Movie Review: Winchester

Winchester * ½ / *****

Directed by: The Spierig Brothers.

Written by: Tom Vaughan and The Spierig Brothers. 

Starring: Helen Mirren (Sarah Winchester), Jason Clarke (Dr. Eric Price), Sarah Snook (Marion Marriott), Finn Scicluna-O'Prey (Henry Marriott), Emm Wiseman (Nancy), Tyler Coppin (Arthur Gates), Michael Carman (Frank), Angus Sampson (John Hansen), Alice Chaston (Clara), Eamon Farren (Ben Block), Laura Brent (Ruby Price), Bruce Spence (Augustine).

 

Since their invention, horror movies have often been used to smuggle in political messages that filmmakers would never be able to make in a more overt form. It’s a long tradition, that continues right up until today – Jordan Peele’s Get Out works so well because he found a way to bury a timely message into a horror film to name but one recent example. The difference between the films that do it well, and a film like Winchester, is that those other films find a way to wrap it up in an entertaining story, interesting characters, and genuine scares. Winchester has a political message alright – and its one I happen to agree with, in that guns are killing machines and they are too ingrained in American culture. You could use this as a jumping off point for a good horror movie – but the Spierig brothers Winchester doesn’t do that. It plays more like a screed than a film – and one without anything going on beyond that message.

 

The year is 1906, and Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren) owns 51% of the Winchester rifle company, passed to her by her late husband decades before. Her only child also died years ago, and she now spends all her time in her San Jose mansion. When she bought it, it was a normal house – but she has now turned it into a maze of sorts. She is constantly having rooms built and torn down, and the house has grown unwieldly. She also has interesting ideas about the way she makes her money – she thinks guns are evil, and that the blood of all of its victims is on her hands. She keeps track of all their names in books on her shelves. And yes, the constant construction does have something to do with them. The Board of Directors thinks she’s gone nuts – and hired Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke), getting over his own trauma, to evaluate her – hoping she’ll be declared crazy, and they can take the company from her.

 

What follows is a series of haunted house style scares – many involving the child of Winchester’s niece, Marion (Sarah Snook). The scares don’t really work – they aren’t particularly inventive or original, and basically trade on cliché. You would think having a setting like this strange house would be a goldmine for Production Design (when I think about what someone like Guillermo Del Toro and his team would have done – see Crimson Peak, a film I liked more and more, I weep). The cast is talented, but they’re going through the motions here – Mirren doesn’t seem invested at all, and Jason Clarke seems bored. Snook is perhaps a little better – she was the best part of what remains the Spierig’s best film (least seen) film Predestination, but her character here is underwritten.

 

Basically, it seems like everyone involved wanted to make an anti-gun horror movie, and didn’t really think through how best to do. Make no mistake, a film with this premise could work wonderfully. But it would have required more imagination than anyone involved here seems capable of.

Movie Review: Jigsaw

Jigsaw ** / *****

Directed by: Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig.

Written by: Pete Goldfinger & Josh Stolberg.

Starring: Matt Passmore (Logan Nelson), Tobin Bell (Jigsaw / John Kramer), Callum Keith Rennie (Detective Halloran), Hannah Emily Anderson (Eleanor Bonneville), Clé Bennett (Detective Keith Hunt), Laura Vandervoort (Anna), Paul Braunstein (Ryan), Mandela Van Peebles (Mitch), Brittany Allen (Carly), Josiah Black (Edgar Munsen).

 

The Saw franchise was an annual Halloween tradition between 2004 and 2010 – every year, releasing a new film, in which the killer known as Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) devises new games and new traps for his victims to play, which they more often than not lost, and ended up in bloody messes on the floor – this despite the fact that Jigsaw dies fairly early in the series. The original saw – directed by James Wan – had a simplicity to it that really does make it the best of the series, and is also the least gruesome of the bunch (the other installments can properly be classified as torture porn – I don’t think the original can). Looking at my database of movies, I noticed I gave up on the Saw franchise after 6 installments – which seems like an odd thing for me to do, considering the 7^th had the subtitle of The Final Chapter – you’d think I’d stick it out for one final movie, but no – I had had enough. And yet, I found myself oddly looking forward to Jigsaw – a kind of prequel/sequel/reboot of the franchise – probably because having not watched or much thought about the series since 2010, I wanted to see what the filmmaker had in store. After all, if they were reviving the franchise after all that time, you’d think they’d have something pretty special up their sleeve.

