Prime Time: Sicario 2: Soldado (2019)

It may sound like a cliché to say it, but I really enjoyed Sicario because of the way it showed a very different kind of war, and the cold-blooded and tech-assisted approach to dealing with an enemy who wasn’t cloaked in an easily-identifiable uniform. Working around the rules and diplomacy, pushing everything right to the breaking point, those being depicted weren’t necessarily shown as heroes, but they believed they were working towards a greater good.

As good as that film was, nobody was crying out for a sequel. But here we are. A number of characters return, the main goals are similar, but permission has been granted to go even further than before. There has been another terrorist attacking on US soil, and the President wants to hammer the enemy into the ground.

Written by Taylor Sheridan (who also wrote the first movie), there’s even more shown here to reveal the dangerous game being played by the protagonists, and how disposable they are if things get too uncomfortable for those in power who give approval for their tactics. Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) is told he can let his main asset “off the leash”, which isn’t good news for anyone viewed as a target by Alejandro (aka the main asset, played by Benicio Del Toro). The plan is to pit Mexican drug warlords against one another, and the way to do that is with a few killings and the kidnapping of someone’s daughter (Isabel, played by Isabela Merced). Nobody wants to hurt the young girl, which is why the kidnap will then lead to her “rescue”, getting the Americans some brownie points while the gang war escalates. In theory.

Director Stefano Sollima is at the helm this time around, replacing Dennis Villeneuve, and his filmography will quickly show why he would seem to be a good fit for this material. Thankfully, the end result here also proves him to be a great choice, because this is a film that I feel easily sits alongside the first one, further developing some of the character arcs in a way that is hugely entertaining, yet also feeling organic and true to the nature of everyone involved. Sheridan’s script does that, Sollima’s direction does that, another excellent score from Hildur Guðnadóttir does that, and everyone else behind the camera works together to present a vision of organised violence, murky political machinations, and a palpable sense of intense heat (in more ways than one).

Brolin and Del Toro are once again excellent in their main roles, with both being determined and single-minded about achieving their desired results. Brolin’s character is more tied to the chain of command, and he nicely balanced his grit with the minimal amount of diplomacy required. Del Toro’s character, on the other hand, is free to act more off his gut instinct, showing that he’s more than just a guided missile in human form, at least until those in charge decide that he shouldn’t. Matthew Modine and Catherine Keener are both people higher up in the chain of command, and both appear in a few scenes to set up the main mission and then balk as the parameters start to move further away from the initial vision. Then there is Merced, billed here as Isabela Moner. Although I have only seen her in a handful of main roles, Merced is an actress I will always have time for. Her performance here is as excellent as anything else she has done, and she would already be a huge star in an ideal world. Keep an eye out for her name in any future movie releases, she is surely destined to soon have numerous projects more deserving of her talent than the dire Transformers film that she ended up in. I should also mention Elijah Rodriguez, who does a decent enough job playing a slightly under-written character who proves to be pivotal to the plot.

If you like violent thrillers then you should like this. If you liked the first movie then you should like this. Like Brolin and Del Toro? Then you should like this. I might like it more than most people, but I hope that at least a few others agree with me.

8/10

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Netflix And Chill: Villains (2019)

Co-written and co-directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, who I didn't exactly love for their previous movie, Body (2015), Villains takes a now commonplace idea of two bad people stumbling into a household owned by some much worse people and has some twisted fun with characters all willing to do horrible things to one another in the name of self-preservation.

Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe are Mickey and Jules, respectively. They are small-time crooks, shown in the very first scene committing a messy and amateurish robbery. Making their getaway, it isn't long until their car runs out of fuel. That leads them to a seemingly empty house, one in which a little girl (Blake Baumgartner) is chained up in the basement. When the owners, George (Jeffrey Donovan) and Gloria (Kyra Sedgwick), come home then it's time to see who can keep the upper hand and resolve the situation in the way that suits them best.

