In the Heart of the Sea

I tell ya, he was ten stories high if he was a foot.

Grade: B –

Director: Ron Howard

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw and Brendan Gleeson

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 2 min.

Advertised as “the incredible true story that inspired Moby-Dick,” director Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea is actually more of an audacious prequel. In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship Essex was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific Ocean. Much of the crew spent months at sea, resorting to sundry unspeakables in order to survive. The story is known to have piqued author Herman Melville's literary interest, resulting in his magnum opus published in 1851.

Howard seeks to tell the true tale of the Essex in In the Heart of the Sea, relying principally on Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 non-fiction book of the same name. Philbrick draws largely from a manuscript written by Thomas Nickerson, a teenage cabin boy aboard the Essex, which was lost for over a century until found and ultimately published in 1984.

Dissatisfied with merely retelling this “incredible true story,” Howard conflates fact with fiction by creating an odd framing device wherein Melville (Ben Whishaw) visits Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) in 1850 Nantucket to transcribe Nickerson’s harrowing account, but only after getting Nickerson liquored up and paying off his wife. While Melville is known to have relied on (and perhaps even written) the published account of Owen Chase, the Essex’s first mate, there’s no indication that Melville ever met or consulted with Nickerson.

The result is a film not merely devoid of the social symbolism in Melville’s praised prose, but also one that shoehorns Melville into its nautical narrative in order to appropriate the Moby-Dick mystique whilst harpooning its author legacy.

The tension aboard the Essex is the same waterlogged tiff between captain and first mate familiar to the Bounty, or the Caine, the Alabama in Crimson Tide, or, well, the Pequod. Chase (Liam Hemsworth, who strikes a dashing pose) is passed over again for captaincy of a whaler in lieu of blue-blooded greenhorn George Pollard Jr. (Benjamin Walker). Naturally, Pollard’s inexperience alienates the seafaring crew, especially after he nearly gets the ship swamped in a squall. Still, the Essex sails on since the only thing Pollard and Chase agree upon is that the faster they harvest whale oil, the sooner they can end their voyage.

A paucity of cetacea carries the Essex over 1,000 nautical miles west of South America, where a game of whales is seemingly protected by a mammoth, barnacled white whale with an ill temper and a spite for boat hulls. The ensuing attack leaves Pollard, Chase and the teenage Nickerson (Tom Holland) among the several survivors stranded at sea.

The visual effects and set design are stunning, particularly during storm scenes and whale hunts. Indeed, whaling and life at sea are dissected in illuminating detail, although all the cries of “Avast!” commands to “Swab the deck!” sound too cliched at times.

Storytelling has always been Howard’s stumbling block, and there’s a plodding predictability to these proceedings. The few themes scattered about—man’s place in nature; capitalism’s caste system—are obvious and underlined. And despite Gleeson’s earnest attempts at pathos, it feels like filler whenever the film regularly returns to Melville and the snockered Nickerson.

In the Heart of the Sea is a good film demonstrably short of any semblance of greatness. In other words, it’s a Ron Howard film. Although a movie moored to one of America’s great novels, this feels like the one that got away.

Edge of Tomorrow

Sarah Connor ain't got s**t on me!

Grade: B

Director: Doug Liman

Starring: Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 53 min.

In her tremendous LA Weekly article last month titled “How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star,” Amy Nicholson analyzes how the movie industry and our concept of celebrity has irrevocably changed in the age of social and tabloid media. Her central focus is Tom Cruise, a superstar with still-underrated credentials whose popular but vigorously private professional persona—much it it built on skillfully chosen dramatic roles—was upended by poor individual choices, a changing media landscape and an unfortunate afternoon spent hopping on Oprah’s couch.

Nicholson’s contention is that the mainstream action roles Cruise has taken with increasingly frequency in recent years is the flailing attempt by an aging actor (Cruise turns 52 next month) to reclaim  his evaporating popularity. Undoubtedly, lesser roles in Knight and Day, Jack Reacher and even Oblivion have dimmed Cruise’s star waggage. Moreover, a fifth Mission: Impossible, a Top Gun sequel, and—shudder—another Jack Reacher movie are all in development.

