The Shallow End: VENOM: THE LAST DANCE

There’s a finale feeling throughout Venom: The Last Dance, a movie that plays like an ending in every way. It’s the supposedly final entry in this particular strand of Sony’s barely-connected Spider-Man spin-offs, though its end credits tease a few potential ways forward, and there’s the looming threat of more Morbius and Madame Web out there somewhere. (At least their movies are hacked-up oddities; maybe Kraven will be, too.) Some of these are fun enough, but here there’s something exhausted about this whole endeavor. It’s tied to the increasingly strained efforts to keep the larger superhero boom from going bust. And it’s the slapdash smallness of these Sony concepts, which are especially thin and stretched to the breaking point here. It’s not for the lack of trying on the part of star and co-writer Tom Hardy, who clearly loves pulling double duty playing the awkward muckraker Eddie Brock in all his shuffling, stumbling tics, while also voicing his extraterrestrial parasite, Venom, in a semi-comprehensible gargle. The title character slithers out of Brock in gooey tendrils sometimes ending in a semi-viscous countenance, and then goops over his entire body to become the anti-hero who’ll wrestle with other alien villains. In this one it’s a pack of enormous creatures—some bizarre, toothy hybrid of wolves and squids—sent to Earth to sniff out Venom at the behest of a Bad Guy who spends the entire movie glowering motionless on an evil throne. So Eddie and Venom are on the run from them, and also the government, after being framed for the events of the previous picture, and scientists, who want to experiment on them. It all comes together in a few sequences of boring, dark, half-comprehensible CG chaos.

What it doesn’t leave time for is any believable escalation or cause and effect. Instead we have scenes happening for the sake of happening, characters appearing for the sake of appearing, and decisions made just to prolong the plot and facilitate the fighting. It’s constantly asserting ideas about the relationship between Eddie and Venom that aren’t quite embodied in the storytelling. The first in the series was dumb cliched fun; the second was quick, silly and hollow. Neither laid the groundwork necessary for the tearful goodbyes teed up in the final stretch of this one. (How strange to find this is the second dreary Marvel movie of the year with a self-consciously corny sentimental clip-show montage in the end.) But nor does this movie ever really activate its potential, like those earlier entries could. Instead it’s undercutting every action with off-tempo reaction and even its oddball attempts at humor strand characters in disconnected bits of business. Helmed by Kelly Marcel, the series’ screenwriter making her directorial debut, it finds little visual excitement or narrative momentum or character detail. It’s even shed most of its predecessor’s supporting cast, and barely characterizes its new members, leaving Hardy more or less alone in a routine superhero climax that makes the earlier Venoms look like real movies. It’s all so blasé and tired, it almost feels like the dreary ending for an entire genre. As I endured its endless, unsatisfying sequences of glop, I was filled with the same hollowness that accompanied Joker 2 and The Marvels and Aquaman 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine and so on. To paraphrase Keats, I feel we’re watching the last oozings hours by hours.

Spun Out: VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is not so much a sequel as a faint echo. The first of these Spider-Man spinoffs—largely theoretically connected to the current live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe canon so far, but one never knows—was a surprise hit back in 2018. It was also surprisingly good at what it was. That is to say, it would’ve been the best superhero movie of 2005. It was short and simple, uncomplicated and unburdened, hooked on a squiggly, committed performance by Tom Hardy as a muckraking journalist who gets fused with Venom, a gloopy alien parasite. The alien becomes a growling id in his head, when it’s not a rippling tentacled slime oozing out of him and coaxing him toward superpowered vigilantism. The thing is weirdly small-scale and legible, refreshingly so. Its very rock-dumb simplicity and willingness to build up to satisfying-enough character dilemmas made it play like quite a zag in the year of peak MCU interconnected pomposity. But it’s aged well that way, so slim and spirited and unconcerned with any larger world-building. It was a refreshing throwback then and a nice anomaly now. And the central villain being a heartless tech CEO hoping to launch himself into space off the backs of exploited workers has gained a certain charge. So to find the sequel takes all that goodwill, such as it is, and just doodles around for a bit is too bad.

At least it’s not one of those big blow-out self-important superhero sequels. This one is still trim, with the credits rolling just past the 80-minute mark. But it makes you appreciate what setup there was to the character dynamics last time. This one is mostly about the love-hate relationship between man and monster as they inhabit the same body. There are some funny moments in which Hardy flails about attacking himself as the movie teases out a workable metaphor for self-loathing, and still more enjoyment out of Venom lurking around for other hosts when they get in a fight. (There’s also the movie’s best moment: Venom wandering into a nightclub and holding court.) We get a few good moments with other returning characters, like Michelle Williams and Reid Scott who seem to be having a good time as relatively normal bystanders who reluctantly get involved in some key moments. “I thought you said no aliens,” he says at one point. “No more aliens,” she only somewhat helpfully clarifies. The movie is shot by Robert Richardson, no stranger to good-looking movies, what with the Scorseses and Tarantinos he’s lensed, and helmed by Andy Serkis, no stranger to effects, being the king of motion capture performance for Apes and Gollum alike. They’re at their best staging action with a bit of cartoony slapstick. There’s sometimes fun here. Watching it clunk along, you might almost think you’re watching a real movie.

