Review: Wicked For Good

Prequels can take two paths. In one, they fit relatively seamlessly with what lies ahead - events often build to a finale that's just a rehash of the next film's opening. In the other, all bets are off; you might get a bunch of superficial similarities, but the goal isn't just to provide backstory, it's to recontexualise what we think we know. Even by the end of the first Wicked it was clear we were wandering far from the yellow brick road, and the second half of the story just keeps on going.

When we last left Oz, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) had decided to embrace the whole "Wicked Witch of the West" thing. Enough time has passed (the official version is five years, but the film keeps it vague) that she's now an official symbol of terror in the Emerald City, whereas former bestie Glinda (Ariana Grande) is now Glinda the Good... they're working on the witch side of things, as she still displays no magical abilities.

Behind the scenes, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) is pulling the strings, while the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is the slightly more well-meaning front man. Talking animals are fleeing the new repressive regime, while Munchkins are next in line. Elphaba's sister Nessarose (Marrisa Bode) is now governor of Munchkinland, and everyone else is trapped in a web of doomed relationships, which are as follows (deep breath) - 

Nessarose loves munchkin Boq (Ethan Slater), who loves Glinda, who loves former classmate turned Captain of the Guard Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who is hunting Elphaba because he secretly loves her, and she loves... well, him, which would set her up for a happy ending if we didn't already know where things were heading. 

As musicals go, this is good but not great. There's no real standout song or dance sequence here, and by its very nature the story doesn't build to a big musical climax. It's almost easy to forget this is a musical for long stretches, as the plot becomes too complex and the storytelling too brisk for there to be time to stop everything for a musical number to clarify things. 

Dramatically, this makes up for it by cranking up the stakes. The talking animal subplot comes up just enough to make it clear that things are rotten in Oz; the munchkin repression (Nessarose doesn't want Boq to leave her, so she locks down Munchkinland) only makes things worse. When an attempt to lure out Elphaba brings a familiar Kansas house crashing down, it's clear things are going to change. But which way?

Grande and Erivo are pretty much carrying this, and they're easily the strongest elements here (aside from the set design, which remains gorgeous). Both wring every drop of emotion out of characters drawn in broad strokes, justifying the film's reliance on sentiment to sell a drama where much of the late-stage storytelling is about moving characters into their familiar settings. 

Even then, some of that storytelling is a bit too pat. If you ever wanted origins for The Scarecrow and The Tin Man beyond "Oz is full of weird stuff", you'll find them here, though they mostly just make Oz feel like it only contains maybe half a dozen actual people. The flying monkeys get redeemed too, which is certainly a choice for one of movie's more iconic threats.

But the fact this is actually about something rather than simply an excuse to play with some much-loved toys carries it over the line. The politics have their heart in the right place, and if a few of the classic characters are done dirty - Tin Man fans may not look kindly on the revisionism, though the Scarecrow definitely levels up - for the most part the new angles revealed here make things more interesting. 

Though if you end up watching this before you see The Wizard of Oz - something that it's now and forever possible for people to do - you're going to have a pretty wild ride.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: The Running Man

Edgar Wright's adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Running Man presents audiences with a grim future in which deadly game shows are seen by many as the only path out of poverty. Back in the 1970s, it was bleak satire; today, it's a less compelling version of The Amazing Race. Say what you like about the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger version (which gets a few nods here), but it did a bang-up job of predicting the future of television. Well, aside from the lengthy dance routines.

Working stiff Ben Richards (Glenn Powell) is the angriest man in the crapsack future USA. Whether he's angry because he keeps getting fired for trying to do the right thing, or he keeps getting fired because he's angry, who can tell; all he knows is, he needs money for medicine for his baby. Some things never change, at least not in Hollywood thrillers.

Even his attempt to audition for a low-risk game show makes him angry, which attracts the attention of The Running Man producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). Angry is what his show needs, mostly because the whole thing is an exercise in riling the audience up; Richards gets fast-tracked into a jumpsuit and away we go.

Unlike the Schwarzenegger version, which took place in a confined stretch of trashed city blocks, here the whole USA is Richard's hiding place, with a ticking clock that runs for 30 days. It doesn't really make a lot of sense as a television show; much of the appeal seems to be for regular folks out on the street who can cash in by spotting the contestants. But it's implied the whole thing is just a barely coherent distraction where the real goal is to get people cheering the execution of various cliched undesirables.

