I don't know why it is that printers of the paper wrappers that go around the plastic DVD cases insist on printing their descriptions of the movies they contain in purple four-point type on black. I can't read any of it, so I just have to guess at what kind of movie I'm getting from the title and the cover illustration. And based solely on that limited, highly subjective and often misleading information (probably intentionally, sometimes) I exhausted my supply of light entertainment with a couple of the films reviewed in Part One of the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival Remote Edition Week One. As a result, I wasn't really excited about continuing my perusal of Hollywood's dreary offerings, and have proceeded more from duty than desire.
I have been rewarded, somewhat. The first two movies, which I watched today (Wednesday, as I start writing this) were actually pretty good. By some standards, anyway.
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| copyright Cadence Productions Ltd |
I've seen this guy Jason Statham in action films before. I know he's been the leading man in a number of (to me) entertaining but forgettable action films, and I have a favourable impression of his work without actually remembering any of it, other than a more comedic version in the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy some ten years ago.That's really what I know him from. (I'm pretty sure I've even reviewed another of his films in a previous iteration of this Havasu Film Festival, but no way am I going to bother looking through all the previous posts on the chance of finding it. I mean, who really cares? Other than Jason Statham, who probably won't know either way.)
In this year's release, Statham plays his own stock character: this time named Levon* No-last-name, a former Royal Marine, invincible and unfailingly righteous, now a widowed construction worker. His boss's daughter is kidnapped and he promises to bring her back home. Shades of Taken! Levon gets some material help from former associates in the military but the work is his alone. He is a Lone Wolf.
It's not a great script, it's not great acting, there's not a subtle poignant moral lesson to be learned from this movie. It's an action film. The good guy is entirely good, and all the bad guys -- and there are lots of them -- are entirely bad. They all die (except the top guys in the Evil Brotherhood of Russian Villains, who are still alive and free to cause mayhem in future films, should they be needed).
There is, in short, nothing great about this movie; it's just pure entertainment of a particularly violent kind. I view it the way I used to view the unending struggles between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd: pure meaningless fun that satisfies my sense of justice. All the bad guys deserve what they get; who could complain? We all saw what they did. (That, I think, is the missing essential ingredient when people try to apply the same kind of hard logic to real-life crime and punishment.)
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| copyright Sony Pictures |
No two ways about it, this is a chick-flick. You can tell because (a) Justin Baldoni keeps taking his shirt off to reveal a six pack, and the female characters gush about him in a way that would be considered actionably sexist if men talked that way about a woman; (He directed the film, so he gets to show his body off as much as he wants.) and (b) because it's a very romantic movie with some sexually suggestive scenes but no actual nudity, not so much as a buttcrack or a nipple to abhor female viewers or deprive male viewers of their cognitive skills.
Stereotypes aside, it's a well-done movie with a message. The plot focuses on two relationships involving Lily Bloom (Blake Lively, who I knew only as the wife of the co-owner of Wrexham AFC, in Wales; when I first heard the name, I assumed it was a man): one, seen in flashbacks, involving her first boyfriend from high school in Maine ("Atlas," portrayed as a youth by Alex Neustaedter, and as an adult by Brandon Sklenar), the other with her husband ("Ryle," played by Baldoni) in Boston. The two provide an interesting contrast, though both share the fictive trait of being unable to communicate rationally at crucial moments: the Idiot-Plot again, but again not too distracting from the story. If the two of them didn't jump to incorrect conclusions, and had an actual ten-minute conversation instead of fighting like prepubescent schoolboys, this plot would grind to a halt and the movie would end before the first hour was up, with the two of them laughing over a beer and waxing philosophical about life.
(I'm actually more distracted by wondering where and how these people get the money to set up their thriving businesses in the leafier parts of Boston in the 21st Century.)
