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Blood Money (2017)

03 Sunday Dec 2017

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D: Lucky McKee / 85m

Cast: John Cusack, Ellar Coltrane, Willa Fitzgerald, Jacob Artist

A movie that should really have the tag line, “If you go down to the woods today…” Blood Money shows us that, if nothing else, three friends should never go camping together for the weekend, especially if the girl, Lynn (Fitzgerald), once had a relationship with one of the guys, Victor (Coltrane), and is now seeing the other guy, Jeff (Artist). With all that baggage hanging over them, what’s the likeliest thing that could happen (aside from their falling out, that is)? The answer – of course – is that they run into an embezzler on the run, Miller (Cusack), and the four bags he’s jumped out of a plane with but become separated from. The bags contain a cool eight million dollars, and Miller is determined to be reunited with them. But he hasn’t counted on Lynn’s equal determination to keep them for herself…

And that’s the movie in a nutshell. Embezzler jumps out of a plane with eight million dollars in cash stuffed into four bags, loses them to Lynn and Jeff (Victor correctly guesses it’s stolen money and he doesn’t want anything to do with it; hooray for someone behaving sensibly in one of these movies), and spends the remainder of the movie trying to get it all back from them. A simple plot, no frills, and potentially, a timely reminder that it’s often the simplest of plots that make for the best movies. Just not this time though. Instead, Blood Money insists on putting its characters through the mill in a succession of scenes that make you wonder if writers Jared Butler and Lars Norberg had worked out any of it in advance. The trio of unhappy campers bicker and argue while Miller wanders along the side of a river seemingly in no hurry to retrieve his ill-gotten gains and then skip the country (there’s an element of the D.B. Cooper story here but that has more drama to it than this does). At one point, Victor, having left his “friends”, comes upon Miller lying asleep on a makeshift table. It’s as potent a message as to the movie’s reliance on logic as you could ever need.

The movie does do something right, though, and while it may not pan out as effectively as hoped, it is a better idea than might be expected. The standard approach for this kind of wilderness thriller is to have the thief as the bad guy (he won’t let anything stand in his way, etc. etc.), and the lone female the eventual heroine who overcomes fear, panic, injury and several attempts on her life before eventually triumphing over the bad guy. Here, though, Butler and Norberg have chosen to make Lynn the bad guy, and Miller the character the viewer ends up rooting for. Once Lynn gets her hands on the money, it’s instant addiction time, and no one, not even Miller is going to stop her from keeping it. Again, it’s a great idea, and Fitzgerald has a field day with the role, but the drawback – yes, inevitably, there is one – is that over the course of the movie, Lynn’s determination becomes more than a little tedious, and by the time the script calls on her to explain herself, and she’s become a psycho with a mission, what she comes up with makes about as much sense as anything else in the movie (it’s something to do with becoming a woman, or something like that; in truth, it doesn’t really matter).

Against this the characters of Victor and Jeff have no chance but to sound and feel like also rans, with Victor bemoaning the way in which Lynn broke up with him, and Jeff forever feeling paranoid that Lynn will give Victor a second chance. And as Lynn is so awful to both of them, you can’t help but wonder why either one of them wants to be with her. But the dynamic feels forced anyway. With no credible reason for the trio to be together in the first place – where else but in the movies do these kinds of trips ever take place? – except to grab the loot when it shows up and set the thriller elements in motion, the script’s attempts at keeping us interested in which one out of Victor and Jeff, Lynn will end up with soon becomes irrelevant, and partly because it’s pretty obvious she doesn’t want either of them. So Blood Money becomes a chase movie, and in doing so, becomes even more generic.

At the helm of all this redactive nonsense, director Lucky McKee, who can normally be counted on to elevate the material he works with – check out May (2002) or The Woman (2011) if you need any persuading – approaches the material with no clear idea of how to make more of the script than is there, or to make the narrative more thrilling. This means the movie plods along lacking any appreciable energy, and Fitzgerald aside, wastes the talents of Cusack and Coltrane accordingly (Artist’s role as Jeff is so poorly written that the actor is undermined before he can even start). It’s a shame to see Cusack’s run of terrible movies continue, but here he’s in on the act, giving a less-than convincing turn as a thief with a conscience and an easy-going manner that changes whenever he has a weapon in his hand. Miller is a character you never get to know beyond the obvious, and when he tries explaining to Victor why he stole the money, the scene fades out before he can finish. If that’s an example of how well the character has been created then there’s little hope that any of it will ever matter.

