OH, FOR CRISIS SAKE

In theaters and streaming:

Crisis--With so many to choose from in the world right now, let me narrow it down: The title refers to the opioid crisis. Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki (of Arbitrage)  bounces between three strands, two of which eventually converge. The settings are Detroit and Montreal, tacitly making the point that while the southern border of the U.S. gets the hype as a sieve for drug trafficking, probably mostly for racist reasons the same activity, rapidly rising at the U.S./Canada border, gets much less attention.

Armie Hammer plays a wound-up undercover FBI agent trying to set up a complicated fentanyl bust between Armenian gangsters on the Detroit side and a powerful Montreal kingpin. His younger sister, played by Lily-Rose Depp, waiflike daughter of Johnny, is a junkie. Evangeline Lilly plays a single mother, herself a recovering addict, who loses her adored 16-year-old son to an apparent overdose. The devastated woman begins to probe the tragedy and soon learns that there may be more to it.

The third and most Ibsen-esque of the plotlines involves Gary Oldman as a college professor with a long history of more or less rubber-stamping studies for a big pharma company. When, thanks to a bit of over-diligence by one of his assistants, he gets an ominous result on a test for a new, supposedly non-addictive painkiller, the company tries to suppress his finding and he quickly finds himself bribed with funding and simultaneously threatened with loss of tenure, character assassination, etc.

Currently beleaguered by creepy scandal, Hammer gives a strong performance. I've sometimes found him a lackluster presence in his earlier films, but he has a bristling, vivid anger here that gives his scenes a charge, even though they're the most cop-movie conventional. Evangeline Lilly (whose name somehow sounds like a big pharma company) shows serious chops, getting across the woman's grief with painful believability. 

Even so, it's Oldman, in the least demonstrative of the three lead roles, who effortlessly walks off with the movie. With zero telegraphing, he shows us a person of ordinary character, maybe even a bit of a smug hack, who winds up in a deeply frightening position requiring moral courage.

Finally, a word should be said for the bad guys; Greg Kinnear as Oldman's boss, Veronica Ferres and Martin Donovan as the pharma honchos and Guy Nadon as the Quebecois gangster are all scary. They're as close as a realism gets to supervillians, and they're entirely convincing.

THE FALL CLASSIC

Happy Halloween everybody! My favorite holiday.

Check out The Wife's costume...

Pumpkin Pi, get it?

Here's my costume...

No clever pun with this one; I'm just calling it "Sharky McSharkboy."

Also, Happy Dia de los Muertos. Here's a pic, by The Kid, of the little Day of the Dead dude now riding on my dashboard...

...a kind gift from my pal Joe Moore.

Here's a couple of catch-up reviews:

It's been a few years--since 2015's heavy-handed but enjoyable Black Sea, unless I'm forgetting something--since we've gotten a big-budget submarine adventure picture. But Hunter Killer, now in theaters, gives us an amusing tour of some of the genre's favorite elements--nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse between underwater vessels, threading the ship through narrow canyons, stony-faced rival Captains who respect each other, an Executive Officer questioning orders, decisions effecting the fate of the world made in the cold depths of the sea. Coolest detail: The standing officers leaning back in unison as the ship dives.

The term "hunter killer" refers to a class of submarine used to attack other subs; the one we follow here is the U.S.S. Arkansas, commanded by non-Academy, up-from-the-working-class Captain Gerard Butler. He's asked to navigate his way through a heavily mined inlet to pick up a Navy SEAL team that has rescued the deposed Russian President (who seems decidedly NOT based on the current real-life holder of that office) from the rogue Defense Minister who wants to start a war with the U.S. Along the way the Arkansas picks up the Captain (Michael Nyqvist) of a sunken Russian sub, who must decide whether or not to help the Yanks navigate their way in.

All of these thrills are excitingly if conventionally handled. But where director Donovan Marsh and screenwriters Arnie Schmidt and Jamie Moss really show their ingenuity is how they avoid the dramatic as well as the literal claustrophobia of the submarine genre. We aren't stuck in the tin can underwater with Butler and his crew for the whole running time; there's a dry-land side to the movie as well.

We follow the Russians, and the exploits of the SEAL team, led by Toby Stephens, that's infiltrating the Russian headquarters. And back at the Pentagon, we get to see the squabbles between the bristling head of the Joint Chiefs (Gary Oldman), a sober-minded Admiral (Common) and a shrewd NSA analyst (Linda Cardellini). We even get a glimpse of the blond, female U.S. President (Caroline Goodall), wistfully reminding us that this film went into production when a different set of political and social assumptions were in place.

