Review: Mufasa: The Lion King

Whether or not we needed a sequel-slash-prequel to The Lion King is up for debate; whether it needed to be told using photo-realistic CGI animation is a lot easier to judge. An epic fantasy story about anthropomorphic animals requires an expressive storytelling medium to fully encompass the heightened emotions and conflicts driving events; the visuals here, while impressive on a merely technical level, aren't up to the job.

Put another way, the framing device for what is basically Mufasa: Rise to Power is that it's a story being told by Rafiki (John Kani) to Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), daughter of the OG Lion King Simba (Donald Glover). So even in-universe, it's a kids story... one in which at least four named characters die and a whole bunch of others also get bumped off off-screen. 

Which is fine, except that because it's all photo-realistic there's a constant struggle (one the film mostly loses) to figure out a non-realistic way to kill off the multiple cast members that have to die. There's a lot of cutting away from characters in situation that seem pretty survivable, only to have them never be seen again. Bad guy Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) keeps on saying "you killed my son", presumably to make it clear that his son is in fact dead.

The high body count is especially striking because - unlike the first film - most of this story could be told without stacking up the corpses. After being separated from his family by a flood while a cub, Mufasa is befriended by Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr). Taken in by his pride - though Taka's father, local king Obasi (Lennie James) isn't a fan - we quickly get two main plot drivers: Mufasa wants to get home, and Taka wants to prove himself to his father.

Then Kiros and his pride of "outsiders" turn up and the killing begins, just to make things even more dramatic. Considering Taka's cowardice is a major character point it wouldn't be hard to just have him run away (especially as his brother Mufasa already has motivation to leave). It's hard not to think that the main reason for the constant murders is that the first film is based around a big memorable death and so the follow-up has to bump up the stakes.

That's not to say this would be a better film without the killing, but if you're telling a story that's based around constant murder - only you don't want to show any murder - you're setting yourself a pretty tricky line to walk and Mufasa doesn't do a great job of it. Maybe if you don't want your audience noticing that your predator main characters are never shown eating, don't have a supporting character make a big joke about scarfing down bugs and insects.

Director Barry Jenkins can't do much with his relatively expressionless characters but the visuals are otherwise solidly impressive and sometimes striking, while Lin-Manuel Miranda's songs aren't going to displace the originals any time soon (as the film itself acknowledges). 

As with all prequels, knowing how things will end undercuts a lot of the tension, though this manages to sidestep that a little by focusing heavily on Taka's journey from happy and fun-loving cub to the sullen and beaten down Scar we all remember (hint: it involves a girl).

It's not really a problem that the title character is the most boring character in the film, though it does give the story the air of political propaganda: Mufasa was the best at everything, which is why he was the best choice for king. At least Kiros gets to point out that the "circle of life" is just predator and prey. Once again a Disney bad guy speaks the truth.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Heretic

Hugh Grant has always been fun to watch in movies, even more so in recent years where he's been going big in supporting roles rather than giving the more restrained performances leading man gigs so often require. Heretic sees him stepping up to front man for a film with an exceedingly simple hook: what if Hugh Grant was evil? 

This isn't Grant playing some twisted variation of his usual type: Grant is providing 100% pure Grant here, no accents or fake teeth or abrasive harshness to blunt his appeal. "What if the charming Hugh Grant you all know and love invited you in and then turned out to be evil" is the premise, and it delivers on that premise.

Enter the two Mormon missionaries who are our guide into the world of Hugh Grant horror, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East). Barnes is the more worldly of the duo, the one who's got a bit of experience under her belt and has thought through things a bit. Paxton is the chirpy fresh-faced newcomer, someone who means well and hasn't yet had the thrill of doing good works knocked out of her - though the fact she hasn't yet actually converted anyone is a bit of a bummer.

Right from the start, this is a duo you don't mind hanging with. You may not want to sign up to their church, but they're likeable, intelligent, self-aware and committed to what they're doing without being pushy about it. They turn up on the doorstep of Mr. Reed (Grant) because they've been invited, and they only go inside after asking all the right questions - mostly about his unseen but definitely a real person wife.

