Pretty much anyone who’s not a Republican has come to face the reality that global climate change is upon us. Weather patterns are disrupted, droughts are ravaging several continents, and whole eco-systems are crashing. Assuming that you don’t attribute this to either A) perfectly normal circumstances or B) God’s wrath at us for electing Obama, then it’s time to admit Al Gore may have had a point with that slideshow Of course, this turn of events confronts humanity with a score of very complicated problems: a dwindling global food supply, climate-based migration destabilizing the globe, and—possibly most dire—mutated killer polar bears. Yeah, those are a thing in the case of the B-movie Unnatural.

Unnatural begins in a remote Alaska lab, where biologist Hannah Lindval is noticing some weird results from their experiments with some polar bears. Seems their attempts to make them hardier and more resistant to climate-change has turned one particular bear into a rampaging monster. Well, that’s not good, but before she can do anything about it the bear gets loose and kills everyone in the lab (which seems more like a when thing than an if thing).

Uh, guys maybe you should start with the seals first…

Meanwhile, someplace in unspecified Alaska, hunter and guide Martin Nakos (James Remar) welcomes a fashion photographer named Brooking (Ron Carlson) and his crew to the remote mountain cabin Nakos shares with his, uh, daughter I guess, Lily (Q’orianka Kilcher). The crew consists of a couple models (Allegra Carpenter and Ivana Korab) and his assistant DeLana (Stephanie Hodes).

You’re gonna need a bigger gun, dude.

These big-city folk are almost ludicrously terrible, with Brooking taking top douchebag honors by continually referring to the Native Alaskans as “Eskimos” and generally displaying about the same level sensitivity as that “Nanook of the North” documentary. The models, for their part just sulk and complain about the lack of Wifi. This movie isn’t a very good advertisement for models, the fashion industry or humanity in general.

Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with them for too long, as the polar interrupts of a bikini shoot to chomp down one of the models. This movie doesn’t really ratchet up the tension so much as just lob it into your lap. Well, everyone holes up in the cabin, where, a few kills later, it becomes clear this is no ordinary polar bear.

Well that didn’t go as planned…

During one of his forays outside the cabin, Nakis finds a half-frozen Hannah, who he brings back to the cabin to recover. Once she’s up and talking again, she promptly lies through her teeth and is all like, “Yeah, big polar bear. Damndest thing.” Well, from here the movie basically becomes Ten Little Indians only with a giant, mutant polar bear (which is, if I understand correctly, faithful to the early drafts of Agatha Christie’s novel).

Make no mistake, Unnatural is a very, very bad movie. Director Hank Braxtan gets a lot of mileage out of his stunning location and his seasoned actors (Remar and Kilcher are excellent together), but the story is so lazily-constructed that it doesn’t matter. The characters are all disposable polar bear-chow, anyway.

Pocahontas ain’t taking no crap.

So if you’re not putting any work into the story or the characters, the polar bear must be pretty damn impressive, right? Well, not so much. Most of the time its scenes are shot with such a shaking, frenetic camera it impossible to see anything. The few times we do see it with some clarity it looks like—I kid you not—a St. Bernard in a polar bear costume. I kind of hope that’s what they used. At least some part of this movie would be interesting.

Well, this part was interesting.

In the end, I guess we’re supposed to see the evil corporation as the villain of the movie, despite the fact they’re just trying to help nature survive the warming climate. I guess humble, salt-of-the-earth Martin and Lily are our ostensible heroes, but given how casually they’re dispatched, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. I’m really not 100% where this movie’s sympathies lie.

Bottom line, I guess, is that climate change just sucks on every level.

I think in the 1980s there was some kind of an epidemic of partners being murdered. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure the only reason any homicides were solved at all in the ‘80s was because a cop’s partner was the victim. Like, 90% of the police work being done was in service of avenging a partner. Fortunately, avenging one’s partner allows for some pretty wide latitude (stealing from undercover FBI agents, invading Japan, etc.) In this, 1986’s No Mercy is a pretty straightforward example of the genre, notable only for its leads and the respective trajectories of their careers.

No Mercy can best be encapsulated as “Chicago cop in the Big Easy (or close to it).” It begins in the middle of a typically brutal Chicago winter, with undercover cop Eddie Jillette (Richard Gere) and his partner Joe Collins (Eddie Basarba) busting a low-level drug dealer. The dealer, however, confesses that he’d been contacted by a player from New Orleans to commit a murder for hire. Dissatisfied with their underwhelming drug bust Eddie and Joe decide to meet the player and bust him for contracting a murder. Naturally, they don’t inform anyone in the department of this, because in the ‘80s keeping your supervisors in the loop was totally for pussies.

I don’t have time for a warrant, I’m too busy glowering.

Well, the player (Terry Kinney) shows with a beautiful piece of arm-candy named Michel Duval and played by a luminous Kim Basinger. So far so good. Except that as Eddie and Joe try and separate the two and get the full story, the intended target—as Eddie learns, he’s a crime lord named Losado (Jeroen Krabbe)—shows up and totally lays waste to the whole operation by gutting Joe like a fish and blowing up the would-be client with a rifle-launched grenade. Because that’s how we did in the ‘80s.

Naturally, Eddie’s not just going to sit around and let his partner’s murderer get apprehended by another state’s authorities. Instead, he heads to the hot, languid land of Louisiana to hunt Losado down. And of course he does this without informing the NOPD of the case, his partner’s murder or even his presence in their city as an armed law enforcement officer. Because in the ’80s cops cared fuck-all about jurisdiction.

After some traditional ‘80s police work (read: being such a colossal dick you pretty much guarantee no one will cooperate with you), he’s steered in the direction of the town of Algiers, just across the river from New Orleans. Algiers is a moodily-lit den of inequity seemingly under Losado’s complete control. There, Eddie find Michel, whom he promptly handcuffs himself to because…uh…honestly, I’m not sure of his end game there.

How’s that investigation going, Eddie?

As you can expect, things go tits-up almost immediately with Eddie and Michel fleeing Losado and his armed thugs like a sexxxay version of the Defiant Ones. Along the way—hold on here, this is a major twist—they fall in love. I know, mindblower right! The two beautiful leads totally hook up.

Well, eventually the NOPD catches up with Eddie and try and send him back to Chicago, but when his boss (George Dzundza) shows up, rather than put him on a plane to face an Internal Affairs investigation, he hands Eddie a case containing a shotgun, .357 Magnum revolver and Beretta 92F semi-auto and orders Eddie to take Losado off the board. Police supervision was different in the ‘80s.

Okay, so yadda yadda yadda, it ends with Eddie going all Home Alone on Losado in a dilapidated Algiers flophouse after Michel flees to him for protection. Eddie kills Losado and his goons and the two of them walk off into the murky New Orleans sunrise, having just burned a local business to the ground.

You know, you could just let the fire do your job for you and not expose yourself to any danger. Just a thought.

Obviously No Mercy is a piece of simple-minded ‘80s pulp, but it does have its charms. First off, the movie—directed by never-was Richard Pearce—looks pretty great. He coats every scene in the appropriately lurid noirish trappings—steam and grime for the frozen Chicago winter, chintz and neon for New Orleans streets, haze and sweat for the bayou. It’s not terribly creative, but this isn’t a movie that’s shooting for creativity. Besides, there’s something to be said for doing the utterly conventional and predictable with competence.

The screenplay by James Carbatsos does a good job of humanizing Michel and Eddie. Well, mostly Michel. While Eddie is a typical Chicago hothead, Michel is a genuinely tragic figure—a kept woman, having been sold to Losado when she was 13 and living as his slave ever since. This causes a few moments of sharp pain, such as when Eddie realizes that Michel is illiterate, or the finely observed scene when Eddie pauses from booby-trapping the flophouse to shake his head at an especially sad anecdote she blithely shares.

“So…any compunctions about being MY chattel now?”

As the leads, both Gere and Basinger bring a lot more talent than the movie necessarily deserves. They were both in interesting places in their respective careers at this point. Gere was just beginning his mid-‘80s freefall after a hot streak of American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Breathless. From 1983 until his career comeback with 1990’s Pretty Woman, Gere would mostly struggle with forgettable movies and destructive rumors about his personal life (don’t tell me you haven’t heard the gerbil story).

But if Gere was on the downslope, Basinger’s star was burning the hottest it ever would. Just a year after her jaw-dropping performance in 9 ½ Weeks, she was the walking definition of sex appeal, living short-hand for erotic tension. Putting Basinger in a movie was the equivalent of tossing a concussion grenade into a party—it basically ensures no one’s going to be able to see, hear, or think straight for a time.

As seen here.

The two of them make their generic leads more interesting and relatable than they have any right to be. Gere cranks up his swagger and bluster, playing it against his relatively diminutive stature to hint at a streak of insecurity that just slightly undermines Eddie’s tough-guy act. Basinger, for her part, knows when and how to employ her natural sweetness to contrast it to Michel’s truly horrific life story.

Unfortunately, the movie indulges in some lazy ‘80s mindlessness when it comes to Losado. Krabbe does his best to make his bayou crime legend terrifying, but the reality is that he’s just so ridiculous it’s hard to take him seriously. Incapable of managing a credible Cajun accent, clad in a black duster and leather gloves regardless of the climate (he wears the same outfit in frigid Chicago as well as sweltering Algiers), Losado is a cartoon character. Who, exactly he is, what his feelings toward Michel are—hell, the very nature of his criminal enterprise is totally elided over.

That coat is 90% of his personality.

So that’s No Mercy. It’s basically just a B-movie, but it’s a good one.

“The job is done, and the bitch is dead.”

Those words—Bond’s penultimate line of dialogue from Casino Royale– provide the engine for Quantum of Solace. The 22^nd film in the franchise follows James Bond on a mission of vengence for the death of his lover Vesper Lynd, but also one of forgiveness and personal rehabilitation. Throughout the film, Bond seems to be desperately trying to believe those words, and finally contending with the emotional consequences when he can’t. In the end director Marc Forster uses that engine to deliver a fast, flawed, and occasionally frustrating movie, but ultimately the most fascinating addition to the James Bond canon.

Picking up an hour after CR, QoS eschews the Bond gunbarrel sequence for a helicopter pan over the West coast of Italy, before joining Bond in the midst of a rolling gun battle with security guards for Mr. White, the mysterious underworld figure who glided through Casino Royale (if you haven’t committed that movie to memory the way I have, you should probably re-watch it before you see Quantum). A brief, ill-fated interrogation of White leads to a thrilling chase through Siena, Italy and provides MI6 with the evidence of the existence of a vast underworld organization called Quantum. It also provides Bond with a slim, but serviceable lead on one of their operatives. Pulling away at the threads of the organization leads Bond to Haiti where he runs across the two other leads in the film. First is the villain, Dominic Greene, a smug Euro-weenie played to smarmy perfection by Mathieu Amalric (who played Eric Bana’s French contact in Munich). Greene is some kind of eco-industrialist with an interest in installing a military dictatorship in Bolivia. The second is Camille (Olga Kurylenko), daughter of the soon-to-be military dictator’s old (and murdered) associate. Camille is a dusky beauty whose sexual magnetism is all but short-circuited by her desire for revenge against her father’s killer. In this, she makes the perfect companion for Bond in this outing.

But tangling with Greene, puts Bond on the wrong side of a CIA operation run, in part, by a discontented Felix Leiter (Jeffery Wright. After a surveillance op at an Austrian, avant garde production of Tosca goes wildly (and hypnotically) wrong, Bond ends up railroaded by the CIA and on the run from MI6. Now an international fugitive with little in the way of support, he turns to Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), his avuncular contact from CR (“Just because you are dead, doesn’t mean you can’t still be helpful”). There’s still some bad blood between the two of them, since Bond had Mathis arrested and interrogated as a traitor at the end of that film, but they get past it the way two men in their business would. With Mathis’s support Bond chases Greene to Latin America, and, eventually, to a final confrontation in the Bolivian desert.

