Movie Review: Anon

Anon ** / *****

Directed by: Andrew Niccol.

Written by: Andrew Niccol.

Starring: Clive Owen (Sal Frieland), Amanda Seyfried (The Girl), Colm Feore (Detective Charles Gattis), Sonya Walger (Kristen), Mark O'Brien (Cyrus Frear), Joe Pingue (Lester Goodman), Iddo Goldberg (Joseph Kenik), Sebastian Pigott (Detective Vardy), Rachel Roberts (Alysa Egorian).

 

I almost feel bad that Andrew Niccol’s debut film was Gattaca (1997) – because in a way, he’s been chasing that success ever since. That truly is one of the best modern sci-fi films – one whose reputation grown in the 21 years since its release – and a watermark Niccol hasn’t been able to surpass since. He has tried several times to do another high concept sci fi film – Simone, In Time – because he’s arguably done much better when leaves that world behind to concentrate on something else (my favorite of his post Gattaca films is Lord of War – a GoodFellas riff with Nicolas Cage as an arms dealer). Anon is another one of Niccol’s attempts at creating a dystopian sci fi world a la Gattaca – and another attempt where he comes up short. The initial idea is interesting, but it never really goes anywhere.

 

Anon is set in a world where anonymity is no longer possible – ever person you meet has been tagged, and you can tell everything you need to know about them – their name, their job, etc. Everything is also recorded as well, so you cannot really hide anything, because eventually, someone can just remind your life, and look at what you were doing at any time. In this world, the job of a Detective is much easier – you know what happened at all times – but it doesn’t stop Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) from being a cop anyway. But his most recent case is strange – there seems to be a serial killer on the loose, yet when they check the footage of the killings from the POV of the victim, what they get instead in the POV of the killer – with no idea who they are. Eventually, they are able to tie the crimes to someone who Sal first thought was a glitch – because when he first sees Anon (Amanda Seyfried) none of her information comes up. She has found a way to go anonymous in the world – and for a price, can erase your dirty little secrets as well. Now though, she seems to be killing her clients. Which, of course, means Sal will have to go undercover – and of course, they two will develop feelings for each other. But is she a serial killer?

 

The concept of Anon is a little silly, of course, but then again that’s par for the course in films like this. Niccol is trying to go for some sort of future noir (on a budget) here – which explains why Clive Owen still smokes in this movie, because noir detective always smoke. And it should be said that Owen is quite good here – he always is as these types of weary characters (like Children of Men), and Seyfried is perhaps even better. She is certainly the more interesting character – at least in concept, I just wish she was given a little bit more depth. I also liked the visual look of the film – which is deliberately grey and washed out – which matches the world itself.

 

The ultimate problem with Anon is that Niccol never relaxes enough to simply tell the story at the core of the movie, and instead, wants to explain everything. He wants to create an airtight world – which is not only kind of impossible in these types of films, but also completely pointless. He spends so much time with that, that the ending of the movie feels rushed, and the big twist doesn’t really work, because there is no real way to figure it out, and we don’t really care anyway. The last line of the film is also a clunker that leaves you cold.

 

The film is another Netflix original that feels like an old script, dusted off by a talented filmmaker when the streaming giant came knocking with some money. The idea is there for Anon to be a good movie – but a draft or two more at the screenplay stage to tease out more story and less explanation would have done a world of good. I’ll always have time for Niccol – he comes up with good ideas, even if the execution isn’t always there. Sadly, that is the case with Anon.

Movie Review: Good Kill

Good Kill
Directed by: Andrew Niccol.
Written by: Andrew Niccol.
Starring: Ethan Hawke (Major Thomas Egan), Bruce Greenwood (Lt. Colonel Jack Johns), January Jones (Molly Egan), Zoë Kravitz (Airman Vera Suarez), Jake Abel (M.I.C. Joseph Zimmer), Dylan Kenin (Capt. Ed Christie), Peter Coyote (Langley).

