KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A-

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is not just a fantastically entertaining cinematic experience for a movie that’s fourth in a franchise (well, the modern iteration of it, anyway–technically it’s the tenth of these films to be made), but a genuinely thrilling experience in its own right, on its own terms.

One of the many great things about the modern Planet of the Apes franchise is that you really don’t need to have seen any of the others to enjoy any given one of them. But, the experience is still enhanced by it, particularly the through line of what happens to the human population over time in these films. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), the so-called “simian flu,” a virus made in a lab that enhanced the intellect of apes while making humans sick, was unleashed. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)—my personal favorite of these films—tensions first rise between apes and what’s left of humans, ten years after the events of the first film, and apes discover that some of them aren’t so much better than humans as they thought. Two more years have gone by in War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), when the movie lives up to its name with some on-the-nose references to Apocalypse Now (“Ape-ocalypse Now” reads one graffiti), war raging with a pyshotic military human villain while a mutation of the virus in humans begins rendering them unable to speak.

All of this is, inevitably, leading toward the events of the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film, which itself was far more meditative and philosophically minded than these 21st-century special effects action extravaganzas have turned toward. The upside is that these films still have compelling ideas.

If Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes proves anything, it’s the modern franchise’s legacy of stunning visual effects. All of these movies feature ape characters rendered with motion capture performance, this one the first not to feature Andy Serkis, as his Caesar character is now long dead. Just as the franchise took a seven-year hiatus after its first three movies were released three years apart, in the universe of this franchise, we pick up on the story “many generations later.” We now have an entirely new cast of characters, among whom Caesar looms large as a mythic and increasingly misunderstood figure (shades of Ape Jesus there), all of them performed by new actors.

The urban landscape featured in all three of the previous films was San Francisco, and although there are no obviously recognizable landmarks this time, one can only assume its the same city—now almost completely obscured by green vegetation. I found it really fun to watch apes Noa (Owen Teague), Soona (Lydia Pekham) and Anaya (Travis Jeffery) swing and climb all over their habitat-home in the opening sequence of the film, increasingly wide shots revealing what they are climbing all over to be skyscrapers covered in leaves and vines.

It’s the details that elevate all of these movies, which one might otherwise expect to be as dumb as all those original 1970s sequels were, with talking ape characters in dated costuming. Now, the costumes are motion-capture visual effects, which actually hold up over time in a way few CG-laden films of the past twenty years have. Whoever makes these movies clearly cares about how convincing the visuals are, particularly Matt Reeves with the previous two films, and now Wes Ball, whose only previous feature directorial credits are the three Maze Runner films.

I can only say that the seven years since the previous film have been worth the wait. Ironically, War for the Planet of the Apes was the most critically acclaimed of these films and remains my least favorite; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the least critically acclaimed (reviews have been mixed-positive) and I was deeply impressed and thoroughly entertained by it. This one has the longest run time of them, at two hours and 25 minutes, but not a second is wasted. It’s nice to have a film like this, set further into the future than any of the others, spend some time effectively world building. But when the action sequences do occur, they are consistently, genuinely thrilling to watch. There are moments of CGI-rendered creature movement that don’t look quite completely natural if you look closely enough, but the story is always so compelling that it’s easy not to notice.

Another thing that sets Kingdom apart is how many fewer speaking human parts there are. Here we get Freya Allan as Mae, a human who stuns the apes of Noa’s clan when she demonstrates she can speak (one of a sprinkling of clear nods to the original 1968 film that crop up in all of the modern films). We also get William H. Macy as Trevathan, in a relatively small part as a guy resigned to “the way things are” and comfortably biding his time offering human intellectual education to the tyrannical ape, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). With the exception of one very brief other example of a speaking human, which might as well be regarded as a cameo, Kingdom is otherwise entirely made up of ape characters, including Proximus Caesar’s chief commander Sylva (Eka Darville); an orangutan Noa happens upon named Raka (Peter Macon) who has the last working knowledge of the original Caesar’s actual teachings and legacy; and Koro (Neil Sandilands) and Dar (Sara Wiseman), Noa’s father and mother.

When Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes begins, we get a glimpse of how ape culture has evolved, into this blend of what we think of as animal behaviors and organized social society. In all of these movies, the realistic ape-like movements and vocalizations of the motion capture performers have always been a nice touch. Wes Ball, and screenwriter Josh Friedman, have done an excellent job of continuing and expanding a genuinely unique universe, where the natures of men and beasts intersect in increasingly fascinating ways. That it gets couched in reliably thrilling action movie storytelling only makes it better, and if the quality of these movies has stayed this consistent through an impressive four movies, I can only hope to be first in line for another one in a few years.

Prepare to be wowed and thrilled.

Overall: B+

THE FALL GUY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

The Fall Guy is a lot of fun. I might even agree with the assessment that it’s delightful. It’s also relatively forgettable, but how important is that? This is a movie that merely aims to entertain while you’re there, and it meets that aim.

