The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

We're all mad here

Grade: C

Director: Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston

Starring: Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Matthew Macfadyen, Helen Mirren, Richard E. Grant, Misty Copeland, and Morgan Freeman

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 39 min.

As sweet and insubstantial as the Sugar Plum Fairy’s pink cotton candy hair, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a confounding confection, full of pretty clothes, pretty music, pretty scenery, and pretty much nothing else. Loosely drawn from E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” the film is a mashup began by original director Lasse Hallström and scriptwriter Ashleigh Powell, who later saw their work reworked and reshot by director Joe Johnston and writer Tom McCarthy. The messy result is a lot of ill-fitting parts connected only by James Newton Howard’s treacly score.

Still mourning the death of her mother, 14-year-old Clara Stahlbaum (Mackenzie Foy) is having trouble relating to her dour dad (Matthew Macfadyen) and embracing the upcoming yuletide season. Her mom posthumously gifts her a decorative egg that promises the solutions to all her problems, but it doesn’t come with the means to unlock it. Clara’s search for the key leads her down a rabbit, er, mouse hole, where she enters a parallel universe created and once ruled by her mother. Her search spans contrasting realms: the bright Land of Sweets, overseen by a gaggle of pixies headed by the Sugar Plum Fairy (Keira Knightley), and the adjoining, now-derelict Land of Amusements, ruled by the haggard Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren). Clara is aided by Philip, aka the Nutcracker, a character who never fully springs to life due to the affable, but otherwise languid acting of Jayden Fowora-Knight.

There are passing echoes of Tchaikovsky’s music, and American Ballet Theater star Misty Copeland and Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin occasionally appear to perform portions of Marius Petipa's ballet. But the throwaway plot invariably meanders back to Clara’s inconsequential quest, which smacks of Alice in Wonderland meets Tron: Legacy meets Narnia. The identity of the narrative’s true villain is a mystery to everyone in the Four Realms, even though events that apparently occurred prior to Clara’s arrival should have disclosed their true motives—indeed, an early encounter between Clara and Mother Ginger should, but doesn’t, clear up matters. The key itself is a bit of a MacGuffin whose only true function becomes enabling the antagonist, raising the question of why Clara’s dearly departed mom sent her to fetch it in the first place. The baddie has a ray gun that can transform opponents into toy dolls, and is then never used for that function.

Perhaps indicative of the crowded film production and some consequential slapdash editing, my eyebrows raised at Mr. Stahlbaum’s early, rather odd leering at his decked-out daughters. And then there’s the decision to cast Morgan Freeman, recently beset by allegations regarding his treatment of women, as Clara’s godfather Drosselmeyer, the creepy toymaker who waxes wistfully about Clara’s young mother once moving in to live with him.

Otherwise, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a banal snoozer, an early holiday Disney cash grab that mirrors a Christmas tree ornament: dainty, occasionally dazzling, and signifying little else.

RED 2

No need for wardrobe ... just come as you are.

Grade: C

Director: Dean Parisot

Starring: Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Byung Hun Lee and Catherine Zeta-Jones

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 56 min.

The cinematic equivalent of a retirement community theater, RED 2 is full of performers going through their paces, just happy to playact bygone glory. As long as the production is respectable, a good time can still be had by all. Such is not the case with RED 2, a movie that manages to be both lurching and lumbering in service of a storyline that’s as somnolescent as its senior citizen stars.

I didn’t particularly care for RED, but its kitschiness was occasionally complemented by a comforting cheerfulness. Its sequel, on the other hand, begins illogically and gets even more confusing. Ex black-ops CIA agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is trying to live the quiet retired life with his wife Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), full of days shopping at Costco and nights of solitude. But he’s lured back into action when old pal Marvin (John Malkovich) is killed. Well, not really—it’s part of a ruse to confuse a band of government jackboots who think Frank and the rest of his “retired, extremely dangerous” compadres know the whereabouts of a nuclear device snuck into Russia during the Cold War.

