Screening Room: Deadpool & Wolverine, Fabulous Four, Vourdalak, The Last Breath & More
Tag Archives: George Wolf
Diver Down and Out
The Last Breath
by George Wolf
You’ll notice some form of the word “shark” has not been worked in to the title, which is your first clue that The Last Breath wants to be taken more seriously than much of the sharksploitation fare.
It’s still a shark movie, just one that tries to be a little more based in reality.
Tries. A little.
Noah (Jack Parr) works at a dive shop in the Caribbean that’s owned by the deep-in-debt Levi (Julian Sands, in his last role). The two have recently discovered the wreck of the USS Charlotte, which went down thanks to an enemy torpedo during WWII.
So Noah has some exciting news to share with his college friends, who have just come in for a reunion party. One of the group, Brett (Alexander Arnold) is a rich douche, and he offers Noah and Levi big money to hold off reporting the find for one day, so they can all be the first to dive the Charlotte.
As a certified scuba diver who has gone on a few wreck dives, I can tell you that this is suicidal idiocy. But I get the lure of the premise for writers Andrew Prendergast and Nick Saltrese. It sets up a saltwater take on The Descent, where monsters are waiting in unexplored territory.
And of course, these divers must be equipped with full face diving masks and integrated microphones so that we can see more of the actors’ faces and the characters can speak to each other underwater. Yes, I’m again picking nits on these tourist dive shops offering such expensive equipment, but the bigger problem is the inane dialog and forced exposition that follows.
Director Joachim Hedén, a veteran of diving adventure films, does exhibit a fine command of underwater space and framing, creating a decent amount of tension with visual checks on remaining air supply or a frayed guideline. But while the footage of lurking great whites may integrate sufficiently, the shark attacks themselves offer less than thrilling CGI effects.
On the sharkin’ scale, this is indeed a step up from the ‘nados and the Megs. But if you’re waiting to hear The Last Breath belongs among the rare air of The Shallows or Open Water…
Don’t hold it.
Timeline Bandits
Deadpool & Wolverine
by George Wolf
The prospect of a new Deadpool & Wolverine teamup brings plenty of fan excitement, and one looming question.
What about Logan? They really gonna do him like that, and undo Wolverine’s deeply emotional sendoff with some dream sequence gag or something?
Don’t look away, you’re in a safe zone here. There’ll be no spoilers (and there’s plenty of surprises to spoil, so navigate your media carefully), but rest assured that the Deadpool franchise is built on self-awareness. And what this third installment cooks up is a foul-mouthed, carnage-laden and often hilarious blast of fan service and Friars Club roast that’s set to ludicrous speed.
It also has plenty to say about the new Honda Odyssey. See, Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is selling cars, sporting a “hair system” and pining for Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) when the mysterious Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) gives Wade a chance to finally attain something he craves: to matter.
Remember, we’re in Marvel “multiverse” territory now, so while Paradox is keeping tabs on multiple timelines, all Deadpool needs to know is who can help him save the one holding people he really cares about.
Bet you can guess who can help, but doesn’t want to.
Director Shawn Levy, co-writing with Reynolds and Rhett Rheese, keeps up a nearly constant stream of bloodshed and banter, always staying one step ahead of us on the mockery scale. Disney and the MCU are frequent targets, but extended exposition, past films, previous spouses and more will all be skewered via precise timing from Reynolds and the muscle-flexing wrath of Hugh Jackman’s furious straight man.
This pair of timeline bandits is as much of an R-rated delight as you’re probably expecting, but Levy makes sure these two don’t just talk the talk. The action is stylishly well-staged, heavy on 80s needle drops (cha-ching Huey Lewis!) and often relentless, with D & W mostly battling each other until they come mask to face with the all-powerful Cassandra Nova (Emma Corin).
Nova rules “the Void,” a thrilling dystopian Hellscape that’s home to plenty of jokes about Mad Max and a priceless array of cameos. More and more famous faces drop in to join the fight, enough to leave the fanboys and girls cheering, laughing, and tipping their caps to pop culture callbacks and one very well-played superhero sleight of hand.
