Dolled Up: BARBIE

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a live-action cartoon philosophizing specifically about Barbie’s place in our culture, and gender performativity more broadly. In gleaming pink dollhouse sets against a painted sky, it is artifice in search of a truth. (Squint and you could call it Wes Anderson’s LEGO Movie.) It works, blending bright, sparkling silliness with clever ideas and even some moving earnest heart. That it manages to pull it off well is a post-modern two-step, setting up a dialectic—Barbie is a force for girlish fun and breezy empowerment versus Barbie as pernicious faux-feminist message in a materialistic patriarchal image—that’s somehow simultaneously criticism and advertisement. I’d like to hear how Barbie’s corporate owners let that happen. It’s both an obvious celebration of Barbie-land, and an overt problematization, a rich text that won’t stop explaining itself. The movie has characters flat out speak its ideas and debate their meaning, but it’s so nonstop funny and visually appealing that it rarely feels forced. We’re in a fizzy existential crisis for a movie that’s poppy and peppy and almost profound.

Gerwig opens the movie with gleaming fakery. After a 2001-style origin montage, which winkingly asserts the arrival of Barbie solved every girls’ real-world problems, we meet Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) living her Dream Life in her own little world. It’s a land full of Barbies—President Barbie, Doctor Barbie, and so on—who rule every profession, and their doting Kens who stand around and smile. (The well-cast world is populated with charmers putting on their best plastic grins.) Every day is a beach paradise, and every night is a dance party. But one night, during a bopping choreographed number to an original Dua Lipa song, she’s suddenly aware of her mortality. As her worry only escalates the next day, she’s informed by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) that she should go to the Real World and find her owner to fix this. The resulting story makes the boundary between her world and ours porous, as her new understandings earned through fish-out-of-water interactions also get into the heads of her fellow Barbies and Kens. Ryan Gosling’s Ken is a particularly amusing vector of this confusion, as he gets hyped up on harmful real-world masculine stereotypes and turns from a purposeless accessory to an amped up parody of maleness. Other Barbie associates always seemed aware of their vestigial status, like real discontinued Ken friend Alan (Michael Cera), and the world-building is so loose and light that the very emptiness of these figures is the point.

While our world’s gender politics intrude on the oblivious Barbie’s consciousness, the movie introduces a real woman (America Ferrera) and her teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) who alternately reject and entertain the fantasy Barbie offers. Here’s that dialectic, as Gerwig’s broad screenplay pushes and pulls at the delights and the dangers of the Barbie society, and our own. The CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell) wants her back in the box, so to speak, but she’s starting to think she doesn’t like it there. The movie gives Robbie a deceptively complicated part to play—the perfect doll, then the plucky doubter, all while teasing out the slow crumbling of her facade. It’s strangely moving to see. We project so much, for good and ill, on this toy. To see Robbie bring a sense of interiority to the plastic ad-spread design is to see fifty years of feminism collapsing in on her. But there’s a bubblegum snap to the writing, co-scripted by Noah Baumbach, that never lets us forget the silliness of its construction. And there’s inventive filmmaking that continually reveals surprises in cartoony tableau and theatrical flourishes (even a climactic dream ballet), a sparkling, knowing campiness that melts into something genuine about purpose and connection and mothers and daughters and growing older. Gerwig, with Lady Bird and Little Women, made movies that glow with inner life, and here she finds that spark in plastic hearts. Or, to put it even more accurately, the spark is how those plastic people reflect and refract our own self-images. After all, who wants to be boxed in by other’s expectations?

Hollywood is Burning: BABYLON

Damien Chazelle’s approach to Hollywood history in Babylon is right there in the title. He’s clearly winking toward Kenneth Anger’s gossipy book Hollywood Babylon, known for salacious rumor-mongering that cemented all manner of misinformation and falsehoods in certain corners of cinephilic imagination. Chazelle, like Anger, is interested more in the shock value, in the hurtling sensations of exposition and exhibition, than in getting the detail right. In this new three-hour epic of depraved farce and nihilistic sentimentality, Chazelle is piling on the excrement of scandal and sensationalism. It opens in the late 1920s, with an elephant pushed up a hill by a lowly assistant at the request of his hitherto unseen studio boss. We get an extreme close up of the frightened animal loosening its bowels. The sound design goes all in on the wet plops as enormous turds rain down onto the poor man below. Hollywood, the movie says in this opening sequence, is a lot of wading through muck to get to the top. It’s also, as we see in the next scene, with cavorting partiers engaging in kinky sex and snorting drugs and wailing to cool jazz trumpets, about having such a wild time it’s a wonder the movies ever get made at all. By the time the elephant literally crashes the party, distracting the revelers from the dead woman carried out the back door, it’s clear this is a movie about how sordid Hollywood can be. But Chazelle’s style, in its amped-up whip-pans and pretty people and pounding score and opulent period design and constantly forward-chugging montage, is so intoxicated with the slick surface pleasures of the movies that it practically says any human destruction or scatological peril in the cause of such spectacle is worth it.

