Swirl of WARCRAFT

I’m glad Warcraft exists, imperfect as it is, because Hollywood needs to take its mega-budgets into comparatively weird places from time to time. The result in this case is a big galumphing fantasy epic creating an impressively imagined world in which one could easily get lost. In fact, the filmmakers themselves appear to have lost themselves in it to such an extent that they’ve barely figured out a way to invite the rest of us in. This is the sort of fantasy storytelling that’s vividly artificial – taking style cues from Star Wars prequels’ and Hobbit movies’ sleek digital swooping – overflowing with jargon and unusual names, and with a dense and interconnected backstory that’s, at best, merely hinted. I found myself grateful that the film leans on some standard conventions of the genre, like color-coded good and evil and preoccupations with clans, lineages, and honor, because they were a great way to get my bearings. It’s both too much and not enough, a world whose details remain murky no matter the amount of exposition thrown about, but remains nice to look at in the same way a striking illustration on a genre paperback cover can be.

Based on a popular video game, Warcraft is a respectable effort at translating a clearly unwieldy mythos into something even remotely approaching a coherent two-hour feature film. It takes place in a peaceful kingdom of humans suddenly besieged by a new threat: orcs, shown here as hulking motion-capture performances of toothy muscle-bound giants. Mankind’s neighboring dwarves and elves and whatnots aren’t coming to the rescue, so it’s up to them to fight back the invading hordes. That’s typical fantasy material, but where it gets complicated for the better is in its attention to the lives of the orcs. Not just the mindless monsters you’d find in The Lord of the Rings and its imitators, many have nobility and high ideals, so much so that one principled chieftain (Toby Kebbell) starts to suspect the dark wizard (Clancy Brown) leading them into battle might not have their best interests at heart. This good orc is made a funhouse reflection of a warrior man (Travis Fimmel) who is tasked by the King and Queen (Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga) to help stop this looming warfare before it gets worse.

That seems easy enough to comprehend, but try to keep up as each new scene adds a half-explained wrinkle. There’s a youthful magic man (Ben Schnetzer, looking for all the world like a LARPer lost on set) who quit his mystical training, but still sneaks around trying to solve the mystery of the orcs’ otherworldly power. There’s a small, tough lady orc (Paula Patton covered in green and sporting fetching tusks) who was a slave of the dark orc, but upon her capture by humans decides to help them with inside info. There’s a wizard (Ben Foster) who lives at the top of a gigantic tower and supposedly protects the land with his spells, although he doesn’t seem to be too concerned about the rampaging armies while he spends his time making a golem. I haven’t even mentioned the smooth-faced young soldier (Burkely Duffield) who desperately wants his warrior father’s approval, or the orc baby revived by the spirit of a deer, the pool of good blue magic, the pernicious influence of the bad green spell called The Fell, the giant eagles and wolves, the wall of lightening, the inky black-and-purple cube Glenn Close is hiding inside, and the towering portal to another realm powered by the souls of countless captives.

It is confusion – a mishmash of accents, intentions, ideas, motivations, tones, and haltingly introduced plot threads – but not for lack of trying. Writer-director Duncan Jones’s previous films, Moon and Source Code, were models of sci-fi clarity in the face of twisty high concepts, so I can only image the difficulty he and co-writer Charles Leavitt (In the Heart of the Sea) had wrangling the source material into shape here. The movie is broad and complicated, expensive and chintzy, deeply serious and exuberantly goofy, convincing and fake, exciting and risible. But it comes by its oddball jumble honestly. Besides, you don’t have to consult footnotes or a glossary to get the gist. Jones is effective at communicating the general thrust of the narrative impulses and gestures, even in scenes that might as well be performed in untranslated gibberish. (Maybe they already are.) The emotional stakes are clear enough from scene to scene, even if they’re buried under layers of gobbledygook, and are prone to shift without warning if that’s where the plot needs to go. Maybe devotees of the game would have better luck making heads or tails of it.

Figures travel hither and yon over the fantasy terrain, speaking in negotiations of grave importance and urgently communicating a flood of exposition. More focused on worldbuilding than building characters, the movie ends up telling convolutions in broad strokes, while the narrative plays out as only a slice of story, beginning with problems already in progress and ending without satisfying conclusions. But what I appreciated about Jones’s approach is the consideration he brings to the conflict’s two sides, even at the expense of denying the action sequences requisite bloodlust. This isn’t a standard good versus evil story. There are amongst orcs and humans alike those who ultimately have to fight against the worst of their own to accomplish peace. It’s a movie about our protagonists desperately trying to avoid war, and we watch as chaos erupts in action sequences wherein characters view the act of picking up their weapons as failure. They do what they must for the good of their people, even if their efforts are doomed to collapse for the movie’s waves of obligatory CG combat. There’s admirable effort in all this unfulfilling chaos.