Once Richards is on the run the film takes on an episodic feel, as he goes from city to city finding himself in new scenarios, from a flophouse attack to hiding out with various rebel factions who see his growing fame as a way to get the public on side. The hunters here are just generic military goons (no Sub Zero here) aside from their masked leader (Lee Pace) - no catchphrases or one-liners here, though they do seem to like giving their weapons names. 

Richards himself is much more of a regular guy than in the previous film, so most of the action scenes are more about escaping than colourful kills. The pace is where Wright really succeeds here; the film moves fast enough to keep you leaning in, rushing past points where the story or setting feel just a little flimsy.

Powell himself seems to take a little time settling into the role - or it's just that all his big angry moments are early on, and once he's running he settles down and focuses on dealing with a string of tight situations. He gets enough good moments to come off well, but like everything else here he's a bit all over the place.

One problem is that Wright keeps dropping in moments designed to remind us that we can't trust what we're seeing. Richards has brief (violent) fantasies that are revealed to have never happened; at one point he has a lengthy stress dream which may or may not have taken place for real. Plus it's made clear from the start that the Network can fake any footage; how can we believe anything we see on a screen really happened?

So while this has effective scenes, the overall feeling is of a film that's a little too unstable to buy into. It's not about a world where we don't know what's real - Richards is definitely on the run - but the specifics remain a little too blurry, especially as his character's arc is more about staggering from one desperate scene to another rather than any kind of plan to succeed.

No spoilers, but the ending(s) take this to a whole new level, providing multiple scenarios that pummel any real tension or triumph out of proceedings. Whether studio meddling required a change from the novel's conclusion (which this seems firmly heading towards), or Wright wanted to reflect our current conspiracy-heavy culture, it doesn't really matter.

This isn't a failure, but it's not going to replace the original movie either. Fans of the novel will appreciate its largely faithful approach; fans of the earlier film will enjoy the occasional in-joke. As for fans of futuristic thrills, they'll find plenty to enjoy here - even if this Running Man sometimes runs out of breath.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Now You See Me: Now You Don't

The idea of a crack team of stage magicians using their abilities to right wrongs and take down Bond-level bad guys is... look, you either buy in or you don't. This long-delayed third installment in the Now You See Me series does pretty much everything right, and the result is exactly what you'd expect: a very silly movie. You have been warned.

It's been ten years since global magic sensation - these movies take place in a parallel dimension where stage magic really is as cool as Chris Angel: Mindfreak thinks it is - The Four Horsemen performed on stage, so of course rumours of a hard-to-find comeback gig bring fans out of the wood work. As usual, the Horsemen do their standard trick of using magic to right wrongs (bad news for an embezzling finance bro), but there's a twist: these aren't the Horesemen you were expecting.

Charlie (Justice Smith), June (Ariana Greenblatt) and Bosco (Dominic Sessa) are young magicians who figured using the OG Horsemen's images was fair enough. Enter J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), original leader of the Four Horsemen, who is less than impressed at these kids ripping off his act but a magic card told him he needs them to take down a bad guy so all good.

The bad guy is evil South African diamond miner Veronika Vanderberg (Rosalind Pike), who launders money for arms dealers and drug lords via selling overpriced diamonds and holding fancy events. The new teams' attempt to steal her family's Hope Diamond on a rare trip outside of its high security vault proves to be more difficult than they thought. Luckily the rest of the Horsemen - Merritt (Woody Harrelson), Jack (Dave Franco) and Henley (Isla Fisher) also received magic cards so they're on the scene as surprise backup.

From there the movie is pretty much just a bunch of illusions that mostly work and a couple of surprise reveals that again, mostly work. The best thing you can say about the story is that it does a great job of giving everyone enough screentime to make their characters feel essential, while jumping from set piece to set piece that, again, gives everyone enough to do to make them feel essential. Remember how The Fast & The Furious movies got a lot better once they started bringing all the old characters back? Same here.

