Out of Service: THE MENU and TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

In this new Gilded Age, the rich are a fat, juicy target for any satirist. But in fact, the obscenely wealthy hoovering up our resources and headlines are often far more ridiculous than any satirist could invent. It doesn’t take a political cartoonist to balloon their buffoonery; they’re already doing that on their own. Still, it leaves plenty of room for an astute storyteller to put them before us anew and bite with sharp portraiture to draw bitter laughs. That’s the project of The Menu and Triangle of Sadness, two complementary, and similarly half-successful, movies that take service industry jobs as their window into the one-percenters’ transactional heartlessness that’s at the core of so many societal ills. The willingness to diminish a person to their job is a hop, skip, and a jump from not seeing their humanity at all.

Revenge is the dish served in The Menu, in which a high-level chef (Ralph Fiennes) has invited a collection of horrible people to dinner. Each course ramps up the tension as his cultish cooks and servers twist the knife—sometimes literally—by slowly revealing that 1.) the guests are trapped in the restaurant, and 2.) each tiny, artsy, deconstructed course is designed to steadily reveal ever more of their personal foibles and secrets. There’s a smorgasbord of character actors (Janet McTeer! John Leguizamo! Reed Birney! Judith Light! Nicholas Hoult! And more!) for the ensemble as crooked tech bros, apathetic blue bloods, a snooty food critic and her editor, a washed up actor and his embezzling assistant, and a misogynistic foodie realize they’re being led to a slaughter. The one innocent (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a hired date of one of the diners. So at least there’s one person for whom to wish survival. The characters are all thinly sketched, leaning on our prejudices for implied critiques, and that puts a cap on the sick pleasures it could offer.

There’s a lack of specificity in its energy, and its understandings of its characters. It’s like they know they’re posing for a fiction. The chef himself is an unfair Gordon Ramsey riff, what with his employees shouting “Yes, chef!” upon every command as they run around a kitchen and dining area that looks like a cross between Hell’s Kitchen and Masterchef sets. But it’s never clear what his grievance is, other than, as he says late in the picture, that his guests are the kind of people ruining the art of food. The result is a satire that’s pretty clever line to line—one of the screenwriters comes from the world of Late Night talk shows—and works well enough scene by scene. But it doesn’t really add up to much, with a visual style and pace that’s as smoothly stereotypical as its characters. The movie’s ultimately too pleased with its glibness to dig in and mean something of any consequence. I’ve seen lesser Saw sequels with a better sense of social commentary. Shame this one’s so undercooked.

Triangle of Sadness gets off to a better start because writer-director Ruben Östlund knows how to spin up types and let them crackle with specificities. That’s what makes his best film, Force Majeure, so bleakly funny with its story of a vacationing family’s tensions after a mishap at a ski resort reveals way more about deep character flaws than anyone could’ve anticipated. His The Square does a similar thing with incidents set in a hollowed-out, corporatized, faux-transgressive art world. Sadness has a male model (Harris Dickinson) and his influencer girlfriend (Charlbi Dean) bickering over money before they arrive at a luxury yacht. The middle portion of the movie is dedicated to sharply needling vignettes in which they, or the other insanely privileged, preposterously selfish guests aboard the cruise, are blind to the needs of workers around them. Meanwhile, the smarmy customer service mangers wrangle and cajole their underlings to plaster on those fake smiles and never say “no.” All of these scenes are as precisely observed as they are darkly amusing. By the time Woody Harrelson exits his cabin as the alcoholic leftist captain, the movie’s setting up some pretty obvious ideological collisions, especially as he starts trading Communist critiques with a crooked Russian capitalist’s Thatcherite babbling.

There’s always a sleek intentionality to Östlund’s images, and a stately chill that lets the squirming satire scrambling within them twist all the more uncomfortably. That works right up until it doesn’t in this case. The movie builds up a healthy head of steam on its outrage over inequality. That bursts on a turbulent night that sends these rich folk tumbling through vomit and sewage. That’s a pretty hilarious as a fit of scatological schadenfreude. But it’s the film’s endless final third that slowly unravels anything potent about the early going. Set post-shipwreck on a small tropical island, it thins out its class critiques with a reductive tromping through human nature as a struggle to survive. This doesn’t level the playing field, but reverses it in a reductive, and vaguely condescending way. The result is basically a less astute Lord of the Flies with assholes. And then it concludes—or really just peters out—with a limp joke and some inscrutable ambiguity. That’s the sort of ending that not only is unsatisfying in the moment, but retroactively makes the early going feel weaker, too. It misses the mark.

