Review: Whalefall

Whalefall is really three movies in one, and wisely the one that's probably the hardest to swallow - as it were - comes last. Looked at another way, things get increasingly out there as they progress, but it all happens so gradually that by the time things are seriously bonkers... well, we've come this far, haven't we?

Our story begins with Mitt (Josh Brolin) tying on a divers weight belt and jumping off the side of a boat - don't worry, he's clearly gasping for breath every step of the way, so this is him deliberately choosing a way out he's happy with. Leap forward a year and it's family reunion time, but while everyone else is sharing warm memories, Mitt's only son Jay (Austin Abrams) is more than a little uncomfortable.

A combination of flashbacks and conversation gradually reveal that the two didn't really get along. Mitt was a hard taskmaster with a bunch of strong beliefs about nature and diving, and Jay clearly struggled to get out from under. So why is he even back at the coastal family home considering he's now going to school far inland?

Jay is secretly a man on a mission. His father's remains were never found; he's going to dive down and get them. But as he's underwater trying to do that he gets eaten by a whale, and hopefully you knew that going in because if not it's a hell of a twist.

The whole "getting eaten" sequence (there's also a squid involved) is genuinely nightmarish, and possibly one of the cinematic highlights of the year. After that, there's a lot of being trapped in very close, very organic spaces (with the occasional flashback to previous conflicts with Mitt to keep claustrophobic viewers from fleeing the cinema) as Jay tries to figure a way to escape before his oxygen runs out.

You possibly wouldn't think a story about someone being trapped inside a whale would have much in common with something like Project Hail Mary, but in its middle stretch this also becomes the story of someone in a sticky situation using their knowledge and problem solving skills to try and figure a way out. Only it involves squid parts and a handy glowing jellyfish.

Act three is where things start to get a bit out there, as a combination of exhaustion and desperation (if you want to be realistic) or ghost telepathy (if you don't) brings another voice into play, even as the whale's situation takes a turn for the worse. For some viewers, all this is going to be a bit much; for others... look, you've come this far, and things could be worse.

There are some very effective scenes here, along with some touching moments. There are also a number of scenes that verge on the silly, even if this doesn't gloss over in any way the fact that being eaten alive is not a fun time. Kids, always remember to chew your food properly.

Abrams, last seen losing it in Resident Evil, once again gets to display his skills at playing a character going through a situation so out there even he can't fully believe what's happening. 

Which is fair enough when "what's happening" is being trapped in a whale's gullet.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Street Fighter

For a movie titled Street Fighter there's not a whole lot of fighting taking place on the streets. Presumably "Arena Fighter with side battles in a variety of indoor settings" was too much to fit on the poster. Then again, the title also doesn't mention the many, and often pretty funny, jokes scattered through this film. Guess they wanted to keep a few things a surprise.

There's a fair amount of backstory in this but pretty much all you need to know is that white guy party boy Ken (Noah Centineo, who brings some actual emotion to proceedings) and serious Asian with a grim past Ryu (Andrew Koji, who mostly just gets to look badass) were, despite their different backgrounds, raised as brothers by their martial arts teacher - only to have that bond shattered when their teacher was murdered by an evil spirit trying to get Ryu to unleash the dark power within him.

Actually, you don't even need to know that, because the real story is that Ryu won the World Warrior martial arts contest in 1987 while Ken was ordered to sit it out (his destiny was to protect Ryu... FROM HIMSELF) - all this is an animated prologue, by the way - then when Ryu didn't go all Super Saiyan to save their master Ken turned himself into a sellout joke while Ryu vanished. 

Oh wait, the real real story is that the evil M Bison (David Dastmalchian), dictator of Shadaloo, is trying to extract some kind of energy he calls "psycho power" from top fighters and when the local chumps can't cut it he gets the idea of reviving the old World Warrior competition and luring the world's best fighters in so he can steal their energy. Will Ryu come out of retirement - which currently involves him selling soup so bad not even stray cats will drink it - to punch on, even if it means unleashing his dark power? Probably not... unless Ken does something stupid.

