Game Night

Enough of the "bored" games, amirite?

Grade: B +

Director:  John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein

Starring: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons, Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, Kylie Bunbury, Jeffrey Wright, and Danny Huston

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 33 min.

Landing is that rare category of movies that are better than they have any logical reason being, Game Night is an early-year diversion that sneaks up on you. On (and yeah, below) the surface, it lands on the well-populated space of Jason Bateman comedies where he plays the snarky straight man opposite some form of inanity. I was going to reel off a few examples, but even a cursory list would eat up my review space—suffice it to say that directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein penned the screenplays for both of Bateman’s Horrible Bosses films. In truth, writer Mark Perez’s Game Night script is a snappier brand of silliness, presenting a cinematic exhibition in which the audience already knows the rules, yet the gameplay this time is surprisingly more entertaining.

Max (Bateman) and his wife Annie (Rachel McAdams) meet cute over an evening of intense bar trivia, but the carefree, ultra-competitive personalities that make them whizzes at charades have also (somehow) inhibited their advancement towards parenthood. Enter Brooks (Kyle Chandler), Max’s successful, devil-may-care older brother, who invites Max and Annie’s weekly game night coterie to his rental mansion for an elaborate murder mystery. Things go haywire when two ruffians nab Brooks, leaving Max, Annie, and their four friends floundering to win a contest that may or may not be real.

Movie buffs will enjoy innumerable references that start with overall premise itself, a takeoff on David Fincher’s “The Game.” There’s a recreated Pulp Fiction monologue, a running Denzel gag that’s actually key to one subplot, and copious cues to The Terminator, The Matrix, Ed Norton plus every other actor who played the Hulk, and a mashup of Eyes Wide Shut and Fight Club, another Fincher film. The abode of one creepy character contains avian taxidermy revealed with a Dutch angle, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

The movie subsists on three simple filmmaking elements: a snicker-a-second script that keeps the audience guessing just enough, complemented by game cast. Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury play Kevin and Michelle, a lifelong couple suddenly rocked by the revelation that she once slept with a secret celebrity. Billy Magnussen plays Ryan, an affable doofus who invites an Irish workmate (Sharon Horgan) to the game as his ringer because, well, she sounds smart.

But besides Bateman, the real winners of this Game Night are three actors whose skills are particularly illuminated in this comedic setting, one in which the directors also give each the space to find their distinctive personas. Chandler plays the obnoxious Id to Batman’s backseat brother. Jesse Plemons is a revelation as a neighboring cop who’s wound way too tight since his divorce. And McAdams, so often pigeonholed as the supporting love interest, gets an equal spotlight with Bateman, and their comic alchemy carries the film.

Into a worthy season of Oscar hopefuls and a superhero movie turned cultural touchstone, Game Night arrives as a suitable date night, an enjoyable outing that’s somehow both smart and mindless. We could all use a little escapist comedy right now.

The Conspirator

I thought the statute of limitations had
run on my "Santa Barbara" days

Grade: C +

Director: Robert Redford

Starring: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, Alexis Bledel, Justin Long, Tom Wilkinson, Danny Huston, and Kevin Kline

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

Not until about 20 minutes into The Conspirator do you realize why Robert Redford, a film legend and activist whose recent interests have skewed more political than cinematic, would direct a historical drama about the trial of one of the conspirators behind Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

The opening act is a well-crafted, authentic recounting of the conspiracy to simultaneously murder Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson, culminating with John Wilkes Booth gunning down Lincoln inside Ford’s Theatre. Redford’s impressive attention to detail, here and throughout the film, includes the wooden brace Booth used to jam the door leading to Lincoln’s theater box, the diagonal placement of Lincoln on the bed inside William Peterson’s boarding house because the president was too tall to lie straight, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) ordering a hysterical Mary Lincoln out of the room housing her dying husband.

As Booth and his cohorts are rounded up, the government eventually beats a path to a D.C. boarding house run by Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) where the assassination plot was allegedly hatched. Under orders from Seward, Surratt is tried before a military tribunal where she is not allowed to testify in her own defense, and neither she nor her attorney, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), are privy to the prosecution’s evidence prior to trial.

It’s only when the storyline shifts focuses onto this Gitmo-style simulacrum, with Seward playing the part of a 19^th century mash-up of Cheney and Rumsfeld, that Redford’s motives become far clearer than those of his characters. Aiken, a former Union soldier, is cast as a war hero and idealist, but the only adversity he suffers for his unpopular defense of Surratt is excommunication from his gentleman’s club and the occasional anxiety of his fiancée (Alexis Bledel).

Meanwhile, we are left puzzling over Mary’s Mary’s relationship with her son John (Johnny Simmons) and daughter Anna (Evan Rachel Wood), both of whom seem strangely reluctant to come to their mother’s aid. Further, why does every Southern character speak with such a clichéd drawl –Tom Wilkinson’s senator from Maryland sounds as if he was voice-coached by Foghorn Leghorn.

As some evidence of Mary’s culpability gradually emerges, writer James Solomon waffles between defending Mary’s innocence and indicting the legal apparatus erected to prosecute her, the latter a more bloodless endeavor. Make no mistake: there is unfairness here that deserves contempt regardless of Mary’s guilt, such as the external influence exerted to assure a death sentence in lieu of life imprisonment.

However, Redford’s rendering is so captivated by its historical heft that it forgets to engage its audience in the figures at the center of its diorama. The trial and hanging of Mary Surratt is an important, nearly forgotten episode of American jurisprudence. The Conspirator, on the other hand, is more likely to have you scouring Wikipedia than IMDb.com.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at Indyweek.com: http://goo.gl/yqIFK