Generic Pain: AMERICAN ASSASSIN

In a movie as painfully generic as American Assassin I start grasping at even the slightest glint of unexpected originality. Here it happens to be just one line, spoken by Michael Keaton in his role as a grizzled veteran trainer of deep-deep-deep-undercover operatives. He shoves a cell phone image of a suspect at his superior officer (Sanaa Lathan) and intensely inquires, “Does this picture bong a gong for you?” I appreciated all the trouble to think up a new way to say “rings a bell,” if only because there are literally no other scenes in the picture going that extra step. No, this is a movie flatly and drearily running through the standard dull, grim, guys-with-guns, geopolitical muddle thriller. There’s an ambitious hotshot who wants to save the world, a dead girlfriend serving as opening-scene eye candy and then motivation throughout, there’s a prickly mentor relationship, a couple double crosses, a mysterious connection between heroes and villains, thoughtless political hot button referencing (the Iran nuclear deal), gnarly scenes of torture, casual xenophobia, bloody Bourne-again action with a mild Wick twist, and a ticking time bomb finale with a big red glowing countdown clock. There’s not a single surprise to be found, up to and including the surprises. 

The film stars Dylan O’Brien, a welcome sight in his first role after a near-death accident on the set of the as-yet still unfinished third Maze Runner movie. (It’s sad enough he was nearly killed, but that it was for a Maze Runner is even sadder.) Here does what he can with a role that requires nothing more than a smooth face handsomely troubled and a taut athlete’s body wracked with mournful determination. In the opening scene he and his fiancé are caught in a terrorist attack. He survives, but not intact, having seen the love of his life gunned down before him. Now he’s on a one-man counterintelligence revenge operation until the government steps in and pivots him into a top-secret anti-terror death squad. The whole thing is a topsy-turvy militaristic retaliation fantasy, channeling the character’s vengeance into state-sponsored assassination training. Keaton and O’Brien do what they can with the hoary clichés they’re made to spout, while the rest of the cast fades slowly into the background. It becomes a grey blur out of which flicker a few fleeting moments provoking thought. Taylor Kitsch pops up as the villain, a weirdly small role and a chance to lament how his great-2012-that-wasn’t (with starring turns in the fun, but underrated, likes of John Carter and Savages) reduced him to this. There’s a scene of unseemly torture-approval, as an Iranian double agent is dunked in a tub until the truth is waterboarded out of her. The climax involves the aforementioned time bomb and a whole flotilla of CG battleships. It’s just all so boring and empty and routine.

All for One: LONE SURVIVOR

The true story Lone Survivor tells is inherently mournful, but the film is too slickly pumped up and narrowly focused to communicate much of it. The story follows a SEAL Team on a mission to kill a Taliban leader in the mountains of Afghanistan that went wrong, trapping the men in a firefight that ended with all but one dead. This sad story of sacrifice is presented simply as an extended action sequence that envelops at least half of the runtime. Focused on one moment of pain and death, the film traps its characters, boxed in by the inevitability of their story. We don’t get to see them as living people so much as we sit around waiting to see how they die. It’s a film happy to play with broad types, sparsely characterized, quickly sketching in their specifics in cheap and easy ways. One’s a rookie. Another’s getting married. We should care about them as people – the better to make the lengthy bit of action filmmaking impactful – but instead we’re to care about them as the same standard crew war movies have had since they’ve been an identifiable subgenre. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not fair to the audience.

Writer-director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Battleship) easily creates a sense of what it might be like to be in the middle of a gun battle in Afghanistan if Hollywood filmmakers staged them. It is loud, repetitive, chaotic, and a chance to show off squibs and pyrotechnics as the SEALs are slowly picked off one by one by a largely faceless enemy force. Before we get there, though, we sit with these men through their briefing and then as they set up a stakeout of a mountain village, spying their Taliban target below. Because the actors are likable – Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster – it’s easy enough to sit through their macho militarism. Because Berg and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler have a fine sense of thriller-y procedural nervous energy, the scenes in the command bunkers with Eric Bana – as their commanding officer – and Alexander Ludwig – as an overeager rookie – play out with some surface sleekness. It’s all so very professionally done.

In these early moments the film is full of gleaming glamour shots of hardware and camaraderie right out of a recruitment ad. The SEALs are buddies who jog around the base and haze each other (gently, of course) and listen intently as they’re told their target is a “bad guy” in an info dump briefing that has more in common with a video game cut scene than anything more convincing. We don’t know who these characters are, but they sure look the part. They seem to know what they’re doing. The movie doesn’t have time to slow down otherwise. By the time they’re sitting in the mountains, staring down at their target, it’s been a pretty successfully rosy picture of war that’s about to be shot down. But it’s not like the movie has much of a point of view. It’s bad luck that gets them into their doomed mission and good luck (and a kind deed returning unexpected dividends) that gets one out.

