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Monthly Roundup – September 2018

30 Sunday Sep 2018

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Christopher Robin (2018) / D: Marc Forster / 104m

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Mark Gatiss, Oliver Ford Davies, Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Peter Capaldi, Sophie Okonedo, Toby Jones

Rating: 7/10 – having left behind his childhood friends at the Hundred Acre Wood, an adult Christopher Robin (McGregor), now married and weighed down by the demands of his work, is reunited with them just at the moment that they all most need each other; a live action/CGI variation on A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories, Christopher Robin is an enjoyable if lightweight confection from Disney that features good performances from McGregor and Cummings (as both Pooh and Tigger), but which also takes a very straightforward approach to its story, and allows Gatiss to overdo it as the smug villain of the piece.

Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003) / D: Bob Odenkirk / 83m

Cast: Michael Blieden, Stephanie Courtney, Matt Price, Annabelle Gurwitch, Maura Tierney, David Cross, Melora Walters, Jack Black

Rating: 7/10 – two friends agree to meet for dinner but two other people end up joining them, leading to an evening of surprising connections and revelations that causes each to rethink their own opinions and feelings about each other; adapted from the stage play Phyro-Giants! (and written by Blieden), Odenkirk’s debut as a director is an amusing examination of what we tell ourselves to be true while being closely examined by others who may (or may not) know better, making Melvin Goes to Dinner a waspish if somewhat diffident look at social mores that feels a little forced in places, but is well acted by its cast.

BlacKkKlansman (2018) / D: Spike Lee / 135m

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Jasper Pããkkönen, Ryan Eggold, Paul Walter Houser, Ashlie Atkinson, Michael Buscemi, Robert John Burke, Frederick Weller, Corey Hawkins, Harry Belafonte, Alec Baldwin

Rating: 9/10 – the true story of how, in the early Seventies, the Colorado Springs Police Department’s first black officer, Ron Stallworth (Washington), infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan with the aid of a fellow, Jewish officer, Flip Zimmerman (Driver); a return to form for Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman is entertaining and frightening in equal measure for the way it deals with contentious issues surrounding politics and racism that are as entrenched today as they were back in the Seventies, and for the deft way in which Lee allows the humour to filter through without negating the seriousness of the issues he’s examining.

Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017) / D: John Campopiano, Justin White / 97m

With: Mary Lambert, Dale Midkiff, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist, Peter Stein, Elliot Goldenthal, Miko Hughes, Susan Blommaert, Heather Langenkamp

Rating: 6/10 – a look at the making of Pet Sematary (1989), with interviews and recollections from the cast and crew, and an assessment of the movie’s impact and legacy in the years that have followed; coming across very much like a labour of love for its directors, Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary features a wealth of details about the making of the movie, some of which is fascinating, and some of which is less so, making this a mixed bag in terms of content, but if you’re a fan of Pet Sematary, this will be a must-see, and should offer up behind-the-scenes information that hasn’t been seen or heard before.

Lake Placid: Legacy (2018) / D: Darrell Roodt / 93m

Cast: Katherine Barrell, Tim Rozon, Sai Bennett, Luke Newton, Craig Stein, Joe Pantoliano, Alisha Bailey

Rating: 3/10 – a group of eco-warriors discover a remote island that’s not on any maps, and find a genetically altered apex predator that soon begins whittling down their numbers; the sixth entry in the franchise, Lake Placid: Legacy ignores the previous four movies and acts – without explanation – as a direct sequel to the original, though that doesn’t make it any less abysmal, and it’s easily the worst in the series, something it achieves thanks to a dreadful script, Roodt’s absentee direction, the less than stellar efforts of the cast, and just by being greenlit in the first place.