There’s a line fairly early on, about the movie the actors are making: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s just a movie. It felt like it was giving its own audience permission not to get too nitpicky, and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

I, of course, have nits to pick. It takes a bit longer than really needed in order for the story to really get going. The Fall Guy is the kind of movie that could have been a tight ninety minutes, in which case I would have been left with it in much higher regard. There was no reason for this to be 126 minutes long, which provides too many opportunities for the narrative to sag a bit.

Once the story finally does get going, stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) gets drugged at a club. There follows a fight sequence that is uniquely weird, a character in the scene itself name-checking the psychedelic sequence in Dumbo, a perfectly apt reference. A running gag involves visions of a unicorn. I’d have loved it if this movie had taken the cosmic-comic vibe of this sequence and stretched it through the whole story.

Maybe I just expect too much of a movie like this. The Fall Guy is perfectly serviceable entertainment. You could call it a romantic action comedy, a fairly rare thing to be done all that successfully. Colt gets injured on the job while endlessly flirting with a cinematographer, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), quits the job and disappears for a year, gets convinced by producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) to return as stuntman on a blockbuster science fiction romance epic on which Jody is now the director. The primary tension is whether these two can overcome Jody’s resentment for Colt disappearing and Colt’s regret for not staying in touch.

In other words, the stakes never get all that high. Not even when Gail asks Colt to go look for the movie’s missing star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but without letting Jody know he’s going it, let alone that he’s doing it to keep the studio from pulling the plug on the production. Granted, the stakes kick up a notch when Colt goes to Tom’s house and finds a fellow stunt man dead in ice in his bathtub.

Most of what follows is just a bunch of action sequences, actors playing the stunt performers who are, ironically, often replaced onscreen by actual stunt performers. A lot of them are genuinely entertaining to watch, particularly a fight sequence in Tom’s apartment between Colt and Tom’s girlfriend (Teresa Palmer), where they wind up using movie props as weapons; a dog who only understands commands in French and takes rides along on a car chase; and a climactic sequence in which three people fighting in an out of control helicopter over a recording device veers a bit into screwball comedy territory. The car chase across the Sydney Harbour Bridge could have been rendered a bit more convincingly real.

When The Fall Guy is firing on all cylinders, it really works, mostly due to the undeniable chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. It should be noted that there is some irony in casting Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the hot movie star and Gosling as—well, as the fall guy, the one whose face you’re not supposed to want to see in the movie he’s working on. I mean, come on. Taylor-Johnson is plenty handsome but he’s got nothing on Gosling. Of course, The Fall Guy is the real movie here and Ryan Gosling is the actual star. Oh right, I almost forgot again: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s a movie.

It’s just too bad when a solid-B movie could have been markedly better with just some minor adjustments, a tighter polish. I’m convinced this is the real reason behind the film’s underperforming box office—a light action comedy never needs to run longer than two hours. I never got bored, but I did feel like some minor but key thing was missing. Perhaps it was an editor. A shorter film would have been more tightly packed with what are genuinely good action sequences, but as it is, there are too many stretches without much in the way of action.

There is a slightly pointed bit of dialogue about how there’s no Oscar for stunt performers. It’s saying something that, if there were one, The Fall Guy would not likely win it. I’ve seen better stunts in better movies, but this is still pretty fun—the best we’ve got in the genre at the moment.

How great the shot is, is up for debate.

CIVIL WAR

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

A movie about a modern American civil war should have a clear point of view, and it should have balls. Alex Garand’s Civil War has neither. It should be noted: the premise alone does not qualify.

I’m not even saying this movie has to make explicit what the political issues were across the country that resulted in armed forces in many states turned secessionists. Garland’s choice to avoid that kind of specificity is actually one of his smart ones. That does not, however, preclude a point of view, something beyond vague notions of “war is bad” or “journalists are soulless.” And notwithstanding the empty complaints among people on the right who clearly haven’t even watched this movie, Civil War really offers very little, story-wise, to hold onto. It’s just a road trip through war-torn country that happens to be America, with some incredibly well directed, gripping, beautifully shot battle sequences.

Even the comparisons of this movie’s American President (Nick Offerman, seen onscreen far less than expected) to President Trump are exaggerated. We know this president is in his third term, that he has ordered air strikes on American citizens (but not how or why), and we know that unlikely groups of people are allied against him. He’s never characterized as a buffoon, or of particularly low intelligence. And yet, the “Western Forces” of California and Texas are allied against him—something that has caused a great amount of chatter among people, on all sides of the political spectrum, as straining plausibility. My stance on this is that far weirder things have happened in times of war, which makes strange bedfellows. Besides, a line early in the film has really stuck with me: “When D.C. falls, they’ll turn on each other.” Indeed, once a common enemy is pushed aside, people previously on the same side are free to find fault with each other.

