Review: Candyman

Right from the start, Candyman has always been about looking at a monster, and not because of all the mirrors. The first Candyman film established that "The Candyman" wasn't just a slasher like Jason or Freddy Kruger; he was a legend, a creature that worked (and the first film worked very well indeed) because of the setting and backstory and what he symbolised at least as much as he did because he looked cool and murdered people. It was a slasher story with things to say; the problem with this sequel (not a reboot) is that at times it has so much to say it struggles to get any of it out clearly.

Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is an artist who's lost his drive artistically and with it his already precarious place in the Chicago arts scene. His girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris) is an art gallery director who's going places, and his failure to keep up is causing friction. Looking for inspiration in his community - well, not his actual community, because his community isn't interesting to white buyers, but in the increasingly gentrified former slum known as Cabrini Green - he hears about the legend of Candyman.

Candyman's angle - his hook, if you will - is that after you say his name five times in a mirror he turns up and kills you. You'd think would rapidly thin out the number of people stupid enough to do that and surprise! This film is (in part) directly about that. It's also about gentrification, black culture and where it's situated in America, cycles of social unrest and abuse, myth-making, and why both cops and art critics deserve to die. 

That's a lot, and the dreamy, almost aimless storytelling early on that enables it to touch on so many different angles is one of this film's biggest strengths. For much of the film the story almost drifts along, scene following scene propelled more by dream logic than anything else. There's two main threads - Anthony's increasingly unstable state both physically and mentally, and the growing bodycount racked up by Candyman as Anthony's Candyman-themed exhibit at a local arts show spreads the word around - each increasingly surrounded by a buzzing cloud of dread.

Eventually it's time to tie everything together, and that's where this stumbles. It turns out there is a reason of sorts behind all this, but it's too little, too late, and too muddled to really pay off on all the creepy promise of the earlier scenes. This version of Candyman is covering a lot of ground culturally, and even a hook-handed killer swarming with bees can't do everything.

(one thing this film does do? Brings back Tony Todd in the role, though he's not the only Candyman we see)

It's ironic that this is a story about a slasher icon that survives across time as a legend, as Candyman creator Clive Barker (Bernard Rose co-wrote and directed the original film) has gone from being the hottest thing in horror when the first film was made to barely a footnote in the credits. This time around Jordan Peele is the big name on the poster, though it's the often striking visuals from up-and-coming director Nia DeCosta (who's already been tapped for a Marvel movie) that make this work.

The opening scene (re-interpreted throughout the film) where a hook handed man comes out of a hole in a wall to offer candy to a child is pure nightmare fodder. Most other horror movies wish they had an opening that strong; if this never quite lives up to that, it doesn't let it down either.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Respect

It seems obvious to state that biopics are largely aimed at people already interested in the subject, but it's easily overlooked when the hype around a film is focused on selling it as a gripping story for the ages. Some incredibly famous and successful people led fairly straightforward lives; just because they get a film made about them doesn't mean that film is automatically going to be good.

In that respect, Respect has a tricky job ahead of it. The things that make Aretha Franklin (played here as an adult by Jennifer Hudson) interesting as a movie character aren't always the things that made her successful as a musician - and her musical career, at least as presented here, isn't exactly high drama. She grew up in an extremely musical household where her talent was recognised from a very early age (by family friends like Sam Cooke and Dinah Washington), music labels were competing to sign her, and the only thing holding her back from the success that was her due was a handful of men standing in her way. Like that was ever going to stop her.

So the drama has to come from other directions, which is a different kind of problem because nobody likely to see a film about Aretha Franklin wants to see her getting slapped around by her husband / manager Ted White (Marlon Wayans). Even her overbearing but well-meaning but domineering and gun-toting preacher father C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker) can be a bit much, even if he's clearly an obstacle to overcome rather than a bad personal choice.

This ends up hinting at a more interesting Franklin in a handful of scenes that never quite gel. The Franklin who likes sex, can arrange a world-beating song, and is driven to succeed but is wracked by "demons" possibly linked to childhood sexual abuse never quite comes into focus, even when she's staggering around on stage drunk. Respect ends up feeling like the film equivalent of the authorised biography, where only the best-known dirt gets aired and even then only just enough of it to avoid accusations of sweeping it under the rug.

That isn't automatically a bad thing, and to be fair this is clearly as much aimed at people who just want to hear the hits and see her role in the civil rights movement cemented in the public record as those looking for a dramatic story. For the former, it's good news: the hits all get the respect they deserve. Hudson, who's performance is excellent all around, is unsurprisingly good with the musical numbers, which range from early jazz standards right though her 60s classics.