Since I’m an eternal optimist we’ll get the film’s missteps out of the way first. For the most part, they’re a result of the movie’s pace and tempo. Making it a dead sprint leads to a couple of scenes that simply don’t make sense (a boat chase in which there’s no way Bond could know who the bad guys are from his vantage point; a colleague sleeps with him moments after meeting him for the first time; some sympathetic characters are offed for no reason other than to move things along). Forester also doesn’t always know how to handle his action sequences. He had the Paul Greengrass disoriento-vision trick down pat, but while the Bourne movies always made clear the outcome and collateral damage of his action scenes, several action setpieces in QoS leave the viewer wondering just what happened to whom (one chase involving a tactical team doesn’t even conclude, so much as Forester seems to lose interest in it and changes the scene). Finally, in hewing—even marginally—to the Bond formula, QoS offers us an end knock-down in the villain’s exploding headquarters. Not only is it far too familiar, it suffers in comparison to CR’s genuinely unique finale with a sinking building.

But thankfully, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and Forester deserves some props for making QoS the first Bond movie with a distinct visual style beyond simple kinetic action sequences. He brings an existential, meditative quality to the film that plays like a fusion of Michael Mann and Gus Van Sant (imagine Collateral crossed with Gerry). The shootout at Tosca is easily the most stylized sequence ever included in a Bond film, and several scenes leading to the finale featuring a post-modern hotel in the middle of a featureless desertscape border on the surreal. The locations feel gritty and authentic (unlike the Brosnan-era habit of using an establishing shot, then transitioning to a soundstage), and the onscreen titles identifying the locations are done in different scripts and fonts and float over the scene rather than just appear in the corner of screen. For the first time in a long while, we have a Bond film that’s interesting to look at.

The movie also pays off in the quieter scenes when it always itself to breathe and brood along with its main character. Much has been made of Daniel Craig’s brutish, bruising interpretation of bond, but the most interesting observation I’ve heard came from TenFeet, who pointed out that Craig’s Bond was so emotionally vulnerable he necessitated the physical bulk to be taken seriously as an action hero. That vulnerability is on display in several scenes in QoS, establishing him as a deeper, more interesting Bond than we’ve ever had before. No other actor could pull off the heartbreaking, death’s bed conversation he has with one character (nor the nerve-deadness of the following scene where he disposes of the body). Likewise, in no earlier Bond film have we had a scene of such emotional complexity as the one in which Bond drinks alone and pores over a photo he’s stolen from M of Vesper and her boyfriend. Bond and Camille’s terse, Hemingwayesque dialogue before setting out on their twin missions of retribution is probably the most blunt, honest exchange ever written for a Bond film. The final scene, while not nearly as iconic as that of CR, is nonetheless bold in its own right by being an intimate, internal conclusion to Bond’s character arc (can’t say much more without spoiling the movie, but suffice it say that we’re a long way from “Who says Christmas only comes once a year?”).

Quantum of Solace is a frustrating movie. I wish the plot hung together more tightly. I wish Bond’s gun-handling skills were more realistic, as they were in CR. I wish Jeffery Wright had more scenes and that his boss, the CIA station chief, didn’t look like he’d just stepped out of a ‘70s cop show or a ‘90s gay-porn film. I wish they hadn’t tried to work in a half-assed homage to Goldfinger. But none of those things are deal-breakers, because Quantum left so many scenes stuck in my mind like nettles the way any good film should. It also pushes the franchise closer to a maturity it’s never had, which makes it interesting to speculate where the next film will take the character. It’s unclear at the end whether Bond has earned his quantum of solace, but I know I have. 

Bond is back.

Skyfall, the 23^rd entry in the 007 franchise, comes to us six years after Daniel Craig’s debut as James Bond in Casino Royale, and four years after the interesting, but developmentally-compromised Quantum of Solace, and with itwe finally get the James Bond film we have been waiting for: a return to all the things that make this franchise so beloved—gadgets, girls, foreign locations, intrigue—but also a film possessed of an emotional nuance not seen before in the franchise. It’s also finally recognized what the past 17 years of Bond films have mostly missed: the best Bond girl is Judi Dench.

The movie begins with a breakneck pre-credits sequence set in Istanbul, in which Bond and a fellow agent, Eve (Naomie Harris—now, proud holder of a place on my list of “Chicks I Want to Live on My Island and Bear My Uber–Children”) race to recover a stolen hard drive containing the identities of various deep-cover agents. Throughout the first of many thrilling action set-pieces, several fateful decisions are made, which will resonate throughout the rest of the film. The most obvious being Eve’s errant rifle shot, which clips Bond by mistake and sends him plummeting into the sea.

Things are good on the island, Naomie. We have a Komodo dragon pit

A few weeks and one elegiac, Adele-themed credits sequence later, we find that Bond has chosen to go AWOL and convalesce by escaping to a beach-town, drinking-heavily, and banging beautiful women (really, what else would you expect?) When the mysterious terrorist who stole the aforementioned drive blows up MI6 in a statement to M, Bond returns from retirement.

Alas, he’s a bit rough around the edges. His bullet-wounds have healed poorly, he’s in a lousy physical shape, and he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with his Walther PPK if he was standing inside it. He also harbors no small amount of resentment toward M for the decisions she made during the Istanbul mission (he’s cool with Eve, since she was just following orders, and, hey, she’s hot). M, under pressure from Thomas Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), the Minister of Whateverthefuck, clears Bond for duty and sends him after the drive.

This mission will take him to Shanghai, and then Macao, before Bond confronts Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem, clearly having a blast), a betrayed spy, who aims to make M pay for a past betrayal. It’s here where the film breaks with tradition in making the bad guy’s quest purely a personal one. Yeah, sure, Sean Bean was also motivated by revenge in Goldeneye, but that was a part of a larger plan, In Skyfall, Silva just wants to make M pay.

That’s a nice watch.

So, where do you start with Skyfall? First off, this is easily the best-looking Bond film ever made. Quantum had some striking images, but A-list director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition), has created a visual palette that matches the sensualist heart of the Bond franchise. The films have always been travelogues, but since The Spy Who Loved Me, they’ve mostly fallen down in terms of immersing us in exotic locations—generally settling for a couple of dazzling stock-footage skyline shots. In Skyfall, Mendes plunges us into locations, so brilliantly-filmed you can practically taste their air. Shanghai is neon-drenched mega-city. A high-class casino in Macao is an Orientalist fantasia, gorgeously lit in rich reds and umber, and featuring beautiful Asian women and a Komodo dragon pit (because, apparently, Mendes has seen the inside of my brain).

Pictured: My happy place (not shown: Gong Li, Komodo dragon pit)

Skyfall also makes good on the promise Craig brought to the franchise in the wake of a several high-performing, but uninspired Pierce Brosnan 007 entries. By casting an unconventionally-attractive actor, the producers hoped to bring new life to the formula with a more complex portrayal of what had become a stock male fantasy figure.  We got a bit of that in Casino Royale, but in Quantum of Solace, most of Craig’s performance got lost in the film’s bullet-to-the-head immediacy. With Skyfall, the filmmakers allow Craig to exercise his acting ability beyond just breaking someone’s limbs by giving us an injured, conflicted Bond. It’s an idea they’ve played with before (The World is Not Enough, License to Kill), but usually chucked in favor of not disturbing the formula too much.

This film, in contrast, pretty much demands that Craig invest Bond with a realism and naturalism not seen before in the franchise. Above all, Skyfall is about regret, and to that end, it explores the fraught relationship Bond has with M. Introduced in Goldeneye as a largely-humorless foil for Bond, a mother/son dynamic slowly worked its way into Dench’s portrayal. That pays dividends here, as the story establishes the prickly, professional bonds that bind them. Bond isn’t just an outlet for M’s stymied maternal instincts, but more like the prodigal son whose nature of challenging her at every turn has endeared him to her above all others—though she’d rather die than admit that.

This picture has nothing to do with the preceding paragraph.  It just looks cool.

All of this culminates in a climactic conflagration that both lays our main characters open emotionally and readjusts the franchise, putting it back on familiar ground. The film’s coda isn’t quite as satisfying as Bond canoodling in bed with Naomie Harris, but it’s reassuring all the same.

If all this seems unrelentingly grim, I should point out that Skyfall is lighter and funnier than the last two films put together. More than a few people have commented that the biggest problem with Craig’s portrayal of Bond is that he never seems to be enjoying himself (as if Timothy Dalton was a barrel of monkeys), but that’s nicely rectified here. If Craig really does want out of his contract (no, please God, no), he certainly doesn’t show it.

Dan, I have thirteen bucks in my wallet. It’s yours if you promise to do the next two films.

Yes, I have my quibbles with Skyfall. I wish it wasn’t so Glock-happy (really, Hollywood, there are other, better handguns out there), and I wish the gunplay had been as realistic as it was in Casino Royale. Bond’s liaison with the sexually-damaged bad girl Severine (the stunning Bernice Lim Marlohe) is over almost as soon as it begins, and he really should have spent more time in bed with Naomie Harris. I can’t emphasize that enough.

How does she *do* that?

Nonetheless, Skyfall is an amazing movie. A truly self-possessed Bond film that gives us a moody, introspective plot, a complex hero in James Bond, and the most satisfying character arc we’ve seen maybe ever. Fifty years after Ian Fleming saw his creation created onscreen (and lamented that the film was so terrible it would destroy his reputation), the James Bond franchise shows us that it’s not only capable of still delivering the goods, but of exploring uncharted territory. Hell, there’s probably another 50 years left in it.

Plus: Komodo dragon. Seriously, Komodo freaking dragon!

If you’ve followed this blog even casually, you know that I’m a James Bond superfan and roundly consider the Daniel Craig installments to be a human achievement roughly on par with the pyramids, Hoover Dam, and, well, democracy. And you would be right to assume that I might not be the most impartial of critics when it comes to James Bond movies. I will admit that if Spectre, the 24 entry in the James Bond franchise, consisted of nothing but 120 minutes of Daniel Craig reading aloud from a Nicolas Sparks novel and punching a dolphin in the face I’d probably leave the theater thinking, Well that was a bold direction to take the character and then immediately buy the limited edition Omega watch.

Still, I’d like to think my love for the franchise also gives me a keen sense of what should and should not be in a Bond movie. And Spectre pretty much gives us mostly the former with a little of the latter.

“Are you ready to get back to work?”

“With pleasure, M. With pleasure.”

That exchange—the last lines of dialogue before the triumphant horns blare Monty Norman’s James Bond theme—ended the previous 007 entry, Skyfall, with both a declaration and a promise: Bond was back, and Bond would be back. Of course, Daniel Craig owned the Bond role from his first scene in Casino Royale, but closing Skyfall in the familiar mahogany-appointed office with the padded door told us that now–having introduced a mop-topped hacker Q and a tougher, more action-oriented Moneypenny–the 007 franchise would steer away from the stripped-down post-9/11 aesthetics that characterized Craig’s first two adventures and back to the familiar formula. Spectre does exactly that.

Somehow I get the feeling any boat ride with 007 ends this way.

This film opens perfectly: i.e. with the traditional 007 gunbarrel sequence. This leads into a bravura pre-credits sequence set at a Day of the Dead street carnival in Mexico City. As with all things 007, this sequence involves a beautiful woman, gunplay, massive explosions, and, for good measure, a helicopter doing things that are nearly aerodynamically impossible. On top of that it features an amazing, seemingly uninterrupted tracking shot that can’t be seen as anything other than a bit of swagger from returning director Sam Mendes.

Any movie that starts with her is already off to a good start.

After the requisite title sequence, we hit all the familiar notes: Bond has a meeting with M, meets with Q, then heads off on his next adventure. This one has Bond investigating a shadowy cabal known as SPECTRE, and if you’re familiar with the canon you know that SPECTRE is a global crime syndicate that specializes in supervillains with fondness for secret lairs and a penchant for killing its own members. Rest assured, we get both here.

Heading SPECTRE, as we all know, is a sinister megalomaniac named Ernst Stavro Blofeld. And, yes, Blofeld is here, too. Bond’s pursuit of Blofeld takes him to the Austrian mountains, a sinister Italian estate, and a bizarre compound in North Africa. Along the way he confronts his old nemesis Mr. White (last seen plucked from MI6’s clutches in Quantum of Solace), romances an Italian widow (the ravishing Monica Bellucci), and an enigmatic doctor (the gorgeous Lea Seydoux), and eventually forces him to face an old, buried secret. He also tangles with a menacing, bruiser of a hitman named Mr. Hinx (David Bautista, doing some great, understated work), sucks down martinis, wears great suits, and tools around in an Aston Martin that somehow manages to be sexier than the female leads.

