Netflix And Chill: The Silence (2019)

I left it too long to watch The Silence, but also maybe didn’t leave it long enough. Because this is a movie I could quite happily have gone through my life without seeing. The main draw for me was Stanley Tucci (damn you, Tucci), and he once again does great work, despite this being one of the worst movies he has starred in.

Some pesky people break through into a cavern, unleashing a flock of creatures that go on to cause havoc and carnage in our world. The creatures are like man-eating bats, and they react to sound. That should be okay for the Andrews family (headed up by Hugh, played by Tucci). The Andrews family have been learning sign language since their daughter, Ally (Kiernan Shipka), lost her hearing in a bad accident. Everything quickly goes from zero to the collapse of society, and you also get a cult (led by a preacher, played in full creep mode by Billy MacLellan).

Directed by John R. Leonetti (responsible for such masterpieces as . . . Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, The Butterfly Effect 3, and Wish Upon, ALL films I enjoyed more than this), The Silence is one of those movies completely hampered by the contrivances thrown into the plot. That might have something to do with the script, written by Shane and Carey Van Dyke (names I know from their work with The Asylum, as well as them being part of the Van Dyke family, and they also wrote Wish Upon). It’s uniformly terrible, from the depiction of the main characters to all of the plotting that puts them in increasingly deeper peril.

Tucci, as mentioned, is great, and there aren’t too many reasons to complain about Shipka, MacLellan, Miranda Otto (playing the mother of the family unit), or anyone else involved. In fact, a lesser cast would make this much more painful. 

There are so many things here that don’t make sense, from the spiralling devolution of society to the fact that so many characters opt to use sign language and still speak some of the words, albeit at a low volume, at a time when silence is the most important thing. I was so irked that I even disagreed with Shipka having to deliver dialogue explaining how she has learned to live in silence, and therefore being equipped to deal with the current circumstances. She has had to adapt to a loss of hearing, which is actually no help at a time when you need to be wary of every noise that you might make.

The premise could have worked, if the writers had put a lot more effort in, and the director had better material to work with, but this isn’t anywhere near being the best way to make a movie around the core idea. Supporting characters don’t make much of an impression, the set-pieces are clumsy and ineffective, and none of the main acts have even one highlight (the beginning is flat, the middle is infuriating, the end is laughable at times).

The saying goes that if you don’t have anything nice to say then you should just say nothing. I still really like Tucci. Unfortunately, that may be the only good thing I have to say about this.

2/10

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Netflix And Chill: 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

I like sharks. They terrify me, and I want to look away, but I also have great respect for them as predators who are very close to the top of the food chain in their main environment. I used to read up on them, and various aquatic creatures, when I was a kid with the time to spend on special projects and absorbing factoids like some info-hungry sponge.

I cannot remember all of those facts here and now, and I won't use Google to make myself seem smarter, but I do remember that a) a shark can sense one drop of blood in a large body of water from quite some distance, and b) they can also sense the small electric fields given off by animals. They're pretty canny when it comes to finding "food".

So the fact that 47 Meters Down: Uncaged wants you to believe that a bunch of panicking teens could stay still, whimpering, while trying to avoid a large, blind shark is just one of the many preposterous elements that made it impossible to ever take seriously. I'll try to mention some other ridiculous highlights below.

Scheduled to go off on a boat ride, Mia (Sophie Nèlisse) and her stepsister, Sasha (Corinne Foxx) are instead persuaded to go off with Sasha's friends, Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone), to dive and explore an underwater city. It's an area that is being explored by Mia's father (played by John Corbett) and his team, although they will be at a different part of the site while the girls sneak in to have their underwater fun. And eventually they are all surprised by the giant, blind, shark. The appearance of the beast is so surprising that one of the young, thin, teenage girls pushes back in the water so far that she hits a stone pillar . . . so hard that it is knocked over, blocking the way that they entered the sunken city. Because that is entirely plausible.

I like director Johannes Roberts. He has spent the past couple of decades working with various budgets and resources to supply a mixed bag of genre thrills. Highlights include the superb, and too rarely mentioned by horror fans, F AKA The Expelled, the film preceding this one, and The Strangers: Prey At Night. But I'll even stand by some of his films that could be viewed as lesser efforts. The Other Side Of The Door at least tried a couple of different things among the more familiar beats, and Storage 24 simply aims to be an entertaining, low-budget, British sci-fi horror. He even manages a couple of good moments here, one or two set-pieces that still entertain in between the stupidity, and the final sequence is just the right kind of silly to prove a satisfying conclusion.