There are other references to aligned states in throwaway lines in Civil War, such as “The Florida Alliance,” or Midwestern states still loyal to the U.S. government, where small-town residents live their daily lives pretending like none of this is happening. Our protagonist, hardened photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst, truly fantastic) has parents in Colorado doing exactly this. Her very young acolyte photojournalist, Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, actually 23 years old during production and playing 23, though she barely looks even 18), has parents in Missouri doing the same.

A major problem I have with Civil War is the same problem I have with many dystopian visions of a near future: its refusal to acknowledge race. Does anybody really think there would be a second civil war in the United States and race would have no relevance? There’s a very tense sequence in which Jesse Plemons plays a blithely murderous militia man, and the scene uses two men of Asian descent to illustrate his pointed xenophobia. This is in the same neigborhood as racism, of course, but it’s still distinct from it. But Alex Garland just isn’t interested in going that step further.

This is the fundamental problem with Civil War, which is the cinematic equivalent of a product with claims of nutrition when it actually has none. And don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot to recommend Civil War, which is genuinely gripping from start to finish. But, much like the 2006 film Children of Men, it has too many “why” questions it refuses to answer while it wows us exceptional production. (Children of Men, at least, is far more impressive on a technical and production level, creating a world that feels far more lived in, if just as implausible.)

It’s the ideas themselves that are the problem—or, the lack thereof. This is the kind of movie that you really get into while it’s happening, and can only leave saying it was great if you don’t think too hard about it. Garland, however, is challenging us to think about it, without fleshing out what it’s trying to say. There’s certainly the idea that there are not truly “good guys” in active warfare, and we are never given a side to root for—something these journalists don’t even want, as they pride themselves on supposed objectivity.

And yet, even with journalism being looked at through by far the most critical lense in this film, even that winds up muddled in presentation. Too many of the details make too little sense. “They shoot journalists on sight in the capitol,” we are told early on. Somehow, the armed forces closing in on the capitol welcome press with open arms, no questions asked. Come on, really? And this is hardly a new observation: far too few of the journalists in this film are seen taking video (in fact, I think we see only one or two doing so, and only with a professional news camera—literally not one single character is seen taking video on their smartphone). Lee and Jessie engage with still photography exclusively, albeit with many of the still shots they take being equal parts beautiful and horrifying.

A lot of Civil War is gorgeously shot, which is part of the deeply misleading journey it takes us on. All the plot connections are shaky at best, making this a kind of low-rent Apocalypse Now, even with its often beautiful imagery. I just watched this movie feeling a bit lost as to the actual stakes, and what I was supposed to take away from it. And what I took away from it was its top-notch cinematography, direction, and acting, particularly on the part of Dunst, who has never been better. But what is the whole thing that these parts are coming together to make? Yet another in a long line of supposedly anti-war movies that wow us with its rendering of war, in this case with nothing of any real substance to say.

The Expendables: four journalists face their various fates.

Overall: B

MONKEY MAN

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I really, really wanted to like this movie. I have long enjoyed Dev Patel as a leading man. This being his feature directorial debut was a compelling idea. Most exciting of all, Monkey Man is a Hollywood-style action movie set entirely in India, specifically Mumbai, fully embedded in Indian culture. There’s only one White character in the entire movie, and he’s a South African underground boxing emcee (Sharlto Copley). There’s no American characters to be found anywhere, giving Patel—actually a British actor—the space to showcase the culture of his heritage. What’s not to love?

There’s a lot not to love, it turns out. Patel so directly wants us to think of Monkey Man as “John Wick in Mumbai” that his character, credited as “Kid” (side note: Dev Patel is 33), buys a gun from a man who directly references the Keanu Reeves films: “Have you seen John Wick?” the guy asks. “This gun was in it.”

Here’s the trouble with comparing this to John Wick—a franchise that consistently puts out solid-B action movies: there’s a purity to John Wick’s premise, which is also less serious but delighted audiences: some assholes kill Wick’s beloved dog, a crime worse than human murder to dog lovers, and he spends the first movie getting revenge for this wrong. As the series has gone on, the world of assassins in which John Wick inhabits gets increasingly ridiculous and elaborately structured, but at least it stays in its lane, and consistently offers moments of levity in between its many extended “gun fu'“ action sequences.

Dev Patel’s movie is also a revenge tale, but seeped in sectarian and religious tensions that have characterized India for decades. “Kid” is out to get back at both the police chief (Sikandar Kher) who killed his mother when he was a chid, and the Hindu nationalist politician (Makrand Deshpande) who gave the order to destroy the settlement on the land later used for his temple. This turns what could be a movie about good clean, personal vendettas into an action “thriller” that amounts to little more than political violence. I struggled to understand how I was supposed to sit in the theater and root for it—and make no mistake, Monkey Man is not a Dune-style commentary on the pitfalls of hero worship. It simply glorifies violence for its own sake, using the dressing of social justice in a way that is far more transparent than it realizes.

