As the Romans Do: GLADIATOR II

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator movies work by wrapping sports movie logic around the trappings of ancient warfare. They meet in the bloody overlap between the two genres. Armies clashing are distilled down to opponents in the arena. It has the basic structure of competition—the athlete with promise rising through the ranks, suffering some precarious setbacks, and then emerging victorious in the end—to drive it through its Ancient Roman intrigue. The sequel even adds a complicated coach for its scrappy warrior, as Denzel Washington, wielding his charisma with a light, playful touch, swoops in to mentor an underdog gladiator. That underdog, played by Paul Mescal, who here adds a flavoring of muscle to his sad-young-man persona, turns out to be the long lost son of Russell Crowe’s heroic gladiator from the first film. So it’s the Creed of Gladiator movies, though never quite that serious, despite its efforts to bend a knee to its predecessor. Scott clearly has the urge to enjoy recreating the earlier film’s setting and mood. He whips up the spectacle of the Colosseum with all its attendant echoes of our modern stadiums—box seats, preening announcers, and a crowd clamoring for action. The combat is as bone-crunching, blood-spouting, and brutal as expected. Add a rhinoceros or a monkey and it gets even gnarlier.

Overall, the sequel is a little less interested in wallowing in tragic backstory, although it’s there, and a little more amped up with political intrigue and class warfare. This Rome is crumbling under vain boyish twin emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), a fine vector for Scott’s recent interest in the slimy eccentricities of the super-wealthy. Sensing their weakness, Washington’s scheming aristocrat is planning to use his gladiators to grow his social status and angle for more power. Meanwhile, a celebrated general (Pedro Pascal) and his wife (Connie Nielsen, returning from the first film) plot a coup of their own. Mescal will end up a pawn in these competing plots unless he can wrest control of the narrative for himself. Hard to do in chains. Easier when given a sword. (Also, good luck having us root against Washington’s ostensible villain, who elevates the movie in his every moment on screen.) The result is a fine, thin sword-and-sandal spectacle, with galloping horses and hurtling weapons and splats of gore. Its actors are having fun, and Scott’s such a pro at helming these period-piece action efforts that he could do it in his sleep. (With his worst movies, you might suspect he has.) It’s not a great movie, but it’s often a fun one, full of diverting period detail and exaggeration and committed to its live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword ethos. Washington stares Mescal down early in the movie and explains: “Violence is the universal language.”

Stargazing: THE LOST CITYand THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT

Hey, it’s another sign of life for an endangered genre at the multiplex: an original romantic comedy. It’s an old-fashioned treasure hunt adventure, too. Three in one! The Lost City is a rare breed indeed, an original—in that it rips off its inspirations instead of remaking or rebooting or existing in the same cinematic universe as them—star-driven picture that coasts entirely on the charm of its leads. It stars Sandra Bullock, a beloved actress who made it big with romantic comedies returning to the genre after more than a decade away, as a beloved author who made it big with romance novels returning to publish after many years away. Neat trick, that. Unfortunately the comparison isn’t mined for much, as the movie’s instead interested in tromping through some familiar motions. The author’s popular series is best known for a cover model (Channing Tatum). When their joint book tour is quickly interrupted by a villainous billionaire (Daniel Radcliffe) kidnapping her thinking she can help him find buried treasure on a remote tropical island, the handsome lunk hopes to rescue her and prove he’s more than a pretty face.

Thus, we get Bullock and Tatum—also a welcome sight, having just returned to our screens with Dog a few weeks ago—traipsing through the jungle together. It’s Romancing the Stone with a blander coat of paint. The writer thinks highly of her cleverness, and the model is always a step behind but trying so admirably to think things through. He’s just slow on the uptake, and she’s slow to realize she’s falling for him. That old thing. Though the stars shine brightly, proving all over again why they were so appealing in the first place, the project’s way too blandly directed and formulaically scripted to ever really get off the ground. Car chases and shootouts hit their marks, and the banter is slathered on with a first-draft brush—then augmented with tons of off-screen ADR, the last refuge of filmmakers who’ve discovered far too late their scenes need more lines that almost sound like jokes. That’s all pretty pro-forma stuff, but the pretty island scenery and predictable melting of affections through a scampering adventure really do work at some basic level, if only for the charming Movie Stars enjoying the chance to do that increasingly rare thing.

