Where the Boys Are: WARFARE

The soldiers burst into a house and shuffle the civilians to the side. The civilians don’t even become characters. This is a movie about the men with guns. They set up a stakeout shouting jargon and tersely staring down the barrel of their guns. They talk over their radios. They look warily out the windows. They wait. This is Warfare, a movie set in Iraq in 2006. It tells a very small story. There are a handful of military men—boys, really, with fresh faces and dewey eyes and a sense that, if not for their training and ranks, they’d be in the club. The opening scene shows them bopping around to the electronic dance hit “Call On Me,” a very mid-aughts reference. That’s also the only scene of happiness. The rest of the film is about fear and futility. They’re hunkered down in this random home, a place of shattered domesticity. The enemies are encroaching. A trap is set. Suddenly, they’re pinned down, with danger on all sides. A few are wounded, screaming in agonizing pain. Others’ pain is internal, mental. Still others are dead straight away. They all wait as the minutes tick by, with an agonizing wait filled only with fumbling attempts to help each other survive, and with desperate counting down the time elapsing before reinforcements can arrive. This spare, stripped-down war movie is advertised as coming from actual memories of service members who lived through these moments—a few harrowing hours in a larger conflict.

In its telling, it becomes the story of the entire Iraq War in miniature. It begins with invasion easily accomplished, then a difficult stay that grows violent and scary, before ultimately ending with a messy withdrawal leaving all the worse for wear. (The final shots of Iraqis carefully stepping through the debris of their neighborhood are an especially sharp closing note.) The film proceeds in extremely precise moments calibrated for experiential momentum, both the long stretches of procedural waiting, and the sudden thumping terror of gunfire and explosions. The characters are a blur of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and some familiar faces that are barely recognizable in their combat grimace and anonymizing uniforms. Boyish young actors including Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton are totally enveloped in their roles. They form a tight unit as characters who fall back on training, with flickers of personality subsumed by the urgent need to do the next right thing. Writer-director Alex Garland, with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza serving as his co-writer and co-director, has made a technical and even clinical war movie that succeeds in conjuring a hellish look at what the monotonous unpredictability of war does to a body. Garland’s usual interest in the fragility of men and of systems, through movies like Ex Machina and Civil War, here finds another gripping expression. Here’s the story of a whole war in just a few well-observed stretches of chaos rushing in where control falters.

Rocket Power: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: VOLUME 3

Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 pays off a near-decade of investment I didn’t know I had in these misfit sci-fi heroes and this particularly eccentric and isolated corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It does so by offering what no other subset of the MCU has managed: an ending, full and complete, exciting and moving, and honest both to its characters and its tone. This is a rollicking adventure with wacky side characters and rambunctious action sequences. But it also really cares about these cartoony weirdos and has, in the end, found a reason to communicate that love through a vision of self-sacrifice in the name of an open-minded community. There’s a real idea here—about the futility of forced homogeneity, the futility of perfection, and the rousing power of ragtag diverse cooperation. And there’s vision of splashy colors and apocalyptic rumblings that set the characters on edge with a palpable sense of danger and finality.

The likes of earnest goof Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and killer green Gamora (Zoe Saldana) with her blue robot sister (Karen Gillan), talking tree Groot (Vin Diesel), hyper-literal muscle man Drax (Dave Bautista), and simpatico alien empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff) are still a loose, funny ensemble. And here their problems are treated with a genuine frayed edge. The writing gives them a strong squabbling affection and heartfelt duty. They really care about saving their world and their friends and everyone they can. Funny how often comic book movies let that slip away these days. This one populates its widescreen invention with a menagerie of characters we’ve actually come to care about, and who actually care about each other and what they’re doing instead of merely posing in the chaos. How nice that this entry is somehow freed from the treadmill of franchise promises—which so often strand each Marvel movie as just an extended promise that the next one will have the really good stuff. That makes it the only MCU property to emerge from the Avengers cross-overs and Disney+ spinoffs not looking worse for wear. It helps that the Guardians are easily the best parts of the enjoyable Infinity War and hollow Endgame. And that makes one of the biggest laughs in this new one when Star-Lord deadpans a one-sentence summary of the latter.

