Careful What You WISH UPON

They don’t usually make horror movies this kind of bad anymore. That’s why there’s something quaint about how entirely ineffective Wish Upon is. This isn’t a found-footage headache, or a scuzzy faux-exploitation wink, or an element of 80’s nostalgia (despite Stranger Things’ Barb turning up in a very Barb-like supporting role). This isn’t a franchise, sequel, slasher remake, or low-budget VOD title. This isn’t a wide, cost-effective Blumhouse release or an art house slow burn. This is an old-fashioned high-concept teen chiller, where good-looking youngsters get tangled up in something that’ll inevitably kill them. Maybe we’re just moving from 80’s nostalgia to late-90’s cycle of YA frights, because this new movie is swimming in the same waters as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer (a star of which turns up as father of a teen here), albeit in the shallow end of that pool. In telling a teenage riff on The Monkey’s Paw through a wish-granting evil Chinese music box, the film fails to conjure up striking iconography, scary sequences, or memorable characters. It’s just no good, but at least it’s a different kind of bad than we’re used to seeing.

It follows a mopey teen outcast (Joey King) who cringes and shrinks from the popular bullies, snarks with her pals, and is embarrassed by her trash-picker father (Ryan Phillippe). He’s the one who scavenges the box – in its heavy, ornate, black-and-red design the thing looks like a Hellraiser device – and therefore sets the whole thing in motion. (Of course, it dates further back, to her mother (Elisabeth Röhm) who mysteriously hangs herself in the opening scene, and to a century earlier in China, or so a supporting character reads to us off a fictional Wikipedia page.) The girl, not knowing it’s a magic box and just taking a plot-convenient guess, places her hands on the object and wishes her arch-nemesis would go rot. The next day the popular glamor girl isn’t in school on account of a nasty infection. Voila! Next our lead girl wishes for love, riches, popularity, and everything else you’d expect. But it comes at a price as side characters keep meeting grisly ends – a slip in the tub, a ponytail down the garbage disposal, and other sub-Final Destination circumstances (my, how I’d like that series to come back to us!). Quite hilariously, the camera will later spy a newspaper clipping which blares in bold type: “Police Warn of Uptick in Unusual Deaths,” or something to that effect. Barbara Marshall (Terra Nova) had a screenplay with such a great idea, it’s a shame to see it flail with chintzy flimsiness. 

The whole production is pathetically limp. There’s not an ounce of atmosphere to the flat digital photography and over-lit design, though certainly seeing director John R. Leonetti (Annabelle) use staging for maximum PG-13 coyness and strangely flat-footed setups doesn’t help matters. Scenes unnaturally stop and start, chopping away without letting an ominous clue settle in and hacking into the next without any preamble. It feels slapped together, as if moving along fast enough would outrun how ludicrous it all becomes. No character behaves believably, making leaps of logic and avoiding obvious solutions for the sake of prolonging its runtime. (Wish the box never existed! Duh! Why doesn’t anyone mention it, even if only for a clever write-around?) The dialogue clunks and clanks, not allowing any character to develop personality or accrue backstory. It’s cringing and clumsy, about as earnestly stupid as horror movies get. Then there’s loads of inadvertent comedy from the preposterous violence one notch below flat-out slapstick and from the basic fumbling plot mechanics. My favorite laugh comes when our lead wishes her dad was cool. Cut to him serenading her friends by playing saxophone in the living room, complete with a jazz band backup who are never seen before or after. The girls stare at him in awe. The movie is full of such clumsiness, right up to and including a howlingly low-res establishing shot that might as well be sourced from MiniDV. Who could possibly see that and approve it for big screen consumption? It’s all symptomatic of a good concept thoroughly sunk by botched execution at every turn. They don’t make them like they used to. That’s not always a compliment.

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.

