False Idols: GODS OF EGYPT

A big, lumbering, gaudy, gold-plated fantasy set in Ancient Egypt, Gods of Egypt is a modest collection of oddball flourishes buried under an explosion of convention and generic effects. It’s idiosyncratic in all the small details, but overblown and undercooked in the broad sweep of its tedious and predictable quest narrative. Behind this eccentric production is Alex Proyas, a director of blockbusters who brings such total commitment to his ideas that you have to admire the force of his personality shining through, no matter what you think of the end results. He’s given us the death-haunted pop Goth The Crow, the sci-fi noir Dark City, the popcorn tech ethicist actioner I, Robot, and the genuinely apocalyptic disaster conspiracy picture Knowing. Those are nothing if not big swings. But they can’t all connect big, hence his latest. Gods of Egypt is his worst, but only because it clearly got away from everyone involved, a mess of ideas and impulses at which a studio kept throwing money when a comprehensive rewrite would’ve been a better idea.

The film finds Egypt ruled by its Gods, towering gold-blooded giants who demand the praise and obedience of their small, humble mortal subjects. Lazy Horus (Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is about to ascend to the throne when his Uncle Set (300’s Gerard Butler) takes the crown for himself. To add injury to insult, Set plucks out Horus’ diamond eyes and locks them in a vault. This casts the land into a villainous darkness that should be familiar to anyone who has seen this sort of thing before. The plot proper kicks off when a spirited human thief (Brenton Thwaites, playing the thin, pretty, bland hero) makes a deal with Horus. If he gets the God his eyes, then the God must find a way to save the poor boy’s grievously wounded One True Love (Courtney Eaton in gowns cut for maximum cleavage) from the clutches of the underworld. That’s all pro forma fantasy nonsense. The real glorious goofiness is in the details.

This is a movie in which a bald Geoffrey Rush pulls the sun across the flat Earth’s sky in a boat floating above the atmosphere, stopping periodically to do battle with a ginormous space worm. It features magic immortals who can turn into grotesque cartoony animals or extrude armored plates from their skin like Egyptian Transformers. It has Chadwick Boseman as an egotistical know-it-all God who clones himself a hundred times over, and Elodie Yung as a Goddess who can find anyone with magic sand, provided her magic bracelet keeps her literal demons at bay. There are waterfalls from outer space, Rubik cube pyramid puzzles, a crumbling sentient Sphinx, a flying chariot pulled by giant scarabs, and a days-long line of deceased souls ready to blissfully commune with a pulsing energy they call the afterlife. This is all pleasantly straight-faced odd, a mix between high fantasy and low cornball camp. Proyas takes the mythology just seriously enough, and stages some fun sequences, like two massive fire-breathing snakes attacking our heroes, or thundering fisticuffs atop a 2,000-cubit high obelisk.

But the screenplay by Dracula Untold’s Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless makes a miscalculation in becoming one of those fantasy stories that spends more time filling us in on its rules, caveats, backstory, prophecies, curses, and other assorted gobs of tedious exposition than in actually running through its main story. As a result the brightly lit movie feels endless and consequence free, since the magic is arbitrary and prone to change (with laborious explanation) if the next scene calls for it. There’s no weight. Add to this a feeling of a salvage job, with mismatched scenes, awkward jumps in logic, and plot holes papered over with afterthought narration and incessant tin-eared exposition, and the whole thing starts giving off a whiff of sloppiness. I mean, this is an Egyptology fantasy with a cast of Brits, Americans, Danes, Aussies, anyone but an actual Egyptian. (Butler’s brogue has to be the least fitting Cairo speaking voice since Edward G. Robinson’s in The Ten Commandments.) This is a clearly a movie that’s the product of an interesting directorial imagination hobbled by more than a few unfortunate decisions. 

