Tag Archives: thrillers

Time to Stop Reaching

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

by Hope Madden

Who is Jack Reacher?

“The guy you didn’t count on.”

Or, the guy spewing some tired, tired lines.

Four years ago Tom Cruise pissed off Lee Child fans when he put on the rumpled jeans and tee of the 6’5” drifter with mad military skills. In the serviceable thriller Jack Reacher, Cruise’s character puzzled through a homicide set up with the help of an inappropriately dressed defense lawyer.

Nowadays, though, maybe Jack is subconsciously looking to settle down. He meanders back to DC to talk with the Major who is now in command of his old post – the overtly fierce Samantha Turner (Cobie Smulders). Sparks?

Well, there might have been except Major Turner’s been incarcerated, there’s a highly trained sociopath with an alpha complex and a fancy pair of leather gloves, and an at-risk teen is in need of guidance.

The action’s far less interestingly choreographed, the humor is nonexistent, the villain is far blander (it was Werner Herzog last go-round, for lord’s sake!).

With the right combination of vulnerability, brattiness and savvy, Danika Yarosh provides the rare bright spot as the wayward teen. Smulder’s indignant badass is all but intolerable. Meanwhile, Cruise seems paralyzed as he tries to relay confused and conflicted paternal tendencies.

Edward Zwick’s stale direction isn’t helping. The closest thing to panache comes by way of the now de rigueur chase across urban rooftops. Yawn.

Still, Zwick’s greater crime may be the screenplay he co-wrote with Richard Wenk and Marshall Herskovitz, adapted from the Child novel. There is a difference between streamlining text and discarding character development, plot movement and sense. You spend 30% of the film thinking, “Well, that was certainly convenient.”

Incompetent plotting, weak catch phrases and a shocking lack of chemistry among any and all actors will keep a project from succeeding. Hopefully everyone involved – including the audience – can leave the film and never go back.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

Bottom Line Business

The Accountant

by Hope Madden

For a middling thriller, The Accountant offers a handful of worthy items.

Its central character Christian (Ben Affleck) is an unusual choice for a hero. He’s a mathematical genius on the autism spectrum whose youth was spent learning to function in society, and developing mad mercenary skills. Why the second? Never really clear.

Affleck is a proven director. He doesn’t direct The Accountant, but recent roles suggest he’s become savvier with his acting choices as well. He seems to recognize what the rest of us have known for a while – he lacks range.

What better character for him, then, than a man who struggles to show the slightest emotion?

The film also boasts – much thanks to Affleck’s performance – humor. Rather than an amalgam of stereotypes and contrivances, Affleck’s bean counter comes off as a relatable human.

Another item of note: director Gavin O’Connor (Warrior) choreographs the impeccable action sequences with the kind of clarity and efficiency that reflect the film’s protagonist. Even as that sounds potentially dull, the result is quite the opposite. These are some of the clearest and most interesting action pieces of the year, actually.

O’Connor’s direction and Affleck’s performance are subtle with Christian’s tics, focusing our attention instead on slight changes in the character that make him more provocative. By pairing him with Anna Kendrick’s corporate CPA Dana – a sweet, jovial type – O’Connor explores the social awkwardness in all of us.

Now for the problems.

These fall mostly to the script, penned by Bill Dubuque, whose triad of storylines climaxes in a clean and witty shootout. Too bad every intentional surprise has long-since been guessed, leaving only those inconsistencies in the plot that are probably not supposed to have been noticed, either.

Christian, drawn to puzzles and possessing a super human knack for math, often works with disreputable clients. He’s taken a legit client – a robotics firm that makes prosthetics for the medical industry. But this isn’t as it seems, and brings Christian in contact with a corporate hitman who wants him silenced.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department is finally piecing together Christian’s whereabouts and may be onto him. Why now? Another mystery.

The criss-crossing, flash-backing, money-following and head-scratching don’t pay off because, at its core, the thriller is just exploiting a gimmick. But Affleck and O’Connor are not, which is why the film turns out as well as it does.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmKtb-Pvpf4

Baby Mama Drama

The Ones Below

by Cat McAlpine

Having a child is an amazing and joyous event. It is also terrifying. Alien knew it. That whole Season 8 arc of the XFiles knew it. We’ve even dedicated a Fright Club to Pregnancy Horror. But The Ones Below favors less bursting out of chests and more psychological slow burn.