Killing Gunther (2017) / D: Taran Killam / 93m

Cast: Taran Killam, Bobby Moynihan, Hannah Simone, Cobie Smulders, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Allison Tolman, Paul Brittain, Aaron Yoo, Ryan Gaul, Amir Talai, Peter Kelamis

Rating: 4/10 – an assassin, Blake (Killam), hires a team of other assassins to help him track down and eliminate Gunther (Schwarzenegger), the world’s most feared, and successful, hitman; ostensibly a comedy, Killing Gunther is yet another ill-advised movie where the script – and the cast – try way too hard to make absurdist behaviour funny all by itself, and where the tone is as wayward as the narrative, something that makes the movie an uneven watch and less than successful in its attempts to entertain – and the less said about Schwarzenegger’s performance the better.

Overboard (2018) / D: Rob Greenberg / 112m

Cast: Eugenio Derbez, Anna Faris, Eva Longoria, John Hannah, Swoosie Kurtz, Mel Rodriguez, Josh Segarra, Hannah Nordberg, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Payton Lapinski, Fernando Luján, Cecilia Suárez, Mariana Treviño

Rating: 6/10 – when a rich, arrogant, multi-millionaire playboy (Derbez) falls overboard from his yacht and loses his memory, a struggling single mother (Faris) that he’s treated badly sees an opportunity to exploit his misfortune for her own personal gain; a gender-swap remake of the 1987 original, Overboard is pleasant enough, with well judged performances from Derbez and Faris, but it plays out in expected fashion, with only occasional moments that stand out, and never really tries to do anything that might make viewers think of it as anything more than an acceptable remake doing its best to keep audiences just interested enough to stay until the end.

El club de los buenos infieles (2017) / D: Lluís Segura / 84m

Cast: Raúl Fernández de Pablo, Fele Martínez, Juanma Cifuentes, Hovik Keuchkerian, Albert Ribalta, Jordi Vilches, Adrián Lastra

Rating: 7/10 – four friends, all married but experiencing a loss of desire for their wives, decide to start a club for men with similar problems, and in the hope that by “seeing” other women, it will rekindle their desire; based on a true story, El club de los buenos infieles starts off strongly as the men explain their feelings, but soon the ridiculous nature of their solution leads to all sorts of uncomfortable moments and situations that stretch the credibility of the material, leaving the principal cast’s performances to keep things engaging, along with Segura’s confident direction (which helps overcome much of the script’s deficiencies), and a couple of very funny set-pieces that are worth a look all by themselves.

Destination Wedding (2018) / D: Victor Lewin / 87m

Cast: Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves

Rating: 5/10 – two misanthropes (Ryder, Reeves) invited to the same wedding (he’s the groom’s brother, she’s the groom’s ex), find they have much more in common than expected, including an attraction to each other; the kind of movie that has its characters spout pseudo-intellectual nonsense at every opportunity in an effort to make them sound wise and/or studiously profound, Destination Wedding could have been much funnier than it thinks it is, and wastes the talents of both Ryder and Reeves (yes, even Reeves) as it leaves no turn unstoned in its efforts to be a romantic comedy that isn’t in the least bit romantic, or comic.

The Resurrection of Gavin Stone (2016) / D: Dallas Jenkins / 92m

Cast: Brett Dalton, Anjelah Johnson-Reyes, Neil Flynn, D.B. Sweeney, Shawn Michaels, Patrick Gagnon, Tim Frank, Tara Rios

Rating: 6/10 – a former teen TV star whose adult acting career isn’t going as well as he’d hoped, finds himself doing community service at his hometown church, and discovering that having a lack of religious faith is the least of his problems; a bright and breezy romantic comedy, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone wears its Christian beliefs on its sleeve, while doing absolutely nothing that you wouldn’t expect it to, thanks to likable performances from Dalton and Johnson-Reyes, a solid if predictable script, and workmanlike direction that never lets the material stray from its formulaic constraints, though if truth be told, on this occasion that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Predator (2018) / D: Shane Black / 107m

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Sterling K. Brown, Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, Yvonne Strahovski

Rating: 5/10 – a rag-tag band of PTSD sufferers and an army sniper (Holbrook) find themselves taking on a couple of Predators while a secret arm of the US government atempts to exploit their presence on Earth; a movie that could and should have been so much better (soooo much better), The Predator is unnecessarily convoluted and stupid at the same time, and despite Black’s best efforts, remains the kind of sequel that everyone has high hopes for, only to see them drain away with every dumb moment that the script can squeeze in, and every tortuous twist of logic that can be forced onto the narrative, all of which leaves everyone hoping and praying that this is the end of the line.

