VEIN MAN

Opening this weekend...

Morbius--Jared Leto certainly has the physique and facial bones to play the title character in this Marvel flick. His performance as the hapless vampiric hematologist is good, too; quiet and haunted yet not oppressive, tinged with grim humor. The movie, however, could use a transfusion of originality platelets.

Michael Morbius, the cadaverous "Living Vampire," was introduced in comics in the early '70s as a nemesis to Spider-Man...

...and eventually headlined Marvel titles of his own. Like Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, he was a reluctant and tormented blood-drinker. Michael had brought on his condition, which includes superhuman strength and batlike gliding and echolocation ability, through a serum intended to cure the rare blood disease that was killing him. He craved blood but didn't want to hurt anyone, and, as with The Lizard (with whom Morbius notably clashed), Spidey empathized with him and tried not to harm him.

There are other strong performances in the film, directed by Daniel Espinosa from a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (the team behind 2014's Dracula Untold). Matt Smith slyly plays Milo, Michael's mega-rich pal and research patron, who suffers from the same disease and soon notices the same side effects from Michael's serum, but feels less guilt over his bloodlust. Adria Arjona has a lovely sober quality as Martine, Michael's partner and romantic interest; her gravity seems to bring out a hint of playfulness in Leto.

I really wanted to like this one; I'm fond of the comic character. And for the first half or so it cruises along enjoyably enough, though there's nothing really new to it, just standard spooky gothic flourishes. The corn is as high as a vampire's eye, too; repeatedly, when they're in bloodsucker mode, both Michael and Milo strike a scary pose and go "RAAAAAH!" like the bully kid in A Christmas Story, and after a while they seem like the performers in a Halloween haunted house.

Then, as the movie progresses, the questionable logic increases. Why, for instance, would a boat on which secret medical experiments were being conducted require a large team of heavily armed mercenaries? Why would Michael want to commandeer a counterfeiting workshop's equipment to adapt into scientific equipment?

In the later scenes, as Michael and Milo battle in the shadowy streets of New York--The Batman has nothing on this movie for gloominess--Morbius descends into an unexciting muddle. It has a truncated, cut-down feel to it, a suspicion supported by the presence of scenes in the trailer that didn't show up in the finished film.

The most disappointing of these is the paucity of Michael Keaton, as Adrian Toomes aka The Vulture; he's shown in the trailer and I figured that if nothing else worked in the movie, Keaton would at least goose a little life into it. But [spoiler alert!] he only appears very briefly at the very end, and adds almost nothing to the picture (unless I nodded off when he said it, even the line he speaks in the trailer was cut). In the sequel, if there is a sequel, I certainly hope Keaton gets a much bigger role.

GHOST CLOWN

Opening this weekend:

Poltergeist—One of the wittier moments in the original 1982 Poltergeist came when the little boy’s clown doll finally came to life and attacked him. What makes the scene brilliant is that, though the poor kid is terrified, he doesn’t really seem surprised.

Do any children actually enjoy clowns? Did they ever? The poster for this Poltergeist remake features another awful clown with a look of indolent evil on his face. At what toy store was this nightmare purchased, and by who, with the idea that it would delight a little kid?

The clown face on the poster is a key to why this new Poltergeist doesn’t work. Like this image, the movie pushes too hard. I like the original film, but have never thought it was all that scary. Its chief appeal, aside from the legs of Jobeth Williams, was its idyllic vision of suburban life, the charm of which was only strengthened by the interruption by malevolent supernatural forces.

The family in the new film, directed by Gil Kenan, has downsized into the haunted house after Dad (Sam Rockwell) has been laid off. The structure is more or less the same as that of the original—indeed, it’s probably a tighter, more coherent piece of storytelling. But despite a few halfhearted attempts at humor, the subtext this time is all anger, disappointment, economic impotence and sexual frustration. Mom (Rosemarie DeWitt) walks on eggshells around Dad’s wounded breadwinner’s pride, and Rockwell gives off such seething fury, especially toward the beginning, that he seems like a greater danger to his family than the ghosts.

Into this already queasy atmosphere Kenan introduces the scare scenes whole-hog, way too early after a perfunctory build-up. I’m pretty easy to scare, and I found most of them routine.

