Tag Archives: Jodie Turner-Smith

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Nothing Permanent in This Wicked World

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Tron: Ares

by Hope Madden

Tron was a fun idea in 1982. What director Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares gets very right is its commitment to simplicity, impressive yet simple visual effects, and soundtrack.

Greta Lee is Eve Kim, head of ENCOM, a tech industry whose whiz kid founder vanished back in the 80s. Kim’s been working on AI that can materialize into something concrete—like an orange tree. But she’s missing the string of code that will make the thing permanent, helping her eradicate hunger and do so many other good things AI will clearly never actually be used to do.

Meanwhile, megatech competitor Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) is materializing soldiers, of course. But their impermanence is a stickler for him as well.

The race is one to own the permanence code! Natch, Dillinger sends one of his soldiers (Ares, played by Jared Leto) to nab Kim, leading to adventures inside and out of “the grid”.

Is it dumb? Of course it is. Is it fun? Sometimes it really is! There’s a motorcycle chase that looks amazing, a gorgeous opening sequence, and visuals that manage to be both forward thinking and adorably retro—kind of a highly polished version of a tech world as imagined in the early 1980s.

Supporting turns from effortless badass Jodie Turner-Smith and ever glorious Gillian Anderson class up the joint. And did I mention the characteristically jarring, distorted and sorely missed sounds of Nine Inch Nails?

Jared Leto does his best Jared Leto, handsome and wise and weirdly stiff. Whatever. But Greta Lee is clearly better than the material, which can’t help but elevate the few scenes requiring true acting. She runs well too. And Peters is a bit of fun as our favorite punching bag, the spoiled, entitled, weak tech billionaire playboy. (He’s no Nicholas Hoult, but the performance is still solid.)

Is Tron: Ares great? It is not. But it doesn’t suck, either.

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Without Explanation

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Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse

by Hope Madden

Michael B. Jordan is a bona fide movie star, a butts-in-seats celebrity ready to front his own spy thriller franchise. He’s ready to Harrison Ford.

He definitely is ready, there’s no doubt he has the talent, charisma, looks and mass appeal to bring a Tom Clancy story to the big screen. But should he do it?

Jordan’s John Kelly finds himself in an unexpected operation in Aleppo. He loses a friend and nearly loses his commanding officer (Queen & Slim’s Jodie Turner-Smith, wasted), much thanks to a cagey CIA operative (Jamie Bell) who’s hiding something from the team. Something Russian.

Well, those Russian secrets keep resurfacing, and they rack up a heavy body count. Next thing you know, Jordan has to take off his shirt and splash water on his bare chest because…I don’t know. It might honestly just be a contractual thing now.

I’m not saying I’m sorry it happened.

Stefano Sollima directs this espionage thriller, and he has even less luck than he did with his last feature, Sicario: Day of the Soldado. The problem this time around is not that his film suffers terribly by comparison. (Man, that was the problem last time.) The problem is that writers Will Staples and Taylor Sheridan just don’t seem to be trying very hard.

And Sheridan can be one of the finest writers working in film (Sicario, Hell or High Water). But you would not know that here.

The thrills are mediocre, the shootouts and fights are middling, and the only thing more obvious than the plot points are the performances. Worse still, the writing is sloppy and convenient. There’s an unmanned, unlocked, running vehicle right when John Kelly needs one, and don’t even ask how he gets unconscious villains from point A to point B. I guess that’s confidential.

It’s not that Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is a terrible movie. It isn’t. But there’s no excuse for it to be utterly mediocre, which it is. The director’s proven to be competent and the co-writer has proven to be genius. Plus there’s a bona fide movie star at the height of his wattage leading the effort.

I blame Putin.