The Astounding She-Monster (1957) / D: Ronald V. Ashcroft / 62m

aka Mysterious Invader

Cast: Robert Clarke, Kenne Duncan, Marilyn Harvey, Jeanne Tatum, Shirley Kilpatrick, Ewing Miles Brown

Rating: 3/10 – kidnappers take their hostage up into the mountains, unaware that a space ship has crash landed nearby, and the sole occupant (Kilpatrick) is more than capable of defending itself; not a cult classic, and not a movie to look back fondly on for any low-budget virtues it may have (it doesn’t), The Astounding She-Monster is a creature feature without a creature, a crime drama with an annoying voice over, a sci-fi horror with minimal elements of both, and a movie with far too many scenes where the cast run through the same stretch of woods trying to get away from an alien whose only speed is ultra-ultra-slow.

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Trailer – The Predator (2018)

10 Thursday May 2018

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The long promised fourth entry in the Predator series is now a step nearer (after being delayed from its planned February 2018 opening). And what do we have in store come September? Well… alarm bells should be ringing like a campanologist’s convention at Notre-Dame Cathedral. A young boy just happens to receive – in the mail, no less – a beacon that attracts a Predator to Earth? Shane Black is a terrific writer, and there’s likely to be a perfectly plausible explanation for what appears to be one of the clumsiest set ups in sequel history, but right now, the jury has to be out. And the various action beats we can see don’t exactly augur well either. With most of said action apparently set in yet another small American township (that will be likely smashed and blown to smithereens in the process), this doesn’t look or feel as tense or as thrilling as the original. But who knows? This is meant to be a teaser trailer after all, and it does feature Boyd Holbrook (always a good thing), and it does bear witness to Black’s sardonic way with dialogue (or maybe co-writer Fred Dekker’s), so there may be more to the movie than meets the eye. Let’s hope so, because at a time when third sequels – let’s forget about those awful Alien/Predator movies – don’t elicit that much of a positive response, this could be one to buck the trend.

Logan (2017)

03 Friday Mar 2017

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D: James Mangold / 137m

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Richard E. Grant, Eriq LaSalle, Elise Neal, Quincy Fouse

It’s 2029, and mutants are pretty thin on the ground, with those that remain hiding from the rest of humanity, hoping to be overlooked. They’re almost extinct thanks to a virus created by the Transigen Project, led by Dr Zander Rice (Grant). More able than most to blend in, Logan aka Wolverine (Jackman), is working as a limo driver while also looking after – secretly – Professor Charles Xavier (Stewart), now in his nineties and suffering from senile dementia. Hidden away in Mexico, Logan is helped in this by another mutant, Caliban (Merchant). Xavier’s psychic abilities are now inherently dangerous; if he has a seizure it triggers a psychic attack that could mean the death of anyone around him. In one of his more lucid moments he talks of a mutant who will need Logan’s help, but Logan doesn’t want to know anything about it.

An encounter with a woman, Gabriela (Rodriguez) and a young girl, Laura (Keen), brings Logan and the mutant Xavier has been talking about together. Laura is a mutant, but with a difference: she was created in a Transigen lab, along with twenty-two other “children”. Bred to be weapons, the creation of a twenty-fourth mutant means Laura and all the other children are expendable. Gabriela has helped Laura and the other children escape, but now they need to rendezvous at a place called Eden in North Dakota. When Transigen come a-calling at Logan’s hideout – in the form of Donald Pierce (Holbrook) and his team of genetically enhanced Reavers – previous events dictate that Logan, Xavier and Laura make a run for it, and against Logan’s better judgment, they head for North Dakota. But Caliban is captured by Pierce and coerced into using his tracking abilities to find Logan and the girl.