Why wouldn’t the agents just ask Frank and co. where the device might be instead of trying to immediately torture or kill them? Why do Frank, Marvin and a suddenly thrill-seeking Sarah figure the best plan of action is to globetrot from France to England to Russia in order and retrieve the device themselves, and where do they get the money to do so? What kind of hairstyle and Michael Jackson-esque uniform is Catherine Zeta-Jones sporting as Katja, a Natasha-style Russian agent?

So little makes sense from one scene to another that you begin to seek enjoyment exclusively in the performances and byplay. Alas, the bulk of the humor boils down to lunkheaded one-liners punctuated by repeated reaction shots of a bemused Malkovich (mirroring the audience, no doubt). Willis is joyless, while Parker’s tonally schizophrenic. It’s nice to see Anthony Hopkins flash his metaphorical fangs again, but Dean Parisot’s (literally) bloodless direction makes little use of it—after Hopkins’ mad scientist Dr. Bailey shoots and slashes the throat of three people, he coyly quips, “Sorry about the carpet,” even though not a drop of blood is visible.

There are only two things that make RED 2 passingly palatable. The first is Byung Hun Lee, formerly the star of the hit 2009 South Korean espionage TV series Iris and here playing a contract killer hot on Frank’s trail, whose martial arts action and dashing good looks convince me he’s a Hollywood action star in the making. The other is Helen Mirren, reprising her role as an aging British assassin who is as fetching as she is dangerous. Mirren gets the overall joke and plays it with breezy aplomb, whether it’s dousing acid over a dead mark while wearing an evening gown and carrying on a casual cell phone conversation, or firing handguns out both sides of a spinning sports car driven by Lee. If only the rest of RED 2 embraced its inanity, instead of exacerbating it.

Monsters University

Monsters Club Ltd.

Grade: B +

Director: Dan Scanlon

Starring the voices of: Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Helen Mirren and Steve Buscemi

MPAA Rating: G

Running Time: 1 hr. 50 min.

There’s an urge to lump Monsters University, Pixar Animation’s first prequel, in with the studio’s last stab at a sequel. But whereas Cars 2 was a lackluster, uncreative money grab, Monsters University is, well, a money grab. But it also exhumes the studio’s signature wit and charm, mothballed since 2010’s Toy Story 3.

Speaking of which, Monsters University fits purposely into the timeline of Pixar’s maturing target audience that began with youngsters who discovered the hidden world of their playthings in 1995 with Toy Story. They’re also the teenagers who, 15 years later, left behind those old childhood playthings en route to college in Toy Story 3.

Three years later, that college life is the setting for Monsters University, a prequel to 2001’s Monsters, Inc., where kids saw an imaginary world behind the bedtime fears. Billy Crystal and John Goodman reprise their roles as the younger incarnations of Mike Wazowski  and James “Sulley” Sullivan, respectively. The uni-eyed Mike enrolls in the titular college hoping to major in scaring and eventually land a job at Monsters, Inc., “the big leagues.” Sulley, on the other hand, is a lunkheaded child of privilege who gets by on his family name and one go-to fright face. The hard-charging but scareless Mike resents the lazy Sulley, while Sulley dislikes know-it-all Mike.

Mishaps eventually thrust the two together as members of Oozma Kappa fraternity (“We’re OK!”), a melange of misfits who are distinct underdogs in the annual Scare Games. Both the games and scaring program are overseen by strict Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren), a Hogwarts-esque headmistress who holds the keys to Mike and Sulley’s futures at MU.