In the end, and thankfully it’s a short enough experience that it rolls around quite acceptably, Blood Money has no clear agenda beyond its basic plot. There are no hidden subtexts, no attempts at allegory, and no sense that there was ever any intention to include them. But with that being the case, then the movie had every opportunity to up the ante on its simple narrative and make it all as tense and as thrilling as possible. That hasn’t happened though, and the movie is a plodding exercise in undercooked thrills, rampant narcissism (Lynn), and underwhelming relationship advice, and it all ends as precisely as you’d expect. So beware: if you go down to the woods today…

Rating: 4/10 – shoddy and inconsistent in its efforts to provide a convincing mise en scene, Blood Money is another forgettable outdoors thriller that seems to have been written on spec and directed accordingly; only worth watching if you want to see deconstructed gender politics given a light dusting of credibility, or the movie’s Georgia locations rendered beautifully by DoP Alex Vendler.

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Blackthorn (2011)

18 Friday Jul 2014

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Blackthorn

D: Mateo Gil / 102m

Cast: Sam Shepard, Eduardo Noriega, Stephen Rea, Magaly Solier, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Padraic Delaney, Dominique McElligott

Bolivia, 1927: An old man named Blackthorn (Shepard) writes a letter to his nephew saying that after spending too long in South America, he is planning to come back to the US and finally meet the young man he’s never seen.  Leaving behind the woman who’s shared part of his life in Bolivia, Yana (Solier), Blackthorn sets off on horseback.  Along the way he encounters Eduardo Apodaca (Noriega), a Spanish engineer with a nearby mining company who has stolen $50,000 and is being chased by what appear to a posse hired by the mining company.  Blackthorn agrees to help Apodaca in return for half of the money, and they head for the mine where the money is hidden.

As they make their way there, flashbacks show that Blackthorn is actually Butch Cassidy (Coster-Waldau), believed to have died in a shootout with the Bolivian army in 1908.  With his partner, the Sundance Kid (Delaney) and Etta Place (McElligott), he travels from the US down through Mexico and into Argentina, where in 1905 he is almost captured by Pinkerton agent Mackinley (Rea).  Later, Ella, now pregnant with Sundance’s child, returns to the States; Butch and Sundance end up in Bolivia where the aftermath of their encounter with the Bolivian army leaves Butch helping a wounded Sundance to escape.

Blackthorn and Apodaca retrieve the money and narrowly avoid the posse.  They return to Blackthorn’s cabin, but the next morning two members of the posse arrive looking for Apodaca.  There is a shootout in which Blackthorn is wounded, and Yana and the posse members are killed.  The two men attempt to flee the country by heading across the Uyuni salt flats and over the mountains beyond.  The posse tries to outflank them; the two men split up and in the process manage to kill their pursuers.  Blackthorn reaches a nearby town and is treated by a doctor.  While he’s unconscious, the doctor notifies a now retired Mackinley about Blackthorn’s presence.  At first, Mackinley plans to have Blackthorn arrested by the Bolivian army, but he changes his mind; he also tells Blackthorn the truth about Apodaca’s theft of the money: the mining company is owned by the mining families, which means Blackthorn has aided Apodaca in stealing from “the people”, something which is at odds with his principles.  He sets out to track down the Spaniard, but is pursued by the Bolivian army and the miners.

Blackthorn - scene

A slow-moving, often leisurely movie, Blackthorn takes a “What if…?” idea – what if Butch Cassidy didn’t die in 1908 but lived on, what would he be like, say, twenty years on? – and spends an hour and forty-two minutes still trying to work out an answer to the question.  On the surface, Blackthorn is a handsomely mounted movie that aims for an elegiac feel but instead falls short, its pace so slow at times that elegiac becomes sluggish.  The main problem is that once it’s clear that Blackthorn is Cassidy, the mythic nature of the man is confirmed, leaving his involvement with Apodaca and the pursuing miners something of a letdown.  It’s perhaps more realistic in terms of the time and place, but it’s also less satisfying at the same time.  It’s as if the filmmakers, deciding to bring Cassidy back, then couldn’t come up with a better story to suit the man and his iconic status.

