ATOMIC BLONDE Has More Fun

I like imagining Charlize Theron saw 2014’s slick, cool, expertly choreographed Keanu Reeves actioner John Wick and thought to herself, “I gotta get me one of these.” And get it she did. From that film’s stuntman co-director David Leitch comes Atomic Blonde, a stylish, knotty last-dregs-of-the-Cold-War thriller set against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall’s fall. German unrest is at a head, and into this mess strides Theron as an ice-cold, hyper-competent, platinum blonde secret agent who must plunge ahead into one last mission tangled up in Stasi, Soviet, French, British, and American spies fighting (and double-triple-quadruple-crossing each other) over a MacGuffin. There’s a potential defector and a list of undercover identities in the mix, and all the combatants want them for one reason or another. But is there any doubt it’s Theron who will emerge victorious? She has all the right moves. The movie is told largely in flashback. It opens with Theron’s pulling her naked body out of an ice bath, showing painful cuts and bruises dappling her skin. After dressing for her day, she smolders into a debriefing room where Toby Jones and John Goodman eye her suspiciously and ask her to explain what went down in Berlin. She proceeds to spin the tale – of seduction, sabotage, secrets, and surveillance accounting for each and every injury. It’s hard to keep track of the ins and outs of the byzantine plotting – at once pulp simple and complicated – but with Theron in the center of it all, our sympathies and source of awe are never in doubt.

Grooving on a frosted palate and the smooth New Wave cuts pulsating on the soundtrack, the film keeps its intoxicating placid cool. Leitch glides the proceedings easily through the complications of spycraft genre conventions – moles, listening devices, traitors, hookups – enumerated by the screenplay by Kurt Johnstad (300 and its superior sequel) from the comic book The Coldest City. It’s stock stuff, but elevated to pulpy pop art by its sleek exuberance, and by Theron’s fierce, believably outlandish performance – solid and steady, a human terminator who takes a beating and keeps going. Leitch has the good sense to center her in the telling and the frame, finding supreme entertainment even in the way she walks across a tarmac or slips into the back of a car. This is a woman who always knows exactly what she’s doing, how she’s carrying herself, and what to do to prepare to beat down any attackers. The variety of action – held in steady shots lovingly revealing the whole-body choreography from multiple combatants – is thrilling. She fights off two men from inside a speeding car armed only with a sharp red high heel. She grabs a length of garden hose to fend off assailants in a grubby apartment. In the film’s highlight, she goes up an elevator and down a staircase, in and out of a bunch of rooms along the way, punching, kicking, slapping, stabbing, and shooting a handful of formidable villains. By the time she and the last man standing are breathing heavy, bleeding from multiple wounds, and clutching throbbing muscles, staggering as they attempt to regain their balance, you’d think the fight is done. But there’s still a chase sequence to come.

Mostly a short and sweet genre riff done up in pleasing period burlesque and oozing casually ostentatious style in every frame, Atomic Blonde is committed to serving up memorable action beats. It takes what could be a hackneyed, played-out, half-comprehensible plot in more lugubrious, self-serious hands and just digs into its improbabilities as a clothesline for its visual tricks and exquisite action. Theron is the capital-S star, and she’s surrounded by dependable actors (James McAvoy, Eddie Marsan, Sofia Boutella, Bill Skarsgard) doing what they do best. It fills the downtime with enough eccentric flavoring without overpowering what Theron’s doing at center stage. Everyone’s just a piece of the puzzle – a cog in a conspiracy, obstacle to be run over, asset worth flipping or deceiving. Besides, it’s all about the sheer pleasure of the film’s posing and posturing. It’s in a gleaming pair of sunglasses, a shock of neon, a white trench coat, a car sailing backwards through a busy intersection, a seductive French photographer, a wily watch salesman, a wall standing ominously dangerous (for the last time) in the center of town. It’s in the thwack of a blow connecting, the snap of a sniper’s gun, the blast of pop from a car stereo, the crunch of boots in the snow. The movie’s pleasures are exactly this simple and surface and satisfying.