Of course, once they get inside things start going wrong, but importantly a): the missionaries continue to ask the right questions and do the right thing (Paxton wants out the second things get iffy - nobody's failing to read the room here), and b): this is Hugh Grant at maximum charm they're dealing with, so even when he starts going on a little too much about religion he does so in a way that's very disarming.

Which is, of course, where the scary side of things comes from. We know he's bad news - just look at the poster! - but in the world of the movie it's perfectly reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt. Should we panic at the first suggestion of not-quite-rightness from anyone we meet? Of course not; we'd never get any shopping done for starters. And yet there are people out there willing to exploit their charm and our desire to get along for their own ends - why look, there's one on the screen now.

Heretic is at its strongest when the threat is simply that someone as charming and likable and fun to listen to as Hugh Grant is using those powers for an evil you can't quite figure out. There's a point around the middle of the film that's possibly the highlight, where the missionaries - having been drawn deeper into Mr Reeds creepy church-like house by his promises that the only way to leave is to go further in - are given a choice of two doors to leave by.

One, we're told, is the good door, and the other is the bad. Mr Reed, as is his want, poses this choice in big terms, saying their choice will reveal the very core of their beliefs. Sister Barnes, just wanting to get the hell out, brushes off this choice, opens one of the doors, looks inside, then quietly closes it and goes to the other door, refusing to say what she's seen.

It's a chilling moment, largely because it's the point where Mr Reed's creepy preaching enters the real world. What's beyond the door - a literal gateway to Hell? Another door? The bathroom? And once we find out, it becomes a more traditional scary film, the core mystery gone.

Which is kind of the point: Mr Reed is someone in love with his own voice, his own ideas, and to him everyone else is just a prop.  Sadly his ideas are, when you boil them down, bog standard internet troll blather about religion that our heroines can see right through. Seems charm alone will only get you so far.

Of course, this being a horror movie, what lies behind his charm isn't all that pleasant.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Wicked

One of the big questions when a fan-fave hit moves to the big screen is, what do you change? It's not like adapting a regular book or a play: it's already a success with an army of fans. They know what works (everything), but film is a different medium, with different requirements and needs. So how do you make it work while keeping the fans on side?

In the case of Wicked, the answer often seems to be "go bigger". And to be fair, why wouldn't you? A revisionist take on the pre-Wizard of Oz life of the Wicked Witch of the West, aka Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), and her complicated relationship with Glinda (Ariana Grande) in the years before all that business with Dorothy, there's plenty of scope for big sets and big costumes to go with the much-loved stage version's big songs.

Born green thanks (we assume) to her dead mother's fondness for hard liquor, Elphaba grew up withdrawn - and filled with a rage that occasionally bursts forth in magical form. When her wheelchair-bound younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) is accepted into Oz's Shiz University, Elphaba's only along for moral support, but when the usual color-related snickering sets off a magical outburst it attracts the attention of university bigwig Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), who brings her on board to get the training she needs.

Director Jon M Chu (everything from G.I.Joe: Retaliation to In the Heights) knows how to create arresting visuals, and he constantly opens up every scene, largely grounding his characters (even the non human ones) in actual sets for the big musical numbers. Movie spectacle almost never replaces the magic of seeing someone actually sing on a stage in front of you, but this does a better job than most.

Big singing, big dancing, big sets; also a big run time of 2 hours 40 minutes, and a teeny tiny "Part 1" under the opening title to let you know there's a very big story ahead. Fortunately, this half of things ends up coming to a fairly satisfying conclusion - there's clearly more to come, though if you decide you've had enough it works as an origin story on its own.

It's strengths are pretty much what you'd expect. Composer Stephen Schwartz's songs are quality stage musical gear, Chu gives the big set-pieces some real zing, and the performances are first rate (Jeff Goldblum as The Wizard is a role he was born to play). Fans of the stage version have nothing to fear.

