Kill List (2012)
Dir. Ben Wheatley3.5 out of 5
Kill List is an angry, angry film set in modern-day Britain, but its close-up examination of moral bankruptcy is universal. It peels back the layers of a discontented, war-weary, and financially untenable society until we see nothing but its raw nerves and seething rage. We see this darkness gradually enveloping ex-soldier and private security contractor Neil Maskell, who is driven by economic pressures and his ball-busting wife (MyAnna Buring) to take a job as a contract hitman for a mysterious employer, despite his many reservations. His boss's insistence on signing a blood contract is just the first sign that something is amiss. What's more, the victims on Maskell's hit list all seem to recognize him. They hint that the bloodshed is part of a larger plan, accepting death with a chilly tranquility that's unsettling even to a cold-blooded killer.
A salvo against slickly-produced, lifeless crime thrillers masquerading as exploitation films, Kill List is a character study of a man whose fury simultaneously drives and consumes him. Scuttling around the darkest corners of Maskell's psyche (it's strongly suggested that he suffers from PTSD), writer-director Ben Wheatley creates a feeling of constant disorientation onscreen. Maskell's utter confusion is perfectly married to his lack of grace - a man of action grudgingly accepting that he can do nothing but react. His long-suffering sidekick (Michael Smiley) can only do so much to smooth over his colleague's boiling rage with a disarming sense of humor. Smiley's humanity never rubs off on Maskell, a proper peach who rejects his young son's request for bedtime stories about King Arthur in favor of ones about his own war-scarred past.
Wheatley's stark, elliptical style is heavily indebted to Lars Von Trier, with scenes of domestic discord smashing up against grisly violence and ominous symbolism. Essentially, Kill List is Von Trier by way of David Fincher, a parable of the destruction wrought by man's hubris packaged inside of a twisty, voyeuristic film about society's criminal underbelly - not a bad pedigree for one's second feature. But this also means that the film often feels overly familiar when it should feel more assured. Wheatley's reference points and hint-dropping may tip off astute viewers to the story's climax too far in advance, and the film's last twenty minutes feel like a peculiarly specific response to the disastrous Neil LaBute-Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man. The success of Wheatley's homage to and/or meta-commentary on British horror is a secondary concern, though. Kill List easily stands on its own merits, mining the depths of a confused and dissolute world to propel a bruising, bracing morality play."Kill List" is receiving a very limited theatrical release but is also available via Video On Demand.
The Innkeepers (2012)
Dir. Ti West4 out of 5
Indie horror filmmaker Ti West skewers a familiar Internet meme near the beginning of The Innkeepers: the gag where a unsuspecting victim stares intently at a dull photo until some terrifying image unexpectedly bursts onto the screen. It's a corny "gotcha," but it's also the first touch of self-awareness in this unique comedy-horror hybrid. Taking a back-to-basics approach in its exploration of the ghost story and its psychological underpinnings, The Innkeepers nimbly re-appropriates old school horror tropes with fiendishly successful results. West beckons the audience with a slow burn of freaky murmurs, ominous portents, and excruciating pans around dark corners, aiming for nothing less than to reclaim the soul of the American horror film.
The Innkeepers is a simple story elevated by its unusually strong characters. Sara Paxton and Pat Healy are amateur ghost hunters convinced that the spirit of a jilted bride haunts the going-out-of-business Yankee Pedlar Inn, using their downtime to fuss over their Geocities-era website and record garbled nighttime whispers. "There's a lot of money in this right now," grumbles Healy, acknowledging a bizarre reality in which the living have an economic incentive to harass the dead. The arrival of "healer" and professed psychic Kelly McGillis (in town for a New Age convention!) furthers illustrates the film's bemusement with the commodification of the paranormal. But this playful skepticism only establishes a false sense of security. McGillis encourages Paxton to ignore the jaded Healy and indulge her curiosity. And despite the heroine's decision to disregard some pretty obvious warning signs, the audience remains in step with Paxton's mental state as she blurs the line between inquiry and obsession.
Paxton and Healy have a great comedic rapport that makes The Innkeepers a livelier effort than West's previous film, the vintage horror homage The House of the Devil. Healy has great deadpan timing, but Paxton is simply fantastic: a gorgeous pixie who effortlessly transforms into a gawky, high-strung underachiever sweetly oblivious to Healy's crush on her. Like many who dabble with dark forces, she has a frustrating penchant for running herself into dead ends, but she remains affecting even in peril thanks to her overall likeability and determination to find some damn answers. By taking the time to craft such believable relationships, West earns amnesty for the times he squanders it all on anticlimactic boo! moments. But even with glacial pacing and only a handful of thoughtful scares, The Innkeepers cranks up the tension until it becomes almost unbearable - a diabolical strategy that forces us to admit that sometimes we fear what we know (or think we know) is coming even more than the things that take us by surprise.
