an ally, they’re in luck. But if she’s out to destroy them, she just might win.

Running an unbelievably brisk 131 minutes, Rogue Nation is stuffed with excitement manipulated efficiently. McQuarrie and his team get just about everything possible out of each action sequence without overstaying their welcome. There’s no need to have a perfunctory car chase when it can drive the plot forward while adding participants and obstacles cleverly colliding and careening throughout. Each setpiece is wrung for all its worth, but stops where it can still leave the audience begging for more, as the characters regroup for their next move. McQuarrie understands the appeal of a blockbuster action movie at its best, marrying a fine ensemble with elaborate special effects in a tightly plotted machine delivering everything you’d want and a little more, too. The Lalo Schifrin theme has become big-budget action cinema’s most reliable sound. You can lean back sure that whatever happens next will be hugely enjoyable.

Reassembled: AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

Avengers: Age of Ultron is noisy, colorful, brightly lit, mostly enjoyable comic book nonsense. It is, in other words, the latest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that mega-franchise of interlocking superhero series currently dominating a section of big budget filmmaking. This is only the second outing to bring together the now familiar team of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) to battle a foe no single hero could take on alone. But because producer Kevin Fiege and MCU screenwriters have allowed a great deal of cross-pollination in the interim, it feels like the Avengers have never left. In fact, the latest picture begins with the team in the middle of a mission, hitting the ground running.

Shorn of the need to endlessly introduce itself, this sequel launches right into its action, letting the group snatch a MacGuffin from the claws of evil HYDRA before the opening title card even appears. We know these characters, how they relate to one another, what their individual problems are, and how their personalities clash. Now it’s just a matter of sitting back and letting the plot carry them away. And, oh, does writer-director Joss Whedon supply the plot. There is a constant churn of incident and spectacle, new introductions, returning side characters, exposition, cameos, and foreshadowing. The Avengers banter, then cross in and out of the main action with their own throughlines, though some naturally get a little buried in the mix. (Sorry, Thor.) It’s dense with nerdy detail, yet aerodynamically simple in plot, ceaselessly hurtling forward.

Their big concern this time around is an evil robot named Ultron (voiced with funny pomposity by James Spader). He was created by Iron Man to protect the world and prevent further damage from cosmic nastiness like we saw in the first Avengers. But let this be a lesson: don’t expose your experimental artificial intelligence to an Asgardian mind-control staff. That’s what turns the robot evil, charging up his mind so much he thinks the only way to save the world is to rid it of those pesky people messing it up. I mean, he has a point, but that solution wasn’t exactly what Iron Man had in mind. At least it’s not another interchangeable grump looking for a glowing crystal or giant laser, which describes every villain in the last half-dozen of these things. Whedon mixes up the formula by finding the heroes the cause of and solution to their outsized problems, struggling to save the world from themselves. The action involves saving civilians from the path of destruction instead of merely letting collateral damage interminably rain down, a welcome change.

To stop Ultron, and his army of other robots he’s making in a commandeered factory, the Avengers trot across the globe, finding large-scale action set-pieces at every turn, each one better then the last. The filmmakers provide token downtime for feelings and expressions thereof – rivalries, romances, and the like – but wastes little time picking up velocity again. There’s a raid on a HYDRA base, a rampage through an African metropolis, a multi-vehicle chase through downtown Seoul, and a fictional Eastern European city imperiled in a clever high-flying climax. Whedon fills the screen with elaborate, CGI-heavy chaos. Laser beams zigzag across the frame as debris falls, sparks fly, robots swarm, vehicles soar, background objects go boom, and superheroes flex their powers. It’s recognizable characters doing their familiar Whedon quipping shtick while boisterously effective – if occasionally incomprehensible – excitement erupts around them. The funniest line comes late in the climax when the least superpowered among them takes stock of his contribution, says, “This doesn’t make sense,” then heads out to do his part anyway.

