GUN AND GAMES

Opening this weekend:

The Naked Gun--It's in the trailer anyway, so allow me a spoiler: "Please, take a chair," says Detective Frank Drebin to his beautiful costar. After politely declining on the grounds that she has plenty of chairs at home, she ends up walking out with a chair.

There are better jokes in the movie, and there are worse jokes, too. But it's a fair representative.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer, this new version of the late-'80s/early-'90s-era series, derived from the short-lived 1982 TV show Police Squad! (the first feature was titled The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!) shows real allegiance to its source. There's some fine silly wordplay and elaborately constructed sight gags. Most essentially, though, the movie keeps a first-rate poker face.

Frank's adversary this time is a rich guy (Danny Huston), boss of a company that sells self-driving cars. He's also the head of a cabal of "evil billionaires" with an ambitious plot to cleanse the earth of mediocrities and rebuild it to their advantage. But the plot is little more than a clothesline on which to hang schtick. 

The old show and the first three movies were the creations of writer-director-producers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams and writer Pat Proft, who in various combinations were also behind the Airplane! and Hot Shots! movies. Their seeming approach was to fling multiple dumb gags per minute at the audience, apparently on the theory that if only one of them landed, the movie would still be a laugh a minute.

But their best trick was to let old-school, stone cold serious actors like Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and George Kennedy deliver those dumb gags. And nobody benefitted from this technique more than Leslie Nielsen. Younger audiences may not remember that Nielsen had been a bland leading man who had graduated to authority figures and shady villains as he matured, until Airplane! allowed him to let out his goofy side. Before 1980, the idea that he would have become a major comedy star would have seemed funnier than most of the jokes in those movies.

Liam Neeson is probably about as close a contemporary equivalent to Nielsen as you could find. In the new film, Neeson takes his cue from Nielsen and plays it utterly, hilariously straight as Frank Drebin the Younger. If you happen to reflect that that's Oscar Schindler, or the avenging middle-aged tough guy from the Taken flicks, up there glowering and deadpanning those absurd dad jokes and acting out that slapstick and potty humor, it deepens the comedic effect.

Pamela Anderson is just as game as Neeson's leading lady, at one point knocking out a jaw-dropping scat number. She keeps her dignity through some major raunch, and through one of the strangest romantic montages ever.

It takes very smart people to craft something this artfully stupid, and while this style of comedy might not be the healthiest as a steady diet, The Naked Gun could be just what we need right at the moment. Maybe smartest of all, it's blessedly short, clocking in at under an hour and a half. Brevity is the soul of wit; it's also the soul of this movie.

BEAR, TRACKS

Opening this weekend:

Paddington 2—As far as I know, this is the first crime thriller about the theft of a pop-up book. The title bear wants to buy the one-of-a-kind tome, you see, as a gift for his adored Aunt back in "darkest Peru." Alas, before he's saved up enough of his pay as a window-washer to make the purchase, the book is filched from the antiques store by a mysterious burglar, and Paddington is suspected of the heist and thrown in jail.

The real culprit—it’s revealed early on, but stop reading now if you don’t want the “spoiler”—is a crackbrained, down-on-his-luck actor played by Hugh Grant, who knows, as Paddington does not, that the pop-up book contains clues to the location of a hidden treasure. So as Paddington struggles to negotiate the perils of prison life and his upper-middle-class adoptive London family searches for evidence of his innocence, the thespian gets closer and closer to claiming the loot.

Michael Bond's beloved bear, with his blue coat, floppy red hat and love of marmalade, has been a mainstay of Brit kiddie-lit since the late ‘50s. Bond, who died this past year (Paddington 2 is dedicated to him) claimed that the character’s inspiration came, in part, from the sight of tagged children on railway platforms being evacuated from London during WWII.

There have been several animated TV series based on Bond’s tales, but the first feature film was a 2014 live-action effort, with a CGI Paddington excellently voiced by Ben Whishaw. That movie had plenty of charm, but it was marred, for me severely, by the introduction of a Cruella de Vil-like villainess played by Nicole Kidman, an obsessed taxidermist who, lacking a specimen of Ursa Marmalada in her collection, wanted to stuff Paddington. This nastiness felt really out of place in the gentle context of the movie.

