Welled Up: DEEPWATER HORIZON

Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon is a compelling, workmanlike, gearhead recreation of a tragedy that was a prelude to an ecological disaster. He’s not so much concerned with artificially inflated human drama or even in the resulting fallout from the 2010 deep sea oil rig explosion that left several BP employees dead while millions of gallons of crude gushed into the ocean. Berg’s films (from Friday Night Lights to Battleship) are always most interested in group efforts. This one’s about systems failing, and a group who must survive as best they can when it blows up in their faces. There’s the usual disaster movie opening acts which introduce a variety of recognizable actors showing up to work on the rig and the various tensions slowly straining between the men who are there to put in hard work and the men who are there to cut corners. The sharply drawn division between the laborers and the money men put me in mind of The Towering Inferno, while the somber just-the-facts tick-tock of daily routine felt more in line with the grim United 93. The synthesis of these two approaches is compelling enough, but the movie really comes alive when it all blows up.

Because Berg and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan (World War Z) and Matthew Sand (Ninja Assassin) take such an interest in the mechanics of the Deepwater Horizon in the movie’s throat-clearing beginning, with loving looks at the machinery including a camera sliding up the main pipe’s muddy buildup like a colonoscopy, there’s no need for belabored explanation later. Because they let us know how it’s supposed to work, they can let the pressure build until the rig erupts. We know what’s wrong. The way there provides human stakes, letting us watch good average capable workaday guys trying their hardest to make the task of seemingly impossible corporate orders – personified by meek dopes in polo shirts – work anyway. There’s Mark Wahlberg doing his earnest best, and Kurt Russell commanding attention and respect (and rocking a fine mustache). There’s no-nonsense Gina Rodriguez and sweet Dylan O’Brien and kind Ethan Suplee. They’re likable, but then there’s John Malkovich, bald and chewing through a splendid accent as the guy from the head office willing to push forward without completing all the necessary safety checks. Even if you didn’t know where this is going, you’d know where this is going.

You’d certainly know something’s about to blow if you paid attention to the heavy-handed foreshadowing. Before leaving for the rig, Wahlbeg and his wife (Kate Hudson) watch their adorable moppet show off her visual aid for a career day explanation of her dad’s job. It’s a Coke can she manipulates like it’s underground undersea oil. As the scene ends, the can ominously explodes. Later, Russell is handed a safety award by visiting company men, a scene crosscut with Malkovich barking at underlings to ignore a warning about unsafe pressure in the pumps. So the movie lays it on a little thick. But when the danger flares, the movie’s ready to turn its eye on knobs, dials, gears, switches, buttons, keys, screens, alarms, propellers, tubes, signals, readouts, levers, and more into watching every one fail. As the whole oil rig comes crashing down around the characters, they spring into action, trying to contain the mess or, failing that, getting themselves and their co-workers to safety. Everyone on screen is coated in grease, mud, and blood. It becomes a loud, cacophonous series of explosive sequences, one perilous development leading inexorably to the next as everything falls apart.

There are political points to be made through a story like this, but Berg keeps that ambiguous. It’s a celebration of hardworking human spirit and a condemnation of heartless profit motives driving them to doom. It’s a business calamity with bloody casualties, bailed out by civic good. We see the coast guard fly into action (an echo of Sully, the other recent-event-turned-movie of the moment), and the people on board the rig do all they can to help their fellow workers. There’s a thrill to watch such dramatic life-and-death circumstances play out on the big screen, the effects large and convincing, the booming sound design rattling the theater seats with every new blast of the inferno. But there’s also sadness to the spectacle. When one man sacrifices himself to stop a piece of equipment from falling on others, Berg holds close on his wincing face, then watches as he’s blown out a window, smacking into a bulkhead on his way out of sight. I fleetingly wondered what it would be like for the real man’s family to see this movie, and I hoped they wouldn’t. And yet the movie is so effectively produced, I was fascinated by its every development, as the best laid plans of men go horribly wrong in spectacular fashion.

Fly Another Day: PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR

Penguins of Madagascar successfully chucks everything stupid, boring, and routine about the Madagascar movies for a spinoff focusing on the best part: the penguins. In those earlier films about escaped zoo animals having a variety of wilderness adventures, the center stage went to dull neurotic creatures not cut out for jungle life. The fun happened in whatever a quartet of oblivious and absurdly confident penguins was getting up to. Scheming like a troop of superspies, complete with exaggerated karate poses and chopped Army Man voices, they bungled their way from one calamity to the next with an outsized sense of accomplishment and superiority. Of course, putting fun side characters in a movie all their own runs the risk of collapsing the charm with too much of a good thing. After a trial run in a cartoon series on Nick, here they’re in a movie that matches their loony goofiness and gives them room to stretch out. It’s a fast, often funny, very cute slapstick adventure.