It's as a writer that he seems to have slipped most, once again working with Ernest Riera on this. You can either go for gritty realism and tension or complete absurdity, but trying to land between the two rarely works. Most people will start wondering how they are supposed to take this film when the girls all put on scuba masks, nothing covering their ears, and then are all able to talk clearly to one another once underwater. Maybe the masks were designed to work in the same was as bone-conducting headphones, I cannot swear that there aren't any out there that don't work in that way, but it just didn't seem at all likely. Then the blind shark appears. Then you get that pillar knocked over. And things just keep getting sillier and sillier, for the most part. It would be more endearing if you didn't suspect that there could have been the chance here for another properly good underwater horror from Roberts.

The main actresses don't do a bad job. They are all required to swim around and look frightened, and they do that well enough. There's the strained relationship between the stepsisters, you get the one person delivering all of the information to the group (and viewers), and there's a great moment that has the classic freak out by someone who then tries something incredibly selfish. Make the rest of the plotting more believable and the cast would come out of it all a lot better. Corbett also does a decent job, and also provides some info at just the right time.

It's laughable in what it wants you to believe, a film that assumes everyone will be able to switch their brains off for the duration, and tests that notion to the limits, but if you CAN at least switch your brain off for some of the runtime then you also get some decent death scenes, and some crude jump scares that will provide a distraction for 90 minutes.

4/10

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Prime Time: Street Kings (2008)

Street Kings is a gritty cop thriller directed by David Ayer AND based on a story by James Ellroy so, basically, if you go into it expecting any of the main characters to be unselfishly trying to do good in a bad world then you've never experienced any previous stories from either man. But, just in case there was any doubt, the whole thing helps to let viewers know what they are in for when the main character gets beaten up by some criminals and has his car stolen, which we then discover is all part of a plan to allow him to find where the crooks are holed up, with young female kidnap victims being kept there until they can be moved/sold on, and he then gets to barge in, shooting to kill. It's a good deed, in the grand scheme of things, but it's also symptomatic of the way this character acts. He'd also had a couple of drinks beforehand. He wasn't interested in any due process. He is someone being watched with interest by those who investigate such individuals in the force.

All of this is just a taster to the rest of the film, of course, which follows Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) as he tries to keep doing the job the way he prefers to do it while keeping himself protected from the prying eyes of those who want him stopped. He's helped in this regard by his captain (Forest Whitaker). One of the people wanting him stopped is his ex-partner, Detective Terrence Washington (Terry Crews), and things start to look even stickier for Ludlow when he and Washington are caught in a seemingly random shoot-out. Washington is killed, and Ludlow wants to find those who did it. But those who know Ludlow's behaviour think it would be best for all concerned if the case was dropped and the shooters left to get themselves arrested or killed on some other occasion.

Although there are plenty of beats here that are very familiar to fans of Ayer's work, Street Kings does turn into something slightly different once it gets beyond the opening third act. It's still not a million miles away from anything else the director has done, but the more interesting developments stop it from feeling like nothing more than a tired rehash. You can feel the Ellroy heart beating through most of the runtime, once that opening act is out of the way, and the screenplay put together by Ellroy, Kurt Wimmer, and Jamie Moss is solid in terms of the plotting, pacing, and character development. That's not to say that it's always believable, not at all, but there's enough done to distract you from/let you forgive the less believable moments.

Reeves is very good in the lead role. He's not on top form, it's always a bit harder to believe him as someone with such a murky moral code, but he does well enough. Whitaker gives one of his standard turns, and is good enough, and Crews does enough to show himself as a viable threat to his ex-partner before the shooting takes him out of the film. The rest of the cast is full of great performers, although they are not all used as well as they could be. Chris Evans is the highlight, playing the detective in charge of the shooting investigation who ends up allowing Reeves to help him, and you also get Hugh Laurie with an American accent again, and Jay Mohr, John Corbett, and Amaury Nolasco playing the main colleagues who accept that getting the job done often means breaking some rules. Naomie Harris and Martha Higareda try their best, despite being given the usual short shrift that women tend to get in Ayer movies, and there are good little moments for Cedric The Entertainer, Common, and The Game.

Far from essential viewing, this remains a film I would highly recommend to those who like this particular subgenre. The various elements are well put together, it feels like something a bit different for Reeves, and the ending is surprisingly satisfying when everything eventually pays off.

7/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.