Point of View: HARDCORE HENRY

There are some theoretically cool death-defying stunts going on in Hardcore Henry, an exhaustingly extreme action movie. It’s too bad the production is too committed to its gimmick to take advantage of them. The whole thing is shot in first-person, a gauntlet of gnarly chaos from the unblinking perspective of a silent stuntman protagonist, an uncommunicative amnesiac cyborg soldier. There’s a good reason why, in over a century of cinema, there has very rarely been a feature shot entirely in this style. (This parenthetical is the obligatory reference to Robert Montgomery’s 1947 noir Lady in the Lake, the closest this novelty ever came to working.) Spending the entire time watching bobbling frames with the occasional limb swinging through just doesn’t work, especially when thrown into an ugly, nasty movie of smeary GoPro parkour and vacant characterizations conspiring to create a propulsive narrative of dehumanizing brutality. It’s quickly tiresome, a numbing cacophony of visual noise.

It’s halfway between a virtual reality theme park experience and a first-person shooter, with none of the immersion of the former or the interactivity of the latter. The movie wakes up with its protagonist, some unknown fit guy who has been Robocop-ed before the story began. He doesn’t know who he is or why he’s in this bionic state. All he knows is that his wife (Haley Bennett) is the scientist who saved his life. There’s not much downtime before she’s kidnapped, a snarling Russian villain with telekinetic powers (Danila Kozlovsky) taking her away. Seeing this Princess Peach snatched away by a mean Bowser gives our hero all the motivation he needs to rampage through waves of anonymous henchmen who pop up in a variety of locations: a highway, a subway station, a high rise, a brothel, a forest, a field, a decrepit hotel, and a skyscraper. For a guide he has an endlessly regenerated helper (played in all its guises – a cabbie, a biker, a coked-up nut, and more – by Sharlto Copley) who helpfully remotely updates his smart phone with the latest maps and missions. It’s gamified action taken to its illogical conclusion.

The brutally simple movie becomes essentially a 90-minute stunt show and shooting gallery. It’s repetitive and nasty, rounds of ammunition and grotesque splatter separated only by grindingly bland exposition, flashes of oddball gallows humor, and a few truly nifty chase sequences. Seeing the camera protagonist take off running up the side of a building or across a park is good for some fleeting thrills. More often, though, we’re stuck in the point-of-view of a merciless killer mowing down his prey indiscriminately and with upsettingly gory excess. This is a movie that’s pornographically violent. I don’t mean that as knock against the adverb, but as a description of the film’s explicit imagery. It’s preoccupied with the penetration of bullets and knives into the flesh and viscera of its combatants, eager to watch the plunge of a projectile in the torso of a living, breathing being. To see the film is to be trapped in the viewpoint of a faceless mindless rage-driven killer, stripped of all humanity and characterization as he obliterates random foes, being asked to imagine oneself in his place. It’s queasy-making.

Comprehensively amoral, right down to its gross misogyny – a lengthy sequence finds prostitutes helpless in crossfire, and later a few key twists reveal a woman as the puppeteer of all the man’s pain – and total disregard for human life, it’s a movie catering to its target crowd’s worst impulses. Writer-director Ilya Naishuller, in his feature debut, has clearly marshaled talented, athletic cast and crew to carry out the action, figuring out some complicated staging and pulling it off with precision and skill. And he’s made a far more cinematically palatable vision than you’d expect to see from footage captured on the forehead of a stuntperson. The camerawork is sometimes clever, but the effect isn’t when tied to faulty story and structure. And there’s an overwhelming sense of futility when the stunts are only worth appreciating if you can fill in the surroundings – imagining the car flip you only half see beneath the leaping camera – and ignore the bloody muck of the mean, empty content around them.