Helped by the fact that they have a bit more to play with this time around, Berk and Olsen maybe viewed Villains as the movie that they would have made their debut, if only they had made the connections and extra resources back then. It's obviously a central idea that they saw potential in, and this comes much closer to achieving that potential than their last film did. The only big thing working against it is the fact that it's a bit of an overused trope nowadays. It's still fun, but we've seen it so many times throughout the past decade or so, from The Cottage to Monster Party, from Don't Breathe to The Owners, and many more. Some of these films are much better than others, and a big part of the success or failure depends on just how well the plot mixes in the dark comedy, nastiness, and characters to root for.

They can also depend on the central cast, which is a big plus here. Skarsgård and Monroe are excellent as the young crooks who find themselves suddenly way in over their heads, with the former an especially likeable doofus, and Donovan and Sedgwick are so ready to turn from absolute calm to absolute madness that you suspect they already have a number of bodies hidden away under the foundation of their house. The most fun is had whenever Donovan tries to remain calm and composed in the face of increasingly brash and stupid escape attempts by the youngsters.

Although I had fun with this, and REALLY appreciated the lead performances, Villains doesn't manage to be quite as good as most of those other titles I just mentioned above. And I am sure there are some other movies that I have forgotten to name-check that are in the same ballpark. But I'd find this an easy one to rewatch. There just happens to be many others that I would prioritise ahead of it.

7/10

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Prime Time: Wrath Of Man (2021)

Guy Ritchie seems to be on a bit of a roll at a moment, having made use of his blockbuster success with the Sherlock Holmes movies to play around a bit more with projects that feel more in line with his earlier works without just feeling like regurgitated "mix tapes" of his past glories. Wrath Of Man may be a remake of a 2004 movie, Le Convoyeur (sadly, I haven't seen the original yet), but it's also great material for Ritchie to slot one of his favourite stars into.

There's also a great remix of Folsom City Blues, familiar already to anyone who saw the trailer. Yes, it's so good that I am mentioning it here before I forget to mention it at all.

Jason Statham is H, a man who gets himself a job at a cash truck company. The company had a truck robbed some months before, a robbery that resulted in some deaths, but H doesn't seem bothered by the risk inherent in his new role. In fact, he seems to want robbers to try their luck with him. He definitely has his own agenda, and there's a lot more to him than he is revealing to his new work colleagues.

Having worked on the screenplay with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies (who also worked on The Gentlemen and the upcoming Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre), Ritchie uses a familiar bag of tricks - the friendly faces, a non-chronological approach to the main storyline, a good helping of dry wit - to sugarcoat what may well be his darkest film yet. The film is broken into a number of chapters and one, entitled "Scorched Earth", stands out as being a mix of the cinematically stylish and the incredibly nihilistic. It's a flesh-coloured trip through a circle of hell that shows Statham's character beginning his quest for whatever it is that he's seeking.

Aside from Statham, being as great as ever in the lead role, the rest of the cast includes some fine supporting turns. Holt McCallany enjoys one of his best ever movie roles as Bullet, one of the main company staff members, straight-talking and with the potential key to information that would prove invaluable to H. Josh Hartnett is good fun as the "all mouth, no trousers" Boy Sweat Dave, Eddie Marsan is the depot boss, Jeffrey Donovan is someone who thinks they have a perfect robbery planned, and Scott Eastwood does his best work yet (not saying much though, compared to how bland so many of his other performances have been) as Jan, a robber with the kind of attitude that you just know is going to lead to trouble. There are other people doing good work here - Andy Garcia, Niamh Algar, Alex Ferns, Darrell D'Silva, etc - but they're very much minor moons orbiting the planets at the heart of the big set-pieces, although D'Silva still does enough to make himself an easy highlight.

