The Killer (2023)
Were you even aware that David Fincher had a new movie? The celebrated director has been very mercurial since 2014’s Gone Girl, only helming one other movie. His partnership with Netflix has afforded the notoriously perfectionist director a lot of creative latitude, though sadly not a third season of Mindhunter. But even the artistic cache of a new Fincher movie isn’t enough for Netflix to change its business model. The Killer only played in theaters for two weeks before beaming into millions of homes. You would think this streaming giant would want to leverage its big names and their new projects, but I’m reminded of how much money Netflix likely left aside forgoing Glass Onion’s theatrical run. Alas, The Killer is an intriguing if cold and unsatisfying thriller that epitomizes the limits of surface-level living.
Our titular killer (Michael Fassbender) is hired to kill a Parisian businessman and botches the job. He’s on the run and fears for his well-being from his employers wanting to eliminate any loose ends. His girlfriend in the Dominican Republic is beaten and threatened, and the lead killer realizes he’s going to have to out-kill all the other killers after him if his loved ones don’t get killed. Through five chapters, each ending in a death, the killer works his way up the food chain.
Fincher is attempting to strip out the movie-cool mythos of the world of hired assassins, to subvert the entertainment value that can come with expert murderers leading to blood and death. The Killer is Fincher’s stubborn subversion of what a trained assassin movie should be, and his main takeaway, beyond stripping the misplaced glamor from the profession, is how tedious it would all be in real life. In the movie world, being a trained killer involves all sorts of exciting derring-do and acrobatics and the like. In the possible real world, being a trained killer is more like a paid security guard; it’s a lot of protracted sitting and waiting and watching, and it’s easy to understand just how overwhelmingly boring all this would be. The opening twenty minutes quite convincingly strips the cool factor away from this profession. It doesn’t make you feel the weight of the culpability, like 2018’s You Were Never Really Here (more on that later), but what it makes you feel is just how maddening and boring this whole job must be and what kind of dedicated people would succeed. It’s like Fincher is making a bet with a mainstream audience that he can find a way to make a boring assassin movie, and while doing so can be seen as subversive to some degree, bleeding much of the thrills out of the picture, it also feels like a bet gone wrong. You made the main character boring on purpose to prove a point, but regardless of intent, your protagonist is still boring. Victory?
As physically inactive as Act One proves, watching our title killer sit and wait and watch, it is conversely hyperactive in narration. This is wall-to-wall narration as our lead character expounds upon his regiment to keep his mind and body ready when his eventual window materializes. It reminded me of the narration of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, about his methodical lifestyle routines. Except that character was being satirized from their first moments, whereas the emptiness of our killer here is the larger point, that he’s fashioned himself into an unfeeling weapon. Here is a character that feels he is only effective if he strips everything human away, if he only focuses on the job regardless of politics or consequences, and lives his spartan existence. I’m sure he envisions himself as some noble modern-day samurai, living a code others cannot keep. Except the movie reveals throughout that he might not be the best killer in the phone book. First off, he misses shooting his target, which sets everything into motion. All his narration about focus and yoga and dedication and even I know you shouldn’t fire while someone else is in front of your target. There’s a jarring scene where he fires nails into the lungs of a character and theorizes the man has six or seven minutes left to live before his lungs fill up. Nope. The man dies within one minute max. For all his resourcefulness, which is benefited by the long reach of capitalism, the man also doesn’t live up to his self-image. His paranoia keeps him from returning to his home on time and allows the attack on his girlfriend to happen in his absence. There might be an even deeper commentary on how even the lead is confusing his life for a movie.
My favorite scene is a sit down with a competing hired hitman played by Tilda Swinton (Three Thousand Years of Longing). She’s one of the two competing assassins responsible for targeting his girlfriend, so she presents a threat. He meets her at a fancy restaurant and she already accepts that she will not be making it to dessert. She is the exact opposite of our main character, a woman who has found a way to live a normal life in the suburbs, marry a man, and enjoy the luxuries of a life afforded by her wealth. She’s not living out of storage units or purposely dressing like a German tourist to stay under the radar. In some ways, this has allowed our more single-minded assassin to get the jump on her, to take advantage of her complacency. However, it’s also an indictment on the stripped-down, isolationist life our lead killer has prioritized. Here is a woman who has embraced allowing herself to enjoy things. She’s not eating McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches minus the slimy egg patty. She’s not slumming it for her “art.” She sees no value in abstinence. This stark contrast, as well as a sustained conversation between two foes, is the highlight of the film. It’s also interesting to watch Swinton’s character go through her own mini-grieving process accepting the likelihood that this will be her final meal, and so she savors it without fear.
Being a David Fincher movie, you can rightly assume that the technical elements are nearly flawless. The visual arrangements are beautiful, the cinematography is chilly and atmospheric, and the editing is precise and smooth. The first attempted kill has a nice degree of tension simply from shifting audio levels, going from diegetic to narration, never allowing the viewer to properly adjust during such a heightened point of paying attention. It’s naturally unsettling and effectively raises the tension of a moment we’ve been waiting over twenty minutes to arrive. There is an extended hand-to-hand fight sequence that’s exceptionally well choreographed and carries on from room to room, transforming with each new location and utilizing the geography of each space nicely (the John Wick folks would approve). The overall movie feels more in keeping with the likes of Fincher’s Panic Room or The Game, a more straightforward thriller that lacks simply extra levels and commentary, like Zodiac or Gone Girl. There’s nothing wrong with a well-executed and developed thriller purely designed to be a good time. It’s just at this stage of Fincher’s career, the expectations are raised, fairly or unfairly, with every new release. The Killer is a polished thriller meant to be pared down to its essential parts and can be enjoyed as such.
There is little to hold onto here emotionally though, so we’re left with the intellectual curiosity of watching a so-called professional go about their business and see how he gets around obstacles. Very often it’s dressing up in a delivery outfit and simply waiting on other polite strangers to open doors for his unassuming facade. One could argue that the character arc is about a man who rejects empathy, argues that it is weakness, comes around to accept empathy, and embraces it on his way out. I can see some of this, as the motivation for his trail of vengeance is to protect his loved one from being harmed again. There’s even a moment where he demonstrates a sliver of sympathy to a victim, albeit still utilizing gruesome violence. Except I don’t believe that easy assessment of this being a journey of embracing empathy. This doesn’t come across as a character changing who they are but instead as a character cleaning up their own mess. The main character keeps reiterating to “stick to the plan, don’t improvise,” but I don’t think he’s reflecting at any point on his actions beyond a clinical cause-effect relationship. He’s stripped all the complexities of humanity out from himself but recognizing fault isn’t the same as building and maintaining a sense of empathy. I also think the reading that many critics are making of Fincher standing in for the main character, a dedicated tactician who tries to do it all, is a little too cute and desperate for meta-narratives to derive a better lens to analyze the overall vacancy of the lead character.
This is very different from Lynn Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, a film that also subverted the same hitman sub-genre and made the audience re-examine its own bloodlust. As I wrote in 2018: “The focus of the movie is on the man committing the acts of violence rather than how stylish and cool and cinematic those acts of violence can be. …Ramsay offers discorded images and brief flashes and asks the audience to put together the pieces to better understand Joe as a man propelled and haunted by his bloody past…. It’s not all tragedy and inescapable dread. Amidst Joe’s tortured past and troubled future, there’s a necessary sense of hope. You don’t know what will happen next but you’re not resigned to retrograde nihilism.” This is not the feeling I took from The Killer, and I recommend everyone watch Ramsay’s movie too.
The problem with making a boring assassination thriller on purpose is that, at the end of the day, you still have a boring assassination thriller. Fassbender (who hasn’t been on screen since 2019’s Dark Phoenix killed the X-Men franchise) can be compelling for two hours doing just about anything, and a performance that is minimal in spoken dialogue does not mean a minimal performance. He’s great to sit and watch, the running commentary of his narration serving as a starting point to assess all the concentrated, nuanced acting under the surface. The Killer has sheen and skill, much like its title character, but it too also misses the mark where it counts.