Like a Villain: MALEFICENT

Maleficent, the sorceress who gives Sleeping Beauty her cursed slumber, is one of Walt Disney Animation’s greatest accomplishments. Frightening and elegant, she has a tall, statuesque presence, high model features, towering horns growing from her head, and flowing dark robes swooshing around her. She glows green with dark magic, and by the end uses her powers to conjure the form of a dragon to fight off the Princess’s chances for True Love’s Kiss. She’s an iconic image. Thus the challenge for Maleficent, a live-action retelling of the story from the sorceress’s point of view. How to fill the role with a mere flesh and blood actor? How to recapture the power of those drawn images, so striking and so fearsome? Luckily, the filmmakers were able to meet the challenge and cast Angelina Jolie, whose high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and elegant silhouette make her an imposing presence when draped in the makeup and wardrobe to match the character’s iconic look. Here her eyes are fierce, her face is sculpted and angular. She’s a perfect fit.

But making Maleficent the center of this story is not without its problems. In the 1959 film, as in the fairy tale upon which it was based, she’s pure evil, bestowing an awful curse on an infant for her parent’s crime of failing to invite the witch to a party. Maleficent is a force of destruction and looms large over the plot as pure threat, casting a dark shadow over innocent first love, worried parents, and sweet dotty fairies in a colorful Disney kingdom. Maleficent is out to make some changes, moving the title character into the position of protagonist. This isn’t Sleeping Beauty of old. It opens with a narrator (Janet McTeer) telling us about two lands that sit side by side. One is a kingdom ruled by man. The other is a magical forest ruled by no one, the better for fairies, living trees, sprites, and other fanciful creatures to frolic freely. In this forest a young Maleficent lives, carefree until the day a man (Sharlto Copley) appears, tells her he loves her, and then steals her wings.

The man presents the wings to the dying king in order to be named his successor. Now the new king, he has a daughter. She is cursed on the day of her christening by the vengeful, violated Maleficent who lashes out at the man who hurt her by attacking his child. Hidden away in the forest by three largely incompetent fairies (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple, great actresses doing bad comic relief), the baby grows up to be Aurora (Elle Fanning). Something - lingering guilt, perhaps, over hurting a child for the crimes of her father – makes Maleficent hang around, offering unseen assistance to Aurora as she grows, becoming something like a fairy godmother to her. And so, regretting her curse, Maleficent and her raven sidekick (Sam Riley) try to undo it before it is too late. Meanwhile, the evil king is plotting to invade the enchanted forest and slay the sorceress once and for all.

Flipping the script on a classic villain, Linda Woolverton (of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) has written a screenplay that’s a bit of a mess, but at least finds thorny thematic issues with which to wrestle. Now it is not a fairy tale about unexplained evil and the pat True Love that will conquer all. Instead, it’s a movie about the marginalization of women, in which the king sees both Maleficent and Aurora as pawns in his life story instead of people with thoughts, feelings, and ambitions of their own. Just as surely as Maleficent is wounded for the sake of his promotion, his daughter is cast aside for his peace of mind. In the end, Maleficent made huge mistakes, but it’s the king who is the real bad guy.

That’s all interesting, but if only the film had the patience to stop and wrestle with the ideas. Instead, it’s content to only suggest deeper thoughts as it hustles its way through exposition and character beats with a sense of obligation instead of enchantment. Even the appearance of Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) is a huge non-event, which is at once a hilarious example of the movie’s welcome shifting of gender roles and an example of its half-hearted plotting. I love how it takes a story about a young woman whose fate is decided by her father and her love and makes it a story about misunderstood and victimized women and their complicated relationship with each other, but the movie is simply too frustratingly thin to support these deeper concerns.

While Sleeping Beauty is less emotionally complex, it has a stronger and more direct sense of storytelling. Maleficent has a vague understanding of what a story looks like, but often plays like a series of haphazardly connected scenes. Characters have changes of heart and evolutions of thinking for no other reason than because the movie needs them to do so. Consequently, there is not a lot of momentum here and the film grows mushy and aimless in the center as it spends its time telling us what we need to know instead of allowing it to unfold. The result is a small cast standing against flat, over-lit CGI backgrounds reciting dialogue that sounds like someone left all the subtext on the surface of the rough draft and never did a rewrite to bury it.