Two kids and an old man herding their goats back to their home accidentally infiltrate the stakeout. Here the film finds an interesting moral dilemma briefly entertained. Let them go and risk being found by the Taliban in the village? Or kill them and be sure of completing the mission without exposure? They do the right thing after brief debate, which leads the Taliban fighters right up the hill to find them. (It’s unclear if their decision directly led to this, but that’s certainly the implication.) What follows is the hour of tense bloody conflict up and down the mountainside, crouching behind branches and rocks as the dead pile up on both sides of the conflict.

I’m reminded of the famous quote from Francois Truffaut about the impossibility of making an anti-war film because of the action’s inherent exciting qualities. That’s certainly a problem for Lone Survivor, with its endlessly exchanged rounds of gunfire, overeager effects work – look at that exploding helicopter and its lovingly CGI carnage – and gunsight crosshairs killshots right out of a first person shooter. Or rather, it’d be a problem if it seemed to be a film interested in being anti-war or anything at all.  (Or if it didn’t grow less exciting the more attempts are made to thrill.) It’s a film that’s not thinking about any sort of big picture. It doesn’t see any further than the barrels of its guns. It tries to sell heroism, but seems perversely uninterested in the characters it’s selling as representative of some larger ideal of patriotic machismo or something. The final moments, which shows photos of the actual SEALs killed in this mission, is more moving and respectful than the two hours that came before. It’s a serious subject tackled in a self-defeating manner, utterly lacking the weight it deserves.

Danger to Themselves and Others: SAVAGES

In case we needed proof that director Oliver Stone has entered a relaxed late period of his filmmaking career, here comes Savages, a leisurely thriller that’s glancingly topical, set amidst recessionary drug-war politics and Mexican cartel violence, and at once complicated and reductive. He’s not stretching to make a pointed political statement or pumping up the style of what is already a fairly lurid, violent plot. Instead, he’s luxuriating in the nastiness and complexities of the script he co-wrote with Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (from Winslow’s novel). He’s taking his time, letting characters simmer until the time is right to spring them into action, allowing the plot to throw unlikely allies together, reveal its secrets, spin its wheels, come to moments of fiery action and then back down, coast along with a mostly talented ensemble cast until falling into a satisfying shoot-‘em-up climax that throws in a last minute surprise as it rewrites itself as it goes along.

The movie, a pulpy series of noirish events unraveling under the hot Laguna Beach sun, concerns two peaceful pot-growing entrepreneurs (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson) and the girl (Blake Lively) who loves them both. The steamy opening moments slowly introduce us to this tricky romantic triangle. The arrangement of relationships is open and the three of them are friendly, so it all works out. As the plot kicks into motion, the guys, on the advice of their crooked D.E.A. pal (John Travolta), are considering a substantial offer of money from a lawyer (Demián Bichir) representing a ruthless Mexican cartel that wants to hire them as a north-of-the-border supplier. When the guys make plans to skip town and turn them down, the head of the cartel (Salma Hayek) orders her head henchman (Benicio Del Toro) to kidnap the girl.

What follows is a movie of shifting alliances and jockeying for power on both sides of the border. Everyone involved wants to get out of this nasty entanglement with the best enriching scenario for themselves, but given the violent, ruthless stakes of it all, most of them will be lucky to escape with their lives. In the telling, Stone is much less interested in the specifics of the action – although he stages a thrilling mid-film sequence of literal highway robbery – than in the slow burn of mood and style. This is a thriller that doesn’t feel in a rush to get anywhere in particular. Instead, it serves up long sequences that sit with characters as they try to fight their way through the suffocating moral thicket into which they’ve tumbled headfirst in the pursuit of self-preservation and profit. It’s a movie playing with all sorts of tropes of gangster movies, and neo-noir Westerns, but it’s really all about bloody business negotiations.

The ensemble cast is up to the task with incredible faces on which to watch the negotiations, and all the other scheming and plotting, play out. Kitsch and Johnson are buddies in over their heads with squinty, low-rent Butch and Sundance charm (a duo namedropped in the film itself). Hayek has a calm face of deep anger, sadness and cold calculation, Del Toro, a brutality behind his literal mustache twirling, Travolta, a close-cropped greed that reveals itself in scenes with both sides of this mess. Lively’s character, when she's not reading overwritten narration, is a vexing dilemma, needy and terrified, willful and weak, and hard to read. She’s in a position of very little power in this scenario, but she’s desperate to find a way out nonetheless and works very hard to hide this desperation as she gets close to the one who holds her captive. It’s a tangle of emotional and business connections.