Long before the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival began, I had heard about this movie in passing. A web site I sometimes visit to immerse myself in bad grammar and poor spelling would sometimes include posts about things the contemptible class think of as News, and for a while in their estimation this included some kind of controversy between the two stars of the movie, Lively and Baldoni. I never summoned enough interest to actually read any of it, having already jumped to the conclusion that it was all either a P.R. stunt or handbags at twenty paces. Probably the latter, as the movie itself hardly got mentioned in the headlines of those posts. So I still don't know what it was all about. (I did happen to notice, when searching Wikipedia for the movie poster above, that there's actually a whole separate page devoted to the controversy. I was not moved to click on the link, and so I remain as unenlightened about this celebrity dust-up as any Neanderthal gamboling about in the German forest; and unless it somehow comes to affect Wrexham AFC, I will most likely remain so.)
As for the movie, I recommend it, though possibly not for a first date. Wait at least until you know enough about the person you're out with to honestly appraise their integrity, and remember that despite what you hear on TV, it works both ways. Second date stuff.
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| copyright Blumhouse Productions |
I select the movies for the Havasu Film Festival pretty much at random. I choose a shelf at the library and select films based only on what I can learn from the box. Since I've never heard of most of the movies, and usually can't read anything of the blurb on the back, I'm really going mostly by the picture, maybe the names of the stars if they're printed large enough, and my answer to the question, "Will I be able to sit through this?"
So I always wonder when coincidences happen, like this: Drop is about a woman and a man on a first date in downtown Chicago. The woman, Violet (played by Fahy) was a victim of abuse (coincidence #1) by her late husband Blake (coincidence #2). She may have killed him, though flashbacks indicate otherwise; now she's out on her very first date since his death a few years before. The man she meets at an elegant restaurant in a glass skyscraper is Henry. Henry is played by Brandon Sklenar (coincidence #3). Henry in this film has all the characteristics of the Atlas character in the previous movie (coincidence #4), but without a beard. And I picked this film to view, pretty much at random, off the pile of DVDs, right after It Ends With Us. (coincidence #5)
No idea what to make of this. I could accept that it's just an odd series of unimportant coincidences that these two movies came out about the same time and both were, as a result, in the library's "Express Collection" at the San Pedro branch. Or I could recall similar things happening with other films, and conclude that there is a vast web of profit-driven plagiarism in Hollywood, with people stealing ideas left and right and rushing to get their movie out before the other guy's.
Yeah, let's go with that theory. Not that it matters to me. I just thought it was curious.
So anyway, the screenwriting for Drop isn't nearly as elegantly done as was that of the other movie; in fact, it was pretty stilted throughout. The plot is interesting, but requires an implausibly tech-literate villain, who is also on a first date with perhaps the most patient woman in Chicago. The villain also has to be able to transport himself invisibly around the dining room of the posh restaurant to poison innocent people's drinks and intercept attempts to alert people to the victim's plight. And he has to have an unlimited supply of spy-cams posted in every nook and cranny of both the restaurant and Violet's home. Oh, and he has to be able to text with phenomenal speed without his date noticing it. At one point one of my eyes (the left, which was slightly closer to the screen) rolled completely out of my head.
The denouement of this film, while entertaining, was so implausible that the neighbour called to ask what that snorting sound was, and was I okay. First of all, I couldn't buy that Violet, who has figured out what's going on and who's doing it, could vanquish the villain in a protracted fight, get car keys from her now-wounded date, stop to comfort an innocent bystander who tried to help and is also injured, descend thirty-something floors in an elevator to the building's multistory parking garage, find the date's car, and drive from there to her house in whatever part of Chicago* it's in, and get there in time to thwart the villain's accomplice, who has been patiently waiting inside Violet's house to kill Violet's son and sister, all in less time than it took that accomplice to act after receiving the telephonic instruction, "Kill them." It should have taken him, oh, twenty, maybe thirty seconds to kill the two innocents. What, did he have a Hot Pocket in the microwave that he needed to wait on, maybe the last one?
That's the most implausible point of this whole story, but by no means the only one. Runner-up would be that Skelnar's character is such a nice guy that he would persist with the world's worst first date after the horrible encounter we all witnessed. No man IRL is that desperate, and no woman IRL is that attractive. (I reserve judgment on whether any date could really be that bad. I've been on a few that might come close, but not in decades, thank God, so my memories may be exaggerated.)
