Back in Action: NOBODY and WRATH OF MAN

The lizard-brained appeal of the shoot-‘em-up Nobody is a little misjudged. It stars Bob Odenkirk, the great sketch comedian of Mr. Show turned wry and soulful character actor star of Better Call Saul, as a suburban family man in a rut. An early montage shows us his daily routine of coffee and commute and office work filling spreadsheets. His wife won’t sleep with him. His son doesn’t respect him. Day after day. This is interrupted by a pair of semi-bumbling thieves who break into his home and steal just a few trinkets. Feeling emasculated for failing to stop the robbery, he roams the city looking for trouble, eventually beating up some shady characters on a city bus with surprisingly adept combat moves. Turns out he’s a former secret agent retired in protected obscurity. Also turns out he just beat up some guys connected to a Russian mobster, who sends dozens of anonymous goons after him, leaving this humble middle-aged dope no choice but to send his wife and kids away while he goes full John Wick. (That the screenplay is from Wick scripter Derek Kolstad should be no surprise.) The result is a movie in which a mid-life crisis of masculinity is solved by violence—waves and waves of shootings and stabbings and all sorts of things to make a faceless, personless baddie’s body go splat. I’ll admit the action, staged by director Ilya Naishuller (whose previous actioner, the woozy POV-shot Hardcore Henry was repellently violent), takes on a passable jolt, and the dumb retribution logic plays out with some dopey spirit. But I couldn’t shake the fact that the whole amoral shape of the thing was like someone traded American Beauty’s portrait of male-pattern ennui’s sex fantasies for violence, then dropped the clumsy satire for overplayed needle drops and self-satisfied slow-mo. Odenkirk is smartly restrained and underplayed throughout, though. And the shoot outs and explosions and car wrecks have a stupid satisfaction to them. But the whole arc of the picture — better living through mass murder — leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Far better to see a movie that knows how deadly serious its pulp plotting is. I’d be loath to say a thriller as unremittingly dark and unsparing as Wrath of Man is a moral work, but it has a code and a perspective that understands there is no such thing as good violence or a righteous kill. It’s too stark and unflinching, lean and mean, to be anything but impressed by the emptiness with which it leaves every character involved. There’s something ominous to its undertow, crisp crime plotting that will be drug under by its poisonous grasp. Here men’s schemes are what opens that Pandora’s box. They’re pitiless; their crimes run cold; blood oozes and splatters like tar. It stars Jason Statham in one of his chilliest performances, his tight musculature crafted into a stone-faced determination. He’s a new hire at an armored truck company that has recently been targeted by a team of robbers who blocked off a road, blew out the side door, and gunned down the drivers. Statham is silently hyper-confident, keeps to himself, and seems to be way more talented than the job requires as the movie’s introductory passages draws him into his co-worker’s world of jargon and joshing. You can tell he’s up to something. As the movie steadily widens its scope, sidestepping to show us other groups of men, we see this armored truck depot is the hub of criss-crossing plots: two teams of thieves looking for a big score, a man-on-the-inside working to help one of them, some cops who may or may not be onto something. And Statham? He’s on his own, out for revenge. You can tell when he calmly, precisely guns down some potential robbers without breaking a sweat, and then follows it up with the faintest flicker of disappointment. These weren’t the thieves he was looking for. The movie’s unflinching grimness and deliberate forward motion matches Statham’s, as his vengeance works itself into mythical, or perhaps Old Testament, dimensions through the dark rumblings of fatalism, the taciturn brutality of its sparingly deployed concussive violence, the score full of low, slow strings and thunderously rolling drums.

The film untangles its deceptively knotty plot with razor-sharp simplicity and focused tension. Revelations drop into  a sturdy structure that thuds each new variable into place with equal parts inevitability and surprise. Moving backwards and forwards in time, and moving in different groups of dangerous men on a direct collision course with each other, the heat steadily builds to a boiling point, spilling over in a clever and tragic escalating climax. The way there finds in its long set-up and clockwork payoffs a merciless logic and calculated futility. We get the sense all of these guys need to take action in response to their circumstances (they were wronged, or greedy, or bored), but know deep down all this danger won’t get them much of anything in return. It’s a fallen neo-noir world past saving, but something must be done anyway. The big ensemble of enjoyable character actors (Holt McCallany, Josh Hartnett, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, and on and on) keep the personality on a low simmer, the kind of hard-bitten pulp dialogue that curlicues with just enough flair, a mixture of hollow macho posturing and gruff molasses-drip dialogues of heavy seriousness. The film matches this tone with its own self-seriousness: chapter headings, drawings of snakes and devils in the open credits, a well-deployed use of a gravely Johnny Cash lament in a violent montage, restraint in patient wide-shots and smartly withheld reveals. But that seriousness finds a good match in the mood and craft of the picture, which imbues what could be affectations with a level of tightly controlled artfulness that elevates what could in lesser hands devolve to mere shoot-‘em-ups. Here every shot counts, and hurts.