There is also a significant presence of transgender characters, known in India as hijras, which I have very mixed feelings about. Setting aside the fact that the prinary trans character is played by Vipin Sharma, a cisgender man—I cannot find any confirmation whether any of the other hijra characters were played by trans actors—the Kid character’s position among them never sat quite right with me. The way the hijra characters help Kid felt only a step or two away from a queer Indian version of the “Magical Negro” trope; the way Patel is clearly proud of himself for offering unprecedented trans representation in his film feels like a straight-Indian version of White saviorism.

In short, it never quite feels like the trans presence exists for the right reasons. And Monkey Man clearly wants us to applaud it for featuring these trans characters as badasses, an idea I very much support in theory—except they just engage in the same gruesome violence as anyone else, their saris shot spinning in slow motion while they slaughter nameless enemies with the same ruthlessness with which they themselves are targeted. Somehow, we’re supposed to feel good about this?

The fundamental problem with Monkey Man is that it’s convinced it has a righteous point of view while its moral center proves nebulous from start to finish. This applies to Kid’s showdowns with both the corrupt police chief and the Hindu nationalist politician running for Prime Minister. What should have been fun movie violence, with only very sporadic moments of minor humor, gets weighed down in South Asian politics with real-world implications that are muddled at best—a phrase that would be aptly applied to this movie as a whole.

The Hindu legend of the hanuman has more clarity than this movie.

Overall: C+

THE BEEKEEPER

Directing: B-
Acting: C+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

There are countless legitimate reasons to shit on The Beekeeper, to bury it in a . . . a swarm of criticism—but I have to be honest: my heart isn’t in it. I had too good a time watching this objectively idiotic movie.

So, well, why not judge a film on its own terms? The Beekeeper knows exactly what it is, which is both a b-movie and a bee movie (get it?), with its own rules of logic, which it basically follows to the letter. It may be a by-the-numbers revenge action movie, naturally starring Jason Statham, but somehow, it still manages to be way better than what it could have been.

I’ve seen some disappointment that this movie doesn’t lean into the “so bad it’s good” genre, but being disappointed on that level entirely misses the point. Have we learned nothing from Snakes on a Plane? When a movie self-consciously tries too hard to be “bad,” it tends to land with a thud. The “so bad it’s good” vibe only really works when the people making the movie were genuinely convinced they were making something good.

The Beekeeper is something different, ironically by being exactly the kind of movie it’s designed to be: it’s pretty stupid, but not too stupid. The actors are all kind of phoning it in, but none of them are being lazy. The action is well choreographed, just clever enough, and consistently entertaining.

Admittedly, even I went into this movie, about a literal beekeeper (Statham) who turns out to be retired from a nebulously defined, top secret program of people also codenamed “beekeepers,” kind of hoping it would be relentlessly stupid. That can be fun, right? And it is stupid, just not relentlessly so. It’s also got a healthy dose of onscreen charisma, a modicum of wit, and a subtle self-awareness as a film that refuses to take itself too seriously.

I sometimes wonder what a stacked cast was thinking when they read the script for a movie that clearly doesn’t work. And no one here is exactly turning in Oscar-worthy work here, in a cast including Josh Hutcherson as the misguided “brains” behind a company that scams elderly people via their computers, Jeremy Irons as the company’s head of security, Phylicia Rashad as one of the company’s victims, and Minni Driver, getting disappointingly little screen time as the director of the CIA. One thing they all have in common, though: they’re having a good time. And so is the viewer.

The Beekeeper does lay it on a little thick with all of its many “hive” metaphors, not always with full coherence (Statham’s Adam Clay is somehow just “protecting the hive” with all the countless people he dispatches), which ultimately is part of its charm. No one set out to make a “smart” movie here, and no one watching it expects one. This is a rare instance of movie marketers being full forthcoming with the kind of movie they’re offering, likely because anyone going to see it only wants exactly that.

In a way, The Beekeeper is just a Fast and Furious movie without any racing cars. You might expect that to make it less exciting, and I suppose arguably it is—but not by much. It’s still got plenty of violence, well staged combat scenes, and at least relatively inventive scenes of either dismemberment or death. What more could you ask for? If you want Oscar bait, there’s still more than plenty of that to go around. If you want heightened action ridiculousness, with an inexplicably indestructable hero bent on avenging the victims of elaborate phishing schemes, there’s The Beekeeper.

It should also be noted: January and February are historically notorious dumping grounds for cinema garbage. What the makers of The Beekeeper seem to understand is that, they can make something in keeping with the vibe of this time of year that’s actually worth the time, if all you’re looking for is knowingly mindless but well-executed entertainment.