In one of the first scenes, the four penguins literally rocket away from the end of Madagascar 3 into their own story. (“I was getting pretty tired of that song!” one shouts over the sounds of the previous series’ recurring “I Like to Move It” fading into the distance.) Leader Skipper (Tom McGrath), enthusiastic young Private (Christopher Knights), serious Kowalski (Chris Miller), and mute Rico (Conrad Vernon) just want to break into Fort Knox and steal one of the few remaining stockpiles of banned snack food Cheesy Dibbles. In the process, they’re pulled into a diabolical octopus’ evil plot to kidnap penguins from zoos around the world. The crazy cephalopod (John Malkovich, sounding a chummily megalomaniacal sort) is jealous that penguins get all the attention, distracting from the less adorable aquatic creatures. Fair enough, I suppose, but he’s overreacting in gleefully cartoony villainy.

So our hero birds race around the world trying to save penguins from certain doom. Every step of the way, they cross paths with The North Wind, an elite commando unit of snow-white arctic animals, a wolf (Benedict Cumberbatch, in one of his best performances, no joke), a seal (Ken Jeong), an owl (Annet Mahendru), and a polar bear (Peter Stormare). These critters are better equipped to fight supervillains. They have a plane, jet packs, tracking devices, tranquillizer darts, and a secret base in the center of an iceberg. It’s not hard to see why they’d be upset to find four bumbling amateur spy penguins doing about as well in the pursuit of stopping the octopus. The pros make perfect uptight foils for the weirdly effective nonsense the birds bring. Even better, there’s no way these penguins are learning a lesson or going through some pat character arcs. They remain blissfully themselves.

Stuffed with visual gags, rapid puns, and antic action, the movie has plenty of brisk, colorful cartoony pleasures. The scattershot globetrotting effectively collapses all sense of geography, going from New York to Venice to Madagascar to Shanghai and back again in no time at all. That’s part of the fun, high-energy whirlwind mock spy movie stuff done with waddling dim wits. Every stop is home to a manic action sequence involving a variety of animals and weapons deployed to mostly humorous effect. I liked when octopi swarmed a gondola driver and made him their puppet. That’s something you don’t see every day. Nor do you often watch a penguin punch an octopus in the face, or perform a slaphappy dance dressed in lederhosen. Sometimes, you just appreciate the novelty.

This is one of DreamWorks Animation’s most effective animal comedies, even though it arrives at a time when they’ve pivoted away from them towards animated adventures like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. Directors Eric Darnell (Madagascar) and Simon J. Smith (Bee Movie) make a tight and uncomplicated feature that’s over in 90 minutes and lots of fun along the way. Added strange asides include: a documentary filmmaker voiced by Werner Herzog in Encounters at the End of the World mode, a shouting man-on-the-street reporter voiced by Billy Eichner, penguins in mermaid costumes (“You mermaid my day!”), and a villain’s habit of shouting for henchmen in ways that accidentally sound like celebrity names (“Drew! Barry! More power!”). It’s an enjoyable time at the movies, quick, pleasant, energetic, funny, and modest. I’m not complaining.

Undying Love: WARM BODIES

When R (Nicholas Hoult) meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), he doesn’t know what to say. He’s understandably tongue-tied, and not just because she’s a smart, capable, pretty blonde in tight jeans. He’s dead. Well, he’s not dead, exactly. He’s undead. Warm Bodies, written and directed by Jonathan Levine from the novel by Isaac Marion, takes place some years after the dawn of a zombie apocalypse and R is just one of many reanimated corpses shambling about the ruins of civilization. He’s an unusual zombie since his brain seems to be rattling about with a fair amount of activity. There’s enough going on in there, at least, to provide us with a chatty narration that his rigor mortis won’t allow him to vocalize properly. We’re in his head and can tell he’s instantly in love with Julie even though she and her friends are being attacked by his kind, judging by the way the scene drops into slow motion and an 80’s pop ballad fills the soundtrack as she fires her rifle, hair blowing, cheeks rosy.

