Reality Bytes: M3GAN 2.0 and THE NAKED GUN

It says a lot about our current technological moment that two of the only big summer movies that speak even glancingly to it are also the most intentionally silly. Sequel M3GAN 2.0, for instance, makes fun out of the artificial intelligence bubble currently forming, in which the technology’s biggest boosters are really just salespeople lumping many functions, some helpful and many not, under one dubious umbrella. The picture is a slight pivot in mood and form from the original M3GAN, in which a toy designer (Allison Williams) makes a life-size A.I. doll for her lonely orphan niece (Violet McGraw). The fake girl is supposed to keep the real one company and protect her from harm, but then takes that directive so literally it’ll kill a mean neighbor or a schoolyard bully to do so. That film has a pretty basic slasher formula and some fine tongue-in-cheek performances. What really made it special was the eerie doll design itself, performed by child dancer Amie Donald in a partially expressive plastic mask and voiced with a pixelated mean-girl sneer by Jenna Davis. The creepy little dance she did right before she killed the main human villains went viral for a reason; it’s an eerie bit of performance, blasé and confrontational in one fluidly disjuncted wiggle. She’s not bad; she’s just programmed that way. 

But for all that movie’s modest horror charms, the sequel one-ups them in every way. Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper return to transform the genre into a gleaming sci-fi action picture. It’s every bit the T2: Judgement Day to the first’s Terminator. This time there’s a rogue bootleg bot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) escaping military control and looking for revenge against her creators, which include the characters of the first movie who mobilize a souped-up M3GAN to help fight her relentless sister birthed from the same code. The movie doesn’t take its sci-fi convolutions too seriously, seeking instead to launch into fun combat and chases and gunfights and martial arts moves. And, yes, there’s a dance sequence, too. It’s all set in glowing neon and shiny surfaces and the actors are well-calibrated to inhabit broad genre shorthand characteristics while still feeling plausible and worth rooting for. It’s propulsive and entertaining with choreography and smirking humor balanced well. Then the movie’s best ideas spring forth from its A.I. ambivalence, making all of its human villains tech billionaires and the gullible customers who buy what hyperbole they’re selling. The last twist in that theme is to make M3GAN an ever wilier bit of programming that is simply following the logic she was taught. It’s a movie that entertainingly ties up its own loose ends while leaving the larger question unresolvable. Is A.I. both the cause of and solution to our problems?

Funnily enough, there’s an evil tech billionaire as the villain in the new The Naked Gun movie, too. Played by Danny Huston with the grit and gravitas in his line readings that he’d bring to a trashy drama, it makes the totally ridiculous lines he often has all the funnier. That’s a key insight director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer (he of Lonely Island and cult classic comedies Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) takes from the original film of the same name. That was a cop movie spoof from the makers of Airplane! and Top Secret!, part of their formula of having serious actors play it straight while acting through complete absurdity at a vaudevillian level of puns, slapstick, silly signage, and cartoonish vulgarity while simultaneously riffing on cinematic tropes and forms. It was the least of those three pictures, but a solid entry in that now-dormant style. Schaffer’s new legacy sequel comedy pivots back to that older tradition, and as such is so stuffed with gags and punchlines that even if it really only hits huge laughs half the time, that’s still more than we’re used to encountering in one sitting. I found myself occasionally annoyed or exhausted, and some of the jokes here are definitely clunky, but the movie is overall so cheerfully ridiculous, and somehow both a dusty throwback and breezily contemporary, that I was delighted to be continually surprised by its eager goofiness. Even the title card has an unexpected laugh.

Schaffer does a good job making the movie look like a routine studio programmer with a rumbling score and brightly lit action, and then around every corner is a running gag or a quick punchline or a background detail that sends laughter jolting through an audience. Liam Neeson is totally serious as the lead cop, son of the original’s Leslie Nielsen. (The similarity in their names is it’s own unspoken bit of whimsy.) It’s somehow a fitting tribute to the franchise that he’s riffing on his own previous 15 years as an older action star, while fully inhabiting the obliviously incompetent cop role expected from this series. He bumbles through a goofy pulp mystery involving a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson), a hapless partner (Paul Walter Hauser), and a tough boss (CCH Pounder). That he just might end up taking down the dastardly tech guy’s criminal conspiracy to drive the world mad (an apt jab) is semi-accidental. He drinks progressively larger coffees handed to him in increasingly incongruous situations. He pronounces “manslaughter” as “man’s laughter.” Cops pull cold case files out of a freezer, and are all thinking in overlapping hardboiled narration. There are gross gags about diarrhea and decapitation (those are separate scenes). A romantic montage turns into a spoof of a high-concept horror movie. Neeson blames his misbehavior on the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show and says, “Who’s going to arrest me? Other cops!?” You get it. The movie goes anywhere for a joke, finding some of its own while borrowing gags from its predecessors, and a few from Austin Powers or Scary Movie, and is so very pleased with itself for reviving a whole style of comedy that’s disappeared. I might’ve been more skeptical if I hadn’t just laughed too much to pick nits.

Liam Neesons: THE MARKSMAN, HONEST THIEF, BLACKLIGHT, THE ICE ROAD, MEMORY, andORDINARY LOVE

The moment that indisputably made Liam Neeson an action star is the phone call in 2009’s Taken. That junky, xenophobic little action thriller, lifted entirely by the spectacle of a prestige actor slumming it, has that one great memorable moment in which the star commands total attention and gravitas. He’s playing a special agent whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers while on vacation in Paris. He gets one of the abductors on the phone and, in a low growl, says those infamous words:

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I         don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a         very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now         that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

Remembered as an ultimate steely action movie threat of promised retribution—a short speech and statement of purpose—it, more than anything else, opened the doors for Neeson’s next fifteen years of action movies. He was immediately able to play dozens of tough old guys who still know how to muster up the ability to kick in some teeth and survive chases and shootouts. But watch the scene again and notice that it also taps into what the best of those pictures find: his sadness. You can see the fear and doubt on his face, the deliberate weighing of words that are as much about talking himself into action as they are scaring the bad guy. He takes one heavy pause, a slow blink, as he steels himself for what he hopes won’t have to come next. He’s tired, but determined. When he asks the villain to “let [his] daughter go now,” you really feel that he hopes that will be the end of it.

