Marshall (2017)

13 Saturday Jan 2018

Tags

Chadwick Boseman, Dan Stevens, Drama, Historical drama, James Cromwell, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, NAACP, Rape trial, Reginald Hudlin, Review, Sterling K. Brown, True story

D: Reginald Hudlin / 118m

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, Sterling K. Brown, Dan Stevens, James Cromwell, Keesha Sharp, Roger Guenveur Smith, Derrick Baskin, Barrett Doss, Marina Squerciati, John Magaro, Ahna O’Reilly, Jeffrey DeMunn

Thurgood Marshall (Boseman) was a lawyer who worked across the US for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) during the Thirties and Forties. During his time with the NAACP he tried cases in front of the US Supreme Court, and won twenty-nine out of thirty-two of them. His most famous case was Brown v Board of Education, Topeka in 1954, in which the the educational segregation of whites and blacks was deemed unconstitutional. It was a landmark case, and a major victory for the Civil Rights Movement. But instead of telling that story, the makers of Marshall have opted to tell the story of The State of Connecticut v Joseph Spell, a lurid rape case that occurred in 1940. The movie, capably directed by Reginald Hudlin from a screenplay by father and son team Michael and Jakob Koskoff, also makes the decision to change things around so that Marshall himself is the focus and not the original trial lawyer, Sam Friedman (Gad). Does this really matter in a movie that’s based on a true story? Let’s answer that with another question: what’s wrong with the true story by itself?

The differences between what actually happened and what occurs in the movie are many (as you might expect), but one aspect that leaves a bitter after taste is the treatment of Sam Friedman. Here he’s Marshall’s flunky, criticised repeatedly, and treated in such a poor way for so long that bullying becomes the only word for it. In a role reversal that would be outrageous if it weren’t so credulous, Marshall treats Friedman as if their racial positions were reversed: Marshall is the master and Friedman is the slave. Friedman was a more than capable lawyer who in 1940 had more trial experience than Marshall, and who was hired by the NAACP to defend Joseph Spell (Brown). Marshall was sent as a consultant, and the legal liberties the movie takes to reduce his presence in court while at the same time making him look like a puppet master pulling Friedman’s strings, is objectionable. While it’s good to see an educated, strong, confident, and positive example of a black man on our screens, did it really have to be at the expense of the white man who actually did all the heavy lifting?

Things aren’t helped by the predictable plotting, and the stereotypical characters, from Stevens’ arrogant prosecution lawyer to Cromwell’s obstructionist, authoritarian judge. The trial scenes have a certain amount of energy to them, as do the flashbacks to the night of the rape (Spell was a chauffeur who was accused by his employer’s wife, Eleanor Strubing (Hudson), of rape and attempted murder), but away from the courtroom, much of the movie is perfunctory, and the visuals are quite drab. It’s also a movie that recounts the more tawdry aspects of the alleged rape with a degree of detachment, and what should be shocking sounds more as if it were unrelated to anyone who’s actually involved in it all. As Marshall, Boseman adds another real-life person to his resumé, and invests the character with a lot of passion and vigour, but as the movie finally gets round to giving Friedman his due, Marshall becomes a secondary character and his impact diminishes. Gad handles the enforced comic aspects of his character with his usual amiable skill, but doesn’t always look comfortable doing so. Hudson brings a degree of ambiguity to her role as Eleanor, and Brown is a solid, dependable presence throughout. In dramatic terms, the verdict is a given, and it’s a mark of the movie’s lacklustre approach, that when that verdict is announced, the response from the viewer is likely to be “Okay” instead of Oh my God!”

Rating: 6/10 – patchy and hesitant in parts, Marshall beefs up its main character’s involvement in a rape trial and spends much of its time reminding the viewer that Thurgood Marshall was a better man than anyone else depicted in the movie; a hagiography then – though not the first – and one that, by adopting such an approach, reinforces that old newspaper saying, “If you can’t print the truth, print the legend”.

