Review: Nobody

Nobody pivots on the idea of an everyday schlub secretly being the employee of the month for Murder Incorporated, which is kind of unlikely and yet not as unlikely as the idea that we're meant to think that Bob Odenkirk isn't capable of cold-blooded mass murder. By "we", I mean long term fans of his work, because if you've ever seen Mr. Show (and if you haven't run, don't walk) you know there is literally nobody (heh) working in film or television today better able to display full-throated rage with a single "what the fuck".

But Mr Show was a lifetime ago (or at least, the 90s) and nobody (lets stop this now) remembers sketch comedy, so chances are most people coming to Nobody are thinking of Odenkirk as the beat-down hustler he plays so well in Better Call Saul. The joke here isn't quite that he goes from playing one trademark Odenkirk role to another, but it's close enough for the 90 minute run time.

The other joke here is that the 55 year-old Odenkirk is able to casually murder dozens of highly trained bad guys half his age, and the multiple action scenes - all excellently staged and shot by director Illya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry) - in the back half are firmly set up by an opening that verges on a parody of boring, generic, middle-aged male impotence, piling on the numbing routine while surrounded by a family that either forgets he's there or treats him with barely hidden contempt. 

The point with all this isn't quite that Odenkirk's Hutch Mansell is an emasculated loser (it becomes clear later on that he chose to wimp out, knowing the murderous flame inside him couldn't be dampened forever), but for anyone looking to read this as the story of an old dude showing the doubters he's still got it, go right ahead.

The plot itself is extremely thin, with one moderate fake-out early on - Mansell's house gets broken into but he doesn't go murder on the crooks because it turns out as a former professional murderer he's also a very good judge of who needs to die. One of the film's better gags is that Hutch likes his work but isn't indiscriminate about it: once he finds some scumbags who deserve to die (seems the local Russian mob is both unpleasant and overburdened with a secret stash of cash), he all but taunts them into attacking him so he can deal out what they deserve. 

(this motivation makes his first full blown fight scene especially impressive, a grueling pummel session clearly driven by the need to just plain hurt somebody; this isn't what this film is about, but it's a shame it isn't explored further)

Nobody eventually pushes the John Wick formula a lot closer to parody (it's written by Wick's creator, Derek Kolstad) without ever quite tipping over the line, which is impressive considering how close to parody Wick already was. If there's any flaw in this highly enjoyable film, it's that the tension tapers off a little as the inevitable warehouse showdown arrives, simply because the story's over as soon as the mob (led by Aleksey Serebryakov's nightclub singing psycho) commit to going head-to-head with Mansell.

There's some fun cameos here (including Christopher Lloyd and RZA as Mansell's father and mystery brother), but the whole thing is totally Odenkirk's show. If he isn't quite as convincing as the physical embodiment of death as Keanu Reeves, his mix of middle-aged melancholy and murderous glee remains a winning combination throughout, providing enough spark between the slayings to make this the total suburban slaughter package.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Godzilla vs Kong

Okay, so here's what you want to know: there is an actual winner here. That said, as the final installment in a generally well thought-out (if not always successfully executed) series, those involved have clearly thought - a lot - about how to end things in a way that's going to keep everyone happy. Mission accomplished: whoever wins, the other guy's fans also win.

Unfortunately, that sense of being extremely careful not to put a foot wrong extends throughout this somewhat satisfying but never spectacular series capper, resulting in a film that never cuts loose the way a film titled Godzilla vs Kong should. Remember how the tagline for Clash of the Titans was the awesome yet awesomely stupid "Titans Will Clash"? This needed a lot more of that energy.

Still, titans (this series' co-name for giant monsters) literally clash here, so it can't be all bad even if it does take an exceedingly long time - close to an hour - to get to the first major fisticuffs. Before that Kong is in a cage while Godzilla roams the seas, and while Kong is clearly unhappy it's Godzilla that starts something, turning up at a US tech company's vaguely sinister coastal base to trash the joint for Reasons Unknown.

