What we get in the movie is not at all what was suggested by the early production reports or the marketing – instead, it’s a thoroughly odd experience, a tonal mix that didn’t quite work for me, but something that definitely sets itself apart from the dime-a-dozen thrillers Neeson has made consistently for the past 10 years.
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However, while parts of the movie don’t really work, Shyamalan’s ultimate goal is to make the audience doubt the truth of the characters’ abilities. In a climactic scene outside the facility, Shyamalan uses extreme wide shots, fish-eye close-ups, and clumsy staging to strip a fight between Dunn and The Horde of the thrilling, Marvel-style grandeur we might expect from the subject matter.
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The bafflement that the character’s family feels about his actions – first as an absentee father and then as a drug mule – will feel familiar to anyone with a family member with a penchant for frustrating behaviour. Stone wants to be a provider, but doesn’t fit into the traditional model for one, and he doesn’t understand why others don’t recognize what he’s trying to do.
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The size and skill of Widows’ cast is enough to mesmerize on its own, but once you get a grasp of the various threads, it’s fascinating to watch how McQueen tightens each one in turn, until he can yank one and let the whole thing unspool.
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Goddard brings vestiges of this approach to his newest film, Bad Times at the El Royale. He even carries over the theme of the characters being constantly watched by unknown forces. But though Goddard captures some strong performances in the process, Bad Times doesn’t have the subversion, shocks or flat-out hilarity of the filmmaker’s previous film. Instead, we get an overlong exercise in brilliant setup, with no follow-through.
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To be sure, the pace of Burning is slow, and those expecting a Hitchcockian everyman wrapping up a citizen-justice murder case in the space of 100 minutes will be disappointed. Lee lays out enough material that up until that final scene (and perhaps even beyond it), the door is still open for the tables to turn and Jong-su to be revealed as the one who kidnapped Ha-emi.
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Which is all well and good, but the film doesn’t encourage us to cheer her on. We’re not given much evidence of her unhappiness with her family, and so she comes across as impulsive and entitled. Later on, she reacts inexplicably coldly to a violent act perpetrated by Jay, and it’s hard to tell how we’re supposed to feel about it. Then, despite being given many opportunities to part ways, Samira and Jay drift into something resembling a romance, though they have very little chemistry (unless evidence of it got buried in one of the many travelling montages). It adds up to be a rather uninspiring amount of character work, with no clear purpose.
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By the time the second act rolls around, it’s clear this movie isn’t quite as tongue-in-cheek as the Bobby Darin needle-drop in the trailer suggests. There’s a little too much self-seriousness to call it a comedy, and a little too much comedy to call it a thriller. The mixture of tones doesn’t make it impossible to watch, just hard to recommend; especially when you could easily go see Mission: Impossible – Fallout again.
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There seems to be two distinct films in here; there’s a black ops espionage thriller pitting the talkers in suits versus the doers in camo, and another which weaves a slow burn tale of a hitman who is forced to decide between the mission or the moral high road.
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The problem with a lot of crime films is that they often feel the need to explain multiple backstories to their viewers before going for the pay-off moment, rather than dropping them in to the middle of a crisis and saying, “here, figure it out.” There’s no big build-up here; you see things as Joe sees it, and a lot of it doesn’t make sense right away. Joe’s PTSD is as much a character of its own as Joe, and it’s often manifested through quick cuts to Joe suffocating himself with plastic bags or silently drowning in water
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The problem with a lot of modern horror-thriller sci-fi films is that it’s quite obvious which characters will survive and which ones won’t. I think, over the decades, plot twists that seemed original are much more commonplace now, but Annihilation avoids most of that by telling the audience the result of the expedition in its very first scenes. Self-destruction is briefly mentioned in a line of dialogue but it’s a pervasive theme throughout the entire film, and one of its strengths is showing how each character deals with death and pain and how they ultimately choose to end their fight.
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Sadly, despite the potential, what Jones delivers with Mute is a classic example of a passion project that should have stayed on the page. The film is admirably small-scale, when a lot of futuristic science fiction aims to make big statements about humanity. But taking a narrow, Black Mirror approach to the story can’t save it from an emotionally distant main character or a repetitive, fractured plot. At times, you can almost feel Jones waffling over what to include in his story: more of Alexander Skarsgård gazing listlessly at reused sets from Blade Runner 2049, or more of Paul Rudd’s obnoxious mustache.
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How disappointing, then, to see Landis so casually rip up his rulebook to make a quick buck in league with Netflix, the hottest brand in entertainment. The result is Bright: a loud, incomprehensible and utterly tone-deaf action thriller with an admirably bonkers – though ludicrously heavy-handed - concept.
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In many ways, this serves the Duffers well. Season two of Stranger Things is marked by a willingness to diverge from some of the things that made the first season so addictive. The nostalgia for 80s pop culture is less pronounced. There’s very little (if any) Dungeons and Dragons. The dynamics of the core group of kids are in flux. But this doesn’t reduce our craving for more; in fact, the show keeps us clicking the “next episode” button by folding in character development and narrative experiments, all to test what Stranger Things can be.
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Sadly, the feature-length experience of the film offers none of that joy. Unlike its genre brethren (The Core, The Day After Tomorrow or 2012), Geostorm is a deadening facsimile of earlier apocalypses. The main characters are only once physically threatened by the storms they’re racing to stop. The filmmakers woefully underuse their core concept - a malfunctioning weather-controlling satellite network - wasting opportunities to see wild remixes of typical weather. The cardboard characters interact as if they’ve all wandered into the proceedings from other movies. And perhaps most disappointing, they spent so much godforsaken money on Geostorm that it can’t even aspire to the kind of grubby, homemade production value that might bring a smile to your face, in the vein of Birdemic or Troll 2.
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