Deepwater Horizon

How an oil rig works, honey, is first

I drink your milkshake.

Grade: B

Director: Peter Berg

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Gina Rodriguez and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 47 min.

The oil industry jargon in Deepwater Horizon spews forth like a gusher: “Schlumberger”; “negative press test”; “kill line”; “mud displacement”; “blowout preventer.” The audience is left to its own devices to divine the meaning of these terms, but that’s far from a demerit. It’s just one instance of the verisimilitude that imbues this well-made and admittedly surface-deep film about the 2010 BP oil spill.

Everything we learn about each of the film’s characters is gleaned inside their opening 30 seconds of screen time. Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg, still hitting above his weight in film choices) is the cocksure electrical tech for the titular BP-leased, Transocean-owned floating semi-submersible drilling unit. Felicia (Kate Hudson), Mike’s wife, is the fretting spouse back home. Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell) is the gruff, no-nonsense rig manager, who we first meet dressing down an oil exec for wearing a magenta tie, since that’s the color of a full-scale alarm (Foreshadowing!). Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) is the capable navigation operator and the only female crewmember. And every BP suit—led by Donald Vidrine, played by John Malkovich and his gonzo Cajun accent—is a money-hungry villain eager to get the Macondo oil well flowing after going 43 days behind schedule and $53 million over budget.

Against the better judgment (we’re told) of Harrell and Williams, Vidrine orders that drilling commence despite inconsistent pressure tests on the rig’s drill and kill lines. The resulting blowout kills 11 crewmen and ultimately pumps over 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

Director Peter Berg’s uncompromising technical proficiency as a filmmaker is put to tremendous application here, and the result is realistic and hair-raising. Berg has an eye and ear for his setting, from the ambient noise of an offshore oil rig to the outpost’s remoteness. He also expertly conveys the catastrophic chain of events that led to the blowout and its hellish consequences. Shortly after the blowout, oil-covered gulls fly blindly onto the deck of a nearby tanker ship like a Biblical plague.

Berg has a hero worship and patriotic streak that has increasingly informed his films—The Kingdom, then Battleship, then Lone Survivor, and his upcoming Patriots Day, about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. In Deepwater Horizon, even as an inferno engulfs the oil rig, Old Glory still flaps in the foreground. While the action in Lone Survivor felt exploitative, here the real-life heroism lends heft to the visual stimulation—it’s part ‘70s disaster flick and part paean.

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.

Warm Bodies

Even in a post-apocalyptic future,

you'll end up next to this in the $5 bin at Walmart

Grade: C
Director: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco and John Malkovich
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.

It takes more than Kensington Gore to make a good monster movie, and it takes more than spackling your film with Shakespearean tropes to lend it Meaning™. Warm Bodies tries to have to both ways, along with harvesting the teen romantic-comedy market for good measure. Isaac Marion’s source novel of the same name was published in late 2011, an important fact in nailing down its sundry pop-cultural influences. It’s Romeo & Juliet meets The Walking Dead meets Twilight meets a steaming pile of rotting entrails.

Our narrator is a zombie named R (Nicholas Hoult)—as in Romeo, get it?—who falls for a girl named Julie (Teresa Palmer)—as in Juliet, get it?—and has a best friend named M (Rob Corddry)—as in...oh, forget it. There’s also a scene where R appears below Julie’s balcony. But while R and Julie’s respective tribes don’t get along, it has less to do with family squabbling and more to do with the fact that R’s undead pals want to feast on Julie and the last vestiges of humankind.

But R is unusual, starting with the fact that while he can’t talk, sleep, dream or do anything but amble around all day waiting for a dollop of viscera to fall his way, he can provide an entirely articulate, introspective voice over narration. While on food patrol one day, R and his buddies happen upon a band of gun totting 20-somethings, including Julie and her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco). R munches on Perry’s brains, allowing R to absorb and envision Perry’s memories, which are projected somewhat miraculously in two-shot and multi-angle imagery. R becomes infatuated with Julie and sneaks her to his home, an abandoned 747 parked on the tarmac of a derelict airport.

Never mind the fact that R chowed down on Julie's boo—his tousled hair and ‘80s vinyl record collection, when combined with a heady dose of Stockholm Syndrome, is all that’s required for her to go gaga. In return, R starts experiencing some special feelings that spread to the rest of his carnivorous clan the first time they glimpse R and Julie holding hands.