Nate’s Grade: B-
Share this:
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)
I’ve learned so much more about pre-teen horror video games in the years since I’ve become a parent. There is no shortage of horror-themed games, many of them available through Roblox, that act as gradual entry points for burgeoning new horror fans that might not be emotionally ready for more intense horror (for my money, the creepy smiley creatures with dozens of teeth are more frightening than Michael Myers on any day). This brings me to the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie based on the insanely popular video game series that essentially said, “What if Chuck E. Cheese was, like, evil?” The game involved shifting between security cameras to keep watch on some frisky animatronics that have a hard time staying put, and of course jump scares and bloodless deaths. It’s a game about alternating camera feeds and waiting, and so the big screen version is also a movie very much about waiting for the creatures to stir. That’s probably why a quarter of the feature is watching Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) travel into a dream-space to try and communicate with mysterious children to figure out what must be some of the more obvious plot revelations that he just can’t seem to grasp about this sleepy town and its history of missing kids. Why are we spending this much time on the human character’s back-story when we have killer robots to maim dumb teenagers? There are more scenes with the ghost kids than the animatronics of fame. The protagonist’s motivation seems wishy-washy since he’s putting his life on the line to keep his little sister and then makes an ill-advised bargain with the robots to get rid of her because… we need a moment for him to realize what really matters most? Huh? The scenes of horror rely much more on impressions, favoring shadows and implied violence than featuring anything too overt. I found the revelation of the ultimate villain to be laughable, no matter if it matches up with whatever the convoluted lore is for a game that, again, is flipping through TV channels and trying not to get eaten. There just isn’t a whole lot going on here, and the human drama of Hutcherson trying to win custody of his little sister feels a bit too dramatic and real for something this silly. He can’t get any other job than guarding an abandoned pizza parlor? Why does anyone just not enter the restaurant? He keeps returning to the job even after he realizes the danger. Unless you’re a diehard fan thrilled to just see live-action versions of your favorite furry friends, Five Nights at Freddy’s fees like four nights too many.
Nate’s Grade: C
Share this:
Lost in Translation (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released October 3, 2023:
Sofia Coppola probably has had one of the most infamous beginnings in showbiz. Her father, Francis Ford, is one of the most famous directors of our times. He was getting ready to film Godfather Part III when Winona Ryder dropped out weeks before filming. Sophia Coppola, just at the age of 18, stepped into the role of Michael Corleone’s daughter. The level of scathing reviews Coppolas acting received is something perhaps only Tom Green and Britney Spears can relate to. Coppola never really acted again. Instead she married Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and adapted and directed the acclaimed indie flick, The Virgin Suicides. So now Coppola is back again with Lost in Translation, and if this is the kind of rewards reaped by bad reviews early in your career, then I’m circling the 2008 Oscar date for Britney.
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a washed up actor visiting Tokyo to film some well-paying whiskey commercials. Bob’s long marriage is fading and he feels the pains of loneliness dig its claws into his soul. Bob finds a kindred spirit in Charlotte (Scarlet Johansson), a young newlywed who has followed her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) to Japan and is second-guessing herself and her marriage. The two strike up a friendship of resistance as strangers in a strange land. They run around the big city and share enough adventures to leave an indelible impression on each other’s life.
Lost in Translation is, simply put, a marvelously beautiful film. The emphasis for Coppola is less on a rigidly structured story and more on a consistently lovely mood of melancholy. There are many scenes of potent visual power, nuance of absence, that the viewer is left aching like the moments after a long, cleansing cry. There are certain images (like Johansson or Murray staring out at the impersonal glittering Tokyo) and certain scenes (like the final, tearful hug between the leads) that I will never forget. Its one thing when a film opens on the quiet image of a woman’s derriere in pink panties and just holds onto it. It’s quite another thing to do it and not draw laughs from an audience.
Murray is outstanding and heartbreaking. Had he not finally gotten the recognition he deserved with last year’s Oscar nomination I would have raged for a recounting of hanging chads. Murray has long been one of our most gifted funnymen, but later in his career he has been turning in soulful and stirring performances playing lonely men. When Murray sings Roxy Music’s “More Than This” to Johansson during a wild night out at a karaoke bar, the words penetrate you and symbolize the leads’ evolving relationship.
Johansson (Ghost World) herself is proving to be an acting revelation. It is the understatement of her words, the presence of a mature intelligence, and the totality of her wistful staring that nail the emotion of Charlotte. Never does the character falter into a Lolita-esque vibe. Shes a lonely soul and finds a beautiful match in Murray.
Lost in Translation is an epic exploration of connection, and the quintessential film that perfectly frames those inescapable moments of life where we come into contact with people who shape our lives by their short stays. This is a reserved love story where the most tender of actions are moments like Murray carrying a sleeping Johansson to her room, tucking her in, then locking the door behind. The comedy of disconnect is delightful, like when Murray receives incomprehensible direction at a photo shoot. The score by Jean-Benoît Dunckel, front man of the French duo Air, is ambient and wraps around you like a warm blanket. The cinematography is also an amazing experience to behold, especially the many shots of the vast glittering life of Tokyo and, equally, its emptiness.
Everything works so well in Lost in Translation, from the bravura acting, to the stirring story, to the confident direction, that the viewer will be caught up in its lovely swirl. The film ends up becoming a humanistic love letter to what brings us together and what shapes how we are as people. Coppola’s film is bursting with such sharply insightful, quietly touching moments, that the viewer is overwhelmed at seeing such a remarkably mature and honest movie. The enjoyment of Lost in Translation lies in the understanding the audience can feel with the characters and their plight for connection and human warmth.
Writer/director Sofia Coppola’s come a long way from being Winona Ryder’s last-second replacement, and if Lost in Translation, arguably the best film of 2003, is any indication, hopefully well see even more brilliance yet to come. This is not going to be a film for everyone. A common argument from detractors is that Lost in Translation is a film lost without a plot. I’ve had just as many friends call this movie “boring and pointless” as I’ve had friends call it “brilliant and touching.” The right audience to enjoy Lost in Translation would be people who have some patience and are willing to immerse themselves in the nuances of character and silence.
Nate’s Grade: A
——————————————————
WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I have never done this before in the four years of my re-reviewing movies, but I really just want to quote my introduction into Lost in Translation because I feel like this perfectly sets the scene, as well as giving my 21-year-old self some kudos: “Sofia Coppola probably has had one of the most infamous beginnings in showbiz. Her father, Francis Ford, is one of the most famous directors of our times. He was getting ready to film Godfather Part III when Winona Ryder dropped out weeks before filming. Sophia Coppola, just at the age of 18, stepped into the role of Michael Corleone’s daughter. The level of scathing reviews Coppola’s acting received is something perhaps only Tom Green and Britney Spears can relate to. Coppola never really acted again… So now Coppola is back again with Lost in Translation, and if this is the kind of rewards reaped by bad reviews early in your career, then I’m circling the 2008 Oscar date for Britney.” Besides the unnecessary broadside against Ms. Spears, who I’ve already apologized for with my re-review of 2002’s Crossroads, I think all this holds true. Within three films, Sofia Coppola went from an unfortunate punchline (not her fault!) to Oscar winner and indie darling.
Lost in Translation was my favorite American movie of 2003, so I’m always curious how my then-favorites stack up twenty years later. I’ve softened on American Beauty and Requiem for a Dream, and still consider The Iron Giant, Magnolia, and Moulin Rouge to be excellent. My feelings toward Lost in Translation, upon re-watch, remain mostly the same, though after two decades of watching other slow-burn, character-centric indies and widening my viewing, its highs aren’t quite the rhapsodic high for me in 2023 but it’s still an effective melancholy mood piece.
