Movie Review: Bright

Bright * / *****

Directed by: David Ayer.   

Written by: Max Landis.

Starring: Will Smith (Daryl Ward), Joel Edgerton (Nick Jakoby), Noomi Rapace (Leilah), Lucy Fry (Tikka), Édgar Ramírez (Kandomere), Ike Barinholtz (Gary Harmeyer), Happy Anderson (Montehugh), Kenneth Choi (Agent Coleman).

 

I’ve defended Netflix for most of 2017, as it certainly seems like the streaming service has taken its lumps from critics and cinephiles who wish that some of their films got theatrical releases, instead of showing up directly onto their website. Sure, films like Okja, Mudbound and The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) would not feel out of place in art house theaters around the country – but I understand that’s not really Netflix’s business model, and say that the problem isn’t that Netflix is putting these films on their site – but that no other studio in town would finance them in the first place. Any studio could have bought Mudbound for instance – but none of them did, except for Netflix. The site has also been a boon to documentaries as well. Sure, I have nits to pick with them – they still haven’t figured out how to make their original movies into events like they have with their TV shows. Sadly, the first real blockbuster Netflix has attempted – that has apparently gotten the views – is the worst Netflix original (of any kind) that I have seen so far. David Ayer’s Bright is a confused and confusing mess of a film, with big writing, bad acting and bad everything else bringing the film down to ridiculous levels.

 

The film is directed by David Ayer – who before he made last year’s horrible Suicide Squad, had made any number of films about the tough cops of the LAPD – some great (he wrote Training Day and Dark Blue, and wrote and directed End of Watch), some not so great (Sabotage, Harsh Times). With Bright, he has essentially returned to the genre – except in some sort of weird alternate universe, which humans lives alongside orcs and fairies, and other strange creatures. The screenplay, by Max Landis, tries very, very hard to draw racial parallels to the way orcs are treated in this world, and how African Americans are treated in ours (a rather insulting comparison, if you think about it) – none of it really works.

 

In the film, Will Smith stars as Daryl Ward, a veteran beat cop who has been teamed up with Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton) – the first ever Orc cop on the LAPD. The opening scene sees Daryl get shot, and Nick failing to capture the criminal who did it – everyone thinks that he let the shooter get away because it was another orc, and orcs cannot be trusted. Everyone wants Nick out – and go to Daryl to try and help them do it. Then, through a series of events too complicated to comprehend, the two partners essentially have to go on the run together – they have a wand, and everyone wants the wand, and everyone will kill for the wand – including their own fellow cops.

 

I wish I could work up much hatred for Bright – hatred at least makes things interesting – but I really can’t. To be honest, I was pretty much bored from beginning to end of the film. The cast is full of talented stars – not least of which is Smith, who you could normally count on to deliver great amounts of charm in his roles, but now just seems to be coasting. The rest of the cast is wasted – with not even the great Edgerton being able to leave an impact on the film.

 

Up until Bright, I could defend the choices Netflix was making by saying that were funding the kind of films no one else would – they were daring, and edgy – and even if they didn’t all work, you admire them for going for it. Bright is the exact opposite of those films in pretty much every way.  

Movie Review: Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad

Directed by: David Ayer   

Written by: David Ayer based on the comic book by John Ostrander.

Starring: Will Smith (Floyd Lawton / Deadshot), Jared Leto (Joker), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), Joel Kinnaman (Rick Flag), Viola Davis (Amanda Waller), Jai Courtney (Digger Harkness / Captain Boomerang), Jay Hernandez (Chato Santana / El Diablo), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Waylon Jones / Killer Croc), Cara Delevingne (Dr. June Moone / Enchantress), Karen Fukuhara (Tatsu Yamashiro / Katana), Adam Beach (Christopher Weiss / Slipknot), Ike Barinholtz (Griggs), Scott Eastwood (GQ Edwards), Alain Chanoine (Incubus), Ben Affleck (Bruce Wayne / Batman), Ezra Miller (Barry Allen/Flash).

