SPY CANDY

Opening this weekend...

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre--Bad guys have stolen some horrible world-threatening thingy from a laboratory, and initially British Intelligence isn't even sure what it is. Not to worry, though--luxury-loving man of action Orson Fortune, played by Jason Statham, is placed on the case, with a high-tech team assisting him.

The McGuffin, when we finally learn what it is, turns out to be disappointingly vague and prosaic. The ride to retrieve it, however, directed by Guy Ritchie from a script by Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies and the director, is pretty enjoyable, in the usual headlong Ritchie manner. We're zipped from one exotic location to another, Morocco and Madrid and Turkey and more, via private planes and yachts and villas, and there are shootouts and car chases and helicopter duels. It's swanky, with an edge of irony and plenty of violence to distance us from the shallow glamour.

All of  which is to say, Operation Fortune is essentially an off-brand Bond flick, and a sufficiently skilled one to offer an amusing, relaxing couple of hours free of substance and ethics. Despite Ritchie's assured technique, the real appeal is the cast. Statham shrewdly keeps it low-key and lets his costars shine: Cary Elwes as Orson's nettled boss, Eddie Marsan as the boss's boss and Bugzy Malone as Orson's stalwart sidekick.

Josh Hartnett, whose existence I had largely forgotten, has a nice turn as a Hollywood star pressed into service on the mission, and Aubrey Plaza is appealingly insouciant as a slinky computer whiz, complete with closeups of her lips as she purrs directions into a mic. She reminded me of Adrienne Barbeau as the deejay in The Fog.

The standout in the company, however, is Hugh Grant as the cockney billionaire arms dealer that Fortune's team targets. It's surprising how flexible Grant's diffident persona has proven; what's even more striking is that, even as this callous, corruption-encrusted vulgarian, he still manages to be likable.

MATTHEW WHIZ

Happy Friday everybody!

Awright, awright, awright, check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, for my review of Guy Ritchie's The Gentleman.

Have a great weekend everybody!

PLUMMER'S CRACKLESS

Opening this week:

The Exception—Has any actor since Paul Newman aged as well as Christopher Plummer? He seems to get more majestic-looking every year, and he has more wry, mischievous charm now than he did as a young man, by quite a large margin.

Having played the aged, gulled Tolstoy in 2009’s The Last Station, he now plays another washed-up historical figure, Kaiser Wilhelm II, in this roiling yarn, the feature debut of Brit stage director David Leveaux. Based on Alan Judd’s novel The Kaiser’s Last Kiss, it’s set near the beginning of WWII in the Netherlands, where Wilhelm has been living in comfortable exile with his wife, the Princess Hermine (Janet McTeer), feeding ducks, chopping wood and brooding over the loss of, you know, WWI and his throne.

The Nazis, who have just invaded the Netherlands, loathe and mistrust the Kaiser, but aren’t quite ready to eliminate a relic for whom the German people retain a fondness. So they send a young SS Captain, Brandt (Jai Courtney), disgraced by an earlier act of conscience, on the dead-end assignment of guarding the old man against the possibility—a long shot, he’s sure—of an assassination attempt.

As he glumly enters the Kaiser’s manse, Brandt catches sight of a darkly beautiful housemaid, Mieke (Lily James). She catches sight of him right back, and the two immediately develop one of those unspoken sexual passions that arise so conveniently in tales of this sort. As their intimacy increases and he learns, among other secrets, that Mieke is Jewish, Brandt’s already tenuous loyalty to the Reich is tested.

For stretches The Exception seems like potent moral drama, and for other stretches it seems outrageous, on the borderline of camp, like a sanitized prequel to The Night Porter. Either way, though, it’s a tense thriller. I found myself caring for these people whether their plight was plausible or not.

All of the acting is strong, from the intelligent hunk Courtney to James with her angry erotic avidity to McTeer’s pitiful Princess to Ben Daniels as Wilhelm’s sad, loyal aide to Mark Dexter as a vexed Gestapo man. But the anchor is Plummer, as the handsome, irrelevantly regal old Wilhelm, trying without success to mask his bitterness and guilt behind a rueful, chuckling humor.

Indeed, the only performance quite as vivid as Plummer’s comes from Eddie Marsan in the small role of Himmler, who drops by with a proposal for the Kaiser. The ever-resourceful Marsan’s portrait is deeply repellent and terrifying—a murmuring, milquetoast monster.

CIRCUIT TO THE CHASE

In the political thriller Closed Circuit, opening today, a truck bomb explodes in a London market, killing dozens. The surviving terrorist is assigned two lawyers—one, Martin (Eric Bana), to defend him in his public trial, the other, Claudia (Rebecca Hall) to advocate for him during the closed hearings involving classified evidence, which is kept secret even from Martin.

Claudia and Martin have an illicit romantic past—his marriage broke up over his affair with her. This creates the teeniest conflict of interest, but the lawyers, eager for the high-profile assignment, neglect to tell the judge this. Before long both of them, working separately, become aware that they’re under a near-Orwellian level of surveillance, and then that their lives are in danger, as they discover a secret at the heart of the case that the Government is willing to kill to protect. Sadly, nothing seems very implausible about any of this.

Directed by John Crowley from a script by Steven Knight, Closed Circuit hurtles forward with almost unseemly speed and economy. There isn’t a shot or a line of dialogue in the picture that could be called digressive, and the tension rises with metronomic precision, driven along by Joby Talbot’s ominous orchestral music. The atmosphere of humorless, frightened suspicion is palpable and oppressive, and the movie grips.

