Two for the Road: THE HUNT and BLOODSHOT

With movie theaters closed in the face of a global pandemic, we are about to have a radical transformation of moviegoing for the next few months (at least). Us frequent moviegoers will feel the brunt of it in our habits. Personally speaking, I haven’t gone more than a week without seeing something in a movie theater since George W. Bush was president. This will be quite an adjustment for us all, with only VOD titles and whatever the streaming services upload for our amusement passing for current cinema. Multiplex employees will hopefully continue to get paid by the big chains (deepest shame for those companies that don’t), and if you can buy a gift card or membership to a local independent or nonprofit theater now, that’d be a good investment in making sure they stay around. These are strange times, and they ask much of us. Movies are the least of our worries, but as an already weakened (through competing forms, corporate consolidation, eroding interest, and streaming malaise) aspect of our culture, it’s natural to wonder about their long term viability in the face of all this disruption.

I, for one, will find some small solace in the ability to finally catch up on the unwatched discs my collecting habit has piled up over the years. I’ve already dug into the stacks for some long runtimes I’ve been putting off. Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981) — a finely textured cop drama that accrues more than it unfolds — and Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) and Nixon (1995) — divergent and yet complementary fevered midcentury epics, and reason enough to think the name Robert Richardson is one of those talents basically synonymous with cinema — have been recent highlights. Nonetheless, whenever movie theaters open up again, it’ll feel so good to see that big screen light up with a new movie. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. Tears of joy will follow, no doubt. Still, I saw a few movies last week before everything fell apart to social distancing and self-quarantine and working the day job from home. Given the state of world affairs, and the entertainment business, I’ll probably be among the small number who can actually claim to have seen these movies in their original release. Small bragging rights, to be sure.

One was the cursed release of The Hunt, a controversial Blumhouse horror effort that got its initial release scuttled by political forces last September. You see, the premise is that rich liberals have kidnapped a handful of conspiratorial red state folks to hunt them for sport. Some conservatives, the sort who love to play dumb and aggrieved to whip up gullible audience’s anger, claimed the movie was against them, irresponsible, and a totally inappropriate concept. This leaves aside, of course, the fact that the trailers and advertising clearly set up a film in which the hunters were the obvious villains and the heroes the plucky underdogs being hunted. If anything, the voices calling for its removal — up to the highest, dumbest levels of politics — would like this movie, if only because they’d misunderstand it the other way. Not that it’d be entirely their fault. No, director Craig Zobel (of the superior upsetting Compliance) and co-writers Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse (the showrunner and a writer on HBO’s brilliant, sociopolitically sharp Watchmen sequel) have made a movie so sloppily both-sides that it condemns ultimately only the discourse. It asks, aren’t we all angry these days? And never stops to interrogate why. Maybe the unactualized movie about the divide in this country being only superficially between right and left when it’s really between rich and poor that lingers unexamined behind this premise would’ve been better for being clearly stated. Instead we have heads blown off and limbs torn away — sometimes in jokey manners — for maximum splatter impact, and a fine lead performance from Betty Gilpin (Glow) as a Deep South wage slave who — surprise! — is an educated woman capable of taking on the big bad (Hilary Swank). There’s that sort of wishy-washy condescension all over the picture. Some of the action is passably done, but when your ostensible social commentary ends up only saying that people are too mean on Twitter — which, yes, but also, that’s a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem itself — then you need to go back for another rewrite. Instead of being actually provocative, it’s a shallow incitement, and as such, merely boring.

Better is Bloodshot, a dopey small-scale superhero movie of the kind you might’ve seen in the late 90s, maybe catching it between Spawn and Blade. It’s refreshingly throwback in its appeal in that way, proud of its few good visual tricks while mostly playing it safe as a modest mid-sized star vehicle for a man of rumbling stoic charisma. Based on a character from Valiant Comics (one of the competitors to the Big Two of Marvel and DC that arose in the peak comic book era three decades back), it follows a soldier (Vin Diesel) who is killed, then resurrected by a biotech startup. The head of the company (Guy Pearce), a doctor and inventor, is proud to move beyond artificial limbs into this new feat: tiny robotic nanites in the blood that gives his experimental patient nearly unlimited ability to regenerate tissue and bone in the event of injury. The poor muscle man awakes with memory of his death, and soon sets out to get revenge. It’s almost like this super solider idea is what the company had in mind all along (hmmm), as they do nothing to stop the newly alive solider from executing a plan that involves crashing head on into an armored car and walking straight into hundreds of rounds of gunfire from the private army protecting the bad guy (Toby Kebbel). That’s a fun sequence, shot under a red light and cloud of flour, with each digital squib on our hero a curlicue of instant robotic recovery, each blood cloud a swirl reentering and reconstituting him. Alas, as fun as it can be, the whole arc of the movie grows repetitive, as any reasonably alert viewer is miles ahead of the protagonist in figuring out the derivative plot twists, and the action sequences never quite figure out a way around the problem of a character that can’t be injured. Still, the filmmaking of the action is brisk and cut confusingly close, giving enough of a sense of energy and speed-ramped dazzle to approximate excitement. Director Dave Wilson is yet another alum of VFX house Blur, following Tim Miller (Deadpool) and Jeff Fowler (Sonic the Hedgehog) into a feature debut. (It’s the best of the three.) He crafts the central visual ideas well enough as the action becomes a swirl of nanite clouds and shrapnel amid powerful punches. And the character of Bloodshot himself benefits from the soulful stillness of Diesel. He’s unstoppable, but he’s not happy about it. There’s some unshakeable baseline appeal to his star persona in the terse, glum Riddick or Witch Hunter sci-fi mold. What we’re left with is a grindingly competent B-movie, totally forgettable and destined to be a passable time waster on cable or streaming. And yet, as the last theatrical experience I’ll have for a while, I’m fonder of it by the day.