But even amid this apparent professional tailspin, Cruise remains a bankable, quality actor. And when his still-formidable ability meets entertaining material like Edge of Tomorrow, well, people will start talking about a Cruise comeback.

In a not-so-distant future, aliens called Mimics—which resemble the multi-tentacled Sentinels from the Matrix sequels—have invaded Earth and overrun most of Europe. Buoyed by a recent win at Verdun, mankind's allied military forces, headed by General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson), have assembled for an all-out assault on the west coast of France. Brigham orders Major William Cage, a popular Army PR flack with no combat experience, to the frontline to publicize the expected victory. When the cowardly Cage resists Brigham’s orders, the general orders Cage arrested, knocked cold and shipped to an airbase at Heathrow Airport, accompanied by a fabricated backstory that Cage is a deserter and con man.

It’s a head-scratcher why no one recognizes Cage, an omnipresence on television and other mediums reporting military propaganda and inspiring thousands of enlistments. Nevertheless, Cage is soon thrust into a battle squadron and rappelling into the doomed invasion. However, Cage also manages to kill a large mimic, and as the creature’s blood oozes over him, Cage blacks out and awakens days earlier at the exact moment he turns up at Heathrow.

Cage’s bloody imbibing gives him the ability to loop back to the moment he arrives at the base every time he dies. Cage remembers everything from loop to loop; no one else around him does. The only person who believes Cage’s deja vu-doo is Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the special forces heroine of Verdun who teams with Cage to correct the military’s impending mistake and find an actual path to win the war.

The script is adapted from the Hiroshi Sakurazaka light novel All You Need Is Kill. Cinematic inspirations include the likes of the Terminator films, Source Code and even Groundhog Day. And as you probably already guessed, the screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jaz and John-Henry Butterworth is best left unanalyzed lest you find yourself plummeting down a logical rabbit hole.

Indeed, interpreting most of the film’s time-looping twists and turns is best left to a very patient and forgiving quantum physicist. Frankly, sometimes it feels like the narrative construct is an elaborate excuse to repeatedly show a particular shot of Blunt’s toned, prone psyche (not that I’m complaining).

The film’s entertainment quotient is raised thanks to the light touch of Cruise and director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity; Jumper). Both interject welcome moments of levity into an otherwise dark plot that requires the repeated death of its protagonist. Moreover, Cruise is smart enough to embrace his character’s faults and cowardly goofiness, ceding the ramrod hero role to his female costar. It’s a show of confidence on Cruise’s part, one that elevates both himself and the film’s subtle subversiveness of foisting a protagonist that's essentially the embodiment of the video gamer culture: play, die, repeat.

Moreover, Liman avoids the script’s biggest potential pitfall: the tedium of its looping storyline. Through jump cuts and deft variations, Liman keeps the repeating sequences from becoming monotonous. And Liman eventually turns the tables with scenes that the audience sees for the first time only to discover Cage has already experienced them hundreds of times on his arduous path to elusive victory.

Unfortunately, the film’s final act is visually and narratively murky and even mundane, a conventional  island amid a sea of kinetic cleverness. Regardless, the ride to that point is a heckuva hoot. The future of humankind hangs in the balance in Edge of Tomorrow. But we already know one thing that survives: Tom Cruise’s career.

The Smurfs 2

Now, Papa Smurf...you.must.die.

Grade: D +

Director: Rafa Gosnell

Starring: Hank Azaria, Neil Patrick Harris, Brendan Gleeson, and the voices of Jonathan Winters, Katy Perry, Christina Ricci, John Oliver, J.B. Smoove, and George Lopez

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 45 min.

The fact that there are five screenwriters “credited” with inflicting The Smurfs 2 on a ticket-buying public that really oughta know better resembles a firing squad in which one or more members are issued blanks instead of live rounds. That way, each member of the group can retain the belief that they weren’t among the ones propelling actual pain toward their intended target.

