Without Remorse: Without quality

Without Remorse (2021) • View trailer

Three stars. Rated R, for violence

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.30.21

We’ve not had a high-profile, Tom Clancy-esque espionage thriller since the COVID lockdown began last year, and they’ve been missed.

 

Too bad this one — debuting on Amazon Prime — isn’t more promising.

 

After learning more about CIA agent Robert Ritter's (Jamie Bell, left) duplicity,
John Kelly (Michael B. Jordan) gets understandably hot under the collar.

No blame can be assigned star Michael B. Jordan; he’s a solid presence and physically adept action hero, clearly in the mold of Jason Bourne. But that’s actually a problem, because memories of the far superior Bourne films make this one look even worse.

 

It’s not merely that the clumsy, muddled Taylor Sheridan/Will Stapes script has virtually nothing to do with Clancy’s 1993 thriller, beyond swiping its title. Director Stefano Sollima and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot compound the problem by staging many of the melees and action sequences in dark-dark-dark settings, so it’s often difficult to discern good guys from bad guys, and who’s doing what to whom.

 

I’ve always regarded that as a lazy affectation; it’s also irritating.

 

And a shame, because this film does offer solid acting talent and — in fairness to Sheridan and Stapes — reasonably engaging supporting players.

 

Events begin in war-torn Syria, where John Kelly (Jordan) leads a team of Navy SEALs on a covert mission to rescue a captured CIA operative. But the CIA spook calling the shots — Jamie Bell, as Robert Ritter — has been less than candid; to Kelly’s dismay, he realizes they’ve invaded a nest of Russian mercenaries.

 

Later, back in the States, revenge comes swiftly; several members of Kelly’s team are murdered by masked Russian assassins, and he barely escapes with his own life.

 

While he convalesces and re-builds his strength via intense physical therapy, Kelly’s friend and former SEAL team member, Lt. Commander Karen Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith) meets with Ritter and U.S. Secretary of Defense Thomas Clay (Guy Pearce), for what she expects will be a discussion of response options. To her dismay, Ritter insists that nothing be done; the situation now is “tit for tat,” which is where it should be left.

 

Raise your hand, if you think Kelly won’t settle for that.

 

(He doesn’t.)

Rocketman: Blast off!

Rocketman (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity, drug use and sexual content
By Derrick Bang

Elton John’s life is the stuff of legend anyway, so the fantasy touches certainly don’t feel out of place in director Dexter Fletcher’s audaciously opulent jukebox musical.

And so it begins: Reggie Dwight (Taron Egerton, left) and Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell)
are excited to discover that their musical strengths perfectly complement each other.

Granted, it’s disconcerting when little Matthew Illesley — as young Reginald Kenneth Dwight — warbles the first few lines of “The Bitch Is Back,” which promptly turns into a lavish dance production involving all the denizens of his family’s suburban Middlesex neighborhood. But Fletcher cleverly sets the film’s tone with that number, particularly with respect to cinematographer George Richmond’s clever use of color.

Nor is this sequence the first eyebrow-lift. The film actually opens when the adult Elton (Taron Egerton), in outrageous performance dress, strides down an institutional hallway in order to join a group counseling session at a fancy rehabilitation clinic. His saga subsequently unfolds as an extended flashback, with occasional returns to the present; as the story progresses, Elton sheds more and more of the costume, reflecting his willingness to be increasingly candid.

A rather obvious metaphor, but it works.

Rocketman covers Elton John’s life from childhood, in the late 1950s, to 1990, when he had a God-given moment of lucidity — amid a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol and depression — and wisely checked himself into rehab. Given a music library well in excess of 300 songs, armed with Bernie Taupin’s alternately energetic and poignant lyrics, it obviously wasn’t difficult for Fletcher to highlight each step of Reggie’s life with a cleverly appropriate (or archly ironic) tune.

Most of the 22 song choices and stagings are inspired; a few are a bit forced, a little too on the nose. They don’t arrive in anything approaching chronological sequence, but rather as suits a given scene (hence the aforementioned startling use of “The Bitch Is Back”).

Lee Hall’s screenplay occasionally loses steam, mostly during the second act (which seems crazy, given the arc of John’s career, but pacing here is crucial). Even so, the film’s overall impact is breathtaking: both because of the music, and its presentation, and Egerton’s flat-out astonishing performance.

At times, he looks, sounds and acts more like Elton John than the man himself. It’s not merely a matter of Egerton nailing John’s defiantly sassy, mildly pugnacious stage presence; the actor also has impressive vocal chops (as is obvious to anybody who’s seen his recent duets with John, on “Tiny Dancer” and “Rocket Man”).