The flaws are no surprise either. Did we really need an origin story for the Wicked Witch's hat? Or the Yellow Brick Road (though at least that does involve a cool diorama)? There's an overstuffed feel to proceedings that makes a few scenes drag, every moment milked for main character drama while a few of the subplots feel underserved (presumably they're needed for later).

Some parts of this revisionist take are interesting. The Munchkins' glee at the demise of the Wicked Witch in the opening scene is pitched as just a little disturbing. Others parts are just the usual elbow-to-the-ribs reminder of bigger moments from a better film (and at one point, where someone is zooming around the sky in a flapping CGI black cloak, that better film is The Matrix)

Whether this film will win over many new fans is up for grabs. The epic tone at times feels more interested in fan service than pure entertainment, the story not entirely sure where it wants us to focus and the ending could have ended sooner. 

But the story's heart - the central relationship between the two future witches - is a strong one. When they're together, Wicked sings.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Gladiator II

In an era of remakes and reboots, Gladiator II is a good old-fashioned sequel. Which is to say, it's a step down from the first film while still having enough going on to make it watchable. In fact, its big problem is that in some ways it has too much going on: someone should have said "this Rome isn't big enough for the both of us".

The story we've come to see is the tale of Lucius (Paul Mescal), who, after his African home town is conquered and his arrow-shooting wife killed by a Roman army led by Marcus Acaius (Pedro Pascal), is enslaved, becomes a gladiator, and starts stabbing his way through Rome on a mission of revenge.

Complicating matters somewhat is the fact - known to us but not him - that Marcus is sick of Rome's endless lust for conquest, and together with his wife Lucilla (Connie Nielsen from the first film) is plotting to overthrow the creepy twins currently ruling the place and restore some semblance of good governance, aka "the dream of Rome" that everyone in the first film was going on about.

And just to add another layer to proceedings, Lucius' owner is Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave turned wheeler-dealer who clearly has plans of his own. He's promised Lucius that, if he plays along, he'll have all the vengeance he thirsts for and more. But if Marcus is secretly a good guy, then that means vengeance is... bad?

It's not hard to see how Lucius's character arc is meant to play out: revenge against one man becomes revenge against the system becomes trying to restore the system. Unfortunately the script is too busy with everything else going on to give Mescal (who does a very good job with the whole "leader of men" side of things) time to work through his character's multiple changes of heart.

Usually what would happen in this situation is that other subplots would be whittled down to provide that room. But when you have Denzel tearing up the place, you'd be a fool to limit his screen time - and whatever his many flaws, director Ridley Scott is no fool. Washington lights up the screen every time he's strutting around, and while he's technically a bad guy (what with not being on board with the whole "dream of Rome" deal) all that bad ain't nothing but good for the film.

And the film needs it, because while there's plenty of very impressive surface spectacle here, there's rarely much of anything to sink your teeth into. It's telling that the opening battle - which is the only one where anything is actually at stake - is also the most impressive and compelling. 

We're told that Rome is rotting from within but the sleazy decadence is barely on show, the fights are competent but rarely brutal, and the big coliseum spectaculars lack narrative heft. They don't move the story forward, they're just Lucius's day job. He doesn't even make any gladiator friends we can be worried will be killed off.

The other solution to Lucius' lack of agency - his role for much of the middle of the film is to slowly have his real status revealed to him - would be to present his arrival as a wild card, a rogue element tossed into an already complicated situation. There are traces of that, but this is so intent on looking back to the first film and presenting his arrival as a continuation rather than a new story that the longer this story goes on the less of his own man Lucius becomes. 

By the end his own motivations have been forgotten entirely, replaced by those of long dead characters whose story ended in the distant past. Even for a tale of ancient Rome, that's a bit on the nose.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Here

Robert Zemeckis' movie Here is based on Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here, and you only have to be familiar with the work of one of them to wonder how the heck this is going to work. Shock twist: it doesn't, and sad to say the blame lies pretty much entirely on the Zemeckis side of the ledger, because on the rare occasions when he seems to realise he can use the substance and not just the surface of McGuire's work there are glimmers of a worthwhile experience.