 

The DC cinematic universe is in trouble. Only three films in, and the company has yet to really find the sweet spot that seemed to come almost naturally to Marvel nearly a decade ago when they started on the same path. There have been dumps in Marvel’s road of course – and increasingly, I get a little annoyed with how bloated the movies have become, and the growing sense that the series is never going to wrap up anything, but just keep on expanding ad infinitum. Yet, those movies have been remarkable in terms of their relative consistency – even the lesser films usually deliver an entertaining night out at the movies – which is something DC hasn’t done yet. Man of Steel was okay, but awful dour for a Superman film. March’s Batman vs. Superman was a downright train wreck – bloated, dark, heavy and joyless – a film that really only came alive in those few minutes Wonder Woman (and that great music that accompanied her) was onscreen. For the second movie in the franchise, that film felt like it wanted to do too much – it introduced too many characters for the movie to possibly sustain, and the movie collapsed under its own weight. Now comes the third film, Suicide Squad, which suffers from some of the same issues. This feels like a film that should come later in the series – after most of the characters in the film have already been properly introduced and developed. As the movie stands now, it spends about half its runtime just setting up who everyone is, before its comes to a ridiculous climax, laden with bad looking CGI, which, like seemingly other blockbuster, basically amounts to a bunch of floating crap crashing into each other. Suicide Squad is a slight improvement over Batman vs. Superman though – mostly due to the fact that there are some really good performances going on, despite everything else going on around it, and at least certain elements of lightness to the tone – it doesn’t take itself as thuddingly, dully serious as the two Zack Snyder movies that kicked off this series does. Is that enough to hang onto some hope for the future of this franchise? I guess it better be, because it’s coming whether we like it or not.

 

The movie takes place in the aftermath of Batman vs. Superman – with Superman apparently dead, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), a senior government official of some kind, thinks that the American government needs to be prepared for the threat that “meta-humans” pose. After all, Superman was a good guy, but what if he wanted to destroy America? Who would stop him? She proposes the government form a team of very talented, very bad guys they already have locked up. They will use their special skills to help the government – and if they don’t comply, they all have a chip implanted in their neck that will allow her to kill them with the push of a button. There’s Deadshot (Will Smith), a hitman who never misses a shot. There’s Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the former psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum, who fell in love with the Joker (Jared Leto), who turned her into a love crazed killing machine. There’s Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) a thief who is good with, you guessed it, a Boomerang. There’s El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), a L.A. gang member who can set things on fire with his bare hands. There’s Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a half man/half crocodile like creature. There’s Dr. June Moon (Cara Delevigne), who has become possessed by an ancient witch named Enchantress, who can do pretty much anything. Oh, and I forgot Slipknot (Adam Beach), but then again, so did the movie, until he was suddenly there, and someone says “This is Slipknot”. They are led by a Special Forces man, Rick Flagg (Joel Kinneman), who is in love with June Moon, and backed up by Katana, a Japanese woman with a sword that traps the souls of the people she kills with it.

 

That’s the character list, and a handy plot summary for the first half of the movie or so, which does little else but introduce these characters one at a time. Eventually, they will be sent out on a mission, when Enchantress turns evil, frees her powerful brother from a stature, and starts to build a weapon, which looks like a swirling vortex of CGI crap.

 

