Tag Archives: Rupert Friend

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More Teeth

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Jurassic World: Rebirth

by Hope Madden

Every great creature feature from King Kong to Godzilla to Jaws to Jurassic Park and on and on understands one basic principle. The monster is not the problem. Human greed is the problem. Some monster movies are just better than others at telling that story.

It’s not a new notion to director Gareth Edwards, who riffed on it in Monsters (2010), Godzilla (2014), and The Creator (2023). For Jurassic World: Rebirth, he teams with writer David Koepp, who adapted Michael Crichton’s novel for Spielberg’s 1993 original. Given the sheer volume of callbacks in Rebirth, I’d say Koepp is pretty pleased with how that first one turned out.

Scarlett Johansson is an extraction specialist hired by Big Pharma in white linen, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to gather DNA samples from three living dinosaurs: the biggest on the sea, land, and air. Mahershala Ali is the ship’s captain who’ll get crew and scientist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to the island no one is allowed to visit, they’ll gather some samples and get home. Zip in, zip out.

But wait! Naked alpha zombies!

Just kidding. But seriously, why can’t someone write a proper film for Mahershala Ali and Scarlett Johanssen? Because these are talented individuals (hell, one of them has two Oscars), and they are better than this retread.

To be fair, Edwards crafts some eyepopping set pieces early in the film as two different boats—Ali’s, and that of the cloying B-story family—run afoul of the swimming beasties. These action sequences set you up for thrills, but once both A and B story hit dry land, Gareth is more interested in recycled ideas and images, not just from this franchise but from the Alien series as well. Just get a look at the monster they kept hidden away on that island. I think I know what they were cross breeding that with.

The B-story about a shipwrecked family (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, and Audrina Miranda) is cliché straight from the family friendly action movie playbook, complete with a comically adorable (and tonally discordant) baby dinosaur stowing away in the littlest daughter’s backpack.

The presence of the family softens the best members of the elite team and amplifies the villainy in the worst. Of course it does because Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing if not obvious. It obviously knows the story it’s supposed to tell, it just doesn’t tell it especially well.

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Paranoid Android

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Companion

by Hope Madden

It’s not to say that writer/director Drew Hancock is saying anything new, exactly. Most of the ideas are borrowed, and even the look of Companion feels cribbed from more insightfully stylized films. But the way he puts these ideas and images into play and keeps them playing guarantees a mischievously, wickedly good time.

On the surface is a timely reminder of themes played out on film since Bryan Forbes’s 1975 Stepford Wives and before. But today, as AI and sexual predation become terrifyingly acceptable, the tension feels wildly of-the-moment.

Sophie Thatcher (so good just last year in Heretic) is Iris. She doesn’t know it yet, but Iris is a robot companion, an emotional support robot, a f*ck bot. She and Josh (Jack Quaid) are hanging with Josh’s friends Eli (Harvey Guillén), Patrick (Lukas Gage) and Kat (Megan Suri) at Kat’s boyfriend Serey’s (Rupert Friend) for the weekend.

Things get out of hand.

Lars and the Real Girl meets Revenge meets AI meets maybe twenty other movies, but damn if Hancock and this sharp ensemble doesn’t make it work.

A great deal of the film’s success is in our investment in these themes, the way we recognize and respond to buttons Hancock pushes. But what’s maybe more impressive is the plotting and structure of the thriller underneath. It’s smart, its beats make sense and amplify tension. A couple of reveals are telegraphed, but it’s not nearly enough to sink the fun of the story.

And it’s funny. Guillén can be counted on for hilarity, but the dark sense of humor that flows through this thriller as surely as blood consistently strikes the right chord.

Quaid convinces as entitled “nice guy” Josh, an excellent foil for Thatcher. Her turn in Heretic offered a glimpse of the instincts on display here. Thatcher seems simultaneously aloof and vulnerable, unnatural and human. She gives the film a depth of character, a heartbeat that allows it more punch than your garden variety dark comedy.

Hancock does settle for humor, biting though it may be. The script flirts with darker, edgier but no less honest ideas, but Companion isn’t here to expose all of that. Because that stuff is just not funny, and outright horror films need content too.

Turns out it’s kind of fun to be on the side of AI for a change.