Paddington 2 is a major improvement. Directed, like the first film, by Paul King of the marvelous Brit TV comedy The Mighty Boosh, the sequel features lengthy, complex slapstick sequences in the sprit of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati, executed by Paddington (Whishaw again) with similarly earnest absorption. And its softer and sillier villain hits just the right note, without taking too much of an edge off the picture. It does, after all, contain the line, spoken by a security guard at St. Paul’s, “A nun went beserk.”

And that cast! Returning from the first film are Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi and Jim Broadbent, joined here by the likes of Brendan Gleeson, as Paddington’s tough-guy prison mentor, Tom Conti, Joanna Lumley and Eileen Atkins, billed here as Dame Eileen Atkins, if you please. It’s a testament to the bear’s iconic status over there that that sort of a-list talent could be assembled for a kiddie-movie sequel.

Stealing the picture from all of them is Grant, who turns his no-good greedy ham into a star part. He gets to use a variety of accents and wear cunning disguises—including as that aforementioned “very attractive nun.” He even gets to perform a full Sondheim number.

The Commuter—Liam Neeson plays a 60-year-old ex-cop turned insurance salesman who rides a commuter train from Tarrytown to Manhattan and back everyday. Heading home on the day he gets laid off, baffled by how he’ll send his son to college, he’s approached by a mystery woman (Vera Farmiga) with a proposition—somebody on the train doesn’t belong, she says.

He’s given a false name that the person is traveling under (he isn’t told the gender), and promised that he’ll be given $100,000 if, using his cop skills, he makes the identification for them. In a moment of weakness he takes the down payment, but quickly realizes that the people who have hired him are ruthless killers, and that he’d be dooming their target by making the ID. He also realizes that his own family is in danger.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spaniard behind 2015’s Run All Night and several other Liam Neeson righteous/reluctant killing sprees, this thriller pays obvious tribute to Hitchcock—overtly to Shadow of a Doubt—but is just as reminiscent of the Bruckheimer-style action excess playbook. The plot gets more convoluted, and the action more ludicrously overscaled, as the movie progresses.

But as usual, there’s Neeson at the center of it, with his quiet masculinity and his decency and his pained, sad-faced acceptance of the distasteful duty of pulverizing his enemies—it’s distasteful to him, that is; we in the audience drool for their retribution. He’s an action hero for middle-aged guys who feel ineffectual, and he delivers again here.

On the whole, The Commuter is more fun than many of Neeson’s other massacres. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s generous-hearted: especially in a Spartacus-like climatic flourish, it’s about strangers sticking up for each other.

IT'S BACK, ACTUALLY

Harkins Theatres screens Love, Actually tonight as a "Tuesday Night Classic" at 7 p.m. at several different multiplexes throughout the Valley. The chain did this before back in 2014; here's what I posted about it then:

This week’s edition of Tuesday Night Classics at Harkins Theatres is Love, Actually, the 2003 multi-strand holiday comedy-drama by Richard Curtis. As with many of the Tuesday Night selections, it might be slightly premature to call it a classic, but it’s a strong, rich movie, and it wouldn’t be a bad way to get the holidays rolling, actually.

Actually. What a great word. Nobody says “actually” like the English of the posher classes. For them, perhaps, it’s a way of admitting that most of what they say is understated pleasantry, while at the same time asserting that the particular remark to which they’re attaching the modifier is heartfelt, even though they aren’t about to drop the reserved, self-deprecating manner. Coupled with the word “love,” it’s a fairly hot-blooded English avowal of passion, actually.

Even among the English, no one says the word “actually” quite like Hugh Grant. He used it more than once in his halting, foot-shuffling performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral back in 1994, scripted by Curtis, and he used it again in Love, Actually.

Grant plays the young Prime Minister of England, who arrives for his first day at Ten Downing Street only to find himself instantly afflicted with infatuation for a smiling, zaftig office assistant (Martine McCutcheon) who bears, though it’s never stated, some resemblance to our Ms. Lewinsky. This is one of several plot strands which Curtis loosely interweaves. The theme, it need hardly be said, is love: Romantic, marital, erotic, cross-cultural, adulterous, parental, filial, puppy, requited, unrequited, from afar, even patriotic—all of these variations are treated by the enormous cast.

