Movie Review: Men in Black International

Men in Black: International ** / *****

Directed by: F. Gary Gray.

Written by: Matt Holloway & Art Marcum based on characters created by Lowell Cunningham.

Starring: Chris Hemsworth (Agent H), Tessa Thompson (Agent M), Rebecca Ferguson (Riza), Liam Neeson (High T), Emma Thompson (Agent O), Kumail Nanjiani (Pawny), Rafe Spall (Agent C), Jess Radomska (Spike – Alien), Viktorija Faith (Jellyfish Alien).

 

Are people big fans of the Men in Black series? I know the first one was a major hit in 1997, and the second and third films were also hits in 2002 and 2012, but it’s not a series that I hear very many people talk about very often. I know that while I didn’t hate any of the three previous films, I have never really thought about them unless I am directing watching them – they are fun, but meaningless. So we really didn’t need to reboot the series at this point. Having said that, the fact that they cast Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson in the lead roles, I was cautiously optimistic that the series would at the very least be as good as the older films – fun, but forgettable. But it really does seem that no one involved in the film really thought this movie through – really worked on making this movie fun. The entire movie coasts on the charm of Hemsworth and Thompson – with an assist by the voice work of Kumail Nanjiani – but there’s really nothing going on here.

 

In the film, Thompson plays Agent M – the newest member of the Men in Black. As a kid, she met an alien – but the Men in Black who came and erased her parent’s memory, missed her. She has spent her entire life since trying to find those men in black – and she finally does. Impressed enough by that, they offer her a job – on a probationary period – and send her to the London office. There, she’s teamed up with Agent H (Hemsworth) – in order to track down some alien weapon to stop some sort of invasion, etc. It’s not really made all that clear – although, as you watch, you don’t really question it.

 

We know from Thor Ragnarok that Hemsworth and Thompson are more than capable of being funny in an action movie, and that they have unbelievable chemistry together. They have an easy report with each other, and the ability to play off of watch other in and be extremely charming together. You see some glimpses of that here. But the biggest problem with the film is that it seems to feel the need to rush from one thing to another – and never settles down long enough to let Hemsworth and Thompson do what they do best – which is just to riff.

 

The introduction of Pawny – a tiny alien, who pledges his allegiance to his new queen Thompson – does help. Nanjiani, a huge fan of the X-Files, and a hilarious comedian, is clearly having a blast in the role. He is basically playing the animal sidekick from a Disney film – like Eddie Murphy in Mulan or Shrek – and he is quite funny. I would be interested to know if Nanjiani did any improve here to punch up Pawny’s lines – apparently Hemsworth and Thompson brought in other writers to try to punch up their dialogue. That shows a little bit, because their funny lines seem to stick out like a sore thumb – like the afterthoughts that they clearly were.

 

The film is directed by F. Gary Gray, who is a component filmmaker, capable of delivering action beats, and he doesn’t really that bad a job here. He’s a journeyman director though – and he doesn’t really find a way to elevate much here. It is a workman’s job – all done very competent but not very memorable.

 

The opening weekend box office clearly indicates that audiences didn’t really care that they brought this series back. It’s another indication this summer – following disappointing debuts for Dark Phoenix among others – that Hollywood cannot just reboot or continue a series that audiences used to like. You have to give them a reason to show up. Men in Black International gives people no such reason.

Movie Review: The Fate of the Furious

The Fate of the Furious *** / *****

Directed by: F. Gary Gray.

Written by: Chris Morgan based on characters created by Gary Scott Thompson.

Starring: Vin Diesel (Dom), Jason Statham (Deckard), Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs), Michelle Rodriguez (Letty), Tyrese Gibson (Roman), Ludacris (Tej Parker), Charlize Theron (Cipher), Kurt Russell (Mr. Nobody), Nathalie Emmanuel (Ramsey), Luke Evans (Owen), Elsa Pataky (Elena), Kristofer Hivju (Rhodes), Scott Eastwood (Little Nobody)..

