On the Road Again: THE TRIP TO SPAIN

With Hollywood in the grip of its latest bout of late-sequel-itis, is it too much to idly wish for a My Dinner with Andre 2? (I’d settle for the action figures, at this point.) At least we have The Trips, now a trilogy of Michael Winterbottom films following Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as versions of themselves bickering, bantering, and playfully marking their showbiz territory while dining and driving through beautiful European countryside. The Trip to Spain may not have the sparkle of discovery the first one had, or the fresh melancholy fully flowering in the second (to Italy). But the filmmakers haven’t skipped a step, creating a lovely portrait of quixotic, drifting middle-aged ennui, a sort of prickly Antonioni by way of Michael Palin’s travelogues. What a deft wonder, allowing Coogan and Brydon to play up and against their individual vanities, prattling like better than the best comedian podcasters – full relaxed, erudite, anecdotal mode dotted with the expected bursts of dueling impressions. (Best is an extended bit in which Brydon drives Coogan crazy pretending Moorish architecture was created by Roger Moore. Runner-up: Coogan’s constant Philomena humblebrags.) 

One could hardly ask for funnier company, and Winterbottom (and uneven and eclectic director, but when he’s on he’s on) maintains a perfect balance of casually beautiful location shooting, drooling food close-ups, and witty chatty conversations that prattle on and on, pleasurable looping around the same pet themes. Professional contentment and resentment, literary and cultural references, and off-handed tossed-off commentary about the Way We Live Now are once again topics du jour. It’s all filtered through the recurring motifs of creative frustration, business negotiation, petty jealousies, fatherhood, and legacy. They’re soulful comedians, not quite sad clowns, but certainly on the way to wintering into wisdom if they’ll let themselves. It’s familiar, but comfortingly so, while differing slightly, and not only in the locations. The ending this time is a stinging scorpion’s tail, puncturing the good mood with a topical surprise cliffhanger (of sorts), darkly funny and tremulously unresolved. As Coogan pontificates in the picture, European films are allowed big, obvious metaphor. They just work. Here a story about aging entertainers enjoying the sights and tastes of a foreign country, trading tales of the biz with subtle power plays and literary/historical references becomes a subtle, sad portrait of two men – and maybe a culture – on the precipice, uncertain where to go but onwards, anyway.

Shake IT Off

Scares in It, the second screen adaptation (though the first for the big screen) of Stephen King’s clownish tome, are constructed so homogeneously that the whole two-hours-and-fifteen-minutes is ultimately an exercise in tedium. When you know it’s nothing more than regular intervals of a talented teenage cast’s cliched bantering punctuated by sudden appearances of a deadly supernatural clown-shaped evil and its attendant assorted monster manifestations (a knockoff Modigliani, a leper, a geyser of blood, and so on), you can almost set your watch by it. It drifts on cultural nostalgia for what is, in my frustrated experience, a thick, shambling novel long on iconography and short on thrill. There’s a reason why only Tim Curry’s marvelously funny/scary performance as Pennywise the Clown is the sole lingering element of the 1990 miniseries. This new adaptation – scripted by True Detective: Season 1 director Cary Fukunaga with co-writer Chase Palmer and revised by Annabelle’s Gary Dauberman – takes King’s narrative of childhood innocence fractured by fears and treats it so very seriously. Here the story of a town besieged by an evil in their sewers and the plucky young teens who are the only hope of stopping it grows ponderous and empty. We’ve been here before, and there’s nothing new to show for it, aside from yet another 80’s-set genre period piece. (Funny how a novel from the 80’s – a clear inspiration on Stranger Things – now feels like a copycat of its own copycat, completing a cultural circle of some sad note.) 

Director Andy Muschietti, whose Mama was a superior exploration of similar child-endangerment themes, makes a movie proficient and dull, whipping up reasonably good effects at maximum volume, but failing to string them along in any momentum of excitement or dread. (He also returns to the same small bag of tricks over and over – the slowly canting angle when something bad is about to happen; the long pause with negative space before a blast on the soundtrack; the creepy flat stare and otherworldly lilt of Bill Skarsgard’s clown villain.) The pulp jump scares – and that’s all that’s here, mild jolts of surprise with none of the under-the-skin stickiness one expects from quality horror – sit queasily next to flatly cartoonish manifestations of adult malfeasance towards children. Every grown-up is preposterous and monstrous – shot low and ominous, makeup forming mottled complexions, wobbling tottering mounds of wardrobe shrouding them in ill-fitting un-fashion – as uncaring at best, abusive at worst behavior leads one to think children getting dragged down drain pipes by Pennywise is hardly the town’s worst problem. The experience is a flat line, no modulation and only the slightest of nice grace notes – a shyly flirtatious glance, an authentically trying-too-hard raunchy one-liner from a nerdy kid – to bolster the bludgeoning familiarity and routine gloopy rhythms.

Run to You: THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD

A bantering movie star buddy-comedy actioner made like they never went out of style, The Hitman’s Bodyguard rests solely on its leads’ charismatic chemistry and its director’s flair for hard-charging, light-touch action. Good thing that’s more than enough. Ryan Reynolds (forget Deadpool; this is the foul-mouthed bloody action comedy that made me understand his appeal) plays a down-on-his-luck bodyguard whose freelancing career protecting bigwigs took a nosedive after losing a client to a sniper’s bullet. Hoping to regain his top-bodyguard status, he’s saddled, through various plot complications, with protecting a funny, foul-mouthed assassin played by Samuel L. Jackson exactly how you’d guess he would. (He’s hugely likable here, appealingly soft-hearted for a vulgar, cold-blooded killer-for-hire.) The guy’s moral code leads him to testify against a human-rights-abusing dictator (Gary Oldman) on trial in Geneva. Or rather, he will testify if he can survive the trip there. The setup is a simple clothesline on which to hang banter and booms. Director Patrick Hughes (last seen helming Expendables 3, managing some memorable action between playing traffic cop to the bloated ensemble) obliges with fast car chases, clangorous gun fights, and heavy thwacks on the Foley track accompanying every bludgeoning. It’s all in good fun.

Reynold’s bodyguard (reluctantly pulled in by his lawwoman girlfriend Elodie Yung) naturally clashes with Jackson’s assassin (who ultimately wants to negotiate the release of his wife, Salma Hayek). Prickly mutual respect for their deadly skills and romantic motives remains separated by the side of the law with which they align themselves. But once they realize they both are only out to kill bad guys, they can make tentative peace in zippy action sequences that take them through planes, trains, automobiles, SUVs, boats, motorcycles, and a shuttlebus full of nuns. It’s that kind of movie. In brightly glossy digital widescreen frames, the action isn’t as elaborate as John Wick’s or as sensation-driven as Michael Bay’s. But there’s a happy medium to be found: proficient, efficient, hurtling stunts tied to a simple, effective ticking clock narrative momentum. Cars flip and explode. Bodies toss and turn. It builds a pleasurable rat-a-tat rhythm in which sometimes the staccato is the explosions, and sometimes it’s the wisecracks. Even so, the charm is in the two Movie Stars allowed to relax in a movie that lets their personas rev up and collide in pleasing B-movie sparks while action erupts effectively and concussively around them. It’s a splattery, foul-mouthed funny tone maintained with aplomb.