A potentially far richer Movie Star text of a high-concept comedy is The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Too bad it stays shallow. It stars Nicolas Cage as Nicolas Cage. He plays an actor who once won an Academy Award and starred in action blockbusters, but now a couple decades later fears he’s making nothing much of note. Does the actual Cage think that of his lesser direct-to-video efforts of late? (He still gets the occasional wild pitch lead in a hallucinogenic horror movie like Mandy or a taciturn indie drama like Pig.) The film makes some effort to be about the idea of Cage more than the true man himself. His wife (Sharon Horgan) and daughter (Lily Sheen) in the picture are nothing like his real-life family. And his professional frustrations seem to be responding more to a tabloid image than anything real. (He’s fittingly haunted by a waxy de-aged ghost of his younger self.) But of course, if any actor would play a loose self-portrait balancing image maintenance with gentle self-critique it would be Cage. After all, he’s the one who describes his own process leading to wild and unpredictable performances in everything from Moonstruck to Face/Off as “experimenting with what I would like to call Western Kabuki or more Baroque or operatic style of film performance. Break free from the naturalism…” As for if he goes over the top, he once said: “You tell me where the top is and I’ll tell you whether or not I’m over it.”

The movie has a fun hook anyway, even if it eventually loses the fun. Cage is hired to attend the birthday party of a Spanish oligarch (Pedro Pascal). Once there he discovers he’s fast friends with the guy. Too bad, then, that the CIA recruits the actor to spy on his host. The movie’s then bifurcated between pleasant and appealing buddy comedy—Cage humbly cedes most of the charm to Pascal’s giddy enthusiasms, while he provides the thawing reaction shots and sweet-natured stumbling—and a painfully generic action picture. The bad guys are stock types, the chases and explosions are flat, and the mystery is a stop-and-start nothing. Whole subplots are dropped or elided at times, too, with some comic relief suddenly turning up dead and others disappearing for large swaths of run time. This is almost certainly a movie hacked apart at some point in its development. It leans way too hard on its meta winks without going all the way into speculative loop-de-loops a la Being John Malkovich’s head-spinning. Why quote the great Con Air theme song in the opening scene if not bringing it back in a rousing encore by the end? And why make a movie in love with Cage movies without engaging in what makes them great? Or what makes any movie great, for that matter? Early on it has a character disparage being “forced” to watch silent classic Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as it gave them “anxiety” to dislike it, and it’s later a sign of character growth when another learns to love Paddington 2 without much reasoning. This results in an oddly small movie, so in love with its star’s willingness to play himself that it forgets to do anything with that willingness. It needed someone behind the camera who’d be as willing to go hurtling over the top with him.

Work Out: THE BUBBLE and RIEN À FOUTRE

Wasn’t it stupid to try to make a big movie during a pandemic? So says Judd Apatow’s The Bubble, a big Netflix movie made during the pandemic. Aside from that central uneasy irony, the whole thing’s a bust. It’s a long, loosely-structured would-be comedy with really only the animating anxious confusion of life during COVID and free-floating anger at a flailing studio system hanging the shambles together. The picture takes place in a palatial hotel in the English countryside in the pre-vaccine phase of our current crisis. How strange to see that time so far in the rearview already, and yet still we muddle on. Nonetheless, it forces the fictional studio in this movie, in the midst of mounting the $100 million-budgeted production of the too-chintzy-to-believe Cliff Beasts 6, to lock its cast and crew in an isolation bubble. There’s a lot of wincing goofiness at the top as the cast assembles in masks for temperature tests, nasal swabs, and a two-week quarantine. And then they’re off, with sequences alternating between broad goofs on Hollywood egos and studio politics in front or behind the scenes, and even broader chafing against the COVID protocols on the other.

There’s much silliness made out of clashing actors—pompous leading men (David Duchovny), mumbling self-serious thespians (Pedro Pascal), ditzy leading ladies (Leslie Mann), lifestyle-brand floggers (Keegan-Michael Key), flailing aged ingenues (Karen Gillan), and a social media star (Iris Apatow). That last one has to be the funniest, with Apatow’s younger daughter nailing the spacey cadence and passionless dancing of a zoned-out TikTok influencer. (That her manager mom is played by the equally zonked-out, wide-eyed Maria Bamford makes perfect sense, and made me wish the she was in the movie more than her fleeting appearance. Maybe the whole movie should’ve just been about them? Hey, still could do a spin-off, right?) There’s also Fred Armisen as an indie director failing in a franchise, Peter Serafinowicz as the harried producer, Kate McKinnon as the heartless executive, and a host of other bit roles filled out by interesting or amusing presences like Maria Bakalova, Rob Delaney, and Daisy Ridley. Much is made out of safety zones, face shields, and positive tests, but just as much tepid farce about cooped up celebrities and harried crew members falling into hook ups and drug use and so on. Any sense of life outside this bubble fades fast, leaving the wasn’t-that-a-time material stale and distant and empty.