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.

Monkey Business: WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

War for the Planet of the Apes, the finale for the trilogy that is Fox’s most recent attempt to restart the venerable sci-fi franchise, is the heaviest picture yet concocted for this series. And that’s saying something, when back in the 70s it gave us a film that ended with the planet Earth exploding, then improbably followed that up with a sequel that kindly supposed three beings escaped the destruction only to see them to their violent deaths a couple hours later. But that was decades ago, and done with a sense of sharp pulp fun. Now, though, War’s director Matt Reeves, returning from the previous entry, treats the ongoing conflict gravely. After Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – a dour, but thrillingly charged allegory for intractable armed conflict – the band of mind-bogglingly convincing CG primates lead by Caesar (Andy Serkis), the smartest of their kind, have continued to retreat into the woods. They fend off attacks from humans, but only in defense. They want to be peaceful, but continue to be dragged into war by men – and they’re all men here – who fear them. Mankind knows its time is up – ravaged by disease and facing apes of undeniable intellectual equality – and would rather go down fighting than slowly die out. 

Reeves takes this idea as seriously as possible. He shoots the film like a Holocaust drama, suffusing a gunmetal grey and mottled mud palate with a somber heaviness as it captures atrocities inflicted upon bodies ape and human alike. Our primate heroes are slaughtered, captured, carted away, and forced into slave narratives and POW trauma. The people – heavily armed, and adorned with graffiti like “Bedtime for Bonzo” and “Ape-pocalypse Now” – get sick, and act sicker. The raw materials of blockbuster dazzlement – effects, explosions, CGI monkeys, and loud armories – have a pall cast over them. Sure, you might think it’d be fun to watch apes ride horses and root for them against dastardly military madmen. But Reeves wants to make sure it hurts, too. This has always been a series of films interested in the damage mankind does to itself and others, the venal and violent tendencies burbling underneath that lead us inevitably to our doom. Sometimes the apes who take over are stand-ins for minorities and the oppressed. Sometimes they also represent, in true Animal Farm fashion, the worst human qualities, as the more like men they become – walking upright, speaking, organizing – the worse they behave. It’s rich sociopolitical text, but War’s grinding depression and repetitive thematic inquiry mutes its impact. As a fitting conclusion to this Caesar’s story – here hoping to take his clan to the promised land, one step ahead of the Kurtz-y colonel on their tail (Woody Harrelson) – it ties up loose ends. As a continuation or furthering of the ideas – visual and otherwise – that were so thrillingly novel in Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 kickoff Rise of the Planet of the Apes and expertly complicated in Dawn, it’s nothing much, flatter and, worse, routine.

The film carries itself with the gravity of a historical epic, moved with grim contemplation and constructed as if preordained. Of course, because this is nominally prequel narrative to the planet of apes Charlton Heston (or Mark Wahlberg) would discover centuries later, it is preordained. We know where this is heading. In his concept of the fall of man and rise of ape, Reeves (co-writing with screenwriter Mark Bomback), makes this film at once sweeping and small, massive in implication and intimate in execution. It follows Caesar and his compatriots across mountains and beaches and forests, and yet boils down to small confrontations, a tiny cast of speaking roles, and tight closeups – chimp and man growling philosophy in terse conversations and patient shot/reverse shot. The planet is irrevocably changed, and it happens largely offscreen, indifferent to the dramas of the players on the film’s center stage. It’s an environmentalist lament about species struggling to survive, a pacifist’s sorrow about the inevitability of violence begetting violence, an idealist’s compromises to gain a better future for his followers. This contributes to the heaviness of the film, but it also gums up the spectacle, growing humorless (a delightful comic relief Steve Zahn ape notwithstanding) and cold. We watch apes slowly put plans into action as men with guns and tanks move into position to take them out once and for all, but not before working them nearly to death to build last-ditch human battlements. It’s involving and interesting without ever tipping over into compelling or emotionally satisfying. Still, the all-consuming mood is effective, enveloping, and hard to shake, a bleak drumbeat of pessimism and glum resignation. Even the rattling action comes booming with a sense of doom, sorrowfully leaving bodies piled high.