Ah, but now I’m almost writing myself into thinking I enjoyed it more than I did. If only the thing were the sum of its best moments. Instead it's wedded to one of the most underdeveloped and under-thought villain plots in recent memory. He’s Woody Harrelson as a serial killer on death row who, through some far more convoluted reasons than an 80-minute movie needs, gets a drop of Venom in his system which turns him into an evil red gloop of tendrils and tentacles. His goal is to, well, wreak carnage and get married. He does a little of both. He breaks out of prison in an explosion of effects. Then he bides his time till he strikes again to find his fiance (Naomie Harris). Then he fights Venom. Never once does it sell a broader feeling of danger, or build to anything cumulative. It’s simply contained and separate from the main action. Harrelson isn’t given the chance to build much of a character, and the ultimate final confrontation is so flailingly amorphous it’s hard to tell whose digital glop is slicing whose. (I liked the stained glass backdrop, though. That was a nice touch.) I almost wish the movie hadn’t a villain at all. It clearly put most of the effort into Hardy’s inner struggle anyway. Everything else falls flimsy. By the end, it basically feels like treading water. Even now, I’m almost asking myself if I actually saw it, such a non-event it is.

The Beach Front: DUNKIRK

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a logistical triumph about a logistical nightmare. The film tells the story of one of World War II’s nerve-wracking retreats. It’s 1940. British and French forces are repelled from the mainland, trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk with nothing but the water behind them. Off in the distance, perhaps, they can almost convince themselves England can be seen. Alas, it’s so close, yet so far away, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers sitting ducks for the Nazi bombers thundering overhead and the encroaching Axis ground forces held back by Allied gunners behind makeshift sandbag perimeters. As the film unspools, the desperate stranded men look for ways to help speed up their rescue, while we know that help is on the way agonizingly slowly. Nolan’s film has something of a Hemingway spirit about it. Dialogue is terse, to the point. The narrative is in the details, the soft surf of the tides and sea foam, the oil and explosions, the eerie quiet in the air and the dirt under fingernails, the wet hair and panicked expressions betraying stiff-upper-lip duty-bound effort. Nolan, operating at the height of his filmmaking powers, marshals his resources to not so much tell any single man’s story, but to orchestrate an experience that’ll do the real stressful cacophony justice.

He shows us this war story by land, by sea, and by air. With a deft structural trick, he weaves together three distinct speeds and perspectives with which to pass through this historical moment. By land, the soldiers (like those played by Fionn Whitehead, Cillian Murphy, and Harry Styles) and their commander (Kenneth Branagh) fret and plan and hope while under constant threat of enemy fire as they await evacuation, a story taking place over a week. By sea, we find British citizen sailors called in to help speed up the transporting of the troops (an event tenderly memorialized from the homefront’s point of view in William Wyler’s 1942 classic Mrs. Miniver) because the Navy’s destroyers can’t approach the shallows near the beach. We follow one of the boats (captained by Mark Rylance) as its crew makes its way into battle with a sense of dutiful patriotism and a solemn desire to help, a journey there and (hopefully) back again that takes a day. By air, we find the air force, strategically sending a small squadron (led by Tom Hardy) to provide cover in the final stretch of the rescue effort, a crucial dogfight taking place over the course of an hour. Nolan, with his usual crisp, precise, and confident cross-cutting (think Inception’s dream layers, Interstellar’s time change, or Memento’s backwards-and-forwards design), tells these three actions simultaneously, cutting between them to heighten suspense and danger, often in clever matches – floods of water, rat-a-tat guns, grim expressions. 

By the time the stories start to intersect, weaving details in and out, allowing us to see, say, a plane crash first as a moment from above, then floating next to it with another group of character’s later. Eventually, all three storylines converge, climax upon climax upon climax, every character’s peak danger and despair in the same moment of converging crescendos. This remarkably effective structure – experimental, but completely coherent in its logic and effects – is in service of an impeccably detailed recreation. Although the characters it focuses on are sketched quickly, fictional composite stand-ins for the masses of people involved and impacted, the overall sense of fastidious reenactment gives the film the historical weight under its immediacy. This is a lean, tense true-life thriller, every moment pulsing with the unforgiving tick, tick, tick of time running out (further emphasized by Hans Zimmer’s relentlessly simmering score). Shooting on film, and full IMAX film for many scenes, allows cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to craft shots of remarkable size and scale, with tangible texture and detailed grit, expansively filling the frame with eerie pale light, foreboding blank beaches, cavernous clear skies, and vast expanses of ocean. The men huddled against the forces of warfare are arranged in patterns and lines, formations and orders, holding steady to rules and regulations even in these desperate hours. 

