'71

'71
Dir. Yenn Demange

3.5 out of 5

In the opening scenes of '71, Gary Hook (Jack O'Connell) is part of a regiment of young British soldiers training for their eventual deployment overseas.  But the action they see will not be far from home - just across the Irish Sea, in fact - as the soldiers are ordered to ameliorate the internecine conflict between Catholic and Protestant militias in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the early years of what would quickly become known as the Troubles.  During his squad's first mission in the field, Gary becomes separated from his unit and embarks upon a dangerous journey through Belfast that exposes him to the ethical complexities and diverse combatants in this tangled sectarian conflict.

While Yenn Demange's film has an academic interest its many different factions vying for power in Northern Ireland - staunch Protestant loyalists, shady British military intelligence agents, and two squabbling groups of fiery IRA nationalists - it's ultimately about the corrupting nature of war in general.  Seen through Gary's relatively innocent eyes, the brutal violence is an almost apolitical byproduct of base human impulses that go beyond the immediate 20th-century concerns of government and religion.  Demange and screenwriter Gregory Burke aren't creating a historical document here - they are crafting a passion play within the structure of an urban action thriller, replete with stunning escapes, double-crosses, and unlikely allies.

Indeed, labeling '71 as simply a "war movie" belies its focused intensity and would muddle the broader message its creators are attempting to convey.  Its ideals are not glory or honor but a certain humanity - albeit a tragic one - that persists in some of the most hopeless situations.  On the other hand, the film's scale sometimes tips too far into the symbolic; the deeper Gary falls into his predicament, the more he functions as a plot point than as a character.  Demange also seems to squander '71's specificity in the characterizations of the supporting cast, whose motives either remain unclear or are spelled out in a somewhat clichéd language.  Still, '71 is absolutely captivating whenever lives hang in the balance and Gary is on the run - which is to say almost the entire time.  The filmmakers' general political ambivalence turns out to be a wise choice for the type of movie that '71 so frequently is: a tense, protracted chase sequence through a maze of crooks, charlatans, and collaborators.

Chappie

Chappie
Dir. Neill Blomkamp

2.5 out of 5

It takes a village to raise an automaton.  That's the most cogent takeaway from the sci-fi thriller Chappie, in which the architect (Dev Patel) of Johannesburg, South Africa's robotic police force uses a decommissioned machine to produce a sentient form of artificial intelligence.  But when the little guy, childlike and helpless, falls into the hands of some desperate street thugs, his development oscillates between the warm, compassionate wonderment supplied by his surrogate mother (who impulsively dubs him "Chappie") and his criminal exploitation at the hands of his father figure - played respectively by South African rappers Yolandi Visser and Ninja, better known as Die Antwoord.  Then there is the harsh, violent reality of Chappie's environment, where a stable urban society exists adjacent to a quasi-Mad Max wasteland, characteristic of director Neill Blomkamp's consistent predictions of a future starkly divided between the haves and have-nots.

Chappie, at its core, is not so different from Boyhood - if Boyhood also featured a beefed-up version of the ED-209 from RoboCop controlled by the thoughts of an ex-military hardass (Hugh Jackman).  The film's coming-of-age element maintains a critical emotional through-line within Blomkamp's loud, hyper-stimulated action aesthetic.  The tenderness and cute humor of Chappie himself - animated via the vocal and "poor man's motion capture" performance of Sharlto Copley - cuts through the static of an energetic but often hopelessly cluttered script.  Co-writers and real-life partners Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell have crammed enough ideas and subplots for multiple movies into Chappie, resulting in a film that feels disjointed for its first two-thirds, then hopelessly rushed once it's time to tie all the threads together.