Teen Life: THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN

It’s hard being a teen. Brining in hormones transforming a person from child to adult heightens emotional stakes. Every decision seems to weigh heavily on the future, relationships feel like they have life and death consequences, urges can lead to reckless decisions. Caterpillars are lucky no one can see them inside the cocoon. For us unlucky humans, we grow into new bodies, new thoughts, and new behaviors with gangly guesswork. Part of Nadine’s problem in The Edge of Seventeen is thinking she’s the only one hit hard by teenage changes. She compares herself to her handsome older brother – popular, sporty, fit, charming – and comes up short. She’s awkward, disheveled, with bouts of acne. And she has only one friend, the same one since second grade when they bonded over – metaphor alert! – a caterpillar they plan to raise together only to suffocate a few hours later. All these years later, and Nadine is sure she’ll be like that caterpillar: snuffed out in one way or another before she can flower into the confident young adult she doubts she’ll ever be.

Hailee Steinfeld stars, and it’s her best role since her debut in the Coen’s True Grit. She has a perfect face to play this exasperated young woman coming apart at the seams. She has a sympathetic openness cutting easily into sharp edges of pain and meanness. She’s able to send her dark eyes flitting between beleaguered and bitter, humble and harried, open fumbling flirtations, deep pain, and howling rage. She always struggled with feelings of isolation and loneliness, but now, in the years following her father’s death, she’s been lost in a fog of depression as well. Snark is her primary coping mechanism, throwing up a layer of derision, eye rolling, and mean quips to protect herself from further emotional damage. She affects an attitude of carelessness, because it’d hurt more if people knew she cared. But then her only friend (Haley Lu Richardson) starts dating her brother (Blake Jenner), and she finds herself adrift, no one to turn to. Her mother (Kyra Sedgwick) is too busy, and too lost in her own problems, to connect. Even her favorite teacher (Woody Harrelson) has only deeply sarcastic rebuttals to her flawed attempts to ask for advice.

As writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig unfolds the warm and prickly comic teen drama around Nadine, she captures an authentic adolescent attitude of perpetual crisis. We’re joining the lead’s life at a moment of snowballing emotional pain, which has its roots in sadness of the past, but escalates now at the brink of adulthood. She’s all-too-aware of her struggles, and in fear that no one cares. She thinks she’s the only person with problems this bad, even though her mom’s weak advice is to remember that everyone’s as empty as she is. (“They’re all just better at pretending.”) A low-key, dead-on portrayal of high school depression and angst, the movie proceeds in funny bantering exchanges between characters as Nadine huffs and sulks through her latest dramas. She’s witty, perceptive, intelligent, but the sort that leads a teen to pull back from peers, explaining away her self-imposed exile through self-loathing masking a feeling of superiority. (In one deeply sad moment, she confesses, “I just realized I have to spend the rest of my life with me.”) This feels far more real and raw than the usual teen movie constructions, and lets the comedy fall easily into cutting spikes of sadness.

There’s a feeling of honesty permeating the film’s decisions. Craig knows how to duck and weave in the teen comedy formula, when to fulfill expectations and when to subvert them. Jokes land hard, then emotions hit harder, because it marries the sharp comic timing of a Mean Girls or Easy A with the more nuanced emotional dexterity and direct dramatic appeal of, say, a James L. Brooks film. (He was a producer here.) It starts on the level of wardrobe, with Steinfeld wearing believably haphazard adorable rumpled teen wardrobe: baggy sweatshirts, cute clashing patterns, eccentric layering. She’s an understandable relatable teenage girl, recognizable in her look and convincing in the psychology driving her. She’s clearly suffering, and there’s no easy answer to any of her problems. Some will fade with age and maturity. Others will take a little more work. And Craig’s screenplay is wise about allowing her to come to realizations on her own terms, without expecting an easy solution to end the film on an artificial happily-ever-after.

This isn’t a smartest-teen-in-the-room movie. It’s sweet and sour, candid and heartbreaking, often very funny, but true to the way real teenagers talk. And it surrounds Nadine with a whole family unhappy in their own ways, complicating what might appear at first glance to be standard stock types with smart casting and clever writing. We first see the brittle mom, cool brother, torn friend, cute crush (both the Good Guy (Hayden Szeto) and Bad Boy (Alexander Calvert) varieties), and cranky teacher as the best possible version of what you’d expect from their apparent narrative function, tangential to our lead’s world. But soon they’re complicated with compassionate, empathetic nuance. It’s a lot like Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret in that way, another movie about a girl who learns that she has an effect on others, too. They’re not just figures in her life. She’s in theirs. This new awareness is the dawning of maturity, and though it’s not easy to get there, it’s fulfilling to make even one more step in the right direction.