The character of Apodaca is also a problem, his callow treachery entirely to be expected, and Blackthorn’s inability to see through him as believable as Mackinley’s later change of heart.  It all goes to serve a plot that twists and turns in on itself with increasing frequency, the money stolen by the Spaniard proving no more than one of Hitchcock’s famous McGuffins, an unadventurous hook on which to hang the storyline and the action.  Also, with Blackthorn proving such a taciturn and irascible old man, it becomes difficult to sympathise with him as the movie progresses.  Even when he becomes aware of Apodaca’s lies, his reaction is less angry and more slightly peeved, which is in stark contrast to when his initial encounter with Apodaca leads to the loss of his horse and the $6000 in savings it was carrying.  Losing his horse makes him furious; duping him and putting his life in danger, well, that’s not so bad.

Shepard is a great choice for Blackthorn, but the producers decision to cast Coster-Waldau as the outlaw’s younger self, undermines the idea that only twenty years have passed since Cassidy’s “demise”, as there’s no physical similarity between them, and there’s such a disparity in their characters that any sense of regret that Blackthorn may feel at spending so much time in Bolivia seems false by comparison.  That said, Shepard brings a quiet authority to the role, as well as a requisite world-weariness, and is a commanding presence that is sorely missed in those scenes he doesn’t take part in.  As the Spaniard, Noriega is whiny and annoying in equal measure, but has little room to manoeuvre as the script by Miguel Barros doesn’t attempt to add any flesh to the character’s bones.  Rea is a breath of fresh air, his measured performance as Mackinley adding some true depth and pathos to the notion that these two men, once great adversaries, have seen their time come and go, and now deserve whatever peace they can find.

Gil is a capable director, and makes the most of the Bolivian locations, in particular the salt flats which are spectacular, but he falters when trying to find the emotion in a scene, or the connection between some of the characters; only Blackthorn’s relationship with Yana has any degree of conviction or truth to it.  Barros’ script attempts to extract some mileage out of Blackthorn’s age and situation but it often feels forced and unreliable.  Shot with the deliberate look and feel of a Sixties western, Blackthorn looks the part, and it has that Spanish feel to it that is reminiscent of international oaters of the time.  And there’s a great score by Lucio Godoy that evokes the period and the movie’s western antecedents with emotive aplomb.

Rating: 6/10 – not a bad movie per se, Blackthorn still falls short of its ambitions, stumbling through a too simple story that lacks depth and passion; often beautiful to look at, it’s for fans of speculative drama and the great Sam Shepard.

Sabotage (2014)

28 Wednesday May 2014

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Sabotage

D: David Ayer / 109m

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington, Olivia Williams, Terrence Howard, Mireille Enos, Joe Manganiello, Harold Perrineau, Josh Holloway, Max Martini, Kevin Vance, Martin Donovan

When a DEA task force led by veteran John “Breacher” Wharton takes down a house used by a Mexican drugs cartel, it becomes clear they have a more primary mission their superiors know nothing about: to steal $10 million of the cartel’s money.  Hiding the money in the sewers to be collected later, “Breacher” and his team – “Monster” (Worthington), “Grinder” (Manganiello), “Sugar” (Howard), “Neck” (Holloway), “Pyro” (Martini), “Tripod” (Vance), and Lizzy (Enos) – are soon under investigation by Internal Affairs on suspicion of stealing the money, but when they go to collect it, they find it’s gone.  Six months later, and with IA having found no evidence to prove they took the money, “Breacher” and his team are reinstated.

Shortly after, one of the team is killed when his trailer is hit by a train (it was moved onto the tracks while he was unconscious).  The death is investigated by Detective Caroline Brentwood (Williams) and her partner Darius Jackson (Perrineau).  Attempting to interview the team proves fruitless, and Brentwood enlists “Breacher”‘s help in talking to them.  They visit one of the team, only to find he’s been killed as well, and in a way that suggests the Mexican drugs cartel is targeting them in retaliation for stealing the money.  They find a third member of the team murdered also, along with clear evidence that he was killed by the cartel, one of whom they find dead nearby.  Jackson traces the dead man’s mobile phone to an apartment block; he and Brentwood take a squad there to arrest them but “Breacher” and the remainder of his team get there first and kill the men they find there, only to discover they aren’t the cartel’s hit squad.  When the bodies of the cartel hit squad are found a short time after, and it becomes clear they couldn’t have committed the first two murders, “Breacher” realises it’s one of his team that is picking them off one by one.