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As the trio journey to Eden, Logan learns more about the activities of Transigen and their attempts to create mutants they can control, while Pierce comes close a couple of times to catching them. A chance encounter outside of Oklahoma City with a local family, the Munsons (LaSalle, Neal, Fouse) has unexpected consequences, as well as revealing the identity of X24, Transigen’s latest creation. Logan does eventually get Laura to Eden, which proves to be real and not the comic book-inspired destination that Logan has believed Gabriela made up. There the other children are planning to make a break for the Canadian border, and Laura plans to go with them. But Pierce, now accompanied by Dr Rice, is soon on their heels, and it will need Logan’s alter ego, the Wolverine, to ensure they reach safety instead of being captured and killed.

Fans of Logan/Wolverine have been clamouring to see the character that they’ve read and seen in the comics, brought to life in the same violent, berserker fashion that he’s portrayed on the page. A brief moment towards the end of X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) gave everyone a chance to see what that would look like, but it was just a moment, however well-received. Now, in his third solo outing, Logan’s rage has finally been given its due, and this is the ultra-violent/borderline sadistic outing that the fans have been waiting for. The tone is set right at the start, with a scene that pits Logan against a quartet of gangbangers. Blasted in the chest, he still gets up and proceeds to use his adamantium claws to slice, dice and eviscerate all four of them. But at the same time it’s clear that his healing powers aren’t as effective as they used to be, and though his trademark rage is still there, it appears that the use of his claws is as painful for him as it is for anyone on their receiving end.

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It’s this vulnerable side to Logan’s character, this curtailment of his powers, that makes Logan such an interesting movie to watch. Based very loosely on the comic book series Old Man Logan (2008-09), this version of Logan, older, even more pragmatic, yet weary of life and living, allows the viewer to look beyond the usual superhero movie traits, and into the mind of a character who’s seen and done too much and doesn’t care to keep living that kind of life. He wants to die, a concept that most – if not all – other superhero movies shy away from. But returning director James Mangold, who made The Wolverine (2013), and along with screenwriters Michael Green and Scott Frank, has made a road movie-cum-Western that adds surprisingly complex emotional layers to its basic storyline, and which doesn’t tiptoe around the issues it brings up. This is an unashamedly adult “superhero” movie, dealing with adult themes in an intelligent, adult way, and at no point does it short change the viewer by glossing over the emotional stakes set up within the narrative.

It’s the Wolverine movie that Hugh Jackman has been waiting to make since his first appearance in the role back in 2000. Still aloof, but weighed down by experiences we can only guess at, Logan is battered and scarred, his features weathered by time, and partly hidden beneath a salt and pepper beard that provides texture in terms of his age and weary resignation at being so old. This is a Logan who is continually in pain, the antithesis of the Logan we’re used to seeing, and it’s ironic that the source of his strength and invincibility (until now), his adamantium skeleton and claws, is the very thing that’s now killing him. There’s an inevitable layer of melancholy attached to this, but Mangold and Jackman make sure that Logan’s gruff demeanour is still in place, derailing any sentimentality that might have arisen otherwise. This isn’t as elegiac as its references to Shane (1953) make it sound; instead, it’s about that other staple narrative of the Old West, the passing of an era.

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Jackman excels in what is easily his best performance in the role, and it’s good to see him finally playing Logan as something more than the cigar-chomping, Elvis-sideburned figure we’ve been used to. But if Jackman’s transformation into a much older Logan is disarming, then he’s more than matched by Stewart’s interpretation of Xavier’s mental disintegration. There are moments when Stewart’s bewildered, beseeching features are too painful to watch, and again it’s the irony of seeing a once proud and powerful man undermined by the very gift that made him stand out from the crowd that makes the movie so emotionally complex and rewarding. There are terrific supporting turns from Holbrook (give this man a leading role, for Pete’s sake), Grant, and Merchant, but inevitably it’s Keen who draws the viewer’s attention for her largely mute, refreshingly feral performance as Laura/X23, a character with a close connection to Logan, and someone you really don’t want to mess with when she furrows her brow.

