Generic Pain: AMERICAN ASSASSIN

In a movie as painfully generic as American Assassin I start grasping at even the slightest glint of unexpected originality. Here it happens to be just one line, spoken by Michael Keaton in his role as a grizzled veteran trainer of deep-deep-deep-undercover operatives. He shoves a cell phone image of a suspect at his superior officer (Sanaa Lathan) and intensely inquires, “Does this picture bong a gong for you?” I appreciated all the trouble to think up a new way to say “rings a bell,” if only because there are literally no other scenes in the picture going that extra step. No, this is a movie flatly and drearily running through the standard dull, grim, guys-with-guns, geopolitical muddle thriller. There’s an ambitious hotshot who wants to save the world, a dead girlfriend serving as opening-scene eye candy and then motivation throughout, there’s a prickly mentor relationship, a couple double crosses, a mysterious connection between heroes and villains, thoughtless political hot button referencing (the Iran nuclear deal), gnarly scenes of torture, casual xenophobia, bloody Bourne-again action with a mild Wick twist, and a ticking time bomb finale with a big red glowing countdown clock. There’s not a single surprise to be found, up to and including the surprises. 

The film stars Dylan O’Brien, a welcome sight in his first role after a near-death accident on the set of the as-yet still unfinished third Maze Runner movie. (It’s sad enough he was nearly killed, but that it was for a Maze Runner is even sadder.) Here does what he can with a role that requires nothing more than a smooth face handsomely troubled and a taut athlete’s body wracked with mournful determination. In the opening scene he and his fiancé are caught in a terrorist attack. He survives, but not intact, having seen the love of his life gunned down before him. Now he’s on a one-man counterintelligence revenge operation until the government steps in and pivots him into a top-secret anti-terror death squad. The whole thing is a topsy-turvy militaristic retaliation fantasy, channeling the character’s vengeance into state-sponsored assassination training. Keaton and O’Brien do what they can with the hoary clichés they’re made to spout, while the rest of the cast fades slowly into the background. It becomes a grey blur out of which flicker a few fleeting moments provoking thought. Taylor Kitsch pops up as the villain, a weirdly small role and a chance to lament how his great-2012-that-wasn’t (with starring turns in the fun, but underrated, likes of John Carter and Savages) reduced him to this. There’s a scene of unseemly torture-approval, as an Iranian double agent is dunked in a tub until the truth is waterboarded out of her. The climax involves the aforementioned time bomb and a whole flotilla of CG battleships. It’s just all so boring and empty and routine.

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.