Apatow is always at his best with character portraits—Knocked Up, Trainwreck, The King of Staten Island—and less adept at the problems of the rich—This is 40. Yet strangely he’s done a great look at showbiz loneliness before in his best film—Funny People. Maybe it helped that it was set in the world of comedy, from stand-ups to writers to movie stars. He understood how to communicate the loneliness of life in this kind of success, and the yearning for a big break from those on the lower rungs. Here, in The Bubble, there’s no such understanding of how these enormous spectacles are actually made—scenes in the green screen spaces or with special effects handlers are weird guesstimates, scenes of the movies-within-the-movie don’t even rise to the level of convincing satire. and there are few attempts to make the characters people instead of caricatures. That leaves the movie with empty farce that does nothing but remind you that there’s still a novel virus tearing through our world and an unfunny movie about the problems of a bunch of fake people in rarified circumstances isn’t making the comments it thinks it is.

That’s not to say it’d be too early to make fun of Hollywood excesses against the backdrop of a global pandemic that’s still killing thousands a day. But the movie’s too scattershot to land its punches with any verve, and the screenplay is so dramatically inert and tepidly shot that it’s two pretty flat hours that crawl by. Besides, the characters are so excruciatingly thinly drawn that there’s nowhere for it to go, anyway. When the leading lady has her hand shot off by an overzealous security guard, well, I guess that’s just par for the course. There’s no sense of escalation to the silliness, so by the time we get there, it’s just one more thing. I don’t doubt Apatow’s genuine dissatisfaction with the soulless Hollywood machinery churning out stupider product in the midst of a fraught time. However, the movie isn’t built to bolster that claim, instead finding at most mild amusement as his cast of personalities bounce off of each other, and then frittering away any attempt to add it all up. This manages to make Apatow’s movie simultaneously a howl of frustration and a whine of privilege. The extent to which the movie’s aware of that fact is dialed up and down seemingly at random. How frustrating. It asks: how dare a studio give these people a lot of money to make something this stupid at a time like this? Ditto.

A new streaming movie that’s actually about what it feels like to work for a living these days is Belgium’s small, well-observed flight attendant drama, Rien à foutre, which can be translated as Zero Fucks Given. With a title like that, and the copious stories lately about belligerent passengers refusing to, say, wear a mask to prevent the spread of disease, you’d think the movie would be a wild, vulgar affair. Going in I was thinking it’d be something like Pedro Almodovar’s deliriously fizzy airplane comedy I’m So Excited by way of Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging’s pandemic satire. But the movie is actually a sensitive little character study about a lost young woman, adrift in the air and on the ground alike as she tries to make do. It’s mostly a pre-pandemic story—though everyone’s in masks in the final scene, a bittersweet way of marking time, to be sure. Its consistent mood of now-what? is spot on.

The focus is simply on sketching the contours of one woman’s life, and finds no build to any false conflict or cheap revelations. No Sundance sentiment or workplace sitcom here. There’s something real and lived-in at the center of the picture. The flight attendant works for a budget airline and is lost to a grinding routine—airports, drinks, clubs, and one-night stands, dating apps and Instagram. She’s making enough money to get by, and she dreams of someday getting better routes to more glamorous destinations, even as she smiles and sells drinks and manages passengers and tries to hit her quotas. She’s not unambitious, but she’s uninterested or unable to achieve liftoff. Even when her supervisor essentially forces her to apply for a promotion, she’s a little put off. She’s happy the way she is. Or, maybe not happy, but it’s what she knows. Even the corporate hoops are mere inconvenience, until they’re not. There are moments where her face fills the frame as a smile passes subtly, slowly from genuine to fake, and you feel her world shift underneath her.

Credit star Adèle Exarchopoulos, then, for keeping the movie aloft. Though filmmakers Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre, working from a screenplay they wrote in collaborations with Mariette Désert, bring a ring of specificity to attendants’ shifts and downtime alike, it’s the lead who lifts it to the level of engaging throughout. Fittingly, they keep the camera in tight close-ups and medium shots on her expressive face and body language, precise and casual, beautiful and troubled. Exarchopoulos, who made such a memorable presence as a hungry teenager in the lesbian coming-of-age drama Blue is the Warmest Color nearly a decade ago, here again makes a compelling center of attention. She appears to be good at her job—she listens, she’s polite, she endures demands and insults with some grace. But she also drinks—sometimes too close to flights—and has no interest in maintaining relationships. Friendships are restricted to her co-workers and seem to last just the duration of any given stay. Romances are ordered up on apps for a few hours at a time. Eventually, she ends up back home with some family for a while, and we get some added insight into reasons why she feels particularly at a loss to move on. There’s real sadness there. But also love.

