Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of The Surfer...
...and Thunderbolts*.
The asterisk, I'm assured, is an essential part of the title.
Showing posts with label DAVID HARBOUR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DAVID HARBOUR. Show all posts
Monday, May 5, 2025
Friday, July 9, 2021
SISTER ACT
Opening this weekend:
Black Widow--Introduced in Marvel's Tales of Suspense in 1964 as a Cold-War-era enemy for Iron Man, Soviet assassin Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, was later allowed to defect, and eventually became a member of The Avengers. She's been played in the movies by Scarlett Johansson since 2010.
This eponymous vehicle, technically a prequel to the Avengers flicks, offers a backstory for the character. We see her enjoying an idyllic childhood in small town Ohio; we soon learn that her family is a sham spy cell. Forced to flee, she and her younger sister Yelena end up in the "Red Room," training as brainwashed Russian agents. Years later, the grown-up Natasha teams up with Yelena and their "parents," to stop the cruelties of the Red Room.
Directed by Cate Shortland from a script by Eric Pearson, Black Widow is everything that Marvel movies usually are: well-made, absorbing, overlong, uneven. The main unevenness here is of tone, early on. It starts with screaming little girls hauled away from their families and shoved into horrible captivity, and it takes a while for the silly action and jocularity that follows to counter this grimness. Or it took a while for me, anyway.
But once Natasha's freaky family reunion takes place, and everybody's speaking English with radio comedy Russian accents, the movie does start to get fun, and by the gratuitously multiple climactic scenes I was invested. As usual, the acting is what makes it worthwhile. David Harbour and Rachel Weisz have a blast as the ebullient Dad and the haunted Mom, respectively, and Ray Winstone makes one of the more thoroughly despicable villains ever in a Marvel movie as the loathsome master of the Red Room.
Johansson is lithe and confident in the title role, but the movie is utterly purloined from her by Florence Pugh, sporting a delicious accent, as Yelena. Just as Pugh's Amy was the liveliest element of 2019's Little Women, she stands out in Black Widow as another upstart little sister.
Friday, September 19, 2014
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
