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 

Review: Play Dirty

The latest in a long line of attempts to bring Richard Stark's armed robber Parker to the big screen, Shane Black's Play Dirty feels a lot closer to the books Donald Westlake (the man behind the Stark pen name) wrote starring bungling thief Dortmunder. Superficially similar on the surface, world's apart in tone.

Parker (Mark Wahlberg) is once again motivated by revenge when the score from a mid-level racetrack heist he was part of is stolen by a fellow thief (Rosa Salazar) who leaves him for dead. By the time he catches up to her, she's spent the money to finance a much bigger heist. To recoup his losses, he deals himself in.

Westlake started writing the much more lightweight Dortmunder novels after he tried writing a Parker novel but it kept slipping into comedy, and that's pretty much what happens here. The story holds together (just), but it's the usual run of heist after heist with a few twists and surprise reveals as things repeatedly turn out to be not what they seemed without ever becoming all that interesting.

The lack of stakes extends to the cast. The crims are all just a little too over-the-top, and even Parker's buddy in crime Grofield (Lakeith Stanfield) - who is a character in the Parker novels - is played too laid back to have any real edge. Only Gretchen Mol, as the wife of one of Parker's dead friends, gives this fluff any real emotion.

Wahlberg is surprisingly not bad as Parker - at times it feels like he's the only one who's actually read a Stark novel. He's given way too much dialogue and way too many chatty / chummy scenes, but when he's given Parker business to do he comes off well (physically he's too small for the role but that's Hollywood). 

It probably helps that he's the only major character who isn't a comedy motormouth, as while everyone else is fine nobody else really stands out (even Stanfield, who's usually a winner, is on autopilot here). Black's had form in the past when it comes to combining comedy with enough edge to give his crime capers real stakes. Here? The whole thing is as weightless as the numerous CGI-heavy stunt scenes.

For fans there's a bit of business that initially seems like a fun bit of Parker continuity (it involves The Outfit), but then turns out to actually be a major part of the plot that's referenced so often you don't need to know Parker history (or have seen Point Blank / Payback) to get the point. 

Play Dirty isn't a failure as such, but it's hard not to feel let down seeing so many quality ingredients add up to something that's middling at best. Parker - under various names - has been fumbled by movie-makers time and time again; much as it'd be great to see a film that really captured the character, it might be time to let him enjoy his retirement.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: One Battle After Another

Just like its characters and the war they're fighting, writer / director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film (loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland) rarely slows down. Despite the title, it's a rare recent action movie that's all about the chase, not the battle: everyone is constantly running to or from conflicts that are over in seconds.

To balance this - there's only so much character and exposition you can get out while you're on the run, though this does better on that front than you might expect - One Battle After Another is a film where what you see is what you get. People are who they say they are, and if they're not then you see the change played out on the screen. The story is about what it's about, with subtext largely kept to the minimal-slash-accidental kind.

So while this is a film that hits hard in the current moment, it is at heart an entertainment. The priority here is to make a satisfying action thriller of the kind that changing priorities and special effects have largely rendered redundant, and in that it succeeds: this feels satisfyingly grounded and weighty throughout, despite the plot containing no hidden depths or startling insights.

As for that plot, in broad strokes: Fifteen or so years ago, terrorist-slash-revolutionary organisation The French 75 roamed the USA, freeing people from immigration camps, setting off bombs in corporate headquarters and robbing banks to pay for it all. Leader Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) combines revolutionary fervour and a straight-up sexual lust for destruction. Good news for her partner and explosive expert "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio); confusing news for military man, one-time captive and now sexually obsessed enemy Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn).

When circumstances required Perfidia to make a choice, she did; in the present Calhoun is Bob Ferguson, a burnt out stoner largely shambling around in a dressing gown who is raising their teen daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) as best he can. The world has moved on, what's past is past - until the now Colonel Lockjaw is offered a chance to join the secret white power organisation that runs America. The only thing that stands in his way is the possibility that Willa might be his daughter. 

Much running around follows as Lockjaw sends all the forces at his command into the Ferguson's home town in a massive crackdown that sends immigrants fleeing under the guidance of Willa's martial arts teacher Sensi Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) while her high school classmates are locked up and interrogated. Willa is in the wind thanks to her family's revolutionary contacts; Bob, who is somewhat past his prime, is left struggling to catch up.

The action, by current standards, is small scale: lots of running, a couple of car chases, a few people get shot. But Anderson wrings every drop of drama and excitement out of these scenes, keeping everything on the move and everybody - even comedy grotesque Lockjaw - firmly human. 

Jumping out of a moving car would be extremely dramatic if it was happening to you; this is a war where one side can bring the full force of the state to bear and the other just has the connections between people to sustain it. By keeping things at the personal level, Anderson makes it very clear whose side he's on.

It would probably help balance the scales a little if Bob could remember the password to contact his former comrades. This isn't quite a comedy but there's a lot of humour here. Killer nuns and ridiculous conspiracy chiefs get laughs, but most of the comedy comes in the form of the well-meaning Bob swinging between anger and a kind of baked exasperation at having to try to resurrect his old life in a world where everything but the bad guys seems to have changed.