As you might have gathered, this doesn't take itself all that seriously and is a much better film for it. There's some pop culture jokes and some decent needle drops (despite being set in 1993, most of the soundtrack features songs recorded years later). But most of the film is a bunch of blowhards boasting about their skills before beating each other up. Which is exactly what you want (the fights are solid without being amazing), while Dastmalchian hams it up as Bison and Eric Andre chews the scenery as the fight announcer. 

Some parts are slightly more serious: the subplot involving Chun-Li (Callina Liang) trying to take down Bison's scheme from within is largely played straight, though her liaison at Interpol (Kyle Mooney) is a bit of a cartoon sex pest because this also has a weirdly horny vibe running throughout (with so many half-naked musclebound people strutting around checking each other out, how could it not).

Of the rest of the fighters, Guile (Cody Rhodes), Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal), Balrog (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) and a near-unrecognisable Jason Momoa as Blanka are the highlights, but pretty much everyone hits the right tone (in a nice meta-joke, masked fighter Vega is played by masked singer Orville Peck). It's all various shades of bombast, but at least the good guys are in on the joke.

It's hard to wrap up a story that's just a bunch of fights and this doesn't even try, with a couple of explosions standing in for a conclusion before everyone hits the road heading towards Street Fighter II. Unless of course they decide to skip ahead and go straight to the 2023 virtual reality game Street Fighter VR Shadaloo Enhancement Plan.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: The Social Reckoning

The Social Reckoning is not a movie for our times, and not just because the bulk of the action takes place between 2019 and 2021. Writer-director Aaron Sorkin's look at the Wall Street Journals' expose of various dubious practices behind the scenes at Facebook is the kind of film where the disinfectant of public exposure dispels the evils of corporate crime (All the President's Men gets mentioned at least once), which, you know, come on.

Because it's based around a giant nothingburger - part of the dramatic conclusion is the Jan 6th Capitol riots, which are shown to be A Bad Thing and yet... *gestures towards the White House* - the required dramatic heft to make this a story worth telling never really materialises. What if journalists and whistleblowers teamed up to expose real corporate crimes causing real harm to real people and nobody cared? Welcome to America.

That's not to say there's no value to be found in this sequel to 2010's The Social Network, just that much of it lies with the robotic Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), who rarely interacts with the main thrust of the story and ends up inhabiting a more interesting film largely taking place away from our sight. Many of his scenes involve him preparing for a congressional appearance, where despite his crack team's best efforts his fundamentally alien affect keeps on shining through.

Meanwhile, data scientist Fred (an excellent Mikey Madison) can't get anyone to listen to her lengthy spiel about how Facebook has secretly pivoted to outrage, lies and hate, which makes her susceptible to a scattergun approach to gathering sources from newly installed Wall Street Journal journalist Jeff Horwitz (an unflashy Jeremy Allen White). He's in San Fransisco to work on FB from a political perspective (a joke that's meant to humanise him is that he's in no way tech savvy), and despite understanding next to nothing of what Fred's telling him, he does realise he's found a way into a very big story.

The timeline shifts back and forth, with much of the Zuckerberg stuff happening as Horwitz's big expose is on the verge of being published. Fred and Horwitz's slow burn rapport and slow dive into the belly of Facebook takes place against the backdrop of Covid (which provides the chance to show a few examples of online radicalisation seeping out into the real world), but is mostly a lot of meetings in hotel rooms where Fred shows up in various sexy outfits because she figures her cover story if she runs into anyone there is "I'm on a date".

Sorkin, it goes without saying, is no stranger to the concept of giving the audience what they want. Or what he thinks they want, which leaves large stretches of this film filled largely with his trademark banter. Here it lacks a certain energy, no matter how sexy Fred dresses; while the pace is snappy and some of the jokes land, the most memorable scenes are where Sorkin moves (slightly) out of his comfort zone, most notably the opening scene where a random roadside police stop spins deliberately out of control.