The plot is as old as Revenge of the Nerds and as recent as The House Bunny and Pitch Perfect. But in the hands of Pixar, director Dan Scanlon and a terrific cast led by Crystal and Goodman (both with voices born for animation), the threadbare story reaches humorous and enjoyable heights. The film doesn’t approach the level of Pixar’s elite entries—the Toy Story series, The Incredibles, Up, WALL-E, Ratatouille, and even Finding Nemo. But it exudes a sure-handed, polished professionalism that is both entertaining for kids and reassuring for adults. The film also reclaims some of the luster Pixar lost in the wake of Cars 2 and even the ambitious but uneven Brave. Still, the fact that Monsters University is the best animated film this year reveals more about the state of animated filmmaking than the merits of the movie.

The Debt

Don't look now...your past is gaining on you

Grade: B –

Director: John Madden

Starring: Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas and Jasper Christensen

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 44 min.

It takes more than subtitles to translate a movie. Films such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and practically Michael Haneke's entire oeuvre, for example, are entertaining in their own right. But their deeper meaning often flows from the cultural vein of their native audiences: Dragon Tattoo reflected its creator's dark vision of Swedish misogyny, while Haneke's Caché draws on the dark past between France and Algeria.

The conundrum becomes magnified when these movies are remade by nonnative filmmakers. The Debt is an American remake of the 2007 Israeli drama-thriller HaHov, which concerns the particularly fraught world of Nazi hunting. Following the war, Israeli intelligence services and private citizens such as Simon Wiesenthal pursued Hitler's former minions, an enterprise that was not without controversy both inside and outside Israel.

The Debt is set in 1997, when three retired Mossad agents—Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren), ex-hubby Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) and David (Ciarán Hinds) must confront the truth behind their incursion inside East Berlin 30 years earlier. Their mission was to locate and apprehend a former Nazi named Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), whose moniker "the Surgeon of Birkenau" clearly models him on Josef Mengele.

The bulk of The Debt, directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), comprises a series of long flashback scenes set at the time of the operation and its aftermath. The exercise to capture and sneak Vogel out of East Germany plays like a taut procedural, particularly a sequence at a rail station in which their plan goes awry. This disruption forces the agents to stow Vogel in their safe house for weeks while they search for an alternate escape route, events that mirror the actual 1960 abduction of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad agents in Argentina. Madden excels in cultivating an espionage-thriller vibe during these sequences that nonetheless hamstrings the present-day scenes by draining them of any philosophical subtext.

The most screen time is dedicated to Rachel, whose later book about the trio's exploits would earn them notoriety. Still, the way the character is written is a muddle: Young Rachel (Jessica Chastain) possesses the mettles to submit to Vogel's gynecological exams, yet she's so needy that, even in the middle of this delicate mission, she drunkenly and arbitrarily throws herself at both of her male co-workers on the same night, forming a haphazard love triangle that informs the story without really improving it.

Even so, the 30-year-old Chastain, last seen in The Help and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, acquits herself quite well. On the other hand, most of the other actors, particularly Mirren, Wilkinson and Sam Worthington (who plays young David), fret and frown a lot. And Hinds doesn't have time to even do that, appearing only once after his character throws himself in front of a passing truck in the film's opening scene.

The Debt's most intriguing characters are two of its secondary ones. Stephan (the younger version portrayed by Marton Csokas) portrays an intriguing clash of sniveling self-interest and earnest patriotism. And the way Vogel deciphers and exploits his captors' psychological vulnerabilities is Lecter-esque: even though Vogel is bound and gagged, he's the one who is truly in control.

Unfortunately, the screenwriting team of Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (Stardust, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class) fails to pivot The Debt from its sheer suspense elements into a film possessing any discernable political, cultural or emotional nuance. It culminates with a journey to Ukraine by Mirren's Rachel and a finale more befitting one of Brian De Palma's campy climaxes. Apparently certain types of cinema are universal, after all.

Neil Morris

RED

Sgt. Pepper, I presume?

Grade: D +

Director: Robert Schwentke

Starring: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, and Karl Urban

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 51 minutes

As another film adaptation of a graphic novel I’ve never heard of, RED is a kitschy caper that tracks a group of retired CIA black-ops agents forced back into action after a hi-tech assassin goes gunning for them. The “plot” – using that term loosely – lurches about with no rhythm or reason. Director Robert Schwentke tries to have it both ways by stuffing his actors’ geriatric antics into a legitimate action movie, but neither half is the least bit convincing…or entertaining.