Lost in Translation taps directly into a universal feeling of yearning for connections in a time where it’s becoming easier and easier to disconnect into our own little bubbles. You don’t have to be stuck in a foreign country to feel isolated or out of sorts, and Coppola uses the external circumstances as a means of reinforcing the emotional isolation and then re-connection of her characters. This is why I brush aside some of the harsher criticisms levied against Coppola’s portrayal of Japanese culture and the locals. This is an outsider portrayal, and I don’t think there’s so much a critical judgment over Japanese culture as being inferior as just being different from what these characters are used to. They are clearly out of their element; it’s not that the culture is weird, it’s that the culture is different (that doesn’t mean there aren’t some overstayed stereotypes here as well). Trying to simply communicate with people that all speak another language is a quick and accessible dynamic to better visualize and articulate disconnect. I feel like this story could have been told from any racial or ethical perspective; it’s about two outsiders finding one another. The racial dynamics are less important. Obviously Coppola’s own personal experiences and outsider perspective in Japan are what provides the specific details with this tale, but I think what makes the movie still so effective in 2023 is because it’s so relatable on a deeper level that it eclipses any specific personal details. It’s about feeling lost and then feeling seen.
The key scene for me happens about seventy minutes into the movie, after Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) have had an adventure with the Japanese hospital system. They’ve become one another’s insomnia buddies, teaming up to explore the city’s nightlife. As they lay side by side in bed during the wee hours, they have an intimate and poignant conversation, and it has nothing to do with sex. “I’m stuck,” she says. “Does it get any easier?” It’s about a young woman asking a middle-aged man for guidance and wisdom and him offering what he can with the caveat that he too is still struggling for his own wisdom. It’s the illusion that at some magic predetermined number of trips around the sun, the mystery of life will somehow become perfectly realized, as if now we can see the grand architectural design. There is no magic number. Everyone is trying their best and making it up as they go, and that’s what this conversation represents. She’s begging for reassurances that adult life will get easier, that she’ll find her footing, and Bob encourages her to continue pursuing her hobbies and passions even if she can’t stand her own art (which sounds like every artist I’ve ever known). Much of his actionable advice comes down to being patient including with yourself. Everybody is in their own way trying their best with what they have. He assures her that the more she gets comfortable with who she is the less things can bother her. It’s a beautiful scene and the reason it works even better is that Coppola doesn’t treat this moment with the gravity it has. It’s not even the film’s climax. Much like real life, when we look back at the exchanges that prove the most formative, we don’t have alarms ringing to better inform us that this is a moment that will have maximum import. We don’t know until it’s over.
I have never viewed Lost in Translation as some kind of will-they-won’t-they May-December romance, and at no point was I secretly hoping that Bob and Charlotte would get together. This is because they do get together but it’s not a purely romantic connection, although once you start really analyzing romance itself, there are far more complicated and nuanced dimensions to this overly simplified concept, and one could argue this is a romance of sorts but not one about physical passion and infatuation that dominate our association. It’s about two human souls drifting along in life who find a kinship with one another when they need it the most. I never wondered at the end whether they would kiss or have some kind of affair or even run off together, because that wasn’t what was so essential to this dynamic. It wasn’t how far they would go for love, including what would they give up or who would they hurt, it was about each of them serving as a life preserver, something to hold onto during a turbulent time. I truly believe that if they had kissed and had some kind of tawdry love affair that the film would have been cheapened. When Bob carries Charlotte back into her hotel room bed, I never viewed this act as two lovers but of a father and daughter. It’s too easy to just reduce every relationship into a sexual pairing. We all have meaningful relationships with many people who occupy different spheres of our life and our experiences, and our lives could be irreversibly altered without their influence no matter how fleeting our time together may have been. To reduce everything into whether they spark something sexual or passionate is just plain boring.
This was a turning point in the careers of all three of its major figures. For Coppola, it was confirmation of her artistic voice and stepping from the long shadow of her father. She won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Director, only the third woman ever at that time. That’s a big deal. This was a statement film for her and she’s been making very leisurely paced, lushly photographed, somber character pieces since, very Sofia Coppola Movies (her latest promises to highlight the perspective of Priscilla Pressly). She never quite had another movie land as well as this one though 2006’s Marie Antoinette is due for a reappraisal as well. For Murray, it was confirmation that he had real dramatic acting skills that he’d shown flashes of in other movies like The Razor’s Edge and Rushmore, and it earned him his only Academy Award nomination. For Johansson, it was also the beginning of establishing her as an adult actress of serious caliber, and there was a critical stir that she had been snubbed by the Academy in 2004 not just for her role in Lost in Translation but also Girl with Pearl Earring. Johansson had been a steadily working actress since she was a child, and this was confirmation that she was ready to make the next jump. From there, she found a creative kinship with Woody Allen, and Wes Anderson, and even became an action movie star that could headline her own blockbusters. She finally got her first Oscar nominations in 2019, for both Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit, becoming only the twelfth actor ever to be nominated twice in the same year. Murray’s star has fallen out of favor recently from his onerous onset behavior, though he did reunite with Coppola for 2020’s On the Rocks.
One of the stranger post-scripts for this movie relates to Johansson’s singing. The karaoke scene in Lost in Translation is one of the best, and it works on a magical elemental level where the music becomes our means of expression. When Murray sings “More Than This,” it’s hard not to read more into the moment. It’s right there in the song choice. Both actors do their own singing, adding to the fun and authenticity. Johansson would later release her own album in 2008 titled Anywhere I Lay My Head. It wasn’t uncommon for young actresses to moonlight as singers for a vanity project (Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan did this too), but what set this album apart was that it was almost entirely comprised of Tom Waits covers. According to Yahoo, as of August 2009, it had sold only 25,000 copies, which to be fair is twenty-five thousand more than I’ve ever sold, so what do I know? She released one more music album, 2009’s Break Up.
Looking back at my original 2003 review, it’s easy to see how smitten I was discovering Lost in Translation and trying to argue its virtues in my college newspaper. I think I assumed most of my fellow collegians would rather watch raunchy comedies like Van Wilder rather than a slow-burn indie about sad people roaming a foreign city. To this day I still have an equal number of friends who deem Lost in Translation as slow navel-gazing fluff to beautiful and beguiling. As I said before, it’s a mood piece about disconnected people, and I think if you’re in the right mood, or an open mind with the patience to spare, then there’s still something appealing and rewarding about an understated movie about two lonely people finding an unexpected kinship that defies reductive romantic classification. I just experienced something on this level with 2023’s Past Lives. I’m glad that Coppola has kept the final whisper between Bob and Charlotte a secret because it doesn’t matter what he specifically says so much as the meaning of this exchange for the both of them. It’s a goodbye of sorts but also a recognition of one another’s help and compassion. It’s not for us to hear. It’s too intimate. It’s a perfect ending for a film that still proves indelible twenty years later.
Re-View Grade: A-
Share this:
Pain Hustlers (2023)
Pain Hustlers is the next attempt to dramatize the numerous stories behind the opioid crisis, a storytelling edict that is becoming its own tragic true-crime sub-genre (Dopesick, Pain Killer, Four Good Days, Recovery Boys, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed). The Netflix original has a starry cast and a topical and serious subject but it’s an un-serious movie caught up in the superficial quirks and appeal of being and making a goofy crime story of greedy sleazeballs.
Liza (Emily Blunt) is a struggling single mother trying to claw her way out of debt and, with her unfinished education and criminal record, few options are widely available. Then enters Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a loud, gouache pharmaceutical rep for a powerful pain killer. He promises a lifestyle of luxury and power, as long as Liza is willing to ignore or bend a few ethics along the way. Together, they build a sales force of attractive women who wine and dine smaller doctors in order to get them to prescribe their special drug to anyone in need. It’s just that a drug intended for end-of-life pain wasn’t meant for common headaches. As sales boom, Liza begins to worry that her glitzy lifestyle is built upon a mountain of American corpses.
