Monthly Archives: June 2024
Napoleon Dynamite (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released June 11, 2004:
Napoleon Dynamite was an audience smash at the 2004 Sundance film festival. Fox Searchlight jumped at the chance to distribute a film written and directed by Mormons, starring a Mormon, and set in film-friendly Idaho. MTV Films, the people behind alternating good movies (Better Luck Tomorrow, Election) and atrocious movies (Crossroads, Joe’’s Apartment, an upcoming film actually based on Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi” song), came aboard and basically said, “Look, we really like the movie, and we want to help bring it to a wider, MTV-influenced audience.” And thus, Napoleon Dynamite seems to have become the summer biggest must-see film for sk8r bois and sk8r grrrls nationwide.
Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder) is an Idaho teen that marches to the beat of his own drum. He lives with his Dune Buggy riding grandmother and 31-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who surfs the Web talking to women. When their grandma gets injured, Uncle Rico (John Gries), stuck in the 80s in fashion and mind, takes up shop in the Dynamite home and coerces Kip to hustle money from neighbors. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends Deb (Tina Majorino), an otherwise normal girl with a sideways ponytail, and Pedro (Efren Ramirez, who was actually in Kazaam!), the new kid at school. Together, they try and get Pedro elected to class president, but standing in their way is the mighty shadow of Summer (Haylie Duff), the most popular girl in school. Oh yeah, there’’s also a llama.
First time director, Jared Hess, and first time cinematographer, Munn Powell, orchestrate shots very statically, with little, simple camera movements and many centered angles. The style is reminiscent of the films of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse), or, more precisely, Wes Anderson. This shooting technique makes the characters stand out even more, almost popping out at you behind flat backgrounds like some Magic Eye picture. Hess easily communicates the tedium of Idaho with his direction. Can anyone name any other film that takes place entirely in Idaho? (Please note that My Own Private Idaho takes place in Portland and Seattle, mostly).
The star of the show is, of course, Heder. His wickedly funny deadpan delivery helps to create a truly memorable character. He achieves a geek Zen and, judging from the incredible amount of kids under-14 that appeared both times I saw this film, is most likely the greatest film realization of a dork. It’s grand dork cinema, a genre long ignored after the collapse of the mighty Revenge of the Nerds franchise. So while Napoleon isn’’t exactly relatable (llamas, Dune Buggy grannies and all), the right audience will see reflections of themselves. You’’ll be quoting from Napoleon all summer.
Napoleon Dynamite is going to be an acquired taste. It’s filled to the brim with stone-faced absurdities and doesn’’t let up. If you’’re not pulled in with the bizarre antics of bizarre characters in the first 10 minutes, then you may as well leave because otherwise it will feel like the film is wearing you down with its “indie weirdness.” Napoleon Dynamite seems to skirt the sublimely skewed world of Wes Anderson, but Napoleon lacks the deep humanity of Anderson’s films. What the audience is left with is a sugary, sticky icing but little substance beneath, and, depending on your sweet tooth, it’’ll either be overpowering and a colossal disappointment or it’’ll taste just right for the occasion. Alright, I’’m done with baking analogies for the year.
Some will find a certain condescension against the characters. Napoleon Dynamite doesn’’t outright look down upon its characters, but it does give them enough room to paint themselves fools. Uncle Rico is really the film’s antagonist, yet he’s too buffoonish to be threatening. It’’s a fine line for a film to have condescension toward its characters, but Napoleon Dynamite ultimately leaves with a bemused appreciation for its characters. The film presents the “good” characters as unusual but lovable and ready for growth (Kip, Pedro, and of course Napoleon), but the “bad” characters (Summer, Uncle Rico) aren’’t demonized. In essence, Napoleon Dynamite is the best example of a film that makes an audience laugh at and with its characters simultaneously.
Napoleon Dynamite is assuredly an odd duck. Some will cheer; others will want to head out the door after a few minutes. It’’s hard to say which reaction an individual will have. If you have a geek-enriched history populated with unicorns, Dungeons and Dragons, and/or social ostracism, then you may be more inclined to admire Napoleon Dynamite. I laughed out loud throughout the film and found it to be an enjoyable diversion, and I went the whole review without one Jimmy Walker reference.