Director Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness) aims to imbue this romance with some sidelong commentary about our disconnected society. But limiting ourselves to the zombie genre, that was done better and more satirically in just the opening half-hour of Shaun of the Dead. All Warm Bodies does is offer up such puzzling queries as why these zombies are the slow-moving George Romero kind at the beginning of the film but the frenzied 28 Days Later variety by the end. Why is ‘80s rock, record players and Polaroid instant cameras featured prominently alongside iPods, Blu-ray and convertible BMWs? What is the power source for R’s airplane and the moving walkways at the zombie-populated airport? Since R is already dead, why does Julie constantly refer to the threat of him “dying” or getting “killed,” including at the hands of her ramrod, freedom-fighting father (John Malkovich)?

Levine shoots the film in a drab grayscale; apologists would say this is to capture the look of a post-apocalyptic tableau when its true intent is avoiding the sort of vivid imagery that would usually carry with it an R-rating instead of the tepid PG-13 the filmmakers clearly wanted. Moreover, if you’re going to foist Romeo & Juliet, then have the courage of your literary conceit and embrace its tragic story arc. Put these together, and Warm Bodies is the thing you’d least expect: bloodless.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Somebody say they needed 1.21 gigawatts?

Grade: D +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

The greatest trick Michael Bay ever pulled was making his last Transformers movie so godawful that virtually any follow-up would look superlative by comparison. While Bay excises most (but not all) of the hip-hop “humor” that sullied Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he amps up the decibels and bumptiousness for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers 3).

As the film opens, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the Autobots roam the planet as a phalanx for American foreign policy – we watch them destroy an “illegal nuclear facility” in some nameless Arab country. Meanwhile, Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugh Weaving) has been reduced to a desert-dwelling raghead patiently plotting his next terrorist incursion.

Opportunity comes in the form a Cybertronian ship whose crash landing on the moon in the early 1960s was the actual impetus for the U.S.-Soviet space race (this historical tie-in includes a shuffle-through by Buzz Aldrin himself). Found aboard the craft are a collection of gizmos designed to teleport Cybertron into Earth’s orbit (we never really know why) together with the dormant hulk of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy’s inclusion provides the film’s lone moment of cleverness when a couple of slacker bots watch the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek TV series and, in a bit of foreshadowing, describe it as “the one where Spock goes crazy.”

Once again the Decepticons and their allies threaten mankind while political leaders opt for appeasement, exiling the Autobots and removing their soldiers from the battlefield in hopes that the enemy will just leave them alone. Instead, the Decepticons launch an offensive to secure world domination, headlined by a rampage through downtown Chicago that does more damage to the Windy City than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Transformers 3 shamelessly assimilates the vernacular and imagery of Sept. 11 (Chi-town is “Ground Zero”), refracted through Bay’s interpretation of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, Holocaust, and Neville Chamberlain. And if toppled skyscrapers aren’t discomforting enough, inexplicable recurring hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) discovers the Decepticons are out to steal your women, too. As Sam’s new girlfriend Carly, ex-Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (subbing for the suddenly sage Megan Fox) primarily sports tight jeans and purses her pursed, collagen-filled lips while standing in front of a green-screen full of explosions and other assorted carnage.

Bay’s literal and figurative flag-waving would be fine if his film was any good. The Bush Doctrine overtones in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are suitable because they’re packaged in first-rate vehicles. By contrast, Transformers 3 an orgy of dizzying, interminable special effects and right-wing allegory set to Wagneresque blaring brass of composer Steve Jablonsky. You pray for periodic flashes of color in order to tell one shape-shifting robot from another – at one point, four indistinguishable silver robots are caught in a Mexican standoff. Bay’s tone-deaf notion of humor is Sam’s mom taking time during the End of Days to chat with her adult son about how to satisfy a woman.

The rest of the window-dressing is equally vapid and useless. Save for Carly's collaboration with Bay’s leering camera, there’s not a single supporting character whose presence would be missed, but there are a whole lot of actors that should know better. They include a gonzo corporate exec (John Malkovich), a NSA ramrod (Frances McDormand), McDreamy as a car collector (Patrick Dempsey), a crazy Asian (Ken Jeong, natch), a conspiracy nut (John Turturro, again), and invincible super soldiers Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

In Bay’s reality, Bill O’Reilly passes for a celebrity cameo and a medal awarded by President Obama for saving the world isn’t enough to get Sam a job as a mail room clerk. “We’re pretty much all Republicans around here,” quips one company headhunter, channeling his director and his loud, jingoistic polemic for neo-con U.S. geopolitics. Transformers 3: Mission not accomplished.