This is no way to make a movie. In an ideal world, all of this characters would have been introduced in previous movies, so that by the time they get together here, we already know who they are, so the limited character development won’t hurt the film as much. No one is more hurt by this that Harley Quinn. Robbie is brilliant in the role – she plays cracked and crazy brilliantly, but her backstory about being abused by the Joker, and turned crazy, needs more than the flashbacks it is given during the course of the movie. You can make an interesting character out of Quinn – the idea of a woman being in love with her abuser is a sad one, but one that is true to life in some cases – but it requires more than this film gives it. The fact that Quinn works as well as she does in the film is a testament to Robbie’s performance – the strongest in the film. As for Leto’s joker, well, he isn’t my favorite actor, and he would not have been my top choice to play the role. But, he was given the nearly impossible task of stepping in for Heath Ledger, whose work in The Dark Knight is justly legendary, and Leto, I think acquits himself well. His onset antics may be a distraction, but who really cares. But he isn’t given much to do other than cackle maniacally, which he does well. Other performances work as well – Will Smith proves once again why he is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, because as Deadshot he is effortless and cool. Viola Davis is badass as Amanda Waller – I’d watch a whole movie of her just being her. No one else is really that good though – and none of them are even really given a chance. Some of them – like El Diablo, the gang banger with a domestic violence past and Katana, the cold as ice Japanese assassin with a sword, and Killer Croc, the African American who is literally half animal, even cross the line into dangerously retrograde/offensive ethnic stereotypes – which may have been overcome had they been given more to do. No one is given a shorter straw though than Delevigne – a model turned actress I really like in Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel and the YA romance Paper Towns. As June Moon, she is given no character to play. As Enchantress, she is asked to do little but spout evil lines, and dance ridiculously in front of the CGI vortex of crap.

 

The writer/director here is David Ayer – who, in ideal circumstances, probably could have made a good movie. He has done so before – with the PTSD drama Harsh Times, the LA cops on the street End of Watch and the WWII actioner Fury. Apparently though, he didn’t have much time to write the screenplay – and it shows. The structure is off, the plot silly, the characters under developed. The whole movie feels like it was rushed, from the writing, to the editing to the special effects work. If you want people to do good work, you have to give them the time to do it.

 

And that strikes me as the problem with these DC movies as a whole – they feel rushed. DC lagged behind Marvel in setting up their giant, interconnected universe, and they seem to want to jump right in with both feet from the start. Marvel didn’t assemble The Avengers until their sixth film – establishing individual characters for years before combining them. DC wants to jump in right away. It’s the wrong approach – and leads to films as jumbled and messy and unsatisfying as Batman vs. Superman and Suicide Squad. I want these films to be good – hell, I want all films to be good – but I do want DC to succeed, mainly because Batman has always been my favorite superhero, and in general, I think DC has a far better stable of villains than Marvel (perhaps the weakest element of the Marvel films so far has been their inability, aside from Tom Hiddleston’s Loki to create a truly great villain). But they aren’t going to get there making films as scattershot and messy as Suicide Squad.

Movie Review: Fury

Fury
Directed by: David Ayer.
Written by: David Ayer.
Starring: Brad Pitt (Don 'Wardaddy' Collier), Shia LaBeouf (Boyd 'Bible' Swan), Logan Lerman (Norman Ellison), Michael Peña (Trini 'Gordo' Garcia), Jon Bernthal (Grady 'Coon-Ass' Travis), Jim Parrack (Sergeant Binkowski), Brad Henke (Sergeant Davis), Kevin Vance (Sergeant Peterson), Xavier Samuel (Lieutenant Parker), Jason Isaacs (Captain Waggoner), Anamaria Marinca (Irma), Alicia von Rittberg (Emma).

As a writer and director, David Ayer has made a career out of exploring masculinity in its most base, violent form. He has had little use for women – wasting the considerable talents of Anna Kendrick and America Ferrara in End of Watch, and pretty much making Mirielle Enos and Olivia Williams play male characters in Sabotage. Therefore, it’s kind of surprising that it has taken him this long to make a war film – the one genre where it’s completely understandable if there are no female characters, especially if, like in Fury, the war in question is WWII. What is perhaps even more surprising than that is that the one scene in the movie that does have women in it, is far and away the best scene in the film – and perhaps the best scene in any movie Ayer has ever written or directed. The rest of the movie is typical, violent war is hell stuff – done with a lot of skill, and elevated by an excellent cast who make up a surrogate family more than just a platoon of soldiers (even if they, purposefully, remain more archetypes than three dimensional characters). But that one scene elevates the rest of the movie.