Stuck in live-action Paris since the last movie, Gargamel (Hank Azaria, giving his all in service to nothingness) now stars in a magic stage show that’s made him a worldwide sensation, armed with a wand that can levitate cars, change people into toads and conjure an interdimensional vortex back to his animated home. Yet, all this somehow falls short of the world domination Gargamel seeks, so he teleports Vexy (oh Christina Ricci, where did it all go wrong?), his ashen, naughty Smurf-like creation, to kidnap a genetically needy Smurfette (whined by Katy Perry) so Gargamel can extract the formula for the Smurfs’ all-powerful “Blue Essence.” Or something like that.

Papa Smurf (the late Jonathan Winters, taking the most ignominious bow since Orson Welles voicing 1986’s animated The Transformers: The Movie) and only a handful of his blue crew give chase, find their old friend Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris), and pun-filled silliness ensues. The tedious spectacle was already teetering on the edge of inanity before Patrick calls his stepfather-turned-duck (voiced by Brendan Gleeson) “Martin Luther Wing” after the mallard frees a coop of fellow fowl.

The whole lazy, meaningless mess is Smurf-itively soul-smurfing … uh, -sucking. At least Smurfs don’t rap in The Smurfs 2 like they did in the woeful first film. But, they do manage one fart and blue bum reference. “If you weren’t in such excruciating pain, you’d think that was hysterical,” Gargamel tells some caged Smurfs after another dud pun. I coulda sworn he was breaking the fourth wall.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

The dodo and the dumbwaiter

Grade: B –

Director: Peter Lord

Starring the voices of: Hugh Grant, Brendan Gleeson, David Tennant, Martin Freeman and Imelda Staunton

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 27 min.

Aardman Animation’s unspoken kinship with the Monty Python legacy takes another step forward with their debut adaptation of Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! book series, subtitled Band of Misfits. It’s an appropriate title since in the modern animation world of CG, 3-D and IMAX, Aardman’s comparatively quaint stop-motion technique—making its return to the big-screen after 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit—feels like a stubborn outlier in a high-tech world (even though Band of Misfits also gets full the 3-D treatment).

Set in 1837, a middling marauder with a luxuriant beard and the rather mundane moniker of the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant), harboring dreams of winning the coveted Pirates of the Year Award, sets sail to out-plunder his rivals. During one in a number of booty-less raids, he boards the Beagle and encounters a young Charles Darwin (David Tennant), drawn here as a sniveling, duplicitous glamor-seeker. Assisted by his chimp-servant Mr. Bobo, Darwin recognizes that the Pirate Captain’s purportedly rotund parrot Polly is really the last living dodo bird. Darwin convinces the Captain and his crew to sail for London to enter Polly into the Royal Society’s scientific discovery contest with the promise of a priceless prize for the winner.

There’s enough animated action here to keep kids interested, but just barely. Mostly, the chuckles skew more mature, including knowing references to Jane Austen, lepers and the Elephant Man (my hardiest guilty laugh). Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) is a bleating shrew with a distaste of buccaneers but an appetite for exotic cuisine.

Directed by Aardman co-founder Peter Lord (helming his first feature since Chicken Run), the set-up for Band of Misfits is like a send-up of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise peppered with references to 19^th century British pop culture. The result is amply witty, but it’s also a bit detached as times, lacking in narrative or comedic drive. The humor is so decidedly English that many quips will undoubtedly capsize on their way across the Atlantic—indeed, in the U.K. the film was released under the name The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists.

Still, backed by vibrant voice talent and CG enhancements to their distinctive visuals, Aardman has created another cheeky charmer. You’ll come for the pirates…you’ll stay for the sidelong discourse on natural selection.

Neil Morris

Safe House

You talkin' to me?

Grade: B
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Starring: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Sam Shepard
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

Training Day will turn out to be the defining film in Denzel Washington’s career, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the cop-gone-bad drama gave Washington his lone Best Actor Oscar win, but it also (forever?) altered his role choices/selection. Before then, Washington was playing the likes of Malcom X and “Hurricane” Carter and appearing in films such as Glory (for which he won a Supporting Actor Oscar), Courage Under Fire, and Philadelphia. There were Spike Lee joints (Mo’ Better Blues and He Got Game), social uplift films (Cry Freedom and A Soldier’s Story) and even Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing).