Nope: THE DO-OVER

Has a movie star ever done less on screen than Sandler in any of his recent lackadaisical performances where he’s little more than a black hole of energy and appeal? Maybe, even after years of scraping near the bottom of the barrel with the dire likes of Grown Ups 2 and Blended, it was combined impact of the relative box office disappointment of his hard-R, but twisted funny, That’s My Boy in 2012 and the bad luck to stretch dramatic chops in two total flops, 2014’s Men Women & Children and 2015’s The Cobbler, that pushed him to do less than the bare minimum. Since then he’s slept through an action comedy (Pixels) and a western parody (The Ridiculous 6), each worse than the last. And each time around he fades under the spotlight, committing less and less to silly voices or high-concept goofiness. He lets the supporting players and desperate flop-sweat gross out gags do the heavy lifting while he appears to look forward to the next time the director calls cut so he can get on with his life.

I dutifully fired up Netflix to sample The Do-Over, the streaming service’s second film from a four-picture deal with Sandler. (Creatively it’s their worst original programming move, but since they keep the numbers secret there’s no telling if it pays off financially.) I quickly found that any attempt to write about it would be putting more thought and effort into it than anyone involved did. The story concerns two unlucky dopes (Sandler, sleepwalking, and David Spade, playing against type as a timid dummy instead of a sarcastic dummy) who fake their deaths to escape their miserable lives only to discover the plan goes awry when they end up in a conspiracy involving cancer drugs. If you think it sounds a bit more complicated than the typical Sandler material, you’d be mistaken. It’s a collection of dumb complications, sloppily plotted, lazily performed, and shot with all the flat visual interest of a stock photo with the watermark still attached. What would be worse: if Sandler has stopped trying, or if this is really the best he can do?

Why does it exist? Is it for the product placement, logos for cell phones and beers and others in a parade of brands prominently displayed? Is it to get attractive women, extras and featured performers (like Paula Patton) alike, in tight dresses, low-cut shirts, and bikinis? Is it to get Netflix to bankroll a trip? Long scenes take place on a tropical island, or in swimming pools, so it’s also another of his paid vacations with a little bit of a film shoot on the side. He’s brought along a host of his usual pals in front of the camera (Spade, Nick Swardson) and behind the scenes (director Steven Brill, veteran of Little Nicky and Mr. Deeds, lackluster comedies that seem better in retrospect compared to this).  It’s such a flaccid, baggy, boring movie, working in cameos for all sorts of people I just felt sorry for, like Kathryn Hahn, Sean Astin, Michael Chiklis, and Matt Walsh. I felt worst for the great character actor Luis Guzmán, who has an embarrassing scene involving sweaty testicles, one of many desperate R-rated jokes fruitlessly attempting to yank some life into this dud.

And then if you happen to take the story seriously for even one second, the whole thing is even worse than the lack of laughs and narrative or visual interest. It’s wrapped in toxic masculinity’s misogynistic expression, blaming the characters’ misfortunes entirely on women who exclusively wish to torment, tease, trick, and otherwise torture the men in their lives. It ends with Spade repeatedly punching a woman in the stomach while shouting, “I’m sick of women lying to me!” The whole thing’s nothing you couldn’t get if you asked a dozen of the worst commenters on a shady website to write a screenplay about how much they feel wronged by women. If out of perverse curiosity you end up watching this movie you have my condolences. To review Sandler films is too often an exercise in finding rock bottom move ever lower.

Two Stars: 2 GUNS

2 Guns is a consequence free thriller about a big stack of money ($43.125 million, to be precise) that a whole bunch of guys with guns would love to get ahold of. We’re supposed to be charmed by it because Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg are so very charming and play the two guns at the center of it all with the script by Blake Masters featuring a bunch of twinkly-eyed buddy-buddy banter. Unfortunately, that’s not quite enough here. This movie’s plot is spectacularly empty, a big bland clunker. The money’s a MacGuffin, nothing more than a reason for characters to scramble about pointing guns at each other and demanding the money for one reason or another. But here’s a movie that goes even further. As twists turn and loyalties flip, it’s all too clear that the movie’s all MacGuffin. I found it arbitrary and uninvolving all the way through.

