WHAT NOT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING

Opening this weekend:

Monkey Man--The title character, also known variously as "Kid" and "Bobby," wears an ape mask in the ring in the underground fights from which he ekes out a living. He's a man on a mission; he wants to get close enough to the corrupt officials in the Indian city where he lives who caused the death of his mother and the destruction of his neighborhood when he was a child. In flashback, we see the saintly woman telling him stories of Hanuman, the heroic monkey-god from the Ramayana.

Our hero works his way up from floor-scrubber to waiter in the human-trafficking club where these creeps hang out, and from there, lots of blood-splattered mayhem ensues. Grievously wounded, he finds refuge in a religious community of transgendered people who become his allies against the bad guys.

This is the feature directorial debut of Dev Patel, who also wrote the story, co-wrote the script and stars. Patel, the kid from Slumdog Millionaire, has already shown his badass bona fides in 2018's overlooked, believable thriller The Wedding Guest, among other films, and he's a true action star here too, though he never loses a certain sympathetic callowness.

Other memorable cast members include the Jon Lovitz type Pitobash (known to American audiences from Million Dollar Arm) as the comic relief, gorgeous Ashwini Kalsekar as the sinister boss at the club, Vipin Sharma as the serene leader of the trans order, and Sharlto Copley as the shady fight manager. The standout, however, is Sikandar Kher as the brutal but shrewd police chief; his clashes with the Monkey Man are the high points of the film.

Shot in garish, lurid tones by Sharone Meir and slickly edited to propulsive Indian music, Monkey Man is extremely bloody, to be sure, at least by wide-release standards. I'm not sure that, at its bones, it's anything but a standard revenge tale, in the manner of a spaghetti western; Kid/Bobby/Monkey Man is a classic Man With No Name. But as such, it's helped by a gallery of seriously odious villains that help you invest in the hero's vengeance. Whether it's a healthy feeling or not, it's enormously satisfying every time the Monkey Man lands a punch.

The First Omen--Just a couple of years shy of its half-century mark, the original version of The Omen, enormously influential both on the horror genre and on society in general, is still spawning movies. In this prequel, set in Rome in 1971, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), a young American novice raised in Massachusetts, arrives at a Catholic orphanage and quickly realizes that something is very wrong behind the scenes.

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, who was also among the screenwriters, this account of the diabolical Damien's nativity has its merits. It starts well, with a setting and a hapless heroine that suggest a tale from Sade. It has a brooding period atmosphere, some nightmarish imagery and sequences, and a cast stocked with veterans like Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, Charles Dance and the bassoon-voiced Ralph Ineson as an Irish priest investigating the matter.

It's also potentially interesting on a thematic level, in that the plot to bring the Antichrist into the world, it turns out, is reactionary; deliberately concocted to create a concrete Evil which will drive people away from the rebellious, authority-questioning counterculture of the time and back to the Church. Something provocative could have been done with this idea.

So it's by no means an unintelligent piece of moviemaking. But it's a tiresomely unpleasant movie. The story concerns the effort to find a suitable mother for the little devil, which results in many extended scenes of restrained women groaning and whimpering and pleading and gasping, to a degree that felt to me uncomfortably close to torture porn at times.

It's possible that this movie's non-consensual gynecological and obstetric procedures are reflective of a post-Roe sensibility, and can thus claim political validity. But that doesn't make them any more watchable. Perhaps this First Omen should also be the last Omen. 

HOLLAR TREE

Opening this week: 

The Hollars—Even though the small-town middle American family of the title isn’t especially prone to raising their voices, the name somehow fits just the same. They’re an explosive bunch; you get the sense that hollering is what they’re always on the verge of.

John Krasinski plays John Hollar, the son who ran away from home. An aspiring but blocked graphic novelist, he’s been living in New York, working a day job he hates, and reluctant to marry his girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) even though she’s in the homestretch of carrying his child. When John learns that his beloved Mom (Margo Martindale) has collapsed and is in the hospital, he hurries home.

Immediately he’s dropped back into the squabbles between his blubberingly emotional, short-fused father (Richard Jenkins) and his divorced, underachieving, angry older brother Ron (Sharlto Copley), whose ex (Ashley Dyke) and two daughters are now living with a maddeningly nice, patient pastor (Josh Groban). Ron, by contrast, is living back at home with the ‘rents, even though Dad has fired him from the family plumbing business, which John also learns is about to go belly-up. Interrupting all of this drama is Mom’s massive brain tumor, for which she’ll quickly need surgery.