At least it fits the general phoniness of everything around them. There is never a sense this fantasy world is real. It just doesn’t look good. Director Robert Stromberg is a visual effects artist making his directorial debut. The picture is filled with competently visualized spectacle, with tree-creatures and strange little fantasy animals wandering around. When Maleficent flies about it’s with a convincing woosh and the dragon in the climax is as big, scaly, and fiery as you’d expect. But the action is repetitive and dull. The environments are stiff and dead. It never feels like a coherent vision of a place or time. It’s just disconnected digital frippery. If it was chintzier, you could almost accuse it of feeling like it was shot in a corner of the Disney backlot. Instead, it just looks like endlessly green-screened busyness. This is the movie’s biggest downfall. On a visual level, it simply isn’t as convincing, as inky dark and richly imagined as its lead performance.

Jolie stands in the center of the movie as iconic a screen creation as ever there was. The scene in which the screen darkens as shadows cast by scary green fire flicker over her face as she bellows sinister magic into a crib is genuinely spooky. And yet, Jolie sells her character’s hurt and regret, her elegance and her frozen mask of emotions that slowly melts for the child she has doomed. She’s a sympathetic, complicated creature, capable of glowering harm and glimmering compassion. It’s a great, full-blooded performance in a movie that’s simply not up to the task of working on her level. She’s so good I wished there was enough to the scenes to allow her to really sink her teeth in and chew. She’s big. It’s the picture that’s small.

New Old: Spike Lee's OLDBOY

I’m not sure who the audience is for Spike Lee’s Oldboy, a sadistic black comitragedy revenge story, and a remake of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 South Korean adaptation of Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi’s Japanese manga. I don’t know who this is for, but I do know I must be one of them. I saw Park’s film some time after it was released in the States in 2005 and liked it quite a bit, but haven’t seen it since. I’m a fan of Spike Lee’s visual feistiness and energetic – distractible, even – thematic liveliness. With Oldboy, he’s honed in on his most straightforward thriller narrative since 2006’s Inside Man, funny since it’s a film that straightforwardly follows the original’s disorienting story down a gnarled path cloaked in grim mystery and propelled by convoluted and pulpy twists. The movie is peculiar, dark, fitfully involving, and rarely dull. It’s full of nasty gore, brutalizing suspense, and sick sensationalism and Lee leans into it, making a film of astonishing visual flourishes and coaxing entertainingly chewy B-movie performances out of a game cast.

The plot, for those who’ve seen the original, has a sense of déjà vu mingled with the unease, a blending of inevitability in general and surprise in the specifics. It involves a drunk (Josh Brolin) who stumbles around after a dinner with a big potential client, a meeting for which he missed his daughter’s third birthday, goes disastrously wrong. Just when you think things can’t get any worse for him, he’s kidnapped and locked in what looks like a meager hotel room where he’s held prisoner for twenty years. He has no idea who did this to him, and never sees his captor or much of the outside world, although on the TV he sees a news report of his wife’s murder and daughter’s adoption by a loving couple. He’s considered the only suspect in his wife’s death, having been framed by the same mysterious person or people who have him locked up. Once freed – he’s knocked out and wakes up in a storage trunk in the middle of a field – he is a fugitive. He desperately wants to find his daughter, clear his name, and figure out who is responsible for all this torture in order to get his revenge.

Brolin is a sturdy center for the strange plot. He gets the help of an old buddy (Michael Imperioli) who calls a kind nurse (Elizabeth Olsen) to help get him back to health. She quickly discovers the man’s unbelievable story and, well, believes him. Together they attempt to unravel the mystery. A threatening voice (Sharlto Copley) calls Brolin on the iPhone left with im in the trunk. (A funny moment of befuddlement crosses Brolin’s face and hands as he turns the foreign object on the first time.) The voice matter-of-factly informs the ex-prisoner that he’ll face grave consequences if he can’t 1.) identify the voice and 2.) explain why this man did such horrible things to him. Our journey to the conclusion includes a few gut-churning twists and several moments of sustained brutal violence lingered upon with grotesque satisfaction. Note what we see – it’s so not implied – happen to the neck of a bad guy played by Samuel L. Jackson. The sequence is a torturous experience.