In this Volume 3, writer-director James Gunn gets to really dig into who these characters are, what they’d need to be happy, and how to send them off with the most satisfying resolutions possible. He’s finishing his neat trilogy of brightly poppy space operas set to a classic rock mixtape backbeat knowing he has the audience goodwill to place the entire film’s emotional and narrative thrust on the tragic backstory of the talking, gun-toting CGI Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper). In the present tense he’s been wounded and his friends need to steal a couple MacGuffins to revive him. We also get flashbacks to the mad scientist who created him, which serves a double duty of exposition seeing as the experimenter in question is also our Big Bad. (Chukwudi Iwuji plays him as a howling, calculating evil, with an eerie calm face literally stapled on.) The two timelines work well to provide a fine undertow of tension and care. So there’s refreshingly a lot jostling and juggling for attention, pleasingly overstuffed and productively messy when so many of its franchise brethren are under-stuffed and tidily hollow. By the time we get to the Guardians hoping to save the villains’ experiments as they revive Rocket, it’s like the Island of Misfit Toys looting Sid’s toy box. I couldn’t resist that hook’s emotional appeal.

It’s a movie overflowing with side-characters and incident, animated by a contagious delight in invention and a specificity in its characters. The main cast are deployed well, and the choice supporting parts are efficiently and effectively drawn, too, like an antagonistic golden super-guy played by Will Poulter as a cross between a terminator on the hunt of our heroes and a sweetheart hoping to do his statuesque mother (Elizabeth Debicki) proud. We also get a few memorable moments with a scruffy space pirate gone good (Sean Gunn) and a telekinetic canine cosmonaut (speaking through a translation collar with the voice of Maria Bakalova) that build neat payoffs of their own. Even the henchmen and thugs and bystanders are given vivid shorthand characterization, fun punchlines, and fleeting touching moments of humanity. Here’s a movie powered on the belief that we should see the characters as characters, and not just action figures or Easter eggs.

This is a bustling picture, a large-scale, all-engines-go sci-fi jaunt powered with enjoyable emotional manipulation. It all comes to a head in a successive series of slam-bang set-pieces in which spaceships careen and laser-guns go kaplow as mutants and aliens and freakazoids of every shape and size ooze and splatter and smash. There are clever, concussive action sequences booming with sound and invention in a living space station, on an exploding planet, and as a space fortress collides with a giant skull. That’s all neat Jack Kirby-style fireworks and design peppered with punchlines. But because it’s driven by this surprising well of affection for the characters, and a commitment to bring them to some kind of conclusion, it works as a crowd-pleasing entertainment, an outsized comic book spectacle with the heart and soul others of its ilk so often miss. In retrospect, it’s a trilogy that put in the work to make us love its characters as much as its creators do, and it’s great to see them fly off on one more grand adventure together.

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.

Escape Route: THE MAZE RUNNER

The Maze Runner is only the latest science fiction story in which the world is in the process of ending and only teens can save us. No wonder teens like these stories so much. These narratives say that the most special and talented people are adolescents who must valiantly defend society from all those mean adults who manipulate and oppress them. Hey, sometimes that works. Take a look at the Hunger Games series, which has deepened its initial teen fantasy into something socio-politically potent. But with Maze Runner, we’re not even close to The Hunger Games quality. We’re talking sub-Divergent nonsense of the flimsiest kind, all monotonous noise and blur that’s never exciting and always chintzy to its core.

It starts with Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) waking up in a forest glade populated exclusively with other teenage boys. He remembers only his name. The others have the same memory problem. They don’t know why they are there. They’ve been in this clearing for three years, with a new boy arriving each month. But together they’ve built an ad hoc society with log cabins, division of labor, and a functioning system of government, though compared to Caesar’s tribe in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes they don’t seem so sophisticated. These boys are surrounded by towering metal walls that open into a vast maze every morning and slam shut every night. Runners are sent into the maze to find the way out. Each day, they return without making progress. Or, if they don’t make it back to camp by sundown, they don’t return at all. There be monsters in that there maze.