Dead on Arrival: THE MUMMY

Every few years, Universal decides to do something with its roster of classic monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and so on – beyond rereleasing the original 30’s and 40’s films on whatever new home video format has arisen since the last time. Lately that means we get 2010’s Wolf Man and 2013’s Dracula Untold, attempts to make new effects pictures out of the old creatures, and maybe even spark a new franchise along the way. Now this had led to The Mummy, the newest attempt to make a whole monster mash adventure series on the solid foundation of hoary old horror tropes. Hey, it worked in 1999 when Brendan Fraser headlined a charming, good old-fashioned Indiana Jonesy period piece action serial about dodging undead Egyptians and their various mythological curses. This time around, in addition to some archeological creepiness the premise requires, director and co-writer Alex Kurtzman (who has had a hand in screenplays for a half-dozen franchises) makes a picture that is a modern Tom Cruise movie, which means it’s at least as interested in hurtling action as it is any simmering supernatural suspense. The movie opens on the star fighting ISIS for control of an ancient Mesopotamian burial site where evil incarnate waits hidden beneath a pool of liquid mercury. Once out, the long-dormant mummified witch (Sofia Boutella, an acrobatic and comitted highlight) will inevitably unleash havoc. That’s enough for a good time, at least until the whole enterprise – growing thinner and duller by the sequence – thoroughly wears out its welcome well before the finish line. And they want to make more of these? Hopefully they’ll be improving as they go.

The main problem with this movie – which has a grinding workmanlike competence to the expected pattern of hectic, noisy collisions of conflict punctuated by droopy exposition spouted by famous faces – is how schematic it is. You can see all too transparently the contract negotiations, marketing decisions, franchise planning, and formulaic plotting on screen. It gives Cruise reasons to take off running from explosions, get into rollover accidents, and smirk at his colleagues before getting likably pummeled. It also has Russell Crowe show up and call him a young man, despite Cruise being two years older (a neat showbiz trick). Crowe is here playing Dr. Jekyll, a clear tip of the hat to a brewing monster meetup in the planned future installments, what with his laboratory with Creature from the Black Lagoon flippers and vampire skulls floating in specimen jars. The film also gives Cruise his usual bantering love interest/professional rival (Annabelle Wallis) and comedic sidekick (Jake Johnson). The script never successfully turns all this into real characters or clear motivations or easily comprehendible MacGuffins, settling for just moderately diverting nonsense and the inexorable pull of blockbuster spectacle sequence-hopping logic. There’s no sense of escalation or danger or invention, just dutifully hitting the marks. 

A constant churn of action works in the exceedingly excellent Mission: Impossible series (probably the most consistent franchise Hollywood currently has running), but those movies use Cruise’s hardworking, hard-charging action demeanor in a series of escalating and cleverly deployed stunts and creatively twisty heist plots. Here it’s just lumpy, car chases and plane crashes and shootouts and howling effects jolting a half-hearted Mummy-stalking feature into the shape of a generic summer movie. In the context of a theoretically spooky monster movie, dripping with zombies and ancient curses and a “who-is-possessed-and-unwittingly-prepared-to-channel-an-evil-Egyptian-god?” plot engine, it starts to feel like two competing ideas smashed unsuccessfully into one. The better idea is the Cruise vehicle, where his charisma and star power can carry along a thin character, and his effortlessly effortful forward momentum can paper over leaps of logic and plot holes big enough a supernatural sandstorm can be seen through them. The lesser idea, alas, is the one that wins out in the end, weakly hitting rote monster beats while hedging its bets, teasing future story and failing to live in the moment long enough to give us a movie worth watching in the here and now. There’s just barely enough for an only mildly disappointing brainless night at the movies, but it’s certainly not enough to crave more.

To Infinity and STAR TREK BEYOND

Star Trek Beyond is a fine entry in a venerable franchise that’s celebrating its fiftieth year. The movie is colorful and clever, with effective adventure sequences, cool visual concepts, and the core intelligence mixed with compassionate character moments that have allowed this whole endeavor to endure, from its original 1966 TV show through five more series and 13 movies with more on the way. Through its ups and downs, the late Gene Roddenberry’s creation remains sci-fi’s shining beacon of utopian spirit. What a pleasure in these dark times, when the world feels irreparably torn by forces of division, hatred, fear, and anti-intellectualism, to settle in for a journey to a possible future where the values of science, progress, and unity have built a better society. The values are comforting, but no less an adventure when the noble crew of the starship Enterprise find themselves drawn into a conflict in uncharted space. It’s a series that dares to dream of a better tomorrow, not one without conflict, but one in which the better angels of our nature can succeed through cooperation between heart and logic.