This film's demure approach to her private life can be confusing - good luck keeping track of her children - but it's very much an approach that's building towards the icon she became, where elements that don't fit (no matter how interesting) are kept to a minimum. No surprise then that aside from recording, performing, and overcoming crappy men, the focus is on her work with the church and with the civil rights movement, both of which are treated with - and there's that word again - respect.

Respect doesn't follow Franklin right through her life. It wraps up with the recording of her 1972 gospel album 'Amazing Grace', which is presented as her turning her back on the drink and the demons that bedeviled her pursuit of material fame. It's a fitting climax; the only way it could have been stronger is if we'd seen more of those demons in the two and a half hours before.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Free Guy

 

Free Guy is the latest movie to try to answer the question "could you please stop playing video games?" Perhaps it's a sign of respect that movies treat video games as an experience to be replicated - like mountain climbing or being attacked by a shark - rather than merely a source of story material (you never see a movie about the experience of reading a book). But if Free Guy is any guide, probably not.

 

The hook with Free Guy is that our lead Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a NPC (non player character) in a Grand Theft Auto-style world, only he becomes self-aware thanks to the power of love (take that, Skynet) and inserts himself into his dream-girls quest to uncover the dark secret at the heart of Free City.  Said dream girl, Millie (Jodie Comer), is a player from the real world, the dark secret is corporate theft, he has to level up to even get her to notice him and when you spell it out like that then yeah, this movie does have a few dodgy moments around the area of personal relationships.

 

The plot is a bit all over the place, as Guy's journey of self-actualisation doesn't have much to do with Millie's real-world struggle to gather proof that her game design was stolen by Taika Waititi's evil corporate video game company. Fun fact: Waititi's performance here is nowhere near as enjoyable as it should be, and kinda suggests that playing a bossy aggressive loud-mouth jerk comes a little too naturally to him.

 

The two plots do connect at one stage where Guy helps Millie with a heist, though it's just a shoot-out scene rather than an actual heist. Considering how popular stealth missions are in video games, why this plot point - which is literally "we need to steal this item from this heavily guarded place" - didn't have them sneaking around (which movies can and do make exciting to watch!) suggests both a lack of gaming knowledge and faith in the audience.

 

Neither plot really stands up on its own either. Guy becomes a real-world celebrity because he levels up by doing nice things in the game, only his being a celebrity has no impact on the plot. The corporate theft angle doesn't seem to make much sense either as Millie's former partner Keys (Joe Keery) is (unhappily) working for the corporation, which is actually referred to in the movie as giving them all the legal cover they need. The broad strokes are clear, but the details don't add up.

 

On the up side, most of the time this manages to be an interesting car crash of a film. That’s partly because Reynolds is an actual movie star playing a clearly defined character and it’s amazing how far that can go to hold a movie together, and partly because this is a rare recent big budget release that is actually about things, even if what it has to say is often muddled or kind of unsettling.

 

All the male-female relationships here are either quasi-stalkerish or based on extremely unbalanced power dynamics, the plot sets out that oppressed peoples can only gain and maintain their liberty at the whim of a more powerful group, a brief comedy insertion of some Disney IP would be an amusing gag if it didn’t explicitly state that Disney IP is superior to anything created for this movie, and gamers outside of a handful of guest stars are presented solely as little kids or basement-dwelling creeps. But a lot of things explode, in-jokes abound, and Reynolds remains charming, so it basically evens out.

 

Strangest of all, a throwaway line or two at the end of the film suggests that the future of gaming isn’t actually controlling characters in a game world, but watching them do things on their own. So basically like… a movie?

 

- Anthony Morris

Out Now: Till Death

The surprising thing about Megan Fox's recent comeback isn't that she's pivoted to lead roles in direct-to-home action thrillers - she clearly still has enough name recognition to draw in viewers - but that the movies she's making are actually not that bad.  

Rogue turned out to be a decent "it's Predator only in the present day and the monster is a lion" action movie; Midnight in the Swtichgrass features Bruce Willis so let's move on; and now with Till Death she takes a stab - literally - at a high concept thriller.

Trapped in a loveless marriage to possibly-evil, definitely-rich dude Mark (Eoin Macken), Emma (Fox) is pretty much sleepwalking through her life, having just broken off an affair with Mark's underling Tom (Ami Ameen). Come their anniversary, Mark gives her a steel necklace, takes her out to dinner, and then drives her out to their lakehouse, which seems a bit suspicious as it's the middle of winter and the place is covered in ice and snow.