There is a good movie to be made about drone strikes as currently practiced by the United States government. About the morality of conducting these operations, how they calculate what “collateral damage” is acceptable, about the effect it has on those tasked with carrying out those missions, and about whether the fact that drone strikes make it safer and easier (for the American military anyway) means that they go overboard with using it. Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill is not that movie. As a character study of one of the drone pilots, it doesn’t really work as the character is so closed off emotionally, and so monotonous in his actions, and the plot both when he’s flying the drones, and his home life so predictable, that much of the movie is dull. In the final act – when Niccol tries to up the drama a little bit, it comes across as false – as if Niccol didn’t know how to end the movie, so he ramped everything up, which doesn’t really work with what came before. If there’s value in the movie – and there is at least a little – it’s in stirring up debate among the people who see it. Great movies do that while also telling a great story – Good Kill doesn’t get there.

The film stars Ethan Hawke as Major Thomas Egan. After being an actual pilot – flying combat missions for years – he is now stationed in Las Vegas, where every day he goes into a trailer with his team and flies a drone over Afghanistan. Sometimes, the only thing he has to do is surveillance – watching to see if a target is there. But more often than not, he is given a mission. His missions consist of him getting into position, and then firing a missile. The drones are so high up, no one of the ground has any hope of seeing them, and the missiles strike within a matter of seconds, obliterating everything in their path. He is the best at his job – an emotionless zombie, who knows what it really means to fly, and who carries out the orders of his commander, Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), without thought or questioning. At the end of the day, he drives home to his wife, Molly (January Jones) and their two kids. He’s just as much of an emotionless zombie there as well. It’s not that he doesn’t love his wife and kids, but that he is having trouble with his job and cannot deal with it. At least when he was flying in combat there was a separation – over there, and back home. Now, it’s one and the same. As his team gets tasked with conducting secret missions for the CIA – represented by the cold voice of Peter Coyote on a speakerphone – it gets worse. Now he’s bombing people in countries American isn’t even officially at war with. And often, he is told to wait after firing his missile – that way, when people run into help those blown up, he can blow them up to. When his co-pilot, Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz) points out this is exactly what terrorists do, she is ignored.

Hawke is an excellent actor – and he is very good in this role, or at least, he plays the role exactly the way it was meant to be played. He is closed off emotionally at all times, drinking constantly, although he rarely seems drunk. He conducts his missions precisely the way they want them to be conducted. The problem is at home, he is the exact same way. He doesn’t want to talk about his work to his wife and kids – bring home the violence and death he sees (and causes) everyday – but since he cannot think of anything else, that means he spends most of his time staring off into space. He is a drone himself.

That is undoubtedly the point of the movie – and it’s a point writer/director Andrew Niccol makes very well. Egan is an emotionless void on the surface who never seems to get angry. But as his wife tells one of her friends when she asks what happens when Tom gets angry, she replies “He gets even quieter” – it’s a scary thing. We know eventually he will explode – he almost has to in order for the movie to have a traditional structure – but for much of the movie we have no idea what’s going on inside his head. Again, that is the point of the movie, but it doesn’t make it all that dramatic – all that interesting to watch. It doesn’t help that aside from Egan, the rest of the cast is given one note roles. Jones as the wife who wants to be supportive, but is tired of his moods, and essentially raising the kids by herself. We know eventually she will say something along the lines of “You’re not here even when you are” – and, of course, she does. Greenwood is effective as the Commanding officer, who may not precisely like what they do, but does it anyway – being able to fully justify it to himself. Kravitz’s function seems to be much like Hawke’s function was in another Andrew Niccol movie – Lord of War, about an international arms dealer (Nicolas Cage – in one of his very best performances) - where Hawke showed up once in a while to make a dramatic speech about how evil Cage was, just in case the audience didn’t get the message. Kravitz is a talented young actress, but there is little anyone can do with a role like that (Hawke didn’t fare much better in Lord of War) – and her bizarre flirtation/attraction to Egan doesn’t make any logical sense at all. There are two other members of the team – but they are “true believers”, and the movie doesn’t do much with them at all.

The last act in the film doesn’t make much sense. For an hour or so, Good Kill shows us mission after mission of the same thing – they are given orders, and Hawke carries them out, and if women and children are killed, so be it. They have no idea what any of the men are “guilty” of – it’s above their pay grade, and they don’t get to ask. The one person they know is evil – a rapist who comes into a courtyard during Hawke’s surveillance efforts on a large compound, and rapes a housekeeper, they do nothing about. They are waiting for the owner to return so they can blow up the house – who cares about some local rapist? We know eventually that Egan has to snap – both at home and at work – because that is what happens in movies like this. He does, but in ways that feel completely false – an excuse to add false dramatics to a movie that didn’t have any dramatics for most of its runtime. It may have been far duller to just continue with Egan pulling off his missions like a mindless automaton, but it also would have made a lot more sense, and be truer to the spirit of the movie, and its message.