This confusion results from a simplistic story—Singin’ in the Rain without the jokes—spread out over a long, rambling episodic structure—Boogie Nights’ plotting without the well-worn melancholy. The actors almost pull it off anyway. Amid a sprawling ensemble, Brad Pitt plays a Don Lockwood type floating along as a silent idol, drunkenly stumbling around behind the scenes until his cue when lights and camera assemble a perfect take where his eyes smolder and visage cuts through the chaos. Margot Robbie is a fresh-off-the-bus nobody who wiggles and winks her way to sexpot status as a silent comedienne. They’re connected by love and business to a striving Mexican immigrant (Diego Calva) who wants to work his way up to studio executive someday. The stars are burdened with tabloid melodrama lives, and that ends up taking their careers on the ups and downs you’d expect. Ultimately, the only smart characters opt out entirely. (Although, as also the only characters of color, they don’t always take that option by choice.) The others meet nasty ends of one sort or another.

Chazelle views the struggle of old Hollywood from the 20s through the 50s with a grand sweep and cynical eye. He clearly loves the movies—he’s an obvious case of millennial Turner Classic Movies and Karina Longworth love—and his film drinks in a period look, though it sloshes anachronistically from time to time. He also thinks he’s being clever re-staging some Singin’ gags—an extended bit with a talkie’s mic problems, for instance—but in a more protracted, profane way that’s lesser than the original. It’s all a mad jumble—loud and flashy and propulsive, but also thin and trite and tiring. That’s the strange paradox of the project. It’s at once a watchable display of pyrotechnic filmmaking, and a wearisome confusion. Chazelle’s as strong a talent as we’ve had debut in the last decade, as demonstrated in the false glamor of La La Land, the elegiacally technical First Man, and the hard-charging percussive Whiplash (still his best). Here he stages inventive and breathless sequences of excess—parties out of control, sojourns into boozy despair and snakebitten foolhardiness, and behind-the-scenes farce whipped up like Noises Off strung out and tweaked up. He has Movie Stars swanning about with broad vaudeville-by-way-of-Cassavetes performances in striking garb in enormous sets and flashy lights, all set to a booming, driving, jazzy score from his usual composer Justin Hurwitz (easily his best work). It’s all very capital-M Movie in a glitzy show-off display of technique. But his imagination behind the camera outpaces the writing, which dwindles off into the blank-headed pastiche of better pictures before circling the drain.

This confused push-pull is never more evident than the film’s ending. The final stretch—in which a gangster pitching a movie (a goofily committed cameo from a recognizable actor) takes an exec to a near-literal hell, conflating a trite addiction drama’s beats with the showbiz milieu as if moviemaking itself is a drug—finds its rock bottom in a literal geek show in improbably dank quarters. Then it pivots to a future reverie in which a character, years after surviving with his sanity by leaving the business entirely, goes to see the classic movie that the movie’s been aping all along, and, as he weeps at the wonder of it all, Chazelle’s film drifts into an ecstatic montage of “Hooray for Hollywood” proportions like Chuck Workman broke into the editing bay with one of his Oscar tributes. As the score works itself into a clanging frenzy, we see quick flashes of everything from Un Chien Andalou to Avatar. All the pain and abuse and bodily fluids behind the scenes, all the bodies ground up to feed the machine, all the contortions asked for the genius of the system, lead to this. (Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this?) The movie’s exaggerations and excesses add up to nothing but an argument that we might hate the process, but the final products can be transcendent magic. I suppose it’s fitting that this movie feels the same. I disliked a lot of it, and wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

Bad Blood: THE SUICIDE SQUAD

James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is better than David Ayer’s 2016 adaptation of DC’s Dirty Dozen riff to which the new movie is a combo sequel, retread, and reboot. But what a low bar to set. Ayer’s version was severely compromised by studio meddling, as he’s more than willing to tell anyone who’ll listen. But even so, though his movie looked and moved like it barely got out of the editing room — choppy, ungainly, atonal, nonsensical — and had an off-putting ooze of nastiness in characterization and tone, it matched his filmmaking personality. Ayer, of End of Watch and Fury, is darkly preoccupied with antihero ugliness, cops and gangs, men of violence, inscrutable poisoned macho codes, and leering pleasure in bloodletting. One felt that, among the film’s many issues, his go-around in the comic book movie world was an oozing R barely, uncomfortably, trimmed back to a chaotic blockbuster PG-13. Somehow Gunn got to go all the way in this new version, clearly positioned as a corrective, a make-good acknowledgement the studio shouldn’t have held back last time. It just took a string of pleasantly eccentric and uneven DC movies — Aquaman, Shazam, Snyder’s Justice League — to get Warner Brothers to let creatives swing away, cinematic universe be damned. Why out do Marvel with connectivity when they could differentiate by going wilder and woolier?