These groups of men are buffeted by elaborate and concussive suspense sequences, immersive effects and booming sound design building dread out of the roaring engines of approaching bombers, the slow smack of waves against a tiny boat, the sputtering propellers of a struggling aircraft, an unforgiving howling wind whipping at frayed nerves. The individuals involved are merely part of the crowd. They aren’t given lengthy moments of backstory and exposition, or made into easy heroes and villains. In fact, the enemy remains unspoken, barely glimpsed behind their weapons of war. Nolan’s focus is on the effect the situation has on the groups of people involved under the vice grip of unceasing peril. They simply do what they must, in every moment, in hopes to see the next. This is an extraordinarily well-made, exceptionally well-crafted film of beautifully elaborate detail building a work of startling simplicity: three straight lines concluding in the same inevitable. It’s a film about process and strategy, how they hold together and fall apart under tough conditions when survival instincts kick in. It’s about how even in defeat you can find dignity, even in fear you can find small acts of heroism. Best of all, it’s an experience that’s uniquely cinematic, overwhelming in its scale and power.

Dead Man: THE REVENANT

The Revenant is a simple pulp revenge story blown up to epic proportions. A gnarly tale of extreme survival and an ambivalent ode to masculine gruffness and stubborn righteousness, it takes as its setting wintry snow-swept tundra and forests of the American West in the early 19th century. There we find a group of fur trappers whose expedition is about to go wrong in just about every way it could. It’s a rugged Western and a bloody survival thriller, shot in gorgeous widescreen landscapes and patient lingering looks at fading sunsets, snaking fog, and curling smoke. There’s a great sense of place and space, striking and vividly photographed in graceful shots of impeccable detail. With it comes the feeling that this endlessly stretching wilderness trampled by invading white men and cycles of violence has led to a form of derangement. Even those who survive will be ever changed by the sheer effort it takes to survive on a good day, let alone when stranded in a cascading series of worst-case scenarios.

Star Leonardo DiCaprio exerts tremendous effort as the main figure tortured by the events of the film. It’s practically a secular passion play of frontier suffering. He plays an expert tracker and trapper haunted by memories of dead loved ones. After a bloody battle with Native Americans (shot in harrowing, expertly choreographed long takes), his colleagues are desperate to get home. Too bad, then, that DiCaprio is mauled by a bear (an overwhelming, mostly convincing, sequence) and left for dead. He's hastily placed in a shallow grave by a greedy and mean coworker (Tom Hardy) who’d just rather get back to the fort than sit around waiting for help. This all unfolds with patience and slowly accumulating dread, a series of inciting incidents gradually occurring. We meet a variety of men (Domhnall Gleeson, Maze Runner’s Will Poulter, newcomer Forrest Goodluck, Buzzard’s Joshua Burge) who are exhausted, crabby, sore, beaten down by the elements, resigned to dreary life in an isolating kill-or-be-killed ecosystem. But then there’s merely DiCaprio, alive only through some combination of vengeance and righteous spite, stumbling agonizingly slowly back towards civilization, and the man who did him wrong.

It’s one violent setback after the next as DiCaprio – torn to ribbons, rendered mainly mute, limping, groaning, spitting, bleeding – scratches his way through ice cold water, blinding snow, roaring winds, mysterious Natives, vicious traders, and other assorted conflicts and obstacles. It’s practically a catalogue of every way frontier life could kill you: weapons (rifles, arrows, knives, tomahawks, pistols), the elements (low temperatures, rapids, avalanches), disease, infection, dehydration, starvation, accidents, battles, and murder. The film sets up clearly a variety of reasons why Hardy is loathsome, though still reasonably human. And DiCaprio goes through a wringer of endless sequences of torturous pain – a faintly and grimly hilarious pile on of deadly and dangerous incidents – escalating in an exhausted what-now? effect. These visceral strands combine to create an elemental desire for DiCaprio, who should be dead several dozen times over, to get back to the fort and prove Hardy wrong.

But of course the overarching tension of the piece is not whether or not DiCaprio will live to confront Hardy again. Nor is it whether or not he’ll learn along the way that revenge is ultimately unsatisfying. (This is a revenge tale with movie stars, after all. We know where it’s headed.) It’s a tension between art house existential dread and gooey genre fare – never more than in a subplot about Natives looking for a kidnapped daughter (an inverted Searchers) treated as a plot engine and overly mystical essentialism. Alternately transcendent and brutal, the main suspense comes from wondering just how much punishment is going to be dealt to our hero. By the time we get a climactic nasty close-up of blood-soaked snow, we’ve already seen a mauling, a stabbing, a hanging, a rape, a few massacres, and a dead horse used for warmth, Tauntaun-style. It’s a lot to take, each new act of violence handled very seriously, with the thudding weight of a film out to be tactile and gross, emphasizing how difficult it all is.