Nate’s Grade: B
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I feel like trying to explain the unexpected pop-culture success of Napoleon Dynamite is a fool’s errand, ultimately leaving one sputtering out and ending with the disappointing culmination, “Well, you just had to be there, I guess.” It was 2004, before the rise of YouTube and dominant social media outlets, and for whatever reason, if you were under 30, you probably fell in love with this Idaho nerd, or at least fell in love sounding like this Idaho nerd. I couldn’t travel more than a few blocks without overhearing some loitering Millennial uttering, “Gawsh” in mock exasperation, or mentioning llamas, tater tots, ligers, or catching a significant other a “delicious bass.” If you can recall how annoying and omnipresent the Borat impressions were after that 2006 movie’s mainstream splash, well the silver lining to every person, usually a smirking male member of the species, saying, “My wiiiiiiife,” was that it finally pushed aside everyone else endlessly imitating Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder). This movie was everywhere in 2004. It was meme-ified before meme culture became prevalent. Re-watching this movie twenty years later is like excavating a novelty from a different time and trying to better analyze why this silly and stupid little movie about weirdos living their weird lives became a zeitgeist breakout.
If I had to explain the appeal of Napoleon Dynamite, I think it serves as the next step in the evolution of comedy for younger adults. The Muppets are a deservedly celebrated comedy troupe for over 50 years, and beyond the iconic characters and their mirthful camaraderie, I think their ongoing appeal is that it’s an introduction to the forms of irony for younger children. It’s teaching that there can be more behind the silly, and Napoleon Dynamite takes that PG-comedy baton and pushes it forward, as its entire being is one of ironic comedy. The entire movie is built upon the viewer finding the behavior and banter of these characters hilarious for being so straight. There aren’t really jokes in the traditional sense of setups and payoffs; every line has the potential to be a joke because it’s a character saying something ridiculous without the awareness of being ridiculous. As I said back in 2004, “If you’’re not pulled in with the bizarre antics of bizarre characters in the first 10 minutes, then you may as well leave because otherwise it will feel like the film is wearing you down with its “indie weirdness.” Perhaps this style of comedy, a feature fully dedicated to ironic detachment, served as an awakening for others in my age-range, who championed the absurdity of the everyday and lionized the liger-loving man. This movie doesn’t achieve the larger artistic ambitions in a heightened tone of a Wes Anderson or a Yorgos Lanthimos, two masters of droll deadpans. It’s not deep. It’s not complicated. It’s always obvious, but that made the comedy all the more accessible to so many, especially for younger teens and kids.
As a movie, Napoleon Dynamite can be overwhelming. Seeing any clip of this movie serves the same comedy function as watching the entire 96-minute experience. It helps to structure the movie around a nerd’s quest to win over the girl and help his fellow outcasts. It has a recognizable us-versus-them formula where we can root for the weirdos to, if not prove their naysayers wrong, at least prove to one another that they have found acceptance from the ones who matter. It works on that familiar territory. Napoleon’s big dance at the talent show is his triumph, showcasing to the rest of the school his skills, though he runs away before the adulation can be felt, robbing his character of the perceived victory but giving it to the audience instead.
For most of the people involved in this movie, they had a brief burst of wider success before gradually coming back down to Earth. Heder was the obvious breakout and was given bigger supporting roles in studio comedies like Just Like Heaven, School for Scoundrels, Blades of Glory, and Surf’s Up, the other animated penguin movie from 2006. Heder has worked almost exclusively in the realm of voice acting in the last decade, including 2024’s Thelma the Unicorn, directed by Jared Hess and co-written by Jared and his wife Jerusha, the same creative team that gave us Napoleon Dynamite. I never really vibed with any other Hess comedy. I didn’t get the love for 2006’s Nacho Libre, and from there the movies just got worse to unwatchable, like Gentlemen Broncos and Don Verdean, each trying to chase that same combination of detached irony and quirk that proved so successful for them in 2004. I think the inability to follow-up Napoleon Dynamite with another breakout comedy of its ilk speaks to the unpredictable nature of assembling the right mixture of actors, tone, and material, as well as good timing. Would Napoleon Dynamite have been as big a success in 2009 as opposed to 2004? Maybe not. There was a six-episode animated TV series version in 2012, and the fact that I never remembered this probably answers the question over whether the filmmakers got lucky in 2004.
Napoleon Dynamite is the exact same movie it was back in 2004 as it now resides in 2024, and forever more. It’s flat, detached, silly, light-hearted and the same joke on repeat, and if you feel yourself gravitating toward that comedy wavelength, then hop on and enjoy. Re-watching it for me was like revisiting a fad from the past that was hard to put into context. What was it that made so many buy “Vote for Pedro” T-shirts and talk about throwing footballs over mountains? Comedies more than any other movie lend themselves to audience dissemination, to take the jokes and moments and characters and run with them. Nearly every successful comedy has experienced some form of this, so why should Napoleon Dynamite be any different? It’s perfectly understandable to watch this movie unfazed, unamused, and questioning what exactly people found so amusing about this guy and his extended family and friends back in 2004. It’s also understandable to smile and chuckle at the absurdities played so matter-of-factly. Gawsh.