But some of those threads, taken individually, can be quite intriguing.  Much like Ninja is obsessed with teaching Chappie all about the hard knocks of life in the slums - and the exaggerated macho hardness that's required to endure them - Blomkamp is preoccupied with the idea of authenticity expressed as coolness.  He's mashing up the worlds of Coachella and SXSW, alternating between the profanely-tagged abandoned rave site that is the criminals' hideout and the sleek, supermodern technocracy where Patel's and Jackman's characters are rivals jockeying for position in the pecking order of scientific and cultural innovation.  In the end, Chappie's own cinematic parentage is an amalgamation of Blomkamp's two previous films, Elysium and District 9; it's both a hopelessly confusing crackpot mess and a visually stunning work of ambitious social import.

It Follows

It Follows
Dir. David Robert Mitchell

3 out of 5

We all know what happens to the sexually promiscuous (or even just the sexually active) in horror films: once the clothes come off, a grisly death usually isn't far behind.  The teen chiller It Follows, from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, magnifies this trope to movie size: after teenage Jay (The Guest’s Maika Monroe) sleeps with the older boy (Jake Weary) she's been dating, she's haunted by spectral visions taking the form of various people, often creepy-looking and disturbingly mutilated strangers.  Jay's lover has the courtesy to explain, post-coitus, that it's a condition passed down a long line of sex partners and that his only motive in courting her was to rid himself of the curse, as the visions will relentlessly hunt down and kill the most recent link in the chain.

It wouldn't take much to push this premise into exploitation territory, but Mitchell takes it in a more introspective direction, trying to examine the impact Jay's situation has on her relationship with her friends: younger sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), schoolmate Yara (Olivia Luccardi), bad-boy neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto), and childhood crush Paul (Keir Gilchrist).  Only the afflicted can see the visions, so they spend much of their time consoling Jay without knowing exactly why.  Jay herself is a fascinating character, contemplating the morality of her limited options in relieving herself of the curse.  Together, they all perform the duties of friendship in a sensitive interplay that would feel very realistic for a conventional coming-of-age drama, much less a horror film.

The premise lends itself to a metaphor for teen sex, one that Mitchell complicates with the ever-changing form of Jay's tormentors and the detail that they will only pursue their victims slowly, on foot.  They're never a powerfully overwhelming force but a consistent creeping dread in the back of Jay's mind.  What she is interpreting, Mitchell cannot truly say.  His script mines a motherlode of mental triggers, from post-pubescent confusion and anxiety about sex to a recalling of the emotional scars left by our earliest intimate relationships, even suggesting a component based on the repression of sexual trauma.

The last thing this movie needs is a moral, but it seems to be grasping at a larger purpose that is not made fully clear.  Granted, that's Mitchell's likely intention, but his lyrical approach short-sells the potential of the conceit.  He delights in constructing a formal mystery house of atmospheric slow zooms, pans that lead to nowhere, and nerve-fraying sound design.  It's top-notch horror movie affect.  It's also pretty frustrating without the right amount of payoff.  It Follows becomes a slow-speed chase film for almost its entire second half, a repetitive exercise no matter how many times the nightmare changes its disguise.  Mitchell's gift for wan understatement also doesn't mesh well with a young cast struggling to communicate the film's intensely psychological conflict.  It Follows is ultimately a great idea resting upon a wobbly framework, trying mightily to strike its own balance between the codification and deconstruction of horror tropes.

This review was originally posted to Screen Invasion.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Kingsman: The Secret Service
Dir. Matthew Vaughn

4 out of 5

The titular organization in Kingsman: The Secret Service is an international spy agency that's not MI-6, even though everyone involved just happens to be British.  Nor are its gentlemen agents who wear fine suits, deploy lethal gadgets, and infiltrate underground lairs supposed to be any kind of stand-in for a certain type of spy who emerged in the golden age of cloak-and-dagger during the Cold War.  (Their origin has something to do with tailors and the fortunes of wealthy casualties in World War I.)  Indeed, Kingsman borrows as many of its cues from modern fairy tales like Star Wars and Harry Potter as it does from spy movies.  Consider its protagonist: Gary "Eggsy" Unwin (Taron Egerton), a poor London youth whisked away from his troubled home life to audition for an espionage program that tests the limits of his physical and psychological capabilities; whilst his mentor, top agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth), investigates a flamboyant tech billionaire (Samuel L. Jackson) for a litany of suspicious behavior, including but not limited to employing a personal assistant (Sofia Boutella) who sports razor-sharp foot prosthetics.