Since Training Day, Washington’s performances remain strong but his characters increasingly coalesce around a steady series of cop dramas and man-of-action thrillers, four of them directed by the Scott brothers (three by Tony, one from Ridley). Although Safe House is helmed by Swedish director Daniel Espinosa, it borrows not only Tony Scott’s gritty color palette but a half-dozen other genre clichés. Remarkably, it all comes together for a rather entertaining rumpus.

Washington plays Tobin Frost, a rogue ex-CIA operative who is nine years into peddling secrets for money. When a big buy goes bust in Cape Town, South Africa, Frost surprisingly takes refuge in the U.S. consulate. Needing a place to temporarily stow—and apply enhanced interrogation methods to—Frost, the C.I.A. ferry him to a local safe house manned by low-level company man Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds).

After a band of baddies raze the hideout, Weston is the only one left to deliver Frost to higher authorities, which Weston must do sans any certainty over who is really friend or foe. He keeps one eye on those giving chase and one on the crafty, ice-cold Frost, whose Lecter-like acuity proves his most lethal weapon.

Safe House is essentially Jason Bourne meets 3:10 to Yuma, down to a villain being the film’s most charismatic character (Yuma) and a group of constipating, backbiting bureaucrats (Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Sam Shepard) back at Langley (Bourne). Despite his treacherous past, we’re virtually preordained to like Frost, seemingly because he knows his fine wines and, well, looks like Denzel Washington.

Still, there’s a palpable, to-and-fro chemistry between Washington and Reynolds, who gives his best performance since 2010’s Buried. Despite its derivative dollops, Espinosa flashes a distinctive style, one in which fights aren’t always quick and clean and death is often slow and ugly. And who else besides a Swedish director would set one of his film’s best cat-and-mouse sequences inside a packed soccer match?

Plot holes persist, as in any film of this sort. But they are not as crippling thanks to the film’s intensity and Washington and Reynolds’ taut tête à tête. Safe House may not have the most solid foundation, but it’s a fun place to steal away for a few hours.

Neil Morris

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

Harry's not feeling quite himself today

Grade: B +

Director: David Yates

Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Brendan Gleeson, and Imelda Staunton

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 26 minutes

In a film rife with depictions of torture and genocide, the most haunting scene in the decidedly dark but tremendous Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (hereinafter HPDH1) is a wordless, isolated moment during its opening sequence. Forced like her Hogwarts schoolmates to flee home in order to escape the encroaching forces of Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) casts a spell on her unsuspecting parents that erases any memory of her, a process that also literally removes her image from the family portraits lining their mantelpiece.

This isn’t your grade schooler’s Harry Potter – no quidditch matches, classroom hijinks, or school dances. Indeed, Hogwarts is never seen at all. Instead, the still-suffocating Potter vernacular is mercifully co-opted by a story steeped in genuine human emotions: love, friendship, racism, loyalty, betrayal, etc. As Harry, Hermoine, and Ron (Daniel Radcliffe, Watson, and Rupert Grint, respectively) have aged before our eyes, so too have the challenges facing them grown more treacherous.

With Harry’s friends shielding the Chosen One from Voldemort’s omnipotent pall, the dark lord’s minions capture control over the Ministry of Magic and initiate their “Final Solution” to exterminate Muggles and any other non-pure-bloods. Wizards-in-waiting are now indoctrinated with such propaganda as “Mudbloods and The Dangers They Pose” and “When Muggles Attack,” written and illustrated to resemble Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic Nazi invectives.

With the death of Harry’s father-figure Dumbledore and minimal assistance from their dwindling adult mentors, it now falls to Harry and Co. to defeat Voldemort by gathering and destroying Horcruxes that sustain the villain’s immortality…or something like that. Also figuring into the equation are the so-called deathly hallows, which we learn about via an ancient fable director David Yates tells using a clever animation sequence.

In HPDH1, Harry, Hermoine, and Ron’s task assumes an epic grandeur, more atmospheric, meditative, and slower than previous installments. Accompanied by the plaintive refrains of composer Alexandre Desplat, they hopscotch from dungeons to Piccadilly Circus to endless sweeping vistas, battling not only Death Eaters but also their own hormonal angst. In particular, Yates brings to the surface Ron’s festering resentment towards the more popular Harry as well as his insecurity over their respective relationships with Hermoine.