The film takes place in the spring of 1945 in Germany. Don “Wardaddy” Collier is a sergeant, and leader of a five man tank crew. They have been together for far longer than most tank crews – it was a dangerous job in the army, made more dangerous by the fact that the Germans had far superior tanks than the Americans did – and the group has just lost one of their own for the first time. As Wardaddy says, he started this war killing Nazis in Africa, and he’s now killed Nazis throughout Europe, and now he’s killing in Nazis in Germany. As Pitt’s character in Inglorious Basterds said “We’re in the Nazi killing business, and business is booming”. Wardaddy isn’t that far from Pitt’s character in Tarantino’s masterpiece in fact – except he’s lacking the humorous irony and sarcasm. Years of war have made him forget – at least temporarily – who he was before the war. Now he’s all business – and doesn’t much care what German he kills, as long as he’s German, Wardaddy will kill him. His crew mainly agree with him. To take the family metaphor to its logical extreme – Wardaddy is (obviously) the stern father – one who commands respect, and expects loyalty, and will give it in return. Bible (Shia LaBeouf) is the more caring, nurturing mother character – he is clearly second in command, but also a little more sympathetic to the others. There are actually more than a few moments of quiet tenderness between these two characters, in which it is certainly possible to read something close to sexual intimacy between these two. The two other crew members are Gordo (Michael Pena) – a Mexican American, and Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal), from somewhere in the deep South, who bicker and argue like brothers – and sometimes say incredibly mean, bigoted things to each other – but in a joking way. These men are a family – and they will die for each other.

So the arrival of Norman (Logan Lerman) is not entirely welcome by the men. He’s only been in the army for eight weeks, has no idea what to do on a tank, and thinks his orders are a mistake. But there is nothing anyone can do about them – so he’s stuck with the tank, and the crew is stuck with him. He may well get them all killed, since he clearly has no idea what the hell he’s doing. The crew resents him – and at first it appears like Wardaddy hates him – but gradually, he takes him under his wing, and the pair bond.

The war scenes in Fury are well handled. Ayer favors a chaotic look and feel to the action, in which there is a ton of blood spilled. Ever since Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), many war films have attempted to up the ante in terms of pure, visceral violence and carnage in their war scenes – and while nothing in Fury approaches Ryan’s opening sequence, it is as well down as that film’s many imitators. Ayer doesn’t give us a grand, overreaching view of the overall strategy – but the point by point, ground level view of the war – where they take over one town at a time.

It is in the aftermath of one of those towns falling, that we get a brief interlude initially involving Wardaddy, Norman and two German women in an apartment building. The scene starts out somewhat menacing – we’ve just seen how far Wardaddy will go on his quest to eliminate the Nazis, including some things that are certainly not sanctioned – and the way he looks when he enters that apartment, with those women makes it look like anything is possible. But the scene then takes a rather gentle, surprising turn. Wardaddy is not looking for sex or violence – but a kind of return to normalcy – at least for a little while. And Norman, in his brief “relationship: with the younger of the two women is tender, and heartfelt – two teenagers in love really. It is the type of interlude that Francis Ford Coppola attempted in the French Plantation sequence in Apocalypse Now (1979) – which he was right in cutting for the initial cut of his masterpiece (my vote for best film of all time) – as he never quite found the right note to it. Ayer nails it here – and then the scene takes a dark turn when the other three men on the tank arrive, and turn the brief respite into one more hellish experience – a dysfunctional family dinner.

From there, the movie progresses as it must – with more violent war sequences, leading up to a point where the men of the tank have a choice between standing there ground in what may well be a meaningless suicide mission, or running for cover. Given what happened before, we know what they will choose before they do.

 
Fury is a fine movie – and that central sequence in the apartment is great. No, the film doesn’t add much new to the war film lexicon, but it does everything it sets out to do with skill and a visceral jolt. Ayer was made to make a war movie – and in Fury he has made his best film to date.