Re-View Grade: B-
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024)/ The Watchers (2024)
I Saw the TV Glow is a strange experience by design, a hallucinatory ode to early 1990s television, coming of age sagas, feeling out of place in one’s own body and mind, and on a Lynchian dream logic wavelength that few filmmakers occupy. From a plot standpoint, Owen (Justice Smith) is a shy kid who looks up to an older girl at school, Maddy (Bridget Lundy-Paine), and they share a love for the TV show The Pink Opaque, a tween-aimed horror series in the vein of Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which ultimately might be real after all. This movie exists more on a slippery emotional plane than on its story sense. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) has created an allegory for self-actualization and self-acceptance through a love of 90s nostalgia and that transitional time of being young and just seeing the cusp of what adulthood promises for the good, the bad, and the mundane. The recreation of the SNICK-era television is perfect, and I loved the little glimpses of these horror monsters taking on new nightmarish incarnations. I wanted the movie to explore its premise more, that this old TV show might be real and posing a danger that only they would uncover. It’s really more a pathway for the characters to explore their selves, what animates them, what confuses them, what provides a sense of community. It’s a movie about the perils of loneliness and finding an outlet, a life raft, whatever that may be, and for Owen it’s this TV show. He connects more with this world than the real one, and when he revisits it later as an adult, it doesn’t live up to his memory. It’s a weird movie but it’s designed for weird kids, or weird adults who used to be weird kids, who found kinship through weird media. It’s a slow and provocative experience that asks you to give yourself over to its vision, but Schoenbrun also makes that engagement quite accessible. While existing as a clear trans allegory, I Saw the TV Glow is open to any outsider who felt unsure of themself and their body and their place in the universe. It’s about obsession and the price of holding onto said childhood obsessions, even if they prove disappointing in your adulthood. It doesn’t offer any general answers or catharsis and is kept on the slowest of slow burns. I began daydreaming of the less arty version of its spooky premise, but that’s simply not going to be this movie. I Saw the TV Glow is impressively personal and surreal and obtuse, but by the end I was hoping for a little more of a foundation to hold onto and its ideas to be fully realized.
Nate’s Grade: B
The expansion of the M. Night Shyamalan creative dynasty has begun. While based on a 2022 novel by A.M. Shine, The Watchers is brought to us primarily by Ishana Shyamalan, who makes her feature directing debut and adapted the screenplay. It has a buzzy premise that feels at home in a Shyamalan movie, namely a young woman (Dakota Fanning) who stumbles into a strange location with captive people telling her she cannot leave or her life will be in danger from monsters. The group of survivors have to “perform” for their unseen watchers, staring into a two-way mirror inside a closed room. There are certain rules that are hazy and unevenly applied: don’t go out after dark, never turn your back to the mirror, don’t go into the creatures’ subterranean dwelling. This poses an intriguing mystery for a while as the movie unpacks and reveals more about this world and the creatures. However, The Watchers ultimately cannot help feeling like an over-extended episode of a sci-fi anthology TV series like Black Mirror or maybe even Shyamalan’s own Apple Plus series Servant (Ishana wrote and directed several episodes). There just isn’t enough here. The revelations do not sustain our emotional and intellectual investment. Once it’s revealed what the monsters are, I kept waiting for extra levels of twists and turns, and there really aren’t any. Once we settle into Act Three, the movie becomes more or less about housekeeping and gaining acceptance. The whole reason the protagonist is on her journey is to deliver a bird in a cage, and every time this thing keeps appearing even so late into the movie, while she’s running for her life but cannot forget about the caged bird, I felt like laughing. It’s a case of inelegantly finding a way for the visual metaphor (the bird is her!) to continue being tied to the plot after it long stopped making sense. Likewise, there are cutaways to the captives watching a Love Island/Big Brother-stye reality TV show, but little is made as far as commentary on communal voyeurism, so they just come across as little odd comic asides. The movie loses some serious momentum once we get to the convenient info dump sequence (a Shyamalan family favorite: scientist vlogs) and you realize there are no more tricks to deliver. It’s disappointing that a movie with such potent folklore atmosphere becomes a lackluster variation on The Village.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)
The first Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was, unquestionably, my worst film of 2023. It wasn’t merely a bad horror movie, it was a depressingly cynical cash-grab with such little forethought of how to subvert the wholesome legacy of its classic characters. As I said in my review: “The startling lack of imagination of everything else is depressing, as is the fact that this movie has earned over four million at the global box-office, hoodwinking enough rubberneckers looking for a good bad time. The problem is that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is only a bad bad time.” Oh, dear reader, I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable deluge of follow-ups, as writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield would resupply his surprising success with further sinister revisions to public domain properties. He’s planning on a “Poohniverse” crossover event with a combination of Pooh, evil Pinnochio, vengeance-fuelled Bambi, and a traumatized or villainous Peter Pan. Again, schlocky movies that lean into their schlock can be wonderful things, but a movie that does next to nothing with its subversive hook, with the history of its cutesy iconography, and could be easily replaced with any other menacing slasher killer is beyond lazy, it’s insulting. I figured there could be nowhere to go but up with a sequel, and while Blood and Honey 2 is an improvement in just about every way, it’s still not enough to qualify as a fun or ironic treat.