 

A few years ago, some critic on Twitter (I’ve long forgotten which) asked to summarize the Fast and Furious movies with one word. A lot (most) said the word “Family”, which if you were going to run an algorithm through the films to find which word is spoken the most, then Family just may come in first. The first word that came to my mind though was VROOOOOMMMMMMM! It admittedly took me a while to start liking these movies – I didn’t even see the first or third installments in theaters (both made during a time when me not seeing a wide release was much more rare then me seeing one), and kind of rolled my eyes through at least the first four. But somewhere along the way, the series wore me done – I think it was just the realization that every time they set out to make a new one of these, they decide to try and top themselves with how much ridiculous crap they can throw at the screen in terms of action sequences – the sillier they get, the more fun they are. I also did appreciate however how seriously the films took their chronology – and even when they doubled backed three films later to change what happened, they had a very good explanation as to why that happened. Sooner or later however, there is only so many times the series can double back on itself, and change our perspective on characters before it gets too silly, too far out – and The Fate of the Furious may just do that. It’s still goofy fun, but it’s not quite up to the height of the past three installments.

 

The bare bones plot of the movie has to do with Dom (Vin Diesel), living the high life in Cuba, until Cipher (Charlize Theron) comes calling. She has a job for him, he’s not interested – but then she shows him something on her cell phone, and he no longer feels he has a choice. He cannot even bring his team into whatever this job is – not only that, but he has to betray them. He does, and goes to work for Cipher, while the mysterious Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) brings the rest of the team together to try and stop them. The word family is used A LOT – even by Fast and Furious standards.

 

This is the first installment of the series directed by F. Gary Gray – taking over for James Wan, who made one film, who took over from Justin Lin, who made four. Gray is a veteran director, coming off his biggest hit to date – Straight Outta Compton – which wasn’t an action movie, although his resume includes films like Set It Off, The Negotiator and perhaps most relevant to this series, The Italian Job. He’s more of a journeyman craftsman than anything else – and I don’t think he necessarily brings anything new to the table. Yet, he is good at pulling off what the series is famous for – large scale, ridiculous action sequences, particularly car chases. There is a great one in New York, and the climax, on the ice in Russia, that also involves a submarine, is so ridiculous stupid, that you cannot help but smile through it.

 

The movie does, I think, try too hard to bring back Jason Statham’s Deckard – and change the way we see him – which doesn’t really work, since there really is no way around the fact that he cold bloodedly murder Han – in one of the previous double backs the series had to bring Han back, after he died in Tokyo Drift.

 

The biggest disappoint in the cast has to be Charlize Theron’s Cipher though. Coming off of Mad Max: Fury Road, you would think that they would give her an action sequence – particularly a driving sequence – for her to shine. They don’t do that though, instead giving her reams of exposition dialogue to deliver, and not much else. Theron is a terrific actress, but I’m not sure she’s particularly good at slumming it in a film like this – compare her to the famous actress who plays Deckard’s mother in a few scenes, and you see the difference between a terrific actress, who knows she’s in trash and is having a blast doing it, and a terrific actress, who doesn’t quite know what to do with trash.

 

The Fate of the Furious is fine, I guess. It isn’t in the league of the last few movies in this series in terms of being a guilty pleasure – and, obviously, it doesn’t have the emotional impact that Paul Walker’s final appearance in the last film does. Still, this franchise doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. If this really does become the new James Bond – a franchise that stretches on for 30 films – you’re going to have a few Moonraker’s along the way (and this, at least, is better than Moonraker).

Movie Review: Straight Outta Compton

Straight Outta Compton
Directed by: F. Gary Gray.   
Written by: Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff and S. Leigh Savidge & Alan Wenkus.
Starring: O'Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube), Corey Hawkins (Dr. Dre), Jason Mitchell (Eazy-E), Paul Giamatti (Jerry Heller), Neil Brown Jr. (Dj Yella), Aldis Hodge (MC Ren), Marlon Yates Jr. (The D.O.C), R. Marcos Taylor (Suge Knight), Carra Patterson (Tomica), Alexandra Shipp (Kim), Keith Stanfield (Snoop).

There is no denying that Straight Outta Compton is a musical biopic that hits just about every cliché of the genre – so much so that there are times where I couldn’t help but laugh and think about Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which mercilessly sent up the genre. Like in Walk Hard, actors playing famous people come on screen and are immediately introduced to the audience in somewhat awkward dialogue, even when no introduction is necessary (do we really need the movie telling us that the giant bald man, in a red track suit smoking a huge cigar and looking mean is Suge Knight immediately after he appears on screen for the first time?), or when the movie overly simplifies the music writing process – so that in one scene the members of N.W.A. are needlessly harassed on the street by the cops, and then immediately afterwards Ice Cube writes what would become “Fuck the Police” – in seemingly 30 seconds flat. So yes, it is true, Straight Outta Compton is as clichéd a musical biopic as it could be – yet that only slightly diminishes the film itself, which is so well directed and acted – and, to be fair when it isn’t shoehorning in star cameos or simplifying the song writing process, written, as well as being a film that is both very much of the time and place the events came out of – the late 1980s, early 1990s L.A. hip hop scene, and yet completely relevant to what is going on in America today. There are other, more significant shortcomings to the movie to be sure (which we’ll get) – but the fact that it is as clichéd as it is, didn’t bother me too much.

