Life's a Beach: OLD

M. Night Shyamalan’s Old has the simple parable power of a Twilight Zone-style conceit, the cheap one-location resourcefulness of a low-fi 50’s sci-fi B-movie, and all the potential stiffness that that could imply. And yet it has an eerie affect through nothing more than suggestion and contemplation of a genuinely horrifying idea if you approach it at the level of earnestness its filmmaker did. What would it be like to live a lifetime in an afternoon? How would your mind race and scramble? How would your anatomy betray you? What would you do with the time given to you? Seeing life dimming as sunset draws near gives you a painfully clear metaphor. The clock is always ticking. So it is with the characters here, a few families and a handful of others driven to a secluded beach by their hosts at the tropical resort where they are vacationing. Once there it’s soon enough clear that the kids are growing up right before their eyes. And then the adults start greying and wrinkling and, well, what else could be happening? They’re aging too fast! Thus goes this nutty thought experiment with Shyamalan’s usual preoccupation with creepy shivers and familial sentimentality. But he’s also here up to subtextual freakiness with squirmy ideas and twisted implications. The movie may not cohere as well as Shyamalan’s best work, but it’s gross and propulsive and never flags in its fluid focus.

On the one hand, it has the trauma of aging from the view of parents who see their cute offsprings’ entire childhoods fly by. (Don’t wish your life away, the mother ironically warns before the beach.) On the other hand is the perspective of adolescences transmogrifying youngsters in practically a blink, so that a 6-year-old mind is broiling in hormones of a 15-year-old body. That’s messed up. The film never quite pushes as far as it could into depravity — Shyamalan’s just not that kind of horror filmmaker — but it’s plenty unsettling as the paradoxically claustrophobic beachfront becomes the site of a cataloging of all the ways aging can turn your body against you: tumors and dementia and seizures and heart attacks and broken bones and blindness and so on. As the day continues, the adults are in rough shape, and the children are thoroughly rattled. (Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie do good work playing stunted kids caught between ages, foreign in their own bodies.) Looking at them, it’s clear growing old is scary stuff. Sure, the movie has them behave in some clunky ways and dialogue can grow creaky and the progression of events sometimes wobbles. But one could easily hand wave that by asking if you’d handle being trapped in this situation any better. How would you even begin to reason your way out of this dilemma? You’re getting older by the second! I suspect there is a purposeful disconnect from the expected behavior. Do you think Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps and Rufus Swell, among others, would behave this awkwardly and unnaturally, all together and in the same pitch and register, for no reason? They’re lost in the melancholy and confusion of passing time as it rushes past. They hardly recognize what they’ve had before it’s gone.

There’s something bordering on chintzy to the premise and execution, but just when I found myself squinting to comprehend its sometimes-flimsy leaps, Shyamalan would win me back by hooking into the tingling emotions jolting the odd mystery of the piece. By the end, of course there’s a solution to all this. And though it wraps up the events with a tight semi-silly but workable conclusion, it doesn’t exactly satisfy (and also clangs a bit against the tenor of the times — I wonder how it’ll play a decade hence). But the journey there is so persistently off-kilter, adrift from convention, with characters totally at a loss to describe what they’re seeing or to understand a way out. Who can’t relate? And Shyamalan matches the confusion with a sincerity attuned to that state: with long takes falling into jittery handheld shots, 360 degree pans that blur and smear, a lingering on bodies in ways that matter-of-factly clue us into shocking changes by revealing a curvier hip or a freshly bulging belly. The shot framing our group of characters through a decomposed rib cage is typical of the attention to highlighting the potential for decay in all of us, the bars that hold us captive. Even when scripts get thin, Shyamalan remains a filmmaker with a distinct visual sense and a finely honed sense of space and storytelling within the wide screen. To see a movie that could’ve easily been disposable or even unworkable on the page lifted to intriguing and compelling and downright interesting through sheer force of filmmaking makes me wish we had more directors working at this level.