Wakefield and new co-writer Matt Leslie (Summer of 84) completely rework the mythology and history established in the first movie, which is now revealed to be the literal movie-within-a-movie of the account of the Massacre of the 100 Acre Wood where Pooh and Piglet slaughtered a troupe of bad-acting British coeds. In this prior film, it was established that Pooh and his buddies were angry with Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers, replacing Nikolai Leon) when he left for college. They felt abandoned and grew feral and monstrous, rejecting the ways of man (though still wearing the clothes of man and driving the cars of man). However, now in the sequel it’s revealed they were always feral and blood-thirsty and it was Christopher who incorrectly remembered them as cute and fluffy. This scene makes for the hilarious visual of a child waving innocently at a blood-strewn manimal lurking about. Also, Christopher had a young brother who was abducted by the creatures of the 100 Acre Wood and never seen again. Also also, there was a mad scientist who was creating human-animal hybrids from missing children, so the blood-thirsty animals might not be actual animals after all (can you see where this is going?). While the first Blood and Honey movie did nothing with the characters, this movie actively gives them a tragic history with some twists and turns, enough to lay a mythos. The use of hypnotherapy-induced flashbacks isn’t exactly smooth or subtle, but I’ll take it. At least this movie provides a distinguishing plot that makes some use of its particular elements. Don’t mistake me, dear reader, this is faint praise at best, but after enduring the creatively bankrupt first film, it’s like a desperately needed oasis. Ultimately, it might all just be a mirage but at least it’s something to those of us who suffered!
In the grand sequel tradition, bigger is better, and now instead of two ferocious beasts wreaking havoc, it’s four, with the addition of Owl (Marcus Massey) and Tigger (Lewis Santer). None of these monsters has a particular style or attitude that distinguishes them. I guess Tigger calls people “bitch” a lot and slashes people. There is one point where hapless cops are investigating a crime scene and say, “Let’s bounce,” and Tigger says from the luxury of the shadows, “Hey, that’s my line.” I figured they’d incorporate the signature Tigger bounce on his tail, but perhaps that was too expensive to perform or that bounce was more a byproduct of the Disney version of the character, still under copyright, and not the available A.A. Milne version. The animal costumes look better than the cheap Halloween masks of the original, though for my money Owl looks more like a turkey vulture wearing cray paper. I’m sure we’ll get Kanga in the inevitable third movie in 2025 where her zombie baby leaps out of her pouch to feed on brains. There is a snazzy addition late into the proceedings where Pooh is welding a fiery chainsaw. It makes little sense for the character but it’s cool, so it’s excusable in lapsed movie logic.
I was hoping for more unique kills, twisted takes related to the characters, like Pooh turning some poor soul’s head into a honeypot. The kills are just grizzly and extensive, favoring quantity over quality. There are plenty of decapitations, gougings, impalings, and other fraught and violent encounters, nearly all of them featuring squealing, terrified women. It’s always women that seem to get the worst in these movies, but of course this is a feature and not a bug of the genre back to its 80s heyday. It gets relentless but I suppose at least these girls aren’t having their tops mysteriously fall off while they’re being butchered. A third act rave set piece features maybe two dozen kills and risks becoming tedious slaughter. It got to the point where I was hoping not to see another cowering person hiding behind a corner because it meant the sequence was going to be even more unbearably long (I’m not personally cut out for the Terrifiers).
In between the spillings of blood and guts is the attempts at human drama, namely Christopher Robin trying to live a normal life while also re-examining his past. Apparently people think he’s to blame for the massacre from the 100 Acre Wood, and so he’s become a pariah, whose very presence unsettles others. He’s trying to find steady work in a hospital setting but he’s blacklisted from pursuing his career because of the negative attention his name generates. He even has a romance with a single mom so that when the Robin family is inevitably skewered we have other characters that can be personally threatened to provide meaningful stakes. The life of Christopher Robin and his discovery of repressed memories makes for a surprising story foundation for Blood and Honey 2, especially when the plot of its predecessor was mostly Christopher being held prisoner and the baddies casually roaming and killing coeds. I think Chambers is a better actor as well, and he’s posed to be the writer/director of Neverland Nightmares, which just began principal photography a month and a half ago as of this writing. Good luck, guy.