Warm Bodies would be more of a satire of the kind of paranormal romances that have flourished in these post-Twilight days if it didn’t work pretty well as a rather surprisingly charming romance itself. R protects Julie from having her brain turned into a snack, sheltering her in a crashed airplane where he keeps his record collection. (The movie has a nice soundtrack to go with those stacks of vinyl.)  She’s understandably scared at first. Her dad (John Malkovich) is the leader of their walled-off, heavily armed city of survivors. She’s been trained to shoot to kill the undead without hesitation. She’s weaponless behind zombie territory when R saves her. And he’s kind, clearly making an effort, straining to be understood through his hunched body language and groaning monosyllabic vocabulary. She decides he’s not so bad for a dead guy.

Though the resolutely PG-13 film has a fair amount of guts and gore kept just out of frame, this is a zombie movie for people who don’t like zombie movies. It’s a sweet and hopeful post apocalypse with appealing lead performances. Hoult makes for a likable monster in that he never comes across like one. Sure, he munches on brains, but our access to his inner monologue makes him seem appropriately conflicted about it. And as his relationship with Palmer grows hesitantly warmer, so too does his yearning to be free of the curse of being a zombie. This sets into motion a strangely off-handed search-for-a-cure plot that helps to move the film towards its conclusion. Along the way we meet other zombies who are starting to spark back to life, including a funny Rob Corddry, playing a likable zombie in what amounts to his most restrained performance ever, grunting out barely half a word at a time, but nonetheless getting some of the film’s biggest laughs.

Since we’re expected to like these zombies, there are also roaming packs of plague-ridden antagonists in the form of rotted out skeletons, undead too far gone, who are irredeemable and therefore suitable cannon fodder. It works to tie up the plot and force a conclusion through fairly standard action beats that are the least inspired aspect of this altogether pleasant amusement. What works best is the genuinely heartfelt chemistry at the core. Despite bordering on sappy with its insistence that true love can break through even cold, dead zombie hearts, Hoult and Palmer give appealing performances that are heartwarming enough to buy it. Levine, whose last feature was 50/50, a largely, and improbably, enjoyable comedy about a young man with cancer, knows how to find comedy out of tough scenarios and directs here with a light touch that never pushes too hard against material so pleasingly slight and likably diverting.

Loud Noises: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

At the center of these Transformers movies are the perfect metaphors for describing them, huge incompressible shape shifting junk heaps that occasionally assemble into aesthetically pleasing vehicles. Aren’t these movies essential just that, occasionally pleasing junk? Directed by Michael Bay at his what was then his most excessive, the first movie, from 2007, might be his best movie. It’s a triumph of machinery, both the creatures and the Hollywood mechanisms of their birth, the kinds of gleaming metal and kinetic action that Bay has always focused on. Here they become the goofiest, most explosive expression of his style, his canted angles and saturated colors that turn every shot into a music-video/advertisement hybrid, popping each shot with the crisp vibrancy of slick commercialism. The controlled chaos fell into disproportionate anarchy with the sequel, 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen. That film, though still capable of fleeting moments that are visually striking, was tonally incoherent and offensively stereotypical on most every level.

Here we go again, with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which splits the difference between the two approaches to the same material. This time, it’s in 3D, which at least serves to slow down Bay’s typically rapid-fire editing, if only by a few blinks per shot. The spectacle has to wait, though. For a good hour, perhaps even 90 minutes, Bay spins his wheels with crude humor, offensive stereotypes, and endless, elaborate setup.

Shia LaBeouf, having saved the world twice, is out looking for a job, jealous that his glamorous girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a former Victoria’s Secret model in her first acting job) is getting so much attention from her sleazy boss (Patrick Dempsey). The job search is a bit of a stall while the robots gather up the plot points that will lead to eventual mayhem, though it gives screen time to a self-amused John Malkovich, and a small role for Ken Jeong that is both racist and homophobic at the same time. As for the elaborate romantic setup, it never really pays off, unless you’re so inclined to count the huge close-up 3D shot of Huntington-Whiteley’s rear end walking up a flight of stairs that serves as her first appearance.

Meanwhile, the Autobots (those are the good guys) are still working with the military, led by Josh Duhamel, to sniff out Decepticons (those are the bad guys) but also blow up terrorists for some reason. The movie joylessly gives us an unintentionally hilarious description of said terrorists’ hideout as “Illegal Middle Eastern Nuclear Site.” Phew. As long as it’s illegal. That’s a sequence that wouldn’t look too out-of-place in Team America: World Police.

Taking a break from working for America, the Autobots just uncovered some top-secret stuff about the true reasons behind the U.S./Russian space race of the 60’s and the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl. I’m normally untroubled by seeing alternate history in pop sci-fi (this summer’s X-Men uses the Cuban Missile Crisis to good effect) but here it comes off sleazy and uncomfortable, especially with waxy CGI presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and even Obama) mixed in with the tweaked historical footage. Later, the movie will take visual cues from the Challenger disaster and 9/11. Ugh.