Mini-Review: Deepwater Horizon (2016)

21 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

BP, Disaster, Drama, Gina Rodriguez, Gulf of Mexico, John Malkovich, Kate Hudson, Kurt Russell, Mark Wahlberg, Mike Williams, Oil rig, Peter Berg, Review, Thriller, True story

D: Peter Berg / 107m

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez, Kate Hudson, Ethan Suplee, Dylan O’Brien

Arriving at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig site in the Gulf of Mexico to learn that certain safety checks haven’t been carried out, general operational supervisor “Mr Jimmy” Harrell (Russell) and chief electrical engineer Mike Williams (Wahlberg) find themselves at odds with BP executive Donald Vidrine (Malkovich) who is advocating that drilling continue despite the absence of these checks. With many more of the crew of the rig expressing their concerns, Vidrine pulls rank and the drilling resumes. Pressure begins to build in the pipeline, and further signs point to a dramatic, and likely, system failure. When it does, a massive blowout ensues, and the resulting explosion causes tremendous damage to the rig, threatening the lives of everyone on it.

As fires rage all around them, the workers’ attempt to evacuate the rig. Williams finds himself rescuing several of his colleagues, including “Mr Jimmy” who has been badly injured. With the Coast Guard racing to the rescue, and with no guarantee that the fires won’t cause the rig to sink, Williams et al must rely on their own ingenuity in order to get to safety, while the world looks on at what will become the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Watching Deepwater Horizon‘s first forty minutes, with its depictions of bubbling air pockets within the drill shaft, and the pipe itself shifting in protest against the pressure being exerted on it, it’s not hard to find a degree of anxiety about what’s going to happen creep up on you. It’s during this stretch that director Berg, aided by editors Gabriel Fleming and Colby Parker Jr, ratchets up the tension as he sets the scene for what we all know will be a nightmarish tale of survival. He also does a good job of introducing the main characters – along with principal supporting character, “Mr Jimmy”‘s moustache – and making us care about them. But once the oil hits the fan and fire takes a hold of the rig, the movie takes a strange left turn and becomes a standard men-in-peril movie where it’s hard to distinguish who’s doing what, where and how.

Inevitably, the movie regales us with moments of sacrifice, heroism and incredible fortitude, but it also features various stock elements, such as Hudson’s anxious wife stuck at home watching it all unfold on TV, and Malkovich’s suitably oleaginous BP executive looking sheepish as he gets in a lifeboat. While it’s easy to see why Berg has included these moments, it’s the way in which they help dissipate the tension established earlier on that proves problematical. It’s equally unhelpful that despite all the pyrotechnics and practical effects on display, Deepwater Horizon feels at times like an extreme, sea-based version of The Towering Inferno (1974). It makes for a distracting viewing experience (even if it wasn’t Berg’s intention). That said, the performances are uniformly good (though Malkovich’s accent is distracting), and the script manages to avoid too much foreshadowing (e.g. “I can’t wait to get home and see my newborn child”, from someone who’s clearly going to snuff it).

Rating: 7/10 – curiously uninvolving once things go from bad to staggeringly worse, Deepwater Horizon is a visually impressive retelling of an incident that BP would probably like to forget about completely; but spectacle without a human element to guide us through it is just that, spectacle, and the movie never finds an answer to the way in which it shifts down a gear after such an effective opening.

Good People (2014)

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Crime, Drama, Henrik Ruben Genz, Hidden money, Jack Witkowski, James Franco, Kate Hudson, Liquid heroin, Review, Thriller, Tom Wilkinson

D: Henrik Ruben Genz / 90m

Cast: James Franco, Kate Hudson, Tom Wilkinson, Sam Spruell, Omar Sy, Anna Friel, Diarmaid Murtaugh, Michael Jibson, Oliver Dimsdale, Francis Magee

Tom Wright (Franco) and his wife Anna (Hudson) have moved from America to London to make a fresh start, and to renovate the house left to Tom by his grandmother. Where they’re living, they rent the basement to a man named Ben Tuttle (Magee). When they find Tuttle dead from an apparent overdose, the police investigation brings them into contact with DI Halden (Wilkinson). Although Tuttle had a criminal background, Halden is after bigger fish: Jack Witkowski (Spruell), a vicious gangster whom Tuttle had recently helped steal a consignment of liquid heroin from French drug dealer, Khan (Sy). Later on, while clearing the basement, Tom finds a hidden bag of money with over £300,000 in it. With bills mounting and his grandmother’s house costing more to put right than he’d expected, Tom suggests they keep the money hidden and when the time is right, begin to use it to settle their debts and get ahead.