Yes, it’s overlong (but you will want to stay through the credits) and sometimes clearly impressed with its own cleverness, but Deadpool & Wolverine is also committed to its promise of adult, crowd-pleasing fun.
Make that overly committed, and over-delivered.
Screening Room: Twisters, My Spy 2, Young Woman and the Sea, Oddity & More
Identity Crisis
My Spy The Eternal City
by George Wolf
I said it four years ago and I still stand by it: My Spy is “the best huge-former-wrestler-stars-with-little-kid movie I have ever seen.”
Amazon Prime brings almost all the gang back for a trip abroad in The Eternal City, a sequel that unfortunately forgets to pack much of what made the original so charming.
CIA agent JJ (Dave Bautista) is still with Kate (now played by Lara Babalola), but she’s conveniently out of the country, which means JJ is guardian for Sophie (Chloe Coleman) just as she’s getting that teenage itch to test boundaries.
Happily domestic, JJ is still resisting offers from his boss David (Ken Jeong) and partner Bobbi (Kristen Schaal) to quit desk duty and return to the field. But like it or not, JJ is about to be forced back into action.
Chloe’s school choir has earned a trip to Italy, and JJ comes along as a chaperone under the demanding eye of Vice Principal Nancy (Anna Faris). David’s son Collin (Taeho K) is also part of the choir group, until he’s kidnapped by some evildoers so his dad will cough up the info needed to activate all those suitcase nukes hidden by the KGB.
And how do the bad guys know where all those suitcases are? Duh, they stole the thumb drive. It’s always the thumb drive!
Director Peter Segal again teams with co-writers Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, but this time they seem much more interested in joining a genre they were winking at in part one.
My Spy would have used all this evil plan exposition for more charmingly self-aware humor. The Eternal City has lost much of that awareness, instead vying to launch some sort of hybrid stepdad/daughter action franchise that can also throw out teen hijinks and adult wisecracks.
Juggling is not in this CIA handbook. As likable as this ensemble is, only a few of the gags actually land, the running time starts to swell and the film spreads its tone so thin that no one gets out of The Eternal City feeling like they had a good time.
Especially those of us so pleasantly surprised with the first outing.
Queen of the Waves
Young Woman and the Sea
by George Wolf
She died in 2003 at the age of 98. And to this day, the New York parade that honored her in 1926 is the largest the city has ever given to a single athlete, man or woman.
Her name was Trudy Ederle, and that year she became the first woman to swim the 21 miles across the English Channel.
Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea brings Trudy’s story to streaming with broad strokes of sports inspiration, and a grounded lead turn from Daisy Ridley that consistently keeps engagement afloat.
Ridley brings intimacy to Trudy’s early struggles against health issues and sexism, crafting a quiet determination to conquer both through swimming the Channel.
Director Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) and writer Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can) adapt Jeff Stout’s source biography with a familiar treatment of Trudy’s path to history. Solid supporting players (including Jeanette Hain, Kim Bodnia, Tilda Cobham-Hervey) create an Ederle family unit with an earned humanity. In contrast to forced underdog sports dramas such as the recent The Boys in the Boat, the family dynamics here feel earned, and that fuels the conflicts that come with the arrival of Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham).
Burgess – who swam the Channel himself years earlier – sees through the attempts by insecure males to sabotage Trudy’s quest, and commits himself to helping her succeed, even when the Ederle family wants to call it off. The period details are affecting, Rønning mines tension from an outcome we already know, and Ridley makes sure Trudy is inspirational without becoming a one note hero.
Young Woman and the Sea may never attempt to shake up the sports biography playbook, but it doesn’t feel like pandering, either. Disney obviously knows the game plan, and the film’s commitment to execution delivers a satisfying and overdue salute to a woman who earned it.