Well, almost sexier.

In other words, it’s formula Bond. And in my book that’s just fine. Spectre has gotten a lot of flack from critics (particularly American film critics) for just this formula, but I come down strictly on the side of the traditional Bond elements. Look, when I order a steak dinner, I expect a slab of dead cow flanked by a big potato and some vegetables I can ignore. The fact that it’s a predictable meal doesn’t make the steak taste any different. The preparation does that. If I want a different dinner I’ll order something else off the menu. 

Casino Royale jettisoned most of these conventions as a course-correction from the increasingly-outlandish Brosnan installments. The fact that Spectre incorporates them does not—not!—make this film the second coming of Die Another Day. The fact is, these elements, as handled by Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, deliver the goods. Even following the 53 year-old template, Spectre is still exciting, romantic, and engaging. The love scenes are genuinely sexy (if you’re not moved by the sight of Monica Belluci lazing on a bed in a corset and garters, you might be dead), and the action sequences hit on all cylinders—a fight scene staged on a series of train cars is genuinely gripping and suspenseful.

And this is why it’s good to be James Bond.

As Bond, Daniel Craig continues to explore the character in ways his predecessors never did. Rather than wear Bond’s vices like a fashion accessory, Craig uses them as signifiers of a spiritual emptiness hinted at in Fleming’s books. Even his loyalty to his work seems at times to be a coping mechanism for a man well-aware of his personal incompleteness. This is used to bring some depth of emotion to his romance with Seydoux’s Madeline Swann. If their relationship doesn’t have the same chemistry as the one between Bond and Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, it’s still more substantial than most.

They’re actually a pretty good match.

Additionally, Spectre is simply a gorgeous movie. Roger Deakins’ transcendent cinematography is barely missed as Hoyte Van Hoytema serves up a visual palate so deep and rich you practically want to devour it. The nighttime car chase through Rome is easily the most gorgeous thing committed to film all year, and many of his scenes in the villain’s lair have a disorienting, dreamlike quality that harkens back to the avant garde set design of the Connery-era.

That said, Spectre suffers for its 150-plus minute run time. The first two thirds speed by, but like a runner who started the race too fast, the film begins to flag in its final act. A car/plane chase in the Austrian mountains is surprisingly conventional and uninspired (they should have made it a ski chase), and a character-building scene in Tangier drags things to a crawl without necessarily paying off the way the filmmakers seemed to have hoped.

Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

If the film definitively falls down in any place it’s in the final action set piece. It looks great, and the action is staged well, but on the whole it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It’s a disappointment compared to the narratively-clear and well-executed climaxes of the previous Bond films. Still, Bond films often tend to get ragged as they close on the finish line, so this too is part of the formula.

This picture has nothing to do with the preceding paragraph. It just looks cool.

Spectre doesn’t top Skyfall, but I’m not sure it could. That film was damn near perfect, and had the benefit of using the franchise’s 50th anniversary to meditate on the passage of time—a weighty theme Spectre doesn’t have the luxury of exploring. Still, it’s a top-notch entry in the franchise. Bond is indeed back and giving us what we’ve come to expect. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ron Howard’s new film In the Heart of the Sea is based on the non-fiction account of an actual incident that helped inform Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Now, as I’ve said before, I—like most human beings—have never read Moby Dick (is it even in print anymore?), but I have seen a lot of the movies that stole its’ themes, so I know the basic story: William Shatner kills the White Whale’s wife, so the White Whale spends the rest of the book trying to get his revenge before he’s killed by the Borg. And that’s pretty much what happens in this movie. With some starvation and cannibalism thrown in for good measure.

In the Heart of the Sea is based upon Nathanial Philbrick’s book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whale Ship Essex, which is, itself, based upon a few survivors’ accounts that manage to have even more complex and unwieldy titles in that 1800 style that basically give a complete synopsis of the story such as The Story of the Whale Ship Essex Which was Totally Pwned by a Big-Ass Whale, Forcing Us to Be Lost at Sea and Eventually Nom-Nom on Each Other to Survive and Who Are You to Judge Me?

“Um, we’re boned.”

But first the story…uh…did you read the above? Yeah, that’s pretty much it. The film the follows the story of Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), who goes to sea as First Officer of the aged whaling vessel Essex, after having been screwed out of a captaincy of his own. Instead, command is given to George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) a rookie with family connections and not a lot of instinct for the job.

So, from the outset there is tension. Chase thinks Pollard is an incompetent blue-blood, and Pollard thinks Chase is undeserving son of a farmer (I guess that’s a faux pas in whaling culture). Still, there are lamps to be lit and whalebone corsets to be made, and hey, those majestic creatures aren’t going to hunt themselves to the brink of extinction, right? So they head out.

Welp, time to rape the environment…

Eventually, the dearth of whales leads the Essex way the hell out to sea—far past the point they should have gone—and that’s where things go seriously Pete Tong as they confront a super-mega-banzai whale (which happens to be white). Said whale goes all bitchcakes on the Essex and ends up sending it to the bottom in a fiery, explosion-filled sequence (side note: how much a screw-up of a captain do you have to be to manage to blow up your wooden sailing vessel?)

For the rest of the movie, the survivors of the Essex drift in some leaky whaling boats, trying to make the 2000-mile journey back to land. In the process, they battle against starvation, dehydration, and their own failing faculties. Oh, and for good measure, the whale shows up every so often to screw with them a little bit, because this whale is a bit of dick.

“Come at me, brah!”

I mention the source material of this story to better understand the inherent dippiness of the story’s framing device. In it, a young Herman Melville seeks out one of the survivors of the Essex and badgers him into telling him his story, convinced that it’ll make a hella awesome novel that will inform the best of the Star Trek movies. The survivor–who was a young whelp on his first voyage to sea when the events of the movie took place–also had the ability to know things and dialogue he wasn’t present for, so I guess he’s, like, psychic or something.  

And this is the major problem with In the Heart of the Sea. Despite being based on a true story (and flogging that fact like hell won’t have it in the promotional material), the movie still structures itself and plays out more like a cinematic event than the retelling of a true story. Along with the dopey framing device, we have the pat conflict between Chase and Pollard, and pretty much all of the major characters have traditional character arcs. None of this seems the slightest bit ragged or naturalistic.

Let’s see…a black-powder musket versus a giant, pissed-off whale. Yeah, that’s gonna end well.

Additionally, Howard seems reticent to totally commit the more brutal elements of the story. The killing and rendering of a whale is presented fairly perfunctorily and largely bloodlessly. The ordeal in the lifeboats only seems to make the actors skinnier in one scene (prior to that they just get more shirtless and ripped the longer the characters go without food), and it never seems to affect Hemsworth’s awesome hair. On top of that, the scenes in which the survivors resort to cannibalism are resented far more demurely and understated than a horror like that should be. I mean, Howard didn’t have to go full Green Inferno, but at least he could have someone gnawing on a thighbone or something.

Hobbling things further are the leads. As Pollard, Benjamin Walker is as charisma-free as he was in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. He does his best, but he’s just so forgettable. Still, competent and forgettable is better than the ongoing train wreck that is Hemsworth’s line-deliveries. I don’t know what, exactly, he was going for, but his Owen Chase alternately sounds like Thor, his character from Blackhat, or else he employs a stilted aristocratic British accent, and sometimes tosses in an overdone Baaaahstahn accent. Halfway through the movie I began to wonder of he was supposed to have that Sybil disease.

Whaler or male-model? You decide.

The whale attacks are pretty effective, but Howard keeps going back to the same fish-eye close-up shots, and after a while it begins to get repetitive. Also, there are several scenes in which the CGI backgrounds are rendered with a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow level artificiality.

Anyway, that’s In the Heart of the Sea. I guess if you’re going to run around on the high seas poking the most powerful animals of earth with small pointy things, you’re probably just asking for it.

Well, by Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been released to near-universal acclaim and a box office haul roughly on par with whatever the Visigoth’s made off with when they left Rome in the rear-view mirror. It was as if on December 18^th, the world let out a collective sigh of relief that the Star Wars franchise could once again be associated with a quality movie. But this does somewhat of a disservice to the prequel trilogy. I mean, they weren’t all bad, right? There was some stuff they did pretty well, and–I daresay it—better than The Force Awakens. To wit…

Nigh-incomprehensible plots: The plot of The Force Awakens can pretty much be summed up in one sentence: Rey meets Finn and BB-8, who has a secret map to Luke Skywalker’s location, and must run from the sinister First Order to get the map to the Resistance. Easy one. Now try and explain the plot machinations of Attack of the Clones. Ha! How many sentences did that take you? Probably a full paragraph, I’ll wager. I mean, you got assassination attempts on Senator Amidala, a mysterious bounty hunter who’s also providing genetic fodder for a clone army, Count Dooku, who is in league with some cockroach aliens who are building a robot army, plus the stalking subplot burgeoning romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padme. Also, Anakin really doesn’t like sand. Now that’s a plotline. I mean, who needs this silly, straightforward story when you can have a good half-dozen plotlines stuffed into a two-hour movie. I mean, I could understand everything that was going on in The Force Awakens, which must mean it’s not a very smart movie, because Lord knows I’m not very smart.

If you can diagram the plot that led to this event, FermaLab will hire you on the spot.

More politics: The Force Awakens glances on the topic of intergalactic politics. There is a Republic—presumably reinstituted after the fall of the Empire—and a resurgent Empire now known as The First Order. Standing against The First Order is the Resistance, which the Republic supports. The relationship is between the Resistance and the Republic is never made clear, and here is where The Force Awakens really falls down. Director JJ Abrams and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan miss a huge opportunity for some political discussions. I mean, it’s bad enough we never get to see the Senate chamber—that iconic location form the prequels—but we never even get any scenes of politicians arguing or voting or making back-room deals. Instead, what do we get? A lot of laser gun fights and spaceship battles, and human drama. I mean, it’s like the filmmakers don’t even know what Star Wars is.

More filibustering! More!

Far less flashy acting: You know what’s distracting? When you’re trying to enjoy a perfectly good political debate about trade routes or tax representation, and some very accomplished actor or actress keeps making it all about them by putting in a great performance. In The Force Awakens it’s like every friggin’ person is played by a good actor doing a great job with their performance. The prequel trilogy smoothly avoided this issue by casting the likes of Hayden Christensen and Jake Lloyd—actors who couldn’t turn in a decent performance if it meant the firing squad—as well as doing some kind of voodoo to drain all the life and vitality out of decent performers like Natalie Portman, Ewan MacGregor, and Liam Neeson. I mean, how are we supposed to appreciate the awesomeness that is General Greivous if I’m distracted by how human-sounding Natalie Portman sounds. Yeah, we never had that problem with the prequels.

Stop it! Stop making me believe you as characters!

Racism: When I saw that John Boyega had been cast as one of the leads of The Force Awakens, I have to admit that I felt some trepidation. I mean, the prequel trilogy had taught me to expect a certain amount of coded racism in the guise of CGI aliens. I really wasn’t sure how well it would go over if they were just blatantly insulting the black guy. Imagine my surprise then when The Force Awakens turned out to have no racism at all. That’s not what I’ve come to expect from modern-day Star Wars. I mean, in The Phantom Menace alone we have a CGI Stepin Fetchitt character, a CGI Jewish moneylender, and practical effect “yellow peril” aliens that sound like a more racist version of Charlie Chan. The Force Awakens? No CGI racism, no racist voices from the 1930s radio serials, nothing. It’s like the filmmakers went out of their way to be inclusive with this movie. WTF?

One of Jar Jar’s less offensive scenes.

They were almost female-free: The original trilogy had probably the biggest gender-imbalance of a popular series since, I dunno, The Rat Patrol maybe. Now this great when I was five years-old and still in my “girls are icky,” phase, but little did I expect George Lucas was going to be good enough to extend this sensibility to the prequel trilogy, with Padme Amidala taking the Leia role “only woman in the galaxy.” The Force Awakens has women pilots, women leaders, even a woman lead character! The hell? Say what you will about the prequel trilogy, but they understood that a woman’s place in the Star Wars universe is either to be a love interest or sacrificed to Tuskin Raiders.