There’s lots of smash-bang popcorn entertainment to be had here, the screen bursting with dazzling movement, the sound mix booming to match. It’s hard to keep up. There’s also not room for the eccentric character work that’s usually my lifeline in these sorts of things. We meet new characters (a speedy Aaron Taylor-Johnson and witchy Elizabeth Olsen, and Linda Cardellini in a sadly under-powered stock role of supportive wife). We glimpse familiar faces from other MCU productions (Samuel L. Jackson, Idris Elba, Anthony Mackie, Don Cheadle, Cobie Smulders). But no one gets much of a chance to make an impact. There's not a lot of acting beyond personality and posturing. We’re too busy bustling to the next conflict, the next explosion, the next dropped thread or portentous reference as promissory note for More Excitement in Future Installments.

The Avengers franchise has fully disappeared into itself. It is the beginning and ending of its entire worldview, able only to refer back to itself or look ahead for future story. It’s a hermetically sealed alternate universe in which no glimmer of the outside world – politics, culture, emotion – is allowed. It’s a frictionless experience, big excitement without a need to think about it beyond the literal visual stimulation and basic story beats. Whedon brings a smidgen of personality, the actors project charm, and the gears of industrial strength effects work their light and magic. The ultimate Hollywood blockbuster as empty calories, Age of Ultron is an exciting experience of sugar and fat, but completely devoid of anything more sustaining. 

Games People Play: AMERICAN HUSTLE

There are no sincere moments in David O. Russell’s American Hustle. It goes beyond the narrative, which follows an F.B.I. operation in the late 1970s that involved blackmail, bribery, corruption, and con men. And that’s just the guys doing the investigating. The film’s characters are constantly pulling one over on each other, trying to make any given situation slippery enough to wiggle away with the upper hand. The problem is the film takes after its characters and in doing so refuses to take them seriously. It’s a true(ish) story filled with great heist movie-style brinksmanship and game playing, but I didn’t believe any of it for one second. That’s not to say I called foul on the facts, but that I never bought into the stakes or emotions of the story. The whole thing is exhaustingly inauthentic, full of pushy camera moves, fussily casual period piece production design, and self-satisfied banter. It expends lots of effort, but ends up with only awfully thin insight. Turns out people, given the right circumstances, might con other people to get what they want. You don’t say.

The film is a nesting doll of deceit, cons within cons within cons. Christian Bale plays a con man sleazily juggling many cons at once. He supplements his laundromat business by selling forged paintings on the side, as well as accepting payment from sleazeballs in return for trying to set them up with loans that will, of course, never materialize. His partner in crime is his mistress (Amy Adams), so there’s another con, this one the relationship he’s hiding from his boozy young housewife (Jennifer Lawrence). Bale and Adams are busted for fraud by an ambitious FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) who says they’ll walk free if they help him bust some of their fellow fraudsters. It takes a con to run a con to find a con or two.

With no choice, that’s what they do, helping to create an elaborate entrapment scheme that soon involves a New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner), a fake sheik (Michael Peña), and increasing amounts of FBI money sitting in bank accounts and renting private jets and hotel suites. With each new expenditure request, Cooper’s boss (Louis C.K., a welcome sight) grows increasingly exasperated, denying them until his boss (Alessandro Nivola), another guy smelling good career moves, overrules him. Cooper keeps urging the project’s expansion, using each new mark to get to another mark. It’s a tangled web of competing interests that’s bound to ensnare some of the people laying the traps as well as their targets.

In the middle of it all, the cast’s central quartet delivers big booming performances that fit the film’s swaggering shallowness. Bale, with a protruding gut and complicated combover, exudes frustrated confidence mixed with desperation, while Adams, shifting her accent around, comes across as a fiercely determined faker and striver. Cooper’s a hard-charging naïve, smart enough to cook up a plan, but overeager to see it through. He’s too earnest for his own good. When one mark says something incriminating, Cooper smiles a little too broadly and exclaims, “That’s great!” Lawrence, meanwhile, thinks she’s scheming, but she’s just good old flighty passive aggressive. Her performance is a whirlwind. The film’s phoniness is hardly their fault. They’re giving the best possible performances this material could get. They’re so good I kept wishing I could like the movie more, if only to reward their likable hard work. They throw themselves into unflattering clothing, funny hairdos, and silly accents, chewing through the script with energy and humor.

