Movie Review: Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo: A Star Wars Story *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Ron Howard.

Written by: Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan based on characters created by George Lucas.

Starring: Alden Ehrenreich (Han Solo), Woody Harrelson (Tobias Beckett), Emilia Clarke (Qi'Ra), Donald Glover (Lando Calrissian), Thandie Newton (Val), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (L3-37), Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Paul Bettany (Dryden Vos), Jon Favreau (Rio Durant), Linda Hunt (Lady Proxima).

 

When Disney purchased Lucasfilms, and along with it Star Wars, and announced that we would basically get a new Star Wars film every year, we knew eventually that sooner or later, the idea of a new Star Wars film would be less special than it once was. The Force Awakens was huge, The Last Jedi did very well, and even Rogue One – the first spinoff or so called “Star Wars Story” was also a hit. But even watching Rogue One – as good as it was (and it’s very good), I couldn’t help but get the impression that Star Wars was now just another blockbuster franchise. Like the Marvel films, some will be very good, some bad, many in between – and the box office would also fluctuate depending on people’s interest in the character – this is why Doctor Strange made $232 million, but Black Panther is still going at plus $600. You cannot expect your audience to feel the same excitement when you’re serving up a new one of these things every year (or in this case, just six months after The Last Jedi) then when they had to wait years in between installments.

 

Solo is the weakest Star Wars films since they came back – and one of the weaker ones altogether. In all honestly, it felt like just another fun but forgettable summer blockbuster, with some great action scenes and enough good performances and twists to keep you entertained for its entire runtime – but a year from now, you’ll likely have forgotten most of the details. This isn’t really a knock on the film – crafting a summer blockbuster this much fun isn’t an easy thing to do, and director Ron Howard makes it look easy. The only way you’re going to walk out of this film disappointed is if your expectations are too high – or you’re allergic to fan service, because this film has that in spades (which perhaps explains why they released it so close after The Last Jedi – which had very little fan service, angering a lot of fans who act like giant man babies when someone does something with the franchise they don’t like).

 

Solo is the origin story for Han Solo, answering all the questions that most of us never thought to ask. Where did the last name come from? How did he meet Chewie? What happened at that card game when he won the Millennium Falcon from Lando? What happened to turn him into the roguish lone wolf who only pretends he doesn’t have a conscience that we all so loved in the original trilogy? These questions didn’t need to be answered, but to be fair, neither did we really need to know how the rebels stole the plans for the Death Star – and Rogue One was still a very good film.

 

In the role of Han Solo is Alden Ehrenreich, who has the most unenviable task of any actor in this recent string on Star Wars movies – because he has to recreate a role that was played to perfection by Harrison Ford. Not only that, but Ehrenreich has to do more with the role than Ford did, because now he has to be the center of the movie, and not just the scene stealing supporting character – Han Solo here has to drive the action and the emotions of the story more than Ford ever did. Luckily, Ehrenreich is a fine actor (don’t @ me, but he’s a better actor than Ford – but Ford is a better movie star if that makes sense, and it does). Ehrenreich, smartly, doesn’t try too hard to do a Harrison Ford impression – he steals a facial expression once in a while, but mostly, he knows he isn’t a young Harrison Ford, and doesn’t try to fool you into thinking he is. Ehrenreich plays this role as well as it could be played – but everyone else in the cast has an easier job, and as a result, a few of them steal quite a few scenes.

 

The biggest example of that is clearly Donald Glover, who is having a blast playing Lando as pure arrogant swagger and charming sex appeal. The role doesn’t have much depth, but it doesn’t need it. Glover is a joy to watch in this role in every scene. If they actually do make a standalone Lando movie (and they should – at least if they’re going to keep churning these things out), he may well face the same challenges Ehrenreich does here – having to carry a movie (you cannot steal a movie when you’re the main character) – but here, he’s great fun. The biggest surprise is probably Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the voice of droid L3-37 – a “woke” droid wanting to inspire revolution. Her role is small, but comes just at the point in the film when the whole thing needs a kick – and she does it wonderfully. Woody Harrelson is in fine form as Tobias Becket – the crook who takes Han under his wing, but may never be fully trustworthy. Emilia Clarke is fine as Han’s first love – who he reunites with, but doesn’t quite understand how things have changed. Paul Bettany does what he can in a few scenes as a one dimensional villain.