If this really is Jackman’s swansong in the role then he couldn’t have picked a better storyline with which to hang up the claws and walk away from the X-Men franchise. By stripping back the narrative, and focusing on the relationships of the three main characters, Logan transcends its comic book origins to become a movie that is daring, quietly introspective when necessary, aggressively violent in a shocking, sometimes disturbing way, and able to take its basic set up – the road movie – and twist it far enough out of shape that it feels more nuanced and transgressive than on first impression. Mangold shapes the world around Logan with a keen eye for detail, and avoids doling out excessive sentimentality, keeping everything grounded and credible, despite the fantastic nature of the material. It’s an artistic triumph, and one that shows that Marvel superhero movies don’t have to follow the same template all the time, a message that Kevin Feige will hopefully take on board.

Rating: 9/10 – an intense, gritty, superbly realised and mature outing for its title character, Logan is perhaps the first “superhero” movie that wouldn’t feel out of place as a Best Film Oscar nominee (though it’s still unlikely to happen); gripping for long stretches, with the quieter moments proving just as engrossing as the action sequences (which are very well staged indeed, if a little hyper-edited), Mangold and Jackman’s determination to give the Wolverine a proper send-off is apparent from start to end.

 

Morgan (2016)

10 Saturday Dec 2016

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D: Luke Scott / 92m

Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Boyd Holbrook, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Michael Yare, Chris Sullivan, Vinette Robinson, Brian Cox

As the song has it, “If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…” Not once you see Kate Mara’s risk assessment consultant, Lee Weathers, driving to a facility hidden deep in the woods where a science experiment, codenamed L9, is going badly wrong. The experiment in question is the creation of a human/nano technology hybrid. The hybrid (Taylor-Joy) looks like a young woman, is called Morgan, is actually five years old, and has recently stabbed one of the team, Kathy (Leigh), repeatedly in the face and blinded them in their left eye. With a psych evaluation planned to take place that will determine whether or not the project continues, Lee’s role is to make the final decision, either to continue the work or to shut it down.

For everyone’s safety, Morgan is confined to a room that has toughened glass from wall to wall, and floor to ceiling. She appears to understand the need for this, but the team are overly apologetic about the incident with Kathy. They all state that it was their fault and not Morgan’s; they should have known better, should have been paying better attention to her current mental state. Lee takes none of this for granted, but does accept that they treat Morgan more as a human being than as a thing. When the psychiatrist, Dr Alan Shapiro (Giamatti), arrives the next day to conduct his assessment, his approach goads Morgan to anger, and a violent outburst means that Lee has no option but to shut down the project.

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She’s stopped, though, by the team. Rendered unconscious, she awakes in Morgan’s safe room, while the team’s own efforts to control the situation – and Morgan – start to unravel at an alarming rate. By the time Lee finds a way out of the room, Morgan’s determination to be free from the confines of the facility has proven disastrous for the team, and she makes her escape, taking along Amy (Leslie), who is the one member of the team that Morgan considers is her friend. But Lee is equally determined to find Morgan and make sure that the project is shut down once and for all.

Morgan is director Luke Scott’s first feature, a step up in terms of money and opportunity following his clever and impressive short movie, Loom (2012). That movie augured well for the future, but with Morgan it seems that Ridley Scott’s son has been let down by a poorly realised script, and the faint whiff of post-production interference. There’s little about the movie that works as well as it should, and long-time fans of this type of speculative sci-fi will be dismayed by the many ways in which the narrative shies away from making any kind of moral statement.