Whose Daring Deeds Are Great Theater? HERCULES

If you had to pick one working actor who could play a convincing Hercules, it would have to be Dwayne Johnson. (It certainly wouldn’t be Kellan Lutz. Just ask Renny Harlin.) The man formerly known as The Rock has the right solid body-builder muscle and charismatic broad-shoulder, wide-stance confidence to be believed as the ultimate demigod strongman of Greek myth. That’s the key here: believable myth. Hercules, the latest telling of the legend, imagines Hercules as a troubled mercenary with a tragic past who spreads exaggerated tales of his parentage and deeds to get work and scare enemies. When he stomps in wearing the pelt of a lion for a cape, the mane flowing down his armored back, a massive spiked club held lightly in his huge hands able to smack down five men with a single blow, it’s easy to see how little a leap it takes to believe the legends.

From Italian peplum pictures to a Disney musical, the character of Hercules has a lot of versatility. Screenwriters Ryan J. Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos (of a bunch of direct-to-video DisneyToon sequels) adapt Steve Moore’s comics into a relatively small-scale adventure. At least it’s not a big brooding bore. The open sequence is a rapid-fire retelling of Hercules myths with the hulking demigod fighting impossible monsters: a hydra, a giant boar, a massive lion. It’s a fun, splashy creature feature and a tease, as it is revealed to be a story told by one of Hercules’ band of mercenaries. The storyteller (Reece Ritchie) is joined by an Amazonian archer (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), a seer (Ian McShane), a swordsman (Rufus Sewell), and a mute feral man (Aksel Hennie). Then in walks the man himself. It takes a lot of people to spread the carnage they pin on their leader. Good thing, with dreams, visions, and optical illusions, ancient Greece is a place used to thinking of itself as supernatural.

But Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules more than merely looks the part. He acts like it, too, even if his immense strength is merely at the extreme upper edge of mortal strength. That’s still not so bad, if you ask me. And in battle he can certainly handle himself well, taking out hundreds of enemy combatants while his colleagues help him pick off the rest and the people who hired them cower from a safe distance. This allows the big guy to fake out the people with talk of his Gods-given power and then walk the walk by, say, hiding an arrowhead between his knuckles so it looks like he kills an enemy warrior with one punch. Smart idea. Above all, I liked his arc from guy who says he’s a legend to a guy who works hard to become his own legend. If anyone could do that and pull it off, it’s The Rock.

After some introductory throat-clearing that introduces us to the world of this Hercules, Herc and friends are hired by a king (John Hurt), his daughter (Rebecca Ferguson), and his general (Peter Mullan), to help stop troublemakers giving his villages a beating and working their way slowly to the castle. Complications and battles ensue, with plenty of swordplay, archery, spear-throwing, chariot-riding and other forms of ancient combat. At one point, Hercules flips a horse over his head. I think that’s when I knew I was fully sold on this movie’s brand of action, which is just over-the-top enough to be pleasantly silly. It helps that there’s some comic relief that really works, keeping the whole thing from getting too self-serious. I especially liked the running joke that develops out of McShane’s insistence that he’s psychically aware of when he’ll die. Before one battle, Hercules asks if it’s his time. “No,” he replies, “but I’m not sure about yours.”

It’s a sturdy, old-fashioned adventure with an eye for bright battle sequences and some moderately engaging ancient intrigue. It’s a movie wherein everyone involved seems to be on the same page about the kind of movie they were making. The cast is all likable wooden archetypes and the look has a glossy but humble B-movie charm. It also looks about as cheap as an expensive movie can look, with few standing sets, a couple dodgy CGI crowd shots, and lots of exterior location work. It’s knowingly small and chopped up. A few short and awkwardly inserted flashbacks involving Hercules’ backstory (including small roles for model Irina Shayk as his wife and Joseph Fiennes as a king) seem like vestigial plot points from a longer cut. But the whole thing is scrappy, and good enough in most respects.

Director Brett Ratner has little in the way of personal style, always slickly and competently executing the screenplay before him with his collaborators. (That’s how he’s managed a career split about evenly between entertaining schlock and schlock schlock.) His Hercules is an empty calorie dumb fun machine that keeps the pace up and spirits high. By the final plot complications and climactic confrontations, I was even invested in how it would resolve. I liked the studio programmer throwback appeal to a time when a big studio would make small and simple lazy-day matinee fare. Maybe it just succeeds in lowering expectations, the better to mildly exceed them, but, hey, when it works it works. 