Torn between artful self-importance and gripping narrative demands, it nonetheless forms a compelling whole. It’s directed and co-written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who makes Very Important and very showy movies about human suffering like Babel and Birdman. His co-writer is Mark L. Smith, who wrote the brisk and nasty little horror movie Vacancy. It’s an interesting pairing. Together they’ve made a movie that’s gripping and long, a beautiful, miserable, suspenseful slog, well over two hours of one thing after another. It’s elegiac and solid, staggering natural formations held on screen as long shivering breaths between moments of pain, and then human figures slowly make their way through them. We might watch for several minutes as DiCaprio limps and winces his way up a hill, then crouches down behind a tree to see what new complications are in store. Nothing happens easy in this film. Iñárritu takes a simple story and makes it a showcase for his style and his skill, and the expert craft of his cast and crew, holding the ominous and steady tone.

The Revenant relies on committed performers and incredible cinematography to achieve its aims. DiCaprio is at his most primal here, often playing wordless scenes of anguish and exhaustion that are among his least phony on screen moments. But just as good is the supporting cast, especially an intense and unexpectedly darkly funny Hardy, a quietly panicking Poulter, and a hesitantly authoritative Gleeson. Together they form a nice cross-section of the different ways people can react to conflicts of lawless violence from nature and from man. The action is captured in dazzling photography by Emmanuel Lubezki, whose work on the likes of The Tree of Life, Children of Men, Burn After Reading, and many more equally visually rich films, has cemented him as one of modern cinema’s best image-makers. He uses austere long shots, drinking in natural beauty, and then hammers home turmoil in fluid takes. He gives the film its massive wide-open spaces, and its close-up intensity, clinging to actors, swiveling and swooping as they get swept up in chaotic moments. This is exquisitely inflated pulp.

Kray Kray: LEGEND

It’s never a good idea to call time of death on an entire subgenre based on the evidence of one movie, but Legend sure makes it look like the gangster movie is on its last legs. The last gasp of a concept out of ideas, it takes the late-90’s Guy Ritchie-led British crime capers, themselves Tarantino-inspired take offs of Scorsese’s virtuosic R-rated updates of 30’s era Warner Bros gangster pictures, and pushes further into airless artifice. Writer-director Brian Helgeland, who sometimes makes good movies, like the anachronistic jousting comedy A Knight’s Tale and Jackie Robinson biopic 42, takes as his inspiration the real story of Reggie and Ronnie Kray, twin brothers who ran organized crime in the East End of London during the 1960s. Out of real conflict, violence, and crime, Helgeland spins a hyperbolic, stylized tale of colorful blood and scheming so tediously clunky and playing like lukewarm leftovers of gangster movies past, it might as well be completely disconnected from reality.

That’s the point, I suppose. It’s not named “legend” for no reason. It’s exaggerated with a self-satisfied swagger, beholden only to an outsized larger-than-life perspective. It opens on a blatantly false CGI skyline, before hopping straight into narration from a character we’ll eventually realize is speaking cheekily, and incongruously, from beyond the grave. She (Emily Browning) is the wife of a Kray, telling us the story of their rise – consolidating power through their violent tempers and a confluence of strategy and luck – and their fall – taken down by a combination of hubris and the law. Fitting a true story neatly into generic formula is a good way to strip specificities and eccentricities from the moments and individuals at play. We get tracking shots into nightclubs straight out of Goodfellas, macho posturing like Cagney lite, and random acts of violence tonally carbon copied out of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. All the while, the colors drip like a faded Technicolor musical, actors pose and chew, and the two-hour-plus runtime stretches forward with leisurely laziness.

Tom Hardy plays both Krays in a double role, showy for its variety of doubled positions and encounters it demands. The effects work is passable, but not nearly as convincing in look or performance as Armie Hammer in The Social Network, or even Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (nearly 20 years ago!). Hardy doesn’t do much to differentiate between the men, other than Helgeland making sure one is wearing glasses and a bit more unhinged, while the other doesn’t need glasses and broods. One of them is gay, which the movie takes as an amusing side-detail instead of characterization, just one more affectation to saddle Hardy with, instead of a window into an actual person’s life. There’s never a sense that the movie has any perspective on the men, other than reciting biographical facts and reenacting moments from their criminal careers in conspicuously artificial and mildly winking style. At one point a Kray gets very upset an opponent brought a lead pipe to a fight, ruining his fantasy of getting in a shootout. “Like a Western!” he whines.

It’s annoying how much Legend knows it’s a movie. Most discouraging is how repugnantly cavalier all this falseness becomes. It takes a lot of pleasure in displaying violence, whether someone’s getting a beating, is stabbed to death, or tortured for information. Even the inevitable hand-to-hand rumble between the Krays – a clumsy feat of blocking and visual trickery – is treated as a lark, instead of a breaking point in a relationship. Collateral damage is breezed over with token cringes from onlookers. Stylish splashes of debris and blood are aesthetic displays more than narrative elements. Phony period detail and glossy slick visuals are one thing; it’s another entirely to use real pain and death as grist for goofy genre play so feather light and dull. Helgeland stocks the movie with interesting actors (Christopher Eccleston, David Thewlis, Chazz Palminteri, Paul Bettany, Taron Egerton) and flashy incident, but that none of it brings any spark of life or imagination to a routine and gratingly misjudged gangster picture makes it all the more disappointingly empty.