If you leave your intellect at home, you’ll have a blast.

Overall: B

GODZILLA MINUS ONE

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B+

There are many impressive things about Godzilla Minus One, but the one that sticks with me the most is its technical achievement: no special effects-laden American film has ever looked this good on just a $15 million budget.

It should still be noted: you can still recognize the effects here as CGI—this doesn’t have the jaw-dropping effects of, say, Avatar: The Way of Water. What it does have, however, is a far better story, one that references a decades-old history of a global pop icon without being derivative (something James Cameron has never managed). And when it comes down to it, the effects here are far more impressive on such a comparatively meager budget, than stunning effects that are the result of a limitless budget could ever hope to be.

There are arguments either way when it comes to how impressive that $15 million budget really is. A Japanese production has no unions for actors or filmmakers, and far greater potential for exploitative practices than even Hollywood. Of course, to suggest that Hollywood isn’t exploitative, unions notwithstanding, is preposterous, and these considerations hardly account for how expertly executed Godzilla Minus One is on virtually every level, at literally a fraction of the budget of American tentpoles that spend $250 million to make—and often still look like shit.

This much I can tell you for certain: Godzilla Minus One does not look like shit. And, far more importantly, it has a story that is compelling in its own right, even without a giant radioactive sea creature entering the picture. This was the first Japanese-production Godzilla movie I have ever seen, and it’s far better than any of the several American Godzilla films I have seen (Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla was a downright embarrassment; Gareth Edwards’s C+ 2014 Godzilla squandered its potential; Michael Dougherty’s C- 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a mess of chaos; Adam Wingard’s C+ 2021 Godzilla vs Kong was merely a minor relief in not being quite as bad). Godzilla Minus One is a clear indicator that it’s best to go to the source: this is the 33rd Godzilla film to come out of Japan since the first one was released in 1954, and I can verify it’s a great introduction.

Not a lot of those 33 films are outright sequels, and neither is this one. In fact, it takes the “return to roots” so seriously that writer-director Takashi Yamazaki sets it at the very end of World War II—when Japan has already been leveled. Rare is the blockbuster monster-movie that offers the level of nuance at play here, much of which likely went over my head just by virtue of my not being Japanese. Still, there’s a lot to consider even for the global audience, particularly this film’s fascinating point of view, which clearly indicates a cultural shift in Japan in which kamikaze missions are no longer seen as the ultimate in honor.

We meet the protagonist, Koichi (a truly wonderful Ryunosuke Kamiki), landing a fighter plane on an island for repair, and quickly revealed to have backed out of a kamikazi mission. His guilt over abandoning his “duty” informs everything he does from then on, including his inability to shoot the creature that suddenly appears and wreaks havoc on the military installation. (It’s clear to us, though, that he makes the right decision not to shoot at it: “What if it just makes it angry?”) He meets a woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who also has no family left, and who is taking care of a baby whose parents died in the war. They become a sort of tentative family, coping with all their own forms of PTSD in the wake of war, only to then be faced with a giant monster.

Okay, so let’s talk a bit about the monster, because I have some ambivalence about its design. Godzilla doesn’t look so much like a radioactive lizard as a barely-disguised guy in a monster-lizard suit—even as rendered in CGI. I understand the impetus to do this, as Godzilla is such an iconic character, and one might argue he should look, at least roughly, like he always did. Nevertheless, in many of the wide shots, which make Godzilla look like a strangely buff lizard-man, I just found the look distractingly hokey.

When Godzilla is swimming in the sea with his back spikes slicing through the surface, though, or he’s powering up to spew nuclear-strength heat rays out of his mouth, the look is pretty damned cool. The corny looking wide shots notwithstanding, Godzilla Minus One is packed with set pieces that are fantastically shot and edited, always giving us a strong sense of place with the characters, and using the effects shots exclusively in ways to convey the shock and awe of what the characters are witnessing.

And this is really what it comes down to: countless moments in this movie are genuinely thrilling, which alone would make it worth a look. But the drama unfolding between the characters grounds the story in a way that blockbuster disaster movies never bother with, because we are expected to be thrilled without consideration for expendable characters. This only raises the stakes when the thrills actually do happen, resulting in final scenes that actually offer a genuinely emotional payoff.

Here’s another great thing about Godzilla Minus One: this movie never asks us to think of the creature as just a misunderstood animal, something that deserves our empathy because he’s just acting on instinct. That’s often a good perspective to have with real-life animals—which Godzilla is not, and with Godzilla, that is not the point. In many Godzilla films, the creature is a symbol, and the possibilities of meaning are endless. In this case, he’s a stand-in for Koichi battling his own demons, and it really works.

There’s a lot going on in Godzilla Minus One, but in this case, it’s beautifully orchestrated chaos. This, right here, is the way Godzilla should be done, and a slew of American directors could learn a lot from it. Or, of course, we could just continue looking to the Japanese for how to shepherd one’s own aging creation into a vital future.