Moving on, there’s a lot to slog through. Buzz Aldrin cameos playing himself, staring up at Optimis Prime, the leader of the Autobots while admitting that, yes, there is indeed an ancient hibernating transformer (Leonard Nimoy) buried on the moon. Bill O’Reily has an interminably smug cameo needling John Turturro’s grating ex-government official. (I pause here to note that the reliably funny Alan Tudyk plays Turturro’s assistant). Frances McDormand collects a paycheck as an Intelligence chief interested in letting the ‘bots find and collect the long-dormant tech off of the moon. In a movie called Transformers: Dark of the Moon we get far too few Transformers and very little moon for all of this time. The movie is scene after scene of humans setting up what we all really want to see: stuff blowing up real good. The first film was actually a competent teen comedy that shifted effortlessly into a goofy sci-fi explosion of action, but after those giant robots have been slamming around writer Ehren Kruger has had no idea how to make just normal people interesting. To be fair he didn’t write the first movie, just the bad second two. All this human setup would be excusable in smaller, more economical doses, or if the robots’ plots made any sense whatsoever.

I won’t take this opportunity to dissect the many ways the logic of the various robot plans do not work. Instead, I will reflect on the fact that giant, largely indistinguishable robots are roaming the planet causing all kinds of ruckus and they’re still supposedly a secret. These creatures are also apparently intuitive geniuses, able to predict the plans of their enemies to an astonishingly accurate level. Take a scene wherein some rolling metal robots emerge to attack Shia on a highway, which leads to a striking 3D composition in which a car unfolds into a Transformer from around its passenger, beats back debris, then turns back into a car with the passenger returned safely to his seat. It makes not a lick of sense and I couldn’t tell you what this brief action sequence accomplishes in terms of plot or who did what to who and why, but it sure looked good for that brief moment.

For all I really disliked about the endless set-up, I was shocked to find that the pay-off almost, almost, made up for it. The action in the last hour or so moves to Chicago where Decepticons are taking over the city for some reason. Humans, after standing by powerless, and Autobots, after cowardly hiding while humans were massacred, roll into town to fight back. The resulting distended urban warfare action set piece is surprisingly effective. It’s well paced and mostly comprehensible, or at least there are clear goals that must be accomplished for the good guys to win. Chicago is thoroughly cluttered in the process. There’s a nifty Decepticon that’s like a metal Sarlacc pit on wheels. There’s good use of 3D to enhance huge drops and dips between skyscrapers. It’s dumb, loud summery sound and fury, and it works on a brute force level. One nearly great sequence with a teetering skyscraper, for example, has nice cliffhanger inventiveness. Bay may often make awkward, frighteningly tone-deaf films, but, when he’s using his eye for forcefully effective action imagery, I’d rather see a pure Michael Bay film than someone else trying to crib from his bag of tricks, like the thoroughly awful Battle: Los Angeles from earlier this year.

I didn’t end up leaving the theater completely hating Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but it’s only because the last hour distracted me from the opening 90 minutes. Upon reflection, dissatisfaction settles in along with the convoluted plot’s sheer idiocy and memory of the horrendous human plot with its endless failed attempts at humor. So, just good enough to very nearly distract from how bad it is, there’s a backhanded compliment for you.

Quick Look: RED

Red is a bludgeoning action comedy that, despite some small pleasure to be found in its fluid comic-book style, is most notable for its collection of slumming thespians that deserves much better. Bruce Willis is the most at home in this movie, starring as a recently retired CIA agent who is now marked for death by the very same organization. He figures out that it has something to do with an old mission, so he, and his mild-mannered kidnapping victim/girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker) set off to find the other agents who were with him at the time. This involves crossing the country to pay visits to other retirees from Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich to Helen Mirren and Brian Cox. It also has something to do with a scowling Karl Urban, a devious Richard Dreyfuss, and two scenes with Ernest Borgnine. Director Robert Schwentke brings some pizzazz to the early action sequences, but even that wears out its welcome before the movie is even half over. The fun of seeing senior citizens in action sequences only takes the film so far and the filmmakers have nothing else to contribute. This is just sound and fury signifying nothing. If you’re going to let a collection of capital-A actors wallow in this kind of junky action-comedy, at least have the decency to make it good junk. I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed. Red is entirely uninvolving, but at least it’s not flat out irritating.