And it’s not like she’s only miserable, exactly. Here’s a movie that understands the complicated feelings many young people have today about their work and their seemingly stalled pathways forward. She seems to get pleasures from her lifestyle, and can like her job from time to time, but there’s also that indescribable sense that there’s no clear way to get more out of it, or to escape these cycles. Exarchopoulos, enlivening a quiet charisma sinking under a facade of pleasantries or a layer of sleepy depression, knits these details together into one convincing portrait. By the end, she feels like a real person we’ve gotten to know, and the movie’s lack of resolution or even easy ambiguity feels like we’ve just left her, she and we still wondering what’s next. In a time when employees are looking for work to give them not only meaning and money, but dignity, too, here’s a movie about a woman slowly realizing she’s worth more than they, or she, might think.

Down to Earth: WONDER WOMAN 1984

If Wonder Woman 1984 was the first Wonder Woman, I doubt we would’ve gotten a second. I sat stupefied as it got worse by the scene, so fundamentally misunderstanding the appeal of the first movie it made me wonder if that one was actually as good as I thought at the time. I’m sure it is, but, still: imagine everything you enjoyed about the first movie. Now imagine a movie with none of that. It does have Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, the Amazon in exile sworn to save humanity from itself. But this time, instead of a clear line to a distinct villain, she’s fussing around in the margins of an obvious parable. There’s a con man (Pedro Pascal) pretending to be a tycoon with slicked-back blonde hair and garish suits. He wants to steal a magic rock on which he can make wishes. Before he can go full Midas, Diana, in her day job as an anthropologist at the Smithsonian, and a mousy co-worker (Kristen Wiig) make wishes on the rock, not knowing they’d actually come true. For Diana, it means a reunion with her long-dead pilot love (Chris Pine). For the other woman, it means becoming an accidental supervillain. (Isn’t that a Brad Paisley song with LL Cool J? Ha.) So the movie involves Wonder Woman investigating a magic rock. Look, that’s not in and of itself the problem, and anyone who says it is better look long and hard inside themselves about the Infinity Stones. The main issue is mild action sequences which generate no suspense, little energy, and, worse still, no wonder. It loses Diana’s character to a curiously passive and simple plot, which somehow takes the stupidest thin ideas and makes them endlessly confused. Why not just grab hold of the magic for yourself and wish the whole movie's worth of problems reversed, or the movie itself over and done with? We’re ahead of her the whole time. It's not every day you see a fantasy arguing we should all dream a little smaller.

After working so well with epic earnestness of the kind you could find in Richard Donner’s Superman, writer-director Patty Jenkins is here going for a Richard Lester vibe, but she overshoots Superman II and ends up closer to Superman III. It has comedy that falls flat, romance that remains unconvincing (the hoops it jumps to get Pine back never satisfy), and a plot that just never sparks to life. WW84 has enormous events — a huge wall popping up in the middle of Egypt (an unusual tone-deaf sequence), nuclear arsenals accumulating, and improbable global catastrophes in the making — that don’t seem to matter much. It stages a confrontation in the White House, but doesn't have any real interest in 80's politics like it did World War I last time. It has a winking tone that at first is a colorful comic book cartoon — I enjoyed the opening action beats: an Amazonian Warrior Challenge and an 80s mall rescue — but grates quickly. So brightly lit and simply staged, it veers away from playing up the secretive God qualities of its star, and instead leans on her rudimentary action figure qualities. She’s posed and weightless, and so is the story which clunks and clatters along. The villains are introduced as comic relief and never work themselves up to real threats, even when the world is ostensibly on the line. Part of the problem is their plot grows both predictable and takes forever to get anywhere. Jenkins and her team want to try something different, and I can admire the attempt to swing away from a temptation to follow the standard bigger, louder, darker, and more overstuffed superhero sequel template and harken instead back to something more contained, and vaugely Silver Age DC. For how expensive it is, it feels cheap and, though it does some globetrotting, it feels so small. It’s almost literally the version we would’ve gotten in 1984, when the sadly underwhelming likes of Supergirl or Red Sonja were all you had for strong women in capes, and studios weren’t betting an extended universe of interconnected spinoffs on them.