But that’s not enough to make it anything more than sporadically entertaining. It’s breezy enough – well over two hours and rarely dragging – but scene after scene, I found myself feeling emptier. Russell and co-writer Eric Warren Singer’s script follows the hodgepodge of cons in a slapdash manner, sometimes revealing too much or too little and scrambling up who we should care about at any given time. It’s shifting allegiances, but always tilting towards mockery – a style that scoffs at strong feelings, a howl of emotion seen as a plot point and a joke and little more. When it all shakes out in the end, it doesn’t feel like resolution for characters as much as it is checking off boxes with little sense of what it all means for the individuals in question beyond the surface level of winners and losers. No matter how fine the performances are, there’s nothing to latch onto.

Why am I to care about the results of any of these cons when the film is only interested in playing them out to play them out? It only cares about pulling out rugs and staring at scheming. When it comes to the whys and who cares, it could care less. The actors give it their all, and to the extent the film is watchable and compelling, it’s that they manage to break through the film’s suffocating artifice with some actual emotion. The rest of the time, Russell’s swooping, energetic camera and non-stop period rock, pop, and disco soundtrack – often the only aspects of the film Russell seems interested in, and a passable, if muddled, copy of every other big swinging 70s-set crime film's style – pounds out and counteracts every genuine emotion with insistent inauthenticity.

Brother & Sister Act: HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS

I’m sure you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel, two little kids, brother and sister, who get lost in the woods and find their way to a cabin made of candy. Inside sits a witch, ready to fatten them up and cook them for dinner. They manage to burn her in her own oven and escape. And that’s that. It’s a nice story, isn’t it? What Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters supposes is that this childhood encounter left the kids with a talent for slaying sorceresses, a talent they take on the road, roaming the countryside from village to village, peddling their ability to liberate towns from the terror of witchcraft in their midst. We pick up with them as adults, walking into a village that has been hit by a string of kidnappings, youngsters spirited away by shadowy magic into the blackest part of the forest never to be heard from again. Hansel and Gretel take the case, promising to slay the witch(es) involved and return the kids to their parents.

Writer-director Tommy Wirkola (of the lame Nazi zombie half-comedy Dead Snow) came up with an inventive twist on a Grimm tale and then stopped there, wanly elaborating upon a simple story until it becomes yet another dour, emotionless action movie. It charmed me at first, in its opening minutes at least, but all too quickly became plodding and predictable, running through its repetitive motions. The violence is splashily over-the-top, giving the characters rapid-fire crossbows, heavy firearms and the standard hyper-competence in murkily choreographed, supposedly improvisatory hand-to-hand combat. Witches are slashed apart in gruesome ways and return the favor by casting spells that cause men to eat bugs and explode or get stepped upon by a troll, which sends what looks like grape jelly splattering under the beast’s boot. And not a bit of it is exciting or involving in the slightest.  

The plot proceeds dumbly and dutifully through one of the simplest, most emotionally and creatively uncomplicated possible versions of this concept. As the adult Hansel and Gretel, Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, who are generally appealing actors even in dry material, appear to be going through the motions dispirited and listless. They are without chemistry of any kind, between each other or anyone else in the cast and the movie calls upon them to do very little with what amounts to nothing more than cardboard action stereotypes dressed up in fairy tale drag. Little creative touches – Hansel suffers from diabetes as a result of eating too much of that witch’s house way back when – seem dropped in out of nowhere and come to mean very little in the scheme of things.

Filling out the rest of the cast is a nice group of supporting actors, from Famke Janssen as the Big Bad Witch to Peter Stormare as a skeptical sheriff and Thomas Mann as a village teen with an exceedingly understandable crush on Gretel. Their contributions are nonstarters as well, ground under by the empty spectacle. It’s a goofy movie that refuses to overtly comment upon its own goofiness while at the same time carefully avoiding taking itself seriously. It’s an odd, uncommitted stance for such potentially enjoyable trash to take. As is, it plays like someone went into the editing room and scrupulously snipped out every bit of humor and excitement, leaving only an 88-minute husk of a good idea, a one-joke movie that never even finds the energy to tell it with any skill.