But the pain and violence mix freely with camp. It’s all excess, grim and goofy alike, intense either way. Take the choice supporting roles, for example. They’re populated with actors visibly tickled with the choices they’ve been allowed or invited to make. Jackson’s baddie is bald but for a cloud of blonde hair dead center on the top of his head. He chews his words wildly around the gold lip ring unsuccessfully pulling focus from his hairdo. And then there’s Copley’s villain! In this mannered, loopy performance he’s playing a posh weirdo of a baddie as if he were imagining what Peter Sellers’ Vincent Price impression would look like. While Brolin, Olsen, and Imperioli are playing on a level of moderately stylized reality, the bad guys are in a whole different ballgame all together. At one point Copley strangles Imperioli, who goes crazy bug-eyed, for calling his sister a whore, an insult Copley repeatedly repeats, pronouncing it “whoooore!” It’s scary and funny all rolled up into one strangely compelling moment.

The movie works, but only for the odd combination of its extreme violent tension and the eccentricities of the performances. For a movie so overtly tragic and torturous, it’s often darkly hilarious, almost as funny as the two elderly women who stumbled into the theater 15 minutes in thinking they were in their screening of Philomena. Lee’s filmmaking is always lively controlled chaos. That style permeates his every film, even here. Oldboy is not really concerned with race or class or politics. But it is about lingering traumas emotional and physical, misplaced grudges guiding warped present day futility and twisted schemes of retribution. Which almost makes it about politics after all, doesn’t it? Lee simply takes the raw materials of the subject matter and commits to making it an exercise in style and performance, pushing to the extremes, camera and production design taking on lushly unpredictable and always bold choices. It’s hard not to read a sense of experimental one-upmanship in his re-staging the first film’s famous one-take fight scene with an even longer take, with a more complex camera move, and with more fighters. Near the climax, two characters step into one of the reddest hallways I've ever seen, a visual symbolically hammering home the blood dripping through the story. I think Lee is having fun and, for the most part, I did too. I don't like all of it, having enjoyed it in parts if not the whole, but I'm glad it exists.

Damon's Run: ELYSIUM

Set in a pessimistically plausible future, Elysium finds the world’s richest few orbiting the Earth in a space station of the same name. It’s a perfect artificial paradise free of disease and strife. Everyone else is struggling to survive on the planet below, a world that is overpopulated, polluted, and where poverty is pervasive and inescapable. To get sick here is a death sentence. That’s what happens to Max, an ex-con turned factory worker played by the always-likable Matt Damon. He’s caught in an accident on the factory floor and told he has five days to live. Desperate to survive, he begs a man (Wagner Moura) who specializes in getting illegal transports to Elysium to find him passage. The deal is this: if he can make it to the space station, he must agree to help those in need. Pumped full of painkillers and fitted with a robotic exoskeleton that’s been painfully drilled into his body, Max is sent out on a mission to crash Elysium and liberate health care for the masses.

The film is written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, who made his feature debut in 2009 with the phenomenally successful District 9, a movie that used aliens that land and are promptly subjugated in South Africa as a metaphor for apartheid. I wasn’t the biggest fan, but it’s certainly an enjoyable movie for the most part. Now, with Elysium, he’s made a film that’s even more overt and heavy-handed about its allegorical intent. It’s loud and simple, but powered by so much contagious anger towards a super-rich minority who here not only keep to themselves enjoying total worry-free luxury while the majority barely gets by, but horde clean air, clean water, and the best medical care available. It is an unjust situation, plain and simple. The icy head of security (Jodie Foster) is determined to keep out the unwanted masses, going so far as to shoot down incoming unauthorized space shuttles filled with illegal immigrants. She looks at them as moochers unworthy to even glimpse Elysium’s palatial suburban gardens or catch a sniff of their pristine air.

