Bubble Girl: EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING

Here’s one of those passable, cloying YA adaptations that’s totally artificial and utterly sentimental, torn between metaphoric exploration of romantic teen alienation and stupidly contrived conceits. Everything, Everything (so nice they named it twice) is about an 18-year-old girl (Amandla Stenberg) who has lived locked inside behind air filters and Plexiglas as long as she can remember. It’s for her health and safety, since her deadly immune deficiency was discovered by her protective physician mother (Anika Noni Rose). The girl has cultivated a rich and playful interior life through reading books, watching movies (always nice to see even a glance of Moonstruck), and checking in on support group chat rooms. But one day, a cute boy her age (Nick Robinson) moves in next door and, in a twist usually only found in stories like this, his bedroom window that looks right into hers. They make eyes at each other for a bit, then he writes his phone number on the glass. She texts. He texts back. It’s love at first emoticon, or maybe at first read receipt. The more she gets to know him, the more she wants to go outside, an urge we’re too swoon over despite the very real threat to her life if she encounters those germs floating in the world at large. Sure, the course of true love never did run smooth, but why risk everything (everything)?

Adapting Nicola Yoon’s book, the screenplay by J. Mills Goodloe (The Age of Adaline) contorts itself to justify the romantic urges, finding tragic backstory and late-breaking twists to convince the audience that it’s all for the better. So it has a premise that’s barely convincing on a literal level and yet – and yet! – it’s often sweet and emotionally appealing because of the unassuming openness of its lead and the soft-spoken, underplayed loveliness of its metaphor. What is first teen love but the blushing sense of getting away with something? The movie doesn’t exactly work, but, hey, I’m not made of stone, either. Stenberg brings shy expressiveness to her confined character, able to communicate her deep yearning for human contact through bashful glances while also signaling the fierce intelligence behind her hesitant smiles and flustered flirting. She’s totally believable as a girl who has more time alone with her thoughts and who has read more than most her age, and yet has experienced precious little of what we’d call the real world. She’s able to give the movie the earnest innocent desires and curiosity that almost provide enough emotional oomph to make the construct work.

Although director Stella Meghie shoots the movie with a pleasant commercial gloss – all bright sets, soft lighting, gauzy close-ups, slick pop-music montages, and coy, implied PG-13 heat – it also gives the sense it’s as closed off as its main character. The darker implications of its premise remain unexplored, tossed overboard for the sake of maintaining a sense of teenage fantasy and persecution. But the way it allows space for Stenberg’s performance to ping off Rose’s strong, stern, maternal love gives the movie the small metaphoric charge it needs to be effective. It becomes, in its strongest moments, a movie about the lengths a parent can go to maintain a child’s safety, security, and purity. Starting with good intentions, this can result in a young person for whom flirtation, let alone dating, seems like a far riskier and fraught prospect than it should. This is a simple movie about teenage love that deploys its dramatic conceit to literalize the sheltered girl’s boxed in feelings, then watches as they’re coaxed out through a sense of determination and outside influences. She and her crush are cute together. He’s sweet. She’s nice. Meghie gives their texting an imaginary mind palace of a meeting spot – fantasies of actual dialogue in the likes of a retro diner and in outer space taking the place of text bubbles as they grow closer – and when they finally appear in the same room, share the same space, well, I said I’m not made of stone. Even middling movies can occasionally get their hooks in you.

Once and Future KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD

Guy Ritchie takes a mythic English figure and turns his story into a scrappy ye olde Guy Ritchie-style story in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. With good gusto, he makes Arthur the nexus of a scampering rebellion, a gang who will become the knights of the round table plotting to take down an evil king and crown the rightful heir by heisting supplies, staging ambushes, beating back black-helmeted ne’re-do-wells, and sinking ships. They’re like the distant ancestors of the grubby, low-level criminals who populated Ritchie’s early works – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, RocknRolla. This is fun at times, watching bantering, quick witted oafs and bruisers scheme their way into the highest positions in the land, and all for a noble reason. It’s especially charming because such a light touch and unassuming mode sits right next to the lugubrious solemnity of High Fantasy, dark magic swirling up stone walls, slithering snake women promising good luck in return for blood sacrifice, giant bats, enormous serpents, war elephants, magic rocks, and a sword in a stone. (That that last one is guarded by David Beckham cameoing as one of the villain’s henchman tells you something about the contrast set up here.) This isn’t nearly as fun a finished product as Ritchie’s spry, visually playful, charmingly plotted reimaginings – two red-blooded Sherlock Holmes adventures and a super cool Man from U.N.C.L.E. – but it has its charms.

The film errs on the side of gloopy CG confrontations and thin characterization, especially in its drearily predictable grand finale, but is otherwise fantasy filmmaking done up with pleasurable genre resonances. Its murky opening, quietly drifting across foggy green hills while mysterious magic erupts in the distance reminds me of nothing less than John Boorman’s brilliantly bonkers sci-fi Zardoz crossed with his Arthurian take, Excalibur. Fire blasts forth and a ginormous battle involves a king jumping his horse from a parapet onto an elephantine platform. This noble hero king (Eric Bana) is victorious, but abruptly betrayed by a nefarious usurper (Jude Law) who covets the crown (and works on self-taught Dark Arts, hoping to one day graduate to master Firestarter). A tiny orphaned prince is floated down the river – Moses style, in this never-ending parade of legendary allusions – and raised in a blisteringly rapid-fire montage that takes him from naïve boy taken in by kind criminals to a tough, streetwise brawler. Grown (into Charlie Hunnam), he’s as quick with his quips as he is with his fists, all swaggering confidence even when he’s doubting himself, like when that sword comes out of the stone and the kingdom’s revolutionaries (led by Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) scoop him up into their plots against the evil reigning o’er the land.

