Review - Knives Out (2019)

Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans
IMDb Link

Just as Rian Johnson's first film, Brick, celebrated the noir genre through a near-perfect reconstruction with a modern twist, Knives Out is a reminder of what makes mystery stories so fun and engaging, while updating the genre fare with a couple of brilliant and quirky ideas.

A rich murder mystery writer has slit his throat, but an anonymous client seems to think that there's more to this than suicide, and the eccentric detective (Craig) they've hired seems to agree, especially since every member of this man's avaricious family could be a suspect. To say more would be to give away too much of the story, and as it's a mystery that ruins the fun, but I do want to talk about a couple of things that may enter spoiler territory, so if you want to go in to the story unfettered by more, just skip to my summary and know that I absolutely recommend this film as one of the best of the year.

What makes Knives Out so utterly engaging is its choice of perspective: both whose we view the movie from and how such things can change. On its own, such a story would only be genre-savvy, but we see the story outside the perspective of the detective: the audience surrogate seems also the perpetrator, and such a decision elevates the film to new heights as it plays such a revelation both for tension and for humour in Johnson's own delightfully off-kilter way. But this idea of perspective shifting the meaning of the story gets taken even further in some of the film's more subtle touches. I love the way each family member, when telling the story of their father's birthday, imagine themselves by their father's side as the cake is placed in front of him, how treating his nurse as "one of the family" to some is little more than using them as an example as they postulate some racist tirade, to how nobody seems to be clear on where said nurse is even from, or who actually voted to not let her attend the funeral. The stories are so deliberately inconsistent, and while it can sometimes feel like very clever window dressing, it all ultimately plays back in to the key themes of the story.

All of this is of course helped immensely by the hammy, archetypal performances of the colourful cast. Everyone here commits to the slightly ridiculous and yet inalienable humanity of their characters; the family is filled with terrible people who behave excessively, but they're always strangely believable. I'd be here all day if I talked about every one of them, so know that each of them is worth talking about while I get in to a couple of my favourites. Jamie Lee Curtis is a highlight here as the eldest daughter, a delight to watch in the most extra of pink power suits, at once the apotheosis of all the greed and power-mongering that runs in the family, and yet the most clearly stricken by the death of her father. Her son, played by Chris Evans, is the most vindictive, uncaring, brutally sarcastic dickhead, and he definitely seems to be having the most fun in what is the second-most entertaining performance in the film. The only one that bests him is Craig's detective, Benoit Blanc, whose hilariously silly caricature of an accent is the mere icing on the doughnut of a man who simply cannot stop talking them by film's end; his is the purest form of puzzling joy that this movie goes for. That said, Ana de Armas is the heart and soul of this movie, her performance the closest to real to keep the audience in her head-space, with the clever juxtaposition of the flaws and strengths of her character reinforcing her most important moments: her caring and her inability to lie seen as weakness by the rest, the perfect foil to keep people on her side and yet perfectly inept to deal with this situation, and Armas handles each challenge excellently.

The Short Version: Cleverly written and masterfully framed, Knives Out supports a colourful cast of characters with a rollicking mystery story whose originality lies in its style of telling, twisting as much with its use of perspective as it does with its dizzying plot.

Rating: 8.5/10

Review - Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer
Written by: Dave Callaham, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin
IMDb Link

Zombieland was one of the best pieces of Zombie fiction to come out of that glut of content the subgenre received in the late 2000s-early 2010s; the "Double Tap" became a meme, the actors all went on to have prestige careers. Before all that, though, the film was wickedly funny, and the running trope commentary felt like a breath of fresh air as the content began to pile up around the subgenre like dead bodies.

Unfortunately, it's been ten years; Zombie content has continued to shamble on, the commentary of the first has grown stale, and Zombieland: Double Tap seems content to spend its time remembering how good the first one was rather than doing anything to really move the story or the characters forward.

It's been 10 years in Zombieland as well, and now Tallahassee (Harrelson), Columbus (Eisenberg), Wichita (Stone) and Little Rock (Breslin) have moved in to the White House. Comfort and close quarters has strained the family, and it's not long before Wichita and Little Rock hit the road again, only for Wichita to return when Little Rock takes off with a hippy poser (Avan Jogia). Meanwhile, Tallahassee and Columbus come across a dumb blonde stereotype named Madison (Zoey Deutch), whose only role in the story seems to be to play to the stereotype and sleep with Columbus to create some easy tension between Columbus and Wichita. The rest is a fairly fun road trip movie that includes a stop-off with Tallahassee's counterpart Nevada (Rosario Dawson) at an Elvis-themed hotel, and a few new types of zombie that only really fill in a couple of gags.