Though Stone spikes the narrative with shots that slowly fade to black and white or flash into various lenses and filters, this isn’t a chaotic stylistic experiment. This is a thriller of straightforward moodiness, a slow-building tension that watches its characters as they twist under pressure, desperate to find simple solutions to their complicated problems. What we have here is the work of a confident director who somehow makes the film feel like a work of mature exploitation. Because it’s a film of characters glowering and calculating, working their way through logic bordering on labyrinthine into triangulations that will hopefully give them the best advantage when on the other side of this bloody mess, moments of incredible violence (one man's whipped so hard his eyeball pops out of its socket) and icky tortures both physical and psychological (especially uncomfortable and unnecessary is a video that Del Toro shows Lively late in the film) feel both shocking and inevitable.

Stone’s always, especially in his more clearly political films, been interested in authority, who has it, who benefits from it, who is hurt by it, whether it be soldiers (Platoon, Born on the Forth of July), presidents (Nixon, W.), politicians (JFK), bankers (Wall Street), conquerors (Alexander), and media forces both institutions (Any Given Sunday) and the infamous (Natural Born Killers). In Savages, the only real authority in the drug trade comes from what can be bought with threats and violence. This is an unstable situation. What makes this a compelling representation of this concept is the way Stone keeps a sharp eye on the characters as they slowly make their moves towards gaining or retaining the upper hand.

Here, after a big violent shootout, one character begs the others to pull to the side of the road and vomits out of the getaway car. This is a vicious movie filled with scared characters desperately trying to find their way back into some kind of comfort zone, an amount of weary realism in aggressive, stylized pulp. Stone may eschew nuance for intensity, but he provides the texture to keep things interesting. It’s telling that, although Stone isn’t out to make any sort of overtly political statement and no character could be considered a moralistic center, at different points in the movie the Americans and the Mexicans each call the other “savages” behind the others’ backs. And then they each get the chance to live down to that description.

Sunk: BATTLESHIP

I don’t know if the nonstop digital chaos and noise wore me down or what, but parts of Battleship aren’t that bad. The main plot point of this movie-based-on-a-board-game is that during joint military exercises between the United States and Japan off the coast of Hawaii, an alien ship of some kind comes in for a splash landing and opens fire. So the movie’s basically American and Japanese sailors protecting Pearl Harbor from alien invasion. Why, that’s almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. Well, in a better movie it would be, one interested in exploring context and building characters or metaphors or providing any sort of narrative momentum or rooting interest other than “Blow up them aliens real good!” It’s a thin blockbuster that takes forever getting started and then has little but unoriginal drivel to get to once it does.

The payoff of all this is actually somewhat competent as far as these kind of big, impersonal blow-‘em-up blockbusters go. It’s the setup that’s totally bonkers and tonally messy, which dilutes the climactic excitement, reducing it to merely better than what’s come before. Screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber start us off with some pretty weird scenes that collide into each other in awkward ways. First, we meet twenty-something screw-up Alex (Taylor Kitsch) sitting in a bar, getting a lecture from his Naval-officer brother (Alexander Skarsgård). It’s a grow-up and get-responsible kind of lecture that awkwardly segues into a happy-birthday cupcake. Then a blonde bombshell (Brooklyn Decker) walks in and Alex goes over to hit on her. She wants a burrito but the bartender won’t give her one this late at night. Alex tries to get one for her and ends up breaking into a closed convenience store to do so, getting tased for his troubles.

Cut to some unspecified time later. Alex is now in the Navy, too. He’s talking about marrying blondie, but she wants him to ask her dad, Admiral Liam Neeson, for her hand first. Also there’s a pre-war games soccer game between America and Japan’s sailors that he loses and a subsequent fight that he gets into. He’s in real danger of getting bounced out of the military after these military exercises are over with, but is also third in command or something. I don’t get it either. This whole jumble of exposition and character building is so confused and tone-deaf, as if the writers had a vague sense of how movies worked and figured they better set up the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys before getting into the action, but had little idea of how to actually go about doing that.