 

Overall, Solo is a lot of fun. The stakes are lower in this Star Wars film than in any other of the series – it’s basically a Star Wars heist film, in which Solo and the team he falls in with have to steal a lot of fuel for reasons (seriously dudes, way TOO MANY reasons – we really do not need as much conversation about the fuel as this movie gives us). There is a terrific early action sequences trying to rob a moving train, which is exciting and fun, and the climaxes (yes, more than one) are well handled. This is why you hire someone like Ron Howard – he isn’t the guy you hire to take risks that will pay off big. He isn’t going to elevate material – but he can execute as well as anyone, and while we can always wonder just what the film would have looked like had Christopher Miller and Phil Lord had been given the chance to complete what they started, the end result is still fun. At some point, they’re going to have to decide what precisely they want to do with these films – if they’ll be content to just produce fun content like this, or whether they want to take more chances like The Last Jedi did. My hope is more of the latter – but if the stand alone films are fun as Solo, it’s hard to complain – even if Solo doesn’t have the impact of most Star Wars films – it’s still a good time at the movies.

Movie Review: Rush

Rush
Directed by: Ron Howard.
Written by: Peter Morgan.
Starring: Chris Hemsworth (James Hunt), Daniel Brühl (Niki Lauda), Olivia Wilde (Suzy Miller), Alexandra Maria Lara (Marlene Lauda), Pierfrancesco Favino (Clay Regazzoni), David Calder (Louis Stanley), Natalie Dormer (Nurse Gemma), Stephen Mangan (Alastair Caldwell), Christian McKay (Lord Hesketh), Alistair Petrie (Stirling Moss), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Anthony 'Bubbles' Horsley), Colin Stinton (Teddy Mayer), Jamie de Courcey (Harvey 'Doc' Postlethwaite), Augusto Dallara (Enzo Ferrari), Ilario Calvo (Luca Di Montezemolo), Patrick Baladi (John Hogan).

Rush, like most films directed by Ron Howard, is pretty much exactly the film you expect to see when you walk into the theater. The trailer sets up a good racing movie, with a rivalry between the hotshot, go-for-glory mentality of James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) vs. the cautious, intellectual approach of Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl), and basically shows how their rivalry developed over a number of years, culminating in their season long dual in 1976 for the F-1 Championship. And that is precisely what Howard delivers, in a film where the racing scenes are expertly staged, and the performances are top notch. The one thing about the film that did surprise me – pleasantly – is how it never takes sides. It doesn’t turn Hunt into a hero, and Lauda into a villain, or vice versa. Instead, it presents two men, with completely different views on what it takes to be a winner – and lets the audience decide who was right, and who was wrong – or, if you’re like me, decide that they were equally right. Both men raced the way they needed to if they wanted to win.

The movie sets these two drivers up as polar opposites – and benefits greatly from the performances by the two leads. Chris Hemsworth, who has never really had a chance to show his acting chops (he’s fine as Thor, but there are no nuances to that character) portrays Hunt as foolhardy – a fun loving party guy who drinks, smokes and screws constantly, and when he’s behind the wheel, he depends on his own intuitions. He has no fear, gleefully accepts the prospect of death, and goes for broke every time out. It’s a fine performance – and I suspect American audiences are going to be on his side more than not – even though Hunt was British, he is almost a prototypical brash American – and Hemsworth relishes the opportunity to play this charming bad boy. He doesn’t have all that more depth than Thor – but it’s a different role, and one that suits Hemsworth. Daniel Bruhl is even better as Lauda – a man who doesn’t care if anyone likes him, he’s just there to win. He’s more involved with the mechanics of his car, and knows every detail of the race he’s going drive. He is a technical driver, one who relies on his intellect to win. At first, he is the much less sympathetic – and likable – character. But he is also given more depth than Hunt. It would have been easy to turn him into an unfeeling villain – but Peter Morgan’s excellent screenplay doesn’t do that. In fact, by the end, I was rooting for him.