So Gunn, hopping over from the rival house style after a stint with the Guardians of the Galaxy, is happy to meld the joshing Marvel sentimentality with his brand of affection for assembling a band of misfit toys and a bracing exploitation cynicism from his Troma days where gooey body horror and geysers of blood and guts are meant to give the audience a sick kick. The idea of assembling a team of C-list supervillains for a suicide mission remains an irresistible one, and this film is eager to turn it into a playground for character actors and effects artists. And the abandon of the storytelling makes any character fair game to receive a headshot as a punchline. It carries over leaders Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) and Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), as well as wild card Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), and surrounds them with a new cast of expendables. Idris Elba makes the best impression as a reluctant leader, while the likes of John Cena, David Dastmalchian, and Daniela Melchior play a motley crew of combination comic relief and oddball energy. Each with their own powers — marksmanship, deadly polka dots, rats, and did I mention the talking shark (Sylvester Stallone)? — they’re dropped onto a fictional South American island where they trudge through the jungle and slip into a dictator’s compound with the mission of getting rid of a shady science experiment. The movie at least has the sense to set that simple objective and head straight there, while finding a few moderately engaging twists along the way. It’s enjoyable, if all a bit too much.

The project matches Gunn’s filmmaking personality, a quipping, vulgar, tightly scripted and shaggily developed mean-streak with a mix-tape heart of gold. He can’t help himself. His films play like the work of the most talented dirty-minded dork from your junior high all grown up. Here it comes out as prankish and coarse and high on its own self-amused supply. There’s some token nods towards serious ideas, like a recognition of compromised US foreign policy and a fig leaf of social commentary about prisons and militarism. (An all-American anti-hero named Peacekeeper says he loves peace so much he’s willing to kill every man, woman, and child who gets in its way. Ha.) But the movie is far more interested in sending its colorful characters into outrageously gory action and concussive, episodic spectacles. (Each new sequence is even separated with a new splashy title, like the next issue of a comic.) In practice, each little bit is a fine spin of studio filmmaking, loud and entertaining, bright and legible, smirking and savage, clever for clever’s sake. But as a total experience is gets awfully tedious and repetitive. I felt hollowed out by the end. Part of that draining sense comes from the slippery sliding scale between deaths played for laughs and deaths played for poignancy which feels all out of whack, from a massacre of freedom fighters shrugged off to one of our more sympathetic bad guys given a backstory of a hated mother that turns into a mean sight gag. It’d be more entertaining if it was less exhausting. And yet I found myself thinking despite myself that maybe the third time would be the charm?

Flight Risk: BIRDS OF PREY

The key object in Birds of Prey is a priceless diamond everyone’s waiting for a pickpocket to defecate, and if that’s not a metaphor for the current state of superhero Hollywood, I don’t know what is. Here’s yet another movie that tries to wring originality out of the subgenre by swallowing another genre whole and attempting to digest whatever charm can be found by extruding it out the other end. In this case, we get a small crime picture, shades of noir, with circling mobsters and cops, that missing diamond, and a host of scheming tough gals whose competing agendas just might align long enough to take down some badder guys. It’s done up in a half-real pop art explosion of Gotham City, though this DC spinoff luckily avoids the toxic cheese of Suicide Squad and the pretentious thematic mess of Joker, the last two villain-centric Batman-adjacent pictures. This one’s just barely the best of the three, mostly by finding a genuinely wackadoo performance at its center. Unlike Joaquin Phoenix, shackled to an origin story that left lots of room for capital-A acting, but little in the way of coherent ideas, this film gets Margot Robbie in a tour-de-comic-book-force, squeaking and squirming and strutting and pouting and slouching (even, by the end, rollerskating) all over every line reading. We’re never meant to take her Harley Quinn, the Joker’s ex-girlfriend, as a person. It’s hard to invest in the character’s plight, but it’s fun to see Robbie’s having a blast. Here she’s a bubble gum time bomb, a splash panel drawn in smirks and squiggles, in a movie that sets its tone as equal parts cotton candy and corroded battery. The whole thing’s sugar-high insubstantial and poison-dart smiley face cynical complete with sickly cutesy title cards and doodles on freeze frames. But I did like the overt musical Howard Hawks homage, and when she storms a police station with glitter bombs then, later, under the downpour of a misfiring sprinkler system. The movie’s a bad good time, or a good bad time, right up until you realize it’s nothing at all.

