Review: A Quiet Place part II

For an end of the world disaster series, the Quiet Place movies definitely keep things small scale. The first film was largely set around a farm; this sequel (with a bit of prequel bolted on the front) involves an epic walk over a hill to a disused factory, where much of the suspense involves the opening and closing of a door. Big budget films are back!

To be fair, what made the first film so memorable was that literally every move anyone made could be their last, as noise-hating alien monsters would attack out of nowhere at the slightest sound. That film ended with the surviving humans - Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and children Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and baby / noise machine Abbott - figuring out a way to use Regan's hearing aid to stun the aliens long enough to kill them. As we soon discover here, sometimes that's not enough.

After a prequel sequence showing how things went to hell, we pick up where we left off: Evelyn's husband (writer / director John Krasinski) is still dead and the farm is still on fire, so after grabbing a few essentials - and a quick cameo from the nail in the step that was so memorable in the first film - they hit the road. With only a shotgun and portable speaker to broadcast the feedback the monsters hate, even the shortest journey is extremely risky, and they've got a long walk (with no shoes) ahead of them.

Eventually they meet up with former neighbour Emmett (Cillian Murphy), who has moved into the aforementioned disused factory for safety even though the whole place is full of teetering chunks of scrap iron just waiting to go crash. Emmett's basically given up after the death of his wife and says (very quietly) they should too, but Regan has bigger plans - and a mysterious radio station broadcasting the same song over and over is a big part of them.

A Quiet Place part II was one of the first films pulled from release when Covid-19 started shutting things down, and watching it in a crowded cinema it's not hard to see why. More than most horror films, this one works because of the shared experience, and the audience's experience is one we share with the people on the screen - in a film where silence is vital and the slightest sound could have dire consequences, we're all but forced to keep quiet to hear what's (not) going on.

(now come up with a movie concept that forces people to keep their phones turned off)

While this is definitely a small scale thriller (and the story's few attempts to broaden things out don't really make a lot of sense), that works to its advantage in creating a world where doing literally anything could get you killed. A quick walk down the (ruined) shops becomes a series of knife-edge scenes, and Krasinski takes full advantage of this. He's constantly dragging out moments for maximum tension and throwing in just as many jump scares as creepy moments where we notice something moving in the background before the characters do.

If there's any real flaws here, it's that it lacks the truly memorable set-pieces of the first film. Relying just a little too much on Marcus being a dumbass doesn't help, but Regan stepping up to be the real hero more than balances that out. For a film that's basically one long creep through a haunted house waiting for a sudden sound to break the tension - only here, the sudden sound makes things worse - this gives her a surprisingly strong character arc. The film's better for it.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Those Who Wish Me Dead

Those Who Wish Me Dead is an old-fashioned thriller in a bunch of ways, and not just because the last fire-fighting action film I saw was 1998's Firestorm, which is memorable solely because towards the end the aforementioned firestorm turns bad guy William Forsythe's head into a burnt match. That's the kind of thing you remember twenty years later; the events of this film, not so much.

Despite Angelia Jolie's face looming large on the poster, this story turns out to involve a wide combination of plot threads, not all of which pay off. Jolie is Hannah Faber, a firefighter haunted by watching a couple of kids fry in a fire (we do not see them fry) and is now a thrill-seeking drunk. Her ex, local sheriff Ethan Sawyer (Jon Bernthal), knows she has a death wish, but good news: she's been posted to a desk job at a fire watch tower. There's no way she'll be able to kill herself there... unless she walks out the front door and jumps off the balcony.

Meanwhile, a hit squad (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) are busy murdering people a few states away as part of their efforts to try and retrieve / bury some mysterious evidence that could get a lot of very powerful people in trouble. How powerful? Their boss is played by Tyler Perry. 

Their next target figures out he's next, hits the road with his son Conner (Finn Little), and probably would have escaped if not for the fact he was stupid enough to head straight for the survival camp he left photos of all over his house - a woodland camp run by Ethan and his pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore). No prizes for guessing which forest this camp is located in, and when the hit squad take out dad but miss Conner, they figure setting the forest on fire will smoke him out.

That's a lot for a 90 minute movie to deal with; whatever this film's problems, a shortage of plot isn't one of them. It does mean most of the characters are barely sketched in, but it's not like any of them are people you'd want to hang out with. The competent professionalism of the hit squad is probably the film's high point; they may be ruthless killers, but their struggles to get the job done make them a lot more interesting than everyone else.

As Hannah, Jolie has the difficult job of being a rough'n tumble fire-fighting gal while looking like Angelia Jolie, and then also has to pair off with a kid who's constant whining and complaining is both refreshingly accurate (hey, he just saw his dad murdered) and annoying enough to totally justify Jolie's complete lack of chemistry with him. Theirs is not a buddy act for the ages.

Hang on, wasn't the forest on fire? And doesn't this film open with Hannah hanging out with a whole squad of seemingly important-to-the-story smoke-jumpers? Yes and yes, yet the fire only plays a minor role in the story and actually fighting the fire barely gets a look-in, which seems like a waste of yet another interesting element in a film that should be gripping from start to finish and yet ends up just kind of sitting there.