The evening after Ron storms out on his friends, Harry and Hermoine console each other with an impromptu slow dance set to “O Children” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Forgive us now for what we’ve done/It started out as fun/Here, take these before we run away/The keys to the gulag.” It’s an affecting scene redolent of an art-house coming of age picture, much less a multi-million dollar film sequel.

The darker, worldly themes in the last three Harry Potter films – the best of the bunch, and all directed Yates, not coincidentally – are unsurprising once you realize they are adapted from the only books J.K. Rowling wrote post-9/11. Moreover, the first hour of HPDH1 is the most provocative in the entire film series, although that does amplify the monotony that takes root during the film’s second half as Yates applies the narrative brakes in preparation for Part 2’s finale next July.

Still, even if the battles for Hogwarts and Harry’s soul have yet to be fought, the merit of the once vapid Harry Potter films has finally been established. Luckily, they saved the best for last.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-part-1-is-decidedly-dark-and-tremendous/Content?oid=1808900

Green Zone

Aim for the cameraman!

Grade: C

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, and Amy Ryan

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Everything in Green Zone is punctuated with exclamation points. The Iraq War is LOUD! The Middle East is DANGEROUS! Helicopters, jeeps, and sprinting soldiers move FAST! No one, not even your friends and allies, can be TRUSTED! It’s not so much an adrenaline-rush as a steroid-transfusion.

Unfortunately, if you want in-depth analysis of the film’s gravamen—the quixotic hunt for weapons of mass destruction—the best you will get is Army warrant officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) repeatedly screaming variations on “Where are the WMDs!” or “Tell me about the WMDs!”

Although a good movie can and should be made that investigates the political misinformation used to justify the war in Iraq, Green Zone, which was shot more than two years ago, feels like a dated political drama grounded in theatrics and buzzwords. The film’s in-your-face sense of urgency now seems strangely passé—it may as well be about feverously hunting for leprechauns or trying to uncover Iraq’s stockpiles of pixie dust.

Paul Greengrass, director of the latter two Bourne movies, sets the action in the spring of 2003, between the end of the initial invasion phase of the war and the formal establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority. What could have been a sweeping indictment of the way the United States bungled the formative stages Operation Iraqi Freedom is instead a reductive, fictionalized potboiler regarding Miller’s one-man mission to ferret out the truth about the covert, purportedly reliable intelligence about Iraq’s weapons program being spoon-fed to the whole world.

Along his road to going rogue, Miller encounters of host of half-written ciphers, each trying to extract information from him to further their own aims—at one point, Miller’s backpack was weighted down more by business cards than MREs. Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) is a Paul Bremer-esque Pentagon hack carrying the water for his neocon minders. Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson, wearing a five-day growth and constipated scowl) is the CIA bureau chief who calls bullshit on the supposedly sound intelligence regarding the presence of WMDs. And, Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) is a Wall Street Journal reporter—and Judith Miller doppelganger—who, having helped Poundstone propound his warmongering propaganda, is now suspicious of him and his clandestine informant who goes by the code name “Magellan."

In Greengrass’ brilliant, affecting United 93, the director enlarged a single, incendiary incident into a broader canvas to create a taut, authentic and comprehensive portrait of the Sept. 11 attack. By contrast, screenwriter Brian Helgeland (still running off the fumes of L.A. Confidential) distills the disreputable underpinning for the war and all its complexities into a flurried chase to track down one Saddam general or commandeer one little black book.

Green Zone is credited as having been inspired by Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, the 2006 book by Washington Post war correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran. However, in place of the novel’s sardonic juxtaposition between the gilded, Oz-like bubble encasing the Green Zone and the social and ethnic tumult brewing outside its gilded gates, Greengrass fashions an action-thriller in which sound, fury and his camera-in-a-blender camouflage the narrative shortcomings of a revisionist fantasy in which one man uncovers and exposes the lies that led us to war. Instead, in terms of tone and relevance, Green Zone needed more Dr. Strangelove and less Jason Bourne.

Neil Morris

*Orginally published at www.indyweek.com