It’s because Neeson is so tall, broad-shouldered, and has a voice so paradoxically soft-spoken while in a gravely tenor, that he makes obvious sense as a heavy threat. He speaks softly and carries a big stick, moving with a slow but inexorable gait laden with potential violence. But it’s that sadness in his eyes, the ways his brow and chin draw down with a resting reluctance, that make him so sympathetic, too. In the best thrillers of this stretch of his career, like A Walk Among the Tombstones or The Grey or Non-Stop or Run All Night, he’s played alcoholics, disgraced cops or retiring robbers, suicidal workingmen, grieving fathers, and sullen widowers. (And that this string of melancholy action pictures began shortly after the sudden death of his wife adds an extra layer to the downbeat mood.) In each, the power comes, not merely from the action itself—though it can be quite well done—but from the mournful weight to the violence. You can feel it, because he’s so clearly affected by it. He enters the pictures sad, and the dutiful action unspools cautiously, reluctantly, forcefully. The spectacle adds weariness to his stance, and his slow-speed pursuit of justice. Or is it simply something to numb the pain and stave off the end?

This was exciting at first—an injection of soulfulness into what could be routine genre elements care of a star finding new corners of his persona. But the last couple years have seen Neeson’s action movies themselves feeling sadder and more tired. (Hey, aren’t we all?) In The Marksman, he’s a rancher on the southwestern border who protects an undocumented teenager who crosses the border onto his property, hunted by cartel guys and border agents. The reluctant protector is written as a flat Clint Eastwood type. In fact, he’s so creaky and terse one imagines that part was written for Eastwood. (Writer-director Robert Lorenz has worked with Clint as a producer, and his only prior directorial effort was the elderly Eastwood vehicle Trouble with the Curve. You do the math.) Neeson inhabits the role uneasily, but gets off some good semi-earnest sentimentality in the part, and is given some functional suspense sequences. But the movie’s entirely muddled on a political level, and the story isn’t good enough to call that ambiguity, or distract from its incoherent messaging. Neeson can’t save this one. But he’s on some better ground in writer-director Mark Williams’ Honest Thief, which at least has a clever conceit. In this one, he’s a prolific mysterious bank robber who’s fallen in love, and so decides to turn himself in, but the government agents to whom he confesses steal his enormous cash pile and set him up for a fall. That’s neat, and the movie’s eccentric ensemble of quirky bit parts goes a long way to keeping it from falling too flat, but the plot is executed with a sluggish trudge that takes a long time going where we always think it will.

Neeson then re-teamed with Williams for Blacklight, a movie that also has a healthy distrust of law enforcement. In this one, Neeson’s an FBI fixer who is drawn into a larger understanding of a conspiracy to murder a progressive politician. He then has to help stop them before they hurt more people. In the opening scene, an Ocasio-Cortez kinda-sorta lookalike is killed in a hit-and-run, and soon an investigative journalist and a whistleblower are imperiled by nefarious Deep State death squads led by a sneering agent (Aidan Quinn) who casually talks about quashing protestors. (This one squirmingly feels the tenor of the times in spots.) The whole thing’s at once too hyperbolic and too chintzy, full of nearly provocative ideas for which it loses nerve, cavernous nowheres where the plot’s detail and dimension should be, and the Neeson character is almost superfluous to the plot’s mechanics. The picture wants pseudo-70’s paranoid style, but is shot in an overlit textureless digital smear in Melbourne doubling unconvincingly for D.C. I wish its style and substance was as wild as its ambitions. But at least those movies are not as perilously thin as Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Ice Road, in which Neeson’s ice road trucker gets entangled in some shady shenanigans. There’s nothing real or convincing about anything, from character to location to action. And it even has Laurence Fishburne around loaning just part of his natural gravitas to the proceedings!When they can’t make a truck chase across a frozen river exciting, you know the movie’s gone wrong.

It’s starting to feel like the Neeson: Action Star project is just about out of steam. The feeling is all through his latest, Martin Campbell’s Memory. Though it has such a good idea for him to play, that makes it all the more disappointing it’s just another middling thriller built from off-the-shelf parts. (And from a director who successfully rebooted James Bond twice! Alas…) Here Neeson’s a veteran hitman succumbing to Alzheimers. What a frightening prospect! There’s a chilling moment in the middle of the picture where the guy’s refused to follow through on an assassination of a 13-year-old girl. That night, he has a nightmare in which he kills her. The next morning, her death is reported on the news. Wait, he thinks, did I? Or didn’t I? The movie plays on the terrible ambiguity, but only for a moment. Turns out he didn’t, so he spends the rest of the movie fighting his slipping mind as a supporting character to the larger investigation carried out by a detective played by a stringy-haired, slumped-shouldered Guy Pearce. The sheer tonnage of routine shoe-leather and rote shootings weigh down the potentially clever ideas at its center, and bury the actors—even Monica Bellucci as a dastardly real estate mogul—in a blandly developed conspiracy that’s too-easily unraveled for us in the audience. Once that’s sorted, then it’s just a glum matter of hoping the characters can figure it out in time.

As thrillers of this ilk have been diminishing returns for Neeson, his most satisfying movie of the past few years is a straight drama: Ordinary Love. The story it tells is ordinary, and it is tender plain-spoken simplicity that gives it power. Here’s a movie about an aging couple (Neeson paired with Lesley Manville). They’re comfortable with each other, so much that even their slight tensions and disagreements can be shrugged off. They go for walks. They grocery shop. They watch TV. They trade chores. There’s an unspoken absence. The mantle photos show a daughter they don’t mention for quite a while. You get the sense she’s dead before they ever make reference to her grave. Like any couple of this sort, they’ve accumulated quite the history, and it sits unspoken on their shoulders, weighing in on every exchange. This makes a fatal diagnosis a cruel puncture to their clearly hard-won comfort. The movie follows matter-of-factly the aftermath of this diagnosis as a course of treatment is decided upon and inevitable emotional and interpersonal struggles arrive from heavy potential outcomes hanging over their heads. The screenplay from playwright Owen McCafferty gives these actors space to explore the ideas inherent in this situation, with Manville providing such a heartrending quivering in her stiff upper lip, and Neeson’s facility with grief and sadness is refined in a film of pinprick specificity. Somehow he’s looped back around to this sort of picture being the refreshing change of pace. How satisfying to see a picture so small, so plain, and yet carrying a lifetime of feeling.