Bourne to Run: THE BOURNE LEGACY

The biggest question I had going into The Bourne Legacy was “What happens to a series when it’s no longer about what it’s about?” Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity and the sequels – Supremacy and Ultimatum – from Paul Greengrass star Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an amnesiac spy who, in order to solve the mystery his identity, has to stay one step ahead of shadowy United States operatives bent on taking him out to prevent that very discovery. It’s a series of dizzyingly complicated character-driven spy thrillers that together form a rare hugely satisfying trilogy. They’re three films that snap together with excellent resonance and airtight plotting all the way through. They are my favorite action movies of the past decade. It was so complete a trilogy of films that Damon didn’t want to come back for a fourth. Greengrass didn’t either. He quipped that it should be called “Bourne Redundancy.” But there was money to be made from the lucrative franchise so here we are.

No longer about Jason Bourne’s search for identity, Legacy nonetheless maintains consistency with the prior trilogy by not only retaining supporting actors like Joan Allen, Scott Glenn, Albert Finney and David Strathairn in small roles, but also bringing in one of the series’ scripter Tony Gilroy (on the heels of his two great directorial outings Michael Clayton and Duplicity) to write and direct. Without Damon’s Bourne, this film focuses on a new character, Aaron Cross, a secret agent in a similar secret program. He’s played by Jeremy Renner. (After Mission: Impossible 4 and The Avengers, this marks the third time he's been brought in to boost a franchise's ranks). The plot of this film starts parallel to the action of The Bourne Ultimatum. While Jason Bourne is doing what he does there, Cross is off in the Alaskan wilderness on a training exercise. When the masterminds of this whole national-security conspiracy panic, they decide to eliminate this particular program, swooping in to kill their field assets before the whole experiment is revealed to the public.

Of course, Cross avoids death and sets off to find answers. Back in the program’s headquarters, while the familiar suits are on Bourne-related business, new characters played by Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Donna Murphy and Corey Stoll fret in dark, tense control rooms, staring at monitors and flipping through classified documents. They’re trying to stay one step ahead of the agents they’re trying to dispose of. Cross sidesteps them and finds himself aiding and aided by a government scientist (Rachel Weisz) who is also targeted in this bloody cover-up. Soon they’re racing together on an intercontinental escape from the people they once worked for. This is familiar Bourne material with a clever, skillful protagonist moving through fake passports and running from all kinds of armed security, while the real villains sit drumming their fingers impatiently in tense conference rooms and in front of glowing screens.

Although in the grand scheme of all that’s come before, this is merely a feature-length footnote in an epilogue, time will tell if this is a spin-off, a reboot, a one-off, or a cause for Jason Bourne to come out of hiding in a future sequel and bring it all full circle. I don’t know what to hope for, myself, since Ultimatum finished off his story so spectacularly. It’d be difficult to top. But anyways, we’re talking Bourne Legacy here. It’s a tense film filled with lengthy scenes of grim exposition and quick bursts of well-staged action. Gilroy ditches Greengrass’s shaky-cam style for something moderately more stately with effective tension-gathering cinematography from the great Robert Elswit. At the very least, together they manage to create a car chase sequence that’s a more than adequate addition to this franchise’s hallmark area of excellence. They also keep the chilly spy-versus-spy feeling of it all nice and cool.