As for the rest of the cast, all three of the kids are excellent, and Jared Harris isn’t bad as a daring celebrity ghostbuster, but the standout among the adults is Jane Adams as a frazzled paranormal researcher. She doesn’t get enough to do, however.

Oh yeah, it’s being released in 3-D. There’s one decent effect, involving a drill bit. Otherwise, as usual, it’s superfluous.

LAVA CAMP

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson of the Resident Evil flicks, Pompeii begins with a few onscreen lines from Pliny the Younger, powerfully describing the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius that buried the title city and many of its inhabitants in 79 A.D. Pliny had witnessed the sudden event, which centuries later would provide archeologists with a snapshot of provincial Roman life, at the age of 17. It so happened I had reread Pliny’s account the afternoon before the screening, in anticipation of the movie.

Rather optimistically I suppose, I was holding out some dim hope that Pliny and his famous uncle Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption, might be characters in the new film. They aren’t, but the stock figures and melodramatic clichés out of which the film is made date back farther than the disaster itself.

Well, OK, maybe most of the motifs date from as recently as Gladiator and Spartacus and the spaghetti westerns and, especially, Titanic. Like that film, Pompeii takes place against the backdrop of a horrific catastrophe the popular perception of which has grown quaint and even romanticized with historical distance. Also like Cameron’s film, it’s built around star-crossed lovers—Cassia (Emily Browning), a patrician girl, and Milo (Kit Harington), a pouty-looking Celt gladiator brought to Pompeii to fight at a festival. Both, for very different reasons—both connected to the same person, however—bear Rome a grudge.

Neither are particularly interesting characters. Harington is on a show I haven’t watched called Game of Thrones, and he’s lively enough, but the character is storybook simple—brave and innately gallant, despite a life of brutal bondage. He’s even a horse whisperer. The nymph-like Browning gets even less to play as the noble and egalitarian Cassia.

As is usually the case, the real fun in Pompeii comes from the supporting cast, and from the wild spectacle, and plenty of fun they both provide. Once it gets going, the movie is an utterly headlong, non-stop ride, so feverishly paced that it becomes funny. Happily, the actors manage not to get crushed (unless the script requires it). Jared Harris is excellent as Cassia’s weakling Dad, a would-be urban developer of a sort not remotely unfamiliar here in Phoenix, who’s trying to smooch the butts of the investors from Rome. Boy are he, and they, in for a surprise.

Carrie-Anne Moss is serviceable as Cassia’s Mom, and Jessica Lucas was, I thought, cuter than the heroine as Cassia’s servant and BFF. Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje is imposing as always as a gladiator who must kill Milo to earn his freedom; they of course become pals. But the real juice in the cast comes from the bad guys—Kiefer Sutherland as a loathsome, heartless senator, and Sasha Roiz as his murderous henchman. The desire to see these two creeps get their comeuppance is intense, always the sign of a well-done villain.

Alongside all of this roiling drama, Vesuvius serves as little more than a plot device—indeed, the movie goes so far as to hint that the eruption may be a gift from the gods to help Milo avenge himself on those who have wronged him! In any case, much like in the disaster movies of the ‘70s, the destruction is amusing to watch. Unlike Titanic, Anderson’s computer-generated depiction of Pompeii’s doom stirs up little genuine dread. Say what you will about the hokey dramatics in Titanic, but Cameron really did generate a frightening sense of how much it would have sucked to be on that freaking boat.

In Anderson’s Pompeii, by contrast, the characters have all the time, stamina and leisure they need to engage in swordfights, exchange taunts, settle old scores, all with flaming pumice raining down around them. At one point Milo remarks to Cassia “We have to get to the harbor.” You think? Nothing gets past these Celtic boys.

ABE PLUS

It’s understandable if, after endless months of venomous, bitterly divisive politics, you aren’t particularly in the mood for a movie about a venomous, bitterly divisive period in American politics. But it would be a shame if political burnout kept audiences away from Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s amazing movie built around the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th President.

Honest Abe has been irresistible to moviemakers for more than a century, depicted sometimes reverently, as in D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) or Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), and sometimes irreverently, as in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or this year’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. His achievements in office, his unassuming manner and his tragic end have, in the movies, generally resulted in one extreme or the other—either he’s a secular folk saint, or else he brings out the urge to spoof. There was TV miniseries called Lincoln back in the ‘80s, based on Gore Vidal’s book and with Sam Waterston as Abe, that made some effort to delve into the man’s psychology, but as I recall it was pretty slow going.