While the budget has increased tenfold, Blood and Honey 2 is still a scuzzy, sleazy slasher movie at heart. If you’re in the mood for a low-budget exploitation movie heavy with gore, there may be enough to qualify this sequel as moderately mediocre, which again is a marked improvement from what I declared the worst movie of 2023. I’ll credit the influence of co-writer Matt Leslie to try and put some standards in place for this runaway gravy train of IP allocation. What’s scariest of all is what Frake-Waterfield’s unexpected success has wrought, encouraging imitators to jump on his now proven novelty act. There’s a 2025 Steamboat Willie horror movie called Screamboat as Steamboat Willie has now entered the public domain (but not other versions of Mickey). Will it be any good? I sincerely doubt it. Will it make money from curious horror hounds looking for an ironic twist on a wholesome childhood fixture? Most assuredly. This is our present. This is our future, and it’s the legacy of Frake-Waterfield and his ilk that stumbled onto a lucrative novelty act. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is just bad, and for that it’s an improvement.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Back to Black (2024)
What do you remember about Amy Winehouse? The tragic singer with the booming voice that was mercilessly picked apart by a rabid tabloid media, as well as rampant online speculation, over every step of her addiction to drugs and alcohol? If that’s the extent of your memory, as well as some of her more notable songs like “Rehab” or “Back to Black,” then this musical biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey, Nowhere Boy) is going to feel like a shallow exercise in piling on a troubled and talented performer gone far too soon.
Back to Black, the film, literally has Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) vocalize what she wants to be remembered for, not the drugs and alcohol, and the movie then erases Amy as a vibrant, complicated human being into a blurred statistic on the dangers of unchecked addiction. You can’t tell her story without documenting her demons, and yet the movie also seems exceptionally forgiving to the men who contributed to her downfall, her doting father Mitch (Eddie Marsan) who enabled her and her bad boy boyfriend Blake (Jack O’Connell) who introduced her to hard drug abuse. We spend so much emphasis on the bad times and her downfall and yet the movie is strangely reticent to cast much judgment on her bad influences, which makes it seem like the movie is further blaming Amy. At the same time, her downfall is focused on being rejected by a man, which is really insulting and limiting for her as an artist as well as a person capable of independent thought. It’s an even stranger decision given that these two influences, her father and ex, were given withering condemnation in the 2015 Oscar-nominated documentary on Winehouse. Apparently, Mitch Winehouse was furious with the documentary’s portrayal of him and Amy. His secondary complaint was that the documentary focused too much on the negative aspects of her life story, which is comical considering the skewed balance that Back to Black dwells upon. We speed through the good times to wallow in the bad, and without a stronger and more complex portrayal of Amy as a character, it all feels trashy and degrading. It’s harder to feel the heartbreak when the movie is only defining her by our foreknowledge of her death.
Amy never feels like her own person in this movie, which is a shame since she was a dominant presence. We never get into her creative process or her inspirations. We never get to see the person behind the omnipresent tabloid headlines. The formulaic rise-and-fall structure is so rushed and uninterested in fleshing out Amy as a person, so we get simplistic impressions like she sure loved her “nan” (Leslie Manville) and never recovered from her death. The movie sets a midpoint montage where her grandma’s funeral pushes her to get a signature tattoo and beehive hairdo, and it plays like a superhero finally donning their cape and cowl (At last, she has become… Batman, I mean… the Amy We Remember). It’s played so dramatically that it might even unleash a titter or two. There is such scant insight into this woman and her demons that I doubt anyone will come away with a better understanding of Amy and her place in music history, as well as who she was as a person. The movie omits other struggles that might take the focus off its specific topic of drugs and alcohol. Her bulimia gets nary a mention except for maybe one scene where her inconsiderate roommate asks Amy to please vomit into the toilet a little less loudly. While skipping judgment over her enablers, the movie also avoids being too judgemental on the social impulses and rubbernecking that fed upon the harassment and mockery of Winehouse and her struggles. Again, by omission this is placing further blame onto Amy herself.