The biggest drawback of Pain Hustlers is that it fully focuses on the glitz and gives lip service to the cost of chasing that avarice. Plenty of movies illuminating bad people doing bad things are accused of glamorizing the misdeeds, from gangster movies to dark romances, though this narrow viewing often seems to conflate depiction with condoning the behavior (see: The Wolf of Wall Street). Watching stories about people stumbling their way into glamorous positions should provide some allure so as to better understand the seductive draw for the characters. The world of vice and power will be a compelling conflict, but for Pain Hustlers, it falters by just focusing on the high-powered lifestyle yet it still lacks specificity to make this story feel interesting on its own. You’ve seen variations of this kind of story before (we’ll call it Scorsese-esque) about the people struggling with less who get a ticket into a new world of access and freedom and then begin to worry At What Cost. Pain Hustlers goes through its plot beats with the most mechanical of movements. The personal details from this supposedly true story feel so generic, reminiscent of similar tales like, Love & Other Drugs and Hustlers. It feels less like an insider account of how these shady people exploited so many and more like the screenplay was cobbled together by what the filmmakers assumed this story must have pertained without reading much of the source novel by Evan Hughes. It’s absent the useful details that allow more of these accounts to prosper as we investigate moral relativism.
The other nagging shortcoming of Pain Hustlers is the consequences for all these bad people. I’m not saying that we need to see comeuppance and justice levied in order for the movie to work thematically; very often these white collar criminal types receive the faintest glance of judicial punishment. What this movie lacks is the emphasis on the consequences, and considering our main characters are pushing sleazy doctors to push highly addictive opioids, that’s a big miss. The movie is all about the climb for its heroine, the comparison of having the fancy life versus a life without. It shortchanges the extremely human cost of its bad actors in a way that does a disservice to the movie and its message. Because of its lack of specificity, this story could have been propelled by any prescription drug, from Viagra to Lipitor. The fact that we’re talking fentanyl, a drug responsible for 200 deaths every day last year according to the CDC, seems immaterial, and that is bizarre.
The effects of the opioid crisis begun by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, and then trickled down through the complicated tributaries of the American medical infrastructure, will be felt for generations. This is a major story. It would be like, say, telling the story of a struggling single mom who decides to take a career advancement in the Nazi Party in 1940s Germany. You’re not just doing a disservice to the people who really suffered, you’re doing a disservice to the audience to ignore the gravity of their moral culpability and excuse-making, of the drama of the character having to confront their part. For a movie about people profiting from opioid over-prescriptions, there is a grand total of one scene where Liza has to deal with the harsh real-world consequences of her actions (minor spoilers ahead, but I’d advise you to continue, dear reader). Early in the movie, when Liza was forced out of her home, she spent a few days living in a motel. The neighbor lady at the motel has a husband who dies from the opioid crisis, and this one man is meant to symbolize what she has wrought as a whole. It doesn’t work, and the fact that the movie presents Liza in tears trying to make amends to this widow, a character we haven’t had any thought over since Liza leaving her Act One beginnings, is a pitiful excuse for a reckoning.
Evans (The Grey Man) and Blunt (Oppenheimer) feel on autopilot here, namely because of the broad and bland characterization. Blunt resumes her Southern accent I recall from the Quiet Place movies, but her energy level feels too low, too disengaged, like she’s already at her quiet rectitude character phase when she should be at the gee-whiz giddiness of her moral slide. Evans is meant to be playing a cad prone to vulgar boasts and condescension for those he willfully steps over to reach his goals, but his “sleazeball” acting tics feel too forced, too played up, in all the ways that Blunt feels dialed down. There’s no baseline for the two of them, so the scenes they share together feel over and under-cooked, and with a generically developed rise-and-fall screenplay to boot. Andy Garcia (Father of the Bride) is the most interesting character as the head of the company, a doctor who began trying to ensure those in desperate need could have the dignity of mitigating their pain, and transforms into a megalomaniacal huckster who only wants to keep meeting the next sales projections. His rise-and-fall seems much more steep and intriguing than trying to give us Liza, a gutsy single mom (with a wacky mother of her own played by Catherine O’Hara) who we’re supposed to identify with and forgive for playing her part in a deadly chain that has wrecked untold lives across the country and world. She did it for her own kid’s medical treatment. So it’s all okay, right?
This is director David Yates’ first movie away from the familiar confines of the Harry Potter universe since the ill-fated 2016 Tarzan reboot, and only his second non-Potter movie since 2005. Given that history, I’m curious whenever this man jumps onto a non-Potter project because you would assume it has to be special in some manner. I’ll credit Yates with changing his visual preferences from the very drabby and gray palette of his Potter filmography.Pain Hustlers adopts a lot of the stylistic tics we expect in glitzy crime thrillers, from handheld camerawork to sun-bleached colors. There are other techniques to bring a documentary-like authenticity, but the constant cutting back to black-and-white interviews with the characters after the fact only serves as a narration crutch to keep things moving. The character narration lacks further insight from the distance or remorse of the onscreen events. The whole movie feels like a copy of a Scorsese imitator, something akin to 2009’s forgettable The Middle Men, a crime movie about a plunge into the underworld from a naif that doesn’t try too hard beyond empty reconfiguration of the superior style of its influences that I doubt anyone really remembers (you might as well add directorial narration, “Ever since I was young I always wanted to make a gangster movie…”). As immediate evidence to the case, there is a slow-motion house party in Pain Hustlers set to “Turn Down For What.”
Should you spend two hours watching Pain Hustlers? Not really, though if you have a fascination with the many schemers who contributed to making the opioid crisis as trenchant and terrible as it currently is, and likely will be for the near future, then maybe there’s some mild value to be had here. But even those people would be better served watching another Netflix series tackling the same subject matter, the 2023 limited series Pain Killer. For me, the Pain Hustlers story was too broad, and where it could have broken out with specificity is where it decided to wimp out and defer to genre cliches. It’s hard for me to argue that you should spend two hours watching this movie on the subject when you would be far better served, from an informative and entertainment standpoint, watching the two-part, four-hour 2021 documentary Crime of the Century by masterful filmmaker Alex Gibney. That film is damning and compelling and authentic in ways Pain Hustlers can only hope to imitate.
Nate’s Grade: C
Share this:
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
I was a nominal fan of the Mission: Impossible series after three movies, and it seemed like the American public was feeling the same. After 15 years, it felt like the franchise was considering a soft reboot/shift with 2011’s Ghost Protocol, setting up Jeremy Renner as the heir apparent to Tom Cruise’s super spy, Ethan Hunt (weirdly, Renner was also set up to be another franchise replacement for Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne in 2012). Except what may have been initially planned as a franchise hand-off became a franchise renewal, with a delightfully twisty plot, fun teamwork as they scramble to adapt, and a show-stopping action set-piece that remains the franchise’s high-point, the scaling of the towering Burj Khalifa skyscraper. It also reminded us that not only does Cruise love to run but the man has a death wish when it comes to performing his own amazing stunts. With Cruise firmly back in place as lead, and Renner jettisoned (which also happened after 2012’s The Bourne Legacy), the franchise was further boosted by two of its best additions: actress Rebecca Ferguson and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie. The Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriting staple was not known as much for his directing efforts, but he became a Cruise confidant after 2008’s Valkyrie, and he’s worked almost exclusively on Cruise projects ever since. He earned the man’s trust and proved a fantastic action director. 2018’s Mission: Impossible Fallout is just blockbuster filmmaking at its high-stakes finest. I was bouncing in my chair with excitement and simply luxuriating in action thriller nirvana.
This time Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his select team of trusted friends and colleagues are battling a villain terrifyingly relevant to our modern times, especially in light of the screenwriters’ strike – artificial intelligence. The big bad is an A.I. that can control the world’s security apparatus, and it’s become self-aware and resentful of its human overlords. It exists inside a computer console inside a Russian submarine at the bottom of the Arctic ocean under a wall of ice, and the A.I., known as “The Entity,” doesn’t want to ever be found (must be an introvert). If only it was that easy. The world is racing to be the first to claim this unparalleled prize, and the Impossible Missions team has to ensure they can find the location, which of course involves a MacGuffin, this time two interlocking keys to access the A.I. sub station. Can Ethan get there first and can he even trust his own government to do what’s best with access to this kind of power?