We Don't Need Another Hero: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

There are moments in Mad Max: Fury Road where I sat gaping at the screen in exhilaration and awe, convinced this film is the car chase masterpiece to which all of cinema has built. That's heat-of-the-moment hyperbole, but it sure is indicative of how enveloping and sustained this exhilarating action film is. I thought back to the jaw-dropping truck chase climax in writer-director George Miller’s first Mad Max sequel, 1982’s The Road Warrior, and how blown away I was as a hurtling pyrotechnic stunt display neared its twentieth minute. Fury Road pushes past its fortieth minute, then its ninetieth, racing towards two hours with no signs of taking its foot off the pedal. People careen between tanker trucks, zoom souped-up jalopies and armored muscle cars protruding jagged metal and long, pendulous spears as guns fire, knives jab, bombs explode into the desert, and vehicles crash and flip. Every rest is simply a suspenseful pause before the chased spy their pursuers roaring over the horizon.

Miller returns to the sand-swept post-apocalyptic outback he left behind in 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome, summoning up every ounce of his prodigious imagination, filmmaking prowess, attention to fantastical detail, and moral heft to create the most soulful and exciting action film in ages. The Mad Max films’ worldbuilding works wonders by staying small and specific, with stakes tactile and personal. We follow the taciturn rover Max into unique and fascinating corners of the ruined world each time out. Here we discover yet another place where water and gas are currency, and where human life has been organized in convincingly cruel and cracked ways. Max (Tom Hardy, flawlessly taking over for Mel Gibson), suffering PTSD from his earlier exploits, finds himself captured by War Boys and held prisoner in their automotive death cult in a cavernous oasis they call The Citadel.

A persuasive and disturbing dystopian society fully thought-through, The Citadel is ruled by an evil warlord, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who breathes with a tooth-studded oxygen mask and has his putrid body sealed in plastic armor. He controls the water, and therefore his subjects, men covered in tumors and scars willing to die for a drink and promise of an automotive Valhalla afterlife. The women are treated as property, good for breeding with the Immortan and providing milk. These enslaved young women (Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton) sneak off with a rare free female, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), in her tanker. The women flee across the desert, Joe’s vehicular army close behind. One driver (Nicholas Hoult) straps Max to the front of his car, muzzled and dripping blood as he’s reluctantly pulled into this conflict.

Miller, writing with Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris, has concocted a story perfect for a feature-length chase, lean and expressive. It’s a tour de force of perpetual motion, briskly characterizing its participants through actions while organizing witty, complicated fast-paced visual spectacle. Always on the move, but never exhausting, the film varies its speed in natural, and suspenseful, ways. Filming real cars barreling across a real desert, Miller finds terrific weight in every movement, a sense that violence matters. This makes the most visceral of crashes and smashes, and every moment with people crawling around and between vehicles, feel impactful and dangerous. Cinematographer John Seale’s wonderfully textured images capture the brilliant stunt work (comparison to Buster Keaton’s The General seems apt), sweeping across vast spaces and squeezing into tight corners. Editor Jason Ballantine elegantly whips up suspense and finds poetry in motion amidst the growling engines, grisly gore, saturated colors, and CGI enhancements. As new combatants join the chase, the momentum keeps things hurtling along with nerve-wracking, teeth-rattling, white-knuckle thrills.

The visual and moral clarity of Fury Road is impressive. We know at every moment what dangers confront our characters, drawn in broad strokes and colored in with Miller’s creative specificity. Wild leather outfits, bright streaks of makeup and motor oil, and steam-punk prosthetics are the ensemble’s costumes. Within them are fiercely primal performances. Theron’s the best, tearing through the scenery as an avenging warrior, bold, bald, smart, wielding a burning glare and artificial limb with deadly serious intent. The villains are grotesque men, sickly dripping disease and rot in impressively gross makeup effects. Their fleeing victims are angelic innocents wrapped in flowing white cloths (though never mere damsels in distress). And then there’s Max, in his cool jacket and affect, perhaps the last noble man left on Earth. He’s principled and troubled, is reluctant to fight, always wanting to save his own skin, and yet unable to ignore the danger faced by those around him. The moral stakes of all this turmoil is agonizingly clear.

It’s this strong, simple core that makes the action of Mad Max: Fury Road so particularly intense. Not only does Miller stage spectacular crashes and explosions, communicating an invigorating sense of pain and drive, but he quickly makes it matter. I was drawn into the fascinating world he created, cared deeply about the characters in peril and what becomes tenderly moving about their relationships. The movie charges forward, asking an audience to lean in and catch up. How exciting to enter a fully drawn world with an immediately gripping scenario of emotional and thematic weight, and find absorbing chaos. This is popcorn filmmaking at the highest level, a master filmmaker proving relentless noise and fury can be artfully shaped, and carry a genuine, meaningful wallop. Miller considers his characters' choices as carefully as he choreographs their cars, in both cases as exhilarating for what they do as how they arrive there.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: LAWLESS

John Hillcoat’s Lawless has all the right ingredients to become a great movie, but lacks the focus to truly capitalize on these assets. His earlier films, muddy, blood-soaked outback western The Proposition and bombed-out, hardscrabble, post-apocalyptic The Road, were films so downbeat, atmospheric and tangibly grim that by the time the end credits rolled I felt like I had dirt crunching under my fingernails. Lawless, a promising based-on-a-true-story drama about three small-town, deep-South, bootlegging brothers in the age of Prohibition, is well cast, well photographed and contemplatively paced. By the end, though, it’s only conjured up a level of surface grime and narrative muddiness. It’s a nice try, but all this craftsmanship has gone into a finished product that’s mostly inert.

