Solo: A Star Wars Story

This is Calrissian

Grade: C +

Director: Ron Howard

Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton, and Paul Bettany

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

The good news about Solo: A Star Wars Story is that it’s not bad for the reasons many dread. Alden Ehrenreich strikes a suitable Han Solo, exuding a sufficient amount of smirk to channel the gestating days of the iconic scoundrel. Those (including me) fearing Chewbacca overload will be heartened to hear that the noble Wookiee ably fits into the film’s emotional innards. And those (including me) fearing the late-production director switch from Phil Lord and Chris Miller to Ron Howard would leave the hollow husk of a Star Wars movie will be glad to know the final product isn’t an unadulatered disaster (The Phantom Menace and Attacks of the Clones still comfortably hold their ignominious spots in the canon).

Solo is what you’d expect from any other Ron Howard joint: a banal, unremarkable product that is designed to both offend and exhilarate few. Considering that Howard was tasked with reshooting at least 70 percent of Lord & Miller’s work while recasting some roles and reconfiguring the storyline, it merits a golf clap that Howard—a reliable movie industry go-to, if nothing else—filed a finished actioner worthy of a weekday matinee.

That said, as I write this review less than 48 hours after watching Solo, there little about the film still highlighted in my hippocampus. Some elements—the bland score, the action sequences—didn’t linger beyond the theater exit. And those aspects I do recall aren’t too positive, chiefly the oppressively subfusc palette that forced me into a perpetual squint.

Somewhere amid the murk, Han Solo (Ehrenreich) is a young miscreant who escapes the mean streets of Corellia (and its law enforcement) by enlisting in the military—the passing shot of an Imperial recruitment video, set to a canned version of John Williams’ Imperial March, feels like one of the few remnants of Lord & Miller’s wry sensibilities. Solo must leave behind his underwritten girlfriend, Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke). Later, he predictably runs afoul of his superiors, necessitating another escape aided by a “beast” that turns out to be his lifelong sidekick.

Solo and Chewie hook up with a gang led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), an intergalactic pirate who is hoping to hijack a shipment of a rare hyperfuel called coaxium in order to pay the debt he owes to crime lord Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), who has somehow, somewhere, sometime taken Qi-ra as his space concubine. When that train robbery goes awry, Solo and company play cards with rapscallion Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and loop him and his Millenium Falcon on an even more perilous exploit.

At its core, Solo is a love story, but not between Solo and Qi'ra, or Lando and his unrequited droid companion-cum-freedom fighter L3-37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), this film’s failed sassy knockoff of K-2SO (Rogue One). The central coupling in Solo is the bromance between Solo and Chewbacca, a platonic relationship built on Chewie’s tolerance for Han’s roguish ways and Han’s respect for Chewie as a being worthy of respect.

Otherwise, when Solo isn’t being perfectly pedestrian, it’s shoehorning stray imagery across the frame meant to channel some social woe or another. But like everything else, it’s a collection of passing references, meant to stoke feelings of nostalgia and the sense of meaning without fleshing out anything meaningful. Solo is good for a Star Wars sugar rush, but be ready for the crash.

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.

Rush

Wait a sec ... didn't you win the Asgard Grand Prix?

Grade: B +

Director: Ron Howard

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl, Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

His toys are more sophisticated, his scripts are more polished and his budgets are larger. But even as he pushes 60, Ron Howard is still trying to prove his mettle with a car race movie. Long before he won a Best Director Oscar for A Beautiful Mind (and the one he should have snared for Apollo 13), the 23-year-old Happy Days star was cutting a deal with Roger Corman to direct his own movie for no salary. Howard’s critically maligned first feature was Grand Theft Auto, and 36 years and 20 films later, perhaps he’s trying to settle the score with his latest, Rush.

Howard reteams with his Frost/Nixon scribe Peter Morgan to track the rivalry between British driver James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian champion Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), culminating in their epic back-and-forth battle during the 1976 Formula One season.

The film has two main attractions. Meticulous period set design and grainy, ‘70s style cinematography plant the audience firmly the era, which Howard and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire, Antichrist) supplement with exquisite race camerawork that spins the viewer outside, inside and around the cockpits. Digital effects occasionally lacquer a layer of artificiality on the action. Mostly, however, the blend of reality and F/X is seamless.