Indeed, the case could probably be made that Curtis, also making his directorial debut, got a bit overambitious here, that there are too many plotlines, that some of them inevitably get short shrift. But I enjoyed the company of all of these people, and even when the movie gets a bit corny and carried away, as in a chase through Heathrow at the end, I found myself indulging it as one would indulge someone going on and on about a new love.

Standouts among the cast include Bill Nighy, hilarious as a down-on-his-luck rock star hoping for a Christmas hit, Kris Marshall as a dorky Brit convinced (not unreasonably) that his accent would make him a hit with American girls, Lucia Montez as the Portuguese housekeeper for whom Colin Firth falls across the language barrier, and Emma Thompson as the wife of the straying Alan Rickman—she suffers courageously in the grand Greer Garson tradition.

Most impressive of all, maybe, is the prodigal young Thomas Sangster—more recently seen in The Maze Runner—as Liam Neeson’s stepson who’s smitten with a girl at school. This kid’s grave, sober line readings dare you to patronize the significance of his feelings.

IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE

Opening today:

Hidden Figures—We tend to think of NASA as part of the “New Frontier” and “Camelot” and the general unembarrassed optimistic idealism we associate, accurately or not, with the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. So it’s a slight jolt to realize that the space program, at least in its early days (then NACA, or the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics), was segregated.

It was, of course, decades before there were female or nonwhite astronauts, but in at least one facility, the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the segregation was overt. A pool of female African-American “computers”—the term was applied to humans who performed complicated mathematical functions in those days—was relegated to a separate building and separate restrooms on the Langley campus until at least 1958.

This drama focuses on Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who, among many other career achievements, calculated flight trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbital Mercury mission in 1962. It also depicts Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), the de facto supervisor of the department, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), who became an aerospace engineer.

The director, St. Vincent’s Theodore Melfi, working from a script he wrote with Allison Schroeder (based, in turn, on Margot Lee Shetterley’s nonfiction book) seems to have compressed and conflated the chronology of events here for dramatic convenience, but he gets across the essentials of this remarkable story, another in the seemingly bottomless supply of belatedly-told instances of American achievement by women and minorities, in the face of outrageous intolerance. The style is standard inspirational uplift, and the characterizations aren’t deep, but the cast—the three leads and also Kevin Costner as the Langley big boss—are vibrant enough to fill in the blanks.

The bright primary-color cinematography and the midcentury period detail are parts of what make this cinematically inconsequential movie so pleasant. Another part, I confess, is the glamour of the lead actresses—I know we’re supposed to be celebrating their intellectual and social triumphs, but as they scurry around in their pencil skirts and glasses, they also show a lot of nerd chic.

A Monster Calls—English adolescent Conor (Lewis MacDougall) lives in a lovely old country house with his adored, cancer-afflicted young mother (Felicity Jones). One night, after he and his mom have watched King Kong together, Conor receives a visit at his bedroom window from a monster; an enormous anthropomorphic tree, something like the green man of myth, who speaks in the rumbling tones of Liam Neeson.

Over the course of the film, The Monster tells Conor three odd stories of elusive meaning, something like Sufi parables, insisting that when he is done with his three, Conor must tell him a fourth story. Eventually he tells The Monster his story and, as with the end of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his own agonized, guilty secret is revealed.

This film, directed by J.A. Bayona, is based on the much-honored 2011 children’s novel by Patrick Ness, which was based, in turn, on an idea and some notes by the late writer Siobhan Dowd. It’s a poignant, handsomely-made piece of work, with beautiful animated sequences (illustrating The Monster’s stories) and fine acting, not only by MacDougall and Jones but by Toby Kebbell as Conor’s absentee dad and Sigourney Weaver as his stern, terrified grandmother. It’s also nice to see Geraldine Chaplin, in a small but effective role as an authority figure at Conor’s school.