The secret to this franchise's success - aside from finding a lot of actors who can come across as likeable, and also Jesse Eisenberg - is that it took a pair of genres that relied on outsmarting the audience (that'd be heist movies and movies about magic tricks) and made them as stupid as possible. Not always a bad thing! Much like magic itself, all the pleasures here are surface level: the second you start thinking about anything you're seeing, you've ruined it for yourself.

The result is a hangout movie best experienced as a chance to watch a group of good-looking airheads run around trading quips while everything around them is either glamourous, fake or a chance to make cops and security guards look silly. Not the best time you'll have in a cinema; not the worst time either.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Predator: Badlands

A big part of the reviewing business is accurately identifying what it is you're reviewing. It's not much good attacking a film for being a boring action movie when it is, in fact, a romantic comedy. And sometimes the identifying part of the review is the whole point - when, for example, a franchise known for being one thing takes a turn towards something else entirely.

Stymied by the demands of turning a one-off story into a franchise, the Predator movies have largely drifted in and out of focus over the years. Aside from the car crash that was The Predator, none of them have been outright bad (we're only talking about solo Predator movies here; enter at your own risk the world of the Aliens crossovers), but none of them have really been solid enough to set a firm path for the series to walk.

The recent direct-to-streaming (but was really good enough for cinemas) Prey made things work by getting back to the basics: badass in regular trouble, then a Predator arrives and the real trouble begins. Predator: Badlands - directed by Dan Trachenberg after helming Prey and the animated Killer of Killers - takes things in a very different direction. So much so that it's a far question to ask: is this really a Predator movie?

Well, it definitely features Predators, if that's what you're asking. After a bunch of family feud backstory - turns out our lead Dek (New Zealand actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the runt of the litter, which is not a good thing to be in Predator (or as they prefer to be known, Yautja) society - Dek is off to Genna, aka "The Death Planet" to prove his worthiness by killing the most deadly creature in the galaxy, the Kalisk.

Also after the Kalisk is Weyland-Yutani, the evil corporation from the Alien movies. That explains why, after a lengthy stretch of struggling to survive on a planet where everything is trying to kill him in entertainingly inventive ways, Dek finds the top half of Thia (Elle Fanning), a synthetic damaged and left behind after a WY attempt to capture a Kalisk.

She says she can help him find and defeat it if he takes her with him. He disdains co-operation - but if she's merely a tool, then okay. Is this the start of a beautiful friendship? There's a lot of competing agendas standing in the way of any kind of bonding, and that's before Thia's much more committed to the mission sister Tessa (Fanning) shows up with an army of identical synthetics.

This works very hard - and mostly succeeds - to hide the fact that this is very much a PG-Disney coming-of-age movie. The WY forces are 100% robots (WY has a long history of using them), which means a lot of "killing" where no people get hurt. The plot is very much about the importance of working together and the value of found family over those violent losers you were born (or made) with. Is there a cute animal sidekick? Sadly yes, though they do play a useful part in the plot (and the killing).

Judged on its own merits, this is a highly entertaining romp. Fanning is a perfect foil as the chirpy Thia, Dek is a classic earnest teen (whose youthful Yautja features are surprisingly expressive), and their story is a legitimate "fun for the whole family" (well, maybe not little kids) adventure. There's lots of exciting action and thrilling danger that never gets too scary because it's almost all plants and robots. But is it a Predator movie?

Fans of old school Yautja action - skinning people alive, ripping out their skull and spinal column, slaughtering dozens of heavily armed men (as opposed to robots) at a time - will notice a distinct lack of that kind of thing here. It's a good film, but the term "Disney Predator" is a pretty accurate description of what this is, no matter how well it plays up all the (plentiful) action, (limited) violence and (non-existent) gore it can get away with under that heading. 

The obvious path for Predator sequels would have been a string of movies that seem like they're going to be something else entirely (workplace drama, family comedy) only to have a Predator turn up out of nowhere at the end of act one and start hunting people. But they couldn't market that kind of movie as a Predator movie without spoiling the surprise, and so instead we've had decades of films striking out in different directions trying to find a way forward.

This probably isn't going to be the long-sought-after new direction. A big part of why Predator: Badlands works is that it's running against what you'd expect to get from a Predator film, but it never just ignores the franchise's violent past. The whole "found family" thing wouldn't hit as hard if we hadn't seen a bunch of films showing us just how brutal and murderous Yautja are.

