Review: Retribution

There are two ways to go with a high concept thriller. Either you stick with the concept right to the very end, or you try something new in act three and hope the audience doesn't mind. Speed is probably the best-known example of the latter, ditching the whole "there's a bomb on the bus" angle with twenty minutes to go. In Retribution, the bomb is in a car - though it turns out there's slightly more to the evil scheme than that.

Berlin-based Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) is a typical Liam Neeson character, only pushed just that little bit further. We're used to seeing him play a gruff dad who's blunt nature hides a desire to do what's right for his family; here his family barely seems an afterthought. He's all about making money for his dodgy hedge fund and his pushy boss (Matthew Modine), and if he has to take the kids (Jack Champion and Lily Aspell) to school, they'd better not get in the way of his sleazy sales calls.

Then he gets a phone call telling him there's a bomb in his car. He triggered it when he sat down, and it he gets up, the car goes boom (much like another car did at the beginning of the film). If he lets the kids out, boom. If he calls the police, boom. You get the idea: he has to do what he's told if he wants to stay alive - even if what he's being told to do seems a little more personal than you'd expect. 

Being a Liam Neeson character, it doesn't take Turner long to a): start reconnecting with his kids, and b): start working on ways out of this situation. The film - a tight 90 minutes - is basically split into thirds: the first third sets the scene, the middle is a lot of driving around trying not to set off a bomb (other drivers around are not so fortunate) even as the police zero in on him, and the final third sees him turning the tables, though there's still a few twists to come.

Efficiency is an underrated virtue in thrillers, and while there's not a lot that's especially new here, director Nimrod Antal doesn't act like he's reinventing the wheel either. Expected plot points arrive early or are skimmed  past, while the action beats are well deployed and effective. The ride is still a little bumpy, but the basic emotional through-line - why is this happening to me, how can I keep my kids safe, how long before I can get revenge - is refreshingly solid for a B-movie.

Retribution also arrests a recent decline in Neeson's action adventures, returning to a level of solid competency after a run of films that often stumbled in one way or another. Perhaps responding to this, Neeson's performance is a notch above his action norm, making clear Turner's confusion, his fear for his kids, and his nagging sense that maybe he did do something to deserve all this. 

Also, in a development that shouldn't be surprising but actually is, it turns out the Berlin police are both competent and highly motivated to stop someone driving around like a madman with a bomb in his car. No doubt this was set in Europe for financial reasons, but having Turner up against a police department that won't just fire a couple thousand rounds into the car and call it a day definitely helps this run longer than your average Mercedes commercial.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Nun II

 

One of the best things about the various horror universes that have spun off from the work of James Wan - you know, The Conjuring (nine films and counting), Insidious, the Saw movies - is that they're very committed to their continuity while making it clear to audiences that they don't really have to follow any of it. They're always full of moments that feel like they're connected to previous films but if you don't remember how or why, it doesn't really matter: the backstory never gets in the way of the jump scares.

So here goes. The Nun II is the sequel to The Nun, which was a spin-off from The Conjuring 2 (The Conjuring is the franchise that also gave us the evil doll movie Annabelle). Do you need to know any of this to enjoy The Nun's comeback? No you do not. The Nun is a demon who likes freaking people out by looking like an evil nun: there, you're up to speed.

The Nun II hits the ground running in a way that makes it seem like this particular demon is not going to be messing around when it comes to racking up a body count, but don't worry - once things settle down the Nun gets back in the habit (sorry) of tormenting its victims in the kind of jump scare-packed fashion that enables a film like this to run longer than half an hour. 

As for the scares themselves? They're usually decent concepts well executed - there's one involving a magazine stand that's a high point - but they're rarely truly scary. You get why the people in the film are freaking out; in the cinema, not so much.

Story-wise, after seemingly defeating the Nun in the first film, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) has retired to a quiet nunnery where she can spend her days looking enigmatic while the older nuns recount the plot of the first film then add "and nobody knows where the Sister who helped defeat the demon is today". 

At least she has the rebellious (well, she smokes, which isn't really all that rebellious in the 1950s when this is set) Sister Debra (Storm Reid) to hang out with. And then she gets a call from the Church hierarchy.  Looks like The Nun is tearing a path across Europe and only one extremely expendable sister can stop its reign of terror.