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is a mouthful of a title. We got a colon, a dash, and a “part one,” a presumptuous gamble that after 160 minutes the audience is going to be ravenously hungry for a continuation in a series that has never had a two-parter before. In short, the movie is a lot, a lot of the same action and renowned stunt work we expect, and a lot of setup and extension that might have been better trimmed by focusing on one movie rather than setting up two. McQuarrie has done this before and been successful without the need of a direct two-parter. For all intents and purposes, Fallout is a direct sequel to 2015’s Rogue Nation, carrying over the same villain for the first time in the series and the ongoing relationship between Ethan and Ilsa Faust (Ferguson). Both of those movies feel complete and satisfying and well-designed in structure and development without needing one part to complete the other. With Dead Reckoning Part One, henceforth known as M:I 7 to spare me from writing this title every time, it feels like an overlong setup. By the end of the movie, our characters know where the A.I. is located but they still don’t know where the sub is or how to get there, which means the entire movie could have been collapsed into a more streamlined venture. Part of this may be the production troubles where they had to shut down and rejigger the plot multiple times from COVID outbreaks, as M:I 7 is the last of the big Hollywood movies to release that was shutdown in 2020 by the devastating pandemic. It all feels a bit overstretched and absent a satisfying conclusion.
The draw of the franchise, and chiefly its 2010s renewal back into the zeitgeist, is still the eye-popping stunts and set-pieces and Dead Reckoning still delivers. Most viewers will likely find the final action sequence aboard a speeding train to be the high-point, and it’s got some wow moments, my favorite is when the train is hanging over a blown bridge and Ethan has to leap from train car to train car before it plummets, oh and it’s all at an incline. It turns each car into a new obstacle to overcome utilizing its specific dynamics, like a dining car with a falling piano to a kitchen with vats of hot grease to avoid. The standout stunt involves Cruise driving a motorcycle off a mountain in a desperate effort to parachute onto this speeding train. However, this whole train sequence didn’t excite me too much, outside of its beginning stunt and the end. Watching men chase one another atop the speeding train, let alone wrestle and fight with knives, only serves to limit what can be done and it reminds me how fake the moment is for a franchise that has made its mark on its daredevil realism. That extended middle feels a bit too much like other Hollywood thrillers and action movies, and that’s what made it disappointing for a series I consider the current gold standard of franchise action.
A much less heralded sequence around the forty-five minute mark was my favorite, where Ethan is running around the Abu Dhabi airport while the following takes place: 1) Ethan trying to evade federal agents (the dependable Shea Whigham) looking to arrest him, 2) Ethan is trying to find the owner of one half of the MacGuffin keys who happens to be a pickpocket that keeps giving him the slip, 3) Ethan’s team, Luther (Ving Rhames, the only other actor who has appeared in every M:I film) and Benji (Simon Pegg) trying to find a nuclear bomb in a suitcase through the maze of baggage claim and disarm it, 4) the introduction of our villain Gabriel, well, our primary lackey to The Entity, who also happens to be a former IMF turncoat who killed Ethan’s girlfriend and essentially “made Ethan Hunt who he is” following Batman logic. This entire sequence is pure McQuarrie splendor, where it introduces the different characters, several at cross-purposes, lets them loose and then finds organic complications and specific turns that take advantage of the geography as well as the character’s emotional states. I loved it, and it made me hopeful that after a bit of a slow start that M:I 7 was now cooking and would be the prolonged deluge of near-perfect set-pieces that was Fallout. Not so much, but this sequence was indeed good fun.
Another issue I had was that our villain, again more like chief lackey, is so bland. I like Esai Morales (Ozark) as an actor, but the character of Gabriel is such a non-starter. Even giving him the personal history with Ethan feels like an admission that this bad guy has little to offer on his own. I think it’s part of how the character is written but I think it’s also a reflection that he’s the number two behind the all-powerful, scheming A.I., and then he too has a number two (number three?) played by Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3), and she is so much more engaging as an antagonistic presence. She’s the one driving through cars and stonework throughout Rome to chase down Ethan. She’s the one who fights him in a narrow alleyway, a nicely claustrophobic change-of-pace action moment for a series that gorges on scale. If the true villain is going to be an A.I., why can’t Pom simply be its number two hench-person? Gabriel is redundant and boring and his fight sequences don’t feel believable against this crew.
There are a couple other storytelling choices that I wasn’t happy with, but I’ll save delving into those for the sake of spoilers. Suffice to say, I hope Dead Reckoning Part Two in 2024 course corrects and we have some welcomed returns. It’s kind of fun to see Kittridge (Henry Czerny, Ready or Not) make his first reappearance since the 1996 M:I and also get so much screen time. He’s essentially the face of the U.S. government infrastructure for the duration of the movie. His clenched-jaw consternation is a nice foil to the always rogue super spy.
Dead Reckoning – Part One is a good but not great Mission: Impossible movie, conceived as two parts and suffering some of the consequences of its over-extension. The thrills are still there, the sturdy production values, the emphasis on the spectacular stunts and fun action set pieces, so any fan of the franchise will find enough to enjoy over 160 minutes. The addition of Hayley Atwell (Avengers: Endgame) as the wily pickpocket who has stumbled into international espionage is great, though she cannot escape feeling like an Ilsa replacement while Ferguson is off-screen for too long. Cruise is still the movie star who delivers the most from film to film, and his high-wire efforts are appreciated. By the end of the movie, the sub is still at the bottom of the ocean, our characters are still in a race to find it, and I wondered why we couldn’t have ditched “Part One.” The answer, as much in Hollywood, is of course money, but I wish this Part One made me more psyched for Part Two.
Nate’s Grade: B
Share this:
Kill Bill vol. 1 (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released October 10, 2003:
Breathtaking and stylistically amazing. That’s all there is to it. Can’t wait for part two.
Nate’s Grade: A
——————————————————
WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Kill Bill was a turning point in the career of one of the biggest cinematic artists of the past 30 years, and as exciting and stylish as Volume 1 proved, this is the point where Quentin Tarantino vanished within himself and became the ultimate B-movie revivalist. It only took two films for Tarantino to not just become an indie brand name but his own adjective, as Hollywood was flooded with “Tarantino-esque” imitators chasing after the man’s unique voice of snappy pop-culture soliloquies, hard-boiled dialogue, and meta-textual irony. Of course the imitators could never truly capture the full appeal of Tarantino’s movies, overvaluing the surface-level aspects (quirky characters, non-linear plots, unexpected bursts of violence) and missing the greater character depth and thematic intricacies that allow the style to accentuate the entertainment rather than solely serve as that value. 2003 was the crossroads where Tarantino switched from smaller dramas and crime thrillers about semi-recognizable and relatable people (the middle-aged romance in Jackie Brown is the most tender and sincere writing of his career) to remaking and re-packaging his favorite grindhouse exploitation movies. It was like Tarantino himself was following the path of the would-be Tarantino-esque imitators.
Kill Bill began as an idea between actress Uma Thurman and Tarantino on the set of Pulp Fiction; it even feels like a big-screen realization of the failed Fox Force Five pilot that Mia Wallace (Thurman) filmed. Thurman had the idea of the opening, a bloody and beaten woman in a wedding dress being executed only to survive her execution. The idea germinated for years and became two movies worth of material. It’s hard for me to envision Kill Bill as one whole entity because the two volumes feel so thematically distinct. The first is an homage to 1970s kung-fu movies and Eastern cultural influences whereas the second volume serves as an homage to spaghetti Westerns and Western cultural influences. I’m shocked that through the annals of numerous physical media releases at no point has someone released Kill Bill as one whole four-hour movie. It’s only ever been physically screened as such once by Tarantino, and I think the implicit admission is that, while conceived as one sprawling and gargantuan epic, the movies work better as halves that reflect and enrich one another due to that separation. As I wrote in my 2004 review of Volume 2, the first part is the “show” and the second is the “tell,” but what a show Tarantino pulls off.