There are humans in this film, a handful of whom are left over from previous installments (notably Millie Bobby Brown reprising her role as A Sassy Teen), so much of the film follows them around as they either a): try to figure out just what the sinister tech company is up to or b): take Kong on a journey to the center of the Earth (which is hollow, don't you know) to collect samples of some strange form of energy that is the only thing that can protect humanity from the now supposedly rampaging Godzilla, and if you haven't figured out where things are going with all this that's only because you already know: this is a film titled Godzilla vs Kong.

Director Adam Wingard has previously focused on smaller scale horror (The Guest, the Blair Witch remake, the not great US live-action Death Note film), which may explain why this really lacks the (occasional) sense of awe the earlier films had for these giant monsters. Kong has always been the more cuddly of the two and much of the film focuses on him; aside from a few early scenes that really stress his size he's nothing to be afraid of. 

In contrast, Godzilla is kept at a remove (he's the antagonist here) but there's no real sense of terror when he's on the scene - he might be positioned as the bad guy, but he doesn't do enough bad guy stuff to build tension that way. Without that sense that as far as these creatures are concerned humanity is irrelevant, the fight, no matter what twists might occur, is just a way to see who's stronger.

Still, when it comes to the actual fight mechanics this does tick all the boxes. Godzilla attacks humans, Kong gets to battle monsters, the lead titans get to fight on each other's turf so the home ground advantage is spread equally - so if you're here to see the monsters size up against each other you won't go home disappointed, even if the final clash (which takes place in an urban setting) could have had a bit more variety as far as the visuals go. 

Unfortunately well over half the movie focuses on the humans, who are either boring, comedy relief, an occasional infodump, utterly irrelevant (Lance Reddick is back for literally one line) or Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a pre-teen deaf girl who as the last human survivor of Skull Island has a primal connection with Kong. 

The presence of her character suggests someone involved knew this story would work best on a mythological level; the scene where someone shorts out an evil computer by pouring booze over it suggests they didn't get their way often enough.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Crisis

Treating drugs like a disaster movie is nothing new. Looked at from one angle, Crisis is basically an opioid-focused update of Stephen Soderberg's Traffic (itself adapted from a miniseries); looked at from another, it's part of an on-going tradition that gave us (to cite the most recent example) Zero Zero Zero. This is wide angle story-telling, where individual lives matter only so far as they fit into the big picture and the moral of the story is that drugs are a disaster wreaking havoc on society across the board.

To make this point, Crisis focuses on three people: Claire (Evangeline Lilly) a single mother with a junkie past who finds herself drawn back into that world after a tragic incident involving her son; Dr Brower (Gary Oldman), a university scientist who's dropped in hot water when a test involving his corporate sponsor's new wonder drug suggests it may not be that wonderful; and DEA agent Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer), who's running an undercover operation trying to catch one of Canada's biggest opioid smugglers (unlike cocaine and meth, opioids come in from the North) and only has a few days to bring in a big fish.

On the whole the three stories fit well together, though Dr Brower's drawn-out battle with the tenure board occasionally seems to be spinning its wheels to make sure it doesn't finish half an hour before everyone else. The chilly locations around Detroit and the Canadian border give proceedings a very different feel to the typical cartel tale, re-enforcing the sense of isolation each character feels. This isn't a film full of warm family bonds; even Dr Brower's wife, who supposedly is a big motivation for his wavering (there's doing what's right, and there's doing what gets you paid) rarely rates a mention.

Isolation aside, what's missing from this is any real sense of why people take opioids. Jake has an addict sister but she's only in a handful of scenes pissing him off with her motiveless love of drugs; Claire's solution to her problems is vengeance, not pills, especially as it turns out her situation isn't as simple as it seems (and may be connected to Jake's case). And Dr Brower's sudden development of a spine after years of taking corporate cash, while clearly motivated by actual concerns about the dangers of unleashing another opioid onto an already saturated market, might have seemed more convincing coming from someone half his age.

Without that, this is a disaster movie that never really explores what the disaster actually is. Why Americans are downing painkillers in massive amounts should be prime material for a thriller, but this ends up focusing on the kind of stories we've seen plenty of times before and while it's competently handled (and the performances are generally strong), it all feels a little stale. Brower's story is probably the most interesting in theory, but in practice it drags, Oldman gets shouty, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a way that refuses to make any solid moral judgement at all. 