Enter a small house containing two flats, one upstairs, and one downstairs. Upstairs is home to longtime residents Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Kate (Clémence Poésy), who is pregnant with her first child after years of denying motherhood. New neighbors have moved in downstairs, and Kate finally catches a glimpse of equally pregnant Theresa (Laura Birn).

Theresa and husband Jon (David Morrissey) come upstairs for dinner one evening, and express how desperate they’ve been for a child over some very stilted small talk. Thus tears the rift between the two couples, which only grows after a tragic accident leaves everyone scurrying to dodge guilt and blame.

First time feature director David Farr chases a touch of timelessness in his arrangement and almost pulls it off. There’s a neither here nor there quality to the set and costuming. Milk is delivered daily in glass bottles on the doorstep, smart phones fill hands but pictures are taken with digital cameras, young couples work in open floor plan offices. The upstairs couple dresses as modern young professionals, comfortably. The downstairs pair is more pressed, more clean, and further off trend. A perfectly manicured garden gives off an eerie, Stepford feel.

The editing and design seem to struggle with Farr’s intention a bit. Cool tones downplay some of the raw emotional quality of the scenes, making more intimate moments feel a bit detached. This could be intentional, or I could be trying to cover up for the lack of chemistry between couples.

The most intriguing performance by far is Birn’s Theresa, who is fascinating to watch with equal measures of conniving and innocent. Poésy and Moore are both down-to-earth and relatable, but Poésy ultimately just doesn’t have much to work with. Moore, as the straight man character to everyone else’s crazy, gives a solid performance and becomes the beating heart of the film.

The dialogue mostly consists of bickering, which lends both realism and additional tension, but doesn’t seem to otherwise motivate the characters. There are vague references to strained relationships, which, while underdeveloped, provide breadcrumbs leading to both false and unbelievable-but-true conclusions.

The film ends, deliciously, with a few sharp twists. The thriller connoisseur will see these tricks coming, but the payoff to Farr’s mounting tensions is welcome either way. The Ones Below is a middling to good directorial debut for David Farr that promises, with a few more turns around the block, he will be serving up a style undeniably his.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

Desperate Men Go Into the Desert

Mojave

by Hope Madden

“I’m into motiveless malignacy. I’m a Shakespeare man.”

So begins the battle of wits and wills at the center of Mojave, writer/director William Monahan’s meditation on the alpha male.

Thomas (Garrett Hedlund) is having an existential crisis. He’s been famous his entire adult life, and now that he has everything, there’s nothing left for him to want. His downward spiral leads him into the desert, where he happens upon a drifter (Oscar Isaac).

The duo’s hyper-literate fireside exchange is tinged with predatory tones, each man intrigued by the shifting ground of dominant/submissive beneath the wordplay.

The stilted, noir-esque characters – including bizarre cameos from Walton Goggins and Mark Walberg – are too hard boiled to be authentic. Instead Monahan and his cast create entertainingly dead-eyed facsimiles of humans, each floating (often meaninglessly) in and out of the battling pair’s dilemma.

What is that dilemma? Well, something happened out in that desert, and as drifter Jack says, “The game is on, brother.”

The wealthy, handsome Thomas misjudges his lowlife adversary, but Jack is equally guilty of underestimating the superficial pretty boy he’s set as his mark. Don’t look for a good guy in this battle, though, because the world would be better off without either party, and they both know it.

Isaac ranks among the most talented actors working today. If you only know him from Star Wars, you need to look deeper into this chameleonic performer’s work. He struggles here and there with Mojave, though, because Monahan’s writing makes it hard to find a real person beneath all the machismo.

Hedlund is no Isaac, but it’s fun to see the chemistry between the two (who shared a similarly uncomfortable chemistry during their fateful car ride in Inside Llewyn Davis).

