Review: Old

Considering M Night Shyamalan's biggest hit - The Sixth Sense, which is now decades in the rear view mirror - was all based around showing not telling, it's surprising how little faith he shows in his concept in Old. Based on a fairly straightforward idea, and surrounded by a couple of solid developments, it still never quite manages to feel anything like a natural piece of storytelling.

Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps) head off for a family holiday with 11 year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and six year-old Trent (Nolan River), with the parents well aware that this will be their last outing together. They're going to get a divorce, obviously - why, did you think something creepy was waiting for them at the resort?

Twist! Obviously yes, there is something creepy waiting for them at the (creepy) resort, though it takes a while to get there. First we have to see Trent planning out the rest of his life with a slightly unnerving new friend, Prisca saying an unnamed medical condition doesn't change anything, and the rest of the resorts' guests being surprisingly annoying when they're not saying their name and occupation. Shout out to rapper Midsize Sedan.

It turns out that spending time on the isolated and private beach on the nature preserve side of the island ages you rapidly ("something is going on with time on this beach"), you can't leave without blacking out, and some of the guests have more time to spare than others. It also rapidly heals any wounds you might have, which leads to a gruesome moment or two. All that clunky dialogue along the lines of "it'll be our last time together" was there for a reason after all.

(and yes, there is a third act twist of sorts, though it doesn't upend everything we've seen)

Shyamalan (who makes a cameo here as the bus driver of doom) has had a recent run of decent films (Split, Glass), which makes this misstep - or return to form, if you're a fan of mid-career efforts like The Happening - especially disappointing. He's never been a particularly naturalistic film-maker, but his usual bombast and one-note characters are especially ill-suited here. This needed a more subdued vibe to really dig down into the many horrific avenues the central concept opens up. Instead there's a lot of clunky dialogue and performances that are clearly straining for something they can't quite reach.

Old ages into a film that seems to be struggling against itself. Shyamalan's approach to the material aims to unsettle, with offbeat shot choices striving for an off-kilter mood amplified by his decision to hint at the horrors rather than show (many of them) outright. But the performances and dialogue undercut this subtlety, constantly shifting gears back down to the clunky and obvious.

It's hard to call this an outright misfire; Shyamalan's definitely made worse. The concept - Old is based on the graphic novel Sandcastles by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters - has a lot of scope for a great film. Sadly, this isn't it.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Nine Days

 

In a mysterious realm that manifests itself visually as a handful of suburban homes scattered around a seemingly endless stretch of beach, Will (Winston Duke) spends his days watching a wall of old televisions, each showing life as its lived through the eyes of an individual on Earth. When one dies, it's his job to choose a replacement from a number of unborn souls who turn up on his doorstep; the chosen one (who will remember none of this) gets to be born, the others fade away.

Will is the rare resident of this realm who lived a human life, which - coupled with what he's been seeing on his screens - has given him a somewhat harsh view of what it takes to survive on Earth. As the number of souls is whittled down, those who fail the test are given the chance to have an "experience" of their choosing, faked up by Will and sidekick / assistant / concerned neighbour Kyo (Benedict Wong). These are crude enough to be touching rather than twee; despite his own emotional issues, Will remains a tough but fair judge - until the final choice comes around.

It goes without saying that the film is beautifully shot and the performances are strong throughout; the "meaningful" ascetic of this kind of film demands nothing less. Beneath the surface trappings, this kind of fantasy usually falls apart because it's too much of a fantasy; without a grounding in human feelings and situations, what's the point? Despite the pre-birth game show aspects, it's Will's suffering - his sense of failure, and the threat that his injuries will close him off to a vital part of being truly alive - that gives this story real stakes.

There are a number of "life is precious" moments that may strike a chord with some viewers and come off as greeting card philosophy for others, but that's how this genre works. At least by focusing on what happens before people are born it avoids the drama death-trap of the afterlife (where storytelling goes to die), and the range of to-be-chosen souls (including Bill Skarsgard, Tony Hale and Zazie Beets) is diverse enough to ensure that Will is making a real choice... though considering the plentiful range of arseholes currently walking the Earth, some of his fellow judges much have extremely bad taste.

It's still a fantasy that doesn't really say much about life on Earth as its lived, but the range of down-to-earth characters give it a heft these type of films often lack. Will's emotional struggle is real, and while it's hard to warm to him (he often verges on unlikable), as a man struggling with grief and loss over a relationship that was in many ways not "real" his plight echoes - and takes seriously - the kind of parasocial relationships social media encourages. 

