MORE THAN THE SUMMER OF ITS PARTS

Opening this weekend:

Measure of a Man--In 1976, chubby fourteen-year-old New Yorker Bobby Marks (Blake Cooper) spends the summer with his family at a cabin in a rural upstate town. Mostly to avoid getting stuck at camp again, Bobby gets a job at a beautiful nearby manse, mowing lawns and cleaning gutters and doing other such disagreeable chores for an imperious and exacting Jewish doctor (Donald Sutherland).

Based on Robert Lipsyte's novel One Fat Summer (written in the mid-'70s but set in the '50s), this movie is about as prototypical as coming-of-age stories get: A sensitive teenage kid is challenged to be a better version of himself by a gruff but wise mentor, and applies what he learns to other conflicts in his life. It feels almost like the result of an assignment:  Encounters with local bullies, who of course loathe "summer people"--check. Platonic friendship with charming girl next door (Danielle Rose Russell)--check. Wild behavior by Bobby's older sister (Liana Liberato) and turbulence in the marriage of his parents (Judy Greer and Luke Wilson)--check and check.

In short, there's nothing especially new or surprising here. That said, the familiar episodes we're given are nicely executed by director Jim Loach, working from a script by David Scearce. The period of the Bicentennial summer is convincingly evoked without heavy-handedness, and the performances are capable. Young Cooper, from The Maze Runner, carries the movie easily. The supporting players don't get a lot to do, but Greer is sweet as the Mom, who's trying to keep up a cheerful front, and in his brief but strategically-placed scenes, Sutherland makes the doctor's forbiddingly formal old-country manners amusing. Beau Knapp is scary, but not without pathos, as Willie, the leader of the bullies.

The scenes in which Bobby is tormented by Willie and his pals are frightening and infuriating, but not, alas, implausible. Like Bobby, I was fourteen in 1976. I was one state over in rural Pennsylvania, and while I was socio-economically a lot closer to this movie's locals than to its "summer people," I can attest that whatever its shortcomings, Measure of a Man gets its bullies right.

Check out my short column, on Phoenix Magazine online, about a special free sing-along screening of the original Mamma Mia! at Harkins Camelback at 10 a.m. this Sunday morning, for Mother's Day. Also, check out my Phoenix Magazine "Four Corners" column about new restaurants that have, like culinary hermit crabs, taken over the spaces left behind by notable earlier eateries.

RUNNING/WALKING

New this week:

The Maze Runner—In the vein of The Hunger Games and Divergent, The Maze Runner is young-adult sci-fi with a body count. Based on James Dashner’s 2009 novel, it’s set in “The Glade,” a grassy, open area inhabited by adolescent boys. Their earlier lives, and how they came to The Glade are unknown to them—they’re all amnesiacs, remembering only their names.

Every now and then a freight elevator vomits up a new resident from far underground. The boys have done better at organizing themselves into a functional community than the lads in Lord of the Flies—they’ve set up an agricultural village with carefully assigned roles. The fastest, fittest and bravest of the boys serve as Maze Runners.

The Glade, you see, is enclosed by monolithic stone walls which open, during the day, to allow access to an enormous Maze. The Runners explore this by day, in hopes of mapping it and finding a way out, but are careful to get back to The Glade before the huge doors close. If they don’t, they’ll be trapped in the Maze with the Grievers, howling presences which stay out of sight during the day, but have the run of the place by night. No one, we are told, has survived a night in the Maze with the Grievers.

All this and shovel-loads more exposition is flung at the newest arrival, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien). He’s an intrepid, somewhat rebellious fellow, and he of course becomes the hot new Maze Runner, and comes face to face with the Grievers, and lives to tell the tale, and generally shakes things up in The Glade—with the result that its population is thinned. It does, however, gain a female resident, Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), who turns up in the elevator with a note declaring that she’s the last one ever.

The premise of The Maze Runner is undeniably intriguing; it stirs the imagination. And director Wes Ball stages many exciting scenes and gets vivid work out of his young cast, especially Blake Cooper, Ki Hong Lee, Aml Ameen, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Will Poulter. What marred the film, for me, was overexplanation—in the homestretch, we get a deluge of unconvincing backstory on how this situation came to be, and the mystery and inscrutability of the boys’ plight, and its allegorical associations with life in general, are sapped of their power. The hook of the movie was negotiating the Maze itself, not learning what the Maze was for.

A Walk Among the Tombstones—When Liam Neeson tells somebody, in that soft, deep, almost apologetic tone of his, that they’re in trouble if they harm some innocent victim, it’s hard not to take his threats seriously. Thus he’s making quite a career out of playing haunted father-figure rescuers and avengers, in melodramas like Taken and Taken 2, The Grey, Non-Stop and now A Walk Among the Tombstones.

Well, it’s certainly not a Tiptoe Through the Tulips. Based on one of the Lawrence Block novels about Matthew Scudder, an ex-NYPD recovering alcoholic and unlicensed private detective, the movie is a parade of horrors, starting us off with a gruesome shoot-out before the opening credits and getting much more unsavory from there. It’s set in 1999, against the backdrop of Y2K anxiety—how quaint does that seem now?—and involves a revolting kidnapping operation run by two of the most loathsome villains (David Harbour and Adam David Thompson) to turn up in a thriller in years.

Scudder (Neeson) is hired to find these two by a swanky drug trafficker (Dan Stevens) whose wife ended up dead even though he paid the ransom. All manner of twists are unraveled, Scudder’s horrifying guilty past is revealed, and our hero also befriends a homeless teenager (Bryan “Astro” Bradley) who wants to be a detective, before the big showdown in the graveyard between good and evil—or, rather, between evil and comparatively good—arrives.

Nasty though it is, I found this Jacobean Big Apple bloodbath intense and satisfying. The script, adapted by director Scott Frank, has some creaky passages, and the strand with the teenage kid bumps up against sentimentality, though it’s well played and it allows Neeson some lighter moments. But Frank’s direction, with his measured pacing and his melancholic atmosphere reminiscent of a certain style of ‘70s urban crime thriller, is really expert.

As the movie progressed, however, I became increasingly aware that these villains were so odious that no comeuppance would be sufficient to calm my vengeful bloodlust toward them. And indeed, it wasn’t sufficient. But that’s my spiteful heart’s problem, not the movie’s.