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.

For Colored Girls

Nasty or not, it's Miss Jackson to you

Grade: D –

Director: Tyler Perry

Starring: Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Loretta Devine, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Kimberly Elsie, Tessa Thompson, and Phylicia Rashad

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours

Far more befitting its East Village coffee house origins, For Colored Girls, the film adaptation of playwright/poet Ntozake Shange’s 1975 play, gets a histrionic, pedestrian treatment from director-screenwriter-producer Tyler Perry. Nine Harlem women bound by color and their wicked men take turns overemoting and monologuing – “Being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet” is one of the more cogent lines.

The laudable aim of illuminating the everyday travails of African-American women is undercut by Perry’s hyper-reality in which every man is a philanderer, rapist, murderer, pedophile, and/or HIV-positive closeted homosexual. Meanwhile, the women left in their wake – portrayed here by Thandie Newton, Loretta Devine, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Kimberly Elsie, Tessa Thompson, and Phylicia Rashad – are conventional cutouts designed to further Perry’s moralizing, female-centric viewpoint, but ill-equipped to bridge Shange’s poetry and Perry’s prosaic prose.

The acting fluctuates between rudderless and overblown, and then there’s Jackson, whose makeup and costumes make her look like mannequin and who now creepily sounds just like her late brother Michael.

If anyone watches For Colored Girls waiting to exhale, don't hold your breath.

Neil Morris

2012

Ah-ha, I think I found your leak.

Grade: D +

Director: Roland Emmerich

Starring: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Thomas McCarthy, Woody Harrelson, and Danny Glover

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 38 minutes

In every Roland Emmerich disaster flick, there are always the digital money shots that not only sustain Emmerich’s inexplicable filmmaking career but seemingly redeem the poor audience members who plunk down their hard-earned scratch to witness tsunamis swamping Manhattan and aliens imploding the White House.

They also usually come about midway through any one of his excruciatingly long apocalyptic forays – Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow – leaving the rest of the time wasted with the same character archetypes. There is the intrepid scientist who warns the noble U.S. President and some skeptical member of his staff about impeding doom, along with a third-party hero who just wants to save his family and the world, in that order. And, always along for the ride are barely realized secondary players who supply annoying comic relief and/or cannon fodder for all the CGI cataclysms.

So it is in 2012, Emmerich’s latest act of paranoia profiteering. Scientific advisor Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, mortgaging his talent for a paycheck) discovers three years out that on December 21, 2012, the occasion of the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, the moon and stars will align for the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs, igniting solar flares and flinging neutrinos into Earth’s core that will heat and melt the mantle, causing massive tectonic shifts and, more importantly, lots and lots of F/X earthquakes.

World leaders, including President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover, slurring his lines like a punch-drunk pugilist), are forewarned, but the cursory, slipshod preparation montages are merely an appetizer for the calamitous main course. Chasms open, buildings crumble, tidal waves crash down, and volcanoes erupt. Our principal tour guide through the Book of Revelations is middling author Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), whose chance encounter with another Emmerich archetype, the nut-job conspiracy theorist (played here with ease by Woody Harrelson), sends him on a mission to rescue his estranged wife Kate (Amanda Peet), her new boyfriend (Thomas McCarthy), and his kids from peril.

The disaster scenes are loopy, but they do constitute popcorn-chomping amusement to a point. Where this and every Emmerich cinematic shipwreck runs aground is its woeful attempts to interject character development, sentimentality, and morality into their narratives. Endless aerial escapes from danger are punctuated by unending tearful telephone goodbyes (yes, apparently satellite and cell phone technology will survive the End of Days as long as cockroaches). Scenes of a tsunami engulfing Washington, D.C. are juxtaposed against Curtis and his wife blithering about why their marriage hit the skids.

The rendezvous point for the lucky or lucrative few is a series of metallic arks anchored in the Himalayas that will house man and beast until the flood waters recede, a comical incarnation of Strangelove’s mine-shafts. When Helmsley and comely First Daughter Laura Wilson (Thandie Newton) protest the fate of those who slaved to construct the mammoth boats, a grouchy bureaucrat (Oliver Platt) sarcastically invites them to give their boarding passes to a couple of poor Chinese workers. The moment is cloying enough. What’s unintentionally hilarious is Helmsley and Wilson’s reaction: They shrug their shoulders and climb aboard their ship, summarily leaving the peasants and Emmerich’s principled pretense to a watery grave.

Emmerich doesn’t just pander to tableaux of death and destruction; he relishes in them. Indulging in new levels of rank nihilism, the director conspicuously razes St. Peter’s Basilica upon the heads of the Papacy and thousands of praying parishioners. This is the second or third time he has demolished the White House, this time using a tidal wave carrying the USS John F. Kennedy (the motive behind Emmerich’s choice of ship is peculiar considering the actual “Big John” is decommissioned and berthed outside Philadelphia).

Ultimately, Emmerich rationalizes the end of the world and the deaths of millions as an excuse for Helmsley and Wilson to hook-up and a way to get Kate’s boyfriend out of the picture so Curtis and his family can reunite. Lovely. If the apocalypse ever actually arrives, let’s hope every copy of 2012 is among its first casualties.

Neil Morris