Fright Club: Shadow of War in Horror
You don’t find a lot of outright war/horror genre mashups, but there are a few. Most of them involve murdering Nazis (yay!!). But the shadow of war—its threat, its echoes, its reach toward civilians, its leftover orphans, its cowards and criminals—that influences horror. The Last Circus, Dead Birds, A Serbian Film, 2019’s Guatemalan La Llorona, even The Others – all solid genre films all reeling from the memory of war. But we have other favorites:
5. Ravenous (1999)
The blackest of comedies, the film travels back to the time of the Mexican/American War to throw us in with a cowardly soldier (Guy Pearce) reassigned to a mountainous California outpost where a weary soul wanders into camp with a tale of the unthinkable – his wagon train fell to bad directions, worse weather, and a guide with a taste for human flesh.
Pearce is great as the protagonist struggling against his own demons, trying to achieve some kind of peace with himself and his own shortcomings, but Robert Carlyle steals this movie.
As the wraithlike Colonel Ives, he makes the perfect devil stand-in. Smooth, compelling and wicked, he offsets Pearce’s tortured soul perfectly. The pair heighten the tensions with some almost-sexual tension, which director Antonia Bird capitalizes on brilliantly.
4. Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Tim Robbins plays Vietnam vet Jacob Singer with a weary sweetness that’s almost too tender and vulnerable to bear. In a blistering supporting turn, Elizabeth Pena impresses as the passionate carnal angel Jezebel. The real star here, weirdly enough, is director Adrian Lyne.
Known more for erotic thrillers, here he beautifully articulates a dreamscape that keeps you guessing. The New York of the film crawls with unseemly creatures hiding among us. Filmed as a grimy, colorless nightmare, Jacob’s Ladder creates an atmosphere of paranoia and dread.
3. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
The Devil’s Backbone unravels a spectral mystery during Spain’s civil war. The son of a fallen comrade finds himself in an isolated orphanage that has its own troubles to deal with, now that the war is coming to a close and the facility’s staff sympathized with the wrong side. That leaves few resources to help him with a bully, a sadistic handyman, or the ghost.
Backbone is a slow burn as interested in atmosphere and character development as it is in the tragedy of a generation of war orphans. This is ripe ground for a haunted tale, and writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s achievement is both contextually beautiful – war, ghost stories, religion and communism being equally incomprehensible to a pack of lonely boys – and elegantly filmed.
2. Under the Shadow (2016)
First-time feature filmmaker, Iranian Babak Anvari, treads familiar ground yet manages to shift focus entirely and create the profound and unsettling Under the Shadow.
The tale is set in Tehran circa 1988, at the height of the Iran/Iraq war and just a few years into the “Cultural Revolution” that enforced fundamentalist ideologies. Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and her young daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) shelter in their apartment as missiles rain on Tehran.
Frazzled, impatient, judged and constrained from all sides, Shideh’s nerve is hit with this threat. And as external and internal anxieties build, she’s no longer sure what she’s seeing, what she’s thinking, or what the hell to do about it. The fact that this menacing presence – a djinn, or wind spirit – takes the shape of a flapping, floating burka is no random choice. Shideh’s failure in this moment will determine her daughter’s entire future.
1. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece is Influenced visually and logically by fairy tales. It takes us to a fairy tale land but is not set on any existing fairy tale, not unlike Argento’s greatest work, Suspiria (1977), and Jee-woon Kim’s brilliant Tale of Two Sisters (2003).
But honestly, there is nothing on earth quite like Pan’s Labyrinth. A mythical cousin to del Toro’s beautiful 2002 ghost story The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth follows a terrified, displaced little girl who may be the reincarnation of Princess Moanna, daughter of the King of the Underworld. She must complete three tasks to rejoin her father in her magical realm.
A heartbreaking fantasy about the costs of war, the film boasts amazing performances. Few people play villains—in any language—as well as Sergi Lopez, and Doug Jones inspires terror and wonder in two different roles. But the real star here is del Toro’s imagination, which has never had such a beautiful outlet.