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

Secretariat

Hippophobia - there is a cure

Grade: C +

Director: Randall Wallace

Starring: Diane Lane, John Malkovich, James Cromwell, Scott Glenn, Dylan Walsh, Dylan Baker, Fred Dalton Thompson, Nestor Serrano, and Nelsan Ellis

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 56 minutes

The folks at Disney specialize in romanticized treatments of remarkable sports stories: Miracle, Glory Road, The Rookie, and Invincible (which, admittedly, also had its good moments). Firmly in that pedestrian tradition, Secretariat tells the tale of the titular Thoroughbred and its legendary 1973 run at horse racing’s Triple Crown, but channels sports history through the considerably less interesting life-story of Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), its housewife-turned-racehorse owner.

Chenery inherits the family breeding farm in Virginia from her ailing father (Scott Glenn) and, through guile, luck, and inevitable sass, raids horse racing’s all-boy’s club. Her obsession nearly bankrupts and tears her family apart, but even an intra-family red state-hippie state divide is no match for Big Red’s unifying power.

Secretariat an unabashed, shameless crowd-pleaser – beating up on it feels akin to sending the mighty horse to the glue factory. Director Randall Wallace (“We Were Soldiers”) has a firm grip on his subject’s formidable reins – his rendering of Secretariat’s astounding 31-length win at the Belmont Stakes is sublime until he slaps on an overblown gospel choir accompaniment (the Edwin Hawkins singers 1969 version of “Oh Happy Day”) down the home stretch. There is the de rigueur eccentric cast of characters, including John Malkovich playing, well, John Malkovich, this time under the guise of Hall of Fame trainer Lucien Laurin. And, although the film cuts many factual corners, it deserves credit for reserving screen time for Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis), Secretariat’s loyal African-American groom.

The problem – beyond its saccharine presentation – is that screenwriter Mike Rich, loosely adapting William Nack’s book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, focuses the screenplay so sharply through Penny’s prism that it never fully appreciates or depicts the Secretariat phenomenon and its place in the American ethos, coming post-tumultuous 1960s, near the latter stages of the Vietnam War, and one year before Watergate (unlike, by comparison, the decidedly Depression-era set Seabiscuit). Rich spends more screen time on Lucien’s funny pants, daughter Sarah Tweedy’s one-dimensional dalliance with the peace movement, and revolving press conferences in which Penny and Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano) – trainer of rival equine Sham – try to out-snark each other.

As in real life, Secretariat only truly soars when the action hits the track. Unfortunately, the rest of the film trots when it should gallop.

Neil Morris

Changeling

Great news - you passed my adoption height requirement

Grade: D +
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Michael Kelly, and Amy Ryan
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes

So banal, so cloying is Changeling, about a Prohibition-era mother’s search for her missing son, that the presentation of this true story actually lacks verisimilitude, relegating a would-be period drama to a hackneyed bit of Oscar bait whose trailer would fit well alongside the “Satan’s Alley” mock preview preceding Tropic Thunder.

When Los Angeles telephone operator Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) protests the LAPD returning another boy into her care, claiming it to be her lost son Walter (Gattlin Griffith), the police protect themselves from a PR backlash by branding Collins delusional and involuntarily committing her to a psychiatric facility for women (cue the power-hose shower and electro-shock therapy scenes…). There, she meets Amy Ryan, playing the same basic character Jolie played in Girl, Interrupted. Along the way, everyone gets to yell at the screen (and, presumably, gullible Oscar voters), whether it be Jolie, John Malkovich as Collins’ faith-based benefactor, or Jeffrey Donovan as a corrupt police captain played less like a character living in the 1920s than a caricature in a movie made during the 1930s.

A meandering metaphor for societal decay gussied up as neo-Gothic costume melodrama, the film also amplifies the uncomfortable nihilistic undercurrent throughout director Clint Eastwood’s filmography. Beyond the anti-authoritarianism in Eastwood’s depiction of systemic governmental corruption, he again underscores his preoccupation with death, whether it be incessant graphic flashbacks of the infamous Wineville Chicken Coop child murders or lingering over every reflexive twitch of an executed killer dangling from the gallows.