Here (the novel) uses the grammar of the comic book - panels on a page - to unfold an experience that remains fixed in space while roaming freely in time. Each page shows the exact same view onto the world, presented randomly from the dawn of time to the distant future as it goes from wilderness to wasteland to jungle to a suburban lounge room and back. Smaller inset panels show other points in time - a person in the 1950's is seemingly handing a drink to someone there decades later while around them a primeval forest thrives, and so on as all of time is layered before us.

How does this work as a movie? Not well; Zemeckis does use the device of panels as windows into different times, but mostly just as a way to transition from scene to scene. The real power of McGuire's book is the way events and situations echo across time, revealing patterns and interactions even as the human scale shrinks down to nothing. Here (the movie) isn't interested in that.

Instead, we're mostly shown moments in the lives of the people living in the house. Or the time before it: there's a bit of dinosaur versus meteor action early on, and both a Native American couple and the residents (Ben Franklin's son!) of the colonial-era mansion across the road get a few scenes as they travel to and fro. But the main focus is on two generations of the one family, led by WWII veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and then his son Richard (Tom Hanks) and wife Margaret (Robin Wright).

Aside from folksy sayings like "time flies" and "there's no place like home", there's not a lot of substance in their stories (suburban life is tough, especially when you're a cliche), and the smaller lives around them don't add much. It seems the house was once owned by the inventor of the La-Z-Boy Recliner Chair, but said chairs play no part in future events (though a new couch and a fold-out bed do).

The rare moment where something does echo across time - the pandemics of 1919 and 2020, for one - provide a brief window into a much more memorable film. Emphasis on brief: it seems much more likely that the driving force for Zemeckis here was the requirement to digitally de-age his cast to cover their decades of puttering around the lounge. The technology used is competent.

Here (the movie) is surprisingly busy - that lounge room sees strokes, funerals, bedridden invalids, sex scenes and a lot more - and yet resoundingly hollow. It tells a handful of cloying, uninspired stories using a conceit that constantly hammers home the small and inconsequential nature of our lives. 

It wants to be a warm look at connection over the years. Instead, its centuries-spanning gaze into a structure that outlasts and erases all who dwell within tells us the opposite: trying to slap a feel good ending onto the march of time is both futile and pointless. 

Sadly for Here, that's not just a matter of perspective.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Saturday Night

There's plenty of interesting and exciting facts about the early days of Saturday Night Live. The problem with Saturday Night is that it packs them all into the 90 minutes before the first episode went to air. It's not that it all becomes a bit much, it's that when you put them all right next to each other... well, maybe being a bit much really is the problem.

It's 90 minutes before the first ever episode of Saturday Night (the Live was added later) and Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) the man behind it all, is flailing. Scripts are being worked on, sets are being built, the crew aren't exactly helping, the cast are all over the place, and management - which may very well have only said yes as part of a wider power play - are wandering around considering whether they should pull the plug. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

There's a lot to like here. Director Jason Reitman (who co-wrote the script with Gil Kenan) keeps things moving at a snappy pace, shifting seamlessly from character to character, subplot to subplot in a way that suggests bedlam but never lets the viewer get (too) lost.

The cast are pretty much all note-perfect. Stand-outs include Rachel Sennott as Michaels' wife Rosie, who's having an open affair with Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), and Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, who feels his theatre background (and race) makes him an outcast (he's right). Everyone else either looks enough like their characters to keep things feeling authentic without getting into CGI creepiness, or is chief writer Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), who it's nice to see making many of his notoriously offensive one-liners.

Reitman also gets many of the smaller details right. Most of the characters (and the conflicts) are accurately, if briefly, sketched - though John Belushi (Matt Wood) attacked Bill Murray (not in this film), not Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith). Weaving in various rehearsals and sound checks allows for most of the first episode's classic moments to make an appearance, even if they're also a reminder that comedy has changed a lot since 1975 (don't worry, there's plenty of cutaways to people laughing hysterically at these bits).  