Renner gives a fine performance as a troubled betrayed operative and Weisz is more than ready to work as his rattled counterpart. They’re fine action movie actors, but it’s hard for the story to not feel a little thin. They’re cogs more than characters. Because the earlier films had a MacGuffin that tied intimately into the character’s inner dilemma – Bourne was searching for his history, his true identity, after all – it’s a little disappointing to find that Gilroy has put in its place a more literal object to retrieve. Aaron Cross and his scientist ally are on the lookout for a little pill that his phase of the top-secret project was forcing agents to take. Without it, Cross will be debilitated or something. It doesn’t really matter what the pill will do; all that matters is that it’s important enough to keep the plot moving. Which also happens to be the movie’s main reason for existence. It keeps the Bourne franchise going. And if that has to happen, it sure could be a lot worse than just a fun, if inconsequential, action thriller, even though the franchise has set a much higher bar for itself.

Superhero Supergroup: THE AVENGERS

The Avengers is not the greatest superhero film ever made, but it sure is a great time at the movies. It’s a high-impact spectacle full of loud, funny, and satisfying sequences that send characters slamming into each other into full-tilt superheroics in broad, bright, colorful collisions. We’ve met the characters in question before, which is just as well since that’s also where their characterizations reside. This isn’t a movie that’s about telling a story with much in the way of emotional character arcs or weighty personal journeys. It’s a movie that gathers up the main characters from recent Marvel Comics adaptations, the one’s they’ve had the exclusive rights to, that is, and teams them up to save the planet. Original, it’s not. (And not just in film. Comics have been orchestrating crossovers like this almost as long as comics have existed.) But the skill, energy, and good will of it all makes it fun all the same.

Marvel has been building to The Avengers for five years now, kicking off superhero franchises one by one with the express purpose of bringing them together for this one big blockbuster. And so, when Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the brotherly villain of Thor, comes shooting out of the vastness of space through a glowing portal into the middle of a top secret military installation and, promising war, makes off with a brainwashed archer (Jeremy Renner) and a volatile blue energy cube, the otherworldly MacGuffin from Captain America, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the connective cameo from all of the earlier films, assembles his team of avengers. The film takes its time – a bit too much, perhaps – reintroducing the superheroes one by one, and it’s a credit to the consistency of quality in this many-pronged experiment in comic book adaptation that it’s nice to see them all again.

Fury himself calls in super-strong Captain Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and dispatches right-hand man, Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), to round up the rest of the recruits. He has master assassin Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) pick up the cursed Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, taking over for Ed Norton, who took over for Eric Bana – maybe stretching into the Hulk causes slow shifts in appearance). Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) flies in with his high-tech suit of armor; Thor (Chris Hemsworth) thunders down from the land of Asgard swinging his mighty hammer. The gang’s all here, though not without some complications on their way to assembling as a group. With such variety in powers and personality, interpersonal conflicts are bound to arise even as Loki’s threat of intergalactic war draws closer to reality.

This is a movie juggling multiple characters (even Stellan Skarsgard and Gwyneth Paltrow return, briefly) while fitting them into one coherent film narrative. Even the tones these heroes bring from their separate films could have easily competed instead of blending. The sarcasm of Iron Man, the pseudo-Shakespearean goof of Thor, the earnestness of Captain America, and the brooding pulp emotion of Hulk gave their films a personality of their own. Removed from their solo efforts the supergroup as a whole has less emotional resonance, as this film is unable to fully explore their outsized, but recognizably human, personalities through the metaphors supplied by their powers. In that sense, the movie is thin. It’s a lot of fun, but the characters arrive fully formed from other movies and end this one with little in the way of growth or development. But, still, this is a movie that throws together great characters and watches them interact asking, “isn’t that cool?” And, yeah, it’s cool.

With so many characters it could have been nothing more than a clash of tones while characters jockeyed for the spotlight. Luckily writer-director Joss Whedon has given these characters a movie in which there is no need to compete for attention. It plays out like the work of a fan who deeply loves these Avengers, each and every one of them, and has spent time thinking about the ways in which the powers and personalities could clash and connect. It’s an affectionate film. Whedon has always had a warm wit which shines clearly through genre material and that’s certainly the case here. This is a movie just crammed full of one-liners that actually land. He seems most comfortable writing for Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, but the other characters certainly have funny moments of their own as well.