No one – the police, politicians, the medical establishment, etc. – is spared Eastwood’s ire. Even the admittedly duplicitous young boy posing as Collins’ son (Devon Conti) is outed using cruel and callous methods: the family dentist allows him to writhe in pain while inspecting for distinctive dental features, and a school teacher holds the boy up for class ridicule when he cannot identify Walter’s assigned seat. In Eastwood’s universe, the meting out of justice is just as heavy-handed as the infliction of injustice. If one courtroom scene isn’t enough, let’s try two simultaneously, followed by good ol’ fashioned hanging during which the condemned serenades witnesses with “Silent Night.”

A wraithlike Jolie spends 140 long minutes weeping and intoning endless variations of “I just want my son back,” some set to the same prestige primal scream she shrieked in A Mighty Heart. Jolie possesses the tools to be a terrific actress, but in Eastwood’s minimalist, laissez faire hands, her talents are unhinged and unfocused. Changeling is a story about tragedy, redemption, and hope. Unfortunately, Eastwood fails to translate that compelling story into a compelling film.

Neil Morris

Burn After Reading

Tonight's feature presentation: "Righteous Kill"

Grade: B
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, and Richard Jenkins
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

I probably rehash the following observation every time I review a Coen Brothers' movie, but it always bears restating: the corrosive influence of greed and/or temptation are the overriding themes in nearly every one of their films. The sometimes compulsory, always creative ways the Coens conjure their moral(istic) object lessons rank them among the most acclaimed American filmmakers of the last half-century.

In that vein, Burn After Reading is a return to classic Coens: a black comic rendering of morally duplicitous people lured and eventually destroyed by greed, yes, but more so the lure of a life supposedly better than their own. Such was the theme to 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, the last original screenplay the Coens penned. Yet, as the Coens enter their 50s, what has changed is the cynical edge of their material – call it cranky Coens. At the end of Raising Arizona, the baby gets returned to his family while H.I. and Ed settle down for a long life together. In Fargo and Blood Simple, the bad guys get their comeuppance while the righteous are left to ponder the inanity of it all. A change of sorts is found in the Coens’ last film, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men; sure, Tommy Lee Jones is left scratching his head at a devolving world, but Anton Chigurh also gets to walk away, battered but alive to kill another day.

In many ways, Burn After Reading is even more pessimistic, despite the fact that it is more of a smiling cobra. An A-list cast gets to cut loose by cutting up, but unlike the Coens’ previous moral plays, there isn’t a canary to be found in this nefarious coalmine. A disgruntled, chronically drunk ex-CIA analyst, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), decides to write his memoirs. At the same time, his ice-cold wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is having an affair with a married, low-level Treasury agent (George Clooney), whose penchants run the gambit from post-coital 5-mile jogs to exotic food allergies. When Katie decides to file for divorce, she copies the family finances along with Osborne’s memoir onto a CD. A copy accidentally turns up at the local Hardbodies and into the hands of two dimwitted gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand), herself locked in an ongoing struggle over how to pay for some “much-needed” cap-a-pie cosmetic surgery.

Linda and Chad’s attempt to return the disc to Osborne – with the expectation of compensation, natch – is met by Osborne’s raging temper. Convoluted circumstances also involving the Internet dating phenomenon eventually bring each character into the same orbit, with disastrous consequences. Private eyes are mistaken for G-Men and chance encounters are viewed with heavy suspicion. In this postmodern satire, greed and paranoia form a combustible concoction in which the hoi polloi reflexively buy into whatever bogey man the government or infotainment conglomerates prop up, whether it is domestic surveillance or rivals from abroad. “The Russians?!,” a CIA chief (J.K. Simmons) repeats with puzzlement when he is informed that Linda and Chad tried to sell their disc of Osborne’s “drivel” to the Russian consulate. [You couldn’t blame them if they’ve been listening to our current presidential campaigns, who have recently dusted off old Cold War rhetoric to gin up votes.]

The subtle brilliance of Burn After Reading is that it is really an anti-spy, nonpolitical film, where the governmental espionage is a MacGuffin masking the fact that the actual intrigue flows wholly from the foibles of flawed, regular people who, although living in an increasingly interconnected world, are more personally estranged from their neighbors than ever. All the while, the actual intelligence community watches on both bemused and confused, armed with near omnipresence - if not omnipotence - but clueless as to how to exercise their power.

Unfortunately, that disengagement also leads the Coens to yet another truncated, shoulder-shrug ending, a la No Country for Old Men, made worse by the fact that nearly all the key climactic events take place off-camera and are only vocalized by bureaucrats trying to make sense of it all, postmortem. “So, what did we learn?”, asks Simmons’ CIA head. Only that the Coens are not yet willing, or able, to share the answer to that question.

Neil Morris