If you’re not hearing anything particularly groundbreaking in this synopsis, you’re not wrong. The Hollars, written by Jim Strouse and directed by Krasinki, is fairly standard dysfunctional family comedy-drama, the sort of modest, “character-driven” piece that actors have a hard time resisting.

Fortunately, the actors who couldn’t resist this script include several of the best now in American movies, and Krasinski managed them briskly. There are scenes that seem heavy-handed and obvious, as when the brothers confer with their mother’s Asian surgeon (Randall Park) and the anxious Ron can’t stop himself from bringing up the man’s race. But most of the interactions between these frightened, pissed-off, loving people ring more or less true, and the actors get all that there is to get out of them, and maybe a bit more.

Vibrant as the whole ensemble is, Krasinski deserves highest marks for giving Margo Martindale a juicy opportunity in a feature film. Long valued as a supporting player, Martindale is showcased here, and has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes with real punch. But her quiet scenes with the lantern-jawed, sadly smiling Krasinski are even better—John and Mom are the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Hollars, and their conspiratorial, amused alliance is the heart of the movie.

HORN STAR

You might forget the somniferous title character of Disney’s 1959 favorite Sleeping Beauty, you might forget her friendly fairy allies, you certainly might forget her crooning Prince. But few people who have seen that film are likely to have forgotten its horned sorceress Maleficent. This imperious, black-clad menace has long been rated among the all-time great screen villains.

Now, in a gesture that will likely cause traditionalists to bemoan the moral relativism of contemporary pop culture, she gets her own movie. Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, is both a backstory and a whitewash. It offers a coherent case for the spite which led her to curse the infant Princess Aurora, and it details her exculpatory relations with the adolescent Princess (Elle Fanning).

The script, by Linda Woolverton of Beauty and the Beast, takes most of the story’s actual wrongdoing off of Mallie’s shoulders and places it where it must, of course, ultimately belong—on a man. The trouble all starts because of the rat-fink behavior of Aurora’s dad Stefan (Sharlto Copley), who was Maleficent’s first love when she was a happy young fairy princess, spreading her wings. Circumstances later bring her into contact with Aurora, and lead her to repent her curse, but she finds she’s unable to revoke it. It’s one of the terrors that a fairy tale can dramatize better than almost any other form—that a momentary moral lapse may be impossible to come back from.

From its idyllic early scenes to its final battles, Maleficent has no shortage of Disney-style kitsch, banality and playing-it-safe platitudes. But the movie entertains anyway, and that’s almost entirely to Jolie’s credit. In an era when few screen actors, even talented ones, can lay claim to the title with confidence, she’s a true movie star. But it’s easy to forget that she’s also a real actress. She’s so inhumanly beautiful that it may be hard for her to find roles that fit her—wings and horns seem almost more plausible on her, somehow, than contemporary street clothes—but she was born to play this part, and it allows her to show off her way with a line, and her riveting poise.

There are other capable performances in the film. Copley, the striking fellow from the brilliant District 9, is striking again as the rotting-from-the-inside King, and Fanning’s Princess, who mistakes Maleficent for her Fairy Godmother, is amusing, mostly because her guileless glee is bounced off of Jolie’s dry reactions. If the kindly fairies—Juno Temple, Lesley Manville and the great Imelda Staunton—make less of an impression here, it may be because they get less interaction with the star. Almost certainly the best of Jolie’s foils is Sam Riley as Diaval, her shape-shifting servant and spy, who’s not afraid to give her backchat.

These filmmakers are to be commended for eschewing the standard, absolutist good-or-evil template usual to the Disney movies. It has to be said, though, that by turning Maleficent into a heroine, they’ve left a vacuum where the villainy should be that Copley’s King just doesn’t fill—he’s a despicable character, but not a strong one. The result is that the final clashes, though they carry plenty of high-fantasy spectacle and a lovely plot twist, aren’t deeply exciting.

There’s always been a certain ruthlessness to the way the classic Disney films engaged the base emotions of children—often through the death, or apparent death, of a beloved character, or by working up hatred toward a witch or other (often female) villain. Maleficent, like last year’s smash Frozen, is shaped as a fantasy for postmodern women and girls, and it wants to have it both ways—to enjoy the droll glamour and power of the sinister, but to take any deep evil out of it. The movie is rescued by the performance at its center, but ironically, in this tribute to the ultimate bad girl Jolie is finally forced to play a little too nice.