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Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing

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Baby Driver

by Hope Madden

Start to finish, the soundtrack-driven heist flick Baby Driver has a bright, infectious charm – and you can dance to it.

It needs to be good, though. The third film in as many years about a mixtape, a rag-tag gang and a dead mom, this movie needs to bring something genuinely mesmerizing.

If there is one thing writer/director Edger Wright knows how to do, it’s propel a film’s action. That’s hardly his only talent, but few excel here quite the way he does. Scene to scene, set piece to set piece, he makes sure your eyes and your ears are aware that things are moving at a quick clip.

Never has this been more true than with Baby Driver.

Wright edits in time with his expertly curated mix tape, creating a rhythm that keeps his lead dancing, his film moving, and his audience engaged.

The beats offer more than a gimmick to ensure the flick dances along – the tunes getaway driver Baby (Ansel Elgort) has buzzing through his ear buds give rhythm to his impressive high speed antics.

Baby is the one constant in the teams Doc (Kevin Spacey) assembles to pull off his jobs. A reluctant participant making good on a debt, Baby keeps his distance from the crew – whether it’s the oily Buddy (Jon Hamm, marvelous as ever), his sketchy girlfriend Darling, (Eiza Gonzales), or the straight-up psycho, Bats (Jamie Foxx – glad to see you in something worthwhile again).

Of course, the tension comes in when Baby tries to leave the robbery biz behind, egged on by feelings for the cute waitress at his favorite diner (Lily James).

If you’ve ever seen a movie, you’ll know that getting out is never easy.

Wright’s agile camera keeps tempo with his killer playlist. Whether back-dropping romance at the laundromat with gorgeous color and tongue-in-cheek visual call-backs, or boogying through back alleys, on-ramps and highways, Baby Driver is as tasty a feast for the eyes as it is the ears.

The game cast never drops a beat, playing characters with the right mix of goofiness and malice to be as fun or as terrifying as they need to be. For all its danceability, Wright’s film offers plenty of tension, too.

Like much of the filmmaker’s work, Baby Driver boasts a contagious pop mentality, intelligent wit and sweet heart.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

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The Longest Knight

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Transformers: The Last Knight

by Hope Madden

Have you ever wondered what kind of chaos would ensue if both Optimus Prime and Megatron just disappeared?

Nope? Well, what if we could work the Transformers story and the King Arthur story into one?

No interest?

Cars, robots, explosions, needless sentiment and a girl who looks alarmingly like Megan Fox in tight clothes?

Let’s be honest, either you’re going to see Transformers: The Last Knight or you are not. Nothing I say is going to sway you one direction or another. But I had to see it. So I’m saying some stuff.

The latest installment in Michael Bay’s toy franchise might actually be more palatable than any of its predecessors. The story borders on being coherent. The action is far more clearly presented than usual. The racism is somewhat muted. There’s less sentimentality.

Also, Bay – not known to have a sense of humor at all – flirts with self-referential comedy now and again. Sure, he steals whole cloth from Alien, Terminator, Star Wars, Short Circuit – but he jokes about it, so it’s cool.

There’s also a strong female character – Vivian (Laura Haddock). We shouldn’t question her strength just because she’s convinced to do something when a male character yells, “Do it. Now!”

Twice.

But the costume changes have to raise an eyebrow. In the car ride she wears one outfit, she gets out of the car in another, goes back home to change, goes directly to a submarine in another outfit, gets off the submarine in another outfit – where are all these clothes coming from?!

And, in case you’re betting, Michael Bay is not above shooting down the shirt of an under-aged girl (Isabel Moner – here playing Needless Emotional Youngster).

All of which could have been almost tolerable, until it occurred to me that we were 70 minutes in and the plot had still not been explained. Then more than 90 minutes in and the hero (not Mark Wahlberg, the real hero) hadn’t joined the cast.

Transformers: The Last Knight is long.

So.
Fucking.
Long.

So needlessly long. So unendurably long. It’s a movie about toy trucks that turn into robots who fight with each other. For the love of God, can we cap it at 2 hours?

Nope.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

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Back to the Track

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Cars 3

by George Wolf

As great as the Disney/Pixar lineup is -and it’s pretty great- the Cars franchise sits low in the batting order, especially after the debacle that was Cars 2 six years ago. Cars 3 rebounds nicely, but still can’t match the meaningful substance of Pixar’s best.

