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3/25/2023 0 Comments 65 When the trailer for 65 - the new film from A Quiet Place scribes Scott Beck & Bryan Woods - first released, it caused a brief-but-exuberant stir on social media over its delectably high-concept premise… a sci-fi action-thriller, featuring Adam Driver as an astronaut whose ship somehow travels back through time and crash-lands on Earth circa the Cretaceous period. In truth, the setup didn’t promise much more than a cheesy marriage of dinosaurs and laser guns and, it turns out, was misinterpreted anyway… Driver’s lead character, Mills, isn’t an astronaut at all; but rather an alien humanoid who chances upon a planet that, as far as he’s concerned, is simply a random rock crawling with overgrown lizards.
It’s a rather crucial distinction, as it wipes out nearly all of the screenplay’s presumed emotional underpinnings. But then the film is almost startlingly basic in its execution. Mills, we learn, is a pilot who’s been accepting lengthier and lengthier space gigs in order to cover his ailing daughter’s medical expenses back on, uh… *checks notes*… “Somaris.” Caught in an asteroid shower, his damaged ship ends up in a smoking crater on Earth - the cryo-pods containing the passengers scattered like dandelion seeds. There’s only one other survivor… a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt, who’s like Hailee Steinfeld’s JV understudy), whose foreign tongue makes even rudimentary communication a challenge. She and Mills need to journey from point A to point B in order to reach a still-functional escape shuttle. They encounter some dinosaurs along the way. And that’s basically the entire movie - all 88 minutes worth. Beck & Woods rightfully earned plaudits for their ingenious Quiet Place concept, but their only prior filmmaking credit of note was the humdrum horror pic Haunt. Clearly no studio was going to hand them a Jurassic World-sized budget to make this film, yet they lack the sort of instinctive, B-movie ingenuity that’s needed to compensate. There are moments that stand out - such as when Mills tangles with a hostile dino in a cave, and the camera pans over to a holographic projection of the fight on his scanner - but these are few and far between. How Beck & Woods managed to rope Driver into starring is anyone’s guess - it’s the weirdest marriage between A-list star and disposable B-movie dreck since Michael Fassbender appeared in Assassin’s Creed. Driver and Greenblatt aren’t bad together, but the timing is terrible - coming directly on the heels of The Last of Us, their surrogate father/daughter bond feels deeply lacking. The emotional impact is comparatively vacant. All of this is quite disappointing. 65 is exactly the sort of picture we need more of in theaters - a digestible serving of mid-budget (and mid-ambition) genre innovation; creativity divorced - refreshingly - from the repressive binds of IP. But this is a plot hook in search of a movie - its narrative dimensions are barely even sketched in. The climax (involving a pair of T-Rexes - though the film in general seems to play fast and loose with paleontology) does have a certain lumbering pulp grandeur… but Beck & Woods neglect to pursue even the most obvious and nominal of narrative payoffs (such as Mills leaving behind alien tech that’s unearthed millions of years later). The film’s tagline (reiterated in the opening titles) declares “65 millions years ago, prehistoric Earth had a visitor.” Frankly, given the way the movie unfolds, you might be inclined to shrug and respond “Big deal.”