But even if you know nothing at all about Saturday Night Live, it's not hard to see that something's off. The bad guys here are a): manual workers who don't want to work outside of their positions, b): Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, c): NBC's David Tibet (Willem Dafoe), who looks at this obvious train wreck and is like "yeah, we need a backup plan here", d) host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), who also suspects the wheels are coming off, and e): Milton Berle's penis. Reitman's swimming against the tide of history on all counts.

And while LaBelle gives an excellent performance, making Lorne Michaels the hero of your story is definitely, as they say, a choice. After all, SNL was the end of a comedic era, not the beginning: pretty much everyone involved already had solid track records (the writers on National Lampoon; most of the cast had worked together on The National Lampoon Radio Hour). 

Saturday Night ends up being a salute to Michaels' drive and vision as he overcomes a wide range of obstacles that the film created to make things seem more dramatic. It wants to applaud a comedic visionary who blazed a trail people still follow today; it ends up being a high five to middle management, a man whose real skill lies in getting everyone else to think he's irreplaceable. 

Looks like he's still got it.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Hellboy: The Crooked Man

As a comic, Hellboy has been running for 30-odd years now under the guidance of his creator, Mike Mignola. Things have changed a lot for the demon fated to destroy the world, and his adventures have grown creepier and closer to folklore than they were back when he was punching out Nazis and giant monsters.

The year is 1959 (well before any of the previous Hellboy films) and the chain smoking, tough talking good guy demon (Jack Kesy ) and a couple of government sidekicks are taking a demonically possessed funnelweb spider back to the lab via train. Thinks go wrong, not all the sidekicks survive, and it's left to Hellboy and rookie agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) to track down the giant spider through the Appalachian mountains. That's not all they find.

Supposedly a big part of the reason why Guillermo del Toro (director of the first two Hellboy films) didn't get to make his idea of a third was because Mignola wanted to take the character back to his roots; that's definitely one way to look at Hellboy: The Crooked Man (which is specifically based on a three-issue run of the comic).

While Hellboy himself remains the same character here, this is a pretty big pivot to small scale horror for the big screen version, in ways that those looking for pulp action might find off-putting. There's no evil end-of-the-world cult or giant monsters or Nazi hold-outs to punch here: ok, there are a few zombies at one point. But this is much more about a creeping sense of dread, of people stumbling into a place that's gone rotten with bad magic.

A lot of the small moments are memorably creepy. There's a witch who leaves her skin behind to roam the woods as a raccoon; another witch rides a horse that turns out to be someone's enslaved father. The main evil haunting the mountain is called The Crooked Man, a walking hanged corpse who sells souls to the Devil for a cent apiece in an attempt to rebuild his long gone fortune.

The main plot is straightforward: Hellboy and Song team up with newly returned local Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) to purge the area of evil, which involves battling the local population (now basically all witches) and defeating The Crooked Man. But for long stretches, it's the kind of story where unsettling things just happen. 

There's asides explaining how to make witchballs and summon up a demon, hints of portals and Lovecraftian monsters, a number of dream sequences featuring Hellboy's mother, a grim joke or two, and at least one character dies for (again, memorably creepy) reasons that are never quite explained... which is kind of the point. They've stumbled into a place where bad things just happen, and a certain dream-like quality is to be expected.

Still, there are also points where this doesn't quite work, rough edges that feel more the result of an uneven script (co-written by Mignola himself) and low budget than firm intentions. Director Brian Taylor (the Crank films, the second, more demented Ghost Rider movie) does a decent job of balancing the unsettling mood with some high energy weirdness (there's the occasional Evil Dead vibe to proceedings), but the whole thing never fully comes together like it should.

If this film manages to chart a new direction for Hellboy, smaller in scope but bigger in strangeness, that wouldn't be such a bad thing. As the film handling the pivot, this struggles to straddle two worlds; it's those memorable moments that stand out, like pennies scattered on an old floor.

- Anthony Morris