Nine Days is the kind of film some people will come out of feeling like they've had some kind of spiritual journey. Those with their feet more firmly on the ground will still enjoy what is basically the story of a man worried he's losing his touch at work. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Gunpowder Milkshake

Gunpowder Milkshake has the kind of cool but nonsensical title that does a very good job of letting you know exactly what kind of experience you're in for. Excessive violence that's even more lightweight than a John Wick movie set against a backdrop of gangster capitalism so stylised it might as well be a literal cartoon? How'd you guess?

The twist here is that it's women doing the murdering, though this hasn't really been a twist in action movies for a couple of decades now. The plot itself is slightly more complex than usual, but it's really just the usual mix of double-crosses, armies of disposable goons, and shadowy figures from the past back to kick ass that these kind of crime fantasy films always deliver. Just once it'd be nice to see a crime cartel that actually was committing crimes and not just "running the city" by murdering people.

Sam (Karen Gillan) is our central murderer, scarred for life after her murderer mum Scarlet (Lena Headey) bailed on her as a teenager. Now she's doing murders for "The Firm", only she's just killed the wrong dude and her bosses are set to cut her loose. Having also messed up a straightforward "get our money back from a thief" job - the thief stole to pay the ransom for his little girl, and with Sam's family issues she wasn't going to leave the girl to die - it's on for young and old.

John Wick has made this kind of cartoon fantasy action commercially viable, at least for now, and this largely covers the same territory. It doesn't really let the side down violence-wise, but there's a real sense that the market is being flooded with cheap knock-offs. The recent Nobody was at its strongest when it focused on the lead's personal needs (he's a suburban schlub who actively enjoys the violence); the best moments here - and there are too few of them - are when this goes for wacky violence rather than the standard over-the-top carnage. 

There's a scene where Gillan's arms have been numbed but she still figures out a way to swing them around in murderous fashion that's the clear highlight of the numerous fights. In contrast, the moments where this is trying to be "cool" - especially with the arrival of her three "aunties" (Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett, who don't get nearly enough to do), middle-aged women who run a library where every second book has a weapon stashed inside - don't work nearly as well.

Like a lot of these recent films (see also: everything with Harley Quinn), there's a much more quirky and entertaining film inside this that was never going to happen because following trends and trying to be cool is how movies get made. It's the kind of film you hope gets a sequel because the first installment didn't push things far enough... but if it doesn't get one, that's fine too.

 - Anthony Morris

Review: Space Jam: A New Legacy

"A New Legacy" is one of those subtitles that sounds like it means something but doesn't, only in this case it kind of does. The first Space Jam was not exactly celebrated on arrival (the mid-90s was a time when the classic Looney Tunes shorts were still the basis of most people's memory of the characters), but over the years its legacy - such as it is - has grown. Basically, the idea here is that even if the kids come out of this thinking "meh", hopefully in a decade or two they'll be forcing it on their kids and the cycle of profit can continue.

If that makes this sound like a soulless business decision, welcome to Hollywood. Fortunately the film itself is just slightly better than the bare minimum requirement for a cross-promotional exercise, thanks in large part to the surprising amount of charm LeBron James brings to the role of LeBron James. The story isn't quite the same as the original - here James and his video-game loving son Dom (Cedric Joe) are sucked into the Warner Brothers "server-verse", home of all their IP and ruled over by one Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle), who is annoyed that James wasn't interested in fronting his latest hacky marketing push. 

For some reason this results in a basketball game, and Al seems to think he's dealing James a bum hand by saddling him with the Looney Tunes characters despite this film existing in the same universe as the first film. While Bugs Bunny has stayed on his home... planet?, the rest of the Tunes characters are scattered across the rest of Warner's iconic IP and have to be gathered up. If you've ever wanted to see the Road Runner and Wil.E Coyote in a Mad Max movie, good news (also, seek medical help).

James himself does an excellent job of holding all this together, even while stuck with a "you kids have to follow the same hardass path to success as I did" subplot (his son wants to be a gamer - a divide Al is more than happy to exploit). This never resorts to poking open fun at James - you wouldn't be watching if you weren't a fan on some level - but it does mix in just enough James-adjacent jokes to make him seem like a decent guy who doesn't take himself super-seriously, and it doesn't hurt that he's animated for a lengthy stretch.

On the other hand, the Looney Tunes characters are poorly served. Bugs is a shadow of his former wiseguy self, while Daffy barely gets to bluster at all. Porky Pig's rap battle as "Notorious P.I.G." is exactly the kind of terrible dad joke this movie seems to require; what it has to do with what remains of his character remains to be seen. Even Lola Bunny is basically superfluous after an introduction where she battles to join Wonder Woman's Amazons. It's hard to think any kid is going to be motivated to seek out the original shorts after this.