Full reviews aren't right for all films - particularly ones that seem past the point of timely comment. These films are better off with bite-size opinionating. Let's call them "Jump Cuts."
The House of the Devil (2009)
Dir. Ti West3.5 out of 5
An immediate sensation in the cultish world of horror aficionados, The House of the Devil is a canny throwback to the vintage American splatter films of the 1970s and early 1980s, zeroing in on a comely co-ed (Jocelin Donahue) who takes an iffy babysitting job in a remote Victorian home and gets much more than she bargained for. The film hinges on a long, slow build of tension - literally over an hour - until erupting in a ending that's one sustained burst of violent mayhem. Writer/director/editor Ti West creates massive anxiety by constantly teasing the audience's expectations, even turning a goofy interlude set to the Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another" into a nail-biting experience. And while some of the material comes across as blatant filler, West's technical skill and loving attention to detail are obvious. In this House, the waiting is the hardest - and best - part.
Hellraiser (1987)
Dir. Clive Barker3.5 out of 5
Can a film be rightly remembered for the wrong reasons? It's a key question to consider in Hellraiser, Clive Barker's examination of sexual desire and dysfunctional human relationships in the context of a horror movie. When a married couple (Andrew Robinson and Clare Higgins) moves into a house previously inhabited by Robinson's brother-in-law (Sean Chapman), it rekindles Higgins' memories of her hedonistic affair with the prior tenant. She discovers that her lover has been transported to a realm of sadomasochistic torture after opening a mysterious puzzle box, and helps him slowly regenerate his body with freshly murdered corpses. Despite its confounding mythology, the film has a uniquely transgressive vibe thanks in no small part to its disturbing imagery and subject matter. However, audiences have heaped attention on the former, particularly a group of S&M demons called Cenobites - mutilated harvesters of corrupt human souls - with enough appeal to sustain a nine-film Hellraiser franchise. There's no doubt that Barker's vision has been diluted by all the facsimiles, as well as his complicity in the rise of the "torture porn" subgenre. But the astonishing humanity of Hellraiser will always be there, proving that he's not just another sicko.
The Babe (1992)
Dir. Arthur Hiller2 out of 5
A dubious exercise in fantasy casting, The Babe takes the Colossus of Clout and turns him into the Sultan of Snooze. John Goodman surely fits all the physical requirements to portray baseball legend George Herman "Babe" Ruth, but there's simply not enough of him to fill out the disappointing two-dimensional role. His gift for paternal softness mingled with quickly escalating rage works well when it's nuanced, but The Babe demands that he swing for the fences in every scene. There's an admittedly good arc in Ruth's life story, the archetypical "too much, too soon" athlete who achieves a belated sort of redemption and wins many laurels along the way. Yet the film persists in perpetuating old myths (that Ruth was sold from the Red Sox to the Yankees to cover the Boston owner's losses on Broadway) and portraying half-truths (the Babe calling his shot in the 1932 World Series) in the most turgid way possible. The Babe cuts too many corners to be worthy of its larger-than-life subject; by the end, it's sadly like the man himself, just going through the motions.
Miss Bala (2011)
Dir. Gerardo Naranjo3 out of 5
Pitched somewhere in between exploitation and urgent social commentary, the Mexican crime thriller Miss Bala builds upon the dispatches from the last half-decade's drug cartel wars to tell a story about collateral damage. As the struggle for control of the lucrative narcotics trade wends its way along the U.S.-Mexico border, a willowy Tijuana beauty (Stephanie Sigman) of modest means dreams of stardom, skipping out on familial obligations to attend an audition for the Miss Baja California pageant. Her youthful idyll is violently interrupted after she witnesses a nightclub massacre by a particularly ruthless drug gang, whose leader (Noe Hernandez) spies an opportunity to use Sigman's striking looks as a shield for increasingly dangerous criminal activity. Loosely based on an incident involving a real Mexican beauty queen, the film dabs an unrelentingly bleak story with generous dollops of pulp.