Games Over: THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY-PART 1

With each installment, The Hunger Games series gets more complicated and more interesting. The latest, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, based on the first half of the last novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, finds Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) regrouping after a rebel cell sprung her from her second Hunger Games, a position she found herself in after inadvertently inspiring a revolution with her first win. In this film, she’s confused and distraught. Her friend and ally, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), is captured, a hostage of President Snow (Donald Sutherland) in the ostentatious Captiol. She’s hunkered in an underground bunker in the wilds of District 13, helping the rebels plan how best to use her popularity to galvanize the whole Panem country and foment open warfare against the tyrants who’ve oppressed them for so long.

Returning director Francis Lawrence, this time with a screenplay adapted by Peter Craig and Danny Strong, turns this dilemma into the stuff of potent political allegory. The series has grown increasingly ideologically fascinating, starting as a surface-level jab at class conflict and reality TV competitions and evolving into what is now a radicalized story of class warfare waged through propaganda battles, lopsided bombing campaigns, and surprise attacks. It’s a grab bag of geopolitical reference points, but the central image of downtrodden working class folks rising up against wealthy tyrants is a stirring one. This feature, which picks up right where the last left off and builds towards yet another cliffhanger, extends the conflicts’ emotional damage while gearing up for the grand finale to hit theaters this time next year. It plays upon our sympathies built up in previous installments and our understanding that there’s more to come.

The film devotes most of its runtime to Katniss struggling with what the movement needs her to be and the conflicted feelings roiling inside her. She never asked to be a leader. In the first film, she was a symbol for the Capitol. The second film found her a symbol for Panem. In both cases, she had no say in the matter. Now, the leaders of the burgeoning rebellion expect her, the Mockingjay symbol incarnate, to appear in their stirring propaganda campaign, smuggled over the airways into the tinderboxes that are the increasingly violently oppressed districts ready to explode. It’s a movie about how heroes are not just born to lead, but built and shaped for their movement’s needs. We’re introduced to a team of commando cameramen (lead by Natalie Dormer) intent on following Katniss into guerilla warfare, capturing great galvanizing images to broadcast. These dispatches look an awful lot like an ad campaign for a Hunger Games movie, so you know they’re effective.

As the rebellion gets ready to make their next step, Katniss talks with familiar returning characters. She sees a friend (Liam Hemsworth), a mentor (Woody Harrelson), her image consultant (Elizabeth Banks), her sister (Willow Shields), and fellow Games’ victors (Sam Claflin, Jeffrey Wright). They’re a collection of great character actors involved in scheming, debating, giving orders, and delivering speeches. Most poignant is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final roles as a canny political operative strategizing the rebellion’s next move. The rebel leader (Julianne Moore, sporting long grey hair) is a new addition, another forceful but sympathetic voice echoing in Katniss’ head.

This could all be static, marking time until the real action can ramp up for the presumably fiery climax of Mockingjay – Part 2. Indeed, it grows cramped and a little repetitive at times. (Tell me why Katniss needs to take a nearly identical tour of ruined District 12 twice?) And the emotional journeys the characters take are mostly minor adjustments that leave them better ready to launch into the next film. But with such great actors involved, especially Lawrence, Moore, and Hoffman, the political calculations of a growing rebellion feel meaningful. Most effectively, the filmmakers have an even greater sense of the world’s details. The spaces feel lived in and thought through. There’s a sense of weight and import to characters’ discussions, real meaning to the sporadic splashes of violence. It’s best when opening up the contained bunker dramas, showing us other parts of Panem carrying out strikes against the forces of Capitol-ism. In one moving scene, a folk song becomes a rallying cry in one of the more unblinking representations of uprising I’ve seen in recent years. There’s real impact to their decisions.

Perhaps we’ll eventually be better off thinking of Francis Lawrence’s three Hunger Games films as one three-part story instead of discreet units. For now, though, it’s fun to simply be back in an engaging world with smart ideas and some stirring action bouncing around a well-constructed blockbuster. I was pulled into the film’s space and enjoyed occupying it for a couple of hours, even if by the end I would’ve much rather watched another couple hours right then and there instead of having to wait a whole year to see it reach an actual conclusion. What’s most exciting about the story told here is the way the filmmakers – and Collins, in her books – are not afraid to change the dynamics, alter the scenario, and do things differently. Here, the games are over, the characters are on the run, with no hope of safety until they see things through to the end. And that’s where they leave us, eager to see where that end will be.