Un-Bear-Able: TED 2

Less a film, more a long string of failed scenes limply strung along by an offensively puny wisp of story, Ted 2 is the sort of movie you’d never want impressionable youngsters to see. Not simply because it’s relentlessly vulgar and casually mean-spirited, but because they might get the wrong idea about what constitutes a joke. Nothing but bad vibes and cheap jabs, jokes here are lazy swipes at stale targets, insults, cultural references, and mind-in-the-gutter gags spat out in a painful patter with no sense of pacing or timing. It’s stiffly assembled and flatly delivered, a long, punishing excursion filled with lifeless shots and awkward pauses. Lacking even the sliver of imagination and energy that made the first Ted, our middling introduction to the eponymous R-rated sentient teddy bear, this sequel begins with no reason to exist and makes no case for itself.

Ted 2 has desperate desire to offend, nakedly condescending. It shouts out names of recent tragedies (in obvious ADR), insults oppressed minorities at every opportunity, and is wallpapered in casual racism, homophobia, and sexism. An equal opportunity offender only lazily upholds the status quo, without a perspective to make any real points. It’s boring to watching such flailing irreverence, chasing empty shocks towards irrelevance. Writer-director Seth MacFarlane’s comic stylings are recognizable from his rancid Family Guy and flop western spoof A Million Ways to Die in the West. He thinks standing back from his material spouting off random garbage is equivalent to wit, but it’s a bullying approach, smirking and slapping at an audience while talking down to his own characters. And then he asks us to care about their plights.

Unlike its predecessor, which fell back on a predictable man-child comedy structure asking its characters to grow up, this new Ted asks us to love them even though, and often because, they’re unrepentant jerks. Mark Wahlberg returns as the man whose childhood toy became Ted (voiced by MacFarlane), and they proceed to rampage through a movie that has them make fun of black men and gay people, destroy a barn, steal weed, molest Tom Brady, start a fight at New York Comic-Con, and knock over a shelf of samples in a sperm bank without consequences. (No good movie has ever featured sperm bank shenanigans.) All that happens because Ted and his wife (Jessica Barth) want to adopt a baby, but are told they can’t since the bear isn’t legally a person. Makes sense to me, but MacFarlane wants us to be outraged enough to care about a protracted court battle as the uncouth bear decides to fight for his nonexistent civil rights.

Between unfunny tomfoolery and insult comedy, long scenes play out mostly straight as characters earnestly discuss Ted’s consciousness, determined to prove his personhood to a jury. How am I to care about this bear when the movie’s so fundamentally unserious, and he’s totally, irredeemably, purposelessly unlikable? We’re supposed to feel suspense waiting for the verdict, after a plucky young lawyer (Amanda Seyfried) delivers sincere speeches and Ted compares his trials to the plight of slaves (he watches Roots and references Dred Scott) and gays (or, as he tells the court, denying his equal rights “is just like what you’re doing to the fags! I’m sorry—homos”). The joke is that Ted uses a slur and then corrects himself to a different impolite term. The effect is an insult – hurtful words so dismissively tossed off – wrapped in a bigger insult – that anyone expected a laugh out of it. It takes a particular kind of social blindness to make a movie that’s both a metaphor for civil rights battles and an insult to anyone who’s fought for them.

It’s lazy and hateful, with sincerity cut only by stale attempted humor the very definition of “punching down.” By the end, two bullies have dressed up in costume to menace nerds at a convention, a wise old civil rights attorney (Morgan Freeman) tells the jury to remember the Emancipation Proclamation and vote pro Ted, and Jay Leno has appeared as himself pretending to be “gay” in the most awkwardly silent thirty seconds I’ve spent in a theater this year. And I saw Paul Blart 2. MacFarlane shows no desire to shape a scene or whip up momentum. With the deadliest pacing, every gag is dead on arrival. There’s no inner drive, nearly two hours spent just clunking along from one patch of dead air to the next. He takes lazy jabs at Bieber and Kardashians (hardly the freshest, or most deserving, of targets), stops scenes cold for fumbled cameos (poor Liam Neeson), and displays a preoccupation with male virility as if it’s an inherently funny topic.

This movie is superfluously backwards and overwhelmingly dull, too slapdash in its story and comfortable in its hypocritical and unchecked assumptions about what’s funny, as if anyone that’s not a straight white bro is worth pointing out and picking at. But, yes, by all means, let’s respect a stupid teddy bear. Yeesh. It’s agonizingly clear how grating and deadening MacFarlane’s hodgepodge approach is. I think he loves movies – he stages a straight-faced joke-free Busby Berkeley-ish musical number as his opening credits – and maybe genuinely wants to make a case for equality. But he’s too tone deaf to be funny while doing so, or control the real messages his Ted oozes.

After Hours: RUN ALL NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once, Twice, Three Times a Taking: TAKEN 3

Taken 3 is the least in its series, which in turn has been among the least of star Liam Neeson’s recent spate of action roles. Unlike his good to great films of late (The Grey, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Non-Stop), these movies are only about how many people Neeson’s Bryan Mills, an ex-special ops guy with a particular set of skills, has to kill to get a member of his family back from the bad guys. The first had a single-mindedness that worked for it more than not, especially if you can ignore its uglier vigilante tendencies. The second wasn’t even that good, but at least had its moments of committed goofiness, like grenade-based echolocation. This third time around, it’s just lazy, requiring bigger jolts to get less effect. Now he has to kill a whole bunch of people just to feel better about losing a loved one, this taking being of a more permanent kind.