Whether in the film's explosively swift and brutal firefights or Sigman's unwilling ascent from driver to mule to bait for a prominent police official marked for a cartel hit, writer-director Gerardo Naranjo seems most interested in the surrender of control demanded by the narco-wars. Hernandez makes a big impression with his chilling performance, quietly monstrous and nihilistic. Even in the softest of threats he commands obedience, and Sigman has no choice but to comply. Her character projects a crushing despair that underlines the cruel coincidence of her condition. She painfully realizes that the entire game is rigged and no help is on the way. Every cop in Tijuana appears as corrupt as the one who delivers her to the cartel when she tries to file a report on the nightclub shooting, and results-oriented DEA agents can't tell her apart from the willing accomplices. Sigman allows herself to smile only once, when trying on gowns for the Miss Baja pageant that the cartel fixes in her favor, but it's a sad, pitiful reminder of a dream perverted.
However, the pageant subplot fails to disguise the fact that Sigman's character is essentially just a backstory with an eternally terrified expression. She's a cipher for the filmmaker to re-enact pieces of the media hysteria surrounding the drug wars. Through her we more easily comprehend the terrible, exploitative nature of the cartels, but her story doesn't give much more insight than you might find in a typical newspaper article. There's also too much dead air in a film that's so preoccupied with the sensual and sensational. Naranjo lets scenes drag on in silence and exhausts the audience with attempts to create formal distance, such as blocking his actors deep within the frame and following Sigman with the ubiquitous Darren Aronofsky back-of-the-head tracking shot (as if her character needed to be any more faceless). The combination of grim realism and stylish artifice does work intermittently. The film gets its title from the Spanish slang word for "bullet," and Naranjo displays his impressive action chops in a handful of thrilling sequences. But while its visceral appeal is impossible to ignore, the movie's style keeps getting in the way of its latent substance. Miss Bala's beauty is, unfortunately, only skin deep.
The Grey (2012)
Dir. Joe Carnahan
2 out of 5
Liam Neeson reunites with his A-Team director Joe Carnahan for The Grey, a man-versus-nature survival picture that casts the late-blooming action star as a modern "great white hunter" employed by an Alaskan oil company. Aspiring to a status akin to the visual equivalent of the muscular prose of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, the film instead reeks of misguided machismo and blandly masculine sentiment more suited to an Under Armour commercial. There's plenty of respect for rugged individuals but precious little regard for the power of the vast, indomitable wilderness, with the two sides portrayed as bitter rivals locked in eternal combat. For the record, I'm putting my money on nature.
Neeson's job is to stand sentinel for oil drillers and ward off attacks from the grey wolves whose ornery insistence on protecting their habitat threatens our endangered pipelines. Animal experts have already been quick to point out the extreme rarity of wolf attacks on humans, but for the purposes of this plot they are aggressive, bloodthirsty behemoths. When a plane crash strands Neeson and a small cadre of oilmen in a remote section of the tundra, they must rely on the hunter's finely-tuned survival skills to escape the wolves' territory and trudge their way back to civilization. Though Neeson slips naturally into a leadership role, his charges unfortunately resemble a generic band of roughnecks destined to become tasty snacks for predators. There's a weird exhibitionist bent in their dwindling numbers, as if Carnahan is unduly obsessed with the many ways people can perish in the Arctic. The lone memorable exception is a bespectacled Dermot Mulroney, who has plenty of rough edges but also shows enough vulnerability to dodge the tough-guy caricature that is the be-all, end-all for so many of his co-stars.
Perhaps most perplexing is the film's tendency to muzzle Neeson, whose spectacular beat-downs are surely the quid pro quo for projects that force him to discard his actorly mien and rely solely on his hulking screen presence. But balls-out man-on-wolf combat is too visually ridiculous for a film this self-serious, and unfortunately leaves Neeson with little to do besides yell at everyone to keep walking. The Grey is a similarly grim, plodding affair (through some admittedly beautiful Far North scenery) that consistently undercuts whatever literary aspirations it does have with misplaced sarcasm. The recurring motif of a pugilistic poem penned by Neeson's father completes the film's blustery Victorian tone, hoping that we'll confuse stubbornness for virility and braggadocio for heroism, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Contraband (2012)
Dir. Baltasar Kormákur
3 out of 5
There's no better example of fill-in-the-blank filmmaking than the "one last score" movie, where the bar of success is set at the rather modest level of not embarrassing oneself. By that forgiving measuring stick, the action-heist film Contraband is better than decent, a capable little thriller that re-animates an old, worn-out formula with sheer grubby energy. Poetically, the film is also a remake: Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur originated Mark Wahlberg's leading role as a reformed ex-smuggler pressured into one more job in 2008's Reykjavik-Rotterdam. Kormákur's steady hand guides his cast through an Americanized version of the story, which sets a course from New Orleans, where Wahlberg's brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) has run afoul of a Cajun crime lord (Giovanni Ribisi), to Panama City, where Wahlberg's crew hopes to secure millions in counterfeit cash aboard a container ship and pay off all their remaining debts. Sounds straightforward enough, but Kormákur is able to keep the tension high by tossing game-changer after game-changer into the mix, subtly mutating the film's admittedly generic DNA.