But it’s more than funny quips and clearly defined characters. It’s all about timing. There’s just enough room for the one-liners and amusing visual gags to breathe, but just enough concision to make them unexpected. That’s where Whedon’s pet theme – teamwork – comes into play. (His work, mostly and most notably in TV with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, consistently revolves around a group of people who must learn to work together.) This movie is filled with long sequences of the characters talking to one another, strategizing, arguing, joking, threatening, comparing internal struggles, and finding common ground. The actors are up to the task; dialogue pings around the room with precision. (It’s almost enough to make one think that if Howard Hawks had made a superhero movie, it might have looked a little like this.) Later, in the action scenes, the way characters spring into motion utilizes the best each has to offer in terrific synchronization. This is a film that plays to the strengths of everyone involved.

Like his fellow TV-to-film auteur J.J. Abrams, Whedon is a writer and director who has a way of injecting a serialized slam-bang cliffhanger style into a film. The Avengers starts with what is essentially a cold open, slams into a title card, and then moves from set-piece to set-piece finding some surprises along its fairly standard action movie path. It is an efficient spectacle delivery device. It’s a bright, loud, crashing crowd-pleaser, a blockbuster superhero movie with an impressive sense of narrative escalation. Each action sequence feels bigger and more complicated with higher stakes than the one before. By the time the film hurtles into a lengthy, chaotic, but coherent, climax (that has a few similarities to a similarly sprawling big-city brawl in Transformers: Dark of the Moon), it’s hard not to get swept up in it all. It is a movie designed to show off cool effects while likable, familiar characters clash and jest, explosions seasoned with genuinely funny one-liners, and some neat visuals, and, with a light touch and fondness for the material, Whedon more than gets the job done.

Take the Money and Run: THE TOWN

The Town, the second directorial effort from Ben Affleck, is more or less a standard cops-and-robbers thriller, albeit one tilted in favor of the robbers. Though it’s nothing revelatory, and riddled with plot holes, it’s the kind of movie that totally works as it unspools. Affleck stages some nice action, the performances are mostly stellar, and the cinematography from the great Robert Elswit is pristinely handsome.

The centerpiece of the film is a broad-daylight armored car robbery that is a crescendo into a symphony of squealing tires and bursts of gunfire. It’s not quite as good as a similar sequence in Michael Mann’s Heat, still the benchmark for modern urban shootouts, but it works well and ends not with a blast of senseless action but a quiet shot of a neighborhood cop, having stumbled upon the robbers just when they thought they were safe. He stares at them, and then, after a beat, slowly turns his head to literally look the other way.

This is a movie set amongst men with strong fraternal and filial loyalty in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, an area that the opening text informs us produces more bank robbers per capita than anywhere else in the country. Our antihero is Ben Affleck, the son of a now-imprisoned bank robber (Chris Cooper) who is now a career criminal in his own right. He’s the mastermind of a team of robbers that works for a menacing florist (Pete Postlethwaite).

Affleck’s best friend and partner in crime is Jeremy Renner. They have an intense, long time bond. Renner spent nine years in prison for a murder committed in Affleck’s defense. Affleck has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Renner’s sister (Blake Lively). Renner’s the type of loose cannon criminal who enjoys his work a little too much. When Affleck shows up at his house and asks him for no-questions-asked help beating up some local thugs, Renner responds with one line: “Whose car are we taking?”

This occurs after Affleck returns from his date with a new girl in Charlestown (Rebecca Hall), a pretty assistant bank manager left shaken by a recent robbery in which she was kidnapped and left blindfolded on the beach. This very robbery opens the film and we immediately see how fraught with potential danger this budding romance is, since Affleck’s crew was responsible for the robbery. Because the guys wore creepy Skeletor masks for the duration, Hall doesn’t know how she actually first met her new beau. For all she knows, they met at the Laundromat. A suspicious FBI agent (Jon Hamm, in a slightly underwritten role) will learn more about this relationship, making the danger greater than mere potential for a broken heart.