The movie quickly introduces what will become the three main characters in the first three scenes – the first showing Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) in a drug deal that threatens to become violent before the cops show up and he has to flee, the next showing Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) listening to music, before being chewed out by his mother for not taking his life seriously, and the third with Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr. – playing his father) – as a teenager on the bus working on lyrics. The three already know each other, and Dre and Cube already have their goals in the music industry clearly defined. Eazy-E isn’t as sure – but he has the money. They decide to cut a song – and when the original group flees the studio, not understanding Cube’s lyrics, Eazy-E steps into the studio instead. The song becomes a local hit – and soon he is approached by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) – who we get the feeling is an industry hanger on – someone who used to be big, but is now struggling. He thinks Eazy-E has something special – and it isn’t long before all of them – Eazy, Dre, Cube – and others are in the studio making what will become one of the biggest, and most influential, rap albums in history – Straight Outta Compton – and heading out on tour. Egos and money will eventually get in their way – and the movie keeps following them – together and separate – for about a decade.

The movie is at its best in its earlier scenes – when the whole N.W.A. is together, working on an album, going on tour, dealing with instant fame and money, the women who come along with that – not to mention the controversy that followed them, as the many thought their new brand of “gangsta rap” glorified crime, violence and drugs, and their controversial song “Fuck the Police” drew the attention of police everywhere they went, and even the FBI. Director F. Gary Gray – making his best film since Set It Off, nearly 20 years ago – goes full Scorsese in these scenes, with a camera that is constantly swirling around these characters. The concert scenes are wonderful, and capture the energy, passion and anger of the music. The movie becomes slightly more disjointed at the end of that tour however – when Cube refuses to sign the same contract as everyone else (thinking, correctly, that Heller is taking advantage of them) and leaves – a path that Dre will eventually follow as well. Without the chief songwriter (Cube) and musical genius (Dre), Eazy-E starts to fall on harder time, while Cube goes off to a more successful solo career, and Dre gets into producing, and eventually falls in with Suge Knight.

The three main performances in the movie are all excellent. There’s no denying that O’Shea Jackson Jr. takes after his father – he looks a lot like of course, but also nails his vocal mannerisms, and has mastered his various looks of outraged anger. Hawkins gets the more serious Dre as well – he’s less vocal than the rest of the group, more committed to the music and producing, and clearly the most visionary. Best of all is Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, who has a lot of heavy lifting to do, going from a fun loving hedonist, to someone paying for that.

The movie taps into the anger that fueled N.W.A. – an anger that is just as relevant now as it was then. It is impossible to watch the movie – with its various scenes of them being harassed by the police, and riots that greeted the Rodney King verdict – and not think of everything that has happened in the last year, starting in Ferguson, and spreading out across America. America likes to talk about how far they have come on race over the years – and there’s no doubt, they have come a long way. A movie like Straight Outta Compton however is a reminder of how, in some regards, nothing much has changed.

The movie has come under attack over the past week for its whitewashing on incidents involving Dr. Dre and violence against women, which the film doesn’t acknowledge at all, as well for the film’s glossing over the misogyny inherit in some of N.W.A.’s lyrics. The film does address – directly – the controversy around their lyrics for glamorizing violence, and even for one of Cube’s songs accused of being anti-Semitic, for its attack on Heller – but the film seems unwilling to grapple with the misogyny at all. The soundtrack seems to have been chosen carefully – only one song (which, I gather, is about sucking dick) is highlighted that crosses that line. To make matters worse, the film lacks any real female characters - only Eazy-E’s widow Tomica (Carra Patterson) is given significant screen time (not surprisingly, she, along with Ice Cube and Dr. Dre are among the film’s producers) – while the rest of the female characters are anonymous – and it does get a little tiring seeing scene after scene of what amounts to orgies, with woman in various stages of undress, that the movie barely acknowledges. A better, stronger, braver, more confident film would have tackled this issue in some way. It would have given its characters more complexity – and considering hip hop culture still struggles with misogyny today, would have been a riskier, yet more relevant choice. The movie is already long at nearly two and half hours – but other scenes could have been sacrificed for at least addressing the issue.