Fantastic Four: Doomed

Fantastic Four (2015) • View trailer 
1.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang

When some movies go wrong, they really go wrong.

Given the care with which the Marvel Comics Group has shepherded recent projects to the big screen, I’m amazed they ever let this atrocious mess out of the box. Based on this evidence, Josh Trank shouldn’t be allowed to direct a small-town theater production, let alone helm a big-budget superhero epic. He hasn’t the faintest idea how to handle actors, maintain a consistent tone, or even execute smooth scene transitions.

Reed (Miles Teller) and Sue (Kate Mara), obviously having no idea how to approach their
next scene, wait in vain for directorial guidance. It ain't gonna happen, now or at any other
point during this misbegotten superhero adventure.

Trank apparently got this assignment as a result of his only previous feature credit: 2012’s over-praised Chronicle. For a fleeting moment, apparently perceived as the Next Best Thing in sci-fi cinema, he even was assigned to direct the next Star Wars film (following this December’s Episode VII: The Force Awakens). Based either on early footage from this inept handling of Fantastic Four, or reports of his behavior while making this film — the media spotlight hasn’t been kind — Trank’s relationship with the Star Wars franchise was abruptly severed.

Smartest decision George Lucas ever made.

This re-boot of Marvel Comics’ original superhero family — the FF debuted in November 1961, almost a year ahead of Spider-Man’s launch in August 1962 — is even worse than the two earlier efforts, back in 2005 and ’07. And, mind you, that means impressively bad, because those two attempts were quite disappointing.

In fairness, Trank doesn’t deserve the sole blame. He shares scripting credit with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater; the former has a vastly superior résumé as both writer and producer, but the latter’s sole previous credit is the completely awful Lazarus Effect, which was unleashed to unsuspecting viewers earlier this year.

Clearly, Kinberg’s efforts weren’t enough to salvage the clumsy, sloppy input from Trank and Slater.

More than anything else, this Fantastic Four resembles the cornball sci-fi TV shows of the 1950s — Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, Captain Video and His Video Rangers, and a few others — with their clunky dialogue, laughably wooden actors and amazingly silly storylines. Yes, Trank’s new film benefits from special effects that those old shows could only dream of, but that’s meaningless these days, when even stinkers can boast awesome visuals.

Frankly, Trank & Co. have ruined the Fantastic Four. The previous two films left Marvel’s “first family” on life support, but this one puts the final nail in the coffin. And that’s truly a shame, because the FF have an even richer comic book history than Spider-Man or the X-Men.

Snowpiercer: Full steam ahead!

Snowpiercer (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity, extreme violence and gore, and drug content
By Derrick Bang

South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho came to my attention in early 2007, with the Stateside release of The Host, a taut, eye-popping monster flick that blended savvy political commentary with impressive levels of tension and excitement ... and more than a little dark-dark-dark humor.

Having captured Mason (Tilda Swinton, center) and made her their unwilling guide, Curtis
(Chris Evans, left) makes her lead the way as his desperate band moves from one train
car to the next, never certain of what they'll find beyond each new door.

Ho delivers the same mix with Snowpiercer, with a notable upgrade: While portions of The Host reflected the naturalistic, guerrilla-style filmmaking of a modest budget, this new film is an A-list production all the way. It looks spectacular in every respect, and is further enhanced by a top-quality cast of familiar faces from both American and South Korean cinema.

The grim, cautionary nature of Ho’s storytelling hasn’t diminished; he remains convinced that humanity doesn’t deserve the planetary paradise on which we reside. Give us half a chance, and we’ll screw it up. The horrific creature that wreaked havoc in The Host was spawned by arrogant Americans who polluted South Korea’s Han River with dangerous chemicals; the post-apocalyptic events in Snowpiercer result from our “brilliant” attempt to reverse the effects of global warming.

I’m reminded of the conversations known to have taken place prior to the initial atomic bomb tests in the 1940s — attributed to either or both Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer, depending on the source — and which explored the possibility that even a single bomb might ignite Earth’s atmosphere via a fusion reaction, and thus destroy the world. Such fears notwithstanding, Those In Charge pulled the switch, and I guess we can conclude that God (and Mother Nature) watched over us that day.

Luck isn’t with us this time. The essential back-story unfolds during a quick montage prologue, as news reports discuss the dispersal of a chemical agent designed to reverse the effects of global warming. We may well imagine a similar cautionary conversation about unintended consequences, but no matter: This switch also is pulled, perhaps just as recklessly, and the results are miraculous. At first.