The moonshine-cooking brothers at the center of the film are a tough, monosyllabic World War I veteran (Tom Hardy), a brutish, bearded alcoholic (Jason Clarke), and a squirrely, dopey hothead (Shia LaBeouf). They run their operation with the full cooperation of the local sheriff, but one day, in swoops a preening big-city representative of the law (Guy Pearce, sans eyebrows). It’s a setup not unlike a Western, with charismatic guys strutting around, hands on their hips, fingers brushing just above heavy holsters. There are pretty women – a recent arrival who works the bar (Jessica Chastain) and the preacher’s shy daughter (Mia Wasikowska) – a local cripple boy who helps out the criminals (Dane DeHaan), and a stately, blunt crooked official (Gary Oldman). Then, here comes the stranger who threatens the small town’s lawless, but weirdly stable, state.

The script by Nick Cave (a musician who also wrote the fiddle-and-banjo folk-music score) is full of vague, evocative mumbling and perplexing character relationships that are at once sharply simple and complex, given to halting development. The plot moves forward in long, languorous periods of stillness and sporadic rise-to-modest-riches montage interrupted only by gory splashes of violence. The film is effectively one of introductions and set-ups that sometimes wind their long, slow way to some sort of resolution. It’s sporadically effective, in short bursts of righteous anger, in which bloodied louts reappear in startling moments of retribution, and scenes in which flawed antiheroes and worse villains clash in a warped cops-and-criminals routine. At best, it’s a film that’s like a backwoods Boardwalk Empire.

But for all the picturesque dusty roads, lush forest landscapes, period detail, and vividly inarticulate performances, the film remains static and unfocused. It’s hard to watch a film introduce such formidable talents as Mia Wasikowska and Gary Oldman in separate striking scenes – the former in an impeccably sound-designed church service, and the latter in a tommy-gun assault down the middle of Main Street – and then thoroughly squander their characters. They fade into the background. Wasikowska lives out an undernourished romantic subplot while Oldman just flat out disappears after two scenes or so. But that’s just indicative of the film’s unfocused approach to storytelling that doggedly refuses to allow clarity into the characterizations. Take Chastain, for instance, who simply floats through the margins and, despite experience some horrific (off-screen) abuse, exists only so that Tom Hardy can have someone other than his brothers to grunt at.

To some extent, I was willing to follow the aimless nature of the film simply because Hillcoat is such a strong director. There is considerable craftsmanship here, striking images, impressive sequences, stunning shots. What’s lacking, ultimately, is a reason to care. By the time the film dead ends in a climactic confrontation, I found myself realizing that I still knew very little about these characters, even as I bristled at the uncomfortable, ill-fitting ugliness that warps the whole thing into a pat clash between good and evil, with the scrappy small town criminals fighting back against a slimy federal influence. It’s a strange note to end on, but no stranger than the wistful epilogue that follows. This is a film that’s well made on every technical level, but deeply confused about what it’s about. It’s a film about rough, violent entrepreneurs and slick, violent lawmen and yet remains uncommitted as to what it wants to say about that, if anything at all.

Knightfall: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

After Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight concluded with Batman (Christian Bale) fleeing into the night, taking the fall for a series of crimes so that Gotham City may still have hope, or something like that, it makes a certain amount of sense that The Dark Knight Rises would position the caped crusader as a public figure who has slunk away from the spotlight and is poised to earn back the city’s trust. There’s no such trust problem for this big-screen iteration of the famed comic book hero. If anything, Nolan has earned, rightfully or not, an astounding surplus of fan trust, a rabid kind of fervor that had a great many convinced of the movie’s perfection sight unseen. It’s to Nolan’s credit that the film doesn’t coast on franchise loyalty and therefore manages to avoid the major problems that typically befall the third entry in these sorts of series. It’s a movie of high-quality craftsmanship from all involved, nicely shot and terrifically staged. It's a startlingly big movie, containing sweeping establishing shots and grand gestures of spectacle (the better to maximize the added value of your IMAX tickets), a rapidly expanding ensemble of characters, and the most apocalyptic villainous plot yet. The film can’t live up to its own best moments, but it’s still a solid entertainment that builds to a tremendous finale.