The Capitol Strikes Back: HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE

It’s always a pleasant surprise to see a sequel not only learn from the mistakes of its predecessor, but to move forward exploring the aftermath of its initial narrative. In the case of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire it is a modest improvement, but improvement nonetheless. I suppose when you make nearly $700 million dollars worldwide, you can afford an upgrade in the scale and believability of your special effects. But more than that, director Francis Lawrence, taking over for Gary Ross, brings a clarity of vision and the script – adapted this time by Simon Beaufoy and Michael DeBruyn – finds a leaner and tougher approach to plunging us into the tangle of potent sociopolitical allegory. The filmmakers have, of course, the novel by Suzanne Collins to work from, but the film’s sequel represents a step up in quality, something not represented in the books. I get the feeling that the ideal director for this material would be the violent satiric Paul Verhoeven of Robocop or Starship Troopers, but Lawrence, having directed Constantine and I am Legend, is no stranger to character based spectacle. He gets the details and surface excitement right and the adaptation keeps character and politics balanced.

When we last saw The Hunger Games, an annual children’s fight-to-the-death put on by the Capitol to keep the 12 Districts of dystopian future nation Panem in line, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) became unprecedented double-victors. They managed to finagle a fake love story for the Capitol’s cameras that caused a rule change when the gamemaster balked at televising the Games’ first double suicide conclusion. Catching Fire picks up as Katniss and Peeta are sent on a victory tour in advance of the next year’s Games, a tour that ignites tremors of rebellion throughout the country. News of the Capitol’s loosening grasp, as represented by these two kids who beat the system, only brings down the violence of the state all the harder. Because Lawrence (the director, not the star, no relation) holds the camera steady as the screenplay allows the film to let the mournful anguished aftermath of the first to linger, it’s impactful in its stillness.

Transparently evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland) feels so threatened by these victors, he commissions a new gamemaster (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to devise a set of rules for the upcoming Hunger Games that’ll leave the Districts shaking and complacent with fear once again. These two actors spend their screen time chewing over every evil growl as they scheme a way to eliminate Katniss from the situation. So it’s back to the arena again, only this time the tributes competing are not kids, but former champions, some still young, like our heroes, others elderly, unfairly thrust back into the battle. Katniss and Peeta, plagued by guilt and post-traumatic stress dreams, are forced to fight once more. But now the Captiol’s men behind the curtain seem determined to kill them all. The arena – with its man-eating monkeys, poison fog, and other disasters that make for good CGI spectacle – is as deadly as the competitors, who feel betrayed by the society that’s coddled them in the years since their victories. It’s a volatile situation, vibrantly dramatized in a sequel that’s unafraid to complicate its premise and slowly radicalize its characters.

The first film was about a girl learning to game an unfair system to survive. The sequel is a film about how she responds to finding herself an accidental symbol of burgeoning revolt. She agrees with the ideas she has come to represent, but can’t figure out how to best position herself (if at all) as the savior the people crave. Lawrence (the star, not the director, no relation) lets us see her fear and resolve as she feels her way towards becoming the rebellion she represents. She doesn’t want to hurt those she loves, like her sister (Willow Shields) and best friend (Liam Hemsworth), but as the Capitol conspires to restrict her choices, she’s left with only her own resilience to guide her as she must decide who to trust.

Woody Harrelson, as a drunken mentor, Elizabeth Banks, as a flibbertigibbet slowly growing a conscience, Lenny Kravitz, as a charitable designer, and Stanley Tucci, as a teeth-flashing talk show host, reprise their roles. New to the scene are Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer as techie middle-aged tributes, Sam Clafin, as a handsome young tribute who may be an ally, and Jena Malone as an entirely fearless tribute furious about her situation and ready to tear down the Capitol on live broadcast if possible. It’s a whole lot of character and situation storming about the film, but because the world of Panem has ever so slightly grown more complicated it can more than accommodate the additional interest.

It becomes, at times, a fairly moving picture of resistance and defiance in the face of sickly opulent fascism that’s willing to put the underclasses to work and, when they won’t, put them down. The metaphor of sociopolitical traps – have-nots violently encouraged to submit to the haves – is potent, as is its mass mindless entertainment as purposeful distraction of serious injustice. Like its predecessor, Catching Fire largely separates its ideas and its action, forcing the audience to think and feel through an hour of politics and satire sitting tantalizingly on the surface, before plunging into crisp, relentless action and danger in the back half. The bifurcation works, loading up the back half with busy thrills after slowly pulling tension out of scenes in which some of our finest character actors in sometimes silly costumes say serious and goofy things surrounded by spare sci-fi future chic.