Butler is good company once again, and the late Swedish actor Nyqvist, to whom the film is co-dedicated (along with producer John Thompson), brings an effective tinge of the tragic to his Russian counterpart. Those hoping for a good rip-snorting Gary Oldman scenery-chew may be disappointed; he gets less of an opportunity for flamboyant ranting here than in some of his other roles.

In case it isn't clear from my description, Hunter Killer is a very old-school piece of work, in the "guy movie" tradition. If you're the sort who could never resist a Saturday afternoon rerun of The Enemy Below or Ice Station Zebra, this might be the movie for you, and maybe your dad or your grandfather or your uncle might want to come along. Much of the action seems cartoonishly implausible, and it's exactly on that basis that you're likely to enjoy it.

A note on this movie's Russians: In another old-school convention, they speak Russian when it's necessary for the American characters to overhear them, and accented English the rest of the time, so we don't have to read subtitles. But at a key moment, a Russian character expresses his feelings to some of his fellow countrymen by showing them his middle fingers. Does that gesture have the same meaning for Russians that it does for us?

Halloween is here, both the holiday and yet another movie named after it that's too scary for younger children and wimpy adults. But there's also a milder movie alternative for such audiences who still want to get into the spirit: Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween. The subtitle begs the question, though--shouldn't any self-respecting Halloween be haunted?

It's a sequel to Goosebumps, the 2015 comedy-fantasy riff on Scholastic Publishing's massively successful young-adult horror paperback series of the 1990s. The heroes of these tongue-in-cheek tales, cranked out by the dozens by author R. L. Stine, were kids, pitted against ghosts and werewolves and aliens and giant bugs and mummies and pretty much any other standard horror or sci-fi menace you could name, most of them derived from the movies.

The 2015 film turned a bunch of these creatures loose on a small town in Delaware; it also brought Stine onscreen as a character, played by Jack Black as a vain but lovable curmudgeon with an imagination so powerful that his creations can literally leap off the page. It was a trifling film, but well-made and enjoyable, with a little more wit than might have been expected.

Goosebumps 2, directed by Ari Sandel and set in a small town in New York, has a Halloween theme. Two scavenging boys inadvertently unleash the power of an unfinished early Stine tale, Haunted Halloween, and the town's elaborate decorations and treats come to life, from a bucket of Gummi bears to an enormous black-and-purple dragon made of balloons. These creepy creatures are led, once again, by Slappy, the sinister ventriloquist's dummy come to life.

Some of the resulting sequences are visually striking, though again, none are allowed to tip over into serious terror, and the film should be fun for all but the littlest viewers. The young cast, led by Jeremy Ray Taylor and Caleel Harris as the boys and Madison Iseman as Taylor's college-bound older sister, are capable. But most of the laughs are provided by the adults, especially the always-amusing Wendy McLendon-Covey as the indomitable mom, Chris Parnell as the drug store guy turned into Slappy's toadying sidekick, and Ken Jeong as the wacky neighbor who really, really likes Halloween.

One of the best features of the first film was the lively music by the great Danny Elfman. The macabre scherzos here are by the British composer Dominic Lewis, and he channels Elfman so well it's scary.

WIDOWER & WIDOWMAKERS

Opening in Arizona today:

Menashe—Yiddish movies used to be a thing; more than a hundred of them were made, mostly in Poland or the U.S., in the decades before the Second World War. After that, they became rarities—this indie drama is thought to be the first American feature made mostly in Yiddish since 1975’s drama Hester Street.

The title character is a Hasidic widower in his thirties who works in a grocery store in Brooklyn. He’s a genuinely loving father to his ten-year-old son Rieven, and doesn’t agree with the requirement that the boy go to live with his uncle and aunt until Menashe remarries, because of the belief that a child must not be raised by a single parent. He’s in no hurry to remarry, but he wants his kid back.

The simple story that ensues provides director and co-writer Joshua Z. Weinstein ample opportunity for a peek into a little-understood world. The movie was shot, not quite surreptitiously but with a very low profile, in the Hasidic enclave in Borough Park, Brooklyn, with a cast of non-actors. While this generates a neo-realist, almost verité atmosphere, Menashe transcends cultural anthropology. It’s a character study, brought to life by a gifted first-time star—Menashe Lustig, on whose life the story was loosely based.