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Another screenplay picked out from the Black List (this time 2014’s), Morgan begins with a shocking act of violence, and continues with not one character reacting or behaving normally in its wake. Everyone carries on as if it was a minor incident, one that’s hardly worth bothering about. Morgan behaving strangely is to be expected, but when the team behave even more strangely than she does, and right from the start, then it only serves to undermine the drama that follows. Only Michelle Yeoh’s mother figure acts as if she has any idea of the consequences to Morgan’s actions, but she’s allotted so little screen time that she becomes the occasional, and token, voice of reason, trotted out to offer a limited balance to everyone else’s strange behaviour.

Things are further hampered by the character of Lee, played with stony-faced antipathy by Mara. It’s a role that’s difficult to talk about without revealing too much of why the character is at the facility in the first place, but while she’s an outsider given over to remaining so, Mara provides a better performance than expected, giving Lee an unexpected likeability even though she’s pretty much there to conduct a corporate hatchet job if necessary. As the movie progresses, her minimal social skills are stripped away, and Mara again strikes a careful balance between “assassin for hire” and consultant doing her job. She’s matched by Taylor-Joy, whose bleached looks and unnerving stare never quite manage to morph into the features of someone you could trust implicitly. Though her motivation becomes more and more strained as the movie continues, her performance highlights the emotions that Morgan has managed to express, even though she can’t understand them properly.

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Alas, the rest of the cast aren’t given nearly enough to make their roles worthwhile, and as you might expect, some are just waiting around until Morgan decides that everyone is surplus to requirements. The final half hour ups the ante in terms of action, and Mara and Taylor-Joy enjoy some well-choreographed fight scenes, but even then there’s a distinct lack of tension or energy. Scott seems unable to inject the necessary spark to make things that much more exciting, and the movie suffers as a result. As it heads towards an inevitable conclusion, one that it’s set up right from the moment we first see Lee in her car, Morgan begins to look and sound and feel like another great idea for a movie given the least amount of commitment by all involved. That’s not entirely true, but there are large stretches where the viewer won’t be able to shake off that feeling at all.

Watching Morgan, there’s an obvious correlation with Ex Machina (2015), but this is a different movie with a different agenda, and nowhere near as complex. The script by Seth W. Owen isn’t as fully rounded or well thought out as it needs to be, and Scott never really finds a way to avoid the pitfalls that Owen has left in situ. And watching the movie unfold, and the speed with which it changes direction from a somewhat intriguing sci-fi thriller to all-out action drama, it does smack a little of interference in the post-production stages, as if the producers had realised that the movie was in danger of losing its audience altogether if it didn’t change tack. On the plus side, the movie does have a decent score courtesy of Max Richter, and Tom McCullagh’s production design does help to anchor the movie in a more realistic fashion than the script does.

Rating: 4/10 – what could have been an intriguing, thought-provoking movie is scuppered by poor narrative choices, a lack of credible characterisations, and a shift in tone two thirds in that alters the movie’s trajectory as if no one would notice; a good idea given a lacklustre presentation, Morgan will only satisfy those viewers who don’t expect much from sci-fi thrillers, or are comfortable looking at things only on a superficial level.

Cardboard Boxer (2016)

18 Friday Nov 2016

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D: Knate Lee / 88m

Cast: Thomas Haden Church, Terrence Howard, Boyd Holbrook, Rhys Wakefield, Zach Villa, William Stanford Davies, Macy Gray, Carlton Byrd, David Henrie, Conrad Roberts, Adam Clark

Willie (Church) is a homeless man who sleeps in a cardboard box at night, and who wanders the streets by day looking for food wherever he can find it (even if it’s not exactly fresh), and hoping to score money from passersby. He lives a lonely existence, keeping himself to himself and spending a considerable amount of his “downtime” on a rooftop that affords him a panoramic view of the city where he lives. Down at ground level, home is a place on a back street with a group of other homeless people.