There's nothing here that's particularly bad, but none of it's particularly good either. The laughs aren't as consistent, the new characters aren't anywhere near as funny as the filmmakers seem to think they are, and the theme are basically the same as the first, but replace the word "family" with the word "home" as a roundabout way of getting the characters essentially back to where they started. As the same time, the film is incredibly comfy: references to the first are always welcome and even make for some of the better bits in the movie, and the jokes that aren't funny also aren't aggressively unfunny. The whole experience is very easy to lean back with and somewhat enjoy, and it's rarely less than that, but also never more than that.

The Short Version: Like warmed up leftovers of really nice meal: you know you've had this exact meal but better, and yet there's not much to complain about.

Rating: 6/10

Review - 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Written by: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Starring: Sophie Nelisse, Corinne Foxx, Brianne Tju, Sistine Stallone
IMDb Link

I'm pretty indiscriminate when it comes to creature features, especially shark movies, so if you're like me and you're always up for a slightly trashy shark movie that's clearly seen a lot of other shark movies, you'll probably find this somewhat entertaining.

The movie is essentially The Descent, but worse and with sharks. Two step-sisters are having a hard time adjusting to one another in their new home in Mexico, so they escape with a couple of friends to a secret watering hole that has an ancient Mayan temple recently discovered beneath. The girls go to explore the temple, things gets claustrophobic, and one of them accidentally causes a collapse that traps them in the temple, so they have to explore further to find another way out, while discovering that they are in the territory of a breed of Great White Shark that has evolved to use sound over sight.

The story actually 'works' in the sense that it has a very on-the-nose setup and obvious theme: the sisters aren't getting along (each of them very pointedly says "she's not my sister" within the first ten minutes of the movie) so they have to learn to work together to survive. It's also surprisingly coherent with the first movie's focus on sisterhood as an inalienable bond. Unfortunately, little else is developed, with characters so shallow they can't even be called archetypes; even the one that's supposed to be aggressively unlikable due to their selfishness doesn't have any real energy to her. I'm not asking for much, but you'd think a film that so aggressively pulls ideas from The Descent would also try the whole "likable and sympathetic characters" thing a little harder instead of gratuitously using slow-motion to pad out the running time like a Zack Snyder film. But I digress, this is a shark movie, so I'll talk about the horror.

There's exactly one scare in this movie that's absolutely masterful in its craft. Shortly after one of the girls knocks over a large pillar and causes a massive flood of silt in the water, blinding everyone and cutting off their radio connections. We're stuck alone with the main character, who turns about frantically as she looks for her friends and fumbles with her light. As it flashes around in the water, it shines behind her, and for the briefest moment of complete silence, we see the blind shark pass by. It's an absolutely chilling moment that carries with it no fanfare, and just let's you sit with the knowledge of the horror that could be befall her, as she continues to struggle and search. The tension is set and held when she finds a couple of her friends, now she thinks she's safe, and that dissonance with what the audience knows is exactly the sort nail-biting horror that elevates these sort of films, even as the poor writing highlights who's going to die by how little time has actually been spent developing them. This one moment, the follow-up, and the eventual release of the earned jump-scare is better than everything else in the movie by a mile, even the scene that lifts its ideas directly from The Land Before Time V (seriously; I wish I could find the scene to draw a comparison). The rest of the time this movie goes for horror it quickly gets repetitive, to the point that many of the shots feel exactly the same as the girls scramble from one tunnel the shark is too big to swim through to another, and the impact the sounds these girls make have on the sharks become more and more inconsistent.

The Short Version: Uncaged reaches all the way up to the lofty heights of slightly better than the original. It's contrived but functional, cliche but genre-savvy, and its few excellent scares are drowned out by repetition.

Rating: 5/10

Review - Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Directed by: Tim Miller
Written by: David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, Billy Ray, James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee
Starring: Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger
IMDb Link

The Terminator movies hadn't really had a good movie since 1991. T3 is a fine action movie that throws away the best story elements of T2; Terminator: Salvation is better than people give it credit for but between the drab colour and poor direction the action never feels particularly engaging; Terminator: Genisys is monumentally bad despite trying something interesting with the time-travel stuff, never actually making sense of any concept it comes up with and messing up almost everything it tries. Needless to say, I was not excited for Dark Fate, which is why I found it all the more surprising that I came out of it ready to recommend it.