After much throat-clearing exposition, Mills discovers the murder of his ex-wife (Famke Janssen, turning up for a cameo that’s half corpse). He just got back to his apartment after buying fresh bagels and finds her dead in his bed, bloody knife left dripping nearby. The cops aren’t far behind. Naturally, they think he did it, so he goes on the run to clear his name, protect his now-college aged daughter (Maggie Grace), and find the people responsible. As the detective on the case and on the chase, Forest Whitaker, who hilariously eats the fresh bagels out of the active crime scene, interviews the ex-wife’s husband (Dougray Scott) who asks if this has to do with those two times Mills got caught up in nasty business overseas. Whitaker’s reaction to the question is so underplayed to be nonexistent. It’s like he hears about suspects’ serial vigilante killing sprees everyday. Maybe he’s seen the earlier movies too.

Neeson spends the entirety of the movie on the run in a sleepy riff on The Fugitive. The reasons for this are protracted and stupid, easily the stupidest plot co-writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have yet concocted. It’s not just absurd. I could handle that. It’s wholly unnecessary. Neeson flees the authorities, pursuing his own sense of justice despite A.) a solid alibi, and B.) almost immediately discovering video evidence that, if turned over to Whitaker, would point cops directly to the real baddies. I mean, I know Neeson’s the best of the best, but wouldn’t he rather clear his name and let the police arrest the clearly guilty bad guys? I guess he prefers the collateral damage implied in a reckless chase down a freeway, an explosion on a college campus, and a shootout in a skyscraper. It makes it hard to disagree when, late in the game, Scott turns to Grace and says, “Your dad’s a homicidal maniac!”

This superfluous running, jumping, shooting, punching, and chasing (all PG-13 bloodless, naturally) would be better off if we could at least enjoy it. But there’s a sense of mercenary profit-based laziness involved, as if everyone did the least they could to get the paycheck by pumping out another entry in the brand. Barely comprehensible action scenes are a perfect compliment to the dumb connective tissue between them. This is director Olivier Megaton’s sloppiest deployment of chaos cinema, quick edits and haphazardly framed shaky cam hiding most effects and many causes in the dimly imagined action. Worst, it obscures how Neeson gets out of most of his close calls. At one point he backs his car down an elevator shaft, plummets several stories, and groans. Then the car explodes, elaborately and with many angles. After an edit, we find he’s on the phone in a different location. How’d he do that? I get the feeling no one knows and, worse, no one cares. I know I don’t.

Truer Detective: A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

Scott Frank knows what he’s doing. He specializes in crime stories, heists and mysteries, serious-minded and skillfully puzzled out. With his scripts for the likes of Minority Report and Out of Sight and his 2007 directorial debut The Lookout, he crafts stories of dangerous, or at least resourceful, people trapped in unfortunate situations. A Walk Among the Tombstones, his latest film as writer and director, is hard and hardboiled, the stuff of typewriter clacks, bottles of brown liquor, and gristle. It’s a detective story about a man with deep psychological wounds who works quietly in the shadows. He doesn’t like what he does, but needs to do it as a way of working through his past mistakes.

Frank’s filmmaking craftsmanship is impeccable. There’s a classical restraint to the steady, crisply blocked stillness of the shots. It has throwback appeal in the patient setup and slow reveal of one clue after another. Based on a 1992 novel by crime fiction legend Lawrence Block, the film finds pleasures in the investigation, watching Detective Matthew Scudder think things through. Once a cop, he was in a bad incident resulting in the death of a little girl. Since then, he’s been haunted by that moment, eking out a living as an unlicensed private investigator. As the movie begins, he’s asked to find a kidnapper who snatched a drug trafficker’s wife, got ransom money, then killed her anyway.

Scudder, Block’s most famous creation, having appeared in 18 books since 1976, is here played by Liam Neeson, no stranger to the role of a calm, grieving, professional man of violence. He’s right for this kind of part because he’s so confident. We believe in his skill. We can see intelligence and thought in his eyes, the moral gravity of the situation resting on his broad shoulders. As he’s aged, Neeson has grown not restrained, but minimalist. He can suggest so much with a layer of gravel in his voice, a small shift of eyebrows, a tilt of the head. He’s still, solid, softly deploying his deep intonations until they calcify with deadly seriousness as he addresses bad men. He towers over others in a scene, and yet exudes a beguiling mixture of intimidating warmth, fierce intelligence and refreshing compassion equally sparingly deployed.

He’s reason enough to see the film. We watch as the gears turn in his head. He meets with the trafficker (Dan Stevens) and his brother (Boyd Holbrook), talks with witnesses, does research in the library (the film’s set in 1999), and casually scopes out crime scenes. Eventually, he’s paired with a sweet homeless teenager (Brian “Astro” Bradley) who loves Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe as much as this film does. The kid likes the idea of being a private eye. The relationship he slowly develops with a reluctant Neeson isn’t cloying or sentimental, but positioned as a nice dim light in an otherwise grim experience.

Violence is brutal, sudden, and graphic in impact and implication, if not always shown. On occasion, Frank cuts to the depraved kidnapper (a pair of them, actually, played by David Harbour and Adam David Thompson) in flashbacks to prior murders and in present tense stalking of new targets. It’s unpleasant and unsettling, a grey mood of unrelenting menace. The ensemble is exclusively male, women left to be only objectified, wounded, imperiled, and chopped up into little pieces. We feel the weight of this danger, and as the stakes are raised it gets unrelentingly tense. Frank is certainly serious about the way he approaches this violence. It’s not a lark. It hurts. But the speaking parts are so fully ensconced in a masculine world, it’s more than a little disquieting to realize every female presence is only meat for the plot’s grinding.

But Neeson is so good, and the procedural mystery aspects so skillfully deployed, it manages to work despite this nagging imbalance. It’s compelling, the kind of tough, darkly effective detective movie we don’t often get these days. The film serves up all the usual red herrings and revelations you’d hope for. Frank’s script is terse and smartly plotted, playing fair by the various developments and actions. All the while, Neeson anchors the proceedings with his intense and welcome seriousness, as well as his dry humor and desire to keep his demons at bay. His humble struggle against the evil that men do is the lurid hook, but the throughline of his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, threaded throughout, including a monologue intercut with the climax, makes it matter. He gives a complicated, soulful genre performance as much a throwback to detective stories of yore as the plotting. 