That it comes from writer-director Guy Ritchie marks potentially a new era in his filmmaking. After all, he began in the 90s as part of the post-Tarantino fast-talking genre movie crowd, with jumpy and jumbled crime pictures like Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels that rattled chronologically and pictorially. Those early films of his are energetic and youthful, but also empty, callow contraptions. His exercises in style were then well-served as directorial eccentricities in massive Hollywood branded blockbusters — two Sherlock Holmes, a Man from UNCLE, a King Arthur, an Aladdin. He often enlivened what duller hands would’ve turned out perfunctorily, taking his quick-cut flashiness and scrappy chatter to glossy spectacles. With Wrath of Man, he’s come full circle with a sense of an aged master, older and wiser, confident in his narrative chops and control of tone. He entrusts a thick layer of menace to a talented cast and crew of ace craftspeople. Every shot is well-judged and clear. Every sequence is economical and thrilling. He rarely goes out of his way to accomplish in two shots what could be done in one. Thus it becomes an exercise in control, taking his interest in underdogs and rivalries, ambition and deception, fatalism and determination, and drawing them out in a mechanically impressive scrambled chronology told with an atypically heavy pace. It’s a two-hour crescendo of sustained suspense and dread, promising and delivering clever realizations and anyone-goes violence. It builds. It escalates and modulates. It finds new depths to dig as it wrestles with the darkness at the heart of these men’s plans, the way wrath animates yet hollows out everyone around it. Here’s a film that look on the evil men do — in so many forms — and feels sick from the weight it carries, before exploding outward in intense genre thrills.

Fast Past: THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS

No matter how ridiculous or improbable the Fast and Furious series became on its journey from humble street-racing Point Break riff to international heist pictures to blockbuster secret agent spectacles (what an evolution!), it always retained its emotional core. Until now. Even at peak jump-the-shark, when Seven had characters not only jump a sports car between the upper levels of two gigantic skyscrapers, but also survive multiple head-on collisions and a rollover accident down the side of a rocky cliff, it could still manage an emotional sendoff to the late Paul Walker. (Play the opening notes of “See You Again” and even the stoniest of gearhead hearts might melt a smidge.) They may have become unbelievable vehicular superheroes, but they still really cared about each other and even their most outlandish feats made sense in the context of the lengths they’d go to show that love. Alas, the eight installment in the seemingly unstoppable franchise, The Fate of the Furious, ditches its core consistency of character relationships for a misguided attempt to mix it up. It’s almost fun – starting with a silly street race prologue and some dark notes of discord – but then bungles the execution.

This time out Dom (Vin Diesel), the patriarch of the makeshift family, betrays them and joins forces with Cypher (the great Charlize Theron, a welcome if underutilized addition), a hacker bent on sending our team chasing her fetch quests. She wants the world to fear her, so she needs weapons of mass destruction. Makes sense. But the leverage she has over Dom to force him to help her, kept fruitlessly secret for the bulk of the runtime, only goes so far. Sure, it’s a tortured melodramatic twist, but the movie doesn’t milk suspense out of the betrayal. His friends pulled into the conflict (Ludacris, The Rock, Tyrese, Michelle Rodriguez, and Nathalie Emmanuel), chasing him down New York City streets and across frozen lakes, register only mild disappointment in his switch, and shrug when the truth of his double-double-cross is revealed. They’re too busy outrunning a nuclear submarine or avoiding fleets of technologically hijacked self-driving cars. Those are cool, goofy, over-the-top sequences full of revving engines, spinning wheels, and crashes both real and digital. But when director F. Gary Gray (who usually has decent thriller instincts; see The Negotiator or the chases in his Italian Job) simply cuts between careening car coverage and close ups of the people behind the wheels without thinking about what they’re thinking, it’s hard to care. The film has Idiot Plot in the extreme, keeping characters (and often us) outside important information while exhibiting no curiosity about how anyone would react in these topsy-turvy scenarios.

Screenwriter Chris Morgan has created a world in which every villain, no matter how horrible their actions, eventually becomes their friend. It made sense when undercover cop Walker fell in love with their ethos and fell in with their grey-area car culture back in the first movie. And it even (sort of) made sense that lawman The Rock would, despite chasing after them, begrudgingly call on their help in Part 6. Here we have Jason Statham, who has previously murdered one of their best friends and blew up Dom’s house, freed from prison by mysterious government suits (Kurt Russell and Scott Eastwood) to join the team. How do the characters feel about this? Other than a few joshing quips thrown his way and a one-scene threat of Rock-sized retribution, it fades away as he becomes just another familiar face behind the wheel. In this context, no wonder Dom can willy-nilly switch sides and its nothing more than a MacGuffin for the plot engine strung between the action. it hardly matters what anyone does because everyone can survive and anyone can be redeemed. 