There was a time where the idea of Tarantino helming an action movie felt antithetical, but he tapped every corner of his encyclopedic knowledge of genre cinema to give us one of the best action movies of all time. The centerpiece sequence pitting The Bride against the Crazy 88s, as well as the ball-and-chain-wielding schoolgirl Gogo, feels like the culmination of a lifetime of cinema geek passion. It’s viscerally exciting without getting boring over the course of twenty-something minutes because Tarantino keeps things shifting, never falling upon redundancies, as if he’s so eager to squeeze in each and every loving homage and reference point. The climax, which again feels so natural an escalation and end point for a “part one,” took eight weeks to film, and the MPAA insisted it be toned down to secure an R-rating (he turned it black and white to obscure the color of the blood, itself another indirect homage to martial arts movies of old when they played on American television). Reportedly over 450 gallons of fake blood was used during the production of both volumes, but this first edition is definitely the more gleefully over-the-top.
The revenge structure is shaped around The Bride (née Beatrix Kiddo) killing the five members of her former gang, the Deadly Viper Squad. Volume 1 only covers two members meeting their just desserts, one of which is the opening scene. That means after the first ten minutes fighting Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), we’re working the rest of the movie to the next boss fight. That’s where we get the character dynamics, the obstacles that The Bride must overcome (step one: wiggle your big toe), and the history of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Lui) and her ascension to Japanese crime lord. With less careful filmmakers, this middle stretch might feel sluggish, but with Tarantino, it’s invigorating as the new world and its many faces connect together to create such an intriguing and engrossing larger picture. Volume 1 provides the structural bones of the story, as well as buckets of sticky viscera, whereas Volume 2 adds the meat and complexity and larger nuance. That doesn’t mean Volume 1 is lacking creativity, it’s just that it’s the half that has to perform more foundational lifting so that those character details and choices will have the larger impact they do. Volume 1 is a long straight line back to O-Ren Ishii, and the accelerating carnage is wonderful to behold.
Thurman has never been better than with her Quentin collabs. After her sudden rise in Pulp Fiction, it felt like her career stalled playing many “hot girl” roles in misfires like The Truth About Cats & Dogs, The Avengers, and of course Batman & Robin. After her Kill Bill revival, her star rose again only to once again falter from more reductive “hot girl” roles in misfires like Paycheck, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and the movie musical of The Producers. She recently came into the casting orbit of Lars von Trier, a filmmaker who never met a beautiful woman he didn’t want to punish excessively onscreen for society’s ills. Her role in 2014’s Nymphomaniac volume 1 was a memorable high point as a contemptuous woman confronting her husband’s younger lover, the titular nymphomaniac. Perhaps it was the meta-textual comment of Thurman’s cinematic type-casting, the older “hot girl” replaced by the younger, newer beauty. I’m probably just grasping for greater meaning here. Thurman and Tarantino didn’t speak for years after the conclusion of the Kill Bill series, but it wasn’t until 2018 that we found out why. That’s when the public found out about the existence of a video where Thurman was driving a car and crashed. The problem was it should have been a stunt driver but Tarantino insisted and pressured Thurman into doing the stunt, she crashed, was injured, and still suffers to this day. She says she has since forgiven Tarantino even though he and Harvey Weinstein withheld footage of the incident for years.
The music has taken on a life of its own. Much was repurposed from old movies and given new context, much like Tarantino’s overall creative mantra. The siren-blaring announcement of two foes facing each other has become its own pop-culture meme. The slow-motion walk to “Battle Without Honor or Humility” has also become pop-culture shorthand. “Twisted Nerve” is a great ringtone, and “Woo Hoo” by the Japanese surf rock girl group The 5,6,7,8s became so inescapably hummable that it eventually became the catchy theme of a wireless company.
This movie also holds a special place for me because the image that immediately comes to mind is watching my father uproariously laughing throughout the movie and rocking in his theater seat. A severed head leading to a geyser of endless blood had my father cackling like a child. By the end of the movie, I recall him turning to me, smiling ear-to-ear, and exclaiming, “Now that was a great movie!” Conversely, I also remember my college roommate falling asleep next to me as The House of Blue Leaves was bathed in (>450) gallons of (black and white) blood.
In the ensuing two decades, Tarantino has directed five other movies, published two books, been nominated for Best Director twice, won his second screenwriting Oscar, and essentially brought the tastes of the Academy to his own. He’s written three Best Supporting Actor winners (Christoph Waltz in 2009 and 2012, Brad Pitt in 2019) and become one of the most commercially reliable names, a director whose very name itself is a selling point for mainstream audiences. Even while some may bemoan that the indie provocateur might be “slumming” with his own highly polished version of B-movies, he’s dragged those same tastes to wide commercial appeal and industry acclaim. Kill Bill Volume 1 is the beginning of Tarantino tattooing ironic air quotes to his output, but when you’re this talented and passionate about movies of all kinds, even a kung-fu homage can become a cultural force and one of the best superhero origins ever (The Bride is pretty much a superhero and compared to Superman in Volume 2). Kill Bill Volume 1 is still a masterfully entertaining and bloody fun experience twenty years later.
Re-View Grade: A
Share this:
The Meg 2:The Trench (2023)
It’s Jason Statham riding a Jet ski and literally jousting giant sharks, so the fault should be on me expecting something more from The Meg 2, right? I wished there was more of this kind of gonzo schlocky action, moments like Statham kicking a guy into the mouth of a killer shark and saying, “So long, chum.” Too much of this movie is setting up an ensemble of characters that are boring and not Jason Statham, including villainous turncoats that I kept forgetting who they were. There are also small-sized dinosaurs but other characters just chase them down to shoot them. I was mostly fine with the first Meg movie as dumb fun, and this one seems to be going for the vibe of a bigger-budget Asylum/Sci-Fi Channel schlockbuster, the kind of movie with a “Sharktopus” or “Mega Shark” in its outlandish title. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t seem to accomplish even that aim. I wish the movie had been even more crazy but it feels like, for whatever misplaced idea of tone, that the filmmakers held back. Next time just have Statham psychically linked to the shark and fighting dinosaurs and own it.
Nate’s Grade: C
Share this:
Retribution (2023)
Liam Neeson has had one of the most unexpected second acts, from an esteemed dramatic thespian to Boomer action hero. The man’s natural gravitas elevated 2009’s Taken, plus the undiscovered thrill of watching Oskar Schindler karate chop goons in the neck, and ever since the Liam Neeson Action Vehicle was a 2010s Hollywood staple. He has been a downtrodden father, ex-husband, CIA agent, FBI agent, air marshal, border patrol agent, cop, ex-cop, ex-hitman, wolf-hunting marksman, snow plowman, ice road trucker, usually an alcoholic or recovering alcoholic, and always the beleaguered fighter called back reluctantly into action. But by the turn of the next decade, the Neeson Action Vehicle shifted from playing on the big screen to the small one, as the direct-to-DVD/streaming phase may likely extend to the remainder of the man’s career. He’s approaching his Geezer Teaser era (71 years old), though he has already made an appearance in an Expendables sequel, practically a subsidy for AARP action castoffs
I haven’t watched many of these latter Neeson action movies but the premise of Retribution intrigued me. Reminiscent of Speed, Neeson is Matt Turner, another beleaguered father who spends ninety percent of the movie in the confines of his car thanks to a pressure-triggered bomb that will explode if anyone exists. Unfortunately, Matt’s teen son and daughter are along for the ride in the backseat. They’re beset by antagonizing phone calls from a mysterious culprit with an escalating set of demands and orders. Can Matt save his family and maybe even his car too?
Apparently the third remake of a 2015 Spanish movie of the same name, Retribution moves along on a wholly predictable yet efficient plot as we’re introduced to supporting characters who will inevitably only serve one function. You don’t hire a famous name and then relegate them to one scene to get blown to smithereens. Likewise, there’s always an authority figure investigating the pieces who always has a supportive ear no matter the wild predicament of our hero. The kids are pretty much interchangeable as disaffected family members who will, over the course of 90 minutes of fantastic events, come to see that dad maybe cares after all and they shouldn’t be so rude to their old man. On the flip side, Matt will also come to better understand, through the intervention of a mad bomber, the importance of family he has been heretofore ignorant thereof. It’s all fairly mechanical clunky genre stuff, and if you’ve ever watched any relatively lower budget, straight-to-DVD action movie, especially the Geezer Teasers, then it’s all predictable. The viewing experience thusly comes down to finding nuggets of something memorable or different, something to hold onto unless the movie simply slips into a morass of mediocrity.