Menashe is described as a schlimazel by his own family members, ungenerously but perhaps not inaccurately—he’s a nice fellow, but he’s chronically late, late with the rent, broke, and so forth. He insists on mild rebellion from his culture—not wearing the full Hasidic regalia on the street, for instance—in ways that nettle his family and do him no favors.

As played by Lustig, however, the character is also quietly, unsentimentally, even a little exasperatingly endearing. Lustig gives us a naturalistic portrait of the man’s humor, his guilt, his anger, his mischievousness. At one point Menashe’s disapproving brother-in-law says he’d like to see him become a mensch, but we in the audience see him this way already.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard—Samuel L. Jackson is the Hitman, Darius Kincaid, who specializes in killing rich, powerful scumbags; Ryan Reynolds is the Bodyguard, Michael Bryce, who escorts such scumbags to safety. Michael is recruited to get Darius, his longtime enemy, safely from prison in Manchester, England to The Hague, so that he can testify at the International Court of Justice against a brutal Belarusian dictator (Gary Oldman, who else?).

Apparently the imprisoned tyrant is pretty well-connected, as massive numbers of mercenaries try to kill Darius enroute. Hitman and Bodyguard bicker jocularly through mayhem, slaughter, even torture. Michael is persnickety, orderly, a planner, while Kincaid flies by the seat of his pants.

There's nothing new here, but strictly on its own terms, this cartoonishly overscaled buddy picture, directed by the Australian Patrick Hughes, is perfectly executed. Well, almost perfectly; it has the genre's annoying sentimental streak. And like most big-budget action flicks of the last few decades, it could be trimmed by at least ten minutes without losing anything it needs, but as it clocks in at just under two hours it doesn't quite wear out its welcome.

Yet despite the skill with which it's made, there is an imbalance to The Hitman's Bodyguard, in the unsavory contrast between the cutesy comedy and the shocking violence. When the dictator kills a man's family while he watches, and then minutes later we're back with Reynolds and Jackson and expected to crack up at their bantering, it's really jarring, and it doesn't feel like a deliberate black-comedy effect. It just feels like an adolescent sensibility, willing to use the sufferings of people under such regimes as a summer blockbuster plot point.

The leads keep us diverted from this ugliness, however. Reynolds has never been a favorite of mine, but he 's a good sport here, embracing the role of a prim foil to Jackson. That great actor has rarely gotten the chance to cut loose to quite the degree he does here. He seems to have a blast, singing fatalistic blues lyrics (there's a pretty good one written by Jackson himself, and reprised under the end credits) and cheerfully guffawing at the twists of fate that fling him about. Darius is out of his cell, so despite the carnage around him and the constant peril, anything else is gravy.

LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

The Space Between Us­—The space in question is hundreds of millions of miles. It lies between Gardiner, the first boy ever born on Mars—he’s the fruit of a moment of poor judgment by an astronaut—and Tulsa, a foster kid on Earth with whom he’s struck up an online bond. Gardiner would like to come and visit, but his heart isn’t up to Earth’s gravity.

There must be some morbid romantic appeal in the idea of a love that your heart literally can’t stand. In 1993's Untamed Heart we saw Marisa Tomei fall for Christian Slater despite his delicate ticker, supposedly transplanted from a baboon (the working title was Baboon Heart, but perhaps that didn’t test so well).

Taking the idea to interplanetary levels seems extreme, but Asa Butterfield, who plays Gardiner, specializes in this sort of fragile-misfit part, and Britt Robertson, who plays Tulsa, isn’t without spunk. Gary Oldman is on hand as the space honcho, as is Carla Gugino as Gardiner’s surrogate Mom, and it’s good to see them, even in uninspired roles.

Directed by Peter Chelsom, the movie is sort of pretty to look at. It gets across a suggestion of the bountiful variety of Earth compared to the drab desert uniformity of Mars, and the gratitude we ought to feel for living here, and too rarely do.

But the dialogue is painfully terrible, and the plot gambits used to turn The Space Between Us into a road movie are clumsy and unconvincing. Throughout, Gardiner keeps asking people “What’s your favorite thing about Earth?” It’s not a bad question, but it’s doubtful that this movie would be anybody’s answer.

The Red Turtle—This animated feature is a Japanese-European co-production, and it looks it. It begins with ocean waves that look like the art of Hosukai. These tempestuous swells maroon a man, who looks like a character out of Tintin, on an island of bamboo forests and beaches crawling with deadpan little crabs.