The racing scenes are some of the best of their kind ever put on film. Working with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Howard has crafted scenes that are loud, brash and exciting – often putting us behind the wheel with the drivers. Although at times Howard does rely on some rapid editing, he never loses focus – and you never lose perspective on what is happening. You feel the rush (pardon the use of the word) of the races in your guts as they are going on – that mixture of excitement and fear, that feeds the drivers need to go out there week after week and risk their lives.

As a narrative, Rush follows a fairly well-worn path – the two rivals start off hating each other, and gradually they build up a begrudging respect for the other person. They still may not like each other, but they realize that in a way they need each other – the presence of the other fuels their desire to get better, and pushes them to places they otherwise would not get to. That’s not exactly an original observation, but it gets the job done.

And that pretty much describes the movie as a whole – not exactly original, but it gets the job done. Howard has always been a gifted technical director – and this has to rank as one of the best of his career in that regard. And he has always been good with actors – and he gets career best work out of Hemsworth and Bruhl (the rest of the cast is pretty much disposable – but have some nice moments). And Peter Morgan’s screenplay is very good – stripping the movie of much of the filler movies like this often have, and concentrating on what works. Rush is precisely the movie the previews promised it to be – and for me that makes it an immensely satisfying, if not overly original, movie.

The Career of Ron Howard

Before Rush opens wide this weekend, I was going to write something about Ron Howard’s directing career. I considered doing a ranking of his films, as I have done with many directors in the past, but the truth is out of his 21 theatrical efforts before Rush, I’ve missed 6 films – including some big ones like Night Shift (1982), Splash (1984) and Parenthood (1989) – so I decided against that (I think I’ve caught most of Parenthood when it aired on TV – but I’m not sure). Then, I was going to write a little career retrospective, about Ron Howard the king of the Middlebrow directors. Than in this week’s The Conversation, The Dissolve’s Scott Tobias and Noel Murray beat me to it. (http://thedissolve.com/features/the-conversation/172-the-ron-howard-enigma/). It’s an excellent read, and almost made me not write this at all – but dammit, I already wrote half of it in my head, so I decided to go ahead and do so anyway. I’m such a small blog, it’s not like they’re going to come after me for “stealing” their idea anyway. Besides, I’ve seen a couple of other things looking back at Ron Howard’s career in the past week or so – it’s not like it’s an overly original idea.

When the term “middlebrow” comes up in relation to movies, it’s probably not going to be that long before the name Ron Howard is invoked – usually derisively. I admit, I’ve done it myself at times - I remember expressing disappointment that one of the most daring directors in the world, Oliver Stone, essentially made a “Ron Howard film” when he directed World Trade Center.

It’s easy to see why – Ron Howard IS a middlebrow director. But is that, necessarily, a bad thing? The thing about Ron Howard is almost always, you know what you’re going to get when you walk into one of his movies. He is a skilled technical director – his films are almost always well put together. And, as a former actor, he is capable of getting some very good performances out of his cast. I find it impossible to truly hate many of his movies – but also nearly as impossible to love many of his movies. They seem too impersonal to me. They certainly do not have a “directorial stamp” on them – Howard is no auteur – and as Tobias and Murray point out their conversation, it’s difficult to pinpoint a recurrent theme in Howard’s work – agreeing that the closest he comes is portraying people who “really good” at their jobs – but even they agree that’s a stretch.

There are exceptions to the no “love it or hate it” in the case of Howard of course. I do love Apollo 13 (1995) – and consider it his best movie (we’d be in a better place had that won the Best Picture Oscar in 1995 rather than Braveheart – which would have meant something other than Howard’s A Beautiful Mind could have won in 2001). This is one of the best movies about astronauts ever made – even if it pales in comparison to The Right Stuff (1983) and the upcoming Gravity in that regard. But it’s a movie made with precision and skill – features wonderful performances by Tom Hanks et al, and is perhaps Howard’s most personal film – as we know he loves space. The one film of Howard’s I truly despise is Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), a horrible movie that misses everything charming about the original story. Sure, it made a lot of money – but does anyone NOT hate that film?