Gross! Stay out of my space fantasy, you harpy!

So, I think you’ll agree that the prequels aren’t nearly as bad as their reputation would suggest. As a matter of fact, the prequels are actually better than The Force Awakens in some ways…provided you’re a weird, anti-social, sexless, emotionally-stunted male.

As an avowed fan of Michael Mann, release of his 2015 film Blackhat was a somewhat bittersweet affair. Mann isn’t a prolific filmmaker, so any new film he makes is cause for excitement. But Blackhat was preceded by bad buzz, and its January release date wasn’t exactly a blinding display of confidence on the part of the producers and distributors. Unsurprisingly, the movie slipped into and out of theaters as stealthily as one of Mann’s protagonists robs a bank, only with a lot less to show for it in the end. And that’s too bad because while Blackhat might be minor-Mann and content to mostly recycle tropes better deployed in earlier films, it’s still a solid, if unremarkable, thriller.

The knock on Blackhat came not because of a ballooning budget, reports of backstage drama, or because anyone involved in the production went bananas (*coughJoshTrankcough*). Instead, Blackhat was derided by critics and the Internet caucus before anyone had even seen the film. It was a movie about hackers and Hollywood has a less-than-stellar track record with that genre (it’s basically just War Games). Worse than that, it starred Chris Hemsworth as one of the hackers, and while audiences might be willing to suspend their disbelief when Hemsworth wears his high-class orgy costume and pretends to be a Norse god, apparently believing that a hacker could also be a chiseled jock is a bridge too far. With these mockable points realized, it really didn’t matter whether the movie is any good. It was joke before it ever opened.

Get back to the Marvel ghetto, son of Odin!

Blackhat is Mann’s stab at the kind of topicality he flirted with in The Insider while grafting it onto his favored genre: the heist movie. Mann must have seen cybercrime as a perfect way to stake out this new territory—after all, at the end of the day knockover is a knockover, whether it’s done with an assault rifle or a laptop, and that’s Mann’s turf. So he makes Blackhat not into the usual hysterical vision of hackers as wicked demi-gods manipulating every detail of the daily lives of we poor mortals when we’re foolish enough to use public wifi to download the latest episode of Serial. Instead, his hackers use their computers the same James Caan and James Belushi use propane torches or wire-strippers. They’re just tools to get to the money.

Blackhat begins with the remote sabotage of a Chinese nuclear power plant, causing a near meltdown. This is alarming enough to force the FBI and Chinese intelligence to work together to identify the perpetrator. The Chinese agent, Chen Dawai (Lust, Caution’s Leehom Wang) recognizes the coding in the program that opened a vulnerability in the nuclear plant’s system as having been the same as one written by his old roommate at MIT.

ROC Agents. they’re chill.

Said roommate is Nick Hathaway (Hemsworth), a hacker currently serving time in a federal pen for defrauding some banks, and without access to a computer. In relatively short order, Dawai convinces his FBI counterpart, Agent Barrett (Viola Davis) to offer Hathaway a full pardon in exchange for his assistance in locating and arresting the guy who caused the meltdown. The FBI agrees because, well, movie.

Assisting Dawai is his lissome sister (and accomplished programmer in her own right) Lien, who takes a quick liking to Hathaway. And while their romance strains credibility (she seems to fall deeply, passionately in love with him over the course 72 hours—a good quarter of which must have been spent on international flights), the two of them have a nice, unforced chemistry.

Aww….

The movie takes the shape of a mystery, with each network intrusion leading them to another location, another clue, and sometimes a fightfight or shootout. The trail of evidence leads them from L.A. to Hong Kong, Malaysia, and eventually Jakarta, where Mann stages a shockingly intimate final knockdown amid a candle-lit procession. In the meantime, Hathaway untangles the villain’s sinister plan, and, surprisingly, it’s rather mundane. Again, to Mann, it’s all about money. What is difference is the scale of the take—and the collateral damage.

As a crime movie, Blackhat is a nice and sturdy example of the breed. It takes a bit to get going, but when it does it moves along at a nice clip. The actors are all very good, with Mann selecting two exceptional Chinese actors (Chinese-American in the case of Wang, who’s primarily worked in Hong Kong), who are credible delivering lines in both Mandarin and English (no mean feat, that). But he gets an able assist from the likes of Davis, and the great, underrated character actor Holt McCallany as Hathaway’s US Marshal handler Mark Jessup.

US Marshals wish they had this fashion sense.

As an action lead, Hemsworth acquits himself well. Unlike fellow Aussies Jai Courtney and Sam Worthington, he has genuine screen presence, as opposed to being another slap of Outback beefcake. He’s also credible as one of Mann’s hardboiled protagonists, who lives life with his wits and, when that fails, fists. There’s a contained meanness to him that undergirds his movie star good looks, and when his Hathaway decides to take on some correctional officers knowing he’ll get ass beat, Hemsworth sells it.

And then, of course, there is Mann’s cinematography. As always, his films look great, even if his move to HiDef lost some of the glossy sheen of his earlier works. Still, he’s good at creating distinctive visuals, which he does here, but he also makes Blackhat tactile in a way that he hasn’t managed before. His Asia is a teeming, crowded, sensual place. You can feel the heat in a Hong Kong noodle stand, and the grime in a Jakarta flophouse.

Pretty sure she knows how to run, Chris.

Mann also stages two great gunfights, which, as always, are models of realistic gunplay. One of them is visually fascinating and exciting. The other is possibly the most wrenching action sequence I saw all year (ending in an unexpectedly poignant shot).

So, why the bad rap on poor Blackhat? Well, unfortunately all this good stuff is really just recycling a lot of Mann’s earlier stuff. Despite employing new criminal techniques, Mann still falls back on old familiar tropes and types. Hathaway might be a solid protagonist, but compared Rami Malek’s damaged, asocial hacker in USA’s Mr. Robot, Hathaway’s tough guy routine seems pretty uninspired regardless if you buy him as a hacker or not. It doesn’t help that Mann even reuses his own dialogue form earlier movies (“I’m doing the time, the time’s not doing me” and he breaks out the chestnut about taking the bank’s money and not the citizen’s money for the third time). The scene in which Hathaway figures out the bad guy’s plan is meant to be a powerful denouement, except that it’s a less-effective retread of the same scene in Manhunter—right down to the rhetorical exclamation “that’s it, isn’t it you son of a bitch!”

No, changing the location doesn’t make it different.

Ironically, the biggest indictment of Blackhat was the one that the filmmakers probably thought would give their film the most traction: the e-mails released after the epic hack of Sony Pictures’ network. While a high-profile hack breathlessly covered by the news may have given Mann’s movie some topicality, the Sony hack and subsequent blackmail and extortion attempts showed a far more creative and insidious plan than mere robbery. Mann’s hackers may be bad dudes, but one gets the impression real hackers would consider them hopelessly unimaginative. When reality is more creative and interesting than the story you’ve dreamed up you have a problem.

So, that’s poor Blackhat. Not a bad movie, per se, but an average one with some good parts that make it worth a watch. Mann can still shoot a good movie, but it seems like he needs some creative juice.

Well, it’s January. Know how I can tell (aside from, you know, being cognizant of the date)? It’s because the new releases in the cinema is stuff like The Forest. Yeah, January is when Hollywood basically says to us, “What? You don’t want to rewatch all the great movies we released for the last two months? You can see The Force Awakens for a fifth time, right? No? Well, fuck it. We shot our load, so here’s a ghost movie with a Game of Thrones actor.” And that’s how movies like The Forest get a theatrical release.

So, in The Forest, Natalie Dormer (from the aforementioned Game of Thrones and who the Internet keep telling me how to date) plays the dual roles of twins Jess and Sara Price. The movie begins pretty efficiently with a series of flashbacks scattered amid a cab ride Sara takes through nighttime Tokyo.  This sets up the fact that Sara has come to the Land of the Rising Sun to search for Jess—an English teacher in Tokyo—who has disappeared into the Aokighara forest.

I know, Natalie. You’re in “The Forest.”

Sara soon learns that this development has an ominous overtone, as the Aokighara forest has a long and mournful history. Traditionally, in times of famine, villages would exile the elderly and infirm there to die of exposure. In recent times, it’s become a popular destination for disconsolate Japanese citizens to commit suicide. The implications this has for Jess—who, we’ve learned, is more troubled than the upper middle-class Sara—are troubling to say the least.

Checking into a small hostel at the edge of the forest, Sara meets Aiden (Taylor Kinney), a journalist who offers his services and those of a guide to the forest to help locate Sara in exchange for the story of Sara’s search. Clearly out of her depth, Sara agrees. From the outset, though, she is warned about going into the forest. The locals tell her that it’s filled with yurei, or vengeful specters. Sara, of course, doesn’t believe this. Well, you know that’s going to turn out.

Yeah, three people to search thousands of acres of forest. That oughta work.

Naturally, in short order, Sara and Aiden peel off from their guide and end up lost in the forest together. As night falls, the weird stuff begins to happen, natch. But the takeaway is that Sara is warned by a seeming-lost Japanese schoolgirl (who is not at all a ghost, nope) not to trust Aiden. Suddenly, everything Aiden does seems to hide an ulterior motive.

Yeah, nothing at all suspicious about this.

Over the course of a couple days, Sara finds herself stalked by horrifying visages that toy with her mind, and force her to relive the death of her parents which she seems to have been repressing or at least mentally-editing. Meanwhile, she continues to play a tense game of cat-and-mouse with Aiden, who Sara becomes increasingly convinced killed Jess.

Finally, Sara believes she has found the cabin where Aiden has imprisoned Jess. She kills Aiden and confronts the ghost of her father—who, we learn, killed her mother and them himself. Sara races through the woods to a search party led by her husband, only to discover that they found Jess alive, but that she was tricked into killing herself by ghost dad. Poor Sara, but, hey, there’s a spare, so call it a draw.

Oh sorry. Did I spoil that? Well, now you don’t have to see The Forest. You’re welcome.

Uh…you sure you don’t want to maybe use a FLASHLIGHT?!?

The Forest isn’t a wretched movie, but it is a very dull one. Worse it has a fatal deficit of imagination, which is pretty unforgivable given the subject matter. Aokighara forest is a real place, and the suicides there are a real cultural phenomena in Japan (likely inspiring the garden of death in the novel You Only Live Twice). It’s fertile ground for a horror movie with room to explore themes of guilt and despair. So why didn’t the filmmakers do more with it? The story of Sara and Jess’s parents is so half-assed it doesn’t have any emotional resonance at all.

Additionally, the forest (a forest on Serbia) doesn’t even seem all that spooky or forbidding. How it is you can drain the mystery and menace from endless wilderness I don’t know, but director Jason Zada sure as shit manages it. There’s also nothing particularly scary in it, except for some token creepy ghost that have been a staple of J-horror for 20 years now.

“Boo! Boo?”

Dormer does some very good work, and seems to be carrying a weight of genuine sadness that helps make up for the weaknesses in the script, but she’s still left high and dry by a creative team that gave her very little to do. This is too bad, since it wouldn’t haven taken much work to cobble together a story that had her facing some better-defined personal demons.

So, that’s The Forest: a listless, halfhearted offering. What else can we expect form January? God, this month sucks.

Ordinarily, a new movie from M. Night Shyamalan is met with the anticipation reserved for a meteor hurtling toward your home, or the digestion of two day-old sushi. Sure, the spectacle of the carnage to come will no doubt be fascinating, but it’s also probably going to hurt a lot. I’ve already gone into detail about the implosion of Shyamalan’s career, and frankly, so has everyone else. In fact, M. Night Shyamalan’s name is about as synonymous with bad movie as Ed Wood’s. That’s why it’s such a pleasant surprise that his latest film, The Visit, is not only an effective little thriller, but also quite a good movie.

The premise of the The Visit is ingeniously simple: Two teenagers, Becca and Tyler (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) are sent to spend a week with the grandparents. It’s an important visit, because they’ve never met their grandparents as they and their mother have been estranged, since her mother (Kathryn Hahn) married their father, whom they didn’t approve of. Now, with that father having abandoned them for another woman, and their mother somewhat adrift, Nana and Pop-pop want to mend fences. Becca, a budding filmmaker, records the visit on a variety of devices and the film takes the form of a found footage thriller.