It’s all anchored so strongly in Katniss, her journey, and her determination that it doesn’t get lost in the precision campiness of the Capitol, the constant – and coherently photographed – action of the Games or the sometimes misshapen narrative. For in true middle-chapter franchise fashion, Catching Fire, for all its melodrama and movement, doesn’t begin or conclude. It starts in the aftermath of the first and ends by excitingly trumpeting into a cliffhanger teasing more story to come. But it has enough surprises along the way that it doesn’t feel like a cheat so much as the exciting promise of escalation to come. 

Vanished: NOW YOU SEE ME

If you had stopped the heisting magician thriller Now You See Me halfway through, I’d have been just as happy with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, I’d have been a smidge happier, since that would mean I got to leave the theater an hour earlier. Everything about the movie feels arbitrary to its core. If, at the midway point, you’d asked me to explain who the characters are, I’d have been at a loss. They’re given absolutely no characterization outside of what the plot demands of them, which is very little and up to change with the whims of the twists. If you’d asked me to describe the plot, I would’ve vaguely muttered something about stolen money and investigating cops. What happens makes little to no sense in the moment and less when you stop to think about it. By the movie’s conclusion, it’s easy to tell that Important Things are cohering, but awfully hard to figure out why or why we should care.

Within the first few scenes, it’s clear the movie has already failed Siskel’s lunch test: Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? When you see the names in the cast, it’s easy to think a filmmaker can start with this much talent at his disposal and end up with at least a mildly diverting film. (You’d be wrong, by the way.) Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play magicians who are given the blueprints for an amazing trick under mysterious circumstances. Michael Caine plays their bankroller (and a reminder that The Prestige is a much better magic thriller). Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are detectives who enter the picture when the magicians appear to heist millions of Euros out of a Parisian bank during their Vegas act. Finally, there’s Morgan Freeman as a magician debunker who exists herein as Mr. Explanation. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when I actually forgot he was in the movie when he wasn’t in a scene.

The arrogantly nonsensical plotting from screenwriters Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt, and Boaz Yakin does nothing to explain why these magicians are suddenly famous. Their act looks lousy with terrible patter and a sparse collection of cheap tricks, the worst of which are clearly aided by CGI. But, they’re famous nonetheless and though we never get a good sense of their personalities or how they relate to each other beyond what we surmise about the actors themselves from other roles and public personas, they’re supposed to be, well, I don’t know. Are the magicians our protagonists? Maybe. Their stunt ends with the possibly stolen money rained down on the audience. How very Robin Hood of them. But then there’s the dogged detectives, who have a slight edge in the sensible, stable characterization department. I liked them more, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the movie was trying to do with them.

I’d have actually gone along with it if it gave the actors more memorable reasons for doing what they do. Maybe the problem isn’t that it’s nuts, but that it’s not nearly nuts enough. Either way, I sat dumbfounded by how little I cared. Director Louis Leterrier, who started his career with promising actioners like The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk before hitting Hollywood junk like Clash of the Titans, films Now You See Me in a blur of fast-moving images that can’t move fast enough to outrun the looming sense of unsatisfyingly unstable plotting. Scattershot plot points, aggressively explained shrugs of twists, and nothing characters all contribute to a singularly mindless two-hour sit in a theater. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to me; it’s that the movie can’t even be bothered to come up with parameters for itself with which it could make sense. At least this movie about magic manages to pull two good vanishing acts. The first was when my money disappeared from my wallet. The second was when the movie’s specifics left my mind almost entirely even a mere 12 hours after leaving the theater. 

Battle Royale: THE HUNGER GAMES

Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, the first in a trilogy of popular sci-fi novels technically labeled “young adult” fiction, offers an irresistible genre hook that can be boiled down to easily sellable sensationalistic ad copy. 24 enter. Only 1 survives. But the plot goes deeper than the hook. The titular games are an annual event thrown by the wealthy ruling class of Panem, a post-apocalyptic North America with twelve districts. Each district is required to select at random one male and one female between the ages of 12 and 18 to be sent as tribute into a gladiatorial combat reality show. Winners return to their districts wealthy for life. Losers simply don’t return. It’s ritualistic sacrifice as entertainment, subjugation through mass opiates.

