Shooting Stars: THE GRAY MAN and BULLET TRAIN

Netflix’s latest big attempt at making a summer blockbuster is The Gray Man, for which they’ve recruited Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors of Captain Americas 2 and 3 and Avengers 3 and 4. Those were huge financial successes, so I can see why the streamer thought their directors would be a good choice to helm an action spectacle the company hopes can compete with the usual warm-weather multiplex fare. A problem, though, is that the Russo brothers are comedy directors, and you can tell in their leaning on light quipping attitudes and a reliance on medium shots and close-ups. They started in sitcoms and never quite shook it. The best moments in Avengers: Infinity War, far and away their most enjoyable Marvel effort, are all the characters-in-a-room stuff, and the way it builds to satisfying character entrances and exits that even leave room for the audience applause the way a filmed-in-front-of-a-studio-audience series would. Their sense of spectacle is entirely farmed out to effects people pinned in by the lack of decisions—a flattening and deadening of space and place, the better to slot in their swarms of indistinguishable enemies. That means it’s better when it’s outer space or Wakanda than when they just set generic power contests on a wide open parking lot or civic center.

That their newest feature has distinguishable characters in something like real-world places serves their talents well. It’s a Spy vs. Spy setup with Ryan Gosling defecting from a covert assassin job and subsequently hunted by an unhinged rival assassin, played by Chris Evans. The Russos know they’re dealing with two marquee Movie Stars, and shoot with all due reverence. The men are shot from flattering angles, in perfect dramatic lighting, and spring into action in fluidly faked, CG-assisted prowess. And each role plays to the actors’ strengths. Gosling gets his earnest smolder, his underdog confidence. He’s been able to dial that in one direction (Drive) or another (First Man) or another (La La Land) throughout his appealing lead roles. Here he’s every bit the capital-s Star. On the other hand, Evans gets a gum-chewing character turn, cranking his Captain America gee-whiz can-do attitude into a malevolent Team America villainy. There’s some actual crackle to their antagonism. Then their world is filled out with choice supporting turns for familiar faces filling familiar roles for this genre. There are potential Deep State allies (Billy Bob Thornton and Ana de Armas), shadowy suits (Jessica Henwick and Regé-Jean Page), a girl in danger (Julia Butters), and an elder statesman with important information (Alfre Woodard). They’re all talented enough to be a little bit memorable but otherwise just exactly what they need to be to keep the shootouts and chase sequences flowing.

It’s all of a piece—a little samey, totally artificial, everyone written at the same de rigueur canted angle toward seriousness. Which is to say that it’s a blockbuster whose relationship to the world is only other blockbusters. To the Russos, and their screenwriters and craftspeople, the high-stakes shoot-‘em-up globetrotting is all about the real world and real stakes only insofar as we can glimpse them through a mirrored simulacrum—pointing backwards and through the Bourne movies and Bond pictures and so on and so forth. Sure, there’s something pleasingly frictionless about an entirely phony chase in, around, and through a train running down tight turns on cobblestone European streets. Cars flip and spin, sparks fly, bullets careen, and the leads shimmy away from rampaging computer effects. (It’s a little bit clever some of the time, too, like when Gosling uses his reflection in passing windows to guide his aim into the train.) It’s a weightless charge of motion and faux-danger.

That’s the case with all of the action scenes here. They have the form and pace of excitement, but are of mere passably diverting interest. I didn’t exactly have a bad time watching it, though. Its cliched convolutions and obvious developments, acted out by pros who could do this in their sleep, is, as the kids might say, totally smooth-brained. It slips right off the old dome painlessly and without interrupting one with anything worth thought or reflection. That’s right in the Netflix mode these days, as their plummeting stock price has resulted in the board room making noise that they want to cut back on expensive auteurist art pieces (sorry to Baumbach, Scorsese, Coens, Campion, etc.) and instead focus on these time-passing mass-market baubles. As far as their efforts there go—think Red Notice or The Adam Project—this one’s at least thoroughly fine.