Movie Review: Sabotage

Sabotage
Directed by: David Ayer.
Written by: Skip Woods and David Ayer.
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger (John 'Breacher' Wharton), Sam Worthington (James 'Monster' Murray), Joe Manganiello (Joe 'Grinder' Phillips), Josh Holloway (Eddie 'Neck' Jordan), Terrence Howard (Julius 'Sugar' Edmonds), Max Martini (Tom 'Pyro' Roberts), Kevin Vance (Bryce 'Tripod' McNeely), Mark Schlegel ('Smoke' Jennings), Mireille Enos (Lizzy Murray), Maurice Compte (Sapo), Martin Donovan (Floyd Demel), Michael Monks (ASAC Phelps).

Writer-director David Ayer has made his career making mainly violent movies cops on the front lines – fighting against gangs, drug dealers and other very, very bad people. Often the cops themselves are just as corrupt as those they are trying to take down. At their best – as in his screenplays for Training Day (2001) or the underrated Dark Blue (2002), and his last directorial effort End of Watch (2012) the films are gritty, violent, exciting, well directed, well written and well-acted. And then there are his other movies – where things never quite come together. Films like Street Kings (2008), and his latest Sabotage, which seems like they should have promise, but somehow never quite reach their potential.

The film opens with a group of DEA officers, led by John “Breacher” Wharton (Arnold Schwarzenegger) as the storm a drug house and kill everyone they come in contact with. And then they find the money – and curiously, they stop. They grab some of the money, and put it into baggies and send them down into the sewer so they can pick it up later. Not everything goes according to plan, they lose one of their own, and somehow the higher ups know that $10 million is missing from the money pile they found (even though they blew it up). They cannot prove anything though – and after a few months, the team is working together again. But they don’t trust each other – the money disappeared before they could go back for it. And then, one by one, they start dying. Is the Cartel after them? Or is it someone closer?

If Ayer knows how to write one thing it’s masculine, male bonding that come dangerously close to homoeroticism (he did, after all, write the original The Fast and the Furious). He has never had much success is writing believable female characters – and the two major female characters in Sabotage are good case studies as to why that is. Mireille Enos delivers perhaps the best performance in the movie as Lizzy –the lone female member of Schwarzenegger’s DEA hit squad – and yet her main personality trait seems to be that she’s the biggest asshole of them all. Olivia Williams plays a DC cop who catches the case of the DEA murder, and continues investigating even when it becomes clear that the DEA itself won’t help her – and don’t much care that the team they thought was dirty is ending up dead. Arnold’s Breacher does though, so they team up. It would not surprise me to find out that the role was written for a man, and they just decided to switch it to a woman late in the process – it feels like it was written exactly the same as the male roles in this movie – right down to the not so buried sexual tension between her and Arnold.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but feel something was missing. For the most part, the cast is made up of talented – or at the very least interesting actors – but none of them are given anything interesting to do, or even any real character traits that differentiate them from each other – they’re all muscle bound, tattooed buffoons who take way too long before they start really understanding what the hell is going on in the plot. I learned, after watching the film that apparently the original cut of the film was closer to three hours, and was edited down to its current runtime (just under 2 hours) at the behest of the studio who wanted it to be an all-out action film, rather than the mystery film Ayer wanted. Perhaps the longer version was a better film – a more complete one – as I certainly did get the impression on more than one occasion while watching Sabotage that there were whole scenes and sequences missing – as we moved from one place to another with an awkward transition that didn’t work. Yet, I cannot imagine that an additional hour would have solved all of the films problems – and would have certainly made the film slower. If Sabotage has anything going for it, it’s that it never stops moving, it goes from one action sequence to another without slowing down. And Ayer does know how to film these scenes – not an exciting but bloodless way of a PG-13 movie, but in a more brutal, bloody R-rated way.