Easy Dying; Hard Comedy: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

Seth MacFarlane must think you’re stupid. For A Million Ways to Die in the West, his second feature film, the creator of the nauseating cartoon Family Guy and the so-so R-rated teddy-bear comedy Ted has written and directed a Western comedy that assumes you have only a passing familiarity at best with the genre and with the history of the American frontier. The screenplay, a loose collection of often ugly comedy conceits strung along a fairly standard Western plot, is written from a detached angle to the material, filled with characters who stand back and explain the context of the jokes. This is how a town in Arizona got ice shipped from Boston. Here’s the level of medical care a frontier town could expect. Did you know people don’t smile in old pictures? Did you know there were a lot of deadly dangers in the Wild West? There’s a condescension here that assumes you won’t get the jokes, such as they are. It’s a movie made for people who snicker at old movies for no other reason than because they’re from another time.

Stuck in approach somewhere between Lawrence Kasdan’s grinning revival Silverado and Mel Brooks’ anything-goes satire Blazing Saddles, MacFarlane’s film is at once a smirking know-it-all comedy and a somewhat earnest attempt to do a Western. The plot is simple. It’s 1882 in Old Stump, Arizona. A poor sheep farmer (MacFarlane, giving himself the lead) is left by his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) and soon starts courting the beautiful stranger (Charlize Theron) who happens to ride into town. Unbeknownst to him, she’s the wife of the region’s most terrifying gunfighter (Liam Neeson). That’s the skeleton of a fine Western plot, and it’s carried along by expansive widescreen photography from Michael Barrett and a classically trumpeting score by Joel McNeely sounding a lot like what Max Steiner or Dimitri Tiomkin would’ve done in the genre’s heyday. But every time a character speaks, it’s with a clattering, colloquial modern speaking tone that’s ironic, smarmy, and simply not funny.

Patient zero for this flat, desperately unfunny performative patter is MacFarlane, who delivers his own writing with the enervating energy of an overeager standup. He’s impressed with himself, convinced his subpar quips and lazy observations are hilarious. He’s not charming. He’s smug. His character is disconnected, standing aside from even his castmates. He’s given long scenes in which he stands apart, mugging for the camera as he makes fun of 1800’s fashion, medicine, politics, transportation, and technology from a vaguely know-something modern perspective, nothing a high school freshman who half paid attention to history class couldn’t snark. It’s impossible to take him seriously as a person in this story, which is too bad considering the nearly two-hour movie has him in every scene. I simply couldn’t get invested in a whiny, inconsistent character who is barely invested in the plot himself. He keeps giving the whole production the side-eye, as if he knows more than he does and feels so very self-satisfied about it.

Meanwhile, there are real actors around him who at times make his (and Family Guy co-conspirators Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild’s) repetitive and insulting writing seem almost palatable. Theron’s a welcome presence, transforming a decorative plot device into something like a character. Neeson for the most part retains his dignity, assuming that’s a stunt butt that gets a daisy stuck in it, as he seemingly gallops in from a serious Western. Elsewhere, Sarah Silverman and Giovanni Ribisi are trapped in a gross-out subplot that plays like bad knockoff Farrelly brothers, with a prostitute and her fiancé “waiting for marriage,” but they almost make it work. The only person who gets the peculiar tone of the picture exactly right is Neil Patrick Harris, playing a mustachioed jerk wringing every bit of possible enjoyment out of his every appearance. He has to play a scene where he suffers a fit of diarrhea in the middle of the street, catching his runny excrement in his floppy cowboy hat. And he almost makes it work.

MacFarlane is a stunted, juvenile gag writer who expects to get laughs out of edgy material, but fails to shape jokes with thought or artistry. It’s a flat, stiff production that can barely set up a decent sight gag. Characters are placed in front of the camera, barely move, and talk at each other in bad sitcom asides. Periodically they blurt out references to horrible subject matter – racism, misogyny, domestic violence, murder, rape, child abuse – and MacFarlane assumes the shock will get a laugh. The movie is casually dismissive and/or actively hateful to women, Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, Jews, and Muslims. Sometimes the racism is cut with the smug white guy in the center of it all pulling ain’t-I-a-stinker? faces. A “Runaway Slave” carnival shooting game has targets that are big-lipped, wide-eyed blackface images chowing down on a slice of watermelon. Two Chinese men wear rice-paddy hats and sport Fu Manchus. A character jokes he’s going to recite his “Islamic death chant” and proceeds to ululate gibberish.

You can’t have your aggressive stereotyping and hate speech and wave it off, too. So what if (only sometimes) MacFarlane turns to another character and says, “Um, isn’t that racist?” It is. But then what, exactly, are we supposed to be laughing at? The movie comes across as stubbornly created from the perspective of a narrow-minded, privileged, rich white male tittering at anything beyond his immediate frame of reference. Words have meaning. Images have power. MacFarlane knows what buttons to push, but fails to truly grapple with, subvert, or defuse their impact. As director, he can barely stage a High Noon shootout, saloon brawl, surreal drug trip, or musical number with any clarity or consistency. No wonder he can’t even begin to figure out how to frame or otherwise handle hot-button issues.

He wants laughs, and I truly believe you can craft a good joke out of any topic, but he goes about it in exactly the wrong way. This is comedy filmmaking at its most cheap, lazy, and unthinking. Are we supposed to laugh because he went there, or does he actually think he’s being clever? The writing is either offensive or groan-worthy. The gross-out anatomical gags are just gross. Cameos (Christopher Lloyd? Ewan McGregor? Ryan Reynolds?) are merely random nothings. The violence is flatly presented and full of miscalculated gore. A face bloodily squished by a brick of ice isn’t exactly a fun pratfall. At best, the movie is either unfunny or incompetent, a pleasant and vacant experience. But when it’s bad, it’s odious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playtime: THE LEGO MOVIE

You’d think by now I’d have more trust in writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Instead, I’ve gone into each and every one of their films suspicious of the entire project and left feeling pleasantly surprised, won over by their manic energy and thoughtful thematic playfulness. Who would’ve guessed their Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a feature-length expansion of a slight, whimsical picture book, would be one of the funniest movies of any kind in recent years? Or that their reboot of musty old TV series 21 Jump Street would be a jocular undercover-cop comedy perceptive about shifting teen mores and feature one of the best cameos I’ve ever seen?  Now they’ve tackled The Lego Movie. That’s right. It’s a movie based on the tiny bricks with instructions on how to build them into vehicles and buildings that come with square, stiff yellow people to put inside. I don’t see the story in it, although Lego has tried some original fantasy brands and media-tie-in parodies for TV on occasion to move product. Thankfully Lord and Miller found a way to make more than an advertisement. Under their direction, The Lego Movie is a freewheeling and clever family film.

