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Born green thanks (we assume) to her dead mother's fondness for hard liquor, Elphaba grew up withdrawn - and filled with a rage that occasionally bursts forth in magical form.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

Review: Subservience

If you're the kind of person who watches a lot of direct-to-streaming movies, you'll have noticed that Megan Fox is slowly becoming a name you can trust when it comes to halfway decent trash viewing. Not everything she's in is gold standard, but if she can make a decent film out of a story about a sexy nanny who sleeps with the boss then tries to replace the wife - only here the nanny is a robot - then she's doing something right.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is a construction foreman who must be making a decent living, because when his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) has a pre-sexy times heart attack he's quickly off down to the robot department store to purchase a helper. Fortunately for him, his younger daughter takes a liking to Alice (Fox) and not one of the many non-hot models that are no doubt flying off the showroom floor.

Horror movies about AI tend to fall into two categories. The first is "oh no, our house is possessed", where an AI assistant or app or doll uses the power of AI to do a bunch of evil murdery stuff - basically, the AI is non human. The second is "oh no, our maid / butler / sexbot is possessed", where a human is playing the murdery AI. And so it goes with Subservience.

Those films are usually less interesting because it's basically just an evil person and we know the kinds of things they can do, but Subservience pulls out a few tricks to keep the interest levels up. Alice isn't intrinsically evil, for one: Nick's poor programming leaves her fixated on him (bad move when there are other family members) and enables her to fully commit to her forbidden love. Also, Nick? Bit of a dick.

Not only does he have sex with Alice, he then does the whole "it was a mistake, we can never do that again" thing, turning this for maybe fifteen minutes or so into the robot version of Fatal Attraction. Also, unlike most movies of this stripe, having home robots is not a brand new thing. As the movie goes on we see more and more how they're reshaping the world.

For one, "construction worker" isn't really a viable career when your boss can just rent some super strong robots. Suddenly Nick's loyalties are torn between his workmates on the chopping block and bringing in a steady income (again, he's kind of a dick). 

Somewhat surprisingly, this is not one of the many, many recent films where having to pay medical bills forces our lead into a morally dubious corner. This is surprising because for the first 20 minutes or so you'd be forgiven for thinking Maggie (who is nowhere to be seen) was dead, and then when Nick (the dick) does finally visit her we discover she's in dire need of a transplant. Presumably hospital costs are down because yes, robots are doing all the heavy lifting there too. 

While the focus remains on Alice's descent into murderous evil, all these background details gradually build up, creating a wider sense of unease. If robots are all around us doing all the work - as you'd expect they would - and they can turn nasty like Alice, then everyone is in a lot of trouble.

So while this does deliver the usual "I'm doing this insane murdery thing for your own good" thrills, there's just enough going on around the edges - plus decent performances from Fox and Zima - to keep it from feeling like it's just going through the motions. 

In the end it's still more of the same, and how much you get out of this will depend a lot on a): your interest in sexy robots and b): your interest in evil robots. But within those parameters, this does manage a few memorable moments: is letting robots take care of humans ever going to be a good idea?

- Anthony Morris

Review: My Old Ass

Stories where younger and older versions of someone meet are usually focused on the older person. They're the ones with wisdom (and stock tips) to impart; young folks are usually too busy living for today to want to leap into the future and meet their older selves. My Old Ass says "too bad, here's your older self, deal with it"; thankfully the rest of the movie is not someone yelling "you're not my real future self" and slamming their bedroom door.

Elliot (Maisy Stella) is all set for college and looking forward to the bright future (and college girls) that awaits. But first there's a painful summer to be spent on the family farm being annoyed by pretty much everything that isn't hanging out with her friends. Then one night after taking a lot of mushrooms with her buddies, the usual group hang now includes a 39 year old (Aubrey Plaza) who announces "I'm you dude".

Turns out she hasn't been sent back in time to save her younger self from a killer robot, but instead to hand out some basic wisdom: appreciate her family, and stay away from a boy named Chad. It's not a long visit, but she does leave behind a contact in Elliot's phone: My Old Ass.

No surprise then that when Chad (Percy Hynes White) does show up, there's an instant connection. Which is a bit confusing for Elliot, who's only been into women before now. Also, her older self is not one for giving out any big details about the future (aside from the fact she clearly has some regrets), so exactly why he's to be avoided is a mystery. Which is kind of the point.

This is a tightly packed (at barely 90 minutes) coming-of-age story that's not afraid to keep the stakes low. Having her older self lurking around - and seemingly still figuring stuff out - makes it clear that growing up is an ongoing condition. Whatever choices she makes, right or wrong, there's going to be a lot more choices after that.

The performances are a delight, with newcomer Stella and Plaza sharing an energy that makes their connection totally convincing. Writer / director Megan Park really nails the "last summer before everything changed" vibe of waiting to ditch small town life and head off to higher education (though the farm and local lake look gorgeous), and Stella is totally convincing as a bubbly teen having fun living a low-stakes life.

My Old Ass is pretty slight, but the film's lightweight nature is the point. Time does go by fast, and small decisions can linger. Appreciating what you have? That might not be a bad thing.

- Anthony Morris