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3/19/2023 0 Comments scream Vi Chances are, if you’re a horror fan who happened to be a teenager in 1996, the Wes Craven-directed meta-slasher Scream represented a singular cinematic high. The decade, up to that point, had not been particularly kind to the genre; most of its output was still running on the raggedy leftover fumes of the 80s (it was an era of distinctly oddball offerings such as The Lawnmower Man and Dr. Giggles). Scream was the game-changer. Sexy, scary, and suspenseful - but also thumbtack-sharp and self-aware - it shrewdly deconstructed the genre, then reassembled it into something that felt thrillingly elevated and essential. In fact, when Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson gamely attempted to rekindle the franchise with 2011’s Scream 4, the film’s tepid box office was strangely comforting, in a way - it seemed to confirm that Scream truly meant something to that subsect of late stage Gen-Xers and fledgling millennials who were in high school in the mid-90s, and no one else. Then… something funny happened. Another decade passed, and the franchise was rebooted (or “requeled,” to be more accurate) in the very capable hands of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (part of the filmmaking collective known as Radio Silence). Scream 5 (or simply Scream, as it was officially titled) was a genuine hit… resulting in follow-up Scream VI being hustled into theaters a mere 14 months later, to even bigger box office numbers. Suddenly the original fans were a lot like the iconic legacy characters (Neve Campbell’s Sidney, Courteney Cox’s Gale, and David Arquette’s Dewey), caught in a tenuous alliance with the next generation of would-be Ghostface-fodder (most of whom were barely even alive when the first Scream came out) who’d taken center stage. The fact that Gen-Z had effectively appropriated the series right out from under us felt like the biggest meta-stroke to date. Scream VI picks up one year later and shifts the action to New York City, where Tara (Jenna Ortega) is attending Blackmore University (a savvy mirroring of Scream 2’s college setting) alongside twins Chad and Mindy (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown). Big sister Sam (Melissa Barrera), meanwhile, is busy being overprotective, trying to iron out her not inconsiderable personal shit through therapy, and dealing with the fallout of social media unleashing a hate mob that venomously branded her the true culprit behind the latest round of Woodsboro slayings. Before long a new Ghostface is on the loose (as tends to happen in these movies) and the body count starts to escalate precipitously (Samara Weaving - who starred in Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s breakout hit Ready or Not - proves a welcome addition to Scream lore in yet another cunningly subversive opening). Scream VI does show the increased strain of trying to keep the meta-commentary fresh and relevant (Mindy’s self-referential monologuing isn’t that different from the last film, which was already mostly just articulating/reiterating Scream 4’s basic approach to begin with) - but, if we’re being honest, this has always just been the candy sprinkled on top. The Scream films (with the exception of Scream 3, which remains the franchise’s only semi-stumble) endure for a simple reason - because they’re damn fun and they’re damn good slashers. This latest iteration has its issues - the Big Apple (aside from an ingeniously staged and suspenseful subway sequence) isn’t memorably utilized, the climax is janky, some of the casting falls flat (Josh Segarra, as Sam’s new love interest, has a vibe that could best be described as… aggressively peculiar) - but the film maintains the franchise’s newfound momentum. The execution - as it were - still cuts deep where it counts. Much of this has to do with the quality of the characters. With Dewey no longer an active piece on the board (sadly), and Sidney (still much revered but surprisingly not-all-that-missed) rendered MIA following Paramount’s reported lowballing of Neve Campbell, it’s up to Gale to shoulder the legacy side of things - with a welcome assist from Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby, who turns up very much still-alive, and an FBI agent to boot. Both do their part (“You know you’re like the tenth guy to try this, right? It never works out for the dipshit in the mask”), but the series has now firmly shifted onto Barrera and Ortega’s shoulders and the duo is more than up to the challenge (ably complemented by Gooding and Brown, who have great fraternal chemistry as the other half of the self-proclaimed “core four”). Barrera in particular feels like a star; she’s like Sidney with a pricklier edge and deeper emotional scarring (on the downside, the notion of Sam having a murderous inner darkness via the “Loomis gene” is something the filmmakers love to tease and play around with, even though it’s clear they have no desire to really go there in any meaningful sense). As mentioned, the film labors less-than-gracefully through its third act revelations… but short of Willa Fitzgerald and Carlson Young turning up as the disgruntled stars of a Stab TV series that got relentlessly mocked on-line, there are only so many seamlessly clever meta-payoffs one can realistically expect. Scream VI pushes the bloodletting to new heights of brutality, but it’s just as fleet and fun as its predecessors (Mindy and Kirby, comparing horror buff credentials, agree that Psycho II is underrated and somewhat dubiously put the Candyman reboot on par with the original). Few franchises - horror or otherwise - have maintained this level of consistency over a half-dozen entries. As the roman numerals creep up, creative erosion tends to quicken. But in the case of Ghostface, it still feels like he’s just getting started.
Creed III, for better or for worse, is the entry that officially cuts the apron strings in regards to the Rocky franchise. The decision’s underlying logic was sound. The original Creed rose unexpectedly from the dying embers of a series that managed to pull off the minor triumph of Rocky Balboa back in 2006, but otherwise appeared to have well and truly run its course. The Ryan Coogler-directed film was, in a lot of ways, a miracle of tone and execution… casting Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) in the role of trainer and mentor to up-and-coming fighter Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), the illegitimate son of his onetime nemesis-turned-BFF Apollo Creed. It’s a great movie, though its follow-up Creed II - as functional and entertaining a sequel as it is - had a much stickier time balancing the two characters. At the end of the film, Rocky remarked “It’s your time now,” and it genuinely felt as if the torch had been passed. Sly and his most iconic creation had earned a well-deserved rest.