The movie opens with Washington and Wahlberg prepping to rob a bank, then flashes back to fill us in on the events of the previous week. The bank robbery is the central inciting incident of all conflict to follow, but this is nothing if not a movie that loves to explain things without ever really setting up a convincing reason as to why these particular characters are ones we should care about. They’re both undercover operatives trying to steal the money, which they’re told belongs to a Mexican drug kingpin (Edward James Olmos). Washington is with the DEA. Wahlberg is with the US Navy Intelligence. The funny part is supposed to be that neither knows the other’s undercover until the robbery’s aftermath in which it’s clear that, independently, a Naval officer (James Marsden), a DEA agent (Paula Patton), and a CIA operative (Bill Paxton) would like to locate the money, by gunpoint if necessary. And you know the kingpin’s out for blood and bills as well. Though it’s potentially funny that most people scrambling for the money are agents of the federal government – the set up for satire is certainly there – the movie never even threatens to develop a thought.

Events that follow are largely flippantly presented as anonymous bad (I guess?) guys are gunned down and large explosions and dead characters can be waved away in a scene. Washington’s character sees not one, but two supporting characters killed because of his actions, but in the next scene he’s bouncing off to the next banter session, car chase, and gunfight as if he’s over it already. It’s a film that’s interested in little more than the chummy faux-antagonistic interplay between two leads who are charming here with thin material, but who could really hit it out of the park with actually witty dialogue. Here they’re just stuck grinding through the tediously uninspired thriller plotting snapping faded copy-of-a-copy one-liners back and forth. There’s thinness about most every aspect of the movie. The characters that aren’t the central pair are mostly one-note scenery chewing opportunities, but worst is the treatment of Patton’s character. She’s first a nakedly ogled love interest, then a victimized damsel in distress, and finally summarily dispatched from the proceedings with little emotional concern.

Still, I appreciate director Baltasar Kormákur’s approach to the movie’s physicality. The style here is nicely crunchy. When a car drives through a fence, it looks like a car really drove through a fence. When a car blows up, it looks like a car blowing up. It’s the little things, you know? I found 2 Guns to be only an exercise in emptiness, much like his last shoot-‘em-up heist film, also with Wahlberg, Contraband, but without that film’s minor pleasures. Though welcome as it is that this particular movie’s busy nothingness stays relatively earthbound, it’s never a good sign when you find yourself wondering with every scene why you should care about anything that’s been happening and anything that will happen. The movie’s just too complicatedly uncomplicated to find the time or space to make a case for its own existence.

Highflying Action: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

Brad Bird, the remarkable animation director behind such freshly minted classics of the form as The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille has completed his first live action film, which happens to be nothing less than a massive action-thriller and a new entry in an established franchise. Debuting with the fourth in the Mission: Impossible series is not indicative of a lack of courage. But the risk paid off.  Perhaps not since Looney Tunes animator Frank Tashlin switched effortlessly to cartoony Technicolor farces in the 1950s has an animator so successfully ported over his skills with imagery into a live action setting. With Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Bird removes all doubt that he’s at the top of his game as one of modern cinema’s finest pop filmmakers, a genre expert adept at crowd pleasing with confident, energetic, hugely satisfying features.

The Mission: Impossible series is Hollywood’s most successful accidental experiment in auteurism. Each film has been given over to a different director, each allowed to put his own stamp on the material. Way back in 1996, Brian De Palma got to introduce us to Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, a plucky agent who will pull together with his team to execute complicated plans, defeat the bad guys, and save the MacGuffins. That film, a thriller loaded with plenty of action and plenty of backstabbing (at the very least double- and triple-crosses) indulged De Palma’s love of long takes and intricate visual playfulness. It was a complicated (convoluted?) story stylishly told.

For the sequel, which arrived in theaters four years later, Hong Kong action master John Woo spun out a tale of spy vs. spy as an overheated action buffet by way of a crypto-remake of Hitchcock’s Notorious. It’s no Face/Off (Woo’s greatest American effort by a mile) and a seriously compromised vision. It was reportedly edited down from a much longer director’s cut. But it has a paradoxically glossy and shaggy wild-eyed charm.

After another six years, the franchise fell to J.J. Abrams, a television director and writer making his feature film debut. He brought his always-be-closing, serialized thriller chops from shows like Alias and Lost to make M:I:III what was the best of the bunch to date. It’s a film with a great, gnashing villain in Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and a tight script that’s a constant jolt of cliffhangers and set pieces with a surprisingly emotional romantic undertow.