The screenplay from Christina Hodson (Bumblebee) is told in a jumble of chronology to bend the narrative to the scattershot personality problems of its main antihero, name dropped in the self-consciously wordy parenthetical subtitle And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. It’s like Deadpool if he was a fourth as self-aware and twice as pleasant company. We get the backstory of a half-dozen characters and endless wheel-spinning setup for most of the relatively slim runtime, just reason enough to give enjoyable performers occasion to swan around in silly caricature performances that are never quite funny enough to call comedic, and never once grounded enough to feel the weight of the stakes. There’s Rosie Perez as a no-nonsense detective, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a crossbow killer motorcyclist, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as a deadly lounge singer, and Ella Jay Basco as the aforementioned pickpocket, a surly and precocious teen. Together they form the unlikely allies who’ll eventually confront the preening gangster played by Ewan McGregor and his bleach-blonde, face-peeling (a particularly, discordantly gross detail) henchman (Chris Messina). When the action finally hits, and the women all work together in a funhouse carnival climax, it’s a fun bit of cleanly cut and crisply choreographed action. The way there is a halting, stop-and-start maze of exposition and vulgar banter that’s both too much and not enough, holding the rest of the DC cinematic universe at arm’s length to protect its R-rated violence and cussing, while avoiding getting tangled in continuity dilemmas. It feels like its own thing, to the extent it can, though it has nothing on the joys of Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam! Director Cathy Yan can stage action and set a scene in relatively eye-catching ways, and keeps the plates spinning fast enough to stave off complaints of the film’s thinness and predictable plot moves. There’s a diamond in there if you can wade through the rest of it.

Fire and Ice: I, TONYA

Yes, I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie's rollicking whiplash darkly comic recreation of Tonya Harding's ice skating career, is a sports movie with an arc of scandal and tragedy. It would have to be, following the inevitable unlikely rise and tabloid-violence fall of an Olympic hopeful. But what the movie is about underneath these grabby trappings is digging into the psychology of a woman in an abusive relationship. She (Margot Robbie) is used to getting hit. Her prickly, chain-smoking, boozy mother (a tough, biting Allison Janney) chips away at her for years with mean-spirited jabs and frequent smacks. When she escapes, as a late teen, into the arms of her first real boyfriend (Sebastian Stan, with a shyly dangerous charisma unseen in his Marvel pictures), he hits her too. "I told myself, my mom hits me and she loves me," Harding tells us with a honey-drip affection in her voice. It's harrowing and sad, a film intermingling the glowing romance she feels with the bruised eyes and raw scrapes of a battered woman. All the while her skating career is taking off, the thrill of her graceful athleticism sitting next to her hard-scrabble poverty as she has to fight classism and snobbery at every step of the way. She sews her own costumes, which are pretty but not quite the pageant-level shine of the fussy rich girls who dominate the sport. It's not just about talent; it's about image. 

By the time Tonya’s handsome dope of an abusive beau -- now her on-again-off-again husband -- gets it in his head, with prompting from a buddy of enormous, stupidly delusional self-confidence (Paul Walter Hauser, with a convincing bovine look), to intimidate Harding's closest rival, the ensuing chaos threatens to snuff out Tonya's life-long dream. By this point Gillespie -- providing a booming jukebox score, overlapping voice over perspectives, and an active, swirling camera with insistent, pushing editing (a very David O. Russell approach for this usually more restrained journeyman) -- has made it clear the whole incident will be no less than the final parting smack of this abusive husband. Steven Rogers’ screenplay skips around between characters’ competing, overlapping versions of events, sometimes even stopping the action to have another character in the scene turn to the camera and say “I never did this.” It creates a swirling triple-axle of tone, allowing Tonya’s pain to be centered in every telling. This neither excuses her complicity, nor lays all blame at her feet. The film overemphatically pushes and prods at the real complexity under the tabloid sensationalism while using it to raucous effect.

Anti-Hero: SUICIDE SQUAD

Suicide Squad is an ugly, shapeless, and noisy pileup of bad ideas and sloppy execution for so long it’s almost a relief when it gives up the pretense of doing something remotely new with the superhero genre and collapses into the same predictable CG autopilot required of every movie of this kind. The concept sounds terrific on paper: a Dirty Dozen made up of lesser-known villains from Batman’s rouges gallery. A tough security adviser (Viola Davis) gets permission to recruit the worst of the worst from a maximum-security prison to send on certain-doom longshot missions against supervillains. Who can say, her reasoning goes, if the next Superman will turn out to wish us harm? And who, if that happens, could stop him? That’s a clever hook, theoretically able to look at a superhero world from a different angle. And yet this movie can barely figure out how to tell its story, loaded up with false starts and weak characterization, roping in endless exposition and tonal whiplash until finally it just turns into a CG shooting gallery.

There’s trouble right at the start as the movie introduces the Suicide Squad haphazardly and repeatedly. First, there’s a prologue tour of the prison where we meet a few of the big stars, including Will Smith as preternaturally accurate hitman Deadshot and Margot Robbie as mentally unbalanced crime jester Harley Quinn. Then we follow Davis to a dinner meeting where she pitches her idea for a team of super-powered criminals. She reads their names and describes their abilities, which are repeated in on-screen text popping up next to freeze-frames in extended flashbacks. There’s a guy who’s really good at throwing boomerangs (Jai Courtney) and a firestarter (Jay Hernandez), and a guy who looks like a reptile (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Then we’re with the squad’s military leader (Joel Kinnaman) meeting the bad guys all over again, even repeating some footage we’ve already seen. Yet then we’re still finding out about new people – a witch (Cara Delevingne), a masked woman with a sword (Karen Fukuhara), a guy who is really good at climbing (Adam Beach) – with a tossed off explanation or belabored flashback as they show up. Surely there was an easier way to establish the ensemble than all these convoluted repetitions.