Above all, it has a memorable presence in the great creaking, rustling, uprooted Monster. The special effects depicting him are lovely, and it’s nice to hear that urgently authoritative Neeson voice used for something other than threatening bad guys in lurid action movies.

CORNED BEEF & SPAGHETTI

This week’s openings suggest that it’s Bloody Revenge Weekend:

Run All Night—One of the few pretty funny lines that Neil Patrick Harris had in this year’s Oscar show was his introduction of Liam Neeson, to the effect of: “Here’s a man with a particular set of skills—he will find you, and he will kill you.”

This new melodrama is the latest of Liam Neeson’s murmuring threat movies, the ones where he earnestly warns some gangster or kidnapper, usually over the phone, that they’re in big trouble if they don’t lay off some innocent victim. The bad guys never listen, and buckets of blood pour out of people’s heads.

Here Neeson plays Jimmy, a conscience-haunted former hitman in service of Queens crime boss Shawn (Ed Harris). Jimmy’s now a pathetic broke drunk, but when his estranged son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) witnesses Shawn’s cokehead son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) kill some Albanian gangsters, Jimmy kills Danny in Michael’s defense. Though he loves Jimmy, Shawn feels he has no choice but to have Michael killed in recompense, and Jimmy of course is determined to defend his son.

Bullets fly, and innumerable henchman fall. There are some gothic twists, including one of those unstoppable juggernaut hitmen that turn up in movies like this, creepily played by rapper Lonnie “Common” Lynn, called in by Shawn to wipe out father and son (not in that order).

This has the makings of a terrific melodrama, in that it has two great actors in an unresolvable conflict. Neeson and Harris are both as commanding as ever, and when they’re onscreen together they’re better yet—two aging slabs of Irish corned beef who’ve learned first-hand what a vile business murder is, and gaze at each other tenderly, in genuine sorrow over the horror they’re unleashing in each other’s lives.

But the movie, directed by frequent Neeson collaborator Jaume Collet-Serra (he also directed the notorious Orphan) from a script by Brad Ingelsby, ultimately wastes this great advantage. The action is too contrived and overscaled, the escapes too improbably hairbreadth, the music by Junkie XL too blaring. Eventually it gets funny, and then it gets tiresome.

There’s a moment toward the end, when Shawn knows—after one of those murmuring Neeson phone calls—that Jimmy is about to attack his stronghold. He looks at a henchman and tells him to tell everyone to get ready: “Jimmy’s comin’” This could have been a spinetingling melodramatic flourish, but we’ve seen so much ridiculously cartoonish carnage already that it barely registers.

Meanwhile, at the Valley Art:

The Salvation—For sheer ugly brutality, this Western revenge yarn makes Run All Night look like My Little Pony. The hero is Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) a Danish immigrant in the American West whose family is murdered. He quickly kills the men responsible, but in so doing gains the enmity of the twisted gang boss (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who has the craven town under his thumb. Jon and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) are former soldiers, veterans of Denmark’s 1864 Schleswig War, and when they take up arms against the gang, blood spills copiously.

This Danish/British/South African co-production (it was shot in the deserts of the latter country) offers shootings and stabbings, rape and torture, scurvy henchmen and mealy-mouthed officials, most notably Jonathan Pryce as the corrupt mayor/undertaker. It’s like Titus Andronicus on the range, right down to a baleful woman (Eva Green) who’s had her tongue cut out.

This description should be enough to determine whether The Salvation is to your taste—or, indeed, whether you even approve of it—but in any case it’s executed with precision and confidence in a taut hour and a half. Director Kristian Levring works, from a script he co-wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen, more or less in the “Spaghetti western” style, with faux-Morricone strumming away on the soundtrack, and there wasn’t a minute that I was bored, or that I didn’t want to see Jon have his revenge. The comeuppance the bad guys ultimately receive was not painful, humiliating or protracted enough to satisfy my nasty heart, but in movies like this it almost never is.

ALL AN ACT...UALLY

This week’s edition of Tuesday Night Classics at Harkins Theatres is Love, Actually, the 2003 multi-strand holiday comedy-drama by Richard Curtis. As with many of the Tuesday Night selections, it might be slightly premature to call it a classic, but it’s a strong, rich movie, and it wouldn’t be a bad way to get the holidays rolling, actually.