It turns out you really can make the old inventive again.

Overall: B+

THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

Watching The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, eleven years after the first film in the Hunger Games franchise and eight years after the last one, is a little like getting offered one more drink while you’re barely buzzed at a party that’s not very exciting. Okay, sure, why not. I’ll have another.

In the moment, this film is engaging enough, with several charismatic performers. Tom Blyth charms in bleached blond hair as young Coriolanus Snow, assigned as “mentor” to one of the District 12 tributes, a stunning songstress (hence the film’s subtitle) named Lucy Gray. Rachel Zegler makes the most of the part, particularly with an incredible singing vioce, but Lucy isn’t given a whole lot of agency. She doesn’t ever even use any weapons in the arena.

After three novels and four movies that made Jennifer Lawrence a superstar, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes feels a little regressive. Even as a clear nostalgia play and franchise cash grab, here we are given the early life story of the authoritarian President Snow of the previous films, now with a young man as the hero, saving a helpless little lady. At least Katniss was a badass.

Oh sure, this is presented with characters facing all the expected moral dilemmas, and we already know what eventually happens to Snow, which makes this movie this franchise’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels. A burning question might still be: did we really need this?

In the original Hunger Games, the games—in which, in case you’re one of the five people in the world who don’t already know, a group of teenagers are thrown into an arena to fight to the death—are in their 74th year. In The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, they are in their 10th year, which takes us back in time 64 years. Cornelius Snow is now supposed to be 18 years old, so I guess he was 82 the last time we saw him. The production design here is vaguely evocative of a society not quite as “perfected” as we saw it became later.

The story is presented in three parts, and the story beats are the only memorably unusual thing about it. This movie is two hours an 37 minutes long, pointlessly the longest film in the franchise. This is an average of 52 minutes per part, and we see the actual Hunger Games in “Part Two”—which end in such a way that the movie itself feels very much like it’s ending. By that point, we are indeed already a standard feature film’s length in. A group of seven very young adults sat in a line of seats two rows ahead of me, clearly big fans of the franchise, regularly raising the three finger salute from the previous films at the screen. And when Part III appeared onscreen, even one of those kids said, out loud, “There’s a whole other part”?

Indeed, Part III feels almost exclusively extraneous, although it is in this part when we finally see Lucy Gray take some real control. To be fair, she is defiant from the start, even belting out a song the very moment she is chosen at the Reaping Ceremony—a scene that would have come across as a lot more stupid if not for Zegler’s beautiful voice. This never makes her any less helpless and dependent on Snow any time she’s in the arena. And by the time this movie all but declares Lucy’s ultimate fate a total mystery, it’s too late for it to matter much.

If anything makes The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes watchable, it’s the cast. This includes Jason Schwartzman, amusingly smarmy as the Hunger Games’s first televised host; Peter Dinklage as the slightly drunken Dean of the Academy; Viola Davis as the deliciously nefarious head gamemaker; and even Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer as Coriolanus’s cousin. (The casting of a trans actor in a part never identified as such is maybe the one truly progressive part of this production, and it was really great to see her here.)

In other words, due in no small part to the performances, I found myself entertained by this, the fifth film in the Hunger Games franchise. I’m tempted to say I enjoyed even more than The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, but that may be just because this time it’s been so long since I’ve seen one of these movies. The truth is, it’s more of the same but with different characters and actors. Which is . . . fine. Like that last drink you didn’t need but won’t hurt.

Try watching through rose colored glasses.

Overall: B-

THE KILLER

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

The Killer could also have been called The Assassin’s Odyssey. It’s presented in a series of “Chapters,” each in a different location where the title character (Michael Fassbender) makes a kill. Or, as in the case of the deliberately tedious opening sequence, attempts to make a kill. His botched hit makes for the entire premise of the film: he stupidly heads home, stupidly waits an extra night, discovers his girlfriend severely injured in Santo Domingo, and spends the rest of the film hunting down all of those responsible for harming her.

I’m hard pressed to find this plot to be exceptional or memorable, except that, ironically, it is exceptionally and memorably executed. In spite of it veering on being self-satisfied, the editing, and particularly the sound editing are consistently clever. This is a David Fincher film released as a Netflix movie on November 10, after a theatrical release limited enough that I was not able to see it theatrically—and I found myself, watching it at home, rather wishing I had seen it in a theater. The sound editing alone would have made it a much better, certainly more immersive experience.

It’s an objectively fun watch even at home, at least once it gets past that opening scene, hanging out with The Killer in an abandoned WeWork office, waiting out the right time to shoot a mark in a building across the street, and truly overwhelming us with voiceover narration. Voiceover is often pointless and lazy, but it proves to have a point here, coming from an unreliable narrator with a penchant for self-delusion. I was bracing myself for the voiceover to overwhelm the entire film, but mercifully, it’s used comparatively sparingly once that first shot is missed. It’s the inciting incident, and it comes roughly 15 minutes into the film.