Now the stakes can be nuclear war and the movie, aptly dropping the fast from the title, feels turgid and vacant and slow and, worst of all, just plain boring. This has been a series so good at retooling, I hope they can find a better route next time. They had such a good escalation going for six films, building on what works and pivoting before it got stale. But now it’s stuck in a futile need to top themselves with each outing, going bigger, dumber, louder, longer. The strain is showing. This one has apocalyptic stakes and yet nothing to care about. Characters and cars careen through cartoonish outlandish destruction without breaking a sweat, or an emotional beat that lands anything but false. To the extent it's watchable, it is because it's drifting off affection for its own past.

Secrets and Lies: SNOWDEN

Edward Snowden makes perfect sense as an Oliver Stone protagonist. Like JFK’s dogged district attorney Jim Garrison or Born on the Fourth of July’s veteran turned war protestor Ron Kovic, Snowden is a man whose pursuit of what he sees as unambiguous and truthful duty to country causes him to endure outer skepticism and scorn, and inner destabilizing life changes. Like Savages, The Doors, Platoon, and two Wall Streets, it’s about a young person drawn into a career with exciting upsides, but with downsides readily apparent as well. Like Nixon and W. and World Trade Center and Alexander it’s about a man driven by and ultimately fated to be crushed under the weight of history and expectation. But unlike those previous movies, Snowden finds Stone at his most restrained. He views the proceedings from a remove, not digging into the psychology as deeply, or using filmmaking flash as ostentatiously. It’s a movie that sees the spreading web of surveillance with a mournful paranoia. Look at what our government can do and has done, it says, lauding its hero while wondering if what he did will actually matter in the long run.

To best make the case for their protagonist as a misunderstood hero, Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman) begin by showing us Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the point of his earliest civic duty. In 2004 he’s discharged from boot camp after a painful leg injury, after which his drive to serve his country leads him to transfer to the C.I.A. He’s a smart, unassumingly confident computer nerd who defends George W. Bush, gently teases his liberal girlfriend (Shailene Woodley) about her beliefs, and admits to a fondness for Ayn Rand. (It’s not hard to read this material as Stone inviting conservatives into the story with a “See? He’s one of you?”) The movie then follows Snowden’s gradual disillusionment with the intelligence community as he moves from one contract job to the next, finding increasingly shadier tactics used in gathering and deploying data scooped up from a global dragnet. Each new revelation gives him waves of anxiety that seem to pass, but slowly and steadily accrues in the back of his mind until he has to act.

The movie becomes a portrait of a man whose work anxiety grows so potent his only recourse is to exorcise it by releasing it into the world. There’s something of the terror I remember feeling then to this telling now. (If his revelations about the wide-ranging surveillance tactics at the fingertips of our country (and others) didn’t have you slap a piece of tape over your webcam, I don’t know what would.) Because we know what Snowden did – and what we don’t know remains Top Secret and therefore a ripe target for Stone’s mythologizing speculation – there’s little surprise to the film. It’s even structured as flashbacks around scenes of documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) filming Snowden’s secret whistleblower interview with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), footage which would become the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour. This creates a strangely sedate sense of dutiful reenactment, making the characters mere pawns in historical inevitability. Gone is the volatile conspiratorial frenzy of Stone’s heated political films or the schlocky gusto of his genre fare. Here there’s an almost serene sense of data flowing, history written in bits and clicks, coded to produce this outcome.

This calm befits what is Stone’s fastest turnaround for contemplation on a flashpoint in modern American history, beating WTC (another of his eerie calm films) by two years. Anthony Dod Mantle (frequent Danny Boyle collaborator) makes images of clean simplicity, cut with occasional smeary doubling or reflections through layers of screens and glass. Snowden is trapped in a digital world made tangible, with information glowing and streaming, collected and collated. His personal dramas – simple fights with his girlfriend, a late-breaking health issue – are halfhearted, well-acted but beside the point. The most vivid crisis points are when his work life intrudes with unwelcome force on his home life. He can’t take his medication to prevent seizures because it slows his response time. A woozy snap zoom interrupts a heated love scene as he catches the unblinking cam eye of an open laptop, the extreme close up of the tiny black circle showing their nakedness reflected in it. There are standard thriller elements of people avoiding surveillance, befitting a news story that’s already informed dozens of action movies from Jason Bourne to Captain America 2 and Furious 7. Its tension remains at a constant low-boil, mystery dulled by unavoidable outcomes.