Strangely, his story is also the only one that doesn't link up in any way with the others, despite the ending providing an obvious (and depressingly realistic) link to Claire's story. With her history of pain-related drug abuse and Dr Brower's role in the release of a (bogus) wonder drug, it feels like the film finishes one scene early; presumably "the cycle continues"-style endings are only crowd-pleasers when they refer to cops chasing drug lords.

- Anthony Morris

 

 

Review: Judas and the Black Messiah

A young man is tasked by the government to infiltrate an organisation deemed to be a threat to society. He's young, he's still unformed in many ways, which makes him a perfect undercover operative. It also means that the deeper he goes, the more he comes to connect and bond with those around him - those he's been ordered to betray. When the moment comes, will he side with them or the government that's pulling his strings? And will he be able to live with himself either way?

Part of the thrill of Judas and the Black Messiah is seeing this familiar story (I'm thinking Donnie Brasco, but any one of a number of "inside man" movies fit the mold - and that's just mob movies) turned on its head. In those movies, Bill O'Neill (LaKeith Stanfield) would be the hero, the tormented man who nevertheless is doing right, while Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) would be a bad guy who maybe, if he was lucky, would be allowed a shred of dignity as he was taken down.

In the real world, Hampton was a 60s civil rights organiser in Chicago doing good for his community but organising social services and providing a real alternative to the mainstream. It was just that his community - and any other minority community - was seen as an enemy of the state by the head of the FBI (thumbs up to the casting director who put Martin Sheen in that role) and had to be kept down and crushed by any means up to and including direct assassination. 

O'Neill was just a petty criminal in the wrong place at the wrong time who ended up supplying information on the Black Panthers to his occasionally ambivalent FBI handler (Jesse Plemons) while gradually realising he was in a hole he wasn't going to be able to escape from.

There's a gripping story here and an important history lesson to be told, and it's hard to fault the film for choosing the history over the drama. O'Neill's plight as an undercover agent is rarely illustrated; after passing one early test, his loyalty is never suspected (though judging by another subplot, the Panthers definitely had a problem as far as being too trusting). We first see him running a scam where he pretends to be an FBI agent, and while it seems like there's a promising thread there - was there a part of him that liked working for the Man - it's never followed up.

Hampton as played by Kaluuya is a speechifying force of nature, which is both completely appropriate and leaves him more as a symbol to admire than a man to understand. His relationship with poet and activist Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) provides another angle, but the contradiction between his public persona proclaiming he wasn't afraid to die for the people and his private life starting a family could have been a film in itself.

This film does so well at conjuring up a time and place that at times these flaws feel less like faults in the storytelling and more just the limitations of a two hour film. The only time it really stumbles is with the ages of the protagonists: both Hampton and O'Neill were barely into their twenties, angry young men raging against the world, both having their lives taken away - literally in one case, in the other every way but - by a system that crushes the hopes of its people as a simple matter of course.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Raya and the Last Dragon

Hey look. it's a movie that starts off in a dramatic situation - in this case, a warrior woman racing through a barren wasteland - then says "bet you're wondering how I got here" and goes into a lengthy flashback. At least here there's just about enough backstory to justify the cliche: 500 years ago the land was united (and had dragons!) until an evil collection of dark clouds called the Druun started draining the life from everyone and turning them into stone statues. 

The dragons eventually defeated them but at a cost. They vanished from the kingdom, leaving behind humans and a single solitary dragon stone to fend off the (now also vanished) Druun. 500 years passed, and without dragons the humans split the kingdom into five separate warring states; now one ruler, Benja (Daniel Day Kim) wants to reunite them. Unfortunately human mistrust and greed - and a bit of naivety on the part of his daughter, Princess Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) - sees his plan fall apart, the stone broken apart, and the Druun unleashed yet again to ravage the land.