Everything falls somewhere in between. True, his two Dan Brown adaptations – The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009) are both bad movies – but can you really lay the blame at Howard’s feet for them? Are they not “well made” films, with performances as good as can be expected, given the source material? Howard probably made as good of films out of those two bad novels as it was possible to make. He was hamstrung by the material there – he didn’t screw anything up that didn’t arrive to him pre-screwed up. His last film before Rush was The Dilemma (2011) – a bad comedy about Vince Vaughn having to decide whether or not to tell his best friend (Kevin James) that his wife (Winona Ryder) was cheating on him. That movies wasn’t really that well directed – and it was tonally inconsistent from scene-to-scene – but a lot of that springs from the screenplay, and the fact Vaughn never quite figures out how to play the role (it did however how just how good Channing Tatum could be in comedic roles). Howard’s biggest misstep in that film was agreeing to do it in the first place. His only other true misfire was 1999’s EdTV, which may have been better had it not come out a year after the similar The Truman Show – which was an excellent film, and showed just how shallow Howard’s film was. It didn’t help that the main character was played by Matthew McConaghey during his “I’m going to coast on my Southern charm” phase. 1986’s Gung Ho may not exactly be a wonderful film – and it is a little uncomfortable at times for it’s depiction of the Japanese, which borders on racist – but if you can ignore that, it’s an affable comedy, with a fine Michael Keaton performance at its core.

But leaving aside the six of his films I haven’t seen (Grand Theft Auto, Night Shift, Splash, Willow, Parenthood and Far & Away) – can anyone truly HATE any of Ron Howard’s other films? How can you not be charmed by the alien and old folks fantasy of Cocoon (1985) – if for no other reason than it gave some legends one last chance to stretch their acting legs a little bit – and netted Don Ameche an Oscar? I have a soft spot for Backdraft (1991) – perhaps because I saw it when I was too young to know how clichéd it is – but it still wins me over when I see it on TV – from its excellent performances in supporting roles by Robert DeNiro and Donald Sutherland, its exciting firefighting scenes, and even its cheesy ending. The Paper (1994) is a fine film about the news business – it’s not a masterpiece, but it’s very good, and has an excellent ensemble cast. Ransom (1996) is an intense thriller; with Mel Gibson is full movie star mood that is satisfying within its limitations. A Beautiful Mind (2001) may have been over rated in 2001 – when it won the Best Picture Oscar (and Howard a directing Oscar) – but 12 years later, it’s now under rated. Like many Best Picture winners, A Beautiful Mind isn’t great enough to support the mantle of “best of the year”, but it’s hardly the travesty some think it to be – and it does contain excellent performances by Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. The Missing (2003) is actually one of my favorite Howard films – a mystical Western, a little darker than typical Howard fare, with very good work by Cate Blanchatt and Tommy Lee Jones. Cinderella Man (2005) is an overly sentimental film to be sure – but it’s period details are wonderful, and Russell Crowe (again) and Paul Giamatti – not to mention Craig Bierko – are all excellent. Howard may try too hard to make Frost/Nixon (2008) more “cinematic” – but at its core, it’s still an excellent tet-a-tet with great work by Frank Langella and Michael Sheen – and a number of fine supporting roles. The movie takes some undeserved shots because it’s one of the “middlebrow” films that got into the Oscar race that year – instead of more popular films like The Dark Knight or Wall-E - and inspired the Academy to go from 5 to 10 Best Picture nominees – but that’s hardly the films fault.

I think Tobias and Murray hit it on the head when they say that while Howard doesn’t elevate the material he’s given, he doesn’t ruin it either. In short, if Ron Howard makes a film from your screenplay, he won’t fuck it up if you’ve written a good one, but he won’t be able paper over its flaws if it’s a bad one. You’re going to see your work up there – for better or worse – in a technically proficient and well-acted film. In old school Hollywood terms, Ron Howard is not Howard Hawks – who would take the movie and make it his own – he’s more Michael Curtiz – who knows how to make a good film when he has good material.

All of this probably seems like I’m dismissing Ron Howard. I’m not. You have to admire a director who has worked consistently in Hollywood for more than 30 years, and for the most part, has put out one good film after another. True, he has very rarely made a “great” film, but he’s also very rarely made a “horrible” one. How many other directors like Ron Howard can say that? In the 30 years he’s been around, how many directors have come and gone, leaving behind little or no lasting impact on film? Ron Howard may be the poor man’s Spielberg, but that’s a hell of lot better than most directors.