It all adds up to a movie that’s vital and turgid, obvious but with flickers of surprise and life. The known facts of the story are bulked up with lesser-known or fictionalized incidents, inconvenient truths and convenient fictions pumped through with enjoyable personalities. Around even corner is a likable recognizable face bringing fine energy opposite their scene partners. Part of the fun is wondering who’ll show up next: Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage, Timothy Olyphant, Scott Eastwood, Keith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, Ben Schnetzer. Each is used by Stone to keep interest and curiosity flowing, never quite sure whether each new co-worker is a sympathetic ear or a reason to raise Snowden’s disillusionment. They create a pattern to the movie’s pulsing compelling/dull, scary/stale info-dumps (the best of which is an abstract swirling animation of social media chatter and secret metadata flowing into a black hole that slowly forms an eye, the sort of image so hypnotizing it doesn’t matter how blatant the symbolism), playing key roles in the process and personifications of various view points.

In the end it’s another Stone movie of weary patriotism. It’s about the burden of being a good American, about loving the country so much it’s worth wishing it were better. Clinging stubbornly to ideals is difficult, especially when calling into question the ratio of security to liberty from within the government can make you a target for, at best, criticism and stress, and at worst jail or exile. Stone makes Snowden a figure unambiguously good, leaking information as a last-ditch effort to improve what he sees as a slippery slope to tyranny. After the deed is done he literally has Snowden walk out of the dark data center into gleaming white sunlight. And yet the unsettled aftermath – stuck in Russia, communicating in warnings from a robotic screen – creates uncertainty, ending on a slightly more ambiguous note. He receives applause and attention, yes, but isolation and confusion, too. He thought it was important we hear what was happening. Now we know. Now what?

Now and Then: THE LONGEST RIDE

The Longest Ride is a Nicholas Sparks story with a whole other Nicholas Sparks story inside it. For the price of one movie ticket, you get double the sun-dappled Carolina beaches, sad backstories, fatal diagnoses, parental figures, Meet Cutes, smoldering looks, gentle breezes through beautiful fields, make out sessions under falling water, PG-13 sex scenes, and sentimental declarations of love. If you like Sparks love stories and prefer to get quantity over quality, you’re in luck. This isn’t the best or the worst of its ilk, but over the course of two hours it sure serves up a whole lot of what you’d expect. I haven't seen every adaptation of his novels, but I feel like I have.

This time, we meet a cute art student (Britt Robertson), a senior at Wake Forest about to graduate and move to New York City. She reluctantly goes with her sorority sisters to see some bull riding where she meets a strapping young rider (Scott Eastwood) who takes a liking to her. He asks her on a date. On the way home from a picturesque picnic, they see an old man (Alan Alda) who has had a medical emergency and crashed his car. They get him to a hospital. Over the next few weeks, the young couple – totally in love, duh – tries to make a go of it, despite her upcoming move and his riding career. Meanwhile, she periodically visits the older guy who, happy for company, tells her the story of his past great love.

And so screenwriter Craig Bolotin, working from Sparks’ novel, juggles two plotlines. The contemporary lovers have to decide if they have a future while lengthy flashbacks tells us about the oldster’s younger days (when he was Jack Huston) and how World War II caused problems in his relationship with the love of his life (Oona Chaplin). Luckily there’s never a feeling of lopsidedness, since both plots are of equal middling quality. There’s never a desire to rush back to the other characters’ situations, as I was never wholly invested in either, what with their thin, typical arcs. Will WWII injuries threaten an impending marriage? Will bull riding rattle the poor hunk’s brains too much to keep his girlfriend? I think you can guess.

But by cutting between the two sparse, predictable stories at moments of peak boredom, it kept my interest just barely afloat. When one couple’s plight gets too dull, you get to focus on the others for a bit. There are similarities between the two stories – both women love art, while their artless men are following in their father’s footsteps – that aren’t plumbed for any depth. It must’ve been hard work to present a story balancing past and present and make sure all dichotomies come up empty. There’s no point of view here, just sap of half-decent consistency.

Director George Tillman Jr. (Faster, Soul Food) treats both halves of the movie with equal weight and a sturdy hand. He’s got the schmaltzy swooning part of Sparks down, with gooey lighting equally flattering to rural landscapes and the stars’ skin. While the material is simply a pile up of tropes, clichés, and conventions, the stars sell it. Robertson is fresh-faced and charming, while Alda breathes warmth and comfort into every crinkled grin. Eastwood – a taciturn block – and Huston and Chaplin – seemingly ported in from a better melodrama – hold their own as well, although given less charm to play they don’t leave much of an impact. Look at their surnames, though. What an unusually strong connection to Hollywood’s past this picture has. It’s a movie full of movie star lineage and plotlines that would’ve been old hat back when the studios were new.