Now it’s been five years and Brad Bird has his shot to make the series his own. He actually hews pretty closely to the slick narrative style that Abrams’s used in his entry, but Bird jazzes it up with his sensational eye for action and his remarkable sense of visual space. The film gets off to a bit of a slow start (relatively speaking, of course) with two agents (Paula Patton and Simon Pegg) instigating a prisoner riot in order to break Ethan Hunt out of a Russian prison. “If you broke me out of there, things must be really bad out here,” he gravely tells them. Sure enough, the villain this time around is a crazed expert in nuclear war (Michael Nyqvist) who for some reason or another wants to spark just such a conflict between Russia and the United States. Like Salt, the best pure action film of last year and which also made great use of cinematographer Robert Elswit, this film gets a lot of mileage out of its cold-war revival scenario. It’s all so scarily plausible. Well, plausible enough, at least.

Through a series of unfortunate events, the three agents find themselves disavowed by the United States, blamed for a bombing they didn’t commit and trapped overseas without easy access to the Force’s equipment and assistance. They’re all on their own to stop this sinister threat by tracking down vital pieces of technology, intercepting black-market nuclear code swaps, and doing whatever they can to ensure nuclear war won’t break out on their watch. They’re not completely alone since they managed to find themselves joined by a State Department analyst (Jeremy Renner), but that still only brings their team up to four. Four against the world!

The film hurtles through Budapest, Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai, staging sensational (and rewarding full-scale IMAX) action sequences every step of the way. I can hardly remember the last time an action movie had moments that had me feeling like I was clenching every muscle in my body. And I certainly can’t remember the last time a vertiginous moment, a near literal cliffhanger, turned my stomach in suspense so viscerally that I briefly worried I’d be grossly putting my popcorn back into the empty bag. From a dangerous climb up the side of the world’s tallest building to a car chase through a blinding sandstorm, and from a host of foot chases, shootouts, and hotel room brawls to a multi-part climactic sequence that’s a masterful cross-cut thrill, the film never stops to take a break. It sizzles with suspense every step of the way as the characters continually set up intricate plans only to see them fall apart in various ways, each time leaving them scrambling to save the world.

Brad Bird not only proves that he can handle live-action action, but he sets the bar high with sequences so delightfully imagined, impeccably staged, and flawlessly executed that my jaw would have dropped more often if I hadn’t found myself so breathless. It’s also shot through with a welcome kind of playfulness and one-liner energy that feels of a piece with the kind of tone Bird struck in The Incredibles. It’s thrilling, yes, but it’s also such a hugely enjoyable good time. This series has always been in nothing more than the set-piece delivery business. Here, there’s a kind of perfect marriage between characters’ minimalism and the elaborateness of the action. In that way, Bird’s approach is the perfect melding of the previous films’ greatest qualities. It’s the best action thriller of the year, a propulsive juggernaut of action and thrills that put a smile on my face and had my heart racing long after the credits ended.

Love is All They Need?: JUMPING THE BROOM

Jumping the Broom is the kind of warm comic drama in which personalities can clash and long-held secrets can be exposed but all is ultimately forgiven for the sake of a wedding. In this case, the bride’s family is a wealthy family with a mansion on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard while the groom comes straight out of Brooklyn. They’re madly in love but – surprise, surprise – their families aren’t.

The bride (Paula Patton) and groom (Laz Alonso) recede into the background of their own story. There’s the typical last minute fighting and cold feet and declarations of love for the two of them to act out, but the movie is smart to find much reason to showcase the eccentric families. With a movie this comfortably predictable, it’s a pleasure to find that the ensemble is stuffed with enjoyable performers. They’re given far too little to do, but they fill out the gaps in the humor and pathos far better than you’d expect.

Angela Bassett and Loretta Devine are the dueling matriarchs presiding over all sorts of wedding related silliness while the wedding’s guests include the likes of Mike Epps (a reliable source of humor), DeRay Davis, Tasha Smith, Romeo, Megan Good, and Valarie Pettiford. All the while, the uptight wedding planner (Julie Bowen) finds herself in a perpetual state of cultural confusion. This is a mild farce with characters sent careening into each other in the typical fashion of both wedding movies and culture clash movies in which big social events are cause for people to find new love and, just maybe, new ways to think about others.

The movie is broad and drawn in quick strokes. It’s stretched thin, rambling across any number of themes (race, economics, religion, sexuality) without much depth given over to any one of them. I suppose it would be too much to ask for such a feather-light comedy to be a serious commentary on the state of modern America, and that’s not what I was expecting. But the nods towards deeper subjects in the screenplay by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs serve to hobble a picture that’s otherwise blandly sweet and not exactly nuanced, making it feel like it’s playing it a bit safe.