In the film’s opening minutes, terrific detail and convincing special effects fill up the screen in fine sci-fi fashion. Set in future Los Angeles far from the typical Blade Runner vision, vehicles are worn-down, technology is unreliable, the teeming masses speak a combination of English and Spanish and live in a sprawling, crowded series of favelas. Max is the victim of police brutality, the coldly logical robot cops beating him for nothing more than his criminal past and a bad joke. He sees his parole officer, a scuffed plastic head with a mocking frozen smile telling him in a muffled computerized accent that he has eight additional months probation. By the time he’s had the accident and makes the deal to attempt an escape to Elysium, we’re fully immersed in the labyrinthine details that keep the majority of the population poor. It’s a systematic failure enforced by Elysium and unwillingly perpetrated by those on the ground. What is made at the factory Damon works? The very robots that keep the populace down.

All the allegorical force and intriguing futurist conjecture of the film’s opening third is placed in the background as the action cranks up and the film becomes a thundering, clattering, lightning fast spectacle of fisticuffs, gunfire, explosions, and gore. The head of security activates an extralegal agent named Kruger (Sharlto Copley), a vicious creep outfitted with all kinds of fancy weaponry capable of liquefying anyone in his path. He storms after Max and the movie becomes a tense series of bruising combat and close calls. The haves-versus-have-nots throughline very nearly gets lost in the shuffle in a movie more interested in fun setpieces, super cool special effects, and villainous switcheroos than in making sure the allegory tracks perfectly at all times. But an innocent nurse (Alice Braga) and her sick daughter (Emma Tremblay) get caught up in the action to provide a boost of emotional content and obvious rooting interest. (Who can root against a sick child, right?)

Blomkamp keeps the look of the picture agreeably skuzzy. The amount of dirt, grime, dust, and sweat on display makes all the more vivid the earthlings living conditions, as well as their constant toil and exertion. It makes their striving all the more real and urgent, especially in contrast to all the sleek lines and pristine surfaces orbiting above them. He’s smart to make the drive to sneak aboard Elysium not about stomping on wealth out of jealousy or spite, but to provide life-saving resources (medicine, clean air, pure water) for those most in need. It’s a fight for rights. The fight turns into a fairly typical sci-fi actioner, but it’s done in a largely satisfying way, just inventive enough to keep things interesting. I could’ve done without quite this level of lingering on splattery violence, with futuristic weaponry that blows people apart, but I would not for one second suggest going without the film’s biggest gory shock to one character’s face and the coolest gross-out effect that soon follows. You’ll know it if you see it.

Though both the film’s intriguing world-building and hurtling action are largely symbolic and naturally, forcefully thin, the thinly written roles have the benefit of some fine actors. But only Damon truly elevates the material, with his natural, compelling ability to invite instant empathy put to use with a no-frills, working-man striving in his demeanor, a resigned sadness in his eyes that sharpens into steely, determined hope. He’s a compelling center around which a sci-fi concept can confidently turn into a mildly brainy shoot-‘em-up. Though it ends up in a more standard place than it initially appears headed, Elysium is ultimately fast and satisfying on the most basic levels. It’s entertaining and trim, fun in the moment and over before you know it.

These Aren't The Losers; They're THE A-TEAM

Joe Carnahan’s big screen A-Team isn’t as tough and gritty as his Narc (2002) or as much of a cesspool of zesty gore as his loopy Smokin’ Aces (2007). It’s big, broad, and goofy. It’s short on character and long on energetic cacophony, but boy did I enjoy that big, goofy cacophony. It’s satisfying on a pulpy genre level where good guys slam into bad guys with guts and gusto. The movie’s a whiz-bang, red-blooded adventure with over-the-top moments following one after the other. I could not, for even one second, believe it on any emotional or character level, but I believed it on a pulpy movie level, the kind of sheer dumb enjoyment that made me chuckle and grin all the way through.

Taking its cues from the 80’s television show, the movie follows a team of daring-doers who pull off convoluted and nearly impossible plans on their way to get the bad guys. Liam Neeson is a delight here, building off his new action movie credibility bought with his intimidating turn as the vengeful father in Taken, becoming the leader of this A-Team. As the men under his command, Bradley Cooper smirks while Sharlto Copley is enjoyably loony and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson pities fools.