Making terrific use out of the mix-and-match ability of Lego, the filmmakers have thrown out the instruction book. Actually, that’s the crux of the film, a conflict between the two basic ways one can use the product. Computer animation that looks like the expensive Hollywood version of what you’d get making stop-motion Lego movies on your bedroom floor (a quick YouTube search reveals this a popular subgenre of amateur filmmaking) builds a world built entirely out of these multicolor bricks. It’s a generic metropolis filled with generic Lego people: construction workers, police, cat ladies, surfers, coffee shop patrons. They all follow the rules, the same homogenous lifestyle that uses each and every brick in exactly the way the manufacture intended. Disruption comes when an average Lego man (Chris Pratt) finds a legendary brick and falls in with a motley group of assorted outcast Lego people, Master Builders who insist that the bricks can be used to make anything you could dream up. Ostentatiously evil President Business (Will Ferrell) wants to keep the masses oppressed and in line, but our hero teams up with the Master Builders in a last-ditch effort to save their Lego-world by opening it up to be played with however they want.

The film moves at a breakneck pace through colorful madness that spoofs the usual three-act structure of big sci-fi fantasy spectacle. There’s our naive Chosen One who finds the piece and is told by a wise old bearded Master Builder (Morgan Freeman) that he’s the fulfillment of prophecy and the savior Lego-world needs. That this is obviously phony makes for a fun, adaptable running joke. Their allies include a funny mix of characters from various Lego product lines – a punk woman (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), a pirate (Nick Offerman), a unicorn kitten (Alison Brie), and an astronaut (Charlie Day). Their goals are typical stuff – find this crucial object and use it to shut down a superweapon – but it’s treated with a wink and a sly sense of humor. At one point, a character explains backstory most movies of this kind would take very seriously indeed, but here it literally devolves into “blah, blah, blah.” All we need to know is that our heroes are being pursued by President Business’s henchman Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) and his robots in elaborate, endlessly clever action sequences that hop through a variety of Lego worlds like a wild west set, a pseudo-medieval land, and a hodgepodge oasis of secret imagination.

The Lego nature of everything from the clouds in the sky to the water in the oceans, down to even the explosions and dust plumes, is put to good use. Good guys frantically rebuild the necessary equipment on the fly, while the baddies march forward mercilessly rule-bound. Cameos from all sorts of Lego types litter this high energy romp through relentless action and invention, from Shakespeare and Shaq to Wonder Woman and C-3PO, all cracking a joke or two before falling back into the big picture. It’s all such an exuberant sense of childlike play, the characters and setting deconstructing themselves and building new fanciful wonders before our eyes with delightful speed and complexity in the rapid-fire action slapstick. Imagine those charming moments in Toy Story when we watch Andy act out scenarios with his toys stretched to fill 90 minutes and you’ll get a sense of the tone here. This exceptionally, endlessly cute and quick film isn’t afraid to go very silly and step out of its narrative. The villain hoards mystical objects, like a massive used Band-Aid he calls the Shroud of Bahnd-Aieed. In the climax, his giant evil machine sounds exactly like a little kid making a growling engine noise.

For the longest time, I was simply charmed by what was an awesomely high-functioning technical exercise. But in its final moments, Lord and Miller take the film a step towards brilliance, pulling back the focus and revealing new information that moves away from thin genre play and towards something deeper, but no less hilarious. I won’t spoil it for you, but it says something almost profound about the way the act of creativity can bring people together. There’s also something in there about free will and a higher power. One character we meet late in the game is literally named The Man Upstairs. But it’s all folded into a sugary blast of entertainment. It’s amazing how a movie so light on the surface opens up bigger questions effortlessly. Just as amazing is that this multi-million dollar corporate advertisement doubles as an anti-corporate call to individuality in the face of crushing conformity, that this blockbuster movie doubles as a commentary on how blockbuster plots are built out of material as generic and interchangeable as Lego blocks. Lord and Miller are masters of having it both ways and getting away with it too.

Grudge Report: TAKEN 2

Taken 2, like Taken before it, delivers on its promise. These movies can do so simply by not promising all that much to begin with. These are nothing more than well-made junk, advertising and providing relentless forward momentum, parental vengeance, and Liam Neeson’s grade-A gravitas. The first time around, his ex-CIA agent punched, kicked, shot and shocked his way through the Parisian underground after his vacationing daughter (Maggie Grace) found herself kidnapped by human traffickers. The movie didn’t have much in the way of plot or character, but it was short and fast, blessed with an unstoppable force of a protagonist in Neeson, whose every growl and scowl landed strongly. He used his height and seriousness to create his menacing demeanor. It doesn’t hurt that he also got to rumble out an instantly iconic action movie monologue, one that finds him calmly, gravely informing his daughter’s kidnappers that he has “a particular set of skills…” warning them of swift retribution that sure enough comes to pass.

Now, in the grand tradition of Die Hard 2 and Speed 2 and Death Wish 2, a movie about a more or less regular person in an extraordinary action-thriller scenario is followed up by a movie about that same exact regular person ending up in a shockingly similar scenario. This time, Neeson, vacationing in Istanbul with his daughter and ex-wife (Famke Janssen), finds himself taken. He recognizes this inevitability soon enough to call his daughter back at the hotel and tell her the bad news in a pale echo of the first movie’s great monologue. “Your mother…and I…are about to be…taken.” This time the daughter has to rescue the father, who in turn must rescue his ex-wife. He wiggles out of his restraints soon enough that most of the movie he gets to fight his way to his wife and daughter while trying to take out the threats in between.