This is strong stuff and Collins makes it into gripping reading. It starts with satiric bite and shifts into a page-turner and a thrill ride without defanging its sharp social criticisms. The film follows the plot of the book closely, starting slowly in the gray, impoverished District 12. A gutsy hunter, teenager Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), volunteers to take the place of her younger sister (Willow Shields) in the upcoming Hunger Games and barely has time to ask her best friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) to take care of her family before she’s whisked off to the Capital. Along with fellow District 12 tribute, a baker’s son, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), Katniss finds herself in a strange new place, a metropolis of conspicuous consumption, rampant materialism, and grotesque amounts of leisure time. Their creepily optimistic Capital representative (Elizabeth Banks) guides them to their drunken, grizzled mentor (Woody Harrelson) and a kind stylist (Lenny Kravitz). These three are there to help these teens prepare for their upcoming fight to the death.

But first, a publicity tour. They’re paraded around the capital, which is some kind of stylistic mash-up of Metropolis, the Emerald City, and THX-1138.  The teens appear in parades for the approval of the quietly menacing President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his gamemaster (Wes Bentley). Later, they’re interviewed on a talk show hosted by a sleazy ham (a perfectly cast Stanley Tucci). The sights and sounds of the Capital are terrifically imagined caricatures of decadence and careless oppression. It’s a city of people who look like Marie Antoinettes and Lady Gagas, colorful and baroque, while also as aloof as the filthy rich, blissfully ignorant of the true conditions in the outlying Districts of Panem. A telling moment comes during the talk show when a guest comments that the host smells “nicer.” “Well, I’ve been here longer,” the host replies with a wicked grin, underlining the easy-going condescension of the aristocracy. By the time Katniss and the other teens are sent into a technologically controlled wilderness to fight for the amusement of all Panem, it’s certainly clear that the odds are not in their favor.

The question going in to the new film adaptation of the book was if director and co-writer Gary Ross would be able to keep the same powerful mix of brisk, cliffhanger storytelling and wry, allegorical social satire. After all, his last film was 2003’s horseracing period piece Seabiscuit and, before that, 1998’s allegorical fantasy comedy Pleasantville. (Though, come to think of it, Pleasantville had it’s fair share of allegorical social satire). The answer to Ross’s suitability to the material is, thankfully, a qualified yes. This is a movie that’s a successful adaptation (Collins is one of the credited screenwriters) and a solid entertainment. As cinema, it is perhaps ultimately a bit of a disappointment, but I’ll get there.

Odds are that the audience will eat it up, though. This is without a doubt slick, button-pushing Hollywood entertainment that pumps up the emotional notes and hits the expected plot beats with a predictable regularity. Indeed, it’s a particularly faithful adaptation, in many ways a slavish abridgement that leaves the pacing sadly lumpy in spots. It can’t be easy to introduce so many characters and concepts and, consequentially, it feels at once rushed and bloated. But there’s quality control on screen here from a cast and crew that evidently shares a love of the source material. It’s a fine transcription of Collins’s imagination to the screen with some top-notch set designers, costumers, and art directors contributing to a convincing futuristic world. The cast is uniformly solid, though the leads, the usually compelling Lawrence and Hutchinson, are blanker than they should be. Katniss is a great character, a great heroine, but she fades into the spectacle more than she should. Ross doesn’t find a good way to represent the omnipresent interiority of the book that gives us more of an insight into her thoughts and actions. Still, Lawrence sells the big moments with a similar grit she gave to her breakout – and Oscar-nominated – role in Winter’s Bone.

Ross pumps up his filmmaking with shaky cinematography that drains some of the energy. When moments feel flat or preordained, jiggling the camera won’t work to spice them up. Unfortunately, the actual hand-to-hand combat in the Hunger Games themselves is filmed with an often blurry, haphazard, shaky cam as well. Perhaps this is a way to combat the limitations of the desired PG-13 rating, but it’s a lazy solution. The shaking image problem is compounded by the film’s tendency towards close-ups and tight medium shots that pervades the entire production. In many moments, I wondered if it was compensating for the relatively modest budget for this kind of spectacle by limiting what’s actual seen in the frames. The style is a detriment to those who would prefer to understand the in-the-moment action instead of simply waiting around for a still shot to clue us in to which blows landed, who got hurt, who’s alive and who’s dead. But since the 22 other fighters have been so sketchily introduced in choppy montage and rushed exposition, there’s not even much of a sense of who these other kids are. And that dilutes some of the horror. I’m not asking for more gore, only greater clarity.