The locations of each “Chapter” span the globe and virtually every corner of the States: Paris, Santo Domingo, New Orleans, Florida, New York, Chicago. Each has a vibe distinct from all the others. Only one—Florida—proves to feature a legitimate action sequence, with his mark getting the job on The Killer after he’s crept into his house in the middle of the night. And to be clear, the sequence is tense, and thrilling to watch, with excellent fight choreography.

This is what I like most about The Killer: each change of scenery is given room to breathe, all the while with The Killer not so much getting character development, as gradually revealing his subtle ineptitude. This is a guy who exudes confidence, and then regularly makes preventable mistakes. Much as I lapped up the crackling energy of the Floridian house fight, my favorite of all the hits we follow The Killer on is the one in New York, where he catches up with the one woman on his list. Even when the movie is already quite good, Tilda Swinton manages to elevate anything she’s in. Her sequence is the one with real dialogue, a verbal sparring partner with Michael Fassbender who not only matches his talents but exceeds them.

It seems a lot more common for a film to run out of steam, its second half being the weaker half. The Killer achieves the inverse of this, in fact with each scene being better than the last. That opening scene left me skeptical, but by the time The Killer meets up with “The Lawyer” (Charles Parnell) and fatally ropes in his secretary (Kerry O’Malley), revealing to us some bullshit about empathy in his inner monologue, it becomes clear that The Killer is not your standard hitman movie.

I wasn’t quite as satisfied as I wanted to be by the end of this movie, essentially a series of creatively violent vignettes. So many of the preceding scenes so far exceeded my expectations, though, I’m willing to let it go. Everything builds effectively on what came before it, and the destination being a bit hollow means less when the journey is the point.

You want your sociopaths to be at least competent.

Overall: B+

THE MARVELS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

The Marvels has all the same old bullshit I tired of eons ago in these superhero “universes”—the supposed stakes of saving the world; the CGI-laden action climax; the same broad story arc as dozens of other superhero movies just like it. Even worse, it relies too heavily on “MCU world building” that connects all these movies, the onetime novelty where the collective audience consensus finally seems to be: we’re over it.

And yet: there are things that set The Marvels apart. Like Captain Marvel (2019) before it, this is the exceptionally rare movie about a woman superhero. Indeed, this time, it’s about three women superheroes—one of whom is a woman of color. I am all about supporting movies like this, just to keep the studios keyed into the idea that they clearly have an audience. But, it also helps if the movie is actually good.

One of the unfortunate things for viewers who haven’t consumed all of the MCU content is that The Marvels, like most MCU movies anymore, relies on shorthand assumed to be understood by viewers who have. I’ve heard moderately good things about the Disney+ series Ms Marvel, but haven’t gotten around to seeing it, so this film is my introduction to her—otherwise known as Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani)—as a character. Incidentally, I did watch WandaVision on Disney+, but even two years ago is long enough for all the MCU mediocrity I’ve viewed to simply blend together in my memory. I know I liked Teyonah Parris’s screen presence as Monica Rambeau then, and I still do now.

How it comes to pass that Kamala, Monica, and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Captain Marvel herself, have found themselves in a predicament wherein every time they use their power at the same time, they teleport to swtich locations, I could not pretend to explain. The Marvels is packed with science fiction techno babble that is utterly meaningless, and all you can do is let it go. If you keep an open mind to the objective stupidness, The Marvels is actually pretty fun.

It’s the scenes where it goes gonzo-bonkers that I wish it had more of. Goose, the “flerkin” who looks like a regular domesticated house cat but is actually an alien that can swallow things exponentially larger with giant tentacles coming out of his mouth, was easily my favorite thing about Captain Marvel in 2019, and that remains true now. And director Nia DaCosta, along with her team of writers, really ups the ante with Goose this time around: Goose’s ability to swallow giant things whole, and then cough it up like a hairball later, slimy but otherwise completely unharmed, becomes a pivotal plot point. I didn’t know I needed to hear an overhead intercom voice say in a deadpan tone, “Don’t run from the flerkins. Let them eat you.” But it arguably made my week.

In other words: I came for the cats. Or the flerkins, to be more specific. Not to get too far into spoiler territory here, but this time we get more than just goose, but in a way you may not be able to predict, and it’s bizarre, fun, and hilarious.

I just wish flerkins weren’t the only area in which The Maevels leans into getting super weird. Weird is good! The rest of it, really, is just rote. The villain, Dar-Benn, is just dull (through no fault of Zawe Ashton, who does the best with what she has to work with), and represents otherworldly aspects of the Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel story that come across like a cross between Superman and Star Trek, with dying suns and generations of alien-ethnic rivalries. The stuff Captain Marvel has to condend with is rarely earthbound, and within the MCU context—Guardians of the Galaxy notwithstanding—it makes her less interesting. The most interesting superheroes are specimens of flawed humanity contenting with awesome responsibilities, who are dealing with other human beings.