But then, the aliens arrive. These unseen baddies set up a force field around the islands, cutting off a few battleships from all outside help. Poor Liam Neeson can only appear in one or two scenes where he looks determined, worried, and utterly powerless to intervene. Meanwhile, blondie is stuck on the side of a Hawaiian mountain where she is occasionally called upon to interact with a veteran (real veteran Gregory D. Gadson) who has two prosthetic legs and together the two of them look over at some aliens off in the distance and look worried. It’s up to good old Alex to rise to the occasion and figure out how to stop the alien invasion. And I haven’t even mentioned the quivering scientist (Hamish Linklater), also stranded on that mountain, whose satellite array brought the aliens to Hawaii in the first place. There’s also the scowling Petty Officer played by pop star Rihanna and the comic relief (I guess?) provided by Jesse Plemons. They get to scowl and crack wise and shoot big guns.

But anyways, all these characters are trapped in this impenetrable energy bubble. I was all ready to hate the movie based on how terminally uninvolving and unbelievably sloppy I found the schlocky first hour (or more) of this 131-minute movie. Even the opening alien salvo is just nonsense, shredding city streets and toppling buildings in a familiar and dull way. A main character dies almost immediately when a battleship goes down and I hardly cared. But then a funny thing happened. The movie picks up some steam and charges forward into occasionally diverting silliness. It doesn’t get good, exactly, but it moves up from awful to just plain watchable mediocrity. By the end I wasn’t enjoying myself, exactly, but the highly improbable use of a floating museum in the climax made me smile a little.

And it’s kind of clever how the gameplay of Battleship is integrated into the movie. The battleships can’t detect the alien vessels on their radar, but luckily the alien ships can’t seem to spot them either. Luckily a Japanese officer (Tadanobu Asano) comes aboard to help the Americans detect the vessels. He does something related to water displacement and buoy sensors, but the end result is a grid that looks suspiciously like the board game. “E-11!” “Fire!” “Anything?” “It’s a miss!” The following sequence is rather suspenseful, if more than a little goofy. But it’s not any sillier than the way the alien’s missiles are cylinders with little pegs in the bottom so that they stick in the battleships before blowing up. Again, like the game. This is what’s modestly involving about the movie. I never cared about the characters. The humans are mostly indistinguishable except for the main characters that we’re told to like and root for just because they are the main characters. The aliens are just a squishy, flavorless, derivative horde. What do they even want? Who knows? Open fire!

The problem that plagues the movie all the way through is the lack of personality. That’s why the flashes of board-game-referencing winks are the most enjoyable moments; they’re the only relatable, recognizable moments. The acting’s simply functional for such dysfunctional roles. Neeson’s wasted. Kitsch is a blank. (John Carter had a much better role for him.) Rihanna could actually be a good (or even great) action star in a better movie; she has plenty of tough charm here. Linklater’s scientist gets one sort of good line when he comes crashing out of the jungle: “They killed my grad students!” Decker was hired for her cleavage. Not helping the actors much at all are the action and effects which, from the aliens’ designs right down to the nonstop weightless carnage, are just so much shiny digital confusion.

Director Peter Berg, not the most consistent of filmmakers (on the one hand, Friday Night Lights, on the other, Hancock), has shot it all in a style that can only be called watered-down Michael Bay. It’s all of the militarism and convoluted plotting with none of the idiosyncratic personality and ability to create striking imagery. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bay has a distinctive style and when he’s given a big, loud set-piece to execute he knows, for better or worse, how to play it up big.  Here Berg’s only cobbling together a pale imitation, serving up so little payoff that there’s little sense waiting through the setup. 

The Man Who Fell to Barsoom: JOHN CARTER

John Carter begins three times. First, there’s a sequence that begins with a splash of expository narration before joining a conflict in media res with solar-powered flying vessels clashing in the skies above the planet Barsoom. Next, a young man (Daryl Sabara) arrives at the home of his recently departed uncle and, as a condition of the man’s will, is given a journal to read. Now, through his own words, we are properly introduced to that uncle, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), a Civil War veteran looking for gold out west while trying to avoid capture. And then, he’s mysteriously, accidentally transported to Barsoom. These three beginnings do more than place the narrative in framing devices like so many nesting dolls. It’s a narrative technique that emphasizes the protagonist’s status as a man out of time and space.

So too is the film’s source material. John Carter first appeared in print from the author Edgar Rice Burroughs, he of Tarzan fame, in the year 1912, exactly 100 years ago. Consequently, bits and pieces of the story can be traced through much of the previous century’s popular science fiction from Flash Gordon and Robinson Crusoe on Mars to Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and Avatar. The trick of adapting John Carter after all these years is to make new what is old, to make fresh what has already been thoroughly chewed, to reconstitute a story, the DNA of which has permeated the genre in ways big and small these many years.