And yet, this remains largely entertaining thanks to a fast moving plot, a decent dynamic between father and son, Cheadle clearly having a lot of fun, and a final basketball game that, for some reason, has all of Warners most cartoony bad guys in the audience whether they're kid-friendly or not. Yes, that is Pennywise the child-eating clown and the rapist Droogs from A Clockwork Orange jumping around next to the Schwarzenegger-era Mister Freeze, Agent Smith from The Matrix and The Mask. 

There's also a bunch of Game of Thrones references early on, opening the door to HBO's collection of classic kid-friendly characters. What, no Tony Soprano? Where's Al Swearengen from Deadwood? Seriously, once you realise this movie could have had a cameo from Larry David it's hard to settle for what we got. The Looney Tunes characters now exist in the same cinematic universe as Sex and the City; cameos from The Iron Giant and King Kong just aren't going to cut it any more.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Tomorrow War

Hollywood scriptwriting is all about adding and taking away. Screenplays are built in layers; big ideas and twists are added in and taken out, but traces still remain. There's probably an analogy in there with time travel, but to be honest The Tomorrow War doesn't deserve that much thought: it's big, it's dumb, and it's clear that at some stage pretty much everything interesting or original about the concept was tossed in the bin.

It's December 2022 and science dude / former special forces assassin Dan Forester (an insanely jacked Chris Pratt, who might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION FIGURE) is pissed off that his elite skills aren't being taken advantage of and he's wasting his life teaching bored high school kids. Good news! In the middle of the World Cup a bunch of time traveling soldiers arrive on the pitch to tell everyone on Earth that the future sucks and they need our help.

Soon the whole world is sending their military forces - first the elite, now the dregs - off to the future where they promptly get chewed up by the alien White Spikes and spat out in a way that is not at all a metaphor for how America treats its servicemen and women. For a movie that has climate change as an explicit plot point, this sure is optimistic about how much effort today's world is willing to put in to help the future - but once you stop to think that gee, maybe if one country sneakily didn't send their forces off into the future meat grinder then they could conquer today's world that won't matter so much.

Eventually Dan gets called up, and the "eventually" is a bit strange because you'd think a special forces dude-slash science guy would be someone the world of tomorrow might need, but here's the secret behind The Tomorrow War: literally everything that takes place is in service of various clunky, played-out story beats you'll recognise from a dozen earlier films.

For example, why are the troops only sent forward to fight for seven days? Why is the war thirty years away? Why don't, say, the future dudes come back to today secretly, use their future knowledge to take over the global economy, then use it to mass produce Boston Dynamics kill-bots and send them forward instead? Because if they did, we wouldn't get this particular, extremely uninspired story that once again reminds us that when it comes to Hollywood, it all boils down to family.

There are traces of attempts to paper over the cracks. Old dudes are being recruited because they'll be dead in the future (but if the future is so grim and almost everyone there is already dead, what does it really matter?); there's a brief mention that the alien invaders take one day off a week ("the sabbath"), which presumably explains why all the time travel happens then, though why past people only have a one-week tour of duty remains a mystery until the plot reasoning becomes clear. 

The idea that things are grim is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, especially when the concept as presented poses so many questions: why not send the future civilians back to the present day as refugees? Why not bring future knowledge back to today so when the aliens arrive we'll have better guns and training?

Nobody wants to watch a film bogged down in pointless techobabble, but the whole "the future needs bodies" angle comes across as so sketchy it's a real disappointment to get to the future only to discover that it is exactly as advertised. Especially as it makes zero sense that in a future war where humanity is totally screwed (we're repeatedly told they barely have weeks left) they're grabbing fat losers (sorry) from today, giving them a gun and zero training, then literally dumping them into a war zone that they then napalm ten minutes later.

Worse, this turns out to be yet another Hollywood blockbuster where the whole world gets trashed by an unstoppable force that just happens to have a weak point - though at least here the weak point / reset button makes slightly more sense than usual.

 

[MILD SPOILER IN THIS PARAGRAPH ONLY: Also, if the future already has a toxin that can kill the male White Spikes, why not start spraying that shit around considering the male ones are the ones doing all the fighting?]

 

Aside from all that, this has a few well-crafted action sequences, the monsters are decent, and the always great J.K. Simmons plays Dan's extremely useful survivalist tech-ninja estranged dad. The final act is actually a step up from the rest of the film because it turns into a knock-off of Aliens and The Thing, which are both much better films it's always fun to be reminded of. Dumb films that are secretly smart are awesome; this is a smart film that's secretly dumb, and that's not much fun at all. 

- Anthony Morris