But Howard astutely realizes that the racing only accents the human drama. With flaxen locks and rakish charm, Hunt is a talented, daring driver whose main adversary is usually his lack of discipline off the track. On the other hand, Lauda is a wealthy auto design savant who is nicknamed “the Rat” due to his slight overbite and overconfident, even obnoxious personality. (It’s equally off putting that Brühl’s clipped accent sounds like Mike Myers’ Goldmember character from the third Austin Powers film.)

Morgan mostly avoids the loose treatment of facts seen in his previous sports-themed screenplay, The Damned United. Still, Rush implies that the 1976 season was the first time Hunt and Lauda raced each other on the Formula One circuit, which in fact it was their fourth.

The most daring maneuver in Rush isn’t the high octane racing, but instead the way Howard flips the easy classifications of hero and villain. After the cocky Lauda nearly dies in a fiery crash at the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring—a race Lauda wanted to boycott because of unsafe conditions but was outvoted by his fellow drivers, led by Hunt—his improbable return to the cockpit a mere six weeks later elevates the Austrian to a fan and audience favorite. Howard spares few details in detailing Lauda’s grueling recovery; a scene in which he painfully and stubbornly attempts to slide a race helmet over his burned skin is the most daring and uplifting moment of the film.

Howard’s execution isn’t perfect. Some irregular narration adds little beyond distraction, and as the drivers’ significant others, Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara are given little purpose beyond being pensive onlookers. But the biggest misstep might be not releasing this adrenaline rush during the summer, when it could have been a surprising bit of high-minded counter-programming, instead of slotting it in early fall, in what the filmmakers imagine must be the pole position for the awards season.

The Dilemma

Not just gay, but Injuns, too.

Grade: C +
Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Channing Tatum, and Queen Latifah
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 51 min.

If only The Dilemma were as edgy as the pejorative use of the word “gay” that controversially found its way into trailers for the film (and which remains in the movie itself). The principal dilemma plaguing this serio-comedy is a bad case of identity crisis. Unsure whether it should be a side-splitting bromance or a dark farce on relationships and obsession, the film ends up cutting the baby in half, a solution that is never very good for the baby.

Someone who didn’t know better might reasonably think this is yet another bad American knockoff of an already middling French comedy (it isn’t). Best buds and auto design business partners Ronny (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Kevin James) are on the verge of a lucrative business deal with Chrysler to develop motors for electric cars that sounds like classic 1970s muscle cars. However, while contemplating whether to finally pop the question to his girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly) at a Chicago botanical garden, Ronny discovers that Nick’s wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) is cheating on her husband.

To tell or not to tell, that is the question. Complicating the answer is Ronny’s concern that Nick hearing the bad news from him might jeopardize their friendship and impending business deal. So, Ronny chooses a third option: confront and threaten Geneva to dissuade her infidelity, peep and break into the apartment of her tattooed inamorato (Channing Tatum) to gather evidence of their indiscretions, and secretly stalk Nick after finding out his friend trawls Vietnamese massage parlors in search of happy endings.

Ryder’s presence is enough to awaken the inner 80s’ child of viewers of a certain age. Indeed, Geneva’s mixture of sexy and crazy effectively piggybacks off Ryder’s own persona – Ronny refers to Geneva as “Sybil” at one point (after mistakenly saying “Helen Keller”).

However, Allan Loeb’s screenplay lunges hither and dither, tossing out subplots that accomplish little except further muddy the narrative waters, like Ronny and Geneva’s college-age secret and Ronny’s dormant gambling habit. James, a gifted comic, is effectively neutered. We presume Beth is cool because she’s a chef, gorgeous, and plays a mean game of ping-pong; otherwise, Connelly serves little purpose as Ronny’s unaware mate. And, I still have no idea what Queen Latifah – as an automotive consultant – is doing here.

Ultimately, The Dilemma is squarely a Vince Vaughn vehicle, as his outsized personality dominates every scene. Good thing, too, since it seems director Ron Howard only makes movies nowadays so his father and brother can find work. Vaughn customarily adlibs his way into the film’s lone laughs, departing from a script that constantly disservices him with scenes where he manically chases someone down with a homemade blowtorch, offers the most uncomfortable wedding anniversary toast ever, and – most incredulously – attempts to barter with God while sitting at a bus stop.