The Kong Who Would Be King: KONG: SKULL ISLAND

At least the latest big-budget creature feature, Kong: Skull Island, works where it really counts: the creatures. It presents an island full of creepy crawlies and monster mashes, not merely the expected ginormous ape, but also: towering water buffalo, massive birds, a gargantuan octopus, and a family of creepy skull-faced lizards so humungous they’d leave even the biggest, meanest dinosaur trembling in their shadows. It may not have much in the way of character or personality, either for its actors to inhabit or for its filmmaking to display – it’s all borrowed from other, better, inspirations and thinned out in the process – but the effects department earned its budget and then some. It may have the colorful aesthetic gloss of an expensive A-level picture, but its heart has more in common with the junky B-movie big monkey Kong rip-offs than the lean and mean 1933 original or the epic melancholy of Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake.

Moving at an impossibly rushed clip – though to what end I don’t know, as there’s not much worth hurrying to that taking time to settle into the dread and fear couldn’t improve – the movie hurtles a large cast onto Skull Island. We’re told it is hidden behind a perpetual storm system, and the film is set in an analog 1973, a double explanation as to how the place has remained uncharted. The expedition helicopters over and almost immediately runs into the main attraction. This movie’s Kong is the size of a skyscraper. If he tried to climb the Empire State Building he’d crush it in a single stomp. (But though his enormity has grown, his personality, and the movie, is second rate to earlier Kings.) He quickly thrashes the interlopers, killing all the extras and leaving the Movie Stars to fend for themselves amongst the jungle beasties. Would that any of them be allowed a sliver of personality beyond audience recognition from previous roles. It’s hard to be dazzled by the destruction when Samuel L. Jackson’s stubborn colonel, John Goodman’s crackpot explorer, Tom Hiddleston’s tracker, and Brie Larson’s photographer, are merely there to pose in the pulp. They’re asked to sell unsellable empty roles, and thus hard to care about when juxtaposed with the senseless noise around them.

Also along for the ride are Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbel, Jiang Tian, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Thomas Mann, and John Ortiz. It’s a huge cast with little to do. What the film lacks in character in makes up in characters, splitting them up, sending them hither and thither across Skull Island, wandering aimlessly into one creature’s den after the next. When they encounter, say, a gargantuan log with eyes, their first instinct is to open fire. There’s no curiosity or awe here, only bloodlust. This extends to the lack of gravity given to the imagery, monsters treated as frivolous animal foes instead of creatures in their own right. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, plucked from Sundance to helm this Hollywood undertaking, loves watching the tech and the explosions and the bloodshed – and he likes seeing Kong the MMA brawler – but gives it none of the patient dazzlement of Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla. There is only the grubby beauty of the jungle landscapes – crudely standing in for Vietnam in the cinematic equivalent of mumbling your way through a muddled metaphor – and the drooling beasties as ILM dumps out their design book into the wilds of the frame.

Still, no matter how inane and inert the film often is, it crackles to life when John C. Reilly stumbles into the picture as a WWII pilot lost on the island for decades. He plays up the disorientation and madness of his character with unpredictable Brule-like spasms of awkward intensity and exasperation. He brags about his Kong lore, but is quick to admit he’s never actually spoken it aloud before. Single-handedly stealing the movie out from under the most talented cast assembled for something so frivolous in a long time (since, what, National Treasure: Book of Secrets or something?), Reilly offers up personality to spare. He upstages Kong, no mean feat when the sometimes-gentle giant’s every step rattles the subwoofers (except, of course, for the scene where he is suddenly in front of Larson in an open field despite what should’ve been an inescapably long, loud walk). The rest of the movie is just empty 70’s dress up run through a copycat Kaiju playbook, with whack-a-mole monsters and crudely manipulated archetypes. We’re supposed to thrill to the fussy visual touches around the edges – a crashing helicopter from the point of view of a bobble head on the dashboard; explosions seen reflected in sunglasses; a giant octopus slurped up like Kong-sized noodle soup – and forget we’re watching much less than meets the eye.