To sum up, I’ll go see Rush this weekend. I suspect that I’ll like the film, but not love it. I suspect it will be a well-made film, with exciting racing scenes (those are the type of things Howard does well), and that it will be well acted by its entire cast. With Howard, you usually know what you’re going to get when you walk into the theater – and even if he rarely exceeds your expectations, he also rarely disappoints. Personally, I don’t think that’s all that bad.

Movie Review: The Dilemma

The Dilemma **
Directed by: Ron Howard.
Written by: Allan Loeb.
Starring: Vince Vaughn (Ronny Valentine), Kevin James (Nick Brannen), Jennifer Connelly (Beth), Winona Ryder (Geneva), Channing Tatum (Zip), Queen Latifah (Susan Warner), Amy Morton (Diane Popovich), Chelcie Ross (Thomas Fern), Eduardo N. Martinez (Felix).

Watching The Dilemma, I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s rule about the “Idiot Plot”, which is a movie that would be over in five minutes if all the characters in the movie were not idiots. In this case, there really is one idiot in the movie - unfortunately it is the main character played by Vince Vaughn on whose actions the entire movie hinges. Had the man did what any reasonable person would have in his situation, the film wouldn’t exist - but I guess that’s why he has to act the way he does.

Ronny (Vaughn) has been best friends with Nick (Kevin James) since college - and has always admired the relationship Nick has with his wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder). Now Ronny and Nick on are the verge of the biggest deal of their professional lives, and Nick needs to concentrate wholly on delivering the goods. And Ronny has finally gotten his life together to the point where he thinking of asking his longtime girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly) to marry him. But things go to hell in an instant when Ronny spots Geneva with another man - the younger, appropriately named Zip (Channing Tatum). He has no idea how to handle the situation, and does pretty much everything wrong that he possibly could - turning pretty much everyone against him

Vaughn is one of those actors who pretty much plays the same character in every film - the fast talking, charming man who simply refuses to grow up. Vaughn can deliver one of those torrid comic rants like almost no one else in movies right now - and he delivers a bunch of them in this film. In fact, Vaughn pretty much nothing else in this film except those rants. It has to be hard on the rest of the cast, who for the majority of the movie simply has to sit back and listen to him rant and rave. Even Kevin James, who is usually going so wildly over the top in each and every one of his scenes that you cannot help but watch him. Vaughn is fine, I suppose, but as he has proven time and again, he is only as good as the material he is given. In films like Wedding Crashers, Made and Swingers he can be hilarious. In films like Fred Claus and Four Christmases, he can be almost painful. The Dilemma is somewhere in between those two. His supporting cast is wasted. Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder are both great actresses, but are given little to nothing to do. Better is Channing Tatum, who is doing something different from his normal stoic, strong jawed self here.

Did I mention the film was directed by Ron Howard? It surprises me when I saw the preview that Howard would direct something like this, and surprises me even more now that I have seen the film. Howard may not be my favorite filmmaker working, but there has for the most part been a quality to his work that I admire. Far and away his best film this decade was the one that no one saw - the dark Western The Missing. But with the two Robert Langdon adaptations and now this film, I wonder what has happened to Howard’s ambition. Perhaps after making more physically demanding films, like The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, he wanted to relax a little bit and go back to his roots and make a comedy. But couldn’t he have found a better screenplay to work with? It is a by the numbers, formulaic movie that I would have thought that a director with Howard’s influence would have picked something better.

It’s not that The Dilemma is such a horrible movie. It really isn’t. There are isolated moments that work well. But I keep coming back to the fact that Ronny acts like pretty much no one in the real world would in faced with this situation. A decision has to be made, and yet at every turn, Ronny makes one horrible decision after another - and one decision that he had to have known would not work out, because they make no sense. Yes, I know it’s a comedy, and as such needs to put it characters in somewhat exaggerated, comic situations. Yet, there has to be some sense of reality to the movie for it to work at all. And The Dilemma doesn’t have that.