But, farcical implausibilities aside, and uninspired directing overlooked along with its concomitant unenthusiastic performances (by everyone except the implausible villian Richard, played by Reed Diamond with a wonderfully evil glint in the eye and a mouth full of excited drool), and the technobabble discounted, and some pretty on-the-nose foreshadowing excused, what are you left with? I was going to say it's an okay movie, maybe three stars out of five. Then I remembered that I very nearly abandoned this movie about twenty-five minutes in as just too dull. And that was before the two characters met up for their date. No way is this a three-star film.
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| copyright Focus Features |
This movie is absurd. Intentionally so. There is something of Luis Bunuel about it, but by saying that I don't mean to suggest that it's a good movie, or even an entertaining one. This is an art-house movie that seems intended to give a host of well-known popular actors a resumé line that will show they have real chops and are not just in it for the money: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Richard Ayouade, Scarlett Johansson, and others who are probably familiar to European audiences but not to me. This strikes me as odd, because none of them need that kind of validation.
So maybe I'm wrong; it happens. But here they all deliver ludicrous lines in service of an intentionally ludicrous plot with a flatness and lack of emotional investment that, by the end, made me wish devoutly that one of the crossbow bolts (an absurd plot point, one of many with no real purpose) had gone just a little off track and taken out somebody important behind the camera, thus derailing this production. The only acting skill anyone showed is the ability to keep a straight face.
If you want to know what this film's story is, read the hagiographic version that appears on its Wikipedia page; I can't be bothered.
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| copyright Sky Cinema |
Someone in Hollywood -- I'm guessing Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, who wrote this film -- had the idea of pairing an ever-righteous hero with an equally righteous superspy type. In this case, it's Josh Hartnett playing the righteous hero. He has been in a surprising number of movies and TV shows I've never heard of, and more than a few that I have, but never, so far as I can tell, in a truly major role. Yet I recognize his name, so he must have made some kind of impression on me at some point. I just don't know when, where or why.
Here he plays a former Secret Service agent whose properly developed sense of right and wrong got him canned by corrupt US Government bosses, and for two years he's been living off the grid in Bangkok, drinking and keeping his honour intact. Now his ex-girlfriend Katherine Brunt (played by Katee Sackhoff) needs him to do a job for her, and as incentive offers to clear his name. He's to capture and bring in a person called the Ghost, someone whose identity is unknown, but who is apparently able to do anything wanted to disrupt the world's economy.
Somehow, after an unexplained bombing in Bangkok, the Ghost's travel plans show up in a coded chat post in Mandarin on the Dark Web. Brunt has no assets on the ground there, so she hitches up her britches and calls her old boyfriend to beg him to please, please, please get on a flight to San Francisco, identify and capture this Ghost person, and deliver this mysterious entity to her employers. He agrees, and the movie can proceed.
But it turns out that this Ghost has pissed off a lot of people around the world, governments and organized criminal gangs alike. Everybody has a price on the Ghost's head, and everybody has become aware of the Ghost's travel plans. Consequently, the plane is crammed full of assassins looking to kill the Ghost, and by the way they want Hartnett's character out of the way, too, one bounty-hunter to another.
Now we've got a plot, and a vehicle that will deliver about two hours of good, clean, bloody fun. I won't bother describing the action; it's not quite up to Jason Bourne or Mission:Impossible standards, but it's at least as good as in, oh, the John Wick franchise, and funnier. And as for the characterizations, I found them enjoyable if a little too pious on occasion. Fortunately, there's not a lot of chit-chat beyond cracking jokes in this movie, so it's kind of like church service on Super Bowl Sunday: cogent and concise, and then move on. There's even a plot twist near the end that you just knew had to happen, but it still came as a surprise when it did. And there's a final scene that's only there to set up a possible sequel.
I kind of hope that happens. This was a fun movie, one well-enough done in writing and filming to make me willing to see these characters again.
That's it for Week One. My first batch of nine films only lasted five days, so I'm off to the library to replenish the supply. Week Two will probably start tonight, because let's face it, I really don't have anything better to do.
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