As usual, the acting has a lot to do with this. Bana’s charm has always been elusive to me, but here he’s supposed to be a bit of a cold fish, so he’s effective, and Hall is engaging as ever, even in this less-than-warm role. From the supporting cast comes creditable work by Ciaran Hinds, Anne-Marie Duff, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed and especially Jim Broadbent as a mild-mannered yet almost satanic Attorney General who drops into the movie now and then to level a threat in the most pleasant manner possible.

When Closed Circuit was all over, I did find myself wondering why Claudia and Martin didn’t make a point of shoving their at-risk witness in front of the TV cameras outside the Old Bailey, or why they didn’t simply say in court, in a tattletale-ish sort of voice, “M’lud, MI-5 has been trying to kill us all night.” But Closed Circuit wouldn’t be the first thriller that pulls you along so skillfully that you don’t think about its gaps in logic until after the end credits roll.

As in 1812, the British seem to have re-invaded the States—but this time they’ve targeted our multiplexes. Over the course of the week, along with Closed Circuit, at least two other movies from, by or about Brits have landed wide Yank release: the boy-band documentary One Direction: This Is Us and the Simon Pegg comedy The World’s End. The former will be discussed when it opens here Friday, so let’s talk The World’s End here…

The third entry in the “Cornetto Trilogy” of comedies written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Wright and starring Pegg and Nick Frost is now in theaters. The first, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, is a classic both of the zombie genre and of Brit comedy; the second, the 2007 cop-movie spoof Hot Fuzz, started out perhaps even more brilliantly than Shaun but ran out of steam toward the end.

World’s End resides somewhere between the two—not quite the homerun of Shaun, but ultimately more satisfying than Hot Fuzz. The main character is Gary King (Pegg) who is trying to reunite four old school friends (Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) to have another go at a legendary but unfinished pub crawl from 1990 in their hometown of Newtown Haven, whose major claim to fame is that it’s home to Britain’s oldest roundabout.

Gary’s a scruffy loser who never grew up, while the other four have moved on to relatively mature lives—and one, Andie (Frost) bears Gary a bitter grudge. Nonetheless, all four of his friends show up for the 12-pub crawl, their sights set to finish with a pint at the pub called The World’s End.

This middle-aged outing alone might have provided enough laughs for a movie by itself, whipped forward by the snappy comic punctuation of Wright’s editing. But about midpoint, The World’s End suddenly takes a strange sci-fi twist, as the lads realize that something has changed in Newton Haven.

Really, it’s just roughly the zillionth variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it’s an amusing one, and the motivation of the invaders links up thematically with Gary’s personality. As with Hot Fuzz, the movie is a little overambitious—it goes on a smidge too long, and not every scene works. But there are plenty of laughs, and a few touching moments, and the performances are fine, especially by the feisty, stouthearted Frost.

It should also be noted that the final decision of the aliens with regard to humanity—pronounced by Bill Nighy as the voice of “The Network”—is basically the same as that of The Pods in Jack Finney’s original novel The Body Snatchers.

WALKING TALL

A story with a hero named Jack is always promising. The Ripper aside, fictional Jacks tend to be plucky, resourceful working-class fellows who overcome adversity through courage and native wit, without benefit of being knights or princes. Indeed, in latter-day retellings they sometimes even get the Princess—and while killing a giant may be impressive, being accepted by the 1% is truly the stuff of fairy tale

The Cornish folktales known since at least the 18th Century as Jack the Giant Killer have been adapted for the movies at least once already, in a pleasant 1962 version manifestly made in imitation of the Ray Harryhausen classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The lavish new version opening today, directed by Bryan Singer and called Jack the Giant Slayer, borrows elements from the earlier film but applies them to a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk.

The new movie’s Jack is played by Nicholas Hoult of Warm Bodies, whose long, homely-handsome face lends itself to the idea of a farm-boy hero. The script, by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney, cleverly makes Jack’s acquisition of the Magic Beans plausible without either violating the spirit of the story or making him a hopeless dupe. The plot is also embellished to add a sweet Princess (Eleanor Tomlinson), a fretful King (Ian McShane), a scheming rat of a courtier-villain (Stanley Tucci, sly as ever), and a valiant guardsman (Ewan McGregor), among other secondary characters, all effective.

But of course this movie must stand or fall by its giants, and it’s nice to report that they’re terrific—squalid and scabby and scary, but with a certain uncouth grandeur and with pungently distinctive characterizations, from the two-headed alpha male (the left head voiced by Bill Nighy, the gibbering right by John Kassir) down through various aggrieved subordinates and malcontents. They have pathos and a bitter dignity along with their menace; you want to see them defeated, but you don’t hate them.

When episodic high fantasy of this sort is done right—soberly but not somberly, with unpretentious high spirits, a generous heart and a well-structured story that sticks to the rules it sets up—it can offer one of the keenest pleasures of which the movies are capable. Jack the Giant Slayer comes closer to nailing this atmosphere than any I’ve seen in a while, much closer than the remake of Clash of the Titans from a couple of years back.

I don’t think I could ever feel as warmly toward CGI effects as I do toward stop-motion, but that’s personal nostalgia. And it should be said that Giant Slayer is likely to be a little too frightening for smaller kids. But that’s not a criticism either; it just means that they’ve taken their giants with proper seriousness. Jack the Giant Slayer is a strong entertainment. Only in its final minute or two does it strike a very slightly sour note, when it links the story’s legacy to an ongoing aristocratic fetish that is unworthy of a self-respecting Jack.