In the murky rising action of this spectacle, a cult of angry anarchists led by a fearsome mask-wearing savage called Bane (Tom Hardy) are gathering strength and numbers, planning nothing less than a terrifying full-scale takeover of Gotham city, propping up faux-populist sentiments to mask their violent lawlessness, to use the leverage of a scared, powerless populace to get what’s best for a few reckless ideologues, all under the threat of mutually assured destruction. And where is the Batman while all this is going on right underneath the unsuspecting city? He’s slowly but surely getting coaxed back into his cowl, after living a Howard Hughes existence as his true self, Bruce Wayne, holed up in his mansion with only Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) to keep him company. And what’s the inciting incident that causes the Batman to climb out of his cave? Why, it’s nothing less than a daring robbery from cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). It might not take lifelong Batman fandom to figure out that she’s Catwoman, even though she goes without that moniker here.

That’s about as much plot as I’ll get into here, seeing as this happens to be a film that people seem particularly averse to having spoiled. It’s just as well, for the movie is indeed a large twisting narrative filled with lots of little surprises coiled around scenes of spectacular effects and effective tension. Let me just suggest that a great deal of the film’s pleasure comes from the new members of the cast. Of course Bale and Caine are solid as always, as are Morgan Freeman as Wayne’s resident technical expert and Gary Oldman as good old Commissioner Gordon. Of the new additions, Hardy’s Bane is fearsome, even though the design of the mask means his performance is mostly communicated through forceful eye acting and a muffled voice over in a stylized accent. Just turning towards the camera is enough for his intensity to crumple the surroundings in anxiety.

But best of the new here is Hathaway, who plays Catwoman as a sort of slinky Robin Hood by way of Han Solo, a mercenary thief and black market operative who is both a help and a hindrance. Runner up is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing an especially determined and skilled cop. Hathway’s take on her iconic character is that of a satisfyingly sleek, glamorous anti-hero. (I was ready to follow her Catwoman into a different movie where she could stretch out in a starring role). Gordon-Levitt’s part calls for steely professionalism and sympathetic humanity, both of which he provides quite nicely. And I quite liked the little twist given to his character in the final moments that caused me to strike a brewing quip about his role from my mental rough draft. The two of them add immeasurably to this world, bringing real vitality to what, let’s face it, would otherwise become insufferably dower.

At its best, this is a film of terrific blockbuster entertainment with charming asides and great flourishes of action, but for long stretches of this 164-minute movie, Nolan is grabbing hold of more ambition than he can wrangle as he gets bogged down in slow scenes of uncertain stakes and confused tension. In Bane’s evil plot grows a scattershot Rorschach test of tangled political messages that coast off of current unease and generate tension in odd ways that are at once potent and dispiriting. It’s hard to make out whether the film is a relentless fascist machine or just rotting cynicism underneath which lies nothing but nihilism. Either way, this is an extremely bleak film, through which the fun (the kind of sugary, lighthearted, propulsive excitement of The Avengers) pokes through like a small circle of light glimpsed from the bottom of a deep dark pit. Such a pit – a hardly-believable quasi-Middle-Eastern prison that works more as metaphor than literal location – makes a pivotal appearance in the lengthy middle section of the film that finds Gotham closer to ruin than ever before. Although Tom Hardy’s Bane certainly doesn’t make for as memorable a villain as Heath Ledger’s Joker – the script and character design simply don't allow it – his scheme, once it explodes into action, ups the all-consuming anxiety of Dark Knight until the only thing rising in this film is the sense of despair.

Perhaps it’s precisely because of the ways in which Nolan, no longer content to just use the series as a way to mix around with the iconography of Batman, scrambles ideology so thoroughly that the movie is so difficult to parse, so deeply unsettling. Here when a revolutionary rhetoric is twisted with evil intentions until chaos and anarchy in turn provokes a scrappy cop counter-coup, the resonances, as dissonant and confused as they are, become Triumph of the Will versus Battleship Potemkin, propaganda without a cause. Maybe Nolan knew that there was simply no way of satisfying the typical requirements of sequel escalation and superhero bloat and decided to steer his massive blockbuster right into the skid.

The film is, for quite a while, nothing less than a series of exceptionally well-executed extraneous noise and action. A prisoner’s mid-air escape from a plane, a couple of Catwoman heists, and the inevitable triumphant return from retirement for Batman are all early, satisfying, summer movie moments, but upon reflection they’re actually tangential to the plot. It’s not until a brutal mid-movie one-on-one fight scene, shockingly bone crunching and hard to watch, that I felt honest dread wash over me. But soon, the massiveness of the plotting sidelines one major character or another (in a hospital bed, in prison, or both at once) for what feels like ages. The film grows as fuzzy and slow as it is dark. But from there, Nolan nonetheless manages to pull out a startling and effective escalation of tension that becomes a series of exciting climactic action sequences. The film grows horrifyingly high stakes, blowing out destruction more vividly shot and more destabilizing in its implications than I could possibly have expected.