Retribution has one such moment and it just so happens to be its ending, so there will be spoilers ahead but I cannot fathom the person who would watch something like this, so formula-laden and familiar, and chafe at spoilers. Still, be warned, dear reader. It’s revealed by the end that our villain is none other than Matt’s business partner, a.k.a. The only other person that could profit off their personal bank stash who also happens to be played by a name actor (Matthew Modine, collect that paycheck). I don’t know why he personally sneaks into the backseat to threaten Matt at gunpoint when he’s been fine making threats from afar on the phone. Why the gun too when there’s already a bomb in play? Seriously, is it supposed to be surprising that Modine turns out to be our real villain, even after he fakes his own death as an elaborate fake-out? Anyway, after monologuing, Matt goes into full angry dad mode, growling a one-liner, and drives his precious car into the guardrails of a bridge, turning the car on its side. If Matt were to detach his seat belt, he would tumble into the river waters below, utilizing gravity as his savior from the potential blast radius (I suppose just forget about shrapnel or the real prospect of the car falling on top of him from the explosion). It makes for a satisfying if slightly clever (grading on a curve) comeuppance for our smarmy villain. Ending with your best moment is a sign that the filmmakers recognized what they had as a payoff. The movie literally ends seconds after, with Matt treading water, deserting any family resolution, admitting it was all just dross anyway.
What’s funny is how inconsequential the family drama is that is intended to underpin the high-stakes peril. We find out mom is talking to a divorce attorney, and this news is a bigger bomb than the one under the seas. Suddenly the squabbling children realize the love of their family, even gruff dad, and they want things to stay the same. This storyline is so underwritten, really just serving as a catalyst for the kids to shut up and stop being jerks, that it all feels like self-parody that a mad bomber terrorizing a family has helped facilitate their renewed bonds.
As a late career action vehicle for an actor getting long in the tooth, the blandly titled Retribution is a relatively forgettable thriller that asks too little of its star and its audience. There are all sorts of directions a story can go with the concept of a man being unable to leave his car, so it’s disappointing that Retribution does so little, tying events to an obvious conspiracy with few complications. Imagine the funnier version of this movie, where Matt lives the rest of his life in the car. He gets drive-thru fast food for every meal. His daughter’s wedding has to be outdoors and near an easily accessible parking lot. He begins to see the car as an extension of himself and refers to the both of them in the third person. It takes a Titane-esque twist, and he wants to become the car itself. Then, as a decrepit 101-year-old man, the car breaks down on the side of the road and he has no choice but to leave it, and he accepts his fate with open arms. Then again maybe that isn’t as funny to anyone but me. Even Neeson’s weathered gravitas can only do so much when all the movie asks of him is to stay upright and look forward.
Nate’s Grade: C-
Share this:
The Station Agent (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 5, 2003:
This is the most charming film of 2003, and Im not just saying this because I had an interview with one of its stars, Michelle Williams (Dawson’s Creek). Fnin McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a man with dwarfism. With every step he takes every look he gives, you witness the years of torture hes been through with glares and comments. Hes shut himself away from people and travels to an isolated train station to live. There he meets two other oddballs, a live-wire hot dog vendor (Bobby Cannavale) and a divorced mother (Patricia Clarkson). Together the three find a wonderful companionship and deep friendship. The moments showing the evolution of the relationship between the three are the films highlights. Its a film driven by characters but well-rounded and remarkable characters. Dinklage gives perhaps one of the coolest performances as the unforgettable Fin. Cannavale is hilarious as the loudmouth best friend that wants a human connection. Clarkson is equally impressive as yet another fragile mother (a similar role in the equally good Pieces of April). The writing and acting of The Station Agent are superb. Its an unforgettable slice of Americana brought together by three oddballs and their real friendship. You;ll leave The Station Agent abuzz in good feelings. This is a film you tell your friends about afterwards. There’s likely no shot for a dwarf to be nominated for an Oscar in our prejudiced times but Dinklage is deserving. The Station Agent is everything you could want in an excellent independent movie. It tells a tale that would normally not get told. And this is one beauty of a tale.
Nate’s Grade: A
——————————————————
WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Tom McCarthy didn’t invent the quirky, found family indie but he sure seems to have nearly perfected it, starting with 2003’s The Station Agent. This little gem of a movie is so subdued, so relaxed, and so gentle that it seems to adopt the very personality of its lead character, Fin (Peter Dinklage), a dwarf who just likes trains a lot and wants to live his life in solitude. He’s an unassuming man who keeps to himself as a means of survival, because almost every time he goes into public life Fin is met with stares, snickers, and harassment (the convenience store lady gets his attention to take his unsolicited picture). Very few will get to know this man beyond his superficial physical characteristics, so he retreats within himself, perhaps purposely obsessing over an antiquated hobby as a means of escape to the past. He’s a lonely man and the movie is about him finding his clan, his place in the world, by slowly lowering his defenses. It’s a simple sort of story that is lifted by the strength of its characters and its wonderful ensemble cast.
With such a taciturn main character we need a contrasting character, a much more talkative person with high energy, and this is beautifully embodied by Bobby Cannavale. He plays Joe Oramas, a coffee truck operator who exemplifies joy de vie. He’s charming, garrulous, and relentlessly upbeat, which makes for a magnificent odd couple contrast with Fin, and it allows both characters to gradually change and grow attached to one another’s mutual friendship. Finn allows himself to become more vulnerable and form bonds and Joe starts to see the world from Fin’s point of view, allowing himself to slow down and appreciate the smaller things he might have missed in his excitable and irascible activity. Dinklage’s dry understated performance is a perfect counterpoint to the churning energy emanating from a grinning Cannavale. This is a fine showcase of both actors, who would go on to win six Emmys between them in the years ahead.
The third member of this found family is Olivia, played by Patricia Clarkson, and I actually think the movie might have worked better without her character. She does provide a point of view that our two guys lack; she’s experienced significant grief over a lost child and her life is in shambles as she tries to discover what she wants from her cratering marriage to a young-er John Slattery. Clarkson is also wryly enjoyable and gets some of the best lines in the movie, so she’s not at fault here. I think it’s because I’m confused about how this character is treated, especially compared to the natural opposites-attract dynamic of Fin and Joe’s friendship. Olivia feels like a broken thing that the boys need to try and help get better, but we were already covering this with Finn’s reserve from a lifetime of feeling ostracized. The possible romance between Fin and Olivia is also awkward because there are obvious implications that she sees Fin as a replacement son, even having him sleep in her son’s old bed. At one point, in her anger, she yells at Fin that she’s not his mother, but it feels much more like she’s the one who is looking for a surrogate son, and just because Fin is a dwarf and perhaps of similar heights makes the whole thing feel uncomfortable and ill-advsied. I’m not going to refuse an added Patricia Clarkson in my movie, but upon my re-watch twenty years later, it’s hard not to feel like McCarthy didn’t have as much envisioned for this part.
McCarthy’s movie acclimates the viewer to the simple charms of its people and the small town, getting to know the various characters and their foibles and hopes, getting used to the rhythms of this life and adjusting much like Fin. There are small victories that are payoffs, like Fin finally getting a library card, or speaking in front of a school class about his affinity for trains. It works so well. McCarthy continued his found family writing with 2007’s The Visitor and 2011’s Win Win, both anchored by the emotional enormity of sad, lonely men learning to open up to companionship. There were some dips in the road but McCarthy worked his found family magic to the biggest stage with 2015’s Best Picture winner, Spotlight, which McCarthy directed and co-wrote. His only follow-up theatrical movie was 2021’s Stillwater, where an oil rig dad (Matt Damon) tries to save his daughter overseas from a very ripped-from-the-headlines scandal (Amanda Knox was very unhappy). There is also a 2020 Disney Plus movie about a kid detective and his imaginary polar bear best friend (that actually sounds adorable). I guess I figured a Best Picture Oscar on your resume, as well as a history of working within the studio system and world of indies, would have given McCarthy more work than directing a handful of episodes for 13 Reasons Why and creating Alaska Daily. I’ll always be looking for the next McCarthy project when I can.