Writer-director David Ayer’s previous film, World War II tank actioner Fury, was also a men-on-a-mission ensemble effort, but it allowed its cast to build a rapport in a plot that had a streamlined sense of purpose with real weight. Suicide Squad feels hacked to pieces and carelessly stitched back together with whatever bits were easiest to pick back up. It’s airless cacophony, sloppily constructed out of competing impulses, less a movie, more a collection of moments indifferently assembled. It’s badly lit bad behavior trying very hard to be adolescent edgy, casually dropping PG-13 profanity and endless rounds of gunfire, random murder, and police brutality. The movie trades on images of cruelty and smarm, sexualizing or tokenizing its women and stereotyping its characters of color. It revels in unpleasant violence and mayhem, carrying on with machine gun assaults and squirmy intimidation, eventually introducing an army of faceless zombified citizens with craggy rock faces blown to bits in headshots and decapitations lovingly displayed. This may be the most violent PG-13 I’ve ever seen, not only for its explicit nastiness, but also for the general nihilistic spirit.

The heroes are villains – one of the intended Suicide Squad is the arbitrary nonsensical Big Bad – and the villains are heroes. And yet it’s a muddle with no true north on its moral compass. Good and bad don't mean anything. It features an assassin we’re to like because Will Smith is charming, and Viola Davis – our rooting interest, mind you – ruthlessly murdering innocent colleagues. Good guy Batman (Ben Affleck, making a stop between Batman v Superman and next year’s Justice League) briefly appears to punch a woman in the face. And Thirty Seconds to Mars’ frontman cameos as the Joker (surely among the most breathlessly overhyped performances in movie history), massacring dozens, but we’re supposed to go easy on him because he’s doing it for love (of the woman he’s abused). Some of the characters’ origin stories are so horrific – like Harley Quinn, a psychiatrist tortured to insanity by an inmate – that it’s sad to see them ground under the movie’s flippant approach. Robbie, a fine actress, is tasked with playing Harley as a walking quip in hot pants objectified in every frame, a difficult thing to reconcile with the coy references to her trauma. Yet still others go entirely uncharacterized, like the boomerang thrower who has a gargling Australian accent and that’s where his character traits end.

Because there’s no clear perspective beyond rank “ain’t I a stinker?” self-satisfaction and the whole thing grinds to an inevitable, if indifferently set up, conclusion of metropolitan carnage with a CG creature summoning apocalyptic beams of light shooting into the sky, nothing connects or makes an impact. There’s no sense of shape or momentum to the story. The team never makes sense as a unit, and the characters never come to life beyond whatever fleeting moments of personality the better actors can manage. In the early going, scenes are placed next to each other in what might as well be random order. By the time it settles down it’s dreary and predictable. It certainly doesn’t help how misjudged it is on every aesthetic level. The dialogue is flat and half-aware. The smeary cinematography is dim. The production design is like an explosion at a Hot Topic. It’s scored with a busted jukebox puking out snippets of obvious tunes (a bad attention-deficit copy of the Guardians of the Galaxy mixtape). The whole thing is one futile attempt after the next to make boring or baffling or distasteful moments something like entertainment. So loud and obnoxious, overstuffed and undercooked, it’s ultimately just tiring. It definitely puts the anti in anti-hero.

Wild Things: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN

How do you make a Tarzan movie in 2016? Over the character’s century of existence he’s been in everything from the original Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels, to classic studio programmers, cheap boy’s adventures, stately period piece epics, gauzy romances, and even an animated Disney musical with songs by Phil Collins. (The last one might be my personal favorite.) The story of a 19th century child, born in the jungles of Africa to shipwrecked British blue bloods, tragically orphaned, raised by apes, and who grew into a muscular wild man swinging from vines, is an old-fashioned and familiar one. What can possibly be done to make this a story worth retelling? Director David Yates’ solution is to play it straight and take it seriously, tapping into the feelings of displacement Tarzan has while torn between two worlds. The Legend of Tarzan is therefore a rip-snorting jungle adventure, a mournful story of loss, and a sober-minded reflection on the evils of colonialism. The film doesn’t always get the combination of these elements exactly right, but its heart is in the right place, and it’s an often-enjoyable entertainment.

This is a movie that begins with Tarzan (Alexander Skarsagård) already a legend, having met and married Jane (Margot Robbie) and moved to England years before the story begins. Invited back to Africa by a Belgian mercenary with ulterior motives (Christoph Waltz) and persuaded by an American adventurer who needs help proving the colonists are up to no good (Samuel L. Jackson, as a character loosely based on a real man), Tarzan decides to return to his childhood home, reuniting with the apes who raised him and the natives who taught him to become a human. He finds it’s nice to be back, but soon the bad guys attack, and the adventure through the jungle starts. The film began in the thick of colonial African politics, with the scheming Belgian cutting a deal with a vengeful chief (Djimon Hounsou) to trade Tarzan for diamonds. The reasons why are simple. The European needs money to help a bankrupt king pay for his army’s impending takeover of the Congo; the chief wants revenge for some previous scrape. The setup is clear and the villains obvious. Tarzan is in danger, and his return has endangered his loved ones.