For Schwarzenegger, this is an interesting choice – it’s a much darker character than he usually plays, even if he isn’t quite the bad guy either (had they included the alternate ending that is one the Blu-Ray – which crosses the line between exciting action, and misogyny, so good call on cutting it, he would have). In some ways, I almost think that this was an attempt to do something more serious – the final scene seems to want to evoke Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, even if the film in no way earns that sort of ending. Based on his work here, and in last year’s The Last Stand, I think Arnold can still be an action star. He does need to find some better screenplays though. Sabotage has some good action in it – but everything around the action either doesn’t make sense, or is just plain bad.

Movie Review: End of Watch

End of Watch

Directed by: David Ayer.

Written by: David Ayer.

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal (Brian Taylor), Michael Peña (Mike Zavala), Natalie Martinez (Gabby), Anna Kendrick (Janet), David Harbour (Van Hauser), Frank Grillo (Sarge), America Ferrera (Orozco), Cle Shaheed Sloan (Mr. Tre), Jaime FitzSimons (Captain Reese), Cody Horn (Davis), Shondrella Avery (Bonita).

The two LAPD Officers in End of Watch are good cops. Yes, they may be full of cocky bravado, but they take their jobs seriously – and do them well. They are not crooked; they don’t abuse their prisoners or plant evidence. They may bend a rule or two, but they do not break them. Most movies about cops are about bad cops – even the previous work of writer/director David Ayer, who wrote Training Day and Dark Blue, directed Street Kings and wrote and directed Harsh Times. He is obviously interested in the inner workings of the police – especially in LA – and perhaps the reason he made End of Watch is as simple as the fact he wanted to show the police in a positive light for once. And he succeeds. End of Watch is a wonderfully entertaining cop movie.

The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena as officers Taylor and Zavala. They have been partners for years now, went to the academy together, and have become pretty much like brothers. Taylor knows and loves Zavala’s wife Gabby (Natalie Martinez), and when he finally settles down with Janet (Anna Kendrick), Zavala is right there with him. Their relationship consists of friendly banter, much of it mocking each other, but they do love each other like brothers – we never doubt that either of them would be willing to die for each other.

The movie is largely shot through cameras that Taylor brings along with him for a film class he is taking. While there are some boring days, there aren’t that many. There always seem to be a gunfight or a fire or a confrontation with a gang – mainly a Latino gang, who start to hate Taylor and Zavala, because although they are just beat cops, they always seem to be harassing them. We know how the movie will end – a violent confrontation between these two cops and the gang – who like Taylor, always seems to have a camera on recording their activity – which is stupid, of course, because they are really documenting crimes. But this gang isn’t exactly high on intelligence.

End of Watch works because of the performances by Gyllenhaal and Pena. We like these two characters and get to know them, and because of that, when they get into gun fights, or running into a burning building or get into a car chase (which, let’s be honest here, happens way more often to these two than to any cops in history), we want them to make it out alive. Ayer is a smart enough writer and director to know that we’ll stick with the movie if we actually like the characters. They are not cookie cutters, but real guys. Gyllenhaal still has traces of that boyish charm he does so well, but there is something darker in Taylor as well. Pena is a little goofier, a little more relaxed. Both are excellent in the film, and together they make a great team.

How you feel about End of Watch may well come down to how you feel about the camera work. End of Watch is not quite a “found footage” movie, as for some reasons Ayer does give us some establishing shots numerous times throughout the movie, but it comes pretty close. It used to be that found footage was only used in low budget horror movies – but this year has seen several examples of other genres getting into the action – the sci-fi action film Chronicle and the teen comedy Project X for example. Ayer uses the shaky camera work inherent in the genre better than most – not quite as nausea inducing as others I have seen, and still with a definite sense of style. In short, I doubt most amateurs could actually make a film that looks as good as End of Watch.

End of Watch is not a great movie, and really isn’t a very original movie either. You know what you’re getting into from the previews – and if you don’t, the profanity laced tirade that begins the film will surely let you know. But it is a well-made, well-written and especially well-acted example of its genre. And an effective one.