Upon first meeting, Nana and Pop-pop seem almost to have stepped out of a central casting, with Pop-pop a folksy old man and Nana taking obvious delight in baking and cooking. True, there’s not much to do in their isolated Pennsylvania farm house, but they’re thrilled nonetheless.

The only scary thing here is all the carbs.

Soon, however, it emerges that Nana and Pop-pop have some, well, peculiarities. Pop-pop has incontinence issues he hides out of embarrassment, and Nana suffers from a type of dementia call “sundowning,” which kicks in after dark. Consequently, the kids have strict rules not to come out of their locked rooms after 9:30.

Still, even knowing these things Nana and Pop-pop are off. As the snowbound days crawl by, Nana and Pop-pop’s behavior goes beyond the usual eccentricities of a couple old people living alone and into the bizarre. And then things get really bad.

Really, really bad.

I’m not going to spoil any more, because if you haven’t seen the movie you should. And if you have, there’s no point in hashing over the details of what happens. No, What’s worth looking at is how well-made this movie is, and what a great reminder it is of why Shyamalan broke out in the first place.

It’s hard to remember now how promising a talent Shyamalan seemed to be in 1999—and this is largely due to his own actions. Over the course of more expensive and grandiose and misguided ventures, all that talent got buried under bad ideas and hubris.

Nothing can go wrong with this scenario.

With The Visit, he limits himself both financially and technically. Ordinarily, found footage is a lazy filmmaking technique. It allows for filmmakers to mask a low budget and lack of talent under poor-quality camera work and frenetic editing. But Shyamalan, by limiting himself, forces himself to rely on his raw filmmaking chops. And they are considerable. He’s always been an excellent director of suspense, and here he forces himself to create that with a single camera and a handful of unknown actors. And create it he does.

The story itself is so ingenious it’s a wonder no one’s run with that ball before. Everyone remembers that weird, dislocated feeling that had when they spent the night at some relative’s house. You observe the strange rituals of their daily life like a stranger, and no matter how hard you try to integrate yourself into them, you always feel like an outsider. With older relatives there is the added discomfort of seeing the effect of time on the human body and mind. As Shyamalan shows in The Visit, it takes only a few off-kilter interactions to push this into the realm of terror.

And the brutality begins.

But undergirding this story of domestic horror is the damage carried by the kids and their mother from the divorce. And here is where memories of The Sixth Sense’s unexpectedly sweet and poignant family story comes back. Becca and Tyler have both been marked by their father’s abandonment, and Shyamalan shows this in subtle, deft touches: Tyler’s germophobia, Becca’s emotional withdrawal. He even gives Becca a throwaway line about how her mother tends to self-sabotage which is paid off in a quick line of dialogue from their mother on a Skype call.

The Visit is a great return to form from a once-promising filmmaker. Here’s hoping everything he resurrected in this movie—his technical skill, his insight into human behavior and relationships—gets put into his future movies.

At some point in the past ten years, Young Adult novels stopped being about young female protagonists falling in love with various supernatural creatures (who then compete for her affections) and started being about young female protagonists killing people (while a couple dudes she doesn’t kill compete for her affections). This is, I guess, a form of progress–it’s better to have an active protagonist after all—and I suppose as long as we’re telling adolescent girls that all the world’s a sausage-party, it’s the responsible thing to also tell them that they’ll have to kill a few people to get past the velvet rope. The new YA adaptation The 5^th Wave has its protagonist shoot a dude in the face in its first scene, so you can’t say it doesn’t get down to business.

The circumstances that lead high schooler Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz) to blow that poor dude away comprise the bulk of The 5^th Wave, which, like most YA adaptations, is a part of a series. After ventilating the poor dude, we learn that Earth has been decimated by an alien force, which has unleashed four waves of destruction upon it. They start with knocking out the power grid before moving on to causing massive seismic events, a bird flu, and…uh…the fourth wave is a little unclear. But the fifth wave, we learn, will be the final eradication of humankind.

This can’t possibly go well

In short order (read: about a week), Cassie goes from happily being the whitest teenager in existence to a still-very-well-dresses-and-coiffed refugee, looking after her little brother Sammy (Zachary Arthur). They’re separated when their refugee camp is set upon by ominous military types who cart all the kids off to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and kill all the adults. Cassie, who slipped away while the kids were being corralled, promptly grabs an M4 assault rifle and goes after him.

Just because civilization is more or less at an end doesn’t mean her hair can’t still look great

Along the way she’s injured by human snipers possessed by the aliens and nursed back to health by a hunky loner named Evan (Alex Roe–essentially a block of wood with eyes). Sammy, meanwhile, is inducted into an all-kid military unit run by the flinty Colonel Vosch (Live Scheiber) and the maniacal Sergeant Resnick (Maria Bello). The unit is headed by Cassie’s high school crush, Ben Parish (Nick Robinson), and their job, they are told, is to take the fight to the alien-possessed human fighters.

As Cassie convalesces, she learns that Evan is actually a human/alien hybrid tasked with killing humans (uh-oh). But seems he’s fallen in love with Cassie (aww…), so he’s totally onboard helping her defy their alien soon-to-be-overlords.

“Hey, a little treason never killed anyone…except this dude I’m about to kill.”

While that subplot is crawling along like a snake on barbiturates, Ben’s unit goes into battle, and after some brutal urban fighting discover they’ve been lied to, and that Vosch and Resnick are aliens manipulating them into killing off the remaining humans.

So, while Ben goes back to Wright-Patt to rescue Sammy (who he left behind for his own safety), Cassie and Evan also infiltrate the base to do pretty much the same thing. Dang, lucky thing everyone likes Sammy.

Personally, I would have written the little rug-monkey off as “necessary losses”

So, Evan blows the shit out of the base with, uh, alien magic, I guess, and Cassie kills Resnick before linking up with Ben and rescuing Sammy. The movie ends with her joining the remains of Ben’s unit, swearing to take the fight to the real enemy…whoever that is.

There is a potentially interesting movie lurking somewhere in The 5^th Wave’s DNA. A sci-fi movie about children taught by the US military to be remorseless killers could, in the hands of more skilled filmmakers, have been a devastating critique of a country’s whose definition of normal has grown to include “be at war all the time.” Unfortunately, this movie is more interested in playing to its Tiger Beat plotlines, clumsily trying to maneuver some wan characters into a rote teenage love triangle, than thinking too hard about what it’s actually implying.

This is a movie where military uniforms consist of the tightest pants possible.

It doesn’t help that the story makes not a lick of damn sense. I mean, aliens powerful enough to cause destruction on a Biblical scale decide that the best way to wrap things up is to trick kids into going out and murder everyone else? Holy shit, that’s fucking ridiculous. Were they out of good ideas? Was this the plan they came up with on a Friday afternoon? If this was the best plan, what the hell did they take a pass on?

Additionally, the movie wastes some fine actors…no, it actually wastes all its actors. There are no characters in this movie, just vague descriptions of characters. When we’re lucky—as with Maika Monroe’s tough-chick soldier Ringer—we get a stereotype.

“Just deposit the check and keep moving…”

The actors are all pretty much adrift, though none more than Moretz, a supremely talented actress given absolutely nothing to play beyond “stricken and scared.” Even after she learns that the dude she blew away in the first scene wasn’t an alien, she’s never even given a scene when she grapples with her conscience. Jesus, there has to some crime against wasting talent like that. Monroe is game in her one-note role, but, again, is given nothing to do with the formidable skills she showed in The Guest and It Follows. Seeing two excellent young actresses try and bring some life to the Tinker-Toy script is like watching an Aston Martin DB10 sitting in rush hour traffic.

You just read the script, didn’t you?

Schreiber and Ron Livingston—playing Cassie’s father—seem so bored I have to assume that hack director J Blakeson just cut away whenever they checked their watches. The only two bright spots are courtesy of Maria Bello’s scenery-chewing performance that can only be described as “aggressively white-trash” (she does everything short of glug Mountain Dew and snarf down pork rinds), and Robinson’s Ben. Robinson, last seen running form dinosaurs in Jurassic World, has a stolid presence that seems to be equal parts cynicism and responsibility. He really sells his damaged, weary commander, and has an emotional maturity that translates into a genuine screen presence.

And we never see the aliens. Boo!

So that’s The 5^th Wave: a movie with the moral that becoming a remorseless killer is totally okay as long as it facilitates your teenage crush.

New Line Cinemas might have been forgiven for thinking they had a sure-fire hit—or at least a modest box office winner—with Last Man Standing. After all, here was a bang-bang-shoot-‘em-up action film headlined by a still-hot Bruce Willis just two years after the monster success of Pulp Fiction, and directed by action-film maestro Water Hill. Unfortunately, Last Man Standing sunk like a Russian submarine at the box office when it opened in 1996, and while Bruce Willis’s reputation emerged unscathed (as it would continue to for the next fifteen of mostly terrible films), it hastened Walter Hill’s descent into Hollywood obsolescence. Twenty years later it’s worth taking a second look.

Last Man Standing is a loose adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s excellent 1927 novel Red Harvest, which also served as the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Clint Eastwood’s For a Few Dollars More. In it, Willis plays a nameless tough guy who by happenstance ends up in Jericho, Texas, a dying, Depression-era town someplace along Mexican border. In short order, he becomes embroiled in a gang war between rival bootlegging operations.

The Italian mob is run by a pair of cousins (played by Ned Eisenberg and a pre-Sopranos Michael Imperoli), while the Irish mob is run by a guy named Doyle (David Patrick Kelly), who keeps a beautiful, mournful moll named Felina (Karina Lombard). Looking on neutrally is the town Sheriff (Bruce Dern), who advises Willis to “get a firearm.” As it happens, he already has twin .45 Colts in a double-rig beneath his coat. When one of Doyle’s men tries to muscle him, Willis blows the guy away in front of God and everyone, and we’re off to the races.

The uneasy truce is threatened when the Italians make a power play by ambushing one of Doyle’s liquor shipments in Mexico, killing all Doyle’s men and stealing his booze and trucks. Willis, realizing the situation is going to deteriorate fast, promptly begins playing both sides off one another for his own benefit (read: staying alive). I’m not going to detail the precise plot permutations here because A) I could barely follow them myself, and B) Jesus, the synopsis alone runs 11 paragraphs on Wikipedia. Suffice it to say, by then end of the film, the baddies who haven’t killed each other face off against Willis, who himself is pretty banged-up.

So what went wrong? Well, first off, Last Man Standing is an oppressively dour film. Filmed in unrelentingly bleak sepia tones, the only colors on screen are browns and greys and the occasional dark blue. Not even the spilled blood (which is considerable) is vibrant. There’s not a laugh, not a moment of levity to be found in the film’s 101 (but seeming longer) minutes. The characters are all varying shades of gruff—even Willis, who was, in 1996, moving past his wiseguy phase.

This was, almost certainly, by design. Hill might have built his career on films about tough manly men shooting, punching, and insulting each other, but they were never this unceasingly humorless. After all, his biggest box office success was 48 Hours—one of Eddie Murphy’s first films and a key booster rocket on his stunning rise within showbiz. Hill also directed The Warriors, which became iconic precisely because of its unrestrained vitality.

No, Last Man Standing is intended to be a joyless story, because it’s a distillation of the tough-guy tropes of action movies. It removes his macho archetypes from the comforts of their genres and lets them loose with only their stocisim and penchant for violence and shows what happens. Jericho is an artificial-seeming town—all clapboard buildings and seemingly empty except for gangsters and other assorted characters who’re necessary to the film with nary a regular citizen in sight—because Jericho is purgatory. Jericho is a place where the only living, organic thing is violence. It’s not just for exposition that upon arriving in town, Willis visits a tired saloon where the owner (Will Sanderson) tells him he’s the first customer he’s had for weeks.

Even the action set-pieces have a sense of surrealism to them. If Hill knows anything it’s how to stage an exciting gun battle, and yet the massive gun fights in Last Man Standing are weirdly inert for their scale. They almost always begin as a showdown, and Willis always draws fast enough to get the drop on his enemies—even when it’s clearly impossible. He fires dozens of times, and only reloads when the threat is dead. The bad guys he shoots are often thrown bodily through the air in a way that defies physics in a way that would be fake even for cruddy ‘80s action movies. The outcome of thse acts of violence, Hill seems to suggest, are pre-determined. The characters are just going through the motions and ending up where they’re fated to be.