Willie doesn’t engage with other people. He keeps himself to himself, and tries not to get in anybody else’s way, including a local man (Clark) who carries a skillet and threatens to hurt anyone in the homeless group who aggravates him. Fortunately, while his approach to the group is antagonistic, there’s a taxi driver everyone calls The Pope (Howard) who is supportive; he provides blankets and food when he can. Willie and The Pope have a grudging respect for each other, but there are also clear boundaries that The Pope keeps in place.

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One day, Willie finds a little girl’s diary in a rubbish container. It’s burnt around the edges, like the other stuff there, but curious, he begins to read it. He learns at the beginning that the little girl has started the diary after her mother has died. Finding himself affected by her story he attempts to continue reading it, but is defeated by its being in cursive (basically joined-up writing). He begins to ask others in the homeless group if they’ll read it for him but he’s rebuffed at every turn. It’s not until he helps a war veteran, a man named Pinky (Holbrook), that he finds someone willing to read the rest of the diary to him (though he does learn to read cursive as well).

Some time later, two young men, JJ (Wakefield) and Tyler (Villa), appear in the homeless group’s back street and, for fun, challenge skillet man to fight someone for fifty dollars. Willie just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and is attacked by skillet man. However, Willie defends himself and beats the man unconscious. JJ is impressed, and starts calling Willie his friend, something that makes Willie proud and self-conscious at the same time. But JJ has an ulterior motive: using Willie to curry favour with his friends, he persuades him to fight other homeless men for money while he makes even more money via side betting. But things begin to get out of hand when skillet man makes a return appearance…

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If there’s one thing that tales of the down-and-out and the dispossessed always do, is to inform the viewer just why the main character(s) are down-and-out or dispossessed. It’s like a courtesy feature. Here’s a man (or a woman) who’s down on their luck, and here’s the reason why. Except in Cardboard Boxer, the viewer has to make his or her own mind up about why Willie is homeless, and it’s not an easy thing to decipher, because writer/director Knate Lee isn’t about to tell you. That said, it’s not too diffcult, given Willie’s skill as a fighter – well, brawler might be a better term – that his slow-witted nature could have been caused by one too many blows to the head, but even that interpretation lacks confirmation. Here, Willie is extra handy with his fists, and that’s all you need to know.

Except it really isn’t. Willie isn’t exactly an ordinary character, despite his doing ordinary stuff and trying to fit in as an ordinary human being, his emotional attachment to a war veteran whose legs are missing below each knee, and a little girl whose name he doesn’t even know show a need to connect, and it surprises him as much as it does us. But as he works his way through the diary, and begins to express his need for human contact, Willie doesn’t become any more sympathetic, or any more likeable. This is someone who’ll batter a fellow homeless person for money and the apparent “respect” of a young man well over twenty years his junior. And he’s not looking to find a way out of his “predicament”. Instead, and despite sums of money coming his way that could begin to make a difference, Willie shows no sign of wanting to improve his life, even when he has enough money to do so. Sure, he rents a hotel room and takes a shower and eats snacks while watching TV, but this is literally the best that he can come up with. His life literally doesn’t get any better than that.

And so, the movie falls back on the little girl’s diary, with Knate Lee’s script painting a picture of abuse and despair that compliments Willie’s own life – or at least it would do if we ever knew what caused his fall through the cracks of society in the first place. In the end, Lee’s script is a bleak portrait of a disconnected man’s empty life and his belated attempts to give it meaning, even if his methods – fighting for money, treating his fellow down-and-outs with disrespect, latching onto a possibly dead girl’s memory – aren’t exactly forgivable. It all makes for a dour, miserable movie that relies too heavily on Church’s distracted, almost there performance, and which features way too many shots of Willie standing on his favourite rooftop, or on a street corner, or just trudging round the city aimlessly. His life lacks purpose, but that’s an easy call; unfortunately, writer/director Lee feels the need to remind us of this constantly. Take away all those “blank stare” moments and the movie would run at least twenty minutes shorter.

