TO BE OR NOT TO BESPOKE

Opening this weekend:

The Outfit--This gangster thriller takes place almost entirely inside a small, classy shop in '50s-era Chicago run by an English tailor or, as he prefers, a "cutter." The Savile Row veteran makes elegant suits, largely for Chicago gangsters. He also has allowed a slotted box to be installed in his back room, from which the mobsters pick up messages. Some of the envelopes are marked with a symbol indicating that they are from "The Outfit," which causes the recipients to look at each other significantly and hurry off to who knows what intrigues.

The Cutter, whose name is listed in the credits as Leonard but to whom the gangsters affectionately refer only as "English," is played by Mark Rylance, close to the flawlessly made vest as usual. The great actor's bland, unhurried, maddeningly unperturbed line readings potently generate the sense that he's got secrets, potentially dark. He's quietly, politely paternal toward his lovely receptionist Mable (Zoey Deutch), and though she's a bit prickly at his fretting she seems to love him back. Otherwise he appears to have no life but his work. Rylance plays the role with such authority that while we watch him confidently cut and stitch and smooth fabric, we never doubt what we're seeing for second; it feels like watching a documentary.

Trouble starts when two of the hoods, who are looking for a "rat" who has been feeding information to the FBI, show up one night after a gunfight, one of them wounded, looking to English for a hideout and some impromptu field surgery. The twists and turns and bloody violence keep piling up from there, and eventually the boss (Simon Russell Beale in a fine, cliche-free turn) shows up to this messy scene and everybody starts trying to deceive and outmaneuver everybody else.

The director, Graham Moore, who co-wrote the film with Jonathan McClain, plays a lot of this for grim comedy. The style is theatrical, not just because of the single set and small cast but because of the heightened dialogue. With guns pointed at them and all manner of mayhem happening around them, the characters nonetheless launch into heartfelt, reflective monologues about their pasts. If you can accept this conceit, you're likely to find The Outfit is gripping, funny and moving.

Perhaps Moore and McClain push their luck a bit; the film has a twist or two too many. Speaking of his craft at one point in the narration, English observes that perfection, though necessary as an aspirational ideal, is never truly attainable. This movie's last ten minutes or so illustrates this perfectly, but as with one of English's suits, no one is likely to feel skimped.

TAKING (OR LEAVING) THE CURE

Opening this weekend: 

The Death Cure--Well, that would be an impressive medical breakthrough, wouldn't it?

This is the third film in the Maze Runner trilogy, based on the young-adult sci-fi novels by James Dashner. This time the pretty-boy hero (Dylan O'Brien) and a few of his more characterful comrades are on a quest to rescue an old pal (Ki Hong Lee) from his days imprisoned in "The Glade" back in Part One. They infiltrate the city stronghold of the sinister agency known by the anagram WCKD--their marketing department should perhaps have put in a little more time on that branding--where his friend is being held as a possible key to a cure for the disease that is turning the human race into zombielike creatures known as "Cranks."

The first film in the series, 2014's The Maze Runner, had the title labyrinth to help generate intrigue and mystery. In The Scorch Trials, from the following year, the boys had escaped their inscrutable prison, and the results were far more routine adventures, with the same overlay of teenage masochism. This third film is a further step down, alas. The dialogue is banal and the plot, as with The Scorch Trials, is full of elements that recall older, better sci-fi flicks, most notably The Omega Man.

The Death Cure is not without strengths, however. Director Wes Ball, who helmed the previous entries, handles the initial big action scenes excitingly. There are a number of capable vets in the cast, including Giancarlo Esposito, Barry Pepper, Will Poulter, Rosa Salazar, Aiden Guillen, Patricia Clarkson as the WCKD honcho and Walton Goggins in a small but memorable role as the noseless revolutionary leader of the Cranks. Thomas Brodie-Sangster, the kid from Love, Actually, is once again touching as our hero's loyal friend. With the help of these actors and others, the film remains watchable enough until the torturously drawn-out, Wagnerian, sturm-und-drang finale wears out our patience.

This movie is another example of a striking recurrent motif in post-apocalyptic yarns of recent years, however: Walls. Walls erected by the frightened powerful to hold the feared and dispossessed at bay have shown up in the Divergent flicks, last year's Resident Evil finale, War for the Planet of the Apes and now this film. It seems like our collective mind has begun to, well, Hit the Wall.

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.