The movie opens by literally killing John Connor. It's a ballsy move that failed spectacularly in Genisys, but here it's not done for a cheap twist villain; it reforges Sarah (Linda Hamilton) meaningfully as a character (and conveniently brings Arnie back in to the story) in to a tired, wounded version of the savage mama bear she was in T2. While that brings her back in to the story, the plot itself focuses once again on an old comfort zone: two cyborgs come back in time to kill someone that's important in the future, with the particulars swapped around a bit. The good robot (Mackenzie Davis) is actually an augmented human named Grace, the bad robot (Gabriel Luna) is nanoliquid over an exoskeleton so it can sometimes be two robots and is as generally indestructible as the T-1000 was in T2, and the new target, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), is important a new future that was created when they stopped Skynet at the end of T2 (turns out they go on to make something that's not demonstrably different from Skynet anyway; this time it's called Legion). The differences are a little convoluted and the film has to dedicate a couple of scenes of exposition back-to-back, which drags the pacing down in the middle; the film also makes about as many references to T2 as I just did for everything it sets up. That said, the broad strokes are as familiar as the twists are expected, so while the film does dull its experience at points trying to evoke the same horror at humanity's annihilation as its predecessors, the throughline of exactly what the characters are doing and why is never lost.

What's more is that aside from the exposition dump the film manages to keep its focus on the characters and the action, which are the film's two biggest strengths. Hamilton's performance as Sarah is excellent; she manages to be as much of a stone-cold badass as she ever was, and yet evokes a sad reflection of who she once was, a soldier who fights now because her purpose was taken from her. Seriously, I'll give credit to everyone else in a second, but Sarah as a character is easily the most tragic here, and Hamilton is capable of expressing every single wound in her soul while never forgetting how strong she is. Meanwhile, the best new character in this movie is Davis' Grace; she evokes a single-minded desperation juxtaposed against her powerful frame, her strength and her speed betrayed by her fear, a rabid need to protect that which means the most to her. It's very much in the same vein as Kyle Reese in the original, and when considered alongside her augmentations, she essentially gets to play the role of both sorts of protectors we've seen; an attempt to have a character that can do the action scenes of T2 but play the emotional beats of the original. Dani sometimes feels more like a prop than a character, and Reyes sometimes feels a little wooden in her performance, but these factors are mostly remedied in the final act, where she sort of has an arc and Reyes at least hits the right emotions due her character's climax. Arnie's role as yet another T-800 who grew a conscience (this one's named Carl) is one that I feel I'm not capable of criticising; it's Arnie, he's a hero to me, I'd just end up running in circles trying to explain all the ways in which he's great even though his acting has never been his strong suit. Gabriel Luna is a surprise hit here as the new evil Terminator (a "Rev-9" model): his character blends perfectly, even switching up accents at key points to put people at ease, and at the same time his approach in the action scenes is completely animalistic; he's ferocious, unyielding, and the perfect reminder of why the Terminators are so scary, and yet so robotic in his programming that he'll make mistakes when his target is in sight.

This speaks to the credit of everyone who worked on the action sequences as well. The scenes with the Rev-9 do an excellent job of showing just how unstoppable he feels, but also how he can be stymied and even defeated. Likewise, Grace is a revelation when she comes up against him; the two are in an ever-escalating arms race with one another, as she constantly weaponises her environment and he uses his abilities to adapt. These fights have a rhythm, a pulse-pounding pace that to some genuinely jaw-dropping moments of pure action. This gets taken a step further when Arnie gets thrown back in to the mix, his own simple brute force contrasted with the fast and fierce fighting styles of the others with sheer weight; he's theoretically outclassed, but hits harder than either of them, and it all builds to a brilliantly choreographed final fight, where Grace and Arnie's strengths are played together with such measured harmony that you briefly forget about all the heavy exposition, all the bad dialogue, the twist so poorly hidden it baffles as to why they tried, or the way this movie feels overcrowded, and just revel in some truly well-done action. That's what makes this movie the only good sequel to T2: the action feels like something out of one of James Cameron's films, and it works so well that the film's shortcomings fall by the wayside in its most important moments. 

The Short Version: "The best Terminator movie since T2" isn't exactly a high bar when you look at every other Terminator movie, but that same look will show you just how much better Dark Fate is. Its action scenes are exhilarating, its characters and performances poignant (if not a little hammy due to dialogue), and its story not nearly as convoluted as it could have been; it never reaches the heights of its classic predecessors, but between these core strengths, the movie is surprisingly and consistently engaging.

Rating: 7/10

Published November 4th, 2019