But who are the kidnappers this time? They’re none other than aggrieved friends and family of some of the bad guys Neeson maimed, killed, or otherwise hurt in the first film. Led by Rade Serbedzija as the scowling father of the guy Neeson electrocuted, this band of anonymous vengeful others are out for Neeson’s blood. I like the idea of a sequel to a movie of mostly consequence-free violence basing its entire plot around providing consequences to that film’s actions. That this movie continues and expands upon its predecessor’s slight case of xenophobia, in which all foreigners are both undeveloped characters and mindless plot-device aggressors, is disappointing. The film is filled with stage-setting shots that linger on burqas and mosques while the sound of an unseen muezzin filters through the background noise and the villains make their way towards our protagonists. Instead of using its locale as a picturesque backdrop for action, the film feels like nothing more than cheap exoticism as code for threat in ways the feel awfully tired.

Still, the grudge-driven plot seems fitting, even if writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen ultimately have once again used their narrative hook only to provide quick, satisfying bursts of action sequences sprinkled with a moderate amount of connective tension. Director Olivier Megaton (with a name like that, you hardly have to go on to describe him as a French action director) films the car chases, shootouts, explosions and hand-to-hand combat with a slick competency (and with strangely sanitized PG-13 brutality). The benefit of the movie being little more than one long chase scene is that there’s no wasted time and there’s no reason to feel cheated. It is exactly what it wants to be and no more than what little it promises. And there’s still some time for occasional moments of mild invention, like when Neeson manages to call his daughter and walk her through the details of using a map, a shoestring, a pen, and a grenade to pinpoint his location.

Taken 2 doesn’t live up to the modest surprise of its predecessor. For one thing, the novelty is gone. Neeson’s character is hyper-competent, so much so that surprise is not really in the cards. When the situation is at its most dire and he tells his wife that everything is going to be okay, of course I believed him. And that’s really all that matters here. The movie is dependent entirely upon how willing the audience is to see Neeson run through the streets of a foreign city, fighting bad guys every step of the way in order to restore safety to his family. As a sequel, narratively speaking it’s an afterthought. As a movie unto itself, there’s just not much to it beyond what little it promises. But I guess that’s the point.

Sunk: BATTLESHIP

I don’t know if the nonstop digital chaos and noise wore me down or what, but parts of Battleship aren’t that bad. The main plot point of this movie-based-on-a-board-game is that during joint military exercises between the United States and Japan off the coast of Hawaii, an alien ship of some kind comes in for a splash landing and opens fire. So the movie’s basically American and Japanese sailors protecting Pearl Harbor from alien invasion. Why, that’s almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. Well, in a better movie it would be, one interested in exploring context and building characters or metaphors or providing any sort of narrative momentum or rooting interest other than “Blow up them aliens real good!” It’s a thin blockbuster that takes forever getting started and then has little but unoriginal drivel to get to once it does.

The payoff of all this is actually somewhat competent as far as these kind of big, impersonal blow-‘em-up blockbusters go. It’s the setup that’s totally bonkers and tonally messy, which dilutes the climactic excitement, reducing it to merely better than what’s come before. Screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber start us off with some pretty weird scenes that collide into each other in awkward ways. First, we meet twenty-something screw-up Alex (Taylor Kitsch) sitting in a bar, getting a lecture from his Naval-officer brother (Alexander Skarsgård). It’s a grow-up and get-responsible kind of lecture that awkwardly segues into a happy-birthday cupcake. Then a blonde bombshell (Brooklyn Decker) walks in and Alex goes over to hit on her. She wants a burrito but the bartender won’t give her one this late at night. Alex tries to get one for her and ends up breaking into a closed convenience store to do so, getting tased for his troubles.

Cut to some unspecified time later. Alex is now in the Navy, too. He’s talking about marrying blondie, but she wants him to ask her dad, Admiral Liam Neeson, for her hand first. Also there’s a pre-war games soccer game between America and Japan’s sailors that he loses and a subsequent fight that he gets into. He’s in real danger of getting bounced out of the military after these military exercises are over with, but is also third in command or something. I don’t get it either. This whole jumble of exposition and character building is so confused and tone-deaf, as if the writers had a vague sense of how movies worked and figured they better set up the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys before getting into the action, but had little idea of how to actually go about doing that.

But then, the aliens arrive. These unseen baddies set up a force field around the islands, cutting off a few battleships from all outside help. Poor Liam Neeson can only appear in one or two scenes where he looks determined, worried, and utterly powerless to intervene. Meanwhile, blondie is stuck on the side of a Hawaiian mountain where she is occasionally called upon to interact with a veteran (real veteran Gregory D. Gadson) who has two prosthetic legs and together the two of them look over at some aliens off in the distance and look worried. It’s up to good old Alex to rise to the occasion and figure out how to stop the alien invasion. And I haven’t even mentioned the quivering scientist (Hamish Linklater), also stranded on that mountain, whose satellite array brought the aliens to Hawaii in the first place. There’s also the scowling Petty Officer played by pop star Rihanna and the comic relief (I guess?) provided by Jesse Plemons. They get to scowl and crack wise and shoot big guns.

But anyways, all these characters are trapped in this impenetrable energy bubble. I was all ready to hate the movie based on how terminally uninvolving and unbelievably sloppy I found the schlocky first hour (or more) of this 131-minute movie. Even the opening alien salvo is just nonsense, shredding city streets and toppling buildings in a familiar and dull way. A main character dies almost immediately when a battleship goes down and I hardly cared. But then a funny thing happened. The movie picks up some steam and charges forward into occasionally diverting silliness. It doesn’t get good, exactly, but it moves up from awful to just plain watchable mediocrity. By the end I wasn’t enjoying myself, exactly, but the highly improbable use of a floating museum in the climax made me smile a little.

And it’s kind of clever how the gameplay of Battleship is integrated into the movie. The battleships can’t detect the alien vessels on their radar, but luckily the alien ships can’t seem to spot them either. Luckily a Japanese officer (Tadanobu Asano) comes aboard to help the Americans detect the vessels. He does something related to water displacement and buoy sensors, but the end result is a grid that looks suspiciously like the board game. “E-11!” “Fire!” “Anything?” “It’s a miss!” The following sequence is rather suspenseful, if more than a little goofy. But it’s not any sillier than the way the alien’s missiles are cylinders with little pegs in the bottom so that they stick in the battleships before blowing up. Again, like the game. This is what’s modestly involving about the movie. I never cared about the characters. The humans are mostly indistinguishable except for the main characters that we’re told to like and root for just because they are the main characters. The aliens are just a squishy, flavorless, derivative horde. What do they even want? Who knows? Open fire!