Swing Shift: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

The latest product from the Marvel Studios factory is Spider-Man: Homecoming, a co-production with Columbia Pictures, that company making less an admission of failure and more a signal of strong showbiz jealousies. The Sony subsidiary hasn’t been able to make a Spider-Man feature as good as Sam Raimi’s since letting him go, but surely the powers that be were only interested in loosening the reins on their rights to the character when they saw the consistent huge grosses and quality control over at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They didn’t want to do right by the character so much as do right by their producers and stockholders. Still, the result is precisely what you’d hope and expect from bringing in the people who brought us the whole Avengers product line. It’s brightly lit and full of good-humored banter, features a great cast of familiar faces playing colorful characters, and stops every so often for a dazzlement of colorful CG. Though the formula’s getting tired, this new entry manages a high degree of charm and fast-paced entertainment (and even a few genuine surprises). In addition to the predictable polish and routine beats of a Marvel plot machine, this widget has a sweetness and an energy that makes it slightly better than average. It’s good fun.

Picking up during the events of last year’s Captain America: Civil War, where this new interpretation of Spidey was first introduced recruited by Iron Man to be a potential second-string Avenger, Homecoming finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) initially excited to be one of the gang. (This movie’s biggest uphill climb is having to bounce its continuity out of what was easily the MCU’s worst movie, a dull grey 147-minute slog.)  Alas, his dreams will not be coming true any time soon. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gifts him a souped-up supersuit and tells him to stick to being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The boy’s just fifteen, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to be a real hero when he’s older. This leaves the kid antsy and eager to prove himself, and allows the movie to stretch out with what’s always best about Spidey’s appeal: his average, every day, everyman problems. He has homework, an extracurricular academic challenge team, a cheerfully nerdy best friend (Jacob Batalon), an unrequited crush (Laura Harrier), a bully (Tony Revolori), a sweet prickly teammate (Zendaya), and a kind aunt (Marisa Tomei). He has a lot on his plate, plus the whole sneaking out every evening to patrol the streets, swinging from buildings to stop bike thieves and ATM bandits. 

Writer-director Jon Watts (of the small, tense, kids-in-over-their-heads thriller Cop Car) and his five co-writers understand the inherent charm of Spider-Man. They make him a relatable stressed-out teenager, just trying to fit in and do well at school while testing his powers. (They’re great, after all, and so, too, are his responsibilities.) With a bounce in its step, the movie makes like its hero and juggles the demands placed upon it quite skillfully. It weaves itself into the fabric of the MCU with better deftness than some of its inferiors, rooting its villain (The Vulture, played by Batman and Birdman himself, Michael Keaton) motivation in the aftermath of The Avengers. One of the more memorable villains in this mega-franchise, his backstory has him with a contract to clean up the damage from the alien battle, a lucrative deal that gets pulled when SHIELD classifies the high-tech debris. Now he’s flying in a makeshift jet-propelled wingspan, making his money on the black market, smuggling gadgets stolen from the various film’s climactic calamities (Winter Soldier’s D.C. craters, Ultron’s rattled fictional city, and so on). He and Peter – little guys hoping to make big marks – both have struggles proving themselves in this new outsized ecosphere of heroes and villains, which gives their clash a little charge. Keaton’s world-weariness plays nicely against Holland’s adorably boyish happy-to-be-here excitement, making for a compelling conflict.

Because the bad guy’s a local low-level troublemaker, he first shows up on Peter’s radar. Since the boy has trouble convincing Stark’s assistant (Jon Favreau) to take his calls, he feels obligated to put a stop to the mystery man’s bad deeds as he continually crosses paths with the evil plot. All this and the big dance, too. There’s the usual roster of fun character actors popping up to give the zippy plot some added wit and texture (Donald Glover, Bokeem Woodbine, Hannibal Buress, Angourie Rice, Martin Starr, and Michael Mando among the pleasant surprises popping up in tiny roles). They keep things pleasant and crackling with an agreeable comic charge between big splashy two-page spreads of action – leaping between buildings and off monuments, tussling with henchmen and saving civilians – that make for the usual superhero shenanigans. These are all suitably loud and explosive, but also swing with Spidey’s nimble acrobatics. Watts has managed to make a movie sparkling with enough fun and invention that its small piece pumps some life back to the larger franchise puzzle. It simply feels good to spend two hours with a character whose biggest conflict is wanting to contribute more positive impact in the world than he can manage. It’s easy to root for him.