The result is yet another Predator movie that tonally doesn't have much to do with what came before. As such, it brings honour to the franchise. 

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Bugonia

Bugonia is a film about two people who have two extremely different views of the world - so much so that only one of them can be right. Fortunately, one of them is a raving nutcase with a worldview he seems to have pulled from the internet's most insane depths. Unfortunately, he's also the one with a gun.

Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his trusting cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) live on a run down farm in the shadow of a tragic incident that left Teddy's mother (Alcia Silverstone) in a vegetative state. It's understandable that he'd want revenge on the corporation responsible, but what he's planning isn't about revenge: he's trying to save the planet from aliens sent here to doom us all.

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high flying executive at a large corporation. She's a polished operator, well versed in corporate speak: her current push is to encourage employees to leave on time, unless they still have work to do, in which case they should get their work done but also feel free to leave on time just so long as their work is getting done. You know the type.

It's not enough for Teddy and Don to kidnap her and tie her up in their basement; they also shave her head and smear her with antihistamine cream because she's an alien (an Andromedan, to be specific) and her hair is how she communicates with the mothership that'll be arriving in a few days during a lunar eclipse. The clock is ticking if Teddy wants to persuade her to take him with her so he can negotiate for the survival of the human race- or just demand they leave Earth alone.

Much of what follows is a back-and-forth between the two as he explains his conspiratorial world view and she tries to lead him to a place where he lets her go. Both of them seem roughly in agreement that the world is in trouble environmentally: he blames the aliens, she suggests humanity might be responsible all on its own but hey, at least her corporation is trying its best and they could try even better if he let her go.

And meanwhile a famous executive is missing so there's a bit of a search going on, which has Casey (Stavros Halkias), a local cop and also Teddy's former babysitter (which seems to be a story with a bit more to it than we're getting) sniffing around. Is Don fully on board with all this? And what's the deal with the bees?

This adaptation of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet largely rests on the performances of its two leads - well, that and director Yorgos Lanthimos' sense of the absurd - and Stone and Plemons are in excellent form. They both find the humanity in characters that are often little more than debating points, giving the offbeat mix of environmental concern and unhinged conspiracy some much-needed grounding.

As for that debate, the back and forth is often entertaining, and there's just enough going on outside of it to keep this from feeling like a filmed play. The substance of the debate isn't really connected to the real world - especially when we get the occasional hint that maybe Teddy might somehow be onto something - but again, it mostly works dramatically as a power struggle rather than a real attempt to discuss anything authentic.

Which becomes a real problem towards the end, when this takes a big swing dramatically that it honestly hasn't earned. The result is a conclusion that's easily the most powerful and memorable part of the film - it just doesn't feel like it develops emotionally from anything that came before no matter how many clues were scattered around.

The view of humanity here isn't exactly rosy, and despite Teddy's wacky views this is not much of a comedy either. He's put someone in peril in an attempt to deal with his own pain and loss, and the film respects that; while the tone occasionally swerves towards the manic, anyone after something that will lift their mood - or just reflect a generally positive take on human existence - may want to look elsewhere.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

There are two possible audiences for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and they want very different things from this biopic. As befits the story of the making of Springsteen's classic album Nebraska, one audience wants a deep dive into the details, a case of history brought to life - or at least, heavily referenced. The other wants a movie about who Bruce Springsteen is, a character study that brings the man to life instead. The big problem here is that it tries to do both.

At first it seems like this often moody and introspective film has sidestepped one of biopics usual potholes. Rather than covering the entire sweep of his life, Springsteen - here played by Jeremy Allen White - is just recording Nebraska while struggling with undiagnosed depression. So by focusing in on the small details of one of his biggest artistic triumphs (he's also recording tracks like 'Born in the USA' at the same time), we get the big picture? 

Well, no. Thanks to a powerhouse performance from White, Springsteen is a compelling figure throughout, getting at emotional truths even when it's obvious the film is fudging details. And the parts where the story is happy to just present elements without explanation - Springsteen, despite being a massive star, seems to like blowing off steam by playing guitar with a bar band in a local dive - we rapidly get a sense of what kind of man he is.