Movie Review: Angels and Demons

Angels and Demons * ½
Directed By: Ron Howard.
Written By: David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman based on the novel by Dan Brown.
Starring: Tom Hanks (Robert Langdon), Ewan McGregor (Camerlengo Patrick McKenna), Ayelet Zurer (Vittoria Vetra), Stellan Skarsgård (Commander Richter), Pierfrancesco Favino (Inspector Olivetti), Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Assassin), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Cardinal Strauss), Thure Lindhardt (Chartrand), David Pasquesi (Claudio Vincenzi), Cosimo Fusco (Father Simeon).

I don’t care how many millions of books he sells; Dan Brown just is not a very good writer. I hated The DaVinci Code novel so much that I stopped reading it about ¾ of the way through. It was just so poorly written, it made my brain hurt. The movie version was a little bit better – not because director Ron Howard or any of the cast elevated the material, but simply because material that dumb works better as a movie then it does as a book – because it is easier to turn your brain off. But it still wasn’t what anyone would call a “good” movie. I will admit that I kind of enjoyed Angels and Demons in its book form – no it’s not high art, but I did not find as insultingly inane as The DaVinci Code. But the film version is a lumbering bore of a movie. I thought that with this much talent assembled for one movie, based on a decent, trashy thriller, that the film may at least be better than The DaVinci Code. I was wrong – it’s worse.

Tom Hanks is back as Harvard Professor of Symbology Robert Langdon. Someone has stolen some anti-matter from a lab in Switzerland and planted it somewhere in Vatican City on the night that Conclave – where Cardinals from all over the world gather to elect the new Pope – is set to begin. Because it looks like the ancient secret society of the Illuminati are behind the attack, The Vatican calls in Robert Langdon, although his actions during The DaVinci Code did not endear him to the church. The same man who planted the bomb has also kidnapped four Cardinals – the Prefetti – or the four frontrunners to become the new Pope. He tells them that he will kill one an hour starting at 8 pm and at midnight the bomb will go off, destroying Vatican City. Langdon teams up with Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), one of the scientists who created the anti-matter to try and assemble ancient clues which will lead them to church where the Cardinals will be killed, and hopefully, to the bomb at the end of the line.

The problem with Brown’s books, and the movies based on them, is that they are entirely plot centric. He doesn’t seem very interested in creating believable characters, so everyone in the books and movies are one dimensional, and given only the most perfunctory dialogue to deliver. Hanks, one of the most charming actors in cinema history, is stuck delivering some truly inane dialogue. This is a movie where they feel the need to stop – even though they are on a tight timeline – and explain everything they are doing and why every few minutes. I suppose that’s better than Zurer whose job, much like Audrey Tautou’s in The DaVinci Code, is to stand next to Hanks looking pretty while he explains what they have to do. Ewan McGregor has the film’s best role, as the Camerlengo (Pope’s assistant), a Priest whose has the power of the Pope until a new Pope is elected, and who has ulterior motives underneath everything he does. But McGregor cannot make him the least bit interesting. Stellan Skarsgaard, another talented actor, is wasted as the head of the Swiss Guard, as is Armin Mueller Stahl as the Cardinal in charge of running the election for a new Pope. None of these talented actors are given much of anything to do during the course of the movie.

It should be said that director Ron Howard knows how to make a movie. He’s no Scorsese or Spielberg, but he is competent behind the camera, and he does his best to keep the plot moving rapidly enough that the audience doesn’t stop to think about how stupid the proceedings in the movie are. He certainly makes Vatican City look beautiful throughout the night, and he probably does about as good of a job with the material he has as is possible. It’s just not very good material. Screenwriters David Koepp and Akiva Goldsmith condense Brown’s novel, and cut out some of the stupider stuff (thankfully, Langdon does not jump out of a helicopter without a parachute in the movie), but never solve the problem of the characters or the dialogue. The plot just keeps chugging along on autopilot throughout.

Perhaps had I not read the book, I would have enjoyed the movie more. With a movie that is entirely focused on the plot, and its twists and turns, when you already know what’s going to happen, it becomes much less interesting or entertaining to watch. But great movies (or hell, even good movies) should function whether or not you know what’s going to happen in them. Angels and Demons does not.