But again, the fatal flaw is that while Zuckerberg and Facebook are villains here and in real life, there's no sense of any real changes coming from all this hard work, let alone justice being served. The real world will have to come up with its own solutions; it's hard not to wish that Sorkin had followed the lead of Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and dumped reality for some fictional - but satisfying - cinematic catharsis.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Verity

Verity starts off with one of the better meet-cutes in recent times, mostly because it involves someone seemingly exploding off screen and dousing our heroine in blood. Sadly it's not a crossover with the roof-diving zombies from the recent Resident Evil movie, and like so many of the possibilities for this movie to go completely nuts, the promise of a zombie attack gradually slips away. Or does it?

Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is a struggling New York author. Well, not that struggling - she's at least been published - but her book readings are sparsely attended and her agent seems more interested in sleeping with her than nurturing her career. Then she's summoned to a secret meeting where the only requirement is that she dress up. Sure hope a bike messenger doesn't get hit by a car right in front of her splashing her with blood!

Luckily a mysterious stranger (Josh Hartnett) is there to guide her into a men's room to help her wash off, lend her his shirt, and exchange some awkward deadpan dialogue (he fished his dead daughter out of a lake; her mother died last week). Then when she gets to the meeting, who should be on the other side of the boardroom desk but... a bunch of characters we've never seen before. And yes, the mysterious stranger, now wearing a new shirt.

Turns out this meeting is to offer Lowen the chance of a lifetime. Superstar author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is no longer able to complete a series of contracted novels, and they - well, her husband Jeremy, AKA the mysterious stranger - think she's the one for the job. It's life-changing money, Jeremy is keen, there's already a bunch of notes to work from; how could she say no?

As all the notes are at Verity's messy home office in their luxury house in the middle of nowhere (Vermont), Lowen decides to stay with Jeremy and their son Crew while she gets ready to take over the series. There she discovers that after a hushed-up accident Verity is basically a vegetable, unable to walk or move or speak. What she is able to do is appear in occasional creepy flashes and freak Lowen out. But that's clearly just her imagination, right? After all, she's starting to get closer and closer to Jeremy, no wonder she's starting to feel a little guilty.

While all this is a lot, it's not really all that dramatic. Enter a mysterious manuscript with Verity's name on it that purports to be her autobiography, in which she reveals that the reason why she's so good at writing depraved monsters - supposedly her unique selling point as an author is that she writes from the villain's POV - is because (gasp) she actually is one! Could there be more to the death of Crew's twin sister a few months before the accident that turned Verity into a vegetable than meets the eye?

As a mystery, this is a film where many of the red herrings and weird moments turn out to be more interesting than what really happens, even when what really happens is pretty out there. Worse, the story (it's based on a novel by Colleen Hoover) doesn't stick the landing; it's the kind of film where you suddenly realise you've already seen the big climax, and all that's left now is a slow fizzling out.

On the plus side, Hathaway (appearing mostly in flashback) is bringing her A game as a possibly murderous sexpot, while Johnson is sadly too sharp to be playing a character this dimwitted but is still happy to go with it. Hartnett seems to be slowly turning into Charles Bronson, but he knows what's required and doesn't let the team down either. 

Verity is a collection of parts that should work - a promising set-up, the cast, a few sexy scenes, a couple of decent jokes, exactly two moments that had audience members shrieking - but it never quite comes together. There's even some interesting ideas in here: is it worse to be someone who flamboyantly and seductively promotes evil, or someone who acts good and does evil out of sight? 

The steam in this steamy thriller fades well before the end; at least you'll think twice in future about licking a spread-covered knife.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Digger

Back before he became everyone's favourite entertainer, one of the many criticisms leveled at Tom Cruise was that he was always trying too hard. The irony is that while Digger is the kind of wild and crazy film that really wants you to know it's wild and crazy, Cruise is - at some points at least - the least try-hard piece of the puzzle. Even under heavy make-up, he's the one thing that makes this worth watching.