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Despite being on board as an executive producer, Church’s involvement doesn’t do anything to elevate or improve the material, and he does little to convince the viewer that there’s an interior life going on behind the placid-featured façade he adopts for the most part. Howard is stuck with a supporting role that probably didn’t require him to be on set for more than a few days, while Holbrook’s turn as the disabled war veteran Pinky is yet another in a long line of indistinguishable disabled roles that movie makers believe audiences still have a lot of time for. And as for Wakefield, well, JJ is a caricature role that follows a predictable arc that’s married to a predictable portrayal.

The movie has been shot in a nondescript, visually unappealing style by Peter Holland that is no doubt meant to be a reflection of the lack of glamour inherent in Willie’s life, but it’s too obvious a choice and feels like a better effort couldn’t be decided on or made. And under Lee’s guidance, Jeff Seibenick’s editing leaves several scenes feeling as if there should be more to them, or in a weird contradiction, that they should be shorter and more punchy – but the material won’t allow it. This is Lee’s feature debut, and it shows, the choices he makes as a director showing a lack of imagination and confidence. And this is borne out by the movie’s conclusion, a fairytale ending that is both unnecessarily mawkish and dramatically inept given what’s gone before. But at least it’s not as downbeat as the rest of the movie.

Rating: 4/10 – a lumbering attempt to find grace and purpose even amongst homeless people, Cardboard Boxer lacks depth and a sense of purpose, and a central character the audience can get behind; while it merrily (and that’s still not the best word) goes about telling its largely redundant, determinedly non-complex tale, viewers will be wondering when and if the movie’s ever going to grow and stretch into something more affecting and worthwhile.

 

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Trailers – Fences (2016), Mean Dreams (2016) and The Free World (2016)

01 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by in Movies

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In 2010, a production of Fences, August Wilson’s award-winning play, won Tony’s for Best Revival of a Play, Best Actor and Best Actress. The two leads in the revival were Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, so if you think after watching the trailer that their performances look incredibly good – well, there’s the reason why. Set in the 1950’s, the movie examines the effects changes in race relations in the US have on an average African-American family, and in particular the dynamic between Washington’s struggling husband and father Troy, and his teenage son Cory (played by relative newcomer Jovan Adepo). With Washington making his first feature since The Great Debaters (2007), it will be interesting to see just how much of Wilson’s tale of bitter regret and personal despair is retained, and if the movie retains the play’s episodic structure. But from the trailer alone it does look as if Washington has made a challenging, powerful movie, and perhaps a sure-fire awards winner further down the line.

 

In Mean Dreams, Bill Paxton is the kind of backwoods sheriff we’ve seen quite a lot of recently: outwardly charming, seemingly decent, but beneath all that, as callous and conniving as any regular bad guy (and probably more so). But this is a small-town sheriff bordering on the psychotic, which makes his treatment and eventual pursuit of his daughter (Sophie Nélisse) and her wrong-guy-in-the-wrong-place boyfriend (Josh Wiggins) all the more gripping. Given the right role, Paxton is an actor you should never underestimate; he can take a viewer to some very dark places indeed, and often at the drop of a hat. This has all the hallmarks of such a role, and while the movie has a wintry feel to it that appears to suit the mood and tone of the movie, it’s still going to be Paxton who grabs all the attention – and he looks good and ready to do so.

 

There are always actors who pop up in movies and make an impression, but who still manage to retain an air of mystery and have audiences scratching their heads and asking themselves, “Didn’t I see him/her in that other movie?” Boyd Holbrook is one of those actors. He’s been quietly amassing a body of work that’s also been increasingly impressive ever since he first appeared in Milk (2008). Now, it looks as if The Free World, a taut thriller about second chances and personal redemption set against the backdrop of a domestic murder case, could be the movie to catapault Holbrook into the big(ger) leagues. If it doesn’t, then it’s unlikely Holbrook will be too worried. He’ll just carry on giving good performances in whatever movies he makes.