As a movie critic I believe I am obligated by law to review Focus through the lens of what it means for Will Smith’s career: if we have finally reached the end of the dark ages after almost eight years of films that were both critical and financial mixed bags. I might even tell you that we are back at the peak of the mountain we haven’t seen since I Am Legend and that we have our unquestioned biggest movie star in the world returned to us from the exile of After Earth and Men In Black 3. This isn’t that triumphant return; Will Smith is good but not extraordinary in a movie that will never be a blockbuster nor is it a critical darling. Focus is a perfectly serviceable crime movie that feels confined by a lack of ambition and, perhaps, a lack of budget.
It’s hard to classify Focus, because it is honestly unlike any crime movie I’ve ever seen before. (more…)
There’s a certain amount of bravery in making a movie like Hot Tub Time Machine 2. Not, you know, actual bravery because making a sequel is usually an admission that the studio would rather take the money than make a clever new film but comedy sequels are almost always terrible. In a sequel you’re selling the promise of the same thing but good comedy comes from being able to surprise your audience. While there are comedy sequels that succeeded in being funny enough (Addams Family Values, 22 Jump Street, and Back to the Future Part II jump out at me) none of them ever rise to the level of their original and are usually, at best, tolerated. Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is, at least, a tolerable movie but if it were five years from now and both were on Netflix I can’t imagine a scenario where I chose it over the original film.
The bravest part of making Hot Tub Time Machine 2 was the moment in production when it became clear John Cusack would not be returning. (more…)
Kingsman: The Secret Service is, hopefully, a watershed moment for spy action movies. Much in the way The Bourne Identity did in 2002, Kingsman has such a fresh new take on the genre that it begs to be the new standard these films are compared to. Kingsman could have so easily been the lazy bit of satire I feared it would be in the run up to the movie and it avoided nearly all of the pitfalls that could have felled it. It did step in to one big pit and while it put a bit of a crimp in my enjoyment of the movie it was at least a spectacular and bold piece of failure and I suppose tasteless and vexing is always better than boring.
Matthew Vaughn directs action sequences in Kingsman that are nothing short of brilliant. He shoots action with wider angles and without cuts like they’re musical numbers from back in the era when Hollywood stars could actually dance. He does this without sacrificing the complexity we’ve come to expect from a modern fight scene, something from the post-Tarantino, post-Yuen Woo-Ping era. Kingsman makes 54 year-old Colin Firth look like the baddest man alive at 54 years old. He looks like he would pick Liam Neeson out of his teeth. The fight sequences are exhilarating to watch and should be the new standard for any director looking to make something visually interesting but not too proud to crib an existing style. (I’m looking at you, 98% of directors working today.)
The Wachowskis might never reach the heights of The Matrix ever again and, as someone who was 15 when The Matrix was released, maybe it wasn’t that good to begin with—but the films are always wildly ambitious. While Jupiter Ascending fails on many levels, and the script would be generously called hot nonsense, I would much rather see the Wachowskis fail than I would like to see Michael Bay “succeed” at his style of filmmaking. Jupiter Ascending is a film full of interesting ideas and while not all of them get properly explored or pay off in the ways I would like they’re frequently fascinating to think about and that’s way more fun than so many of the incarnations of slow motion explosions I’ve seen in movies this decade.
Going in to Project Almanac I had a very clear idea of what I would be getting: Chronicle but with time travel instead of superheroes. To its credit that isn’t really what Project Almanac is, it isn’t as predictable or as overly dramatic. It doesn’t have a conclusion that’s drawn out too long. In fact, in a lot of ways it feels like Project Almanac is the inverse of Chronicle in that it’s a movie that never seems to know when to stop being playful and start being serious. When the time finally comes to put the dramatic hammer down there isn’t enough time left and we’re left with a third act that feels rushed and unsatisfying.
I spent all week trying to scheme for some angle to not have to see Mortdecai. Maybe this would be a good week to go see a couple Oscar contenders that we missed, maybe our readers would rather hear about The Boy Next Door and see if there’s any chance of a J. Lo comeback, anything to keep me from having to write about a movie that looked to be Johnny Depp doing his best to murder his career on the same hill Mike Meyers went to for The Love Guru. Finally, late on Friday, I came up with a counterpitch that stuck: I should go see Strange Magic because it’s a George Lucas film (or at least a George Lucas story credit) and ComicMix readers probably have a strong opinion one way or the other on the man who launched and arguably sank two of the biggest geek franchises of all time. I regret doing it; I regret succeeding because I can’t imagine Mortdecai being any worse than Strange Magic.