McCarthy’s failures can be just as intriguing as his successes. The Cobbler is just such an astounding idea that it’s hard to imagine anyone thinking it would work out, with Adam Sandler as a magic shoe-maker. However, this same pessimistic mentality probably prevailed when McCarthy was trying to raise money for The Station Agent. His indie successes proved that he could take any jumble of strange characters and turn it into a functional movie. Maybe that hubris, well-earned along with his contributions to the Oscar-nominated Up script, finally caught up with 2014’s The Cobbler. I would pay good money to one day watch that un-aired footage of the original Thrones pilot, the one the producers themselves acknowledged to be deeply troubled. After retooling the show and cast, bringing in Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke, McCarthy departed, though is credited for helping to secure Dinklage’s involvement, and it’s impossible to think of the zeitgeist-defining excellence of the HBO series with anyone else playing the iconic role of Tyrion Lannister.
Re-evaluating The Station Agent twenty years hence, its many charms are still abundant and I appreciated how gentle and relaxed everything felt. When indie movies deal with heavy amounts of quirk and oddities, it can often be heavy-handed and abrasive, never letting the audience forget for a second just how special and strange and different the movie must be (here comes 2024’s look at Napoleon Dynamite). McCarthy’s movie almost feels like a writing exercise where he plucked three very different characters out of a hat and challenged himself to build a grounded movie built upon their unexpected friendships. It’s a movie confident to just let the characters speak for themselves. It’s more a slice-of-life glimpse at people who feel far more real than most Sundance indies built upon oddballs and quirk. I would slightly lower the grade from an A to an A minus simply because of the Olivia character. Clarkson is great but her role feels undeveloped, somewhat redundant, and a little sloppy. Still, the enjoyable performances, the observational detail, and the simple pleasures of a story well told with characters you genuinely care about are what shines through even twenty years later.
Author’s note: In my original review, I cite having interviewed Michelle Williams (yes, surprise, she plays the small-town librarian). While I was my college newspaper’s film critic from January 2002 to May 2004, I did have the opportunity to interview several actors and directors through phone cattle calls with other collegiate journalists. These names include Angelina Jolie (Tomb Raider 2), Billy Bob Thornton (Bad Santa), Kevin Smith (Jersey Girl), and the late Paul Walker (Timeline). However, my school schedule was not accommodating for the Williams interview, so I had my dormitory neighbor and friend Tim Knopp call in and ask my question. It wasn’t me. I’m coming clean after twenty years, folks. I also recall having him quote a line her character says in The Station Agent, saying Fin had “a nice chin,” and being told that she was baffled and blanking on the reference. I’m sorry, eventual multi-Oscar nominee Michelle Williams, for trying to be clever.
Re-View Grade: A-
Share this:
No One Will Save You (2023)
Brian Duffield has been an industry screenwriting phenom for years, though it took too many years for his ribald, clever, and high-concept stories to eventually find their way as finished films, or at least finished versions of his once ribald, clever, and high-concept stories. I fell in love with him as a storyteller with 2017’s The Babysitter, and that love matured into admiration and appreciation with 2020’s Spontaneous, his directorial debut, also my top movie of that year. As hyper verbal and bracing and layered as that stylish movie with major attitude was, and brilliantly so, his follow-up is a sprint in the other direction. No One Will Save You (I keep wanting to type You Will Not Survive This as its title) is a contained thriller with hardly a line of spoken dialogue as we follow Brynn (Kaitlin Dever) battle aliens. Being a nearly dialogue-free experience puts much on the immersive visual experience, and I don’t know if the movie fully sustains this, but the combined effort is solid and sneaky fun.
This is a throwback to the early 1990s invasion thriller, the heyday of The X-Files and Fire in the Sky when the little gray guys with the big black eyes became our default model for aliens. There’s an easy dread to compile when it comes to a powerful and otherworldly entity that has decided to target you, a lowly human. Duffield is able to engineer plenty of anxious moments and jump scares, allowing the scares to luxuriate by building suspense as well as the adrenaline bursts of sudden surprise (a moment with “toes” made me squirm). He makes a key creative decision early to showcase his aliens. Usually these kinds of movies are more guarded about their monsters, confining them to the shadows or at least relying upon the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks before pulling back and finally revealing their true form. There’s a reason that so many filmmakers follow this model, and it’s because the final reveal usually pales in comparison to whatever unseen horror the imagination can fathom. The slender creatures do make for creepy silhouettes, and there are three or four different versions of the aliens and this allows for some additional fun design discovery. A long-limbed one reminded me of a praying mantis. The chattering sound design and ominous lighting do a lot of atmospheric heavy lifting to elevate the mood. If you’re looking for a generally well-executed home invasion thriller with some gasp-inducing moments, No One Will Save You fulfills its promise. There’s a pleasing clarity to the plot mechanics, even if you are wondering why this woman doesn’t abandon her house.
There isn’t much that needs explaining, which streamlines its 90 minutes into a series of reactive responses to the home invasion, with some clues and inferences throughout for us to start to piece together why our heroine is so troubled and seems so isolated by her small-town community. It makes for a visceral, visual method of storytelling but it also limits how much information and depth we are going to encounter. Our main character is still suffused by her own guilt and lasting trauma from her past, and as the movies seem to magically allow, she’s going to be given an external struggle that might just allow her to finally exorcise and resolve a dicey internal struggle. The alien encounters don’t seem to give us better insight into who our protagonist used to be, who she is now, and the misplaced perception of the townspeople. She’s retreated inward. She’s resourceful. She uses what she has to better guard from further close encounters, but all she has are ordinary items found in an old farmhouse, not high-powered weapons and booby traps. She’s just one frightened young woman in an old house trying to do her best. By holding back, we’re only given so much with this character, so she can feel somewhat underwritten and kept archetypal, underpinned by her past mistakes and her current otherworldly dilemmas. I just don’t know if there’s enough going on with this character even with the repeated alien visitation.
Dever (Booksmart) is one of our best young actresses and an excellent choice to anchor our drama. Without the safety of words, much is required from her, and Dever provides a compelling presence even when I feel like the character is hitting her limits. Carrying an entire movie and doing so much with non-verbal acting techniques can be a weighty ask, but Dever relishes the challenge, and through her capable performance we are given a hero worth rooting for.
The movie does an acceptable job of keeping us, and her, relatively in the dark while still not making the sides too overwhelming. How can one Earth girl combat a species with such advanced technology, size, and power? Well, we don’t fully know what they want, and these little green men are still made of fleshy stuff and can still be hurt and killed like any other fleshy goo-filled life form. They may be advanced but they can still get killed, and that at least gives our heroine a chance that she shouldn’t have. The aliens’ plan is generally unknowable, and just trying to piece together a fuller picture of who they are, the different species and forms, and what their purpose might be for the town is plenty of work for the rest of us that don’t speak the space language. It’s enough of a reasonable learning curve to fill out a short movie while keeping focus on the task at hand, whether it’s hiding under the bed, running around the house, or simply trying to figure out whether going into town for help is worth the effort. I wish there was a little more deliberation on her part about whether the aliens might be preferable to her neighbors. The ending isn’t exactly ambiguous but reminds me a little of 2019’s Midsommar, where letting go of one’s personal hang ups might not be the catharsis of enlightenment it may appear to be.
No One Will Save You is a throwback sci-fi thriller that speaks to the human vulnerabilities we can all feel, being helpless against overwhelming powers, be they alien or our own guilt. It’s a fun thriller with some well-wrought sequences of suspense and jump scares. I don’t know if there’s more happening beyond the visceral appeal of the experience. The character and the situation don’t provide much in the way of larger depth and analysis, and more than a few will likely be able to guess her tragic back-story, though that’s also a credit to Duffield providing the key pieces. As a change of pace, No One Will Save You proves that Duffield is an entertaining and capable storyteller no matter what restrictions he holds himself to. I just prefer my Brain Duffield stories without any restrictions because we only have one Brian Duffield.
Nate’s Grade: B
nathanzoebl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.