Beyond continues the recent string of Treks set in an alternate timeline of the first series, with J.J. Abrams’ 2009 entry sending time travel ripples imagining new rebooted, recast stories for familiar characters while avoiding tampering with or otherwise erasing classic lore. This time around director Justin Lin, fresh from making four Fast & Furious movies (including a few of that series’ best), takes a step back from his predecessor’s Into Darkness, a fast, exciting movie that was nonetheless more militarized, destructive, and paranoid than the franchise’s comfort zone. Lin’s film is more in line with the show’s original goals – to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before – in a movie that’s slightly smaller in scale, like a pleasing two-part episode with action blown out to blockbuster proportions between small character work and a journey through an alien landscape. Lin gets the spirit of the enterprise, and the simple appeal of sending a likable crew into a difficult situation and watching them think their way out.

It begins with Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) feeling that life in year three of their five-year exploration mission is growing “episodic.” (That’s a cute meta wink.) He’s starting to doubt his desire to captain. Likewise, his crewmates, like stoic half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto) and irascible doctor McCoy (Karl Urban), wear the weariness of space heavily on their shoulders. The ship docks at a Federation station in deep space – a wondrously imagined thing that’s an idealized spacious metropolis complicatedly constructed on the inside arcs of a gigantic sphere, the tops of skyscrapers nearly meeting in the middle – for some rest and relaxation. But they must cut their vacation short when a distress call comes in from beyond an uncharted nebula. Duty calls, and so off they go, Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and the rest, straight into an ambush. A mysterious creature calling himself Krall (Idris Elba under layers of grayish-blue makeup) attacks them with swarms of bug-like ships, which results in the crash of the starship and the capture of most of the crew.

The screenplay by Pegg and Doug Jung is a little undercooked, but still a cleverly paired down and contained conflict of a familiar Trek kind. The crew must learn about this strange villain’s behavior – why has he captured them? what does he want? where is his army headed next? – and explore the planet to figure out how best to escape and warn Starfleet that this unknown being is bent on its destruction. There are lengthy sequences of dazzling spectacle, Lin bringing considerable visual energy with shiny future surfaces, baroque CG fleets of vessels, and complicated layers of lights and screens. With his usual cinematographer Stephen F. Windon he finds freedom in the floating vacuum of space to turn the camera topsy-turvy, then locks down in the craggy terrain of the unknown planet. But it all depends in the downtimes on the chemistry between the loyal friends aboard the Enterprise, separated in the crash and trying to reunite with each other, trade the information they’ve gleaned, and escape the villain’s evil clutches.

Through three films together, this cast has gelled naturally. Pine’s brash Kirk, Quinto’s logical Spock, and Urban’s crackling McCoy are a perfect Trek trinity, not merely resting on nostalgia for the old cast’s interpretations, but with distinct familiarity of their own. Cho’s Sulu and Saldana’s Uhura are allowed shadings and complications on the margins that make them fresh, while Yelchin (despite his appearance tinged with melancholy brought on by his untimely death) is fun comic relief as the lively and irrepressible Chekov. He gets a moment where he taps his foot to a catchy tune while he confidently pilots the Enterprise just ahead of a wave of fiery doom, a fun needle-drop melded with a fleeting grace note. Lin’s confidence as an action filmmaker is easy to spot, but it’s his light touches with actors that really animates the thrills. Here it’s a pleasure to see this ensemble reunite, and new additions – like a young tough alien scavenger woman also marooned on this planet (Sofia Boutella) – quickly fit right in with the team. Even Elba is allowed just enough brief moments to take a seemingly one-dimensional MacGuffin hunter under a pile of makeup and project his charisma and compelling fascination through it.

Lin knows it’s the eye on humanity that makes for good Star Trek and here he delivers the goods. Beyond might be smaller and thinner than you’d expect after the more slam-bang large-scale entries that came before, but there’s a bright throwback appeal and energy to the whole piece similar to spotting an old rerun while flipping channels. The characters and their world are so engaging that I couldn’t help but be drawn in, intrigued to see how they were going to outsmart their attackers and keep the galaxy safe. In the end the dazzling action climax – zipping in and around an outer space locale in supremely clever use of its lovingly imagined structure – isn’t only about shooting and punching, but more importantly thinking through the best course of action and executing it to perfection by luck and by pluck. There are no grand character arcs or overly heavy thematic preoccupations. It’s simply good old-fashioned space adventure that’s light on its feet, loves its characters, and can tap into the uniquely Star Trek sense of exploring the galaxy with a group of likeminded individuals committed to caring.