 

Unfortunately they really don’t. Jigsaw is hardly an awful movie – and yes, for the sick minded out there, it does offer some nifty traps that slice and dice, and other dispose of the victims in the film in bloody and gruesome ways. Yet, I cannot help but wonder if this really is the best they could come up with in their desperate attempt to revive the once insanely profitable series. The convoluted Jigsaw backstory (Britt Hayes does a great rundown of it at Screencrush if you’re interested) gets even more convoluted in this installment – mostly in ways that make little to no sense. Then again, the backstory in these movies was always just a way to further screw with the audience a little – and to setup the next film, because the series kept writing itself into corners (probably deliberately) that they had to find a way out of.

 

But more disappointing is that the games themselves (which I won’t spoil here) don’t seem to really be playing fair with the victims. Remember, Jigsaw did get mad at protégé Amanda in the original series at some point, because she was building unwinnable games, and that didn’t jive with his sense of fairness. More than once in Jigsaw did I find myself thinking that various characters were never really given a chance to win their games – and if that’s the case, what’s the point.

 

Also, the film follows what the original series always did – and always bugged me – in that it follows the investigations by the police and those around them (the main character here is actually a coroner) trying to figure out the game going on – and always, of course, being somehow involved themselves. These scenes were always my least favorite part of the Saw series – and unfortunately they take up way too much time in Jigsaw.

 

Now, if you’re a Saw superfan, you’ll probably like this. It doesn’t have the brutal simplicity of the first film – and didn’t completely gross me out like the best of the sequels – but it mainly delivers what fans of the Saw series apparently liked enough to make 7 movies profitable last decade. Then again, there is a reason they stopped making them as well, isn’t there?

Movie Review: Predestination

Predestination
Directed by: The Spierig Brothers 
Written by: The Spierig Brothers based on the story by Robert A. Heinlein.
Starring: Ethan Hawke (The Barkeep), Sarah Snook (The Unmarried Mother), Noah Taylor (Mr. Robertson).

For the first hour or so, The Spierig Brothers’ Predestination kept me under its strange spell. This is a time travel movie, and like all time travel movies, gets a little ridiculous when trying to explain the mechanics of time travel – but unlike many of them, the film actually works, and does some interesting things with time travel – and its contradictions. It’s an intelligent sci-fi movie, whose focus is more on character than special effects or action. It has a plot that takes one unexpected turn after another – until the final act where it takes one expected turn after another. Not only did the big final reveal – which is played as if it’s supposed to shock the audience, not shock me, but I actually thought they had made it so obvious earlier in the movie that they didn’t need to reveal it at all. I guess I’m a little smarter than the Spierig Brothers expect me to be. So yes, the last act is a pretty big disappointment given the first hour – but I enjoyed the first hour so much, I still think you should see the movie if it at all interests you.

Predestination is the type of movie where plot twists are key so I’ll throw out a SPOILER WARNING here just to be sure. I knew nothing about it going in, and I think that’s the best way to experience the film. I’ll try not to give too much away of the plot – but I need to say something about it, so what I will reveal is this – the movie is basically a two hander between Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook. We know from the beginning of the film that he is a “temporal agent” – or the time traveler, and he is searching for the “Fizzle Bomber”, a terrorist responsible for many bombings, none worse than on a day in March 1975 when he set off a bomb that killed 11,000 in New York City. Hawke has been trailing him for years, but blew his last chance. He now has to go on one last mission, before he will be retired. That mission involved him pretending to be a barkeeper and talking to a man in a bar who tells him the story of Jane (Sarah Snook) – a gifted young orphan, and her troubled life. END OF SPOILER WARNING

I liked the look of Predestination, which is set both in the past and the future. It is based on a 1959 short story by Robert A. Heinlein, and one of the interesting things about the adaptation is that they don’t change the dates to be more modern. In this movie, time travel is discovered in 1981 – and you can travel up to 53 years either backwards or forwards in time, and that’s it. The bulk of the movie is set during the 1970s – although at various times the film takes place in every decade between the 1940s and the 1980s – all of which look kind of like our own world in those years, but also slightly futuristic. It’s a good look.