I'll want to see the original movie at some point, and some people have said that it's a superior work, but this surprised me with how good it was. It's a classic tale of revenge, and the structure of the narrative helps the pacing and increases the tense gathering of thunderclouds and the impact of the storm that you just know is coming along in the third act. It's not one to watch if you want an action thriller grounded in any kind of reality, but it's a perfect choice if you want a superior Statham vehicle that has plenty of bloodshed, fun dialogue, a cause you end up rooting for, and a number of set-ups that are all paid off before the end credits roll.

8/10

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Shudder Saturday: Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

How do you make a film that follows on from the enormous success of The Blair Witch Project? You can either do it all over again, but show everything instead of showing nothing and throw in lots of jump scares (as Adam Wingard did) or you can take a radically different approach, instead choosing to comment on the reaction to the first film and the way in which everyone so easily believed that it was based on a truth, a blind acceptance of media in an age that had shown media manipulation to now be as easy as making yourself a packed lunch for work.

The focus of the plot here seems to be a bunch of people who head out to take a tour of the woods near Burkitsville (location of the first movie). They're being shown around by Jeffrey (Jeffrey Donovan), who has previously spent some time in a mental health facility. The main characters are Tristen (played by Tristen Skyler, known nowadays as Tristine Skyler), her partner Stephen (Stephen Barker Turner), a goth girl named Kim (Kim Director), and a white witchy woman named Erica (Erica Leerhsen).

That's the plot, but it's not what the film is about. As things start to develop, things become more and more meta, spiralling in on itself like a snake trying to devour it's tail. For anyone wondering why Joe Berlinger (better known for his documentaries at this point) would even want to direct this, from a script he co-wrote with Dick Beebe, it soon becomes obvious when the story being depicted onscreen starts to fragment and weave in and out of any narrative strand that makes sense.

There may have been some (a lot?) of studio interference here, seeming to be most obvious in a few of the more standard scare moments, but the bad doesn't outweigh the good, despite the reputation that this film gained, a reputation I personally put down to that Halloween III: Season Of The Witch effect. Fans decided that they would rather have more of the same than something that took them on a very different stroll through the woods. Berlinger knows that, and perhaps makes it easier for critics to savage the film by slyly setting up to look as if they will play out that way before pulling the rug out from everyone. It is, to me, why I also enjoy the lack of subtlety in the opening act: clips with Burkitsville locals that echo the early footage from the first movie, the immediate reveal of the character who has had mental health problems, the assembly of the core group of stereotypes, the opening credits having "Disposable Teens" over the top of them. It also wouldn't have helped that the film is, essentially, a slap in the face to everyone who absolutely bought into the hype for The Blair Witch Project. It's a movie version of someone waving their hands around and shouting "you believed this? You actually thought this was real???"

It used to be said that the camera never lies, but it's also said that the camera adds ten pounds to your weight. Nowadays, neither of those statements seem correct. The camera almost always lies, either depending on how the image is manipulated or how the context is twisted or hidden. That has grown exponentially in the internet age and, for me, that is what the book of shadows refers to. The internet. A place where every "page" has the potential to captivate someone and change their mind about something. A place where you can challenge yourself or find plenty to support your own beliefs, whatever they may be. It's out there, a worldwide spell cast by all of us, without any limits in place, and it's important to remember that with every single click we make, both as a user and a creator.

The script may not be as sharp or smart as it could be, and the direction is a bit messy at times, but the biggest weakness here is the cast. Aside from Donovan and Director, and Lanny Flaherty (playing a local Sheriff), the performances range from embarrassingly bad to just about tolerable. Leerhsen is the worst offender, but there are a number of times when Turner and Skyler do their best to match her.

Despite these imperfections, Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 holds up for me as a smart and sophisticated horror movie. I encourage people to revisit it, or finally give it a watch for the first time. You're unlikely to enjoy it as much as I do, but I hope that it might one day rise above the unwarranted bad reputation that has been attached to it since it was initially released.

8/10

Anyone else who likes the movie can buy it here.
Americans can pick it up here.