There’s a simple likability to Jumping the Broom but neither the comedy nor the families’ dramas are pushed far enough. It's not altogether unagreeable, it’s just slightly less than good. The director, Salim Akil, is a veteran sitcom director and it shows. I don’t have anything against the form; I enjoy good sitcom work, but I wouldn’t want to watch one in a theater. Akil, drawing on that experience, capably directs the traffic involved with having such a large cast and he keeps the movie moving along with a nice, bright polish. I didn’t exactly have a good time but I didn’t have a bad one either, and by the time the credits rolled I found myself entirely unaffected by the experience.

Precious: A Review Based On Precious: Based On the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Precious Jones, 16-years-old, obese, illiterate, pregnant for the second time, living in inner-city squalor with her monstrous mother, has had a hard life. The victim of perpetual familial and societal abuse, it’s amazing that she has any drive within her at all. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, already much heralded for her performance, does a remarkable job of disappearing into her frame so, despite usually being the largest person on screen, Precious is hiding within her own skin, constantly squinting and scowling as if she is afraid to let others get too close to her. That fear is certainly well founded, given the horribly hellish treatment she has endured from those who claim to love her. The movie that tells her story, the unwieldy titled Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, is a button-pusher and a grueling watch, to be sure, but while it’s almost saved by its indomitable title character and a host of fine acting, it’s ultimately undone by its director.

The first film directed by Lee Daniels was the queasy exploitation thriller Shadowboxer. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, it’s a queasy mixture of in-your-face stylistic flourishes – odd color schemes, whiplash editing – and monstrous inanity that cavalierly mixes brutal abuse and violence in a volatile and absurd plot that, at its most sensical, casts Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a mother-and-son assassin team. Thankfully Daniels hasn’t brought his full bag of noxious tricks to the table here, but, given the nature of the extreme child abuse occurring on screen, not much exaggeration is needed to make the necessary points.

Unfortunately, exaggerate he does, self-importantly rubbing the audience’s faces in the depravity. Luckily the movie calms down after a while, settling in to a subtler groove that, while still hard to watch, is only occasionally spurred into exaggerated grotesquery, once Precious is finally moved to an alternative school and begins to receive support and encouragement from a luminous, saintly teacher (played gorgeously by Paula Patton) and a compassionate social worker (played by Mariah Carey, the most endurable she’s ever been). But until that point, Daniels foregrounds the abuse, shooting it in a nauseating style. Certainly, Mo’Nique gives a whirlwind of a performance as the tyrannical mother, but the performance, the events, and the set-design would be strong enough to stand on their own without constant sensationalized direction.

 Viewers will have their own tipping point where the onscreen depravity becomes unbearable. Will it be when a massive sweating belly in a rape scene is cross-cut with shots of frying fatty foods? Will it be when Precious steals a bucket of fried chicken and we get a close up of her greasy chin as she gobbles it up? Will it be the scene that immediately follows in which she throws up the stolen chicken with explicitly chunky vomit? Or maybe it will be the scene in which Mo’Nique drops a newborn baby? Or the scene where Precious rolls down the stairs while holding the baby, every thump wickedly amplified?

Still, Precious is an impressive character, and it’s easy to root for her. The characterizations ring slightly true; unfortunately there are some in this country who are living lives closer to hers than we would like to admit, despite the presentation here leaning towards stereotyping. The scenes in the alternative school, especially Precious’s interactions with her classmates and teacher, are welcome respites to her home life, calming sequences with humor, hope, warmth and love amidst the hardships. Precious wants to change her circumstances, but realizes it will be hard work. It’s a relief to see her slowly finding a support system that’s more tangible than her gaudy fantasy sequences.

But this is a movie that presses its message too hard, not allowing breathing, or thinking, room for an audience. Daniels knows exactly what he wants us to feel and think and goes after it with single-minded determination, ending up with a movie that’s often grueling to watch and intellectually shallow. The movie’s a classic example of bungled execution. There’s no interest in actually digging in to the real emotions of the situations presented. It’s a movie that just wants to provoke, to push buttons and make you squirm, gasp, and laugh. It’s an absurdly surface treatment of potentially deep topics.

There’s a scene late in the film in which Mo’Nique’s character finally gets to open up delivering a harrowing monologue that’s more involving and disgusting than any of the visualized abuse that occurs up to that point. It’s what the movie should have been, more reserved and observant with a quieter power instead of loud and uncomfortable with every emotion pounded into the crowd. The story is powerful enough that my train of thought would have arrived to the emotions naturally without Daniels greasing the tracks. It’s an uncomfortable and grueling clash of intentions and execution.