Anna reluctantly agrees to Tom’s plan, but both use the money in small ways, and it comes to Halden’s attention. Tuttle’s whereabouts, meanwhile, have come to the attention of Witkowski, who has been looking for him since the theft of the liquid heroin. Tuttle had double-crossed him and taken both the money and the heroin, as well as contributing to the death of Witkowski’s younger brother. Witkowski visits the basement flat and finds the heroin but not the money.

Tom is then approached by Khan who is looking for revenge on Witkowksi and his drugs and money back. He impresses on Tom the importance of being a team player, leaving no doubt that he and Anna will suffer if they don’t help him. Things get worse when Witkowski returns to their home, attacks Tom and demands the money. Anna arrives home and bargains for their lives, stalling long enough until, by good fortune, Halden appears and Witkowski leaves. The Wrights come clean about the money, though Halden tells them they’re not out of the woods yet. He suggests setting a trap for Witkowski and they organise a rendezvous in a park to drop off the money. The trap goes wrong and Halden is shot, leaving Tom and Anna to negotiate another meeting… but this time at Tom’s grandmother’s house.

By most standards, Good People is – and let’s make this perfectly clear from the outset – a shockingly bad movie. It labours under the misapprehension that it’s a thriller and it’s almost entirely a case of what you see is what you get – there’s little or no depth here, and even less that’s credible or convincing. Based on the novel by Marcus Sakey, the movie stumbles and staggers its way from disjointed scene to disjointed scene with barely a moment to pause and consider where it’s going or how it’s going to get there. There are problems literally everywhere, from the police’s inability to trace any of Tuttle’s relatives (while Witkowski finds a cousin at the drop of a hat), to Halden’s vigilante-style approach to police work, to Tom’s attempts at action man heroics, to a number of undeveloped subplots, and the extended showdown at the end that seems to be de rigueur these days (and stretches the boundaries of human physical endurance).

Matters aren’t helped by muted performances from the two leads – unsurprising in Hudson’s case as she’s off screen more than she’s on – and Wilkinson overdoing the weary policeman routine to the point where it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he fell asleep during a scene and started snoring. And he delivers his lines with a kind of bored, indifferent approach that begs the question as to why he took on the role in the first place (surely he’s still not making mortgage payments?). Spruell exudes an icy menace (one of the few positives the movie manages to provide), while Sy comes across as less a disgruntled gangster and more like a petulant catalogue model made to wear a jacket with an ugly stain on it. And Friel, as Anna’s friend Sarah, has a priceless moment where, after being held hostage with her baby by Witkowski, escapes the house at the end and promptly runs off without a backward glance.

There really isn’t much to recommend about Good People. Kelly Masterson’s screenplay gives new meaning to the phrase “all over the place”, and is a major step down from his adaptation of Snowpiercer (2013), while in the director’s chair, newbie Genz displays a liking for odd camera angles that add little to the proceedings other than to leave the audience trying to work out what they’re looking at. The cinematography by Jørgen Johansson makes London look interminably grim and depressing, and there’s an unfortunate emphasis on subdued lighting that adds to the movie’s too-sombre look. There are also issues with the continuity within individual scenes that haven’t been addressed in the editing suite.

Rating: 3/10 – unappealing, contrived and as wearying to watch as Tom Wilkinson’s equally weary performance, Good People is dispiriting fare that never really knows what to do with its basic plot; one for Franco or Hudson completists only, or fans of pedestrian thrillers that leave out the thrills.