That last flourish is typical of Kingsman, a stylish spy thriller and love letter to the James Bond film series that does what many of the Bond films themselves cannot: land on the right side of the homage-parody divide.  Of course, this is the old-school '60s and '70s Bond we're talking about, the movies stuffed with outlandish megalomaniacs, gimmicky henchman, and grounded gadgetry.  But Kingsman is most intriguing in its attempt to best Bond in the personality department.  From their tony headquarters on Savile Row to their emphasis on expertise and teamwork, these guys (and gals) take their self-appointed status as gentlemen quite seriously.   It's a not-so-secret jab at the idea of a violent, vengeful Bond serving as a symbol of masculine cool; the Kingsman way is practically the opposite, according to Hart, who quotes Hemingway to his young protege: "True nobility is being superior to your former self."

It's another way of saying that you must be comfortable in your own skin, as director Matthew Vaughn certainly is.  With Kingsman he finally combines his visual panache and cheeky sense of humor with thematic heft, as the film's the out-of-nowhere commentary on wealth, class, and privilege is a vast improvement over solipsistic missteps like Kick-Ass.  This being Vaughn, the film is none too subtle, and several of its winks to other spy films are rather clunky.  Yet it succeeds all the same by taking a different tack than lesser Bond imitators, which so often try to declare their importance by either symbolically murdering or pantsing Bond in a fit of desperation.  Kingsman is the anti-anti-Bond film, working on multiple levels for many audiences: those who will recognize its tango with the history of the spy genre, those who appreciate a subversive product slipping through the Hollywood system, and those who simply want to sit back and enjoy the buoyant confidence of a movie that knows exactly how to find its own groove.

Seventh Son

Seventh Son
Dir. Sergei Bodrov

2 out of 5

Meryl Streep famously spoke of the difficulties that actresses face upon reaching a certain age - upon turning 40, she reportedly began receiving a deluge of offers to play witches, a role she resisted until last year's Into the Woods.  The starkly generic fantasy Seventh Son seems a lot like the type of movie that Streep was turning down years ago.  It's a film that has no use for female characters who aren't witches, or at least closely associated with the villainous coven led by Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), a powerful sorceress who has returned after a decades-long exile to seek vengeance on John Gregory (Jeff Bridges), the "spook" - a kind of supernatural bounty hunter - who imprisoned her.

It's easy to read Seventh Son as a feature-length act of acquiescence.  The movie squanders a talented cast on a pro forma hero's journey invested exclusively in meat-and-potatoes fantasy clichés (gee, I hope this magic pendant comes in handy later).  As the last representative of an order dedicated to protecting people from evil magical creatures, Gregory is forever in search of a worthy apprentice.  When his latest one dies, he tracks down Tom Ward (Ben Barnes), a restless farmboy so blatantly Skywalker-esque he actually stares into the middle distance and verbally confirms that he's meant for something greater than this.  As they fight their way through Malkin's minions, Gregory gradually convinces Tom that bitches be crazy and that all witches should be summarily executed.  However, the boy nurtures a seed of dissent when he discovers that a mysterious young woman (Alicia Vikander) accused of being a witch might not be so bad after all.

There's nothing wrong with embracing the Joseph Campbell template, but you had better bring something new to the equation.  All of Seventh Son's flimflam about bloodlines and destiny amounts to little more than a few character beats in the film's loud, boring climax, when its sudden stabs at profundity feel completely unearned.  And while most of the cast more or less plays the material straight, Bridges tries way too hard in turning Gregory into one of his signature wizened drunks; for some reason, this one happens to talk like Alfred Hitchcock after swallowing a truckload of gravel.  (One of the movie's few interesting undercurrents is that the heroes progress through the story despite its wise man's consistent recklessness, hectoring, and hardline stance on witch genocide.)  Alas, when the montage of medieval fantasy images in the end credits suggests a deeper and more interesting world than anything in the actual movie, it's clear that Seventh Son suffers from a fatal lack of imagination.