It’s easier to write bad reviews than good reviews, this is the secret of all criticism. Things that are good tend to be good in the same ways, in film it’s usually good acting, writing, directing, those kind of things. Things can fail in a seemingly unlimited number of ways. The movies that make up my bottom six movies of 2014 found some fantastic ways to fail.
6. [[[Only Lovers Left Alive]]] – Only Lovers Left Alive would probably work in any number of other media. It would be a good novella. I’d probably enjoy it as a concept album from an edgy rock band. It would make an amazing series of oil paintings. It is not what I want as a film. It’s a big static nothing with terribly little in terms of character arc and substitutes all of that storytelling energy for some amazing idle shots. I’m not interested in moving pictures where nothing moves and where the stories don’t involve solid characters. I don’t care how beautiful it is.
With the 2014 cinematic year in the books it’s time to do the time-honored tradition of the film reviewer, making a list of the top movies of the year. It makes us feel important and it’s an easy ay to fill space during the dreadful early January period for movies. Here are my top six movies of 2014. I’ll be back in just a little bit with the six worst movies.
6. [[[Godzilla]]] – I wasn’t big on Godzilla when it came out, I though that it cheated me out of many of the giant monster fight that they owed me when I paid $15 for a ticket. But when I was gathering my list of top movies of the year I remembered the movie quite fondly. It’s suspenseful and, honestly, has plenty of action. It doesn’t reach the frenetic peaks that Pacific Rim did but then again Pacific Rim did not make my top 10 list last year. With more Bryan Cranston, this might have been my favorite movie of the year.
Blackhat has a germ of a good movie buried in it; I was very interested to see how a director like Michael Mann would make a movie where most of the action happens in a virtual world. Hacking is perhaps the least visually interesting thing there is you’re probably doing something very similar to it right now while reading this article. Early in the film there are signs that Mann plans to tackle this dilemma there are sweeping, focused, shots of the inside of computers that switch to shots of code moving through virtual space. Unfortunately, it seems that Blackhat completely lost its collective nerve in this regard as after the first act the movie basically refuses to return to any kind of hacker stuff and just becomes a bad action movie.
The clichés in Blackhat are so brazen that I had to stop and consider that it might be some kind of brilliant subversion of the form, it isn’t. Viola Davis plays an FBI agent who cares more about stopping criminals than following the rules because her husband died on 9/11. Chris Hemsworth talks about being in prison and sounds like a professional wrestler doing a bad interview segment. Characters die but usually only after they have a moment of catharsis with another character. These Are things that have been tired and overdone longer than I’ve been alive and I can’t understand why anyone thinks it can fly anymore.
I always hate being this person but the movie is so spectacularly implausible that it destroys my suspension of disbelief. The movie opens with a nuclear reactor exploding and our heroes are walking around inside of it within a handful of days and perhaps this isn’t common knowledge but nuclear meltdowns make places completely inhabitable for centuries. They follow that up almost immediately by having a hack push the price for soybeans up by 250% and that’s almost equally impossible. There are so many ways to make money if you’re a crazy genius hacker and I wish they had picked one that wasn’t completely impossible. Furthermore, I don’t think you can have a private army roving through and shooting up Hong Kong murdering police whenever you want without having some kind of response from the Chinese government. These are immersion destroyers.
This isn’t directly related to the quality of the movie per se but I spent a lot of time focused on the aesthetics of Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat. He’s so much less bulky than he is when he’s playing Thor and I can’t decide if I think this is his natural size and he bulks up for Marvel films or if this kind of dramatic change in physique is just par for the course if you’re in the Chris Hemsworth position in Hollywood these days. He spends an incredible amount of time wearing button down shirts with the buttons open to the navel which is a look I’ve never seen in real life and can’t imagine a context where it makes sense outside of a beach. It felt like objectifying of Chris Hemsworth in a way that I’m quite surprised to see in a movie seemingly exclusively aimed at men. I don’t know how many women you can get to a rather violent movie advertised as a dry cyber crime film just by having a bunch of strong PG-13 male nudity. It’s another curious choice in a movie that can’t stop making head scratching decisions long enough to string together anything remotely coherent.
It’s not that hard to make a sequel to a popular movie. You take the basic formula from the original movie and do all of the same things with slight changes. To make Taken 2 they took just about everything from the original movie and changed it just a little. It wasn’t France it was Turkey, it wasn’t the daughter who was kidnapped it was the mother, it wasn’t about human trafficking it was about revenge. It’s very hard to make a third movie because the audience will make fun of you if you do the exact same things again, the same things they praised you for the first two times they will bury you with the third. Taken 3 tried very hard to find new ground to cover and while they made a very different movie, it’s not a good movie.