Director Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone) has written a number of gritty action screenplays (Sicario, Hell or High Water) that have been vastly improved by superior direction, and there's little doubt superior direction would definitely have helped here. Or even sharper editing; the 90 minute run time could possibly be a sign that those involved realised this needed to pick up the pace (and it doesn't feel like anything important was left out), but while the story is somewhat satisfying on a basic level and the performances are all decent enough, this never really catches fire (sorry).

Put another way, a lot of this film is people hurrying through a burning forest at night trying to escape ruthless killers, which should be a lot more exciting than it turns out to be.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Spiral

There was a period there where the Saw movies were so bogged down in continuity they all but lost sight of what made them work: deathtraps and plenty of them. We don't watch these movies for yet another shock twist reveal that some side character has decided to "carry on Jigsaw's work" - we want to see people mangled for some minor transgression by an evil puppet serial killer who thinks they're righting wrongs. So good news: Spiral ("from the book of Saw") delivers on the mangulations and then some. Maybe leave pork off the menu for a while.

The other element here - and it's literally the only other reason to see this film - is Chris Rock, who isn't playing Chris Rock but if you're a fan of Chris Rock you'll definitely enjoy the way he's playing a very Chris Rock kind of character. "What if Chris Rock was a cop trying to track down a serial killer while riffing on Forrest Gump and referencing New Jack City?" Question answered.

While those are two very good reasons to watch this film (or at least, they are if you're a fan of gory dismemberments and / or Chris Rock), beyond that this slice of grim big city murk can feel a little reheated. A Jigsaw copycat killer is targeting corrupt cops in an unnamed US city, and Detective Zeke Banks (Rock) and new partner William Schenk (Max Minghella) are on the case. Which might be a problem, because years ago Banks took down a crooked cop and the whole force turned against him - even, to some extent, his police chief (now retired) dad (Samuel L Jackson).

Jigsaw Junior is killing corrupt cops; Rock is playing literally the only non-corrupt cop in town. So there's not a whole lot of tension there. Meanwhile, the identity of the Jigsaw copycat is extremely non-mysterious if you're paying even the slightest attention, so that's not exactly keeping you in your seat either. And yet Spiral is still perfectly watchable (unless you're squeamish) and at times almost compelling. What gives?

Seeing a bunch of mildly annoying characters murdered in gruesome ways is always going to be somewhat entertaining, and while the death traps here are pretty basic, they do deliver when it comes to unpleasant ways to die. Spaced out at one roughly every fifteen minutes, it's a fairly solid structure to build on.

Chris Rock is the other big draw (Jackson, who brings some weight to proceedings, is only present for a handful of scenes), and he's going all out to make it work. Reportedly Rock pitched the idea of him starring in a Saw film to the studio; turns out dropping someone with actual charisma into the sub-Seven grime of the franchise makes for a pretty good hook. 

Clearly a shouty cop who plays by his own rules isn't anything special. But Rock (who largely keeps his riffing to character-appropriate gripes about marriage) makes it work here, especially in the scenes where his frustration with his fellow cops boils over.

This is a film that is exactly the sum of its parts and no more; if you're not interested in gruesome death traps and / or Chris Rock, there's nothing else here for you. But put together, those parts add up to a solid installment in the Saw series. As always, the only (rusty, metal, blood-splattered) door here that isn't linked to a death trap is the one that leads to a sequel.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Fatale

There's occasionally some confusion in the movie world about the difference between "good" and "entertaining". "Good" is the kind of film that's considered for awards; "entertaining" is Fatale, a not-particularly-erotic thriller that's staggered out of the 90s like the last twenty years of television never happened. It's a very specific kind of experience, but if you're on its wavelength there's a lot of fun to be had - if not always of the kind the film-makers intended.

There's a lot of plot here and not all of it comes from Fatal Attraction, but all you really need to know is that former sports star (just go with it) turned sports agent Derrick Tyler (Michael Ealy) is raking in the cash but for some reason his trophy wife (Damaris Lewis) has resting bitch face 24/7. So when he goes to Vegas for some business-related partying, he ends up sleeping with a Random White Woman (Hillary Swank), who rapidly turns out to be kind of nutty... but it's nothing he can't handle. 

Turns out he can also handle a home invader who interrupts his makeup sex with his wife; going by the way he swings a club, maybe golf was the sport he was a star in? But when the cops arrive at his fancy mansion it turns out Random White Woman is in fact LAPD detective Val Quinlan, who is both a hero cop for unexplained reasons and a disgraced cop for tragic reasons. Her showing up feels like a coincidence that should mean something; it does not. Well, it does mean she's back in his life, especially as the home invasion could have been an attempted murder. Who can he trust?

Nobody. The answer is nobody, because this is one of those films where pretty much everybody is a scumbag with something to hide. You'd think Derrick would be used to this, what with being a sports agent, but Ealy spends 95% of the film with a WTF expression that, to be fair, is perfectly justified considering what's going on around him.

This has two things going for it, and neither of them is sex despite a handful of sex scenes, which is a handful more than pretty much everything else out of Hollywood in the last few years. The first thing is that the story just keeps on coming: the plot may be implausible and require people to be fairly stupid, but through sheer volume alone the twists - and Ealy's stunned expression - keep the entertainment value up.

The other is Swank's performance. She really goes for it in a fairly complicated role, having to walk at least two fine lines at once to make Val even remotely plausible. She's clearly having fun chewing on a meaty role without ever going so over the top she trashes the film; the rest of the film does a pretty good job of that without her help.

- Anthony Morris