There’s some latent allegory buried deep in Ronny and Nick’s motor project – something to do with things not always being as they seem. Unfortunately, it applies to The Dilemma, a comedy that not hilarious and a drama that’s never smart or serious enough.

Neil Morris

Angels and Demons

Please, Mr. Hanks, we'll tell you everthing you want to know.

Just don't make us watch "Turner & Hooch" again.

Grade: C +

Director: Ron Howard

Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgård, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, and Armin Mueller-Stahl

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 18 minutes

I am of two minds about using the Catholic Church and its austere, shadowy tenets as both literary and cinematic punching bags, first in the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code, and now in its follow-up, Angels and Demons. On the one hand, there is something discomforting about appropriating the religious beliefs held by billions around the globe as a bogeyman for mere pop entertainment.

However, the declaration “Hey, it’s only a movie!” has been rightly used to excuse a plethora of provocative films throughout cinema’s history. And, as long as the Catholic Church remains a powerful world influence adhering to clandestine, medieval traditions and doctrinaire, reactionary teachings, it must expect to be fodder for political activists, conspiratorial muckrakers, and sensationalistic fiction writers.

Angels and Demons is the latest such byproduct, in which Brown parlays the longstanding feud between religion and science as the basis for a pedantic, winding murder mystery. Although Brown’s book is actually a prequel to Da Vinci Code, director Ron Howard wisely postdates the narrative into a sequel. Tom Hanks returns as symbologist Robert Langdon, again called upon to uncover the dastardly plans of another occult society. This time, it is the ambigramatic Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era association purportedly looking to punish the Church for its past denunciation of science by destroying Vatican City and the College of Cardinals using a canister of stolen antimatter.

The bulk of the film, however, finds Langdon spouting one dollop of theological mumbo jumbo after another, each prompting another leg in what becomes an extended travelogue through the streets of Rome and the Universal Studios back lot. No staircase, corridor, or secret passageway goes unexplored as Langdon also tries to stop a series of related, Se7en-esque theme slayings against kidnapped cardinals belonging to the, er, Preferiti, after the Pope’s death and on the eve of the ensuing papal conclave. Going along for the ride is a comely Italian scientist (Ayelet Zurer), an irascible Vatican police commander (Skellan Skarsgård), and Patrick McKnee, the Holy See Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor, now permanently derailed off the track that once led toward headlining these sorts of blockbusters).

The existence of this sequel comes in the face of a first installment that made money despite underperforming at every critical level. Fans and critics complained and Howard listened, righting many of the wrongs that plagued his languid 2006 effort. Angels and Demons moves at a brisker pace, even at nearly 140 minutes, and is not as slavishly shackled to its literary source. And, thankfully, Hanks’ bouffant hairstyle has been tamped down. But, there is little difference between this and the claptrap of National Treasure aside from Hanks’ cachet and better set design.

Howard is a capable director, but he anchors himself in too safe a harbor with a prosaic script co-written by usual suspects Akiva Goldsmith and David Koepp (only the absence of David Benioff prevents the formation of an unholy scriptwriting trinity). Just how lazy is it? Well, the film’s centerpiece suspense scene features Langdon escaping a locked, oxygen-deprived chamber in the Vatican archives by tipping a bookshelf through a Plexiglas wall, and the denouement hinges on the discovery of a secret video recording in which true villain unwittingly confesses his crimes (so, apparently, you don’t need to recount the Seven Catholic Sacraments to solve this whodunit).

When McKenna barges into the conclave and pleas for a religion-science détente, it sounds like a speech lifted from the end of Rocky IV. And, between belated, belabored goose chases, the depth of the screenplay’s “intrigue” extends only to guessing which characters will turn out to be good and evil. Not-so-much spoiler as simple-minded plot-device alert: They will be exactly the opposite of how they initially seem.

If Hanks’ career seems to emulate Jimmy Stewart’s, then this is another furrowed-brow chapter in the transition from his Frank Capra and screwball comedy beginnings into the more stolid but no less productive Alfred Hitchcock-Anthony Mann phase. Let’s hope for more films like Vertigo and The Naked Spur (or Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13) in Hanks’ future. Otherwise, we might have to settle for walk-on poetry readings on late-night TV talk shows sooner than we thought.

Neil Morris