The only place where the characters display anything other than greed, avarice, and violence is in a few cases where women are concerned. Doyle is hopelessly in love with Felina—even when it proves his Achille’s Heel. But that love is poisoned—her husband owed massive gambling debts to Doyle and left her with him to settle up, separating her from her daughter. Willis has a brief, joyless affair with a woman attached to the Italians and protects her when she flees Jericho after being disfigured by the mob when they find out her and Willis. Love, in this place, is not redemptive and leads only to suffering and weakness.

Here it’s worth taking a minute to examine the major differences between the film and Red Harvest. In the book, the town is called Personville (pronounced in the local accent as “Poisonville”), and the protagonist is not a nameless gunman, but Hammett’s nameless private investigator The Continental Op. The Op is there on a case, and while he may not be a cop, he’s a lawful man all the same—an emissary of civilization. When he needs support he calls in a few other detectives. The book is clearly about bringing a measure of law to a lawless place and what that entails (one detective actually quits the case out of protest for, among other things, the morality to setting bad guys up to kill each other). This moral valence is nowhere to be found in the film. Civilization doesn’t exit in Jericho.

Not for nothing, the film’s most vibrant scene comes when Doyle’s decimated gang manages to wipe out the Italians by setting fore to the brothel where the men are holed up. Set vividly against the inky night, their soldiers plummet in flames from the building’s windows only to be mowed down when they escape the blaze. The only way out from purgatory, it seems, leads to hell.

The film ends with Willis alive, but no better off. He sets off from Jericho, but there will be another Jericho, of that he’s sure. In his closing voiceover, Willis remarks dispassionately that the story ends where it began: with him alone and on the move. Purgatory will always be waiting for him.

A movie this bleak would be a hard sell in any climate, but by 1996 the language of action movies had changed radically thanks to Pulp Fiction and its countless imitators. Those movies now featured stylish gunmen trading arch and over-written banter. The bloodshed was countered with dark comedy, inviting the audience not to take it too seriously but instead to revel in how stylized it could be. Last Man Standing makes its violent set-pieces deliberately empty, allowing the audience no cathartic relief. Casting fellow Pulp Fiction alum Christopher Walken’s presence as a whispering, Tommy-gun toting hit man and making him as humorless a cipher as everyone else seems like a deliberate provocation.

Last Man Standing is an unpleasant movie, and one I don’t particularly feel the need to revisit. Still, making a bleak and brutal meditation on the main ingredient in 90% of cinema is a subversive act for a filmmaker who’s bread and butter was that very ingredient. It deserves better than to be buried and forgotten.

When you come across a movie with a title like He Never Died, which stars Henry Rollins, and features a poster with Rollins bellowing like a Trump supporter at a feminist poetry-slam, well, you gotta start sharpening the knives. I mean…you read that last sentence, right? Okay, so I don’t have to explain the tremendous potential for mockery. Except, holy shit, He Never Died—clunky title aside—is actually a really good little movie. And what makes it so enjoyable is a perfectly modulated action-comic performance by Rollins, who shows off some fairly sophisticated acting chops. Throw in some moody direction by first time-ish director Jason Krawczyk, and you got precisely the kind of under-the-radar gem that gives B-movies a good name.

So, He Never Died, is basically a couple days in the life of Rollins’s Jack, a guy who seems to have taken the noir anti-hero archetype and cranked it up to 11. Jack lives alone in a run down flophouse, interacting with almost no one except for his dealer (of what, we will see) and the cute waitress at his local diner. His only social outlet is playing bingo at a senior center. Jack goes through life as if the simplest of human interactions is wearying at best and an annoyance at worst.

Jack’s life is disrupted by the appearance of Andrea (Jordan Todosey) 19 year-old daughter he never knew existed. Andrea doesn’t bring Jack to life, as the standard cliché goes, but her presence in his life causes his aggressive isolation to collapse. First, it gives Cara, the cute waitress (Kate Greenhouse) an opportunity to engage him in some conversation. Then things get bad when a flock of freelance toughs show up, targeting the people in his life (it’s a short list), and that includes Andrea. When she’s taken, he reluctantly goes into Liam Neeson mode to get her back.

So far, so simple. Except the thugs literally have no idea what they’re dealing with. Seems Jack isn’t exactly mortal. He has long scars on his back like something was removed. He had a trunk full of ancient relics and millions of dollars in cash. He also shrugs off things like knives and bullets when they’re used on him. Jack is so old, he explains, he doesn’t know how old he is, “But I’m in the Bible, if that means anything,” he tells Cara at one point.

If all of this sounds like a dark revenge fantasy, well, that’s because I haven’t gotten to the rich comedic vein the film mines in Jack. Where any other film would treat the revenge plot as supercharged engine for the plot, Jack treats the whole thing as a massive inconvenience. He can barely believe he has to go through all this crap again, and how hopelessly small-potatoes it is. You know, comparatively.

This movie only works because Rollins’ performance as Jack is so sublime. He plays Jack’s seeming-immortality as a curse that has wrecked him to the point where social interactions are such a bother he’s practically on the spectrum. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to act around people, he’s just long since stopped putting any effort into it. As he re-engages with society, Rollins slowly builds Jack’s personality to hint at the eons behind his eyes. To call Rollins a revelation in this movie is understating it. He’s simply fantastic.

Compounding the offbeat tone of the film, is some truly promising direction by tyro auteur Krawczyk. The cruddy exurbs where the movie takes place seems both utterly perfect and vaguely unmoored from the rest of world, populated by the working poor, wage slaves, and small-time hoods who’re miles away from a real criminal outfit.

Krawczyk also shows off some impressive directing chops in balancing the tone of the movie, never letting it slip too far in either direction. It’s never too fantastical or too slapstick. Maintaining an even tone in a movie that straddles this many genres is a minor miracle, but Krawczyk does it effortlessly and the movie clips along.

Howard Hawkes once said that for a movie to work it needs one great scene and no bad ones, and this movie meets that standard. There are no bad scenes, and there is one, supremely well-crafted scene of eerie suspense, as Jack makes a late-night visit to his local diner, only to find it occupied by a gang of thugs waiting for him. Krawczyk moves his camera through the diner’s fluorescent-lit emptiness, following Jack, until revealing the thugs so matter-of-factly, they may as well be menus advertising the daily specials. It’s supremely unsettling and sets us up for the conflict to come.

He Never Died is a perfectly example of a low-budget movie whose grasp never exceeds its reach, and because of this it works perfectly. It’s the kind of movie that gives lie to the notion that the currently business model of filmmaking has doomed us to a choice between empty spectacle like Transformers: Just Give Us Your Damn Money and the latest Asylum Pictures tax dodge. Hopefully, we’ll see more performances like this Rollins in the future–when we’re referring to this as the movie that first showed Krawczyk’s promise. 

Well, it’s still January, and Hollywood is making damn well sure know it by continuing to make us suffer for the unpardonable crime of wanting to see a movie a month after the holiday season. The latest instrument of punishment is The Boy, which, while not a terrible movie, is still pretty bad. And that’s before it becomes outright, pants-crappingly stupid. Wanna hear about it? Oh yes you do…

So, in The Boy, Lauren Cohan (The Walking Dead) plays Greta, a footloose American woman who has taken a job as a nanny for the Heelshires (Diana Hardcastle and Jim Norton), the type of English couple that exist only in movies made by people who’ve never known British people. An older couple, the Heelshires live in a rambling mansion atop a lonely moor or field or something that probably has Baskerville hounds running around eating Ms. Havisham’s cake and humping Sir Walther Raleigh’s leg and other stereotypically English stuff.

Pictured: Every English person, according to this movie.

Except that the Heelshire’s son, Brahms is—surprise!—a porcelain doll. Well, Greta thinks this is nuts, of course, but agrees to be the nanny since she needs the moolah. She’s fled an abusive boyfriend in the US and needs some scratch to keep running. Besides, how hard can it be to take care of a porcelain doll?

The other dolls probably beat him up for his lunch money.

Well, as any of the inhabitants of a RealDolls subreddit can tell you, crazy people can be pretty high maintenance. Greta has a list of chores she has to do every day for Brahms including reading to him in a loud voice, playing his favorite music, tucking him in to bed, and disposing of the dead rats in the traps outside the house. Jesus, my imaginary friends only needed to play Star Wars with me in the backyard. This Brahms kid is a real pain.

He doesn’t strike me as Count Chocula kind of kid.

When the Heelshires leave for a vacation, Greta begins to notice some hinky stuff. Like Brahms moves when she’s not looking. There are other weird things, but really, that’s enough to send any rational person fleeing for a less gothic part of the country. Greta stays, though. She begins a flirtation with the local grocer (chain stores, not having made their way to the Old Country, I guess), a decent guy named Malcolm (Rupert Evans).

Mal believes Greta’s story about Brahms beyond the extent necessary to get in her pants, and tells her the true story of Brahms. Seems, he was once a real boy, but he died in a fire shortly after one of his little friends was murdered. If Brahms really is a spectral presence, he may not be a nice one.

We feel your pain, Lauren.

Well, things go all Pete Tong when Cole (Ben Robson), Greta’s abusive ex shows up to bring her home (because unemployed construction workers totally spring for trans-Atlantic plane tickets just to get their girl back). Well, Brahms doesn’t take kindly to that, and promptly goes bitchcakes. Soon, Greta must confront the terrible secret of Brahms if she is to survive. And lemme tell you, the secret of Brahms is almost laughably stupid. I won’t ruin it, because, Jesus, what else is there to see in theaters right now? That movie where Leonardo DiCaprio gets raped by a bear?

This picture is more disturbing than anything in The Boy.

The Boy is an aggressively bad movie—yes, it’s stupid, but it’s also so listless if it was a person someone would have slipped a mirror under its nose and rifled through its wallet. Cohan is a dynamic lead, and more than rises to the material (She’s had tons more challenging material in her five seasons in The Walking Dead), but the rest of the film just slumps along with hardly a scare or a moment of anything approaching suspense.

The doll manages to be cooler than the live kid.

This is unsurprising, considering it was directed by William Brent Bell, the director that brought us The Devil Inside—one of the worst films in recent memory. He hasn’t gotten any better. There isn’t a genuine shot in the entire movie that has anything like any personality. This could have easily been dumped to VOD, and probably should have been.

None of these characters have any personality beyond “protagonist,” “friend,” “ex-boyfriend,” and issues like Greta’s legal status to work or her experience of a different culture are never addressed. This screenplay could have been banged out in a long afternoon watching Child’s Play movies and huffing paint. It probably was.

You don’t have to break a sweat on this one.

Too bad, since there’s a rich vein of genuine creepiness to be mined in this premise. I mentioned the RealDolls already, but the latest trend in Thailand is for childless couples to buy realistic dolls that they treat like real children, with airlines even selling them seats. But it takes a better movie than The Boy to explore this phenomena where it intersects with real life.

What’s your kid’s na…AAAH! GET BEHIND ME, DEMON!

Anyway, that’s The Boy. I’ll say it again, January sucks.

Poor Action Jackson. It’s like the dinosaur that just keeps on scampering through the jungle, blithely ignoring the funnel of ash kicked up by the meteorite that hit yesterday. In other words, it was dead but just didn’t know it yet. By its premiere in February of 1988, we’d already had Lethal Weapon and Above the Law, and the summer would bring us Die Hard—all of which heralded the arrival of lean, wily action heroes who got by more on wit and cleverness than bulk. The era of the muscle-bound, solo action hero was over, and Carl Weathers arrived at the party too late to build his own franchise. Of course, now we can look back and appreciate it for the dumb fun that it was. What’s cool about Action Jackson? Well…

Carl Weathers: Is there a more avuncular action star than Weathers? I sure don’t know. The guy’s just so jolly, that even when he’s supposed to be pissed-off in this movie as a cop who lost his gun and rank after an excessive force complaint, he just looks so happy. When he tangles with his boss (Bill Duke, who could look angry getting a hummer from Rihanna) and says, “Yeah, I damn near ripped off the scumbag’s arm…but  he had two of them!” you just want to hug him.