Until the entire planet is plunged into a lethal ice age, destroying all life.

But this catastrophic result wasn’t instantaneous; time allowed a microcosm of humanity to be saved on board a sleek, lengthy train originally designed as the ultimate, self-contained vacation vehicle for rich tourists wanting to circumnavigate the globe. Now transformed into a futuristic Noah’s Ark, there’s just one problem: Seventeen years have passed, and there’s still no safe place to “land.”

The train races around the world, its nickname derived from the pointed “snout” and high-tech engines and gyroscopic computers that allow it to blast through the frequent snowdrifts and frozen ice that block the track.

The Adventures of Tintin: Thrills, spills and great 3D frills

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: PG, for plenty of peril and action violence
By Derrick Bang


Director Steven Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson respectfully honor their source material during the opening scene of The Adventures of Tintin, which finds the intrepid boy reporter having himself sketched by a street artist ... who bears an uncanny resemblance to the character’s Belgian creator.

A "simple" plane ride is anything but, when intrepid boy reporter Tintin is
involved; our young hero and his faithful canine sidekick, Snowy, barely
survive a crash-landing in the desert. The bigger question: Will the nasty
jolt stir long-forgotten memories in Tintin's companion, Captain Haddock, so
that they can get on with their treasure quest?

Better still, the finished drawing — granted a nod of approval by its subject — is Tintin, as illustrated for close to half a century, from 1929 to ’75, by Georges Prosper Remi, better known by his pen name Hergé.

It’s a brilliant prologue by Spielberg and scripters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, because it immediately connects Hergé’s style and vision with this film’s motion-control characters. Call it a hand-off: much the way George Lazenby faced the camera after his pre-credits escapade in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and, acknowledging his having taken over the role of James Bond from Sean Connery, cheerfully quipped, “This never happened to the other fella!”

Spielberg actually begins The Adventures of Tintin with a smashing title credits sequence: very much in the vein of both Hergé’s work and the equally memorable opening credits to 2002’s Catch Me if You Can. As was the case with that earlier Spielberg romp, soundtrack maestro John Williams delivers another deliciously retro title theme, echoing the “cool jazz” mode of his emerging career in the late 1950s and early ’60s. (Williams, let us remember, was the pianist in Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn sessions.)

I place a lot of weight on opening credits, as slick credits often signal great things ahead. That’s absolutely the case here: The Adventures of Tintin is a marvelous mash-up of comic book thrills, movie serial clichés and — most particularly — ferociously clever animation that allows exhilarating action sequence “camera angles” that simply wouldn’t be possible in a live-action film.

And yet this rich, suspenseful fantasy feels very much like a live-action film, thanks to next-gen motion-control visual effects geniuses Joe Letteri, Scott E. Anderson and Jamie Beard. The “dead eye problem” — which turned the children of The Polar Express into creepy zombies — is no longer an issue; Spielberg also wisely avoided the trap of using animated characters who resemble the film’s “stars,” which made Jim Carrey’s version of A Christmas Carol equally weird, for different reasons.

No, with the exception of that initial tip of the hat to Hergé, these characters look like fully dimensioned versions of their graphic novel selves, and definitely not like the actors voicing the parts. Tintin and his spectacularly resourceful dog, Snowy, are realized superbly; I’m also impressed by the fidelity with which bumbling inspectors Thomson and Thompson have been brought to life.

The Eagle: Can't fly

The Eagle (2011) • View trailer for The Eagle
2.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for rather restrained battle sequences and disturbing images
By Derrick Bang


Great films are easy to admire; terrible films are fun to rake over the coals. Both tend to resonate for a long time, either as fond memories or water-cooler topics of scorn.

Much of Tinseltown’s output, however, is blandly ordinary: flicks that don’t make much of a ripple upon release, and also sink like a stone during home-viewing afterlife. We must remember that the classics we cherish so fondly from Hollywood’s Golden Age represent perhaps 10 percent of the studio output from that era; much of the other 90 percent, never really worth anybody’s time or attention, is forever lost to memory.

When Marcus (Channing Tatum, right) and Esca (Jamie Bell, center) are
intercepted by the vicious Seal People, their prince (Tahar Rahim) relishes the
thought of beheading a lone Roman centurion who has ventured far into
dangerous lands.

The Eagle is likely to join them.