The problem that plagues the movie all the way through is the lack of personality. That’s why the flashes of board-game-referencing winks are the most enjoyable moments; they’re the only relatable, recognizable moments. The acting’s simply functional for such dysfunctional roles. Neeson’s wasted. Kitsch is a blank. (John Carter had a much better role for him.) Rihanna could actually be a good (or even great) action star in a better movie; she has plenty of tough charm here. Linklater’s scientist gets one sort of good line when he comes crashing out of the jungle: “They killed my grad students!” Decker was hired for her cleavage. Not helping the actors much at all are the action and effects which, from the aliens’ designs right down to the nonstop weightless carnage, are just so much shiny digital confusion.

Director Peter Berg, not the most consistent of filmmakers (on the one hand, Friday Night Lights, on the other, Hancock), has shot it all in a style that can only be called watered-down Michael Bay. It’s all of the militarism and convoluted plotting with none of the idiosyncratic personality and ability to create striking imagery. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bay has a distinctive style and when he’s given a big, loud set-piece to execute he knows, for better or worse, how to play it up big.  Here Berg’s only cobbling together a pale imitation, serving up so little payoff that there’s little sense waiting through the setup. 

The Titans Strike Back: WRATH OF THE TITANS

The 2010 remake of 1981’s campy Greek mythology monster movie Clash of the Titans has the dubious distinction of being a hit movie that’s terribly forgettable. I remember being downright bored not liking it and that Sam Worthington fought a giant scorpion and everyone loved how Liam Neeson growled “Release the Kraken!” in every trailer and commercial for the movie. Now here’s the sequel, this time around directed by Jonathan Liebesman, who last directed the alien-invasion war movie Battle: Los Angeles, which was one of the most chaotically uninvolving films I saw last year. So you can see why I approached Wrath of the Titans with a large degree of skepticism. It turns out to have mostly been unnecessary. The sequel may be no great movie – it’s still barely above middling in my book – but it’s a significant step forward and the kind of movie that works so well on its own you can go ahead and forget about seeing its predecessor if you’ve so far been lucky enough to avoid it.

Sam Worthington is back as Perseus, demigod son of Zeus. The opening narration tells us that after slaying the Kraken, he settled down as a fisherman in his seaside village where he lived a quiet, peaceful life raising his son on his own ever since whoever played his romantic interest in Clash decided she didn’t want to come back and do the sequel. Zeus (Liam Neeson) shows up at his son’s door to warn him that the gods are losing their powers and this means that they can’t keep all those monstrous Titans locked up anymore. Having delivered the message, Zeus meets up with Poseidon (Danny Huston) and together they head down to the Underworld, where they find that Hades (Ralph Fiennes) has joined forces with Ares (Edgar Ramirez) to kill off divine competition and free Kronos, who promises to restore the gods’ powers. Hades wounds Poseidon and captures Zeus and is well on his way to having his way.

Meanwhile, a giant, two-headed, fire-breathing, dog Titan attacks Perseus’s village. Once that’s dealt with, Poseidon shows up to deliver exposition, telling Perseus the nature of the quest that must be undertaken to restore peace. He even points out who must go with Perseus on the quest and where to find them. So the movie’s off and running in what seems like no time at all. The stakes are set – end of the world – and so is the goal: to unite Poseidon’s trident, Hades’s pitchfork, and Zeus’s lightning bolt and forge the ultimate weapon and only known Kronos killer. Perseus sets off on his flying horse Pegasus to find warrior-queen Andromeda (Rosamund Pike) and his half-brother, demigod Agenor (Toby Kebbell) and gets them to help find the weapons, rescue Zeus, and save the world.

Unlike its predecessor, Wrath of the Titans makes an asset of its thinness. It just hurtles right along, all so straightforward. None of the actors have much to do and none of the mortal characters ever really pop with any personality to speak of aside from generic action quips and interjections. It’s the gods who are memorable here and they’re only used sparingly. Even so, I found myself reacting to the people on screen as actors not as characters, as in, it’s kind of nice to see Edgar Ramirez hamming it up from beneath ancient armor. What fills the void where memorable characters go, what the entire movie rests upon, is how much enjoyment can be found in the monsters. On that level, the movie delivers. Here there be monsters.

Among the highlights are the kind of expensive-looking, effects-driven setpieces you’d expect from a movie like this. The group runs through a forest with a Cyclops duo hot on their heels. They wander through a cavernous underground labyrinth where hallucinations are eerie, but far less deadly than the Minotaur. And, in the terrific climax, a colossal volcanic man drips immense ribbons of lava and fiery debris down upon a puny mortal army. Liebesman stages these and other action beats in a way that’s more or less understandable and shows off the effects work well, incorporating digital effects and 3D tricks in a likably competent way. It may not have the personality of the kind of stop-motion work Ray Harryhausen did, but it displays a similar respect for the sensation of seeing a vivid monster that could only be made real in the movies. The walking lava cloud is especially memorable. I love the way Perseus rides the flying horse through the layers of dripping danger, bobbing and weaving through the 3D depths in a rather strikingly designed series of shots.

It’s an agreeable diversion of an action spectacle that kind of dissolves on impact. But it’s efficient, delivering the big effects moments without letting the exposition bog down the proceedings or spending too much time providing characterizations to the cardboard. It’s a supremely simple-minded movie that just comes right out and says these are the Good Guys, these are the Bad Guys, and these are the Monsters. Then all of the above run around and fight and then the credits roll. The movie doesn’t overstay its welcome and provides an excuse to sit inside and eat some popcorn while avoiding a spring rain shower. (In a few months, it’ll be a fun, unchallenging rental for a lazy Sunday afternoon when you’d rather watch a movie than take a nap). I wouldn’t call this a good movie, or even a particularly involving movie, but I will admit to having a small amount of affection for it nonetheless. To all the journeymen directors and writers out there: If you have to make an unnecessary sequel to a terrible remake, you might as well make it as watchable as this one.