Once, Twice, Three Times a Cheater: THE OTHER WOMAN

The Other Woman is a light and amiable wish-fulfillment revenge comedy with all the tonal mismanagement that pile-up of descriptors suggests. Getting off to a good start, the film introduces us to a high-powered New York City lawyer (Cameron Diaz) head-over-heels for her new rich, handsome boyfriend (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). He’s her first serious relationship in many years. Too bad, then, that he’s married. When she finds out she’s understandably hurt, but not as much as his wife (Leslie Mann) is. He doesn’t know they know, and certainly doesn’t know they then spied on him and uncovered a second unsuspecting mistress (Kate Upton). From there the three women team up to get revenge on this no-good sleazeball. At first they play pranks, like putting a laxative in his water or estrogen in his power shake. But they don’t just want him humiliated. They want him to hurt. So they target his most vulnerable part: his wallet.

Totally uninterested in making this a dark or biting comedy, the screenplay by Melissa Stack finds fizzy complications that are treated as a lark. This leads to some gross-out gags like a defecating dog or a man in a fancy restaurant having an urgent bowel movement (what is it with this movie and poop?) that are certainly gross and might even make you gag, but I didn’t find them too funny. Okay, that second one was a little funny, but seems out of place, because elsewhere the emotions of the women are triangulated for comedy and light drama. Their common goal includes shifting desires and expectations for each of them at different points. They’ve certainly become friends under unusual circumstances, so it makes sense they wouldn’t always be on the same page. The wife, especially, has her doubts. Sure, he was cheating, but she wonders if that’s reason enough to throw away their marriage?

That’s an interesting question, or at least could be. But Stack’s script isn’t interested in exploring that. It’s too busy alternating between bubbly and goofy. Director Nick Cassavetes (of The Notebook and My Sister’s Keeper) shoots the film glossily. Everything is brightly lit and gleaming. The surroundings are as rich and white as the characters – big glass-covered offices, spacious high-rise apartments, and gorgeous beach houses. But I suppose that’s part of the wish-fulfillment of it all. Not only do we get to watch three beautiful women plot against an awful chauvinist, but we also get to see fancy clothes and nice architecture while they do it. Everyone’s so well off they can drop everything and go to the Hamptons or the Bahamas on a stakeout. Must be nice. I mean, aside from the whole finding out you’re all being cheated on thing.

What keeps this sloppy script and sparkling studio airiness watchable and even at times enjoyable is the strength of the cast. The three women at the center of the plot hold it down with their likable chemistry and funny personalities. They’re all clearly in their acting comfort zones, relaxed and capable of wringing laughs out of the sometimes lame material. One of them actually sells the old looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-binoculars sight gag. That’s no small feat. Leslie Mann is appealing as a tightly wound housewife who increasingly spirals into a manic panic over her husband’s infidelities before finding the clarifying purpose of plotting revenge. Cameron Diaz is fizzy and sarcastic, able to whip up a plan of action and have fun doing it. And Kate Upton is awfully good at selling ditziness, even if her character remains only a happy, curvaceous blank-slate. Seriously, what does she even do? Where does she go when she’s not on screen? We’ll never know.

They aren’t exactly the second coming of 9 to 5, the three-women-take-down-dumb-guy revenge comedy The Other Woman occasionally resembles, but that’s not entirely their fault. Get these three characters in a scene together, trading lines with one another, and it’s all pleasantly enjoyable. Mann’s flighty worry bounces nicely off of Diaz’s wry cynicism and Upton’s airheaded charm proves a fine glue to hold the trio together. But the movie has less to say about female empowerment than you’d hope, keeping the ladies firmly in their stereotypes. The tone wobbles all the way to the end, mixing broad slapstick and blunt innuendo right up to the climax in which the comeuppance we’ve been waiting for is a bit too eagerly vindictive. The movie doesn’t seem to think very highly of any of its characters, even the side characters like a small role for Nicki Minaj that dilutes the snap of her rap persona. That's a factor in the mishandled mood and empty point of view - are we supposed to root for them or view it all at a satiric remove? - that make for a hard movie to embrace. I didn’t mind it too much, laughing at times and smiling a few more, but it’s so slight and forgettable it’ll probably play even better in the middle of a weekend afternoon on TBS.