Up to the task is director Andrew Stanton, whose animation work for Pixar includes WALL-E, a favorite of mine and one of the very best sci-fi films of recent years. He makes his live action debut with John Carter and, much like his colleague Brad Bird proved with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, there’s definitely something to be said for the animator’s eye applied to live action. Here is a film so wonderfully composed, so imbued with visual energy of a sturdy, meticulous kind that this becomes no mere studio programmer and rarely feels old-fashioned or stuffy in any way. No, this is a film that slides into its timeless qualities in a grand Hollywood style, with spectacle and pageantry so lush, so vivid and sweeping, that oftentimes it feels like what Cecil B. DeMille or David Lean would have done with space opera.

The film finds John Carter unexpectedly displaced to Barsoom, a dusty rust-tinged desert planet with regal red humanoids clashing for control of the planet while the tall, green, four-armed tribe of Tharks remains neutral and isolated in the barren wilderness. Barsoom, Carter soon learns, is what he knows as Mars. Its atmosphere and gravity give him extraordinary powers of strength and speed; he can cross vast distances in a single leap, kill a Thark with a single blow. This impresses the leader of the Tharks, the first beings of Barsoom to stumble upon this strange creature they first refer to as a “white worm” before finding ways to communicate with him, though they mistake “Virginia” as his species name rather than his homeland.

The Tharks clash over what to do with the man. One grumbling tribal leader (Thomas Haden Church) believes Carter should be put to the test against fearsome beasts in their punishing arena. But the Tharks’ leader (Willem Dafoe) is inquisitive and hopeful. He believes they’ve found a super-powered champion for their people. This is also the belief of the beautiful and tough princess Dejah (Lynn Collins), who crash-lands while fleeing a marriage to her nemesis (Dominic West) that was arranged by her father (Ciarán Hinds) as a peace treaty. For his part, Carter just wants to go home, but his curiosity and his desire to somehow help these strange people compels him to learn more about these warring tribes. After all, to return to Earth he will need all the help he can get learning about mysterious alien shape-shifters who were involved in getting him into this predicament and whose leader (Mark Strong), unbeknownst to Carter, is the true catalyst for the war on Barsoom.

This is a richly imagined world brought to life with strong filmmaking that, wonder of wonders, trusts an audience to understand aspects of plot without too much of a fuss. Powerful moments, like when an alien battle is crosscut with an Earth-bound burial flashback, sketch in backstory and juxtapose it with an exciting forward pace to draw a fuller picture of Carter’s mental state with incredible ease. The script by Stanton with Mark Andrews and the great novelist Michael Chabon has a wonderful flow, slipping through its narrative loops with a minimum of fuss and delivering big action setpieces without seeming to strain over much towards preordained plot points. The dialogue, so often a sticking point in these earnest throwback blockbusters, is nicely polished. The regal dialogue of the royal Barsoomian people comes off not as stiff fantasy gobbledygook, but vivid pseudo-historical regality whereas the Tharks have a nice tribal feeling and Carter himself has a nice rascally Southern drawl. The actors seem grateful for the chance to do more than pose for effects; they have a world to inhabit and characters to play.

Stanton exhibits a helpful curiosity in the workings of this fantasy world that match the bewildered Carter. The long middle section of the film in which we are introduced to various technologies, traditions, legends, villages, cities, vehicles, heroes, villains, and creatures (including Woola, a squishy, speedy monster-dog who I found more adorable than the dogs in The Artist, Beginners, and Hugo combined) is simply wonderful filmmaking. The effects are wonderful, but Stanton grounds them and makes them work as a cohesive whole. They’re neither confusing, nor overly explained. The costumes, all loose, flowing, ancient-alien chic, and the sets, from humble huts to towering castles, are just as lovingly designed and executed. It all just simply works together as a terrific example of world building while still telling a compelling, exciting, and, yes, even moving story.

It’s by nature a somewhat predictable story, seeing as it has arrived pre-recycled by its genre peers over so many decades, and the film is not without its rough patches, to be sure. But it’s a film told with such energy and a high entertainment factor that I found it especially irresistible. Like the best films of its genre, John Carter is a film that draws upon archetypes – here it’s a crypto-western that shakes off the “crypto” by more or less starting as one – and extrapolates, reinterpreting visceral, primeval stories into a form that expands the imagination. Here’s a satisfying film that, with a flourish of its sweeping Michael Giacchino score, opens up a new world before your very eyes and, whatever its influences, whatever its source material has influenced, manages to become something entirely its own.