Ross mostly nails the mood of Katniss’s main crisis, though. He understands that it’s a story about a young woman trapped in a terrible situation, forced into a nearly unwinnable scenario in which she’s struggling to retain autonomy and self-worth in a demoralizing society that wants her dead at worst, as a propagandistic pawn at best. Katniss is easy to root for; we want to see her succeed even if it’s not clear what success could possibly mean. With a central character, and central conflict, like this, The Hunger Games often makes for a compelling film, even if it’s ultimately a bit too cluttered and rushed – when its not languid, that is – for every little moment to land as well as they should.

It doesn’t consistently fall flat, but nor does it ever really take off. Ultimately Ross has made an adaptation that’s just slightly more than a pale imitation. It’s a solid effort all around and a promising start to a new franchise. (For my money, the third book is by far the best, still thrilling and accessible while even darker and more complex, with greater moral and allegorical force). I wish Ross could have taken more chances, made a gutsier film that made more of an impact with a streamlined pace and a visually coherent and comprehensible style. Greatness was within reach. Instead, it’s a film that drafts off whiffs of more exciting action and greater thematic depths.

It's Not a Romance / It's Totally a Romance: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

Friends with Benefits is a self-loathing romantic comedy, all too ready to hit all the required beats of the genre while almost all the while protesting every one of them. It stars a relaxed, lovable Mila Kunis and a tense, confident Justin Timberlake as young urban professionals and new friends who decide to skip dating and go straight for the bedroom. It’s not that they don’t like each other, far from it. They’re totally in love. They just pretend that what they’re having isn’t a relationship. It’s only casual because that’s what they tell themselves, much like the movie is only not a romantic comedy because it pretends not to notice its own boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl structure.

As the plot creaks through its predictable paces, it finds some occasional patches of effective humor and a few spots of legitimately button-pushing edginess. At times it is capable of living up to its potential frankness, though it often scurries away or buries its insight in juvenile giggling. But as the superficial daring of the film wears thin, I found myself asking why this film is so concerned with not coming off as a romantic comedy. After all, if it managed a few more laughs and a sweeter payoff, it could actually be a good rom-com, a rare feat these days. To paraphrase Godard, a great way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. How better to criticize the recent drought of rom-coms than to make a good one?

Earlier this year, the similarly themed comedy No Strings Attached approached the same topic from a safer, sappier angle and yet by embracing the genre it managed to find its small charms. The couple in that film (Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher) knew they were falling in love, that they were in a relationship, but even if they tried to hide it, the movie didn’t try too hard to deny it. It was a charmingly modest movie. Friends with Benefits finds a far more charming couple, more believably attracted to one another, and yet strands them in a less charming film, emotionally far behind what we in the audience already suspect and realize. These two good-looking people with the comfortable chemistry, twinkly eyes, and quick, easy smiles, love each other and care about each other and it’s completely obvious where the rigid formula of the film will take them. It feels like it takes forever for the characters to catch up to us.

Will Gluck directs the film which he wrote with Keith Merryman and David A. Newman. He brought us last year’s hilarious Easy A, but this film feels looser and slacker yet smaller. It’s filled with a terrific supporting cast, but they’re each given exactly one trait to play. If the one trait doesn’t work for you, you’re out of luck. It’s an ensemble in search of memorable moments that never materialize. Patricia Clarkson is Kunis’s wacky mom who, get this, is still seeing a lot of men. At her age? The movie finds this almost unbelievable. Jenna Elfman is Timberlake’s sister who is kind and supporting. Richard Jenkins (great, as always) is Timberlake’s father, still wise, despite suffering from Alzheimer’s. As for poor Woody Harrelson, he plays a gay sports editor and the film treats that as a big joke in and of itself and aggressively pursues any opportunity to make it one. If he has a line that doesn’t mention his sexual orientation I missed it.

Ultimately this is a film torn between its impulses towards sweetness and edginess and ends up satisfying neither. It’s a film that wants to get laughs from sex, but also earnest uplift from sap like flash mobs. It lacks a tone nimble enough to pivot between those emotions, which is just as well since it lacks a script worthy of it. The cast is game, Gluck’s direction is often energetic, but the self-deluded picture lacks the zip and skill of its ambition to tear down convention while blindly inhabiting it. From time to time it’s an adequate romantic comedy, but why’s it so unhappy about it?