Look at him. He’s adorable! Like a black, muscular E.T.

Everyone wants to beat up Carl Weathers: This, of course, makes no sense at all. Here I am, a bad guy, and Carl Weathers is standing in my way. How do I handle this? Should I a) punch this 200+pound slab of sheer muscle while snarling threatening things, or b) do something more prudent like drop the engine-block of a truck on him? Weirdly enough, everyone in this movie chooses option A. I guess what I’m saying is nobody’s very smart in this movie.

Action Jackson doesn’t carry a gun: In the film, he’s no longer allowed to after his excessive-force complaint, but this means we get a lot of scenes of Weathers punching out people who really should know better (as in: “he’s not carrying a gun; hand me the elephant-rifle”). It makes the movie more fun, because, well, watching Weathers beat people up is a little like watching a big black Labrador frolic in a park. He just seems like he’s having such a good time.

Guess who wins this one…

It’s a Detroit time-capsule: Action Jackson is a great look back at the Detroit of 1988 (and, um, Denver), when that great motor city was losing the auto industry and sinking into urban decay. All-in-all it’s a nostalgic look at a time before Detroit was an largely-abandoned urban hellscape and merely a crime-ridden urban hellhole. I guess what I’m saying is that Detroit has sucked for a long time.

The Auto-Workers’ Union is a force to be reckoned with: Much of the villain’s plot is to neutralize the auto-worker’s union (called something else, but I forget what). Much like the last point, it’s an interesting look back at the days when this union was a massive, monolithic power-making machine. You know, before the decline of the auto-industry crippled it, and their humungous pension-structure damn near demolished the entire industry by 2008.

Now THIS is a movie poster!

Sharon Stone, before she got famous:  She plays the wife of uber-villain Craig T. Nelson, and she mostly gets to play scared, imperiled, and eventually dead. It’s weird seeing her in a vulnerable state, and a reminder that she was an actress before she was a star. A hot actress who gets naked. Can’t say this movie doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Vanity: As Jackson’s smack-addicted, eventual love-interest she’s…well, she’s incredibly hot. This was her period in the wilderness after Prince’s promises of fame and success had evaporated, and she was well into a decline into drug abuse. And while that’s totally not cool, and I feel bad for what she went through…well, she’s just so damn gorgeous. Uh, silver lining?

Man, being a super-villain is awesome!

Jackson drives a car through a house: He totally does! It’s awesome! He drives it up the stairs and everything!

The totally random bouncer: Guarding Vanity’s dressing room is a huge African American bouncer in a natty suit. Jackson squares off with him and says, “I suppose if I hit you again you’d like nothing more than to bounce my tiny body off these walls,” and the guy just smiles beatifically and replies, “Yes, but that would violate my Muslim beliefs.” What? Where the hell did that come from? I don’t care, it’s hilarious.

The bad guy with the grenade-launcher: Yeah, one of the bad guys wields an ARWEN grenade-launcher when he faces Jackson. He may be the smartest guy in this whole movie.

Anyone else think Craig’s working through his Mandingo fantasies in this scene?

So, that’s Action Jackson. It’s a lot of fun. You can see why they kept referencing it on Arrested Development. At least I think they did, I can’t quite remember (I’ve moved on, and other people should too).

Secret in Their Eyes wants to be a prestige Oscar-bait picture really badly. I mean, really, really badly. Like Blofeld-wants-to-kill-James-Bond bad. I mean, look at everything stuffed into it: The War on Terror, the death of a child, a mystery, cops, and about as many of Hollywood’s heavy-hitters as you’re legally allowed to have in a film before you have to register as a chapter of the Church of Scientology. This is a movie that would gladly throw anyone into a piranha tank if it meant that statuette. I’m pretty sure if was possible (and more importantly, feasible) this movie would blow every Academy member. It just wants to be taken seriously so bad….Bwhahahaha! Too bad it’s just really overcooked and ridiculous.

Secret in Their Eyes tells a bifurcated story, jumping between present day and a confused, anxious period in 2002. Linking the time periods is a terrible crime, the murder of the teenaged daughter of an LAPD detective (Julia Roberts), who happened to be serving on an LA-based Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Said JTTF was a veritable Melrose Place of romantic intrigue and professional rivalries. The driving force of the film is FBI agent Ray Carsten (Chiwetal Ejiofor), who totally has the hots for Assistant DA Claire Daniels (Nicole Kidman), who is, unfortunately, engaged to a hedge fund manager or something like that. Well, Ray feels some responsibility for the girl’s death and goes full-throttle after the killer, despite being in LA to hunt terrorists.

HI, I’m also in this movie. Yep, playing another shady character.

Complicating matters is the fact that the likeliest suspect is a DOJ informant planted in the radical mosque the JTTF is surveilling. Well, this plays out exactly like you’d expect…well, no actually it doesn’t. See, any normal-thinking person would expect Ray to use his skill and experience as an expert investigator to build a case against the bad guy. Yeah, that’s not what happens. Instead, Ray goes bugnuts crazy, breaking and entering, illegally detaining him, and finally beating the shit out of him in a conference room. Ray is less an FBI agent than a rogue cop from an ‘80s action movie. He’s one Lieutenant screaming that he’s a loose-cannon away from being in a Cannon flick.

“What? This is how we conduct interrogations in New York.”

Unsurprisingly, the case gets kicked—though, the movie makes clear it’s because of the kid’s use in the War on Terror, and not Ray’s various violations of his Constitutional rights—which brings us to present day, when Ray, now retired from the FBI, has returned with fresh evidence to try and make his case, and maybe win over Claire. And he…promptly pulls the same shit.

“Neener, neener! I killed your daughter!”

Look, this is basically a pulp novel of a movie straining for a prestigious pedigree. The problem is it’s just really stupid. The film is based on the Argentinian book and film The Secret in Their Eyes (but, hey, we didn’t kick the Brits out of this joint to use wussy articles in our movie titles), which also dealt with a murder that is overshadowed by the aftermath of that country’s dirty wars. Those treatments posited that in the shadow of such state-sponsored injustice, even a basic human injustice like murder loses its urgency.

“Yeah, I know she was your daughter, but this movie is mostly about me, so…”

The American version tries for the same theme by using the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as the overshadowing event. This could, in theory, work, except the movie isn’t much interested in reckoning with the various compromises we made to our civil liberties. Instead, Ray just breaks every rule in the book to nail the creep, while lost of people tell him to stop breaking those rules. Even without the state of panic law enforcement existed in during this period, Ray’s case would have been tossed out.

Look at that chemistry. So hot. Wow.

Had the movie showed Ray using the shield of anti-terrorism to steamroll the kid’s civil rights and make his case, it would have made some thematic sense. Sure, the movie posits that the kid is being protected because of his importance as an informant, but when you have a cop as unhinged as Ray, well, you’re kind of rooting for the obstructionists…which I’m pretty sure the opposite point the movie is trying to make.

He’s just beating confessions out of random people now.

It doesn’t help that the movie whiffs on just about every other point. Julia Roberts vanishes for big chunks of the movie while Ray hunts the killer, despite the victim being her freaking daughter! It’s hard to tamp down the bitterness at how thoroughly she’s marginalized so that a male character with no connection to her daughter can make the movie go.

Additionally, the unrequited love between Claire and Ray has to be presented with no subtlety or finesse—director Billy Ray practically screams from off-camera “The really, really love each other!” This is understandable given that Ejiorfor and Kidman—both great actors—unfortunately have about as much chemistry as a tortoise and a lawn chair.

Oh yeah. They just sizzle.

On top of that we get rock-stupid things like the killer’s obsessions with cops, comics, and LA baseball—things that have nothing to do with one another, but only exist for the investigation to make some sense. We also get scenes like the kid leaping three stories onto concrete and then running like a rabbit, which strain credibility much farther than a movie that wants to be this serious can handle.

“Gonna have to move the spare tire…”

Secret in Their Eyes is a grim, dour, joyless slog. It’s simultaneously unbearably pretentious and dumber than a box of hammers. Director Billy Ray has made two great movies—Breach and Shattered Glass—but they were smaller in scope, based on true events, and revolved around a common theme of teasing truth from an unrepentant liar. Let’s hope this movie is just a misstep in his career and not graphic example of his limitations.

Well, it’s Oscar time again, and apparently the movie gods felt the best way to honor this hallowed event was to dump a couple of movies into my local theaters that could only owe their existence to a need to show how great the nominees are by comparison. Or maybe it’s the Universe’s way of saying, Yea, on this weekend as we behold some of the best examples of the art form, know thee that there’s still an awful lot of crap out there, and, hey, let’s face it: they can’t all be Spotlight. So, instead this weekend I took in The Other Side of the Door–which suggests that maybe bringing the dead back to life could be a bad idea.

Okay, so The Other Side of the Door. is what I call a “Just Follow the Directions!” horror movie, joining movies such as Pet Semetary, Wake Wood, and, I guess, Gremlins. Basically, you have a protagonist who’s dabbling in some kind of supernatural or occult phenomena, and are presented with a couple basic rules, which they choose to ignore because, hey, we need a movie, right?

“I can probably just skim this part.”

In TOSotD, it is bringing the dead back to life that, unsurprisingly, goes haywire. Sarah Wayne Callies (the wife no one liked on The Walking Dead and currently starring on USA’s Colony) plays Maria, an American expatriate living in Mumbai with her husband Michael (Jeremy Sisto) and young daughter Lucy (Sofia Rosinsky). As the movie begins, the family is still reeling from the death of their firstborn child, a son named Oliver who was killed in a car accident.

Well, I guess the girl child ain’t cutting the mustard as far as parental affection goes, because Maria attempts suicide. Luckily Michael find her just in time, and is really understanding about it and never once points out “You need to be a freaking mother to your daughter!”

“Mommy loves you, sweetie. Just not enough to keep on living.”

While she is convalescing, the family maid, Piki (Suchitra Pillai), tells Maria that she knows of a place and ritual where they can bring Oliver back from the other side for a few moments. Maybe if Maria has the chance to say her goodbyes she’ll get the closure she needs to move on (and not, you know, off herself and leave her daughter motherless). Of course, as with any perversion of the most basic and immutable of the laws of nature, this procedure has some rules involved. Well, one rule. A biggie.

The procedure requires Maria to bring Oliver’s ashes to a temple in the middle of nowhere and, uh, just hanging out there. But when the deceased shows up, Maria can only communicate through the heavy door of the temple. She cannot, under any circumstances, open that door to see her lost son. Guess which part of the procedure Maria ignores? Yeah (sigh).

JUST DON’T OPEN THAT DOOR! THAT’S ALL YOU NEED TO DO!

Well, next thing you know Maria’s household is being terrorized by ghost Oliver who, unlike corporeal Oliver, is a real dick. He bites his sister, screws with the house, and, oh yeah, kills Piki! On top of that, Maria’s family is terrorized by some cremation-ash-covered fakirs (which aren’t really scary, as they just stand there and point accusingly) and even the six-armed death deity Myrtu. Myrtu looks scary, but mostly just bums around trying not especially hard to take Oliver’s soul back to the Other Side.

“So, uh, think you can give me a hand with my dead kid?”

All in all, a real smart move opening that door, Maria. I mean, I hate to employ an internet meme, but…you had one job! Just don’t open the door! I mean, you are communing with the dead, not putting together an IKEA bookshelf. Maybe you should pay attention to the directions! I think pretty much any normal human being would understand that maybe lifting the veil that separates this world and the spirit world is a detail-oriented task. Not, apparently, Maria. I kind of get the feeling if she was in one of those 1970s Airport movies and land the plane she’d just disregard the whole “lowering the landing gear” part because, hey screw it.

“Uh, mom maybe you and dad should just make me a new brother.”

The Other Side of the Door is a little eerie and pretty atmospheric, but it’s not very scary. The movie never really commits to the notion of evil Oliver until it’s too late, and by then Maria and Michael’s rock-dumbness is so infuriating it’s just hard to care what happens to them. Additionally, director Johannes Roberts (Storage 24) never met a jump-scare he didn’t want to overuse, so rather than build a genuine sense of dread, he mostly just likes throwing things at the screen and accompanying them with a sharp music cue.

So…are you peacocking or what?