All that said, Larson, Parris and Vellani have an undeniable chemistry as a trio, and the addition of Khan is particularly welcome, with her South Asian family getting the kind of representation seldom seen in films like this. Her parents, played by Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff, make the most of the screen time they are given—even as a fight takes place in their house that destroys a bunch of their stuff, and even blows a hole in their ceiling. This is the kind of stuff that annoys me, the massive collateral damage that barely gets acknowledged, or might just get a sigh or an eye roll. Sure, these movies are utter fantasies, but if you are going to set any part of them on our version of Earth, there should be some modicum of groundnedness.

But, yet again, I nitpick. I guess you could say this is my passion. After Goose the flerkin, my second favorite thing about The Marvels is the run time: one hour and forty-five minutes. I saw that and thought I must be dreaming, it was so shockingly reasonable. Did someone get fired so another person could finally come in and say it’s okay to stop making these movies as though we are pretending they’re epics? There are many complaints one can have about The Marvels, but at the very least it’s not bloated.

Instead, it’s a breezy hang with three very different women with great chemistry, and a mouth-tentacled alien cat. If we could just get more weirdness on the level of kitty tentacles and less in the way of tired plot tropes, we’d really be getting somewhere. On the other hand, even a meaningless good time is still a good time.

People aren’t talking enough about how Tango is the real star of the movie.

Overall: B

THE CREATOR

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

The Creator is a visual achievement, and if that’s all you need, it will work very well for you. It’s also a narrative mess.

This film seems to be leaning into ideas of xenophobia, American exceptionalism, the narrative structure of Apocalypse Now (which itself was a loose adaptation of the 1899 Jospeh Conrad novella Heart of Darkness), and even, arguably, both-sides-ism. The script, co-written by Chris Weitz and director Gareth Edwards, doesn’t fully commit to any of these things to achieve any truly crystalized ideas. This movies seems to want, at the same time, to entertain both American military jingoists and self-identified compassionate leftists.

It’ll probably satisfy average viewers just looking to watch a science-fiction action movie. And on that front, it does impress: Gareth Edwards, with previous directorial offerings from Monsters (2010) to Godzilla (2014) to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), has an established history as a gifted visual storyteller. He knows how to integrate visual effects on a modest budget that serve the story rather than the other way around. And in The Creator, every scene is visually compelling. with attention paid to every part of the frame, foreground as well as background. Combined with the production design, it makes for very effective world building.

I just wish the story these things are serving were better. Too many things don’t add up, not least of which is the idea of a world threatened by AI that exists in self-contained, individual robot units, some of them with only robot parts, some with heads and faces indistinguishable from humans, aside from cylindrical holes that pass through where ears would otherwise be. I’m frankly astonished that Edwards would make a movie like this without once considering the idea of, say, a wifi network in which all of these machines are connected to each other, as one unified whole. These AI “beings” exist as though they are all singular personalities, much like androids. Except this is never the way that would go, especially if humanity were to declare war on the lot of them, as has happened here—due to a coding error that resulted in Los Angeles getting nuked, fifteen years before the events of this movie.

We’re moving through the 2060s here. What’s the state of climate change, then? No one ever even mentions it. I suppose I’m nitpicking here, but still, I prefer movies like this to make sense. The best science fiction extrapolates from plausible, present-day realities, which this film all but ignores. Instead, it relies on wild plot contrivances.

I hesitate to even get into the moral quandary of “compassion” for artificial intelligence. Multiple times we hear the line: “It’s not real. It’s just programming.” This movie clearly wants us to hear that as misguided, and take the side of the AI. The problem with this is that “it’s just programming” is actually correct. Ironically, humanity is wildly vulnerable to emotional manipulation by AI to think it’s “alive,” and The Creator itself is a movie that successfully manipulates our emotions. To say there’s a lot to unpack with this movie is a wild understatement.

Further complicating matters is how undeniably entertaining it is, at least when you’re not thinking too much about its many plot holes and lapses in logic. John David Washington makes a great protagonist in this world, easily seduced by the adorableness of “the weapon,” a super-advanced “AI” being designed to look like a little girl, played by a seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles—complete with her own cylindrical hole through her head, ear to ear. These two have great chemistry together, and could have been a classic duo in a better written movie, the “lone wolf and cub” trope notwithstanding.

Between the acting, the cinematography, and the visual effects, The Creator has more than enough going for it to keep viewers rapt from start to finish. When it comes to the technical elements, this is a very well crafted film. If you don’t mind that it really has nothing original or even cohesive to say, then I guess it delivers.

Sure, it looks great if you only look skin deep.