The man has all he needs to survive on the island except companionship. He tries several time to escape by raft, but each attempt is mysteriously scuttled by some force he can’t see but suspects is a great red sea turtle he encounters.

After he attacks this creature when it comes ashore, the turtle changes into a beautiful woman. The man abandons his plans to leave the island, and the two of them settle into married life and have a child, who grows up to think about what might lie, as the song says, beyond the sea.

Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit, this nearly wordless film couldn’t be much more beautiful visually. It has quietly magical atmosphere, but somehow it doesn’t quite add up to the masterpiece it seems to want to be. I liked a lot about it, but the moment where the story’s dream logic provides a dramatic payoff is missing.

CAPETOWN

Just as it was difficult to discuss 2008’s The Dark Knight out of the shadow of the heartbreaking loss of Heath Ledger, so it’s likely to be difficult, for a while at least, to discuss The Dark Knight Rises out of the context of the horror at the multiplex in Colorado. As it happened, I was unable to attend the screening of the film before it opened, so unlike many of my fellow critics, I saw it—Sunday morning, in a theater maybe one-third full—with the Aurora shootings in my head.

But in terms of the movie, all the tragedy proves is how much easier it is to be a supervillain than a superhero. The real world squeezes the “super” part out of super-villainy, however—it’s terrifying when somebody tries to realize that sort of large-scale, comic-book-style mayhem, but in the end it’s also sordid and pathetic and wretched. It isn’t grand or epic.

And, except to express sympathy to the victims and their loved ones, it probably isn’t worthy of even as many words as I’ve already given it. So let’s turn to a far less important subject—the movie itself.

I wish I could report that the new Batman flick by Christopher Nolan, from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is a masterpiece, but I can’t. As with the earlier film, it’s a severely uneven mixed bag, polished and handsome but preposterously overlong, confusing, glutted with enough ideas for three or four movies but way too many for one. Like many, many big Hollywood blockbusters of the last couple of decades, it’s fascinating, even thrilling in fits and starts, but wearying in the aggregate.

Batman hasn’t been seen since the end of Dark Knight. Wayne Industries is in the red, and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), ravaged both physically and spiritually by the tragic events of the last movie, is going through a Howard Hughes-ish recluse phase. Alfred (Michael Caine) keeps pestering Bruce like a Jewish mother to get out and find a nice girl, even if it’s the second-story gal Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), who’s managed to filch a string of pearls belonging to Bruce’s mother.

The principal dastardly duties here fall to a certain Bane, played by the very good Brit actor Tom Hardy, here wasted behind a mask. Bane is like a mash-up of post-Boomer pop villainy, with elements of Darth Vader, The Predator, Hannibal Lecter and especially The Lord Humungus from The Road Warrior—he speaks in the same mushy rumble. But I can’t say I found him as scary as any of the above.

Bane is up to something with a huge crew of henchmen in the sewers of Gotham. Eventually he cuts the city off from the outside world and holds its inhabitants hostage for weeks with a nuclear bomb, while imprisoning Bruce in a hellhole prison overseas.

So there are explosions and chases and fistfights and shootouts and abductions and flashbacks and escapes, between and during which the actors spout pages and pages of exposition, much of it hard to follow even when it’s comprehensible, which for me was maybe about half the time. Things aren’t much easier on a thematic level—politically, the movie flails incoherently, coming across one minute like an Occupy rant and the next like Wall Street propaganda. Scene after scene is propulsive and exciting in itself, but often I was unsure what had happened, or what I should want to happen.

What redeems The Dark Knight Rises is what redeems most overworked movies, if anything does—the acting. Bale is better, or at least less annoying, than he was in the last film, though he’s still using that stupid raspy growl when he has the cape and mask on. Between him and Hardy, much of the dialogue sounds like it’s coming through blown stereo speakers.

There’s no performance on the level of Ledger’s in the previous film, but Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman each get a few minutes to show what they’re capable of without breaking a sweat. Hathaway is certainly not repellent in her Catwoman get-up, but Marion Cotillard casts an even stronger seductive spell as a rival love interest for Bruce.

But it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as an intrepid young Gotham cop, who develops more of a relationship with the audience than anybody else in The Dark Knight Rises. If there’s another film in the series, there’s reason to believe he’ll figure prominently, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

RIP to Al Franken’s laid-back early writing and performing partner Tom Davis, passed on too young at 59.