It’s difficult to think of The Dark Knight Rises in terms of the superhero genre. It hits all the right story beats, but it’s so oppressively grim, with only the faintest glimmers of fun, and far less Batman, at least before the massive and intense climax, than many will be expecting. What it represents is a filmmaker given total control to make whatever crazy ambitious blockbuster spectacle he felt like making and an assertion that he was the one who brought this big-screen Batman into this world and only he can bring this particular version to a close. (That said, there’s plenty of room left for a sequel.) He makes a Batman movie that brings the Batman legend, the tortured nature of the hero, the intense, incomprehensible insanity of the villains, and all those corruptible, flawed characters in between, to a depressingly, almost totally hopeless endpoint, into a climactic conflagration that’s unlikely to be easily matched. I’m not sure I’d want anyone to try.

The sparkle of hope that rises from Gotham’s rubble in the film’s final minutes is barely enough to wipe out the preceding barrage of paranoia and despair. The movie is too confused about its underlying themes, its plot too eager to make leaps of logic despite its otherwise dense build-up, to make use of its potent moods beyond that pure sensation of it all. It’s an impressive film, technically accomplished and overwhelming in many ways. But it’s so unrelentingly without thematic coherence that, for all the sensational spectacle, in the end it feels somewhat underwhelming. And that’s difficult to reconcile. Here is a film that at once thinks big and thinks small, mechanically creating grim spectacle for entirely surface reasons. Its best moments land with such confident grandiosity that, despite some shaky elements and disappointing moments, it’s still a film with an undeniable impact. At least this trilogy of Batman films doesn’t fade away in disgrace. It goes out with a big and mostly satisfying finale.

All's Fair: THIS MEANS WAR

In This Means War two government agents end up dating the same girl and decide to keep it up and let her pick the best man. It’s romance as competition, but it’s so much more than that. These guys throw the weight of the surveillance state behind their contest, each creating small taskforces to bug the poor woman’s house, car, and cell phone, hide miniature cameras here, there, and everywhere, to reroute unmanned drones, to hack into utilities’ networks, and to pull hardworking intelligence officers away from a case involving a nasty arms dealer attempting to cross illegally into the country to carry out revenge killings. None of this is as hilarious as anyone involved in the making of this movie thought it would be.

Reportedly festering in the bowels of the studio system since 1997, it’s finally been expunged onto theater screens in a version with a screenplay credited to Timothy Dowling and 20th Century Fox’s favorite script doctor Simon Kinberg. The whole thing feels stale and creepy without even a smidgen of charm. Of course, it doesn’t help that McG directs with monotonous thunks in the place of plot beats. There’s just no rhythm here, no essential spark of life. It’s also a strangely ugly movie; the lighting makes everyone look either sickly or as if they’re wearing pounds of makeup. All the while, the whole failed comedy gets pulled under by the flopping thriller inside it, compounding the problems.

On their own, the cast members are incredibly charming, or at least capable of it. The guys are played by Chris Pine (the new Captain Kirk) and Tom Hardy (the talented Brit who seems to be spending all of his time on film sets lately). They’re fighting over none other than Reese Witherspoon, no slouch in the charm department herself. But the charm just isn’t there. Setting aside the creepiness factor just for a moment (we’ll return to it, I promise), the plot is just so weirdly juvenile. Everyone involved in this love triangle are adults, and yet the movie makes them flail about like children in awkward social contortions. Don’t even get me started on poor Angela Bassett who is asked nothing more than to appear in a handful of scenes and scowl at everyone. This could be transposed into a high school comedy without sacrificing much. Teenagers would have less access to extralegal surveillance techniques, but that’s an aspect I’d be willing to lose.

Back to the creepiness, this is a deeply unsettling movie, all the more unsettling for being so glossy and watchable. These men are spying on the woman and the bulk of the movie has them listening in on her conversations with her best friend (Chelsea Handler). Then they set about tailoring their behavior on dates to fix flaws that she’s mentioned in these private conversations. One’s too slick, she says. He doesn’t seem to care about anyone but himself. Surprise, surprise, their next date, he takes her to an animal shelter to help him pick out a dog. The other’s too safe, she says. He doesn’t seem to be much of a risk-taker. Surprise, surprise, their next date is to play paintball. Of course, his secret agent skills come out and he runs roughshod over the mere combat amateurs, most of them children who leave the field limping. But, it all ends in the guy getting a paintball to the crotch so, ha ha, humor!

Poor Witherspoon is an unknowing pawn in their game which, despite all protestations from characters and filmmaking alike, has so very little to do with romance. This is a movie that’s so unbelievably smug that it mistakes smarm for charm. The movie’s sole sex scene is staged in such a way that we see none of the lovemaking and only the CIA operatives hunkered in a security bunker watching the couple. Who is supposed to find that scene appealing in the slightest? It’s not romantic, and it’s certainly not funny. It’s gross and demeaning to all involved.

I wasn’t delighted by this movie; I grew sad, and then just numb. It’s an implicit endorsement of the security state. At one moment a technician asks Pine if the spying they’re about to do “is legal.” Pine shrugs and says “Patriot Act.” Is that supposed to be funny? Later on, the fact that she’s under surveillance allows the guys to find her and save her in the action climax. So, see, it all works out, right? The movie is just stupid and thoughtless enough that I could completely believe that an endorsement of such reprehensible behavior is entirely accidental.