A little better than fine is Bullet Train. This one’s a glossy theatrical studio picture with Brad Pitt in the lead. Now there’s a Movie Star. He knows how to hold the frame’s attention without even seeming to try. (His oft-commented upon blend of character actor charm and matinee idol good looks is one of modern movies’ great constants.) Here he’s a reluctant gun for hire who won’t even take his gun with him now that he’s taken some time off to work on himself. Wearing a bucket hat and glasses, talking almost exclusively in therapy speak—“hurt people hurt people”—he has easy, shaggy charm while cutting an odd figure for an action movie. But then again the whole movie is full of such figures. Based on a pulpy Japanese novel, the movie puts Pitt’s mercenary on a speeding bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. The mission: get on board, take a briefcase full of ransom money, and get off at the next station. If you suspect it won’t be so easy, you’d be right.

On the train are hitmen and schemers in a variety of styles and quirks. The cast is loaded with familiar faces and voices—Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Joey King, Logan Lerman, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Bad Bunny, and a few fun cameos, too. Each is given a splashy title card announcing their name, a scattered assortment of quick-cut flashbacks, and one or two whimsical character details. (One is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, for example.) I’ve seen this movie’s manic post-modern approach referred to as if it was in the late-90s and early-aughts trend of snarky post-Tarantino, post-Ritchie crime pictures. But I think we should remember that that was twenty to thirty years ago, and in this case counts as a throwback. I didn’t mind that too much. The movie’s eccentricities fly by as quickly as its speeding set.

The result is a Rube Goldberg machine of an action comedy. Every actor and prop introduced circles back around at least once for another payoff, some expected and some surprising. The straight line simplicity of the main plot, one MacGuffin and one Final Destination in perpetual motion, is interrupted by a jumble of obstacles in each train car, some recurring irritants and some a constant danger. Meanwhile the story curlicues with unexpected doubling-backs—sometimes cutaways within cutaways or long montages that build backstory for a sudden reversal or reveal. This results in some enjoyable scrambling, separating or delaying effects from causes or vice versa. It’s all quite clever and pleased with itself, and the movie bounces along with the music of comedy without quite the words to make it really sing. It’s a constant juggle of witty cutting and awful violence—a kind of cold karmic comeuppance for its largely disreputable and dangerous cast of characters.

Director David Leitch has made this jocular mood for bloody combat cleverness his stock-in-trade. After co-directing the dizzying choreography of John Wick, he’s given us the likes of Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. He shoots action brightly and legibly and knows how to frame with and hold for impact. But those pictures all have a rather flippant bravado, charging hard at action while characters skip across the implications. They leave a high body count behind them while twisting out of spectacular slam-bang dangers. Any respect for human life is gone, the better to gawk at all the ways bones snap and vehicles crash. Bullet Train might be Leitch’s best post-Wick effort simply for giving in to that breezy carelessness entirely. It treats the smacks and thuds and stabs as staccato punctuation—literal punch lines—for sleazy characters ground under by twists of fate. Pitt floats above it all, desperately trying to talk it out, and inevitably pulled back into violence. That he survives any of his attackers' onslaughts is almost an accident. And all the while he keeps bemoaning his bad luck. I guess it really is all in how you look at it. As far as violent distractions go, this one at least starts at a fast pace and never lets up.

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.

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Up: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

What keeps the movies in Marvel’s Avengers multi-franchise franchise somewhat fresh is the way each film exists in a different setting and plays variations on different genres. They’re all shot in a bright house style, the tone always serious enough to generate suspense, but light enough to accommodate bantering between chummy characters. In other words, going into one of these movies you know exactly what you’re going to get, but not necessarily the way you’ll get it. Captain America: The First Avenger was a B-movie World War II picture with snarling Nazis, martyred scientists, and brave soldiers, with a square-jawed superpowered all-American hero in the center. Now its sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, finds the star spangled man dropped into a paranoid conspiracy actioner, danger from unexpected sources at every turn.