Generally easy going and light on its feet, despite plodding inevitably to a dull, clangorous climactic confrontation, Ritchie goes all in on his stylish energy. His films, good, bad, and in between (like this one), manage to be at once rough-and-tumble and smooth operators. He fills this telling with snap zooms, propulsive smash cuts, speed ramping, and zippy, fluid, computer-assisted dipping, spinning, and flying establishing shots. He also draws on his Rubik’s-cube-jumbled approach to what in other hands would be conventional setups and payoffs. Instead of long sequences of exposition leading up to bursts of action, he will often intercut the two, cross-cutting speeches and arguments and planning with execution. We see Arthur and his band of would-be heroes devise a trip into a monster-filled wasteland where he must learn to control his magic sword by placing it on a magic rock, their words carrying over as the soundtrack to a lightning fast montage of creature feature derring-do. This gives the picture a jumpy jangle, at once ponderously mythic and casually loping. No one has time to catch their breath between spasms of style, but the movie somehow accrues a sense of heavy sag.

It never quite finds a way to reconcile these competing tendencies, but as a Ritchie romp – co-written, photographed, scored, and edited by some of his familiar collaborators – it never quite loses its loose-limbed charms either. They’re there jolting and jumping underneath even the stateliest fantasy tropes, production design from Game of Thrones vets turned slightly askew, like when the Lady in the Lake appears to pull Arthur through an impossibly deep mud puddle in a dime-store adventure version of a memorably gross Trainspotting swim. So, it’s not totally satisfying. But it’s also not every day you see a movie that straight-faced sends its hero into battle against Rodents of Unusual Size, or includes a moment when a growling Jude Law cuts off a man’s ear and whispers one last threat into it. Those are the sorts of charming eccentricities of which these dusty big-budget boondoggles could use more.

Trip Despise-Her: SNATCHED

Snatched is one of those disappointing high-concept, mid-budget, star-driven Hollywood pictures that seems to come around every so often. It has the right cast, a fun premise, and a few funny moments, but otherwise just sits there on screen collecting dust. The basic fish-out-of-water adventure comedy plotting finds a dopey daughter (Amy Schumer) and dotty mother (the great Goldie Hawn in her first role in fifteen years—sadly she should’ve waited longer) on a South American vacation. They inevitably get kidnapped and must cease their squabbling long enough to survive and maybe, just maybe, learn a little about themselves along the way. On this sturdy, predictable structure director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before) and screenwriter Kate Dippold (The Heat) pile flat, simple, one-note scenes. This is a movie that only can hold one idea, and often only one person, in a frame, plodding simply without escalation from plot point to plot point, allowing its performers just enough personality to fill out just barely more than a trailer’s worth of entertainment.

 

Cut together with journeyman boredom in every choice – a tourism brochure montage of establishing shots, a slow-mo dance sequence or two, vistas of B-roll you’d find on a hotel lobby TV – the whole endeavor could only succeed with diminished expectations. It’s too thin and grindingly workmanlike in its impersonal bare-bones competence, flatly staged and unimaginatively developed. Comedy and action work best with surprise: an unexpected swerve, a shock reveal, an eccentric resolution. Here we get a smattering of these moments. In an opening scene, Schumer’s boyfriend (Randall Park) says he’s breaking up with her and she responds, “When?” Later a grizzled jungle guide (Christopher Meloni) is asked if a piece of fruit is okay. “Yeah, sure,” he replies, then takes a beat and adds, “Oh! You mean to eat? Probably not.” Funny. So too are Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack as vacationing gal pals intensely interested in looking out for their fellow foreign ladies because you simply never can trust a foreign vacation. (There’s unexamined Ugly Americanism here, natch.) But we’re talking silly little grace notes on the edges of a leaden comedy, flat-footed and tone-deaf, in which two American women get kidnapped and flail around Latin American stereotypes for 80 minutes. 

Why take Hawn, capable of effervescently charming performances, and make her a dowdy scold? Why take Schumer who, at her best, can lampoon awkward social issues in casually biting satire, and make her a routine R-rated comedy-style stunted adult-child? They’re allowed to play against type to fit the dragging constraints of a hectic and unfunny action plot that’s so narrative heavy it rarely pauses to let its leads breathe. Their best moments allow the two of them space for banter that feels like a real testy mother-daughter relationship, one with some history and tension that could flower with room to grow. Instead they’re shoved into tumbles down muddy jungle roads and made to slog through tone-deaf humor. When they arrive at a distant village, it’s a cue for smug eye-rolling and flailing gross-out humor at the expense of the native’s customs and well-meaning doctors, culminating in a sequence involving a tapeworm that’s just flat out nasty. The movie just doesn’t have a point of view, has no idea how to maximize the inherent charms of its cast or activate any sense of tension or suspense in its premise. The emptiness just makes it seem limp and sad, so much running around and yelling and frantic flailing for naught.