Wahlberg is undoubtedly Contraband's weakest link. Lacking a rogue's charisma, he has a face that registers determination as extreme irritation and often comes across as a bully instead of a hero. Yet, as if to remind us that he's the good guy, Wahlberg unfortunately relies on an excessive family-man doofiness that reappears as a frustrating motif throughout the film. Even the unhinged Ribisi gets his own adorable moppet to watch cartoons with when he isn't threatening Wahlberg's children and brutalizing his wife (Kate Beckinsale). Fortunately, the supporting cast provides more than enough ballast to keep the film afloat. Lukas Haas provides welcome comic relief as a semi-clueless accomplice and is appropriately terrified throughout a fierce gunfight at the film's midpoint. Diego Luna also has some fun as a Panamanian gangster who conducts business with a flourish, apparently convincing his men that duct tape makes a better disguise than a ski mask during a robbery. The great and intense Ben Foster also turns up in a role that alters the course of the movie, but his work is much better than his questionable character arc deserves.
You might notice that many of these folks aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer - a priceless and highly recognizable work of art is referred to more than once as "an oily rag." One of these utterances comes from J.K. Simmons, playing a wily ship captain who somehow can't detect the criminal activity occurring right under his nose. The film's dumbest sensibilities come to full fruition in its wildly preposterous ending, but at least Contraband has the good sense to give us a mostly satisfying 100 minutes before that and some halfway legitimate reasons for Wahlberg to turn into superdad instead of calling the cops. Though it never reaches the heights of other, better thrillers, Contraband nonetheless has a grimy appeal that transcends the otherwise mediocre movie at its core.
Red Tails (2012)
Dir. Anthony Hemingway2.5 out of 5
Upon its release in 2009, I tabbed Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds with the potential to annihilate the repetitious World War II movie paradigm of bland deference and esteem, or at least make it a little more self-aware. What I didn't count on was the stubborn will and blithe disregard of George Lucas. In his long-gestating war film Red Tails, we have the exact tonal opposite of the gleefully anarchic Basterds. Yet its approach is surprisingly similar - a hyper-earnest fantasy of wartime drawing inspiration from a rich genre legacy, if not borrowing elements directly from older, more recognizable films. The key difference, however, is that Red Tails is so achingly sincere in its desire to deliver a well-intentioned, wide-angle drama about war, race, and America that it fails to engage on a personal level with its characters or its audience. Instead, Lucas and company see fit to clumsily arrange men and events and facts in a heavy-handed symbolic tableau. In telling its story of uncommon courage in the skies, Red Tails never stops playing to the rafters.
Though hardly the first to approach the subject of the Tuskegee Airmen - an elite group of African-American aviators, the first such unit in the U.S. military - director Anthony Hemingway's film is the first to give them the full-on blockbuster treatment. It focuses largely on squadron leader Martin "Easy" Julian (Nate Parker) and ace pilot Joe "Lightning" Little (David Oyelowo), two men with their share of philosophical differences that are neatly summarized by their nicknames. They clash just as easily in matters of combat protocol as they do in their political approach to the army's overt racism. Commanding officers Terence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. are there to stand up to army brass reluctant to give the Tuskegee group a meaningful mission and whip up the troops with inspirational speeches, but neither leaves a terribly specific impression. The film's breathtaking dogfights are all that's left to redeem its stock characters and routine plot. Red Tails is at its most effective when dispelling notions of individual glory bred by years of Top Gun clones, portraying aerial combat as a group undertaking with a razor-thin margin of error. It suggests that the steely determination of second-class citizens with something to prove makes those men better pilots, and feels like it lands mighty close to the truth.
Yet this is not a feeling that Red Tails can sustain over two hours of what is more of a reverent homage to the Tuskegee pioneers than a compelling narrative film. Quite frankly, it is all over the place, haphazardly plotted and reliant on cornball clichés or outright theft - one minor subplot plays like deleted scenes from The Great Escape, as confounding as it is completely unnecessary. The tin-eared dialogue from co-writers John Ridley and Aaron McGruder doesn't help matters, highlighting juvenile preoccupations that bear the fingerprints of Lucas, who personally financed the entire project. The excellent supporting cast, stacked with alums of HBO's The Wire, truly deserves most of the credit for the film's watchability. In all honesty, it's a minor miracle that this 20-year cinematic boondoggle manages to avoid total disaster, even as its dewy-eyed godfather keeps the movie grounded in naivete and never gives it a chance to soar.