I’ll believe a lot of sci-fi mumbo jumbo, but this situation never feels believable because the relationships between the boys feel so false. There’s typical gruff posturing and friendly banter as camaraderie and rivalries make themselves known. Thomas meets a host of characters who either help or hinder his integration into the group. But these dynamics are not particularly interesting, the characters relating to each other in bland ways, trading exposition and worried looks. They’re thin types who don’t evolve. And it’s all too low-key, predictable, antiseptic, and asexual to be a convincing group of isolated teen boys. It’s not Lord of the Flies. It’s all nice guys except for the one who’s kind of a jerk. Oh, and, in a surprise twist, a girl shows up, and there’s not even a hint of romantic interest from anyone. They’re so well behaved.

Talented actors play these youths, though for the most part you’d only know it if you’ve seen them elsewhere. O’Brien, from The Internship and MTV’s Teen Wolf, is a decent enough leading man, with a fresh face and good action-movie running skills. The ensemble features a few unknowns like Ki Hong Lee and Blake Cooper as well as The Butler’s Ami Ameen, Game of Thrones’ Thomas Brodie-Sangster, We’re the Millers’ Will Poulter, Southcliffe’s Kaya Scodelario, and Black Nativity’s Jacob Latimore, among others. Maybe twenty years from now the movie will only be remembered for containing a bunch of big stars before they were big. But they simply don’t have any interesting material to work with. They’re blanks in an insubstantial situation.

It doesn’t help that they’re made up to look less like rugged young survivalists, and more photoshoot-ready beautiful people artfully smudged. It’s all part of first-time feature director Wes Ball’s glossy approach that shoots the screenplay (by three credited writers from a book by James Dashner) dutifully and unimaginatively with a pounding Hans Zimmer sound-alike score. We scramble around the maze and around the base camp without ever getting a sense of where we are or what’s at stake beyond needing to escape. It sounds important, but flails around uninterestingly. By the time the action ramps up and the climax dutifully explodes with competent, but personality-free, effects work, it seems awfully simple. If that’s all it takes to get out of the maze, what were these boys doing all this time? It’s a symptom of the movie’s low ambitions and high waste of time. It mistakes rule-setting for world-building, obfuscation for mystery, and threatening future installments for creating interest.

Not a Family Movie: WE'RE THE MILLERS

The runtime of We’re the Millers is listed as 110 minutes, but I don’t know what takes so long. It’s a fast-paced movie that’s all plot, dragging along gags and leaving the characters lagging behind. It’s a high concept comedy that leaps so quickly into its concept that we’ve barely met the characters before they’re already completely into the movie’s central scenario. I have no idea how this movie could’ve possibly filled up nearly two hours of screen time. It’s in a constant rush, terrified of downtime or a single thought beyond the overpowering demands of its plot mechanics, which are at once incredibly simple and yet somehow in constant need of further propulsion. The plotting is so brisk and constant that the movie feels paced, especially in its relentless opening minutes, like a series of its own trailers or a playlist of connected YouTube videos set to autoplay. That it literally starts with a string of YouTube videos (double rainbow, surprised cat, etc.) under the opening credits is an odd choice that nonetheless sets up the fast pace.

With that opening paragraph, I’ve probably taken more time getting to the main concept that the movie does. Dave (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level pot dealer whose stash and cash is stolen by a gang of hoodlums. His supplier (Ed Helms) offers to wipe clean the debt and even throw in a few extra thousand dollars if he goes down to Mexico and smuggle back a “smidge of marijuana.” Dave doesn’t have much of a choice, so he agrees. Looking no further than his front steps, he sees a clean-cut family in an RV and decides that’d be the perfect disguise to sneak a bunch of pot across the border. He recruits the woman in the apartment next door, a freshly evicted stripper (Jennifer Aniston), to play his wife, and two neighborhood teens, an abandoned boy (Will Poulter) and a homeless girl (Emma Roberts), to play their kids. They may not be related, but they’re sure going to try their hardest to pass as a family. “The Millers” are going on a road trip.