Still, Straight Outta Compton accomplishes what it sets out to do – and even if it is a whitewash of its subjects, well, most musical biopics are. The movie could have certainly been better than it is. Yet, it’s rare that a mainstream American movie addresses all the issues that the film does – in such a forthright way, and in such an entertaining package. Perhaps its success will lead to more movies like this (please, someone make a Snoop Dogg movie with Keith Stanfield, who first broke through in Short Term 12, who is utterly brilliant as Snoop in his few scenes in this movie) – and that they will address what Straight Outta Compton leaves out. What we have now however, may be imperfect, but it’s still something worth celebrating.

Movie Review: Law Abiding Citizen

Law Abiding Citizen **
Directed By: F. Gary Gray.
Written By: Kurt Wimmer.
Starring: Jamie Foxx (Nick Rice), Gerard Butler (Clyde Shelton), Colm Meaney (Detective Dunnigan), Bruce McGill (Jonas Cantrell), Leslie Bibb (Sarah Lowell), Michael Irby (Detective Garza), Gregory Itzin (Warden Iger), Regina Hall (Kelly Rice), Emerald-Angel Young (Denise Rice), Christian Stolte (Clarence Darby), Annie Corley (Judge Laura Burch), Richard Portnow (Bill Reynolds), Viola Davis (Mayor), Michael Kelly (Bray), Josh Stewart (Rupert Ames).

I think that somewhere in Law Abiding Citizen, a good movie is lurking waiting to come out. It strikes me as a movie that probably started out as a very ambitious screenplay, and got dumbed down as it went through the studio machine. If the movie had stayed true to some of the ideas it introduced – than so casually dismisses – this could have been a great, morally ambigious thriller. Instead, it’s just another silly action movie – and one that falls apart upon close inspection.

Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is spending a happy day with his wife and daughter, when there is a knock on the door, and two men enter, tie him up, and murder his family, leaving him for dead. The pair is arrested early, and it seems like a slam dunk of a case, but then some evidence is tossed out on a legal technicality, and the whole thing is in danger. Clyde still wants to go to trial – he can identify both men – but ADA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), who is in charge of the case is less sure. He cuts a deal with one of the pair – giving him just 5 years in jail for a double homicide – in exchange for his testimony against the other one, which will put him on death row. Clyde is displeased with the result, and let Nick know it, but cannot change his mind.

10 years pass, and Nick is also now a family man. He attends the execution of the man he put on death row all those years before, but something goes horribly, horribly wrong. The prisoner is killed, but is in excoriating, agonizing pain, and the gallery is horrified. When the body of the man who got off is found – chopped into 25 pieces – the police immediately arrest Clyde. Clyde is unsurprised, and doesn’t ever really deny what he did. But this is just the beginning of the game that Clyde is going to play with Nick and the entire legal system that cuts deals with murderers and lets them roam the streets. He is pissed, and he wants everyone to know it.

Law Abiding Citizen is a rather silly movie, as Clyde keeps playing his game, keeps being able to kill people despite the obvious handicap of being in jail. He seems to be to get to anyone, anywhere with an elaborate death sentence to give them. Nick will discover that Clyde is what is known as a “brain”, a man that the military contacts when they need to kill someone but cannot get close to them. Clyde devised ways to kill without ever having to be in the same room as the victim.

As the movie progresses, things get more and more out of control, and the movie becomes more and more ridiculous. It must be said that Butler gives one of his better performances here, as a man hell-bent on revenge. We feel for Clyde, and many audience members will find themselves rooting for him, even if they know what he is doing is wrong. One of the problems with the movie is that Foxx seems to be sleepwalking through his role as Nick – never making him anywhere near as interesting as Clyde is. What could have been a fascinating, moral puzzle – where we feel sympathy for the “bad guy” and hate the “good guy” (like the screenplay, I think wants us to do, but Foxx cannot bring himself to play) is undone by the laziness of the Foxx performance.

The movie is director by F. Gary Gray, who has made good action movies in the past (Set It Off, The Negotiator, The Italian Job) and will no doubt do so again, but here, despite the fact that he keeps the movie moving at a fast pace, he is undone by the stupidity of the screenplay. Are there any developments in the movie that you can actually believe would happen in the real world? I didn’t. And the movie wasn’t good enough for me to suspend my disbelief either. Law Abiding Citizen is a movie that could have, and should have, been great. But it is undone by a screenplay that becomes too farfetched to be believed (the last twist is especially egregious) and a central performance that is too boring.