As far as the story goes, things aren't quite as straightforward as they seem. What they seem to be is a day in the life of one Digger Rockwell (Cruise), an aging oil tycoon who isn't exactly pure evil but is very much focused on pulling as much oil out of various environmentally sensitive locations as he can. He's larger than life, even if his life is largely focused at the moment on keeping a very, very elderly cat alive.

It gradually becomes clear - to us at least, as Digger is not one to let reality get in the way of his demands - that something serious is going wrong at one of his drilling platforms on the Greenland ice sheet. Things rapidly escalate; soon even Digger has to give the crisis his full attention. The US government become involved, and under the leadership of the somewhat fragile President Compson (John Goodman) things become a bit more overtly satirical even as disaster looms.

At one point there's a shift that presents things from a slightly different angle, but this move doesn't exactly sharpen the eco-satire. It distances us from it without fully defusing it; the film's best scene is a rousing rant from Digger to the European Parliament (kind of) where he goes all-in on exactly why any and all opposition to oil is pure hypocrisy, only for the film around him to spell out the real price that's being paid for that view. 

The most interesting things happening here are the minor notes, the small scenes where director Alejandro G. Inarritu shifts focus to contemplate side issues like the nature of storytelling or to deliver a strikingly surreal image. But this is a film that, even with bold swings story-wise, remains surprisingly unsure of itself, constantly swerving back to broad moments while never being fully confident about their impact.

Put another way, this is a film where on more than one occasion characters tell us how funny what we're seeing is or how amazing the performances we're watching are. You don't usually need that kind of thing if you think audiences are going to be convinced by what you're putting in front of them.

Possibly the best thing to be said about Digger is that it's going to be divisive. Even now, a pro-environmental message is controversial in some quarters, and at points this is scathing. The plot ducks and weaves in ways that are sometimes clumsy, while the satire can be scattershot. Most of the supporting cast are wasted in nothing roles.

But Cruise is always watchable and here he's given the chance to go big and go small with the same performance. He grabs it with both hands; if only the rest of the film had been as confident. Comedy might be tragedy plus time, but when it comes to the environment we ran out of time a while back.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: The Heart of the Beast

There are movies about dogs, and then there are movies about military dogs. Especially in films out of the USA, a military dog (and this includes police dogs) usually means you're going to get a story that is very much about a particular view of military (and police) service. How can you have any doubts about the bravery and honour of our brave servicepeople when one of them is a very good boy?

So while there's only the occasional glimpse in flashback of an American flag in this outdoors adventure, tonally there might as well be a faded but still visible flag filling the entire sky in every scene of this salute to the brave work done by dogs in combat in an unnamed American war in the Middle East. 

All this goes pretty much without saying in most US films about returned servicepeople. Thing is, everything that happens here could happen with Pitt's character being a regular outdoorsman with a troubled past and a dog that was injured in an accident. Grafting a "thank you for your service" angle onto these events makes it clear that it's a political choice by the filmmakers (screenwriter Cameron Alexander; director David Ayers), at a time when the American military's global rep isn't as glowing as it once was.

Oh right, the actual story: Belmont (Brad Pitt) and Odin (his dog, who has titanium teeth, an artificial leg, and PTSD from his wartime service) fly out to the Alaskan wilderness for a quiet week of fishing and drinking beer, interrupted only by some grizzled old salt (JK Simmons) who shows up for a night so we can get some dialogue.

On their flight out, there's a slightly surprising misdirect - you think they're going to crash for one reason then they crash for another reason - which means they now have to walk out to the nearest road. Climbing, stumbling, multiple animal attacks, getting dunked in a river, and Belmont repeatedly sticking parts of himself in crevasses (not always intentionally) follow.