It’s a great concept and I don’t blame screenwriters Bob Fisher and Steve Faber (of Wedding Crashers) and Sean Anders and John Morris (of Hot Tub Time Machine) and director Rawson Marshall Thurber (of Dodgeball) for rushing there as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, reducing the characters to types leaves little room for the movie to maneuver as it plugs them into gag-filled scenarios that attempt to wring laughter out of who the characters are instead of what they do. There’s an underlying mean-spirited judgment upon these characters because of their types, jokes that appear to find Aniston’s character inherently funny because she’s a stripper, Poulter funny because he’s a lonely overeager goof, Roberts funny because she’s homeless. Similarly, the unhappy murderous Mexican supplier (Tomer Sisley) who becomes a villain chasing them is a plot development that’d play a lot better if the movie didn’t play up Mexican “otherness” as inherently intimidating. One scene lingers on Aniston during a routine, but breaks the fourth wall with a wink. That the film knows it’s being exploitative doesn’t make it okay. Other scenes play uncomfortably with homophobia in a similarly talking-out-of-both-sides-of-the-mouth tone.

This sense of judging its characters doesn’t mix well with the otherwise freewheeling permissiveness of their behavior as they try to avoid getting caught with the pot. But luckily the movie just barrels right on past by getting great mileage out of how appealing the cast is. I liked them, and by extension their characters. The central four have a core likability and the banter they’re given is often funny in interactions that are prickly but deep down affectionate towards each other. It’s a combination that does much to alleviate the notes that sit so sourly. Even though the movie doesn’t take them seriously as people, and sometimes the characters seem a little under-concerned about the stakes of it all, I found myself wishing them well anyways. The road-trip structure of the movie keeps things hurtling along quickly. If you can survive the opening barrage of rushed, choppy set-up, you might find the pay offs to be a bit more relaxed and amiably crude. It falls into a groove that’s works well, especially whenever an RV full of a seemingly squeaky clean family (parents Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn with daughter Molly Quinn) runs into our disreputable foursome and attempts some good old-fashioned Americana bonding over campfires and Pictionary. That couldn’t be a worse fit with the behavior of these four and their drug-smuggling ways. 

Though for all the inappropriate dialogue, crude sight gags, and shock gross out moments, it’s a movie that’s sneakily square. The selfish, marginalized members of this family slowly come to rely on one another to find safety, camaraderie, and financial stability. These things, the movie ends up arguing, come exclusively from the typically structured nuclear family. The appearance of being mainstream-society-approved good not only lets them get away with being bad, it ends up making them, if not good, at least better. Potentially exciting avenues of sharp comedy – like the comically aggressive border patrol, say – are dumped for the squishy sentimentality of the narrative trajectory. That the “Millers” come to actually care for one another is perhaps the only way to have a movie so otherwise dedicated to bad behavior go down so easily, and with a cast so likable, it was perhaps inevitable anyways. But it results in a movie with a cynical, ugly point of view that also desires of a return to familial stability and camaraderie. Weird.

But there’s a funny thing that happens to a problematic comedy when it can manage to be funny. The wholly mechanical plotting and sour aftertaste has enough situational escalation and likable archetypes that it snowballs into something that is entertaining at the time. I felt bad later about having fallen for it, but as it played I wasn’t unhappy to be there. I found myself pulled right along and reader, it’s my duty to report to you that I occasionally laughed. I could tell you that I had a bad time watching this movie, but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t. The speed that seemed so off-putting at first soon became an asset. The totally perfunctory characters that seemed simple plot constructs in a story that had a bit of a mean streak became, through the pleasant cast, easy enough to take. To make a long story short, the movie’s fairly entertaining provided you let it evaporate naturally before you think about its implications and contradictions for too long.