But then there's a bunch of reductive flashbacks to his childhood where his boozy dad (Stephen Graham) is bad news but means well, turning a bunch of Springsteen songs into mysteries to be solved (who knew or cared that there was a literal 'mansion on the hill' that inspired the song of the same title). At least his doomed relationship with local single mother Faye (Odessa Young) has the benefit of not being used as direct inspiration for some well-known song.

Unfortunately, despite decent chemistry between the characters, pretty much every scene with Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) is a leaden clunk of exposition, where everyone is utterly supportive of Springsteen while being in theory a little worried about the massively non-commercial direction his new album is taking. 

These scenes alternate between infodump speeches - Landau's wife (Grace Gummer) has a hilariously thankless role as the silent sounding board for his semi-regular updates on what stage the plot is currently up to - and the kind of "we're doing this The Boss' way or not at all!" confrontations that sound like Landau (who's still Springsteen's manager) had his lawyers go over the script to make sure he was presented in exactly the right light. 

And yet, the scenes where Springsteen tries to record 4-track demos in his bedroom for what would become Nebraska, and then decides he wants to put the demos out despite the sound being sub-par - re-recording them only made them worse in his opinion - are amongst the films best, simply by setting up a real problem and showing how it was solved.

If this could have somehow left out the history (do we really need to know 'Cover Me' was originally intended for Donna Summer?) and just focused solely on how someone puts together a record as memorable as Nebraska, it might have been something special. At least the music - of which there is plenty - is always ready to lift things up

Especially when The Boss is just chilling at home listening to Suicide's first album, which here seems to be nothing more than a bunch of inhuman screaming.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Tron: Ares

The big gimmick with the latest Tron movie is that it takes the various glowing computer-generated - as in, creations from inside the computers inside the movie, not just the usual unlikely CGI effects - out into the real world. Which sounds promising, but the results only occasionally impress. That's a problem, as that's pretty much all this has going for itself.

The plot largely revolves around a quest for the "permanence code" a line of computer code never before mentioned but was somehow created during an earlier installment that will enable a computer generated character or object to exist on a permanent basis in the real world.

While it's bad news for the evil Dillinger Corporation that their cool tanks and super-soldiers - most notably Ares (Jared Leto) - crumble to dust and vanish after 29 minutes, it's great for the movie, as this timer provides most of the tension in the action sequences. 

Dillinger - led by CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), with his mother and former CEO Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson) not doing much in the background - can send out Ares and his 2IC Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) on superfast motorbikes that can release knife-like walls of solid light behind them as often as they like, but when the clock counts down the chase is over.

Only they can't even keep on sending Ares out because he's staring to dislike the way they openly call him expendable and don't seem to care that he's constantly dying in the real world. So when he finally does catch up with the Permanence Code - don't worry, there's been a whole plot about that going on as well, only it's amazingly forgettable - in the form of rival company boss Eve Kim (Greta Lee), he's open to offers.

With seemingly every blockbuster aimed at 12 year olds it's easy to forget that Disney is a company that makes movies for children, and Tron: Ares is for the most part a kids movie. Well, the half-baked story is for kids: the glowing visuals and Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is for adults looking to zone out and no drug use is implied let alone required to achieve that effect.

Unfortunately it only rarely hits the heights of the previous (and not really that great either) installment Tron: Legacy, which combined Daft Punk and a lot of inside-the-computer visuals to become a not-so-secret stoner hit. The shift to the real world does allow director Joachim Rønning to create some decent action scenes - and one ominous sequence towards the end does generate some actual awe-slash-fear - but ironically it's all too grounded to really work purely as visual escapism.

Still, that side of things works better than everything else: Leto does fine early on when the only emotion going on with Ares is vague dissatisfaction, but he never brings the character to life beyond that - most of his latter scenes require you to imagine a better actor in the role for them to make any sense. 

The story throws a bunch of new characters in like we've already met them - we haven't, so no need to rewatch the previous film - and aside from Peters' chewing the scenery none of them make any real impact at all. 

Is Jeff Bridges back? Well, yes, but he's firmly in "The Dude as Yoda" mode for his brief appearence. Usually a movie with zero engaging characters would be in trouble; in the world of Tron, the computers have always been the stars.

- Anthony Morris