For each viewer, Back to Black is going to sink or swim depending upon your reaction to Abela’s (Industry) performance. She does her own singing and learned to imitate Winehouse’s signature soaring vocals, so that’s generally impressive. However, I felt her greatest moments of acting were the scenes where she wasn’t in song. Her over-extended enunciation and head bobs made me consistently cringe, like watching an overzealous Vegas impersonator. In the few instances where the movie slows down, that is where Abela is best, being distraught over the loss of her nan, infuriated by her ex, incredulous at music producers that want to market Amy like the Spice Girls, and charmingly innocent confiding to a young fan in a checkout line. If the movie had cut all of her vocal performances and given me more time with this Amy Winehouse, I would have gotten more insight and entertainment. Abela isn’t given the material to really bring Amy to life.
Back to Black isn’t so much Amy’s movie as it is her father Mitch’s response to earlier portrayals. He’s portrayed here as a doting and loving father who only wanted what was best for her. You see, his initial refusal to the demands to send his daughter to rehab was because he wanted her to kick this whole addiction thing on her own. She didn’t want it so he wasn’t going to push her. If anything, he’s the hero of this movie, the proud papa who was let down by his daughter’s duplicitous boyfriend-turned-husband, the man who took his little girl away and turned her to the dark side of drugs. When you analyze the approach, it all comes across as a little insidious, a little icky, and unworthy of recreating this woman’s life experiences to better glorify her father. Abela gives it her all, it’s just too little to be had with Back to Black, a shallow biopic treading upon distaste. I’d recommend skipping this movie entirely, unless you’re irreversibly curious, and watch the 2015 documentary Amy instead. You’ll get a much better sense of Amy Winehouse the singer, the star, the addict, and most importantly, the complicated person.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
This is my kind of Guy Ritchie, leaning into the pulp sensibilities of genre movies with style, swagger, and cheek, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is his grand ode to the WWII men-on-a-mission capers. While reportedly based upon the recently divulged secret files of Winston Churchill, the heavily fictionalized account of Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) assembling a team of experts to blow up Nazi plots treats the men like super heroes. For the first hour or so, the movie is rollicking, with the team mirthfully mowing down Nazis at a steady pace, chumming it up, and having a fine time. It’s only after that midpoint where some of the movie’s flaws start to drag and become more apparent. First of all, an extended mission of getting close to a Head Nazi (Til Sweiger) and abscond with some ships off the coast of Africa makes for a very labored stay but without much fekt in progression or complication. I was feeling wanderlust to get moving. Next, the entire team feels unstoppable to the point of becoming boring. They never break a sweat fighting and casually plow through their enemies, so the entertainment value of the slaughter begins to ebb when it all feels too easy for too long. You can do an entire movie of Nazi destruction from the hands of an unstoppable force, like Sisu, but the bloody appeal of that movie is its creative carnage. We needed more variation in the action and set pieces. These gents have no formidable adversary, no overwhelming odds, and no real bouts of bad luck to thwart them. Alan Ritchson (TV’s Reacher) is a hulking mountain of a man, and he has such poise and charisma to be the breakout character, and Ritchie just fumbles it. Ritchie has excelled in the past with easily imbuing striking and memorable personality and conflicts with his Cockney crime larks, and I was missing more of that peppy style and unique flavor. Don’t get me wrong, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare has great promise and entertainment value, but it unfortunately creates its own ceiling, stalling in the second half and failing to develop intriguing challenges to test its underwritten crew.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Robot Dreams (2023)
What a delightfully tender little movie Robot Dreams proves to be. It’s based on a picture book and its story is mostly about a lonely Dog who orders a build-your-own-robot for companionship and their friendship. Much of the movie hinges on the Robot being trapped on a Long Island beach closed for the season, so our intrepid Dog must go on living in his New York City apartment through the seasons while he waits to rescue his friend. The movie is wordless and based upon a picture book, but that doesn’t mean this is chiefly kid’s stuff. It touches upon the profound with such elegance and efficiency, brilliantly relatable and recognizably human. It’s all about our need for connections, and even when they are separated, both the Dog and Robot find other connections with other characters, and then it comes back to our worry that they won’t actually reunite after being apart for the majority of the movie. I was reading some gay coding between the two as well but maybe that was my own projection. My nine-year-old son was quite taken with the movie and could easily follow along, though he was also very much not a fan of the bittersweet ending, his first taste of providing the whole “what you need, not what you want” conclusion. Robot Dreams is lovingly realized, its animation so clean and crisp with wonderful characters populating an alternative 1980s NYC. It’s simple and sweet and irresistible.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)