Spies of the Roundtable: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

Director Matthew Vaughn is always making movies about other movies, not subverting formula or deconstructing tropes, but doing his favorite genres louder, gorier, and goofier than before. The British gangster picture Layer Cake, fantasy Stardust, and superhero movie Kick-Ass are of equal falseness, movies for the sake of movies. They have their moments, but is it any wonder his X-Men movie is his best? The dictates of franchise care required him to play it straight, funneling his skills into his energy and staging instead of stunted and narrow movies borrowing real world pain for nothing more than bloody riffs, one step further removed from anything worth caring about. His latest, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is a colorful goof on the James Bond formula, following the basic outline of the typical 007 plot but playing it looser, faster, bloodier, and cheekier. It’s an enjoyable movie right up until it isn’t.

Maybe it’s more accurate to call Kingsman a half-serious Austin Powers for how consciously silly the plotting, how fawning it is over retro gadgetry. It’s eager to tell us how smart it thinks it’s being, which takes some of the charm out of its self-congratulatory deployment of Bond-style gadgets – bulletproof umbrella, poison pen, exploding lighter – and plot turns. After all, this is a movie with a megalomaniac villain and his exoticized henchwoman trying to execute their convoluted plot for world domination, complete with a giant glowing countdown clock. Several times characters make reference to fictional spies – Bond, Bourne, Bower, you get the picture – and trade the barb, “It’s not that kind of movie.” Oh, but it is. From the first notes of Henry Jackman’s John Barry-esque score, it’s obvious what territory we’re in.

The film’s one clever idea is to recast the double-ohs as a clandestine organization carrying out secret spycraft, a good old Spies of the Roundtable complete with codenames like Lancelot, Galahad, and Merlin. Called The Kingsman, they’ve had a sudden opening. And so respectably stuffy Colin Firth, properly situated in a sharp suit, recruits a rough, tough, street-smart lad (relative newcomer Taron Egerton) and bets he can turn him into a proper superspy, a sort of My Fair Lady actioner (a reference explicitly made). Vaughn, with his usual co-writer Jane Goldman, milks these riffs on pop culture past for bright engaging action. It’s often jolly good fun, drawing on X-Men: First Class montage swagger for early team-building training sequences as Egerton grows from a street kid to a spy, then turns into a adolescent power fantasy. Save the world, get the girl, and all that jazz.

There are giggles to be had in seeing Firth turn into an action hero in elaborately staged, CGI assisted, action sequences. The kid’s quite good, too, holding his own against the older folks while looking dashing in his eventual spy uniform. Their colleagues include a comic relief Q figure (Mark Strong), an underwritten-but-capable pretty girl (Sophie Cookson), and a wise old mentor (Michael Caine). Their villains are nasty, a crazy billionaire (Samuel L. Jackson, hamming it up) and his flunky (Sofia Boutella), a woman with razor-sharp prosthetic legs that make her as fast and deadly as a certain Olympic athlete. The cast is engaging and entertaining, having as much fun playing broad comic book shtick as Vaughn is having a good time whipping up scenarios for near-death action movie experiences for them, like a tense skydiving sequence that’s the cleverest the film gets.

More fun than not for awhile, the movie goes wrong by giving in to its regressive fantasy, probably leaking in from the Mark Millar source material. His are the most gleefully ugly comic books around, trafficking in unapologetic laddish humor and smug shock violence. Kingsman isn’t that bad, but it is a movie in which the villain is an evil lisping black man and the only hope for the world is a bunch of upper-crust white guys and the one up-from-his-bootstraps recruit whose eventual reward is access to a woman’s body. The optics are obnoxious. It’s a movie so caught up in its splashy R-rated cartoonishness that it loses sight of what, exactly, it is enjoying. It spends its time tweaking tropes in the name of escapism, but can’t escape the implications of its giddy gore that ends up giving rightwing nuts something to cheer. (I’d trim two scenes of a real-life world leader if I could.)

Its most troubling scene is a turning point between goofy wish fulfillment and poisonous misanthropy. An elaborate gory massacre is played for laughs, scored with rock and staged with slapstick. It’s followed immediately by the death of a major character we’re supposed to mourn. (How we’re to care about deaths, and yet also find exploding heads hilarious is beyond me.) As this rockets the movie towards a crescendo of climaxes, the movie wants us on the edge of our seats fretting over the fate of the world as violence erupts here, there, and everywhere. I felt the suspense, was effectively manipulated by the crosscutting. And I would’ve enjoyed it more but for the feeling the film was reveling in the carnage and wouldn’t mind if its heroes failed to stop it. It’s a brisk, exciting movie, better in its breezy charming moments than its splashy nasty conclusions.