In this new film, the Captain is still the same old patriotic freedom fighter he always was. Captain America may not be the role Chris Evans was born to play, but, between his capacity for unsentimental earnestness and obvious classically handsome features, it’s certainly the superhero role he was born to play. After being frozen in a block of ice for 70 years, thawed out, welcomed into SHIELD (the fictional Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), and sent out to fight off an alien invasion with the help of Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk, he’s finding himself borderline disillusioned. He asks Director Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) why the intelligence community is ramping up pervasive worldwide surveillance, building a massive apparatus to predict trouble and arrange preemptive strikes. Fury wearily tells him the world has grown dangerous, and they must be prepared for anything. Cold comfort, that.

The film smartly pivots from stars-and-stripes propaganda to clammy paranoia. In the first action scene Captain America and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) free hostages on a freighter in a fanfare of military might. But it’s not long before a high-ranking SHIELD official is gunned down by an assassin, men in suits force good spies on dubious missions, and Fury whispers to the Captain a stern warning:  “no one can be trusted.” It’s a surprisingly sharp – and totally on-the-nose – commentary on contemporary concerns over NSA surveillance and intelligence agency overreach. Though, shadowy governmental conspiracies aren’t exactly only current. Robert Redford, with a history of appearing in paranoid thrillers from Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men to Sneakers and Spy Game, appears as a suit, exuding gravitas in a fun echo of the genre’s past.

What follows is a tangle of twists and turns punctuated with exciting, lengthy action sequences all around Washington D.C. as loyal SHIELD agents reveal dark intent and showy conspiracies are yanked into the light. The blows land harder for the film’s mercilessness when it comes to mortally wounding characters and institutions you’d think the Marvel Cinematic Universe would want to keep around. The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely moves quickly and coherently, dragging in familiar franchise faces (Sebastian Stan, Cobie Smulders, Hayley Atwell, and Jenny Agutter) while smoothly integrating new characters into the action. I particularly enjoyed Anthony Mackie as a former soldier who finds new reason to fight when Captain America calls upon him and quickly establishes an easy, warm friendship between them. It’s nice the movie takes time between the explosions and chaos to make new friends and keep the old, interested in some small way in relationships and how they play out through slam-bang rat-a-tat movement.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, sitcom veterans who, Community paintball episodes aside, make a big action debut here, filming the action in a clean and comprehensible style. The early boat-set sequence includes plenty of shots that refreshingly reveal the entire action head-to-toe, sometimes for seconds at a time. In later car chases, gun battles, fisticuffs, and aerial commotions, they cut rather deftly between perspectives and don’t let chaotic close-up inserts confuse too badly. The majority of the action – a one-against-ten fistfight in an elevator, a man in a winged jetpack outsmarting heat-seeking missiles – is cleverly staged. It’s all so engaging and enjoyable that it’s a bit of a let down to admit it’s also all a tad exhausting in the end. It’s exciting and it wore me out. After over two hours with often pervasive rounds of gunfire – minions just shoot and shoot and shoot, the body count looming large – it grows wearying. By the time the movie is well into its big blowout finale, twists and surprises largely in its rearview, I was ready for the punching and shooting to reach their inevitable end. It’s fun, but I had my fill.

Still, reliable and dependable, this Marvel universe of interlocking franchises has dropped another quality product off of the assembly line. At worst, these films can feel slight and predictable, pinned in by the corporate dictates of the overarching narrative. Much as I’ve enjoyed all of these movies to some extent or another, I’m interested, but not overly invested in the big picture. In individual films, moments of straight-faced near-campiness (anything Asgardian in the Thor movies), side pleasures (the first Captain America’s unexpected and delightful musical number), and funny supporting performances (Tom Hiddleston, Sam Rockwell, Kat Dennings, Tommy Lee Jones), stick with me the most. So it is to the filmmakers’ credit that in Captain America: The Winter Soldier they shake things up, providing all the expected thrills and smiles along with a welcome modicum of complexity to the characters' primary-colors comic book world as it crumbles around them in entertaining explosiveness.