The only bright spot of TOSotD is in the early portion of Oliver’s haunting, when his presence is indicated by the appearance of Oliver’s favorite stuffed lion (which had been buried with him). If this movie had been about a haunted stuffed lion terrorizing the family it would have been about a million times better.

You know Hollywood is deep in the Dead Horse Seas of creative bankruptcy when they remake a movie like 1985’s Fright Night. I mean, it’s not like the movie was any kind of a high water mark of ‘80s cinema. But it has a vampire in it, which you know tripped some producer’s cultural IFF, and, apparently while they were at it, someone said, “Hey why don’t we shoot this thing in 3D so we can squeeze a couple extra bucks out of the Twilight fans and goth kids who see this movie.” And yet, despite the eminently cynical calculations that borne it, the remake of Fright Night manages to be just as charming and understated as the original.

Anton Yelchin plays Charley Brewster, a high school senior, who has suddenly found himself living the high school dream: he’s popular, has a slammin’ girlfriend (Imogen Poots—never thought I’d type that name more than once), and well, what more do you really need? Sure, he doesn’t have a dad, but his mom is hot (she’s played by Toni Collette all filled with MILFy goodness). But Charley’s idyll is disrupted when a former friend of his named Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, really getting too filled-out to keep playing the nerd role) tries to enlist his aid in his quest to prove that Charley’s neighbor is responsible for all the disappearances lately.

Charley doesn’t believe him—who would—after all, the town is filled with people losing their homes and their jobs, or working nights on the strip. Besides, Charley soon meets his neighbor and he turns out to be a hunkaaay construction worker named Jerry Dandridge(Colin Farrell). Vampires, Charley reasons, are not named Jerry.

But when Ed disappears, Charley gets suspicious. And when he watches out his window as Jerry’s date with a local piece of eye-candy turns into something ominous, he realizes the truth: his neighbor is a vampire named Jerry, and Jerry kind of has the hots for his mom. Knowing he needs help, Charley reaches out to Criss Angel-like Vegas showman, Peter Vincent (David Tenant, aka the best Doctor Who ever). Well, Peter Vincent turns out to be a fraud and sort of a douchebag—at least initially—but events soon conspire to convince him to help Charley (and by “events” I mean “vampires attack.”) So, Charley must protect his mom and girlfriend from the increasingly-dangerous Jerry while relying on a dubious ally to help him destroy the vampire next door.

Which was pretty much the plot of the first one, too, except the kid’s ally was played by the significantly less awesome Roddy McDowell.

The original was notable for a couple things. One was introducing the world to a pre-Herman’s Head William Ragsdale (remember that show? Ever heard of it? You’re not missing much), and a pre-lesbian Amanda Bearse. Okay, neither one of those things is really notable per se. I just thought they were interesting to mention. No, what Fright Night did that was unique was to take vampires out their traditional settings and drop them in the middle of Reagan’s cloistered suburbia in all its banal glory. In this it was of a kind with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Blue Velvet in finding the dark side of the Promised Land that lie at the end of white flight. Of course, it wasn’t as good as either of those other two movies, but what hell. It was a fun premise that basically asked, what if they yuppie next door was a vampire?

The remake doesn’t eschew this premise, and indeed even trades on it as solidly as the original did. Where the original brought us to the suburbia of Reagan’s Morning in America, the current film takes us to a spiritually-empty landscape of a boom-time suburb in the desert outskirts of Las Vegas. Director Craig Gillespie perfectly and economically sets up this generation’s suburban nightmare with an overhead shot of a square plot of identical, bubble-era houses before cutting to a street-level view which shows all the realty signs in the front yards. Throughout the film much is made of the fact that this is a place people move away from, and not settle in.

Gillespie (and, I suspect, screenwriter and former Buffy scribe Marti Noxon), uses this setting for a bildungsroman of a sort, positing Charley on the cusp of manhood. And while Charley is hardly irresponsible, the movie makes clear he is ill-prepared for some of the harder truths of the adult world. Indeed, Jerry’s sexuality is nakedly predatory, and, in one scene he toys with Charley by telling him he needs to look out for his women. Farrell plays the scene beautifully, claiming to share some fatherly (or big-brotherly) advice while not even hiding his lasciviousness—Charley’s mom, he claims, “gives off a scent,” while his girlfriend is “ripe.” Against this all Charley can do is writhe impotently–a high school virgin in the presence of a sexual elder. And not only is Charley outclassed by his neighbor, but seems genuinely surprised when Peter Vincent turns out to be (mostly) all a sham. How anyone could watch his vegas show and buy him for a moment is a further testament to Charley’s teenaged naivete.

The filmmakers also make the interesting decision to keep the vampires out of context. Aside from a few tossed off lines, Jerry the Vampire is simply a force of nature, “the shark from Jaws,” as Ed describes him. There is no tortured history or elaborate back story. Jerry is just a blue-collar mope who likes to watch bad reality TV after a good meal (of a stripper). This vacuum falls nicely into line with the rest of the vibe given off by the ersatz neighborhood. The vampire has no lineage, because neither does anyone else. The neighborhood has no past, no history, no lore. There is no character to it. Charley’s rite of manhood takes place within this element: a cultural wasteland filled with garbage TV and homes newly built for buyers who now can’t afford them. It makes the urgency of his mission even more pressing as he’s forced to be the lone sign of integrity in a world where no one else has any.

Of course, the story’s subtexts wouldn’t work if the performances didn’t pop. Fortunately, Gilespie has some ringers at his disposal. Yelchin is rapidly becoming an amazing actor, rising to whatever challenge is thrown at him—whether it’s Mel Gibson’s estranged son in The Beaver or Ensign Chekov. Collete is good in anything and has been for the past decade, so no surprise there, and Poots brings a groundedness that makes even her underwritten character believable. Tenant is the real breakout, though. He jolts every scene he appears in, at first seeming to ape Russell Brand, but then settling into a performance that’s more complicated and enjoyable. He even manages to elicit laughs out of some fairly threadbare eBay jokes.

But it’s Farrell who is the real standout here. His Jerry isn’t freighted with the usual (non-Twilight-influenced) vampire lore, but is instead simply atavistic and dangerous with, as he puts it “400 years of survival instinct.” When Charley tangles with him, he can’t help but be dickish in an older brother type of way…provided your older brother killed strippers. Farrell could have simply phoned in this performance (it’s a summer vampire flick, after all, why break a sweat?), but instead turns in a remarkably complicated performance. He plays Jerry as a kind of null-space–a culmination of the spiritual emptiness that infuses the rest of the film. His Jerry the Vampire exists to do little more than eat and watch trash TV. Farrell seems to have distilled the darkest elements from the rancid contemporary male culture—the predatory sexuality, the sexual territoriality, the desire for immediate gratification—to bring a vivid banality to his vampire evil.

Of course nowadays vampires are all over suburbia—when they’re not glittering, they’re being staked by Buffy (though, unfortunately, not at the same time)—but holding the vampire super-saturation of pop culture against this movie isn’t very fair. Likewise, the bad decision to film a movie that mostly takes place at night in 3D, and thus ensure that many scenes are too dark to completely make out, is also one you can’t put on the shoulders of the creative team.

Fright Night may have been a calculated effort to part people with their money, but—much like Peter Vincent—turns out to have a great deal of heart beneath its mercenary exterior.

1996’s Independence Day was a perfect summer movie. It had a big budget, eye-popping special effects, arresting visuals, and some charismatic actors. Also, it was dumber than a retarded opossum, which, really, is about the IQ you want attached to your summer movies. We don’t go to them to think—that shit’s for winter movies, yo. Now, some 20 years later we have the long-awaited sequel Independence Day: Resurgence. Is it as dumb as the original? A thousand times yes! Is it as good as the original? Alas, no (whomp whomp). Is it as fun as the original? Well, it gets close. Allow me to explain…

So, Resurgence (should I feel dirty typing that word? I kind of do) picks up an appropriate twenty years after aliens curb-stomped humanity in the first film, and, as it turns out, having most of our major cities burnt to a crisp and millions exterminated by alien invaders was the super bestest thing that could have happened to humanity. Rather than plunge into a new dark age due to the fact that all major utilities have been destroyed and food and water supplies undoubtedly poisoned (not to mention the means to distribute what few resources we have left were undoubtedly shattered), everything is totally jake with the world. Seems we raided the crashed spaceships and found to technology to rebuild, repopulate, and invent spaceplanes and moonbases.

Holy shit, I kinda want aliens to attack us right now. Like, this minute.

Maybe if we raided a UFO we could get the F-35 to work right.

Unfortunately, on the 20^th anniversary of our victory over our potential alien overlords, (a victory, we should remember, made possible by an alcoholic crop-duster played by Randy Quaid, who in the interim managed to go even crazier than the character he played). Another ship shows up. This time, however, we’re ready for it, and President Sela Ward zaps it. Ha! Take that, alien overlords!

Yeah, but oops, it was trying to warn us of another alien attack, and by the time we figure that out, a super-mega-banzai alien ship the size of a continent shows up and begins going to town on the Earth again. Once more, humanity must fight off an alien aggressor. Only this time we’ve been through it before so everyone’s a little more blasé about the end of the world.

Goddamn it, why can’t they ever be E.T.’s people?

The various characters and subplots are so freaking numerous—owing to the fact that, aside from Will Smith, everyone from the original movie returns and are joined by a cast of newcomers—I probably won’t be able to list them all, but I’ll give it a try.

So, Jeff Goldblum is back as the premiere alien-expert owing to the fact he managed to pwn the aliens last time with nought but a Macbook and a soda can (that there’s some bragging rights). He’s joined by Charlotte Gainsbourg who play his old flame, a psychiatrist who specializes in alien telepathy (I guess that’s a thing now). Former President Bill Pullman is still around, but kinda mentally unstable.

“So, after the alien attack I moved to Brooklyn…”

His pilot daughter (Maika Monroe taking over for Mae Whitman because, apparently, the producers didn’t feel like a DUFF could fight off aliens) is hooking up with another hotshot pilot (played by the non-Thor Hemsworth) who lives on the moon. Non-Thor has a frenemy in Jesse T. Usher, who’s also a hotshot pilot. Together with a beta-male pilot (Travis Tope), who’s crushing on a Chinese hotshot pilot (Angelababy), they’re our airborne defense system. On the ground we got Brent Spiner returning as Doctor Okum, William Fitchner as the hard-nosed Vice President, Deobia Oparei as a not-at-all-racist African warlord, and Nicholas Wright as a doofy guy named Floyd.

So much beef, so little cake.

And here is Resurgence’s big problem. Clocking in at barely two hours, this movie is a solid 25 minutes shorter than ID4 despite having almost twice as many characters. As a result, where ID4 was well-paced and proceeded logically to its finale, Resurgence is choppy and lurching. Scenes are edited so quickly, they don’t land emotionally. At one point some major characters are killed, but the scene cuts so abruptly, I was expected to return to it later. Instead, a couple characters inform us that, yes they’re dead, so now we gotta move. Likewise, the finale has to give so many characters something to do that it stretches into a seemingly endless series of action sequences. It manages to be both interminable and abrupt at the same time.

“Imma invade all y’all!”

All of that having been said, Resurgence is still dumb fun. Hey, it’s got massive spaceships, tentacle aliens, and spaceplanes dogfighting spaceships. You gotta be some kind of genius to screw that up.

The returning cast is as good as they were the first time (is it possible for Jeff Goldblum, at this stage in his career, to not be charming?), but the new cast is more wobbly. Usher and Not-Thor are both pretty bland, but Monroe is great once the third act gives her something to do (still, it’s too bad, we didn’t get to see Whitman in the role, stupid Hollywood).

In the end, Resurgence is a worthy, if inferior, successor to ID4, if only because the original wasn’t exactly high art. Resurgence is a dumb, big-budget spectacle that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Well, it succeeded on that front.

Also: the whole spaceplanes bit seems like a direct lift from The Asylum’s War of the Worlds sequel (remember that). So, yeah, Hollywood is now strip-mining some of the cheapest, dumbest cash-grab VOD fodder for ideas. The endtimes may indeed be upon us.

Check out my video review of 2016’s (or 2014’s…or 2010’s) Clown directed by Jon Watts, who I refer to as Joe Watts, because I’m a moron).