Everybody loves watching a trek through scenic countryside, but that's pretty much all this has to offer. The survival side of things mostly simmers rather than stuns, despite a couple of set-pieces that do provide some drama. It's a strength that Pitt's character is competent; when things go wrong, it's not because he made a mistake. It's just tough out there. 

Aside from knowing how to make a spear (and his military service), there's not enough to Belmont as scripted to forge any real connection with an audience; it's left up to Pitt's natural charm to do all the heavy lifting, and while he does a solid job he falters whenever he's asked to bring his emotions to the surface.

Likewise, Odin (played by four different dogs in the movie) is an asset rather than a liability, but aside from his PTSD he rarely gets the opportunity to develop any kind of character beyond being, you know, a dog. It's a film where the characters are loosely sketched in, and this needed to be a lot more dramatic and suspenseful to make that approach work.

The Heart of the Beast is a film that assumes you're already keenly interested in both dogs and wilderness. Which is a reasonable assumption, even if that means it only does the bare minimum to make either of those things interesting. Just don't ask why the US military uses dogs in a war zone.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: The Weight

At times The Weight is basically The Wages of Fear only on two legs, and that is in no way a bad thing. A classic of suspense film-making that's been remade a number of times - including the 70s classic Sorcerer and a recent French remake that was less than perfect - it's become the benchmark for a certain kind of white-knuckle tension. And while The Weight is a little smaller in scale, the tension hasn't shrunk a bit.

It's the 1930s, and single dad Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) is, like much of the United States, struggling. He's a loving father who's doing his level best, but when an attempt to find somewhere to live goes awry he's sentenced to hard labour at a camp run by the baseball-loving J.J. Clancy (Russell Crowe).

Things seem set for a run of prison brutality, but when Murphy shows his technical skills off by removing a massive boulder (thus freeing up the inmates to play ball on Sunday), Clancy gets friendly. Turns out Murphy is working to a deadline - there's only a month or so before his daughter goes into permanent care, and even with a day's hard labour taking two off his sentence he won't get out in time. Impressed by his skills, Clancy makes him an offer he can't refuse.

Together with three men he can trust (which ends up being two men and a loud mouth), Murphy's sent over to a nearby gold mine. FDR is about to nationalise the nation's gold reserves, and a bunch of mines have already been robbed to get ahead of the compulsory acquisitions. To keep this load of gold in private hands, Murphy and his crew (accompanied by two guards) are going to carry it overland on a week-long trek through a wild forest to a pick up point. 

If all the gold arrives safely, Murphy will sign their release papers. If even one bar goes missing, they get paid in lead. Which means they can't afford to lose any. Which means that when things start to get tricky - as they almost immediately do - they're stuck carrying the gold through rivers, over ravines, while fleeing from bandits, and through whatever other obstacles get thrown in their way. Not that anyone believes they'll be left to tell their story even if they do succeed.

The supporting cast are broadly sketched but that's enough to do the job. Even Crowe is only around for a handful of scenes; this is Hawke's film, and he's matured into the kind of compelling presence that can hold a scene together just by watching what everyone else is up to.

This isn't exactly an action film, though there are a number of action scenes, and even a shootout or two - think something closer to a 70s-ro-80s tough guy drama. The storytelling from director Padraic McKinley is firmly grounded in the physical, all struggling men and muddy ground, and the forest setting is both beautiful and ominous. 

They're on enemy turf the whole way, whether the threat is a rickety rope bridge that will carry a person or a sake of gold but not both, or a seemingly friendly prospector who might have a few friends hiding in the darkness.

There isn't a lot of subtext to this, but there doesn't need to be: the basic set-up is more than gripping enough to make this work. The Weight is a smart, polished, edge-of-your-seat thriller that builds the tension until you can't take your eyes off the screen; it may not be a blockbuster, but this kind of film is worth its weight in gold.

- Anthony Morris