Actually. What a great word. Nobody says the word “actually” like the English of the posher classes. For them, perhaps, it’s a way of admitting that most of what they say is understated pleasantry, while at the same time asserting that the particular remark to which they’re attaching the modifier is heartfelt, even though they aren’t about to drop the reserved, self-deprecating manner. Coupled with the word “love,” it’s a fairly hot-blooded English avowal of passion, actually.

Even among the English, no one says the word “actually” quite like Hugh Grant. He used it more than once in his halting, foot-shuffling performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral back in 1994, scripted by Curtis, and he used it again in Love, Actually.

Grant plays the young Prime Minister of England, who arrives for his first day at Ten Downing Street only to find himself instantly afflicted with infatuation for a smiling, zaftig office assistant (Martine McCutcheon) who bears, though it’s never stated, some resemblance to our Ms. Lewinsky. This is one of several plot strands which Curtis loosely interweaves. The theme, it need hardly be said, is love: Romantic, marital, erotic, cross-cultural, adulterous, parental, filial, puppy, requited, unrequited, from afar, even patriotic—all of these variations are treated by the enormous cast.

Indeed, the case could probably be made that Curtis, also making his directorial debut, got a bit overambitious here, that there are too many plotlines, that some of them inevitably get short shrift. But I enjoyed the company of all of these people, and even when the movie gets a bit corny and carried away, as in a chase through Heathrow at the end, I found myself indulging it as one would indulge someone going on and on about a new love.

Standouts among the cast include Bill Nighy, hilarious as a down-on-his-luck rock star hoping for a Christmas hit, Kris Marshall as a dorky Brit convinced (not unreasonably) that his accent would make him a hit with American girls, Lucia Montez as the Portuguese housekeeper for whom Colin Firth falls across the language barrier, and Emma Thompson as the wife of the straying Alan Rickman—she suffers courageously in the grand Greer Garson tradition.

Most impressive of all, maybe, is the prodigal young Thomas Sangster—more recently seen in The Maze Runner—as Liam Neeson’s stepson who’s smitten with a girl at school. This kid’s grave, sober line readings dare you to patronize the significance of his feelings.

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.

LEADER OF THE PACK

A few environmental activists have called for a boycott of The Grey, because it depicts wolves stalking & killing humans. Such attacks, though certainly not unknown in human history, are very rare, & given the much higher degree to which wolf populations have suffered at the hands of humans, it may seem gratuitous to use them as movie menaces.

But it’s probably a losing argument. The wolf of traditional stock villainy, as opposed to zoology, can be traced from Aesop, The Three Little Pigs & Red Riding Hood to the modern werewolf movies.

The Grey is a dark & rather unsavory thriller concerning a bunch of oil workers whose plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. The most capable of the survivors, Ottway (Liam Neeson), who hunts wolves for the company, soon realizes that they’ve crashed on the turf of a wolf pack, & he takes charge, trying to lead the group to safety. As the wolves, among other perils, cull their numbers, personality clashes intensify within the party.

The script, by director Joe Carnahan & Ian MacKenzie Jeffers, based on a story by Jeffers, offers some man-against-the-elements philosophizing in between a lot of macho head-butting, in between gory wolf attacks—it’s something like jacked-up Jack London with a dash of slasher movie. The animals look heavily computer-generated in many of the scare scenes, however, which weakens their impact.

I can’t say I found this movie likable, but it has a saving grace, & its name is Liam Neeson. One of the few authentic slabs of beef left in current movies, Neeson’s imposing masculinity, his no-nonsense maturity & the lupine sadness on his face give this overbearing melodrama a touch of Bergmanesque tragedy.

There are other creditable performances—notably by Frank Grillo as the most obnoxious of the party & Dermot Mulroney as the least obnoxious—but no other contemporary actor I can think of could give the role of Ottway the plausibility that Neeson does. Indeed, he brings the film the wild animal presence that the wolf effects fail to capture.

RIP to Robert Hegyes, best known as the “Sweathog” Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter, passed on at 60.