Creed III sees Adonis on top of the world, having retired from boxing as the undisputed heavyweight champion and segueing into a successful career as a promoter (insert your own George Washington Duke joke here). One of the more startling aspects of the Rocky series is that there hasn’t actually been a truly great antagonist since Dolph Lundgren’s Soviet superfighter Ivan Drago in Rocky IV - Rocky Balboa’s Mason “The Line” Dixon and Creed’s Pretty Ricky Conlan were simply a means to an end plot-wise, while Creed II’s Viktor Drago was barely even a character at all (your mileage re: Rocky V’s Tommy Gunn may vary, but the climactic fight was a letdown). The moment Jonathan Majors sets foot on-screen, there’s a different energy - his presence is undeniable. He plays “Diamond” Damian Anderson, once a fighter of incredible promise who was both a friend and big brother to Adonis from their days in a group home, but lost everything when he landed in prison. Adonis invites Damian to train in his gym and is clearly blinded by his desire to do right by him for reasons that aren’t immediately clear - even as everyone around him, including trainer Little Duke (Wood Harris) and wife Bianca (the ever-terrific Tessa Thompson), can see that Damian spent two decades behind bars turning himself into a powder keg of anger and hate. He and Adonis are clearly headed for a reckoning that Adonis can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge. Creed III, by every measure, should be an absolute knockout… so why on earth isn’t this movie better than it actually is? It doesn’t help that our feelings towards Damian remain ambivalent, because, frankly, the film itself is ambivalent towards him - it can’t seem to decide whether he’s a true villain, or a tragic figure redeemable in some form… and such vacillation proves costly. Some have likened the plot to Cape Fear, and it’s a thrilling notion… but in truth, that’s precisely what’s missing - a sense of genuine menace, a feeling that Adonis is in uncharted territory because he’s facing an opponent who’ll cross any line to get what he wants. Damian should be scary - and in Majors, we have an actor more than equipped to deliver… but the movie blinks; it remains distressingly gun-shy. There’s a larger issue here, however… one that Creed managed to elegantly sidestep like a fleet-of-foot fighter, but which haunted Creed II, and now Creed III as well. The brilliance of the Rocky sequels - and why their popularity continues to endure - is that Stallone was essentially making larger-than-life Saturday morning cartoons… but cartoons whose sense of the dramatic were as gloriously juiced as Rocky’s absurdly jacked physique (as a writer, Stallone has never gotten enough credit for his grasp of structural craft). The Creed films can’t help but crib from what came before (Creed III is mostly an amalgam of Rocky II & III), but with their more grounded approach, the key moments are less impactful - less heightened, less visceral - and too often register as pale facsimiles. This is not a franchise that traffics effectively in nuance - it’s designed to paint in big, bold, splashy colors (compare Adonis’s functional but largely interchangeable training montages to the juxtaposition between Rocky’s back-to-basics Siberian approach and Drago’s state-of-the-art lab regimen in part IV). The motivation for Adonis even agreeing to the climactic title bout is strangely lacking in narrative heat. Star Michael B. Jordan - as part, perhaps, of the Creed franchise’s newly asserted independence - elected to seize the directing reins himself, and he proves quite capable behind the camera. The final fight - set in Dodger Stadium - is staged with great technical proficiency (particularly in IMAX, which captures every square inch of Adonis and Damian’s canvas of sweat-speckled musculature)… but there’s also no particular rhythm or story or strategy to what’s unfolding on-screen (what are Damian’s perceived weaknesses and how has Adonis retooled himself as a fighter coming out of retirement are questions one might very well ask… and receive no particular answer to). The end result inspires curiously - and disappointingly - muted emotions. Adonis is ironically showcased in the ubiquitous promo for AMC theaters, as Nicole Kidman waxes philosophic about how “Our heroes feel like the best part of us… and stories feel perfect and powerful.” That’s a fitting description of the Rocky films. I wish it were a little more applicable to the Creed sequels. |
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