The most terrifying part of The Strangers: Chapter 1 is during its closing seconds, as text appears to inform all of us woeful viewers: “To be continued.” Oh no. Chapter 1 is intended to be the first in a new trilogy bringing back the essential concept of the 2008 home invasion thriller, that the masked attackers have no agenda, no motivation, and are being sadistic silent tormentors just because. The explanation, “Because you were home,” was a key revelation to the original, and here this famous line gets re-worked and has the same clumsy impact as Madame Web trying to reword that Spider-Man oath (“When you take on the responsibility, great power will come“). Not that the dialogue is the strong point of this thriller, with clunky expositional lines as nakedly transparent like, “Today is the third day of our three-day road trip around the country,” followed by, “Or our five-year anniversary.” It’s in the annoying, “Yeah I work here too” kind of lazy exposition. But you’re here for the scares, of which Chapter 1 has precious few because I think these are the most unimpressive and lackadaisical home invaders I’ve ever seen. I think the Wet Bandits might give these goons a run for their money (I’d watch Kevin take on The Strangers). Much of the movie is spent waiting, or checking places around the cabin, sometimes while one intruder plays the piano for ambience. One could make an argument they’re toying with their prey, but I would counter that I just don’t think they’re good at their whole enterprise. It doesn’t help that the main couple are so boring and undeveloped and I found it hard to fear for their well-being. As far as memorable scares or set-pieces or ingenious obstacles or overcoming said obstacles, it’s a big miss on all counts. A home invasion scenario can be exciting and terrifying, and it can be delicious fun to turn the tables on the attackers. This movie has so little that even the core ideas feel stretched beyond their breaking point. It’s hard to even feel much reverence for the original here, as The Strangers: Chapter 1 feels more like the steady, unrelenting squeezing of all IP for any possible drops of renewed audience interest. If this is what Chapter 1 has to offer, please spare us the rest. Fun fact: if you want to know what director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) has been doing lately, well here’s your underwhelming answer.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Hit Man (2024)
Hit Man is a movie that is wonderfully hard to describe. The premise has an easy-to-grasp hook that promises fun and hijinks, but where it goes from there takes on as many transformations as its protagonist, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell). It transforms from a fun game of undercover conning with wigs and silly accents into an unexpected rom-com hinging upon mistaken identity, maintaining assumed appearances, and secrets that then transforms into full film noir without losing its unique identity and the stakes of the character relationships. If you’d expect any filmmaker to pull off that trick, writer/director Richard Linklater has to be one of the best to keep things running smoothly, and that he does, as Hit Man is a crowd-pleasing comedy with some unexpected directions to keep everyone guessing until it lands on its own morally gray terms.
The movie is also, chiefly, a showcase of star and co-writer Powell, a handsome young actor hitting a new ascent of his career with last year’s Anyone But You and the upcoming Twisters. Powell is probably best known as the smirking guy you loved to hate in Top Gun: Maverick, but he’s also played memorable supporting roles in Scream Queens and three other Linklater film projects, notably 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!!, a pseudo-spiritual sequel to the seminal Dazed and Confused. This is Powell’s acting showcase and he’s utterly terrific. He has great infectious fun getting into the various hitman characters, which mostly exist in montages, and trying on different personas and voices. I cackled when he was doing his impression of Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, and I smiled throughout most of the other personas. It’s easy to see the network TV version of this premise, where every week Gary adopts a new persona and disguise to bust the next possible criminal from hiring a hitman, like an edgier Quantum Leap). The culprits are played like nitwits but then again the police are also played as nitwits (are there THIS many attempted hitman hirings in one city for the police to have a full-time unit?).
But before this acting experiment can get too broad or too redundant, Linklater and Powell switch things up. Around the Act One break is where Gary meets Madison (Adria Arjona), and that’s when everything changes for him and the audience. Now we have emotional stakes, because Gary intervenes to save Madison. While the circumstances of their first meeting involve her wanting to kill her husband and believing Gary as the professional to do such a job, the scene plays as a disarming first date you’d find in another charming romantic comedy, where it’s clear to anyone with a pulse that these two have something together. Instead of busting her for the solicitation, he pushes her to change her mind, take the money and leave her no-good husband rather than finding a questionable man to eliminate him. From there, they form a romantic relationship that fluctuates wildly. She thinks Gary is “Ron,” the suave and confidant persona Gary adopted for their sit-down. So the nerdy tech nerd who teaches philosophy must pretend to be the daring and dangerous man of mystery he wishes he could be. The script doesn’t get carried away with its farcical elements in play, juggling multiple identities for multiple specific audiences, but it asks the question, “Why can’t the milquetoast Gary simply be Ron? Is this an unexpected means of self-actualization for the nerd to win the girl?” Through this extreme exercise, Gary can mold himself into the man he would like to be. The rom-com is flirty, funny, and just as enjoyable as the earlier wacky comedy of being a versatile master of disguise.