They strike poses capably and look good walking in slow motion or delivering kicks and punches that land with loud smacks and thumps on the soundtrack. This is not the kind of movie that inspires great acting – though it is a film that knows how to find the perfect pro-war Gandhi quote – but the team works well together and they are more than up to the task of shouting brisk exposition over roaring engines and fiery explosions. They’re accused of a crime they didn’t commit, you see, and are consequently on the run from both the military (led by the gorgeous and tough Jessica Biel) and the CIA (led by the ably slimy Patrick Wilson). This calls for all kinds of narrow escapes and close calls on the way to shoot up and blow up a whole bunch of stuff.

It hangs together less as a narrative and more as a series of extended action beats. Carnahan cuts the action a little too fast, diluting clarity, but he still manages to pull off really sensational moments of inspired ridiculousness. So enjoyably cracked are these moments that they blew past any quibbles I have with the film and carried me on a wave of entertainment. This is the kind of movie that finds its heroes sitting around eating red meat, chomping cigars, laughing, smiling, high-fiving, and generally being pretty pleased with how cool their stunts are. I was right there with them, succumbing to my basest instincts and enjoying every Smash! Bash! Crash! and Kablooey! that was sent my way.

District 9 (2009)

District 9 takes off like a bullet, blasting its opening scenes at the audience with a terrifying speed, quickly overwhelming (but not frustrating) with new information. It opens as a documentary, showing us how, twenty years ago, a massive spaceship stopped over Johannesburg and wouldn’t move. Eventually, a hole was cut in the side, allowing the world to discover, and remove, sickly menial workers of an alien race – quickly nicknamed Prawns – the leaders already dead from disease. The aliens are shuffled off into a ghetto called District 9 where they can coexist without mingling with the humans. The immigration and racism allegories that can, and have, been used for aliens in the past, are joined here by an apartheid allegory, made all the more vivid by its South African setting (a place that really had a District 6), is interesting and nuanced. It makes feelings of revulsion towards the “other” understandable with the ugly design of the aliens (I was revolted by them at some points). What a thrilling opening to the film, a science fiction film with real brains and a fully realized world.

Our main character is Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, first-time actor), a bureaucrat assigned to evict the Prawns from District 9 and order them moved to District 10. He bumbles along, cheerfully carrying out said job, jesting with the men working with him and playing things up for the documentary cameras. But, as often happens in these kinds of movies, something goes wrong. Wikus makes a critical mistake and consequentially finds himself falling into a bottomless pit of problems. There are scenes of great bodily horror and gross-out gags. The editing grows more frantic, the cinematography nightmarish. The good mockumentary turns into an equally good horror-mockumentary hybrid. But then, a mistake is made.

Writer-director Neill Blomkamp drops the mockumentary aspect altogether and turns the movie into a straight-up sci-fi actioner. The movie works fairly well as an actioner, and the massive set-piece of discharging weaponry that closes the film is impressive, but it’s jarring to have a fairly typical documentary style film throw in a scene that no documentary filmmaker could have captured and then drop the conceit entirely. But if that were the only problem with the last act of the film, this would still be a very good movie. The problem is it’s not the only problem. Wikus takes a series of actions, late in the film, that make little sense given what we’ve seen up to that point. (I’m sure many of you have seen it by now, but I’ll dance around the spoilers anyways). He very quickly turns on a character because he disagrees with the time a plan would take, despite the fact that this other character is the only person who could help him. Just a handful of scenes later, Wikus is helping the other character again. These changes are nothing more than a plot gimmick, a false and forced beat of drama that provides yet another hiccup in the transition from doc to schlock. Both halves are good, but the first half is more successful at its goals than the second half.

But, these quibbles aside, the movie is still impressive, still entertaining, and still good. The special effects are fantastic, stunningly integrated into the live-action material. Sharlto Copley is equally fantastic, especially considering that it’s his screen debut. There are still brains behind the concept, even though it gets harder to see them as the film goes on. There’s great intense energy and propulsion to the film – it only slows down a little in the middle – that creates a visceral series of thrills. It’s a thrill-ride of a movie. It’s not perfect – I won’t be one of those people over-praising it – but in a summer starved for thrill rides, this will do just fine.