We catch up with legendary race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) in a changing sports world. Suddenly, a new generation of “NextGen” cars, led by rookie sensation Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer), is taking over. New team owner Mr. Sterling (Nathan Fillion) brings in a young trainer named Cruz (Cristela Alonzo) to get McQueen adapted to the new technology, but her “senior project” only fuels the feeling that the legend should stay in the garage for good.

Animation vet Brian Fee helms his first feature as director/co-writer with Cars 3, and while the visual style is characteristically luscious, the story that he’s telling never quite rises above the pleasantries of showing kids some talking cars and introducing a new line of tie-in merchandise.

The gags are amusing but seldom funny and the plot takes some turns that may confuse the young ones, but the bigger concern is what’s missing.

As Cruz reveals her true love is not training but racing, and McQueen reflects on his tutelage under Doc (Paul Newman), the movie has the chance to find the poignancy and resonance that has driven Pixar’s most touching classics.

You’ll find it in Lou, the Pixar short the runs before the feature.

Alas, Cars 3 drives on by, satisfied with “believe in yourself” mantras that are greeting card ready, and a first-place trophy for the cheerfully harmless.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

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Farewell and Adieu

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47 Meters Down

by Hope Madden

Is it Shark Week?

If it isn’t, why the hell not?

There’s a new shark attack movie in theaters this weekend. It’s no Jaws, but it’s no Sharknado, either. Johannes Roberts’s 47 Meters Down treads some similar waters as last year’s surprise hit The Shallows, with a little less intelligence and a lot more sharks.

Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are sisters on vacation in Mexico. Lisa, the play-it-safe older sister, is nursing a heartbreak, which loose cannon Kate hopes to heal via the worst imaginable decisions. Like a shark cage expedition.

Cage goes in the water.

Sharks in the water.

Our shark.

Because tourists are stupid.

How stupid? Sea Captain Taylor (Matthew Modine) has to repeatedly say, “Stay inside the cage.”

But, if you can get past the idiocy – or even embrace it because, if YouTube is to be believed at all, people really are just this moronic – you’ll find some fun jump scares and genuine tension.

Something goes wrong and the girls and their cage drop to the sea floor, a dangerous 47 meters down. They have little oxygen and they’re surrounded by sharks. How will they survive?

The Shallows basically created the Girl Power Shark Movie, and Roberts and co-scripter Ernest Riera end up playing out a far less empowering tale. Roberts’s background is horror, though, so he does know how to deliver some visceral action now and again.

Plus, there is one shot that’s almost worth the price of admission.

Atmosphere is Roberts’s talent, and he creates a good deal of it. Aided by impressive CGI, the sisters’ plight on the ocean floor is often nearly as breathless for the audience as it is for the characters.

Dialog, on the other hand, is definitely a weaker point. Pair the banalities of the conversations with the contrivances that put the characters where they are, then add a first act that’s weighed down with cartoonishly ridiculous choices, and the cool shark sequences have a lot to overcome.

For a mindless, squirmy summer shark fest, though, it’s a fun time-waster.
Verdict-3-0-Stars

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I Don’t Want to Go Out

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There’s new whatnot ready to stream or BluRay its way into your home! Some of it’s worth a look, some of it’s not. Let us run that down for you.

Click titles for our complete reviews. And as always, please use this information for good, not evil.

 

The LEGO Batman Movie

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

John Wick 2

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

Table 19

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

Bitter Harvest

Verdict-2-0-Stars

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Fear Itself

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It Comes at Night

by George Wolf

Two years ago, Krisha served as a stunning feature debut for writer/director Trey Edward Shults. Gripping in the intimate nature of its truths, it heralded Shults as a new filmmaker with tremendous potential.

That potential is realized with It Comes at Night.

He may have bigger stars and a larger budget this time out, but Shults shows storytelling instincts that are already well-seasoned. Resisting any pressures to mainstream his scope and “go bigger,” Shults get even more intimate. While Krisha showed a very tangible threat infecting a family, It Comes at Night is more abstract, an intensely personal take on fear and paranoia.

Deep in the woods, Paul (Joel Edgerton, solid as always), Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and their teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) have established a cautious existence in the face of a worldwide plague. They have boarded their windows, secured their doors, and enacted a very strict set of rules for survival.

At the top of that list: do not go out at night.

This rigid domestic order is tested when the desperate Will (Christopher Abbott) breaks in. He has a wife, Kim (Riley Keough) and toddler to protect, and is offering all they have in exchange for refuge.