Haunt You Every Day: MAMA

Mama is a delicately wrought horror movie that seems to operate from an underlying fairy-tale nightmare logic that makes it all the more scary when we’re occasionally plunged into actual nightmares of warped, fluid imagery and nestled waking-up fake-outs. These visions are what prod the characters towards discovering the nature of Mama and how she can be stopped, if at all. But that’s not until late in the game. For a long time, the title character is hidden away, a specter, a hint, an eerie presence in the characters’ lives. What is she, exactly? Is she a monster? A ghost? It’s unclear for quite a while, but what we see for sure is that something protected two little girls (only 1- and 3-years-old) after they’re cruelly abandoned in a cabin in the middle of nowhere by a despondent father, a father who just shot their mother off-screen minutes earlier.

The film picks up five years later. That man’s artist brother (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) lives with his rocker girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) in a small apartment. They have a mostly comfortable life, happy with one another’s company and without a desire for kids. However, he spends his spare time continuing to search for his missing brother and nieces. It’s still a shock when the girls are found feral, fearful, and full of stories about Mama, their apparently imaginary protector. Their psychologist (Daniel Kash) advocates for their placement in the home of their uncle, providing this freshly constituted family a spacious home on the condition that they agree to allow the girls to be studied. It makes sense to most involved. The girls are damaged by their five years missing, years filled with experiences that remain unknowable to those around them. They’re skittish and hesitant to approach the adults in their lives with anything less than caution.

As the girls’ new guardians feel their way towards a new normal, Mama arrives. We don’t see her, not really, but the long haunting tease brings with it horror tropes. Shadowy shapes that appear in doorways, fluttering insects that crawl along doorframes, and a mysterious accident that sidelines a member of the ensemble all add to the sense of unease. Andrés Muschietti, in his directorial debut, creates a terrific piece of sustained creepiness that’s broadly predictable, but pleasing in the specifics. The way dread twists mournfully into nearly every scene of the film creates a deeper fright than expected. In layered compositions that play upon who we know is in the house and what we’re shown of its architecture bring small shivers that bloom into full scares. A shot that finds a girl playing with an unseen someone in one room in the foreground, while the side of the frame looks down the hall through which, one by one, the other characters walk, is suddenly terrifying. Now that all the characters are accounted for, who is in that room interacting with that little girl?

The film finds fright from the understandable worry that can come from knowing that children adopted out of terrible situations have a past that their new parents might never be able to fully understand. Chastain is remarkable as a woman who is hesitantly embracing her new maternal position. She navigates her evolving relationship with these girls in a halting, nervous way that can’t ever fully reveal itself to them. She must stay strong for the kids, who are the true anchor of it all. These are incredibly controlled and expertly deployed child performances, steady, clear-eyed, and free of obvious ticks and tricks. Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse (as well as Morgan McGarry and Maya and Sierra Dawe in the opening scene) are only impressive. These are girls who are emotionally wounded to various degrees, but can often seem like sweet, average, normal children. It’s in moments of subtle wrongness that the dread kicks in most strongly. The way Nélisse, especially, has of slyly glancing at dead space as if she’s seeing something in nothing in the frame is so suggestive of the haunting these girls have accumulated throughout their five years missing.

By the time Muschietti pulls out the standard horror movie jump scares and other assorted jolts on the way to Mama’s reveal and an extended climactic supernatural struggle, the film grows just a bit more standard than its opening would suggest. But it retains its insinuating, fragile emotional center. I watched some of the last five or ten minutes mouth agape. It becomes a film that’s literally haunted by connections that are difficult to sever. If there’s some kind of happy ending, it’s only because the characters have learned to let go. But a wholly happy ending is too much to ask from this movie that follows its nightmare logic to a suitably scarring conclusion.