There are narrative and emotional questions that could be raised, picking away at the film’s slick veneer, but the presentation is so glossily enjoyable it doesn’t quite matter in the moment. It works through the requirements of its genre with style and speed, making the rusty old formulas squeak to life once more. The fine cast works to bring this life, with Renner, especially, imbuing his character with such vibrancy that he nearly becomes the kind of supporting actor who carries the whole picture. He has a scene at an outdoor café where he stops and chats with Affleck and Hall without knowing that Hall could identify the tattoo on the back of his neck and reveal their criminal secret. It’s a scene of great tension, partially because of the way Affleck, as director, blocks the shots, but even more so from the way Renner is so convincingly dangerous, so lively in his menacing unpredictability.

It is scenes like that, along with the fine action and solid performances, which allow the movie to add up to a reasonably enjoyable experience. It doesn’t break new ground, but Affleck’s confident, sturdy craftsmanship and Elswit’s images proving his greatness once again, help make the movie a little bit more than adequate. This is an entertaining two hours that goes by more or less painlessly.

In Anticipation of Year's End Lists

I didn't get a chance to write about these movies when they were released this past summer so I'm taking this opportunity to briefly comment upon them before the deluge of Oscar titles arrives in my town. With the end of the year fast approaching you'll probably be hearing more about these titles through top-ten lists and Oscar nominations, so I'll waste no more time before throwing in my two cents about them.

By now, Miyazaki may as well be Japanese for magic, for magic is exactly what his films generate, in their layered beauty and easy fantasy that are totally absorbing. With Ponyo, Miyazaki has crafted another beautiful, fun, exciting, tender film. This time around, the plotting is so simple (it’s aimed at very young children) but the fantasy is so complex that there is a bit more of a wheeze to the exposition. But that’s almost secondary, and it doesn’t drastically distract, from the (typical for Miyazaki) effortless fluidity of the imagery positioned perfectly on the border between man and nature, real and unreal. The characters are adorable and the message is strong and sweet, making this perfect viewing for children and those charms aren’t lost on me either. There’s a magical trance-like quality to the exquisite minutia and vivid imagery that slowly draws me in. It’s confident, captivating filmmaking of the Miyazaki kind.

Armando Iannucci's In the Loop follows an eccentric ensemble of low-level political figures who may just decide to go to war if they ever stop endlessly circling the central debate with petty semantic parsing and furious flurries of insults, invective, and bile. It’s painfully familiar evil bureaucracy, but the movie is a non-stop laugh machine, sending wave after wave of quotable dialogue towards the audience in rapid-fire, profusely profane bouts of eloquent swearing. It’s not above a well-crafted sight gag either, like the sequence which follows a supposedly secret meeting that keeps growing in attendance, even after the committee switches to a larger room. The best of the consistently funny cast is Peter Capaldi as a spin doctor who storms through the movie insulting and complaining about anything that moves with the most creatively, wickedly hilarious vulgar metaphors I’ve ever heard. One of the most fascinating moments in the film arrives late in the plot when, in the U.N. meditation room, he stops talking and we get a chance to look at his face as he realizes, for the first and only time in the entire film, that he’s speechless, revealing most starkly that behind the flurry of words, there’s ultimately nothing. And that very nothing is what takes us to war.

There is so much suspense in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker that the further it went on, the longer the tension mounted, the more my stomach twisted in knots. By the time the movie was barely half over, I was sick to my stomach. The movie is so completely immersed in the day-to-day work of an American bomb squad in Iraq, with great performances (especially by Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, who are in almost every scene) and set-pieces all the way through, that it adds weight to the skillful summoning of sickening dread. It’s by turns unexpected, exciting, chaotic, scary, violent, and eerily beautiful. We are only given one sequence, late in the picture, with the luxury of being on the home front, away from the chaos of war, and it arrives with the force of a rug being pulled out from underneath you. The jump cut from the shimmering sands of the desert to the sterile, flickering fluorescent lights of a grocery store is as disorienting a cinematic moment as I’ve felt all year, one that helps the film say much more about the effect of war on soldiers than any Iraq War movie to date.