It's north of two and a half hours but the whole thing just flies by. Some things might not change and some wars may never be won, but you're a lot harder to hit if you don't stop moving.

- Anthony Morris 

 

 

Review: A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

David (Colin Farrell) needs to get to a wedding. Problem: his car just died. Solution: the world's quirkiest car rental place, where a pair of maybe-sinister, maybe just hamming it up types (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge) rent him a thirty year old car and then go hard on the upsell to get him to add a GPS to the deal. If this doesn't sound all that dramatic to you, bad news: this is pretty much as dramatic as it's going to get.

Eventually he arrives at the wedding, where he meets fellow singleton Sarah (Margot Robbie). They don't hit it off, then they do, kinda. He fumbles the ball, she gives him a regretful look (then sleeps with someone else), and on the drive home his GPS asks him if he wants to go on a "big bold beautiful journey". He says yes and it steers him into a tree.

Just kidding! It instead steers him into a third meet-cute with Sarah, and thanks to her equally old, equally rented car failing to start, he offers her a lift back to the city where they both live. Along the way the GPS keeps directing them to mysterious doors that lead to memorable scenes from their past - some uplifting, others a bit more downbeat - and if you're wondering if they really did die in a car crash or something, rest assured that they did not. They just like walking through portals to the past.

The whole point is a kind of interactive therapy session, where the pair - who both have serious issues with intimacy - go over their past to try and figure out what went wrong and how they can find their way to a place where they can accept that the person sitting across from them is in fact right for them. Fortunately they're played by Farrell and Robbie, otherwise this would be unbearable.

Director Kogonada (After Yang) knows there's not a lot to work with in terms of plot so this goes all-out with the visuals while providing plenty of opportunities for both leads to pump out the star wattage. It's a good-looking movie about two good-looking people flirting away like crazy then pulling away because their broken hearts can't take one more failed romance. What's not to like?

Unfortunately the unreality and schmaltz of it all undercuts the emotion, leaving this as little more than an illustrated version of a 100 minute deep and meaningful conversation that isn't quite as enthralling as the two participants think. 

Hollywood loves to strip "love" down to an imagined essence, a primal force that exists on a plain divorced from the human condition. As anyone who's actually been in love knows, the real world - the background landscape this duo merely drive through - plays a big part in who we connect with and why. 

Here, aside from some family history, we know next to nothing about these characters. Jobs, hobbies, friends, political opinions, they're nowhere to be seen. Without that, this unreal fable carries about as much weight as the balloons that drift away meaningfully at some point for some reason.

That said, sit through to the end of the credits for the shock twist that Sarah voted three times for Trump while David works for a migrant welfare organisation. Just kidding! They're saving that for the sequel.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: The Long Walk

In an economically depressed version of the USA that never really recovered from "the war" that tore the nation apart almost twenty years ago, the best idea they can come up with to motivate workers into being more productive is to have 50 young men walk non-stop until only one remains. It's starting to make sense why their economy is in the toilet.

Oh, and by "only one remains" they mean "we kill anyone who slows down for more than a few seconds". Add in the fact that the walk takes place through hundreds of miles of grimly rundown countryside, broken only by the occasional gawker (spectators are firmly discouraged until the walk's final stretch) or saluting cop, and that the repeated headshot murders are broadcast live, and it's very clear that something ain't right in the nation led by the drill-sergeant-esque Major (Mark Hamill).

But Stephen King has never been much of one for logic when it comes to setting, and The Long Walk - written by King back in the late 60s and published a decade later under the pen name he used for his more off-brand works, Richard Bachmann - was more blatantly metaphorical than most. A group of young men sent off to die pointlessly by a cruel government while their deaths were broadcast to the nation? Written during the Vietnam War? Not hard to connect the dots there.

That explains director Francis Lawrence's commitment here to an old-fashioned vibe, with cars, clothes, camera and guns all firmly placing this dystopia somewhere between the mid 60s to mid 70s. Together with a barely sketched-in setting (we learn almost nothing about the wider dystopia) it serves to make the whole thing seem more timeless - or just a reminder that this is a King adaptation, with his fondness for setting his horrors in what is usually a more warmly remembered past.

As a King adaptation, this feels of a piece with works like Stand By Me and It, where a group of well-outlined youngsters come together, form a bond, make a bunch of jokes, and face down death. The difference is that there's no outwitting death here, and poking it with a stick gets you a bullet in the face.

With no flexibility as far as the structure goes - after an initial scene with Raymond (Cooper Hoffman) and his mother (Judy Greer) and a flashback later in proceedings, the whole movie is just one long walk - it's the relationships that form between the characters that's basically the whole deal. If we don't care about them, then it's just a bunch of random death along an endless stretch of road.

Fortunately, there isn't a false note to be found in the performances here, especially Raymond's eventual buddy Pete (David Jonsson). Even the ones that seem a little stagey at first are revealed to be bravado or unease in the face of near certain-death. These young men (the entry age is 18, but at least one character lies about that to get in) have thrown themselves into a machine that is going to kill them, and they all realise that in their own way before their end.