Meanwhile on the other side of the continent, fellow first film survivor Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) - who is actually from Romania, but is now back in France - is charming both the students and the teachers at a girls boarding school. It used to be a monastery and no spoilers but there is a lot of extremely heavy-handed exposition in this film so you really don't have to worry about missing something that'll be important later. Unfortunately for Frenchie, evil seems to have followed him to the school and it's brought a lot of jump scares with it.

The two plots run parallel for a while just to drag things out, with Sisters Irene and Debra trying to figure out where the Nun is heading and what it wants (turns out it's torching priests and killing kids for a reason), while at the boarding school it rapidly becomes obvious that not all is well with Frenchie. Eventually everyone meets up and the film switches from jump scares (which, in case you missed it, this has a lot of) to full on demonic activity. 

If you're expecting any kind of set limits or clear parameters on the Nun's evil powers, forget it: one character comes back from the dead but isn't really a zombie, while another monster is seemingly summoned out of a stained glass window. If it's scary or creepy, then the Nun can probably do it; on the flip side, if the story requires a human to fight against demonic possession or escape certain death, they can probably manage it. Basically, it all evens out.

As a demon-themed thrill ride this has it's good points. Farmiga makes for a compelling and plausibly fragile lead, and the fact that pure evil here lurks inside the only male character (though some of the school students are pretty nasty bullies) is no doubt no coincidence. Director Michael Chaves (a Conjuring-verse veteran) eventually builds enough of a convincingly intense mood towards the end to justify proceedings, but there's not a lot here that'll inspire nightmares.

That said, it probably doesn't pay to think too long about how this occasionally feels a little too much like propaganda for the Catholic Church. It's a movie set in the 1950s where agents of the Church go into a boarding school to save kids from evil; there'd be some parts of the world where that might be harder to believe than the idea of a demonic nun who makes people burst into flames just by looking at them.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Biosphere

Post-apocalypse buddy comedies aren't quite as rare as you might think - having nobody else left is a great way to force two miss-matched types together - but they're not so common that Biosphere ever feels run-of-the-mill. Co-written by and co-starring Mark Duplass, who's best known for a string of mumblecore films with his brother Jay but has an extensive acting career as well, it's a film that starts out as one thing and turns into another. Which, as it turns out, is strangely appropriate.

Billy (Duplass) is the former President of the United States. Ray (Sterling K Brown) is his childhood friend, a scientist who was also his former advisor. They are the only two people left alive after an undefined catastrophe that it seems likely Billy had something to do with. The dome they live in is the only thing keeping them alive, though that's not quite correct: the fish they live off are also keeping them alive, and the last surviving female has just died. Uh oh.

What follows touches on a lot of issues and topics without ever really digging down onto any of them, which is possibly the point. At its heart it's a story about a connection between two people going through a lot of changes, and like any kind of real connection its going to take in a lot of external factors. While it seems like the set-up is ripe with possibilities to explore politics, race, sexuality and so on, for the most part they're only glanced at. It's a film about two people building a new world, not what destroyed the old one.

In this loose-limbed and sometimes ramshackle comedy, what matters most is the chemistry between the leads - it is a buddy movie after all, and Duplass and Brown are convincing buddies. Ray is seemingly the more progressive of the pair values-wise, but he has his limits; Billy is more of a "let's go with it" guy, which may not have been the best possible trait in a President. Together, they're well matched and have an easy charm: it's not hard to believe their lives now aren't all that different from back when the world wasn't a barren lifeless wasteland.

That said, as written the characters are more types than plausible people (there's a lot of talk that feels more like internet confessional speak than things people would actually say, but that's where the comedy lies). It's a common stumbling block in two-handers: if people don't overtalk, what is there to say? Thankfully the performances keep things grounded. Or as grounded as an end-of-the-world story gets. 

Sharply directed by co-writer Mel Eslyn, Biosphere turns out to be surprisingly optimistic: this is not a story where a potential food shortage leads directly to cannibalism. It takes a little while to get past the nagging feeling that the pair are exactly the kind of guys who created the situation that wiped out everyone else, but eventually the film earns its optimism and the duo earn their future. It's all about moving forward. As the saying goes, life finds a way. 

- Anthony Morris