Things quickly unravel.  One of the team tells Brentwood about the money, and is subsequently murdered while talking to her and “Breacher”.  With no other possibilities as to the murderer’s identity, “Breacher” agrees to a meeting with them.  In the ensuing showdown, the whereabouts of the money is revealed and the motive for its theft becomes clear.

Sabotage (2014) - scene

Aiming for the kind of contemporary, gritty, urgent, down and dirty feel achieved in two of Ayer’s other outings as a writer – Training Day (2001) and End of Watch (2012) – Sabotage starts promisingly enough with a well-staged assault on the cartel house but then stumbles badly with its decision to delay the ensuing action for six months.  It doesn’t make sense that the cartel would wait that long to make their reprisals, nor that the killer within the team – especially when their motive is revealed – would also wait so long to target their teammates.  There’s also the matter of the back story involving “Breacher” that is revealed halfway through, which, once out in the open, muddies the waters even further.  With three separate ways of approaching the murders, and the reasons for them, Ayer’s script does its best to keep things as straightforward as possible, but there are too many times when narrative complexity is abandoned for moving the story along quickly to the next action sequence.  This leads to some lapses in logic that also weaken proceedings, such as Brentwood jumping into bed with “Breacher” at the drop of a hat, and “Breacher” allowing one of his team to have a drug problem, and there’s an air of convenience throughout.

Continuing his return to the big screen, Schwarzenegger puts in a grizzled performance that still relies on his trademark squint and square-jawed impassivity.  He’s the rock that anchors the movie but he doesn’t bring anything new to the table, and coasts on his physical presence, leaving the emoting to the rest of the cast (it’s still good to have him back though).  The casting of Williams is an interesting choice but she’s hampered by having to provide “Breacher” with a potential love interest, as well as trying to be a bad-ass detective.  From the team, Worthington and Enos fare best, while Holloway, whose career post-Lost seems to consist of uninspiring cameo turns, is forgettable in a role that appears written as one-dimensional.  Howard is sidelined for much of the movie, and Perrineau is the kind of peppy partner who’s so annoying you wonder why Brentwood hasn’t already shot him for the peace and quiet.

What hampers the movie most, though, is the curiously flat feel it has.  Everything happens at the same pitch, with little or no attempt to make even the action scenes tense or exciting, and the drama is disappointing for being so casually handled.  With Ayer’s direction largely AWOL, his and Skip Woods’ script is left to fend for itself, and its limitations are cruelly highlighted as a result.  By the time we get to the movie’s epilogue – a long time coming in and of itself – the viewer is left wondering what was the point.

Rating: 5/10 – not quite as terrible as it looks, Sabotage is nevertheless a serious letdown given the talent involved; one for fans of Ah-nold, and best viewed as an undemanding Saturday night/beer and a takeaway movie.

Swerve (2011)

03 Monday Mar 2014

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Swerve

D: Craig Lahiff / 86m

Cast: Jason Clarke, Emma Booth, David Lyons, Travis McMahon, Vince Colosimo, Roy Billing, Chris Haywood

While travelling across the Australian desert region near Broken Hill, Colin (Lyons) happens upon a road accident.  He finds a dead man, a briefcase full of money, and, as this is a modern day noir thriller, a femme fatale in the form of Jina (Booth), who’s also the cause of the accident.  Colin takes her home and then heads into Broken Hill to hand in the money to the local sheriff (Clarke).  Everything is going okay, and Colin is preparing to continue on his way, when the sheriff, Frank, insists he come home with him to meet his wife as a gesture for being so public spirited.  (There’s no prizes for guessing just who Frank’s wife turns out to be.)  When the money goes missing, and a “representative” of the people the money was intended for shows up – with murderous intent – the fragile relationship between Frank, Jina and Colin begins to unravel.