Director Kevin Macdonald’s sword-and-sandal saga isn’t really a bad film; it’s simply not distinguished in any manner. It’s also one of Hollywood’s cursed genres – gladiator action flicks, like Westerns, don’t attract viewer interest absent the involvement of a Russell Crowe or a Clint Eastwood – and therefore doomed to box office under-performance anyway.

That said, the premise is reasonably engaging. Jeremy Brock’s script, drawn from Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth, concerns a tantalizing bit of historical fancy: the notion that Rome’s Ninth Legion, stationed for several years in Eburacum – present-day York, in modern England – suddenly vanished in 120 AD. Nobody knows whether all these men marched to an unexpected fate in Scotland, starved to death at their own outpost, or simply were assimilated by neighboring tribes; the mystery made Sutcliff’s book enormously popular and led to both a radio dramatization and a six-part 1977 BBC serial.

And now we have a big-screen movie that, despite this tantalizing notion, emerges as a curiously flat and uninvolving drama. Part of the blame belongs to star Channing Tatum, a stiff actor who never inspires viewer empathy, but in fairness he’s also hampered by Macdonald’s rather lifeless guidance. These characters simply aren’t very interesting, and the various actors never look, sound or feel like denizens of the second century; they’re all modern folks play-acting – and not very convincingly – in togas and gladiator armor.

More disappointingly, Macdonald hasn’t the faintest notion how to stage a battle scene; he and editor Justine Wright cut their melees with such fury that it’s difficult to follow who’s hacking away at whom. Then, too, small Roman squads twice face an overwhelming onslaught of enemies in far greater numbers, during the course of this story, and quite improbably emerge victorious in both cases. That outcome is difficult to swallow the first time, and utterly absurd the second time.

That’s just sloppy scripting, since a detail of this nature would be very, very easy to repair, to help with credibility. It’s not as if Macdonald and Brock were attempting a documentary, and adhering to established historical fact. After all, nobody was on site with a cam-corder.

Defiance: Fighting back

Defiance (2008) • View trailer for Defiance
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for war violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.22.09
Buy DVD: Defiance • Buy Blu-Ray: Defiance [Blu-ray]

Daniel Craig's steely gaze, given more intensity by his impossibly blue eyes, often snatches the focus from the grim events depicted in Defiance.

Director Edward Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond) obviously recognizes the power of Craig's noteworthy feature; the camera certainly cuts to the man's eyes often enough. Maybe too often: It's one of a few "movie star hiccups" that occasionally pulls us out of the otherwise fascinating story being told in this WWII drama.

Although believing that their forest encampment is sufficiently concealed, Nazi
planes spot them anyway, forcing Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig, center) to help
his many Jewish followers flee from a rain of bombs. Unfortunately, the
bombers are but one aspect of a campaign to flush all these people out into the
open, where infantry can cut them down...

2008 was a rich year for Nazi and Holocaust dramas, particularly because most delved into events and psychological readings never before brought to the big screen. As I mentioned when reviewing director Stefan Ruzowitsky's The Counterfeiter last spring, I remain fascinated by the number of compelling "new" stories — not really new at all, of course; merely unheralded until now — that continue to emerge from that most horrible time in German/European history.

Defiance is no different. Zwick and co-scripter Clay Frohman, working from events recounted in Nechama Tec's nonfiction book of the same title, eschew the usual cliché of Jews as complacent victims waiting in ghettos and death camps, to focus instead on a group of resourceful Eastern European civilians who fought back: courageously, cleverly and for the duration of the war.

It's the saga of largely unsung heroes Tuvia (Craig) and Zus (Liev Schreiber) Bielski, who grew up with younger brother Asael (Jamie Bell) on a family farm in Stankevich, in what now is Belarus but in the 1940s — by which time all three were adults — was part of the Soviet empire. Tuvia and Zus, both imposing and charismatic, were known as troublemakers with an aversion to authority.

They therefore were targeted for quick execution when the Nazis invaded in June 1941. But while the German SS and collaborating Stankevich police killed the Bielskis' parents and other family members — including Tuvia's wife and their infant daughter — all three brothers escaped to the local woods, a vast, thickly overgrown area they had known since childhood.

Determined at first to form a partisan group to fight the Nazi occupation, Tuvia and Zus instead wound up gathering any and all fleeing Jews into their ever-expanding encampment. With Tuvia as leader, the group embraced the commitment to save as many Jews as possible: men, women, children, elders ... everybody.

And here's the amazing part: Until the publication of Frohman's book, nobody knew much of anything about the Bielskis or the astonishing degree to which their ambitious plan succeeded.