Screenwriters Adam Cozad (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) supply an interesting narrative structure, a flashback origin story nestled inside a tale of domesticated Lord Greystoke feeling the pull of the wild. This is as much The Legend as it is Tarzan, his famous exploits the source of internal and external conflict, his present as much about how he’ll reconcile his past and his present as it is the action it inspires. Potential nostalgia for the old story is cut with the horror of its peril and the sadness of what’s become of this place as colonial powers encroach. This isn’t a light adventure about a boy scampering with animals. There are hints of a more traditional Tarzan in his upsetting and romantic past, while the present is a rescue mission to stop the looting invaders from enslaving the population and strip-mining the country’s resources. It’s a high-flying, vine-swinging matinee cliffhanger – with some corny lines and broad performances – in a heavier approach. The violence carries menace and weight, and the danger in stock B-movie scenarios is played for real impact.

Against this sturdy backdrop there’s an investment in the feelings of its leads. Skarsgård carries himself with strength and confidence in his physical abilities, and a hesitance in his interactions with other Europeans. Early scenes have him stiff in suits, coming to life when showing off his unusually strong hands, or when nimbly climbing a tree in his yard. It’s with the African people and places where he stretches out, more himself even when forced into an action plot. Then a key delight is watching the burgeoning buddy relationship with Jackson’s quipping, gun-slinging American (so fun and fully formed I wished he could ride into his own exciting adventure series), which brings some of the movie’s lightest capering moments while rarely taking away from the more contemplative tone. Elsewhere the filmmakers have tried to minimize potential elements of sexism and racism from the old setup, allowing Jane (Robbie is fine, even if the character isn’t quite as fully defined as her mate’s) some agency despite quickly becoming a damsel in distress, and giving the tribesmen some portion of personality and meaningful backstory before letting them slip into the background to let Tarzan save the day.

For a long stretch of its runtime this is a more thoughtful approach to Tarzan than we usually see, the action beats landing with visceral thuds in the subwoofer while built on a convincing life-and-death sensation growing naturally out of the emotional underpinnings, which makes concessions to overfamiliar spectacle in its back half disappointing. It culminates in a big stampeding climax that’s more routine than the fascinating early going. But the way there is an effective marriage of adventure with somber impulses, a chase through the jungle with shootouts, fistfights, vine swings, and encounters with wild animals, and an earnest engagement in the reality it creates for itself. Even though this is a movie that plays into tropes – convenient animal assistance; scowling one-note villains; emotional shorthand; flat exposition – there’s a commitment to treating Tarzan’s story with a degree of seriousness, wondering what it would be like to struggle with his place in the world. It doesn’t make this a fresh story, but it makes it a solidly engaging one.

It works because Yates is a real filmmaker with a steady hand. Years helming BBC political dramas and half of the Harry Potter movies have given him the confidence to treat this material seriously without feeling the need to apologize for the potentially sillier moments. He can stage a man fighting a gorilla or a lion nuzzling an old human friend and actually make it resonate with feeling, a fearful intensity in the former and a hushed tenderness in the latter. And then he can turn around and have sincere historical understanding of Belgian slavers in the Congo without feeling exploitative or cheapened. Yates grounds the proceedings in specificity, the handsomely mounted production designed by Stuart Craig (another Potter vet) and photographed by Henry Braham gleaming in cobblestone London, palatial manors, and lovely natural vistas of savanna, river, and jungle. As the movie is interested in examining its wilderness locations from the eyes of a man who was raised there, then left, and is now back again – and through its bifurcated structure that makes it an introduction and its own sequel – there’s an interesting tension powering the action.

Foreign Correspondent: WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT

If you believe Whiskey Tango Foxtrot it’s a miracle we’ve had any coherent reporting out of the war in Afghanistan. It’s a movie singularly focused on a group of correspondents living in a chaotic Kabul from 2003 to 2006. They drink, flirt, party, hook up, jockey for airtime and sources, and then occasionally ride out into danger with American troops. What work they accomplish seems to happen in quick bursts, often almost accidentally, between bouts of fear, discomfort, violence, and gallows humor. It’s a mess. The movie follows suit as a lumpy, misshapen thing, a real quagmire that blunders in with good intentions then bides its time getting more complicated until, suddenly, it withdraws. It is more concerned with a perspective of fish-out-of-water befuddlement than contextualizing its sights and events. It hopes you already know a little about the conflict, and are interested in seeing it from an off-center angle.