The performance though are what make Predestination work. Hawke is appropriately mysterious and sympathetic here. Yes, this is another of his “paycheck” movies, like Sinister, The Purge, Getaway or his previous film for The Spierig’s, Daybreakers. But just because he’s doing it for a paycheck, so he can continue to do other, more interesting things as well, doesn’t mean he’s in cruise control. He’s quite good here. But it is Snook who delivers what should be a star making performance – without saying too much, I will say that she delivers a complex performance that hits more notes than most actresses do in much more serious roles. I had no idea who she was before this movie – I won’t forget now.

The movie kind of lets Snook and Hawke down though in the final act. The movie took one twist after another in its first hour – few of which I saw coming, and I couldn’t wait to see where they were going with it. The final act however is as predictable as the first hour was unpredictable. Worse, it was really rather a series of stupid twists, which I don’t think make any sense – even if I wanted it to.

Still, the movie has enough to recommend it. It’s an odd movie to be sure – and that’s never a bad thing to me. Yes, the finale is more than a little dumb, but it’s a different type of time travel movie, and I appreciate that, even if I wish the film had found a better way to end it all.

Movie Review: Daybreakers

Daybreakers ** ½
Directed By: The Spierig Brothers.
Written By: The Spierig Brothers.
Starring: Ethan Hawke (Edward Dalton), Willem Dafoe (Elvis Cormac), Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), Claudia Karvan (Audrey Bennett), Michael Porman (Frankie), Isabel Lucas (Allsion Bromley).

A large part of me wants to like the new vampire movie Daybreakers. For one thing, this is the bloodiest film I have seen in a few months, and I do love a good dose of gratuitous violence. For another, the vampires in this movie actually act like vampires, not a bunch of pussy male models (if you don’t know what movie I am referring to, then you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years). And finally, Daybreakers really does try to be more than just another horror movie. There are political and social overtones in the film that I appreciated, and yet they don’t quite take hold. Daybreakers tries really hard to do more than just scare the audience, and even it doesn’t quite work, I still appreciate it.

In 2009 an outbreak of vampirism shook the world, and now 10 years later almost everyone left alive is a vampire. The remaining humans are mainly kept in huge storage facilities and farmed for their blood, but the supply is running low. If a blood substitute is not found soon, then the vampires are going to go through a strange evolution into absolute monsters - raging ids who will attack anything. Feeding on themselves or other vampires only makes the process worse.

Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is the Chief Hematologist for a huge corporation. He never wanted to be a vampire, and still refuses to drink human blood. It sickens him that he works for a company, who runs the largest blood farm in the world, but they also fund his research - he is looking for a blood substitute so that vampires no longer have to feed on humans. His boss, Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), is amoral to the core, but recognizes good work when he sees it. A blood substitute means profit. Sometimes, even in a world run by vampires, never change. A group of humans contact, led by Elvis (Willem Dafoe) and Audrey (Claudia Karvan), contact Edward for his help. They do not want a blood substitute. They want a cure.

Daybreakers tries to make points about the current corporate culture, this time greedy executives are literally bloodsuckers. Neill’s Bromley is not interested in a cure for vampirism, but the blood substitute. In part because he loves be a vampire, but also because it means less profits. A blood substitute will be bought over and over again, whereas a cure will only be bought once. This mirrors the criticism that has been leveled at pharmaceutical companies over the years for the research on AIDS. A cure or vaccine would not make them as much money as the cocktail of drugs that AIDS patients have to take every day.

It also quite clearly is looking at a world where a precious fluid will become in low supply, and the chaos that will result because of it. Sooner or later in our world, the same thing could happen if we do not become less addicted to oil, and find a substitute. The war for oil has already begun, but will become more violent as the years pass.

These themes were the most interesting aspect of the movie to me, and unfortunately they are only half developed during the course of the film. The film spends much more time on the relationships in the film, and they are not nearly as interesting. Hawke is a little dull as Dalton, a constant do gooder. Neill is marvelously, malevolently evil as Bromley. Best of all is Dafoe, an absolute hoot as Elvis, a string of one liners marvelously delivered. He is clearly having fun here, and as a result when he’s on screen, so are we.

The film is also gloriously violent, especially the climax, which stages a few huge bloody battles, where geyser of blood shot out from decapitated heads, arms fly across the screen, and blood covers just about everything in sight.

Written and directed by The Spierig brothers (who also directed the similarly ambitious but flawed zombie film The Undead a few years ago), Daybreakers feels like the work of real filmmakers who are striving for something beyond their genre. That haven’t quite gotten there yet, but they are getting closer. I look forward to seeing what they do next.