Screening Room: Fly Me to the Moon, Longlegs, Dandelion, The Convert & More
Man in the Middle
The Convert
by George Wolf
Director and co-writer Lee Tamahori lets us know that for 500 years, the Māori were “edged weapon” warriors. Then, the 1800s brought them muskets, and Christianity.
You can guess how that worked out.
In The Convert, Tamahori brings us into their world via Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce, solid), a lay minister who has accepted an assignment as Chaplain of Epworth, a British colony on New Zealand.
After years in the British army, Munro has a new commitment to mercy, and it almost immediately puts him squarely between two Māori warlords still committed to blood.
One Chief sends young Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) and Pahirua (Duane Evans Jr.) to live in Epworth and be mentored by Munro. While the opposing Chief plots an invasion to take back the land he feels is his, Munro quickly finds how deeply the bigotry grows in little Epworth.
New Zealander Tamahori (The Edge, Next, Die Another Day) shows a strong respect for authenticity in casting, language and customs of the Māori people. But as we learn more about why Munro “converted” from a soldier to a man of peace, a strong Dances With Wolves vibe clouds the more compelling history of these two rival tribes.
Some worthy (and timely) points are made about wars between “have-nots” only serving the “haves,” but while the film never goes full-on white savior, you wonder how it would have benefitted from a less pale point of view.
Munro’s arc isn’t frivolous, but neither is it fresh. The emotional pull here is clearly with the Māori, and it’s a shame The Convert is content to make them side players.
Science, Fiction
Fly Me to the Moon
by George Wolf
Apologies to the Seinfeld/Maher committee, but the biggest problem in comedy isn’t woke madness, it’s people not even realizing when their leg is being pulled.
Remember “Birds Aren’t Real?” It gained real believers. Q Anon? There’s good reason to think it started as gag, just to see just what type of wacked-out conspiracies some folks would buy into.
Then there’s 2002’s Opération lune, a MOCKumentary about the conspiracy theory that the Apollo XI moon landing footage was faked by Stanley Kubrick. The mocking even included much laughing and fessing up at the end of the film, but to this day conspiracy fans cite it as proof of the NASA/Kubrick hoax.
Fly Me to the Moon adds more historical fiction to that Opération lune idea, wraps it an impressive throwback sheen, and then leans on the playful chemistry between Scarlett Johansson and Woody Harrelson for some winning rom-com moments.
Trouble is, they aren’t playing romantic partners.
Scarlett is Kelly Jones, a born saleswoman who’s hired by NASA to get the public back behind the Apollo program. Channing Tatum is launch director Cole Davis (loosely based on Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton), a committed leader who has little use for Kelly’s marketing ploys, even if he can’t deny her beauty and charm.
Kelly’s campaign works so well that President Nixon decides the moon landing is now “too big to fail,” and sends Moe Berkus (Woody) in to charge Kelly with filming a fake landing that can be used for backup.
And Kelly better agree to the ruse no matter what Cole thinks, or else some embarrassing facts about her past might come to light.
Director Greg Berlanti (Love, Simon) weaves some snappy production design into a zesty 60s aesthetic. There is style aplenty, which always props up a debut screenplay from Keenan Flynn, Rose Gilroy and Bill Kirstein that throws a drive-by bone to the science vs. religion debate while it delivers more amusement than outright comedy.
Nice supporting turns from Ray Romano and Jim Rash add to the list of likable elements, but as Kelly and Cole finally get romantic, you can’t be blamed for wanting a little more Woody. No doubt, Tatum has proven to be a solid comedic talent, but here he’s tasked instead with delivering Cole’s tortured backstory as well as his conflicted torch for Kelly, and neither is convincing.
Johansson carries the film by crafting Kelly as a delightful blend of con artist and seductive vamp. Harrelson is a natural as the winking rogue with a talent for intimidation. It’s no surprise, then, that the entire film steps more lively when those two are trying to outfox one another.
Enjoy their mischief, even if none of this really happened, a fact which makes the two-hour-plus running time seen a little more bloated. Still, Fly Me to the Moon has just enough stylish star power to make it a satisfying flight about something that never really happened.
And remember, birds are real.