Taking the real story of reporter Kim Barker as its inspiration, the movie stars Tina Fey as a woman stuck writing up boring stories in a dull office who jumps at the chance to head off to Afghanistan and get her boots on the ground. She thinks it’ll be a fun change of pace, but the longer she stays the more she finds herself addicted to the frenzied and unpredictable lifestyle. She finds it’s much better than her life back home, with a sad desk job and a boring boyfriend (Josh Charles). She’s the fish out of water who discovers she’s wanted to run this sort of terrain all her life and didn’t even know it. There’s an Oprah-ready quality to the cliché self-actualization here, but this story of a middle-aged woman who gets her groove back by succumbing to her inner adrenaline junkie is no Eat Pray Love. It’s sharper, and edgier, just as likely to draw blood as to shout raunchy sarcasm, or stare contemplatively and uncomprehendingly at some aspect of Afghan life, which remains closed off to characters who are theoretically there to make sense of it for the rest of us.

Screenwriter Robert Carlock (a longtime Fey collaborator, from SNL to 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) conceives the piece with a seesawing tone, wobbling between serious-minded comedy and irreverent drama. It’s never more than mildly amusing, and the dread never quite lands either. But they try. There are scenes of tragic drone strikes played for straight-faced horror, a daring night raid undercut by a Harry Nilsson needle drop, and sudden outbursts of ordnance interrupting all sorts of activities. Fey heads out with troops led by a gruff, dryly funny general (Billy Bob Thornton), snarks with a coarse Scottish photographer (Martin Freeman), and makes warm tentative friendship with her interpreter (Christopher Abbott) and cameraman (Nicholas Braun). This is certainly a masculine environment, into which comes an easy rapport with a radiant blonde correspondent (Margot Robbie) who takes her under her wing. Together they make a fine statement about women in the war zone workplace: underestimated, undervalued, and constantly fending off unwelcome advances.

Less a narrative, more a collection of scenes that slowly arrive at a thematically tidy endpoint, directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (in a mode closer to their dark true crime comedy I Love You, Phillip Morris than their slick and smooth heist picture Focus) keep up the chaos. It’s a good way of keeping us disoriented, and then, minutes from the end, a shock to realize its become normalized in a cut back to a tranquil homeland. (That’s a pale echo of a far superior similar moment in The Hurt Locker.) They don’t go for long takes or coherent spatial geography. In fact, there’s little interest here in sketching out the geography or geopolitical facts at all. Put that with the loose structure and you get a movie that’s interested in reporters and war, but fuzzy with the specifics. And it’s this fuzziness, matched with the wobbly tone and wheel-spinning story, that ultimately sinks the film despite Fey having what is perhaps her most fitting non-TV role to date.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot treats its setting with casual disregard for understanding, coding its production design as Other, often scary. Every foreign element is shot to be as exotic, miserable, or mystifying as possible. It can’t decide whether Fey’s headscarf is a source of amusement, cultural appropriation, or social commentary. (Worse still is a sequence in which she goes undercover in full local garb, shown in billowing supermodel slow-mo while westerners smirk.) It casts several white actors to play major Afghani roles, and uses cross-cultural misunderstandings as cutesy punchlines, like when an elderly, maybe senile, villager sees an African American soldier and says, “the Russians are black now!” Maybe you could pull this off as metatextual commentary about the confusion Fey feels, but when you’re making a movie about a journalist, an aura of informal insensitivity in portraying this country is disappointing. It’s a movie that’s too fascinating in its setup to be this thin, hesitant, and unfocused in implementation.

The World's End, Again: Z FOR ZACHARIAH

Here we are again after the end of the world. Some unknown calamity has befallen the earth an unknown time before our story begins. There are few survivors. The world they left behind is contaminated, perhaps irreparably. All that remains is a haunted landscape of abandoned places. We’ve been here before, the post-apocalyptic narrative being one of our most common lately. Maybe we’re preparing ourselves for the worst. Maybe we think we’re already living in the early stages of our own apocalypse and need doomsday prepping. Or maybe we’re captives of a pessimism that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. (See Tomorrowland for the corrective there, I suppose.) Director Craig Zobel’s Z for Zachariah takes this familiar premise into tiny intimate spaces, finding the subgenre simply a convenient excuse to strip away society and all but a few characters, the better to focus on the slightest and narrowest of interpersonal conflicts.

Zobel’s films are about marginalized characters. Think of his low-level con men in Great World of Sound and fast food workers in Compliance. But you don’t get much more marginal than Margot Robbie in Zachariah who, as the movie begins, may as well be the last person on earth, for all she knows. We see her head into town in a HAZMAT suit, scavenge some essentials, then trudge back to her isolated farmhouse where, miraculously, the radiation levels remain at hospitable levels. This has been her life for who knows how long. She credits her survival on her faith in God, praying and playing the organ in a chapel built on her property. We learn she had a family who left to find other survivors and never returned. It’s just her, a dog, a rifle, and God. Zobel treats her daily existence with a deliberate pace and a bright digital glaze.