The Catch-Up: Winter 2014-15

I try to see as many movies as I can, so sometimes I need to purge the queue.  In this edition: catching up with cold weather diversions.

The Interview
Dirs. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

2.5 out of 5

In the wild weeks that took The Interview on its ride from mildly anticipated comedy to potential national security threat to free speech cause célèbre, it was difficult to imagine how we could ever talk about it as a movie.  Turns out it didn't take much - you just had to watch the thing.  Far from the supposedly inflammatory, outrageously disrespectful screed that motivated a group of hackers to raid Sony Pictures' hard drives and threaten moviegoers with violence, the satire of The Interview is more like the prepubescent reaction to a hidden cache of Playboy magazines.  It feels naughty and vaguely transgressive, but it doesn't fully grasp the possibilities.

Just in case you are reading this outside the white-hot political crucible of late 2014, The Interview concerns Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen), the veteran producer of a tabloid news show hosted by Dave Skylark (James Franco), whose quest to boost the program's prestige leads to an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un (Randall Park).  Rogen and Goldberg are savvy in presenting Un as a madman who only pretends to play the buffoon, particularly as he butters up the venal, guileless Skylark with an over-the-top bromance.  Still, The Interview has trouble deciding which route to take, so it often settles on silliness for silliness' sake.  The slightly more serious themes that buttressed Rogen's other 2014 film, Neighbors, are not to be found here, and the result is an amiably goofy yet shapeless comedy.

Top Five
Dir. Chris Rock

4 out of 5

Chris Rock is rightly considered one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all-time - a cultural, comic, and critical voice like few others in his generation - but you wouldn't know that from a cinematic oeuvre that includes misfires like Down to Earth and Head of State.  Even though his overall legacy is quite secure, the winning romantic comedy Top Five is a big step toward rectifying that career blind spot.  Rock plays Andre Allen, a former stand-up prodigy turned star of the Hammy the Bear trilogy, a lowbrow yet wildly successful comedy film franchise that features Allen fighting crime in a bear suit.  He's trying to salvage his career and his self-respect by transitioning to drama, though he's also distracted by the sideshow of his impending televised wedding to a reality TV star (Gabrielle Union).  It all comes to a head throughout a busy day while Andre is in New York City promoting his newest project - a violent historical slave rebellion epic - and being shadowed by a reporter (Rosario Dawson) who forces Andre to come to terms with the decisions he's made, both in his career and in his life.

Top Five is a madcap, banter-heavy fireworks show in the classic screwball comedy tradition.  Rock is omnivorous in his influences, and has a blast combining the familiar - vintage Woody Allen, His Girl Friday, anything from Meg Ryan's late '80s/'90s heyday - with his own sensibility, forged within the traditions of African-American comedy and the fraternity of stand-up.  Though the movie rarely throws a true curveball, Rock follows his gameplan with energy and precision, keeping Andre's exaggerated plight grounded in details that paint a more robust picture of its lead couple as human beings.  Ultimately, Top Five's biggest advantage over more generic, focus-grouped comedies stuffed with cameos and throwaway jokes (which Rock admittedly takes advantage of as well) is its individuality - a quality derived from the movie's character-driven humor and Rock's own unapologetic point of view.

The Boy Next Door
Dir. Rob Cohen

1.5 out of 5

Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman) is the most impossible high school senior I've ever seen in a movie.  For the first 20 minutes of sleazy thriller The Boy Next Door, he's an incredibly buff, Iliad-quoting, garage door-fixing, great uncle-caretaking, surrogate-fathering fantasy for the recently separated Claire Peterson (Jennifer Lopez), a suburban schoolteacher whose current man of the house is her dweeby teenage son (Ian Nelson).  Noah and Claire inevitably bump uglies in classic late-night Cinemax fashion, but when Claire realizes her mistake and tries to break off their non-relationship, it doesn't take long for the boy to reveal him as an angry, manipulative psychopath - a even more preposterous character who tracks closer to "Batman villain" than "spurned jock."