It Comes at Night has been on horror fans’ radar for some time, but it will test the patience of those satisfied with cheap jump scares or spoon-fed explanations. As with Krisha, Shults builds the film around his own experiences, using Travis to often mirror how Shults himself dealt with a death in the family. Through Travis’s nightmares, we are kept off balance, questioning just what is real and who can be trusted.

Shults explores the confines of the house with a fluid camera and lush cinematography, slyly creating an effective sense of separation between the occupants and the dangers outside.

But what are those dangers, and how much of the soul might one offer up to placate fear itself?

In asking those unsettling questions, It Comes at Night becomes a truly chilling exploration of human frailty.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

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Bad Wrap

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The Mummy

by Hope Madden

Remember the first time you saw the trailer for the new Tom Cruise flick The Mummy, and you thought, “My God, that looks awful”?

Dude, you were so right.

Part Tomb Raider, part Suicide Squad – with huge bits stolen whole cloth from the immeasurably superior An American Werewolf in London – The Mummy lacks even a solid thirty seconds of fresh thought. It is as dusty and lifeless as its namesake.

But, because it’s some sort of artistic imperative that every movie we see for the next decade is planned out in huge corporate clusters – I mean cinematic universes – the Universal monsters are being revived. Aging leading men will be tapped for butts-in-seats duties as Dark Universe tries to create a series of nostalgic family(ish) fare neutered beyond recognition with CGI.

First up, Cruise.

A prologue riddled with plot holes leads to one wildly offensive piece of cultural flippancy, as Cruise Indiana Joneses his way into Iraqi insurgent territory in search of unnamed treasure.

He finds an Egyptian sarcophagus. In Iraq. It’s just one geographic discrepancy mentioned but never clearly explained. Part and parcel of a script-by-committee that hopes you’ll overlook its incessant nonsense.

Cruise, as Nick Morton, is Cruise – all superficial charm and charisma. He’s joined by one-note Annabelle Wallis as the archeologist in a white shirt that’s bound to get really wet at some point, and Sofia Boutella as a mummy with strategically placed wrappings.

And Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll.

Will he turn into Hyde? Will it be among the film’s weakest, saddest, most pathetic scenes? No spoilers here.

Director Alex Kurtzman bandages together secondhand ideas, weak writing and an absence of onscreen chemistry with CGI aplenty. Sandstorms! Birds! More sand! And mummy/zombies that look like they should be gettin’ down with Michael Jackson.

If only!

Kurtzman’s impressive lack of instinct for pacing, tone and atmosphere match perfectly with the script’s hodgepodge of stolen ideas. And now we can wait for Hollywood execs to bring other moldering horror corpses back to life. Sigh.

Verdict-1-5-Stars

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Amazon Delivers

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Wonder Woman

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

What with rumors of recuts, controversies over costuming and the recent hubbub caused by all-female screenings, Wonder Woman has caused quite a stir.

Of course, she’s been causing a stir since 1941.

In the hotly anticipated film directed by Patty Jenkins (Monster), the Amazon princess is compelled to leave her peaceful paradise when WWI American spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crash lands. Learning for the first time about the global destruction, she sees it as her duty to try to end the war.

Gal Gadot returns, after a brief turn as the highlight in Batman V Superman, this time shouldering lead duties in the role she seemed destined for. Her action sequences are convincing – two years in the Israeli military will do that. Playing a newcomer to “civilized” society, Gadot finds an appropriate balance of naiveté and self-sufficiency.

Jenkins and screenwriter Allan Heinberg (in his film debut after an arc of WW comics and years in TV) also strike an effective balancing act with the multiple elements at work in their film: period war drama, sweeping romance, action film and superhero origin story.

That origin story, with an inherent freshness unburdened by multiple reboots, is part coming of age, part fish out of water. As it introduces a new hero and questions if the world deserves her, Wonder Woman benefits from a bit of easy charm and the deft handling of some touchy items.

Chris Pine is the charm. As the dashing Capt. Trevor, he carries self-aware good humor and comfortable chemistry with the lead, and he delivers a few of the film’s best lines.

As for Jenkins’s handling, there’s much to be said for the minefield she inherited with this project: the costume, the lasso – hell, the cartoon Wonder Woman has an invisible jet. There’s plenty to ridicule here, or, for a fanboy, to revere.

Jenkins, finding middle ground between Marvel’s wisecracking and DC’s weighty seriousness, inserts light humor, occasionally reverses traditional comic book gender roles with success, and still manages to simply craft a solid superhero movie.