It also really helps things when your two lead actors have such strong chemistry. Powell and Arjona (Father of the Bride, Andor) are smoldering together, like full on “get a room already” territory. This lends even more credence when Hit Man makes its next transformation into film noir thriller. I won’t divulge the specific plot elements but it all works with what Linklater has already established. There’s trouble for the both of them, and the question becomes how far is each participant willing to go to stay above the fray. The transition from silly costume comedy to sundry noir thriller is handled so naturally, as if the characters, already existing under such unique circumstances, found themselves in the elevated movie-movie version of their crazy relationship. Rather than feel contrived, Linklater and Powell have put in the work to make these twists and turns credible and exciting. The shifting nature of the movie is a wonderful reflection of its fake hitman hero. There’s a scene late in the film, where all of our principal players have come together, and you have characters saying one thing, intimating another, for different versions of different audiences, and it’s such a masterful tonal dance that feels satisfying as a climactic turning point as well as genuinely impressive for all the myriad subtext in play.
This is a clear-cut case of a movie being “inspired by” a true story rather than being “based on” a true story. Generally, we expect the “based on” stories to have some voracity to reality. We accept that there will be alterations for dramatic purposes, externalizing the internal, condensing timelines and characters into a more accessible structure, etc. If you go to a movie about Jackie Robinson, you don’t expect to see the famous baseball slugger fighting space monsters (“Racism was the real giant monster all along”). Hit Man is based upon a 2001 long-form news article by Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth, the same author of the source material for Linklater’s fascinating true crime dark comedy gem, 2011’s Bernie, which I highly recommend (a career-best Jack Black). The real Gary Johnson really did pose as a fake hitman for the purposes of catching real criminals, but the rest of the movie exists in its own fictional universe of dramatic complications. Usually we want our film stories to have more fidelity with the truth and reality, but I’m glad Linklater and Powell recognized the sheer storytelling potential of this quirky premise. Sticking to the facts could have told an amusing story, but feeling confident to take bold leaps with well-worn genre motifs, when called for, is the right call for making the most of this tale.
The shame of Hit Man is how quickly it will likely be subsumed by Netflix’s suffocating tidal waves of content. Here is a fun, likable, and surprising indie comedy with definite mass appeal buoyed by great performances, clever writing, and a tonally shifting narrative to keep things fresh. Powell gets the breakout showcase he deserves and we get one of the most unexpected and amusing rom-coms of recent years. Hit Man is a movie that deserves to be seen, to be enjoyed with a crowd, but I worry it will get lost in the shuffle of streaming titles. I suppose this might just be the current reality for fans of mid-level adult dramas and comedies. At least they have a home on the streaming networks even if these movies would have been theatrical breakouts years ago. Regardless, Hit Man is a good time with good people pretending to be bad, or is it bad people pretending to be good, but whatever pretense, it’s a charming winner worth your two hours.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)
As a general rule of thumb, if some movie is described as “Coen-esque,” I must watch it. The Last Stop in Yuma County is a blend of Coen darkly comic malevolence, as well as Tarantino’s knack for the menace of dramatic irony and boiling tension waiting to explode, and it’s a firecracker of a debut for writer/director Francis Gallupi. It’s a relatively contained tale, sticking mostly to one rustic roadside diner and gas station along the dusty Arizona byways. On this day, two of its patrons happen to be recent bank robbers on the run, and they’re holding the other diner patrons captive until the gas pumps get fixed to fuel up and escape. The first hour then becomes a dread-filled game of waiting for things to go very badly. Our two main characters, a traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) and a waitress (Joceline Donahue) who happens to be the wife of the town sheriff, are working together to try and elicit help without endangering their lives, all the time more people keep entering the diner and inadvertently joining the simmering hostage situation. The way Gallupi writes his different characters is sharp and efficient, and the dread compounds in such organic complications, showing how fiendishly well-developed he’s made his potboiler. It also has a clear eye for style. Around the Act Two break, the movie becomes something else, which it intimated through a very specific film reference in conjunction with a specific character reference. It still proves compelling, but the overall sense of darkness and tragedy wore me down a little by the end. By the conclusion of its 90 minutes, I was hearing the saintly voice of Marge Gunderson in my head, shaking her head at the preventable body count and bad choices (“And all for a little bit of money. There’s more to life than money, don’cha know?”). The Last Stop in Yuma County is a twisty and twisted little macabre morality play in the guise of familiar Coen-esque capers. Welcome to the big leagues, Gallupi.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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