War Between the States (And Vampires): ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER

In theory, a big summer spectacle that posits fantastical secret information about a famous American president is a great idea. As a nation, we have no shortage of myths and fictions about our leaders, stories we tell to validate our own worldviews, to view our current political climate on a smooth, uncomplicated continuum with the past. In practice, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter can’t quite live up to its title. Just the idea of our sixteenth president, tall, bearded, and with a stovepipe hat perched on his head, is enough to make me smile, but this isn’t a comedy in any way shape or form.  This is a deathly self-serious production, a lumpy fictional biopic that devotes most of its runtime to young Mr. Lincoln’s increasing hidden knowledge about vampires and their insidious plots within our nation’s nineteenth-century borders, taking time out of its sloppy chronicling of Lincoln’s real-world rise to the presidency for setpieces of vampire-hunting action. It could have used a dash of wit to help it go down easier.

In Seth Grahame-Smith’s script (based on his novel, unread by me), Lincoln’s mother dies after an encounter with a vampire. Years later, looking for revenge, Abraham (Benjamin Walker) tries to shoot his mother’s killer in the head and is surprised to find the man pop back up baring fangs. The future president is saved and confronted by Henry (Dominic Cooper), a confident vampire hunter who agrees to help the young man learn the ways of destroying these creatures that roam the land, hiding in plain sight. So Lincoln, studying to become a lawyer, marrying Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and debating Stephen Douglas (Alan Tudyk) on his way up in a promising political career, happens to moonlight as a stone-cold killer of the undead. This is a future president played as action hero, as superhero. He spins an ax and hacks off the heads of vampires, usually after acrobatic scenes of kicking, spinning, and punching that slow down into stylish slow-mo to better appreciate just how much of a smackdown Lincoln’s giving these monsters.

Director Timur Bekmambetov first made a splash in Russia with his grimy, gory modern-day vampire action movies Night Watch and Day Watch, so it’s no real surprise that his focus in Vampire Hunter is mostly on the bloody spectacle. He thinks it’s fun to have vampires clashing with Abe Lincoln and his allies – like a shopkeeper (Jimmi Simpson) and an escaped slave (Anthony Mackie) who are loyal hangers-on – in one-on-one combat and in elaborately staged action sequences of a most modern kind. And it is, for a while. Lincoln’s first hunts are well staged and his enemies are well-designed, slobbering, blue-grey things. This is an action movie first and foremost, and so it wobbles around when it reaches for slightly more ambitious elements that come into play as the march of real-world time drags Lincoln and the film’s plot into the American Civil War.

Lincoln hangs up his vampire-slaying ax and focuses on being a president, but the leader of American vampires (Rufus Sewell), who happens to be a big-time slave-owner as well, ruling over his kind from a swampy plantation, strikes a deal with Jefferson Davis (John Rothman) to allow his unstoppable supernatural soldiers to join the Confederate army. And so, Lincoln is brought back into the business of killing vampires, using his knowledge to help provide the Union with a strategy to beat back these scary creatures. Of course, none of this has anything useful or insightful (or even slightly interesting) to say about Lincoln, or war, or slavery. Essentially, all of the above are just the plot points on which to hang marginally effective CGI action and destruction, as the whole vampire-as-metaphor-for-slavery thing never really comes into clear focus and the surprisingly clever use for Harriet Tubman (Jaqueline Fleming) and her involvement in all of this straight-faced goofiness is just a nice barely-there subplot.

I went into Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter expecting nothing more than a historical figure hunting vampires, and I suppose I got that, didn’t I? Lincoln definitely hacks away at some supernatural beings during the course of his lifetime as told by this particular fiction. But it’s all contained in such a well-made bore of a movie – a stiff, intermittently stylish dullness – that it’s hard to get too excited about much of anything that happens between the opening scene and the closing credits. The actors are all convincing and the special effects are about as good as you could expect, but the movie is starved for wow moments of any kind. It’s both too much and not enough.