Spielberg’s film takes its time, too, and it’s pictorially beautiful. The cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, infuses his compositions with a muted radiance that still seems realistic and immediate—the whole movie feels like a spring thaw. Yet it’s no iconic hagiography, and the unhurried pace that Spielberg sets gives the story a rising hum of dramatic energy. It’s not a tour of wax-museum tableaux from the man’s life. Surprisingly, and to the movie’s great benefit, it’s a story of nuts-and-bolts politics: the seemingly insoluble legislative wrangle to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery in the United States.

The script, by Tony Kushner, is partly adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The title suggests the difference in the new film’s approach. Political genius isn’t the first thing we associate with Lincoln. Yet the movie suggests that it was skill—at strategy, at marshalling favors and muzzling enemies, and at navigating the moral ambivalence of deep compromise—that, paradoxically, led him to accomplishments of moral grandeur.

Spielberg is at the top of his form here. I think film critics and buffs have, in a sense, underrated him for years. After his initial great success with Jaws and Close Encounters and E.T., he made some really terrible movies in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—pushy, cloying, evasive stuff like Hook and Always—and many viewers naturally assumed that he was just going to be a sentiment-peddler forever. Some of them, I think, didn’t notice that Spielberg’s films in the ‘90s and early 2000s, though often highly uneven in terms of script or casting, were stunningly directed. Amistad and Munich and Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds were all flawed, but they were the often mesmerizing work of a master filmmaker—indeed, of a master filmmaker who had rediscovered and deepened his art.

We see this again in Lincoln, from the first images—of a horrifyingly bloody and brutal Civil War battle—to the first few lines of dialogue, as Lincoln converses with two black Union soldiers of very different temperament, and then with two awestruck white soldiers. There’s a weird and complex play of symmetry and conflicted agenda and formality and off-handedness, all presented with an effortlessness of revelation, that few other directors could have managed, or would even have thought to attempt.

What allows Spielberg to maintain this level of mastery through all that follows is the script. Kushner, who wrote the magnificent Angels in America plays, is one of the few contemporary dramatists who is both capable and unafraid of high-flown language, and the 19th Century idiom allows him to cut loose in this regard without sounding overly stylized.

Yet for all of Spielberg’s and Kushner’s brilliance, and for all the splendors of Kaminski’s camera, what makes Lincoln unique is Daniel Day-Lewis. Like the movie, his Lincoln will not suit all tastes, but for me, it’s one of the great performances in, maybe, the history of movies. It’s up there with Falconetti as Joan of Arc and Brando in The Godfather, and nobody but Day-Lewis could have given it.

A number of people I’ve talked to have been put off by the voice he uses—a thin, soft, upper-register drawl instead of a stentorian baritone. This is thought to be historically accurate, I believe, but it also works in the context of the character as Spielberg, Kushner and Day-Lewis conceive him. The movie operates on the premise that Lincoln was a compulsive raconteur. Again and again throughout the film, he stops, chuckles to himself, and launches a maddeningly digressive anecdote, and everyone in the room, even his friends and allies, look miserable as they sit there and wait for the punchline. This recurring gag, and the voice, connect to the idea that as a speaker Lincoln preferred quiet eloquence to thundering oratory, and as a leader preferred self-deprecating persuasion to conquest.

Day-Lewis doesn’t give the only fine performance in the film. Sally Field strikes the right strained yet sympathetic note as Mary Todd Lincoln; Joseph Gordon-Levitt is moving as Robert Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones lets it rip as Radical Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Less flashy than Jones but just as essential to the movie is David Strathairn as Seward, and then there’s Bruce McGill as Stanton, and Jared Harris as Grant, and Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Stephens and Gloria Reuben as Elizabeth Keckley and Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair and James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson as three comically shady political operatives, among many other creditable turns.

Lincoln is, ultimately—and perhaps to its commercial peril—a movie of remarkable restraint. Spielberg, Kushner and Day-Lewis eschew almost every opportunity for melodrama. Even the score, by John Williams, keeps its voice down. Yet the cumulative effect of this low-key movie is, at least for one viewer, overwhelming.