Soon enough, another person enters her solitary life. He (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is in almost every way her exact opposite. She’s a young white southern Christian farm girl. He’s a middle-aged black northern big city scientist. He left his relative safety on a quest of curiosity, to find the state of the world since the crisis that decimated it. His trip through contaminated spaces has left him half-dead. They’re surprised to see each other, and form a tentative alliance. She lets him stay on her property, nurses him back to health, and accepts his help with survivalist tasks. Together they forage, farm, and plan ways to improve their lives. They maybe even fall in love a little bit, but it’s also clear they’re not sure how much the affection they feel is more a factor of the slow ebbing of overwhelming loneliness.

This is all well and good, an intimate if schematic character study nestled in picturesque uninhabited lush green natural spaces. Taking inspiration from Robert C. O’Brien’s cult classic sci-fi novel of the same name, the story plays out by running softly along the natural fault lines in the characters’ relationships, letting interactions of tabula rasa impressions drift backwards. Into this dynamic arrives a third character, a man (Chris Pine) who stumbles onto the farm desperate for water and shelter. He, too, has gone looking for survivors. He, too, is accepted into their isolated commune. But now that there are three, petty jealousies encroach. What was a restrained two-hander becomes a spare and wan love triangle, so softly and delicately played it may as well be a slight chill on the breeze. It makes for a much less interesting second half, as overfamiliar as it is uninvolving.

Zobel’s commitment to a slow and steady pace keeps the plot’s thematic interests slowly boiling, despite the obvious directions it’s headed. It’s admirably restrained, feeling no need to adhere to what an audience might expect from post-apocalyptic stories. The problem is just that it’s ultimately all so slight and inert. A finely acted drama, it lacks narrative tension or character insight deeper than first glance assumptions, playing out like a didactic Twilight Zone knockoff with the broad strokes in which characterization is painted never becoming a satisfying larger picture. It’s the sort of film that’s just barely compelling enough in the moment, setting up its variables with reasonable control, but concludes with the distinct feeling of neglecting to add up. Where it ends is hardly worth the trouble getting there. We’ve not only been here before, but it’s been far more satisfying, too.

Two for the Money: FOCUS

Focus is a shiny package that offers fleeting, but reliable, pleasures of moviegoing. It has attractive people in beautiful locations wearing gorgeous clothes engaging in wittily plotted preposterous schemes. It stars two glamorous, charming movie stars, an old pro near the height of his powers (Will Smith) and a young up-and-comer more than ready to take the spotlight (Margot Robbie). They meet cute as she, an aspiring scam artist, fails to swindle him, a veteran con man, in a hotel bar. He agrees to help hone her powers of observation, to shift her mark’s focus with one gesture while picking a pocket with the other. Besides, he needs a pretty and clever girl to help pull off his latest schemes. They have a flirtatious early scene lifting items off each other mid conversation, trading rings and wallets, testing skill. It’s easy to believe they’re both so charming they could pull off such delicate, intimate slight of hand with ease.

That also happens to be how writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (of the sly I Love You Phillip Morris and sappy Crazy Stupid Love) get away with making a featherlight and empty picture like this feel fun and diverting in the moment. The movie's so charming it’s easy to lose focus on how ephemeral its effects are. You don’t even feel 100 minutes slipping away. It's familiar, but cool. Of course the con man appears to fall for the con woman as their complicated schemes go well, or not. There are double crossings and ulterior motives, shady side characters and elaborately convoluted clockwork timing. It’s a movie of globetrotting, big bags of money, wine, watches, cars, and likable career criminals. Bursting with handsome, sleek cinematography that’s practically glittering, nighttime glows with warm light, daytime burns bright and colorful. It’s a cool look.

And the filmmakers know what they’re doing with this surface cool. The film keeps a tight focus on Smith and Robbie as they court and con their way through trust-no-one schemes that are simpler than you’d think, but complicated to unravel the surprises. We start in New Orleans, where Smith is running an elaborate set of cons around a big football game. After some satisfying hijinks and romance, the movie switches gears, jumping to Buenos Aires for another con, longer and more elaborate with an even tighter focus on our leads. They’re charismatic in that con artist way of never entirely knowing just how deep their feelings for each other go. Are they using each other? Or is it really love? It’s not a particularly deep or interesting characterization, but either way there’s undeniable sparkle in their repartee and satisfaction in seeing them react to twists in the plot.

Ficarra and Requa have fun with a variety of shell game set pieces, from street-level scams to high-stakes betting and finally high-risk corporate espionage. Along the way we meet a bumbling master thief (Adrian Martinez), a brusk security man (Gerald McRaney), a high-rolling gambler (BD Wong), and a slippery racecar owner (Rodrigo Santoro). They’re an eccentric and slimy enough rouges gallery we can watch Smith in sharp suits and Robbie in stunning dresses flirt and fool their way into and out of lots of money without feeling bad about their victims. Everyone’s playing some sort of game here, and the screenplay unveils its twists and turns with fine relish. In the end, the flashiness fizzles – when the credits rolled I thought, that’s it?  But there’s something to be said for an enjoyably slight diversion that just wants to charm and dazzle with alluring megawatt star power and formulaic genre charms. Its surface pleasures go down silky smooth.