What follows is a well-crafted thriller where, Colin aside, you’re never entirely sure who’s conning who, or if Jina can be entirely trusted, despite her obvious desire to get away from Frank (who is abusive and jealous).  Colin is the only “straight” character in the whole movie and although he does learn to become a bit more devious by the movie’s end, it’s still intriguing to see just how much has to happen to him before his natural attitude changes.  Lyons plays the part to perfection, and while he is adequately matched by Clarke as the increasingly dysfunctional Frank, it’s his integrity that actually holds the attention.

Clarke has since gone on to bigger things: Lawless, Zero Dark Thirty, Baz Luhrmann’s sumptuous The Great Gatsby, and White House Down.  Clarke is an intense actor, and he imbues Frank with a charming edginess that makes watching him an uneasy experience; you’re never too sure just how he’s going to react at any given moment, or in any given situation.  When a subplot involving the death of one of Frank’s deputies comes to the fore, Clarke ups the ante and makes Frank an even darker character than before but without sacrificing any credibility.

Swerve - scene

As Jina, a lot is required of Emma Booth as the character is the linchpin of the whole movie.  From the moment we see her racing down the highway, to the movie’s denouement, Booth displays just the right amounts of complexity and vulnerability to give her character a bruised steeliness that makes the viewer, like Colin, want to protect and mistrust her at the same time.

Lahiff, returning to feature film-making after a nine year hiatus, carries the audience through each twist and turn of the plot with skilled assurance, and makes great use of the desert locations; on occasion, David Foreman’s cinematography is stunning.  The script, also by Lahiff, is pared down to the bone and there’s not one superfluous moment or scene in the entire movie, an aspect helped immeasurably by Lahiff’s brother Sean being the movie’s editor.

Rating: 7/10 – an unpretentious and accomplished thriller from Down Under and the kind of movie the Aussies do so well; good performances and beautiful location work help Swerve stand out from the crowd.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.

An Arcadian Maid (1910)

12 Tuesday Nov 2013

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Arcadian Maid, An

D: D.W. Griffith / 16m

Cast: Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, George Nichols, Kate Bruce

An engaging tale of romantic deception, An Arcadian Maid sees Priscilla (Pickford) finding work on a farm run by a farmer (Nichols) and his wife (Bruce). Shortly after, Priscilla is approached by a peddler (Sennett) who pays attention to her before showing his wares to the farmer’s wife. Unable to make a sale, the peddler speaks again to Priscilla. Before he takes his leave he gives her a ring, and declares them betrothed. Later, in town, the peddler loses what money he has in a gambling den. Aware that the farmer and his wife are in possession of a large sum of money, and determined to clear his gambling debts, the peddler persuades Priscilla to steal the money for him.

An Arcadian Maid was one of 96 short films D.W. Griffith made in 1910 – that’s one movie nearly every four days – and it plays simply and effectively. Pickford may throw her arms in the air a few times to show agitation, and Sennett play with the ends of his moustache a little too often, but this is a pretty straightforward tale of petty larceny and shattered romantic dreams. The pleasure to be had from a lot of movies of this period is the very brevity that forced filmmakers to focus on what was necessary and important to the storyline (here the work of Stanner E.V. Taylor); it wouldn’t be unfair to say this is as lean a piece of filmmaking as you’re likely to see under any circumstances. Griffith marshals his cast to good effect, and keeps a tight grip on proceedings.  G.W. Bitzer’s photography is sharp and well-lit (not always the case with movies of this period), while the two leads work well together, lending an air of credibility that, as with the photography, wasn’t always the case.

Arcadian Maid, An - scene

The ending rounds off proceedings satisfactorily, with the villain punished and the heroine redeemed. Griffith’s strengths as a director are in evidence: the affecting nature of the peddler’s wooing of the naive Priscilla; the tension created when Priscilla steals the couples’ money; the peddler’s dramatic comeuppance; and Priscilla’s redemption thanks to the intervention of Fate. Griffith was a very “proper” director, even for the time, and his moral fables were popular; An Arcadian Maid gives a good indication why.

Rating: 8/10 – an involving and rewarding tale that cements Pickford’s rising stardom, and also gives a clue as to why Sennett moved into the production side of things; a small, rarely seen gem that bolsters the importance of the silent short film.