She can’t escape the genre penchant for excess, and by the third act, Wonder Woman starts feeling every bit of its two-hour and twenty-minute running time. But there is definite hope here, not only for humanity, but the future of the DC film universe.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

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Just Turn Around Now

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The Survivalist

by Hope Madden

Lean, mean futuristic science fiction that feels unsettlingly like reality, The Survivalist ranks among the best dystopian films in recent memory. And as writer/director Stephen Fingleton creates an utterly plausible and devastatingly grim future, the film marks a first time filmmaker with an awful lot to say.

A solitary figure (Martin McCann – amazing) ekes out an existence in a shack hidden in the woods of Northern Ireland. His small field of crops is fertilized by the bodies of interlopers who happen upon him. He spends his days tending his vegetables and reinforcing his traps, but a haunted past and his own isolation are starting to wear at him.

Enter two hungry women: Kathryn (Olwen Fouere) and her daughter, Milja (Mia Goth).

His first inclination is to do with them what we’ve seen him do with others who come too close to his holdout. But he’s tempted, made an offer for something not necessary for survival. Something he wants more than he needs.

For Milja and her mother, this is still nothing more than survival, which is what puts the three people on different planes of existence. The survivalist (for we never do know his name) has entered the treacherous and vulnerable area of want, and then the even more dangerous ground of hope.

The shifting power and landscape of the relationships is fascinating, made all the more powerful for lack of dialog. Who is in control? The answer varies scene by scene.

The title could stand for any of the three, and this trio of performances consistently impresses.

Fingleton lingers on glances and body language to reinforce the pitiless practicality that has taken the place of civilization. McCann’s silent chemistry with each character offers more insight into his character than pages of dialog could, and he’s matched in his efforts – particularly by Fouere.

The film, like its protagonists, is unapologetically efficient. But Fingleton and his director of photography Damien Elliott occasionally offer a glimpse of the beauty left in this dystopia – a beauty that existed long before and will persist long after man’s involvement.

Together, cast and crew trap you in slow-boil of primal instincts with an explosion the inevitable consequence.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

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Lost at Sea

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

by Hope Madden

Summer is the season for amusement parks, and in that spirit Disney rolls out the closest thing cinema has to a theme park ride – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

Pros: New directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (Kon Tiki) keep the pace tighter, the tale more seafaring and the visuals more interesting than in the last few (almost unendurable) installments.

Cons: Disney has brought the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise back.

The series began as a pretty enormous gamble, taking a popular Disneyland ride and turning it into a movie.

Brilliantly, this put the not-yet-self-indulgent talent of Gore Verbinski behind a camera, but let’s be honest, it was Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow that made the film.

All swoozy and splishy, drunk and dodgy, hilariously rock and roll, Sparrow made all of us wish for the pirate’s life. It was fun. It was ingenious, even a bit subversive. It was nearly 15 years ago.

In the meantime, Cap’s adventures have taken on the stench of bloat.

By 2017, Depp is a has-been with a terrible drinking habit. Sure he’s still cute, but there’s something a tad pathetic about him and the consistently bad choices he makes.

As Jack Sparrow, I mean.

Obviously.

Geoffrey Rush returns as Barbosa – intriguing as always. He’s joined by Javier Bardem, arguably one of the three or four best actors working today, wasted here in an underwritten, toothless role. He plays about 2/3 of dead sea captain Salazar, blandly bent on revenge.

What – zombie pirates? Next you’ll tell me Jack’s about to be executed in a town square, or find himself stranded with crazies on a desert island. Or that there will be a pirate cameo from a classic rock star.

Oh, Paul McCartney…

The accursed Salazar wants Sparrow. Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites) – son of Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) – wants Sparrow too, to help him find Poseidon’s Trident, which can break all the curses of the sea and save ol’ Dad.

Also there’s a young female love interest (Kaya Scodelario) – a woman of science mistaken by society as a witch. It’s a storyline that could have been interesting, I suppose, but Jeff Nathanson’s screenplay uses it to nod toward feminism while glimpsing a corset-pushed bosom.

Dead Men Tell No Tales (they do, by the way – tons of them) might seem to some an affectionate wrap up of a once-beloved and now tolerated family film series. Don’t believe it – Rønning and Sandberg are already tapped to direct Episode 6.

Can Poseidon’s Trident put an end to this franchise?

Verdict-2-0-Stars