So when the story really begins, Raya is on a quest to track down the rumored last surviving dragon Sisu (Awkafina), pursued by Namaari (Gemma Chan), a rival warrior princess from another kingdom who doesn't so much want the power Raya is after for herself (though she does) as she doesn't trust Raya with it.

Trust is the big theme of this film, as time and again it's made clear that the biggest problem the five kingdoms face is a lack of trust between each other. And often, within the kingdoms too - after finding Sisu they embark on a quest to reunite all the pieces of the shattered dragon stone, only to find that often the other kingdoms have fallen into ruin because of their own internal mistrusts. Not to mention that Raya's quest is to literally save the world, which you'd think everyone could get behind if only they trusted each other.

Hang on, aren't the real bad guys here the evil life-draining death clouds? Well yeah, and while the message here is a strong one it does occasionally suffer from a bit of a disconnect with what's actually happening in the story. The moral is that if everyone trusts each other the world can be healed; the fact that what literally messed up the world in the first place was trusting too much gets kicked to the curb.

But message-laden plots are standard for Disney these days (presumably parents would get twitchy at the idea of a cartoon that was just fun to watch), and they're smart enough to bury the medicine in a sackful of sugar. The animation is both gorgeous and flawless, the characters are perfectly designed (Sisu in both dragon and human form is spot-on), the story barrels through a string of unique and memorable South Eat-Asia inspired locations like the best fantasy tourism video you could ask for and the action - of which there is plenty - is always thrilling to watch.

If there's anything that prevents this from being a top-tier Disney outing, it's that at times it's a little too busy. There's a lot going on here and it's going on all the time; while the big moments land and the smaller scenes are often poignant there's not always enough space between the two to let the story breathe. 

It's not quite too much of a good thing, but with a lengthy backstory, seven or eight main characters, numerous locations and a story that doesn't slow down, you might come out of Raya and the Last Dragon feeling just a little like you've been fighting the Druun yourself.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Nomadland

Alone after the death of her husband and the collapse of her small one-industry home town, Fern (Frances McDormand) hits the road in a beat-up van, wandering the fringes of America working temp jobs and discovering a community of like-minded nomads. Does anyone name their van "Van Go"? No they do not.

Director Chloe Zhao's road movie works best early on, when Fern is slowly finding a path into her new way of life. The supporting cast are largely non-professionals, giving events a documentary feel as they explain why they've chosen this way of life - or why it's chosen them.

McDormand is mostly reactive in these early scenes, blurring the line between Fern the character and McDormand the actor in a way that keeps the focus external; either way she's meeting these people and figuring out how this life works, giving the scenes a dramatic unity that promises real insight.

That's not to be, as the focus gradually tightens on Fern's adventures. which are mostly of the minor hardscrabble type (trying to find work, having to make repairs, getting moved on from places where overnight stays are banned). The wider range of notes promised early on, where people were becoming nomads for a wide range of reasons - financial hardship, love of travel, belief that it was the lifestyle of the future, refusal to fade into the backdrop with age - are replaced by a singular journey.

On the one hand. this is a strong and powerfully moving look at the kind of character usually pushed the the fringes of mainstream narratives (ironically, considering her fringe-dwelling nature here). The struggle to create a meaningful life devoid of the usual trappings of society - a home, a steady job, a partner - is both vivid and valid, giving this a triumphant tinge you wouldn't expect from the dour landscape and gunmetal skies.

On the other, as the story develops Fern's struggle is increasingly shown to be her own personal choice. Unlike many of those around her, she has options, and the life she leads is the life she has chosen. Which undercuts the unavoidably bleak nature of that life, pushing back against any suggestion that we should be outraged that people are forced to live like this in the richest nation on Earth. 

When it's not a social problem but an individual's choice, then society is absolved of responsibility. Temp work cleaning toilets or packing bags for Amazon are a good thing because they allow people to make the choice to live in a van trying to find a safe place to park every night.

Whichever side you come down on, McDormand's performance remains reason enough to see this. Underneath a shell that alternates between wariness and basic decency, her inner strength is never in doubt; whether that will be enough to survive in this world is the tension that drives this film.

- Anthony Morris