It's pretty much all downhill from there for Emma, who soon finds herself handcuffed to a corpse. With no way to free herself, no way to escape, no warm clothes to put on, and a couple of very dodgy characters roaming around outside, it's safe to say this isn't exactly the anniversary party she was expecting. 

Set almost entirely in and around one house, Till Death is the kind of thriller (verging at times on survival horror) that creates an impact by ratcheting up the twists rather than big set pieces. Within the fairly limited parameters of one house, a handful of characters and no way out, this manages to generate a fair amount of suspense without ever going too far over the top.

First time director S.K. Dale brings a bit of style to proceedings, especially in the early, pre-lake house scenes where it's unclear exactly where things are going. A subtly unbalanced performance from Macken, who seems like a typical dick but also shows moments of tenderness, adds a lot to the early unease.

As the damsel in distress, Fox really only has two gears: depressed zombie early on, pissed-off survivalist later. She handles both well (though in another context those early scenes could easily look like bad acting), and while initially this seems like a thriller with one basic idea - how will she survive the elements chained to a corpse? - the story keeps a few surprises up its sleeve.

Giving the characters a bit more personality (and having that personality play a role in the story) wouldn't hurt, but the plot is solid enough to make sure this is never less than watchable. Dale brings enough flair to the action to make him a director to watch, and Fox remains a performer who can sell a struggle to survive. Gripping in its own right, it's the kind of film that leaves you wanting to see what those involved will do next - even if a sequel titled Do Us Part seems unlikely.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Jungle Cruise

Disney movies aren’t real. Well, obviously – but with other movies there’s usually an attempt to provide audiences with a real experience. Put another way, where other movies generally try to be the movie version of something real, it's fair to say Disney movies aim to be the amusement park version of that experience. And considering Jungle Cruise is loosely based on a Disney ride, you can probably guess where this is going.

 

Things start out surprisingly well, first in 1916 London where Doctor Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) is rummaging through the back rooms of some stuffy explorers club while her brother MacGregor (Jack Whithall) is blathering away distracting them with a failed attempt to borrow an artifact that they’ve just secretly sold to German Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons). And yes, World War One is currently raging, making these explorers also traitors? And nobody in the UK recognised the Kaiser’s son walking the streets of London?

 

These questions are swiftly forgotten thanks to some fun sequences as Lily grabs the mysterious arrowhead then ducks and weaves through the collection to escape. Next stop, the Amazon, where Frank “Skipper” Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) is taking his shoddy boat out as part of actual jungle cruises, which also seems a little ahistorical but he tells a lot of really bad jokes so who cares.

 

The Houghtons want to go upriver to find a mythical tree whose flowers can cure any illness, Wolff wants to get paid so he can settle his many debts, there’s a number of chase sequences as everyone runs around like nutcases, Joachim turns up in a submarine, and the whole first act wraps up in an over-the-top orgy of destruction that would have been the climax of a smaller yet possibly better film.

 

Director Jaume Collet-Serra (The Commuter, The Shallows) has made his name with films that pile incident atop incident to thrilling effect: character work, not so much. As the action moves up river the film is increasingly split between always engaging set pieces and unimpressive attempts to persuade the audience that there’s some kind of romantic spark between Lily and Frank (MacGregor gets to be the twit who eventually comes good). The banter as scripted isn't bad and they're both likable characters in their own right, but together? Half the time they’re barely convincing as workmates.

 

This is a problem, because flirty banter and feisty arguments are the stock-in-trade of the (older, better) films this is a Disney version of. The lack of risk in this cruise up a supposedly deadly river is a bit of a problem too: the early scenes manage to balance cartoony bad guys (exactly what accent is Paul Giamatti's rival cruise operator meant to have?) with equally cartoony chases, but when things are meant to be getting serious later on this often finds itself with no real way to up the stakes.

A quartet of supernatural conquistadors (with Edgar Ramirez playing their leader) cursed to live forever so long as they never leave the river should fill this role, but murky fight sequences and a plot twist or two largely defuse their threat - though they are at least memorably creepy to look at.

Jungle Cruise is still entertaining, and its flaws aren't entirely the fault of the Disney approach: Johnson can do a lot of things, but playing a human being struggling with romantic feelings isn't one of them. But this kind of lightweight adventure desperately needs something believably human underneath all the monsters and deathtraps. It's a lesson in the limits of how far spectacle can take you without real stakes; the result is a film that too often finds itself up the creek without a paddle.

- Anthony Morris