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Hollywood Confidential

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Last Looks

by George Wolf

“I looked up and there she was, the dame I thought I’d left behind a lifetime ago. Would she find what she came back for? Well, one thing’s for sure, getting that answer was going to hurt one of us.”

Nobody says that in Last Looks. In fact, there isn’t any leading, dramatic voiceover at all, which turns out to be a pleasant surprise for a neo noir mystery that manages to entertain in spite of its missteps.

Charlie Hunnam (also an executive producer here) stars as Charlie Waldo, a disgraced ex-cop in L.A. who has retreated to a life in the woods with a vow to not own more than one hundred things.

“And you kept that hat?” asks former flame Morena Baccarin (Deadpool‘s Lorena Nascimento). She’s tracked Charlie down with a lucrative offer to get back in the game. It seems celebrated actor Alistair Pinch (Mel Gibson) has been accused of murdering his wife, and the defense team could use Charlie’s old sleuthing skills.

Charlie declines, but when word is leaked that he actually accepted, he hops on his bicycle and heads down to Hollywood to set the record straight, which of course proves harder than he imagined.

Suddenly Morena is missing and presumed dead, and Charlie suffers repeated beat downs while studio bigwig Wilson Sikorsky (Rupert Friend) throws money at him to spend just one day with Alistair before swearing off the case entirely.

Pinch is a blackout drunk who stars as a judge in a gleefully over-the-top show called “Johnnie’s Bench,” and Gibson, like him or don’t, doesn’t waste the chance to be the highlight of the film.

Leaning into lines such as “I’ve gotten married, fathered children and taken out mortgages and not remembered” and being quick to put up dukes at the slightest umbrage, Gibson seems to relish getting cheeky with his own image, and it’s a hoot to behold.

But director Tim Kirkby (Veep, Fleabag, Brockmire) and writer Howard Michael Gould (adapting his own novel) can’t quite decide just how cheeky they want Last Looks to be.

Hunnam brings a solid and sympathetic anchor while the strong ensemble surrounds him with deliciously exaggerated performances, snappy retorts and vampy character names like “Big Jim Cuppy” and “Fontella Davis.” But just when you’re thinking The Nice Guys, Kirkby overdoes the noir shadings with a turn toward L.A. Confidential.

It never reaches either destination, going at least 20 minutes out of its way to end up somewhere in the middle. But when it lands, Last Looks carves out a throwback mystery that’s engaging enough, and – whenever Gibson’s around – even devilish fun.

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Dead Body Politic

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The Death of Stalin

by George Wolf

Opening with a madcap “musical emergency” and closing with a blood-stained political coup, The Death of Stalin infuses its factual base with coal back humor of the most delicious and absurd variety.

The film cements director/co-writer Armando Iannucci (Veep, In the Loop) as a premier satirist, as it plays so giddily with history while constantly poking you with a timeliness that should be shocking but sadly is not.

So many feels are here, none better than the sheer joy of watching this film unfold.

It is Moscow in the 1950s and we meet Josef Stalin and his ruling committee, with nary an actor even attempting a Russian accent. Those British and American dialects set a wonderfully off-kilter vibe.

Iannucci has a confident grip on his vision, and the impeccable cast to see it through,

Who else would play Nikita Khrushchev but Steve Busemi? Then there’s Jeffrey Tambor and Simon Russell Beale as committee members jockeying for power after Stalin’s death, Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend as Stalin’s manically desperate kids, and Jason Isaacs arriving late to nearly steal the whole show as the uber-manly head of the Russian army.

As enemies lists are updated (“new list!”) and constant assassinations whirl, the hilarious barbs keep coming in dizzying succession, each delivered with bullseye precision by lead actors and walk-ons alike. Monty Python vet Michael Palin is a fitting face in the ensemble, with Iannucci structuring a few bits (like Buscemi and Tambor trying to slyly switch places at Stalin’s funeral-classic) that recall some of the finest Python zaniness.

It all flows so fast and furiously funny, it’s easy to forget how hard it is to pull off such effective satire. We end up laughing through a dark and brutal time in history, while Iannuci speaks truth to those currently in power with a sharp and savage brand of mockery.

Stalin is still dead.

Long live The Death of Stalin!