Niccol can be a fine writer/director at times. His Gattaca (1997), with Hawke, has become one of the most loved sci-fi films of the 1990s with good reason. And despite Hawke’s speechifying in Lord of War (2005), is an extremely entertaining, Scorsese-esque drama, that may have been a worthier successor to GoodFellas (a clear influence) has Niccol not given in and felt the need to explain to the audience just how evil his main character was (we already knew, without being told). It’s that – the tendency to underline the morality, or lack thereof, of his characters in specific, on-the-nose dialogue, that sinks Niccol’s features as often as not (like Simone or In Time). In Good Kill, he has very little other than his message. The film will stir debate to be sure – but as a movie, it’s more than a little dull.

DVD Review: In Time

In Time ** ½
Directed by: Andrew Niccol.
Written by: Andrew Niccol.
Starring:  Justin Timberlake (Will Salas), Amanda Seyfried (Sylvia Weis), Cillian Murphy (Raymond Leon), Vincent Kartheiser (Philippe Weis), Olivia Wilde (Rachel Salas), Johnny Galecki (Borel), Alex Pettyfer (Fortis), Matt Bomer (Henry Hamilton).

I know I’m not the first person to say this, but I have always thought that if you’re remake a movie, you probably shouldn’t remake a classic, that was perfect to begin with, but rather a movie that had promise that for whatever reason just didn’t work the first time around. If studios would do that, I would suggest that someone remake In Time, because the idea behind the movie is brilliant, but the execution of that idea just isn’t up to the idea itself. The idea of currency literally being replaced by time – so that the rich can live forever, where the poor literally live day to day, under the constant threat of death. This near future, science fiction film could not possibly be timelier. And yet, In Time never quite figures out what to do with this premise – and instead of crafting an intelligent film, it devolves into action movie clichés. Too bad, because this movie had the potential to be great.

The film stars Justin Timberlake as Will Salas, a poor factory worker who has to go to work every day just to earn enough time to get back to work the next day. In this future, everyone has been genetically engineered to stop aging at the age of 25 – until then, you’re clock doesn’t wind down at all. When you hit 25, you get one year of time. The poor need to use this time to pay off their parents debts, so that shortly after they hit 25, they are living day to day. The rich can pass their time down to their kids, so that they can live forever. Everyone is split into certain districts, based on their time remaining – and it costs so much to move between zones, that no one ever does it. But one day Will meets a rich man in a bar – with over a century of time on his arm (which is where your countdown clock is located). Will saves him from some people who want to steal that time from him. To pay him back, the rich man gives Will all his time – killing himself. Will, angry at the system (which had just allowed his mother to die), decides to travel to the richest district to get revenge.

There are great ideas running through In Time – at least beneath the surface. Will quickly draws the attention of the timekeepers (led by Cillian Murphy`s Raymond Leon), who track him down quickly. But by then, Will has connected with Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), the daughter of the richest man in the world. Sylvia essentially becomes his Patty Hearst – first a hostage Will uses to get away from the timekeepers, but soon joins Will in trying to bring down the system.

 
Andrew Niccol is a talented writer and director. His Gattaca was one of the best science fiction films of the 1990s, and his Lord of War was a grossly under rated, very entertaining film about an amoral arms dealer, who wins. In Time is more like his Simone, which was also a film with a brilliant premise – a Hollywood director (Al Pacino) who creates a virtual actress so he doesn’t have to deal with the ego of other actresses, only to find the virtual star becomes a huge celebrity that overshadows him. That film aimed to mock our celebrity obsessed cultures, and although that target should be easy, Simone missed the mark. In Time is like that as well. In a year where the Occupy Wall Street Movement made headlines, and the chasm between the rich and the poor grew wider and wider, a movie like In Time should have easily tapped into that anger. But instead, In Time devolves into an action movie – with bank heists, shootouts and car chases galore, that takes center stage and pushes the ideas into the background. Too bad, because the idea at the heart off In Time deserves a better movie.