Which is to say this is a film where you get to know a collection of mostly likable characters who you then get to see die in the most senseless way possible. Powerful, gut-wrenching and relentless, The Long Walk is a straightforward idea taken to a brutally logical conclusion. This walk will stay with you long after the end credits.

-Anthony Morris 

Review: The Conjuring: Last Rites

The horror genre has delivered a lot of excellent film-making over the last decade or more - seriously, there's no genre out there that more consistently punches above its weight - but that kind of excellence can only thrive when there's a solid foundation of predictable, crowd-pleasing, almost instantly forgettable films audiences can rely on to do a passable job. Welcome to the Conjuring franchise.

There have been a few winners over the years. The Annabelle movies, tracing the history of the evil doll currently caged in the Warren's basement, were about, you know, an evil doll: automatic win there. And The Nun movies, about an evil nun who... possessed a painting? They were often surprisingly full throttle when it came to just throwing scary stuff at the screen.

But it always came back to Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), renowned paranormal investigators - well, renowned unless you actually looked up anything at all about their real life activities, in which case yikes. Pretty much the only way to enjoy these movies is to pretend they're about fictional characters investigating fictional cases, an approach the movies themselves are more than happy to encourage.

Supposedly this film is about their final case; the opening makes it very clear they were well on their way out even before people started spewing up broken glass and hanging themselves in a church. It's 1986 - though it often looks a decade or more before that: one of this film's secret strengths is the way it realises that for most people the world is always at least a few years out of date - and the Warrens are giving poorly attended lectures to disinterested teens shouting out lines from Ghostbusters, which is a much better movie than this one.

The birth of their first and only child Judy (Mia Tomlinson, taking over from Sterling Jerins) was messed up by an evil mirror inherited by a young woman who literally vanishes from the story (when asked about her later, Ed says "we don't know what happened to her"); 22 years later, the mirror turns up in Pittsburgh as a confirmation gift for the Smurl family's teen daughter. It's creepy, she hates it, she and her sister throw it out but uh oh, that only makes things worse. Who you gonna call?

Ed's heart attack (as seen in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It) and Lorraine's worries that she's passed on her psychic gift to Judy mean they waffle about for ages before deciding to help the Smurls, providing plenty of time to explore the relationship between Judy and besotted beau Tony (Ben Hardy). Will they become the next generation of spectre-seekers, battling grunge ghosts in the early 90s? Guess that all depends on the box office.

None of this makes all that much sense but there's a decent atmosphere around the hellish Pittsburgh house (this was filmed in the UK) and the jump scare stuff is mostly effective. It's a long slow build up to an "all hell breaks loose" exorcism ending - evil grannies, an axe wielding farmer, and a holy book that bursts into flames all make an appearence - and while none of it is all that memorable, it's a decent enough amusement park ride through the usual spooky cliches.

The good news for regular church-goers is that this is about as overtly religious as a mainstream US film (currently) gets. The bad news is that all your faith is pretty much useless when a demonic force gets you in its sights. Just ask the spectacularly useless priest in this; looks like we're going to need a bigger crucifix.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: But Also John Clarke

A documentary about John Clarke starts off with one huge advantage: it's got John Clarke in it. The New Zealand born comedian who made Australia his home was one of the most effortlessly likable and charming features of both countries' media landscapes, which possibly explains how he managed to get away with so much over so many years.

So this is a must see straight out the gate. Directed by Clarke's daughter Lorin Clarke, this works on pretty much every level you could ask for. Skillfully crafted personal history, peek behind the curtain at the history of his long running satirical segment opposite Bryan Dawe, potted history of Fred Dagg and by extension the origin of New Zealand comedy and much more besides, it's a constantly engaging look at a creative whirlwind who also seems to have been a top bloke in person.

With access to what seems to have been a seemingly endless archive, large sections of this are narrated by Clarke himself in a mix of public appearances and home movies. His extensive written work gets a solid look in as well, with a lengthy collection of his peers and co-workers (ranging from Andrew Denton and Shaun Micallef to Ben Elton, Wendy Harmer and Rhys Darby) reading out snippets in between providing their own insights and recollections. Lorin herself chimes in at times, deftly reminding us that along with everything else he was also a loving father, and a very inspiring one at that.

Add in an insightful look at Clarke's own personal life (where a lifelong dislike of authority was instilled by a school he hated so much there's a note in the end credits to let us know his views towards the school later mellowed), Sam Neill getting emotional more than once, and a reminder that Farnarkling was a craze that swept the nation, and you'd almost think this was too much of a good thing - if such a view was possible where Clarke was concerned.

Instead, this often gives the impression of barely scraping the surface. Which is exactly the impression a look at a man as talented and creative as Clarke should give. Put together with loving care while allowing Clarke's humanity to shine through, this works whether you're a longtime fan wanting to see your favourite works remembered, someone after an overview of a career that spanned multiple decades and formats, or simply looking for a tribute to a man who always had a mischievous twinkle in his eye - even, as Andrew Denton points out, when he was on radio.

-Anthony Morris