There is nothing noteworthy about The Boy Next Door, a self-serious take on material that's one step above amateur erotic fiction and not nearly as fun as the Lifetime movie version would undoubtedly be.  Lopez's big comeback is limited to 30 minutes of lounging in various nightgowns and an additional hour of looking mildly concerned as feverishly dumb reveals pile up in a triumph of hackneyed storytelling.  (Though, to be fair, Claire's totally normal job as a classics teacher at a public high school allows the filmmakers to sprinkle in pretentious references to Oedipus and the works of Homer.)  Ultimately, The Boy Next Door exists solely for two scenes - the steamy May-December sexytime that's built up with all the subtlety of a softcore porno, and Claire's vigilante retribution against a lunatic who surely would have raised about a million red flags by now - presumably to pander to our most forbidden desires while reassuring us of our moral uprightness.  It's an annoying case of a movie trying to have it both ways.  Too bad neither of them work in the slightest.

Jupiter Ascending

Jupiter Ascending
Dir. Lana and Andy Wachowski

2.5 out of 5

The Wachowski siblings' quest to out-weird themselves continues with Jupiter Ascending, a sprawling space opera that proudly chooses quantity over quality when it comes to the ideas that shape its original sci-fi narrative.  And for a while, "quantity" doesn't seem like a bad choice: the film's whirlwind first act includes attempted alien abduction, cybernetically-enhanced bounty hunters, a caste of test-tube humans spliced with animal DNA, and the machinations of intergalactic aristocrats trying to gain control the most lucrative and resource-rich planet left to them in their late mother's will: Earth.  

Caught in the middle of this madness is Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a humble domestic worker and undocumented immigrant living with her large Russian immigrant family in Chicago.  However, this being a space opera, Jupiter is in reality a very important figure in these space politics, which becomes clear when she's rescued from the alien minions hunting her by a human-wolf hybrid named Caine Wise (Channing Tatum).  She's then whisked away beyond the stars to reclaim the royal birthright waiting for her, and to make decisions that affect the fate of the entire universe with only the slightest giblets of information about what in the holy hell is going on.

The film plays like the colicky love child of Dune and Flash Gordon, attempting to parlay its obsession with court intrigue and political ritual into big, dumb action setpieces.  Unfortunately, it's a fatally unbalanced equation.  Tatum is much blander than a wolf-eared super soldier who rides around on anti-gravity rollerblades should ever be, and the movie relies on a repetitive cycle of capture, rescue, and escape that belies the painstakingly detailed world in which it takes place.  Indeed, there's another, more interesting movie going on beneath Tatum's rote action hero exercises, one where Kunis' screwball charm elevates her secret space princess backstory, and where the Wachowskis manage to insert grace notes about personhood and identity (there's a wonderful sequence where Jupiter endures a labyrinth of bureaucrats and paperwork in an homage to Brazil) alongside indelible images of gorgeous gilded spaceships and the many Dr. Moreau-style hybrids that form a kind of galactic underclass.

Jupiter Ascending will undoubtedly receive plenty of scorn for its overstuffed and incoherent plot, its reliance on space fantasy clichés, and the nonexistent chemistry of its leads.  None of it will be unwarranted; despite a release date change, it still draws unkind comparisons to similar fare like Guardians of the Galaxy.  But to pillory the film for its unabashed weirdness is a fatal mistake, an act of myopia that not only discounts the fascinating marginalia and omnivorous influences present in the Wachowskis' world-building, but also discourages any sort of deviation from the status quo of big-budget pictures.  So many movies fail in the most boring, predictable ways possible.  We should be more grateful when a movie like Jupiter Ascending has the good sense to stumble with style.