Ultimately the cat-and-mouse thriller drowns in its own testosterone – the pair of utterly suicidal antiheroes buckling beneath their burdensome masculinity. Still, as literary references abound and the more-alike-than-different outsiders bristle at societal constraint, this over-written mess remains curiously fascinating.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pwwVQ8YCl4

Effective Blunt Instrument

Sicario

by Hope Madden

How versatile is Emily Blunt?

Who’d have thought, back when she caught our attention in Devil Wears Prada or The Young Victoria that she’d step so easily into the role of badass? But between her shotgun-wielding protector in Looper and her Sigourney Weaver-esque role in Edge of Tomorrow, she’s proven as compelling a figure in action as she is in comedy and drama. She proves her mettle again in Denis Villeneuve’s take on the drug war, Sicario.

Blunt plays Kate Macer, a determined cop working hostage crises who’s promoted to a vaguely defined drug taskforce. She will find that her desire to make an impact and her hunger for justice do not always gel. It’s a flawed character who struggles against her naiveté while battling to keep her idealism intact in an operation that vividly encapsulates the murky, complex, and unwholesome battle at our Southern border.

As wonderful as Blunt is, she’s matched step for step by Josh Brolin, as a flippant senior officer who finds humor where most of us would not, and a breathtaking Benicio Del Toro.

Del Toro is at his best as a haunted, mysterious consultant on the case, and his relationship with Blunt’s character is equally menacing and tender.

Villeneuve’s films are dark and challenging, which is certainly the case with Sicario – his most satisfying film to date.

By focusing as intimately as he does on three or four characters, the global picture he paints is anchored, becoming more relevant and comprehensible. Roger Deakins’s weirdly beautiful cinematography mimics the rising panic of Kate’s attempt to soak in every piece of information in her new surroundings, generating an awestruck and terrified depiction of the escalating action.

Villeneuve walks a line between thoughtful drama and all out action film, never abandoning character while still creating arresting, unforgettable action sequences. The opening scene will stay with you, while two different visits to the border – one above ground, one below – are pure cinematic genius.

A tourism advertisement it is not, but Sicario offers an insightful, thrilling glimpse into a possibly unsolvable riddle.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

Beyond Aging Gracefully

Beyond the Reach

by Hope Madden

Michael Douglas continues to find intriguing ways to evolve as an actor. Now into his 7th decade on the planet, the actor has taken more and more interesting roles, generally succeeding. His Liberace in 2013’s Beyond the Candelabra marked a high point in his long career, and for his latest, the thriller Beyond the Reach, he reimagines a role originated by Andy Griffith, of all people.

Douglas plays a multi-millionaire named Madec, a man who collects trophies, buying his way out of red tape and problems, no matter how dire. He finds himself in hot water when an expensive but unlicensed hunt for “big horns” goes wrong. When he suspects that his young guide may not be as easily bought as he’d hoped, he devises a particularly nasty Plan B.

Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) is Ben, Madec’s wholesome but potentially corruptible young guide. What emerges is more than a sadistic cat and mouse game, mostly because Douglas patiently unveils layers to the character that feel at once horrifying and utterly natural.

It’s a straight forward thriller wisely adapted by Stephen Susco from a novel by Robb White. White was the source writer for many an exploitation flick back in the day (House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, 13 Ghosts), and while Susco maintains the same type of urgency and thrill, his taut script is as interested in character as terror.

There is something so genuine about Douglas’s performance – he’s a shark, a man who’s amassed enormous wealth through charm, savvy, and cut-throat maneuvering. His sense of entitlement is based on decades of success, success that has encouraged him to see the world exactly as he sees it here. As ugly as his behavior is, it isn’t necessarily personal. It’s survival. It’s business.

Irvine handles his task capably, but it’s Douglas who makes the film worth watching. What begins as simply the clearest (if most heartless) strategy toward achieving a goal becomes, as time wears on, an old buck’s attempt to dominate the young challenger to his alpha status.

Beyond the Reach is a simple premise and a simple film that could very easily have become another throwaway thriller, and though it’s certainly no masterpiece, it transcends its exploitation trappings thanks to a veteran actor who knows what it means to be a survivor.

Verdict-3-0-Stars