The whole exhibition essentially amounts to a garish vaudeville revue starring past-their-prime performers playing with and against type – “Step right up, folks, and see the amazin’, wacky John Malkovich!” Add to him a laconic Bruce Willis (with a clueless love interest played by Mary-Louise Parker in tow), a doddering Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren shooting one machine gun after another (though not as many as the movie’s trailer would suggest), and bit parts from Richard Dreyfuss, Brian Cox, and Ernest Borgnine (?!), and you’re left RED-faced with something akin to a West End production of The Expendables.

Neil Morris

The Last Station

Stop - your fake whiskers are tickling me

Grade: B –

Director: Michael Hoffman

Starring: Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, James McAvoy, Paul Giamatti, Anne-Marie Duff, and Kerry Condon

MPAA Rating:

Running Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Leo Tolstoy is regarded as one of the world’s greatest novelists, penning such masterpieces as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He was a Christian anarchist and educational reformer whose teachings inspired a movement formed by his followers, called Tolstoyans. But, if writer-director Michael Hoffman is to be believed, all you need to understand the famous author is summed up his quote that opens The Last Station: “Everything I know, I know only because I love.”

Divining the true object of Tolstoy’s affections is the premise of Hoffman’s film, which is set in 1910 and tracks the writer’s final days from his home at Yasnaya Polyana to the Astapovo railway station where he finally succumbed to pneumonia. We see the warring camps through the eyes of a fresh-faced disciple played by James McAvoy. On one side is Sofya (Helen Mirren), Tolstoy’s wife of over 40 years, mother of 13 children (five died during childhood), and his secretary and manger during his most productive literary years. Over time, however, their relationship soured greatly, and her role in Tolstoy’s life is eventually supplanted by his Tolstoyan followers, particularly their founder, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti).

The Last Station details the battle between Sofya and Chertkov for Tolstoy’s spirit, revolving principally around ownership of the copyrights to Tolstoy’s early, most lucrative works. Chertkov wants Tolstoy to renounce his interest in them ostensibly so they can be enjoyed freely by the Russian people; Sofya sees them as his personal and financial legacy, compensation for years of hard work and sacrifice.

Any examination of right and wrong in this conflict is a far murkier than the position Hoffman takes, which is solidly behind Sofya, a histrionic but devoted spouse who sneers at Chertkov’s duplicitous, high-minded cooing. Giamatti’s performance is delectably devious given the part he’s given; any fault in the way Chertkov is presented rests squarely on Hoffman’s one-dimensional rendering.

Hoffman ignores any detailed analysis of the sweeping political issues or influences at play, nor does he explicate obvious subplots such as why Sasha (Anne-Marie Duff), Tolstoy’s daughter, aligns herself with Chertkov against her mother.

Although the screenplay is actually adapted from a 1990 novel by Jay Parini, the stagey presentation of this subject-matter makes the film feel like a cross between The Lion in Winter and The Madness of King George; indeed, Count and Countess Tolstoys’ noble titles only reinforce the palace drama ambiance.

All that said, The Last Station is not strictly a high-gloss biopic or stuffy agitprop. At its heart, this is an acting exercise for the ageless Plummer and Mirren, both Oscar-nominated for their performances. Both play their meaty roles to the hilt; Mirren gets to crash through a windows, fall into a pond, and fire off a firearm, while Plummer clucks like chicken as foreplay before one of Leo and Sofya’s few intimate moments.

The closing credits contain rare, vintage footage of Tolstoy and others characters depicted in the film. Beyond the historical significance, it is the one instance when The Last Station feels authentic, not something being projected – however ably – to the balcony of a West End theatre.

Neil Morris