Netflix And Chill: Prisoners (2013)

Another day, another film that I delayed watching for over a decade, despite strongly suspecting that I would love it. Prisoners is written by Aaron Guzikowski, directed by Denis Villeneuve, and stars Hugh Jackman, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Viola Davis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Melissa Leo, and David Dastmalchian in a number of main roles. That's a hell of a cast, and Prisoners is a hell of a film.

A dark and downbeat crime thriller, this is the story of two girls (Anna, played by Erin Gerasimovich, and Joy, played by Kyla-Drew Simmons) who disappear. Their parents obviously fear the worst, but there may be a chance for a good result with Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) on the case. It doesn't take long for the police to haul in a prime suspect (Alex, played by Paul Dano), but things are complicated by the fact that he has the mental age of a small child. He's clearly guilty though, at least according to Anna's father, Keller (Hugh Jackman). Which leads to him coming up with his own plan to get information when the police have no choice but to release Alex back into the care of his guardian (Holly, played by Melissa Leo). Keller has an empty building available to him, a hankering for some violent retribution, and a variety of ideas that he think will force Alex to tell him where his young victims are.

The first thing worth noting here is that this isn't quite as great as it could have been. Guzikowski's screenplay leaves characters repeating themselves too many times, and it feels heavily indebted to a couple of crime thrillers helmed by David Fincher. Mind you, if you're going to be influenced by other art then you may as well be influenced by some of the best, and that is certainly the case here.

Villeneuve is happy to go along with the same mindset. This is a dark world, with almost every scene accompanied by a heavy downpour once the young girls have gone missing. Making important decisions about what to show and what to heavily imply, Villeneuve keeps things riveting for those who can handle the subject matter, helped by the fact that the direction and screenplay seem to keep a tiny portion of hope dangling in front of our faces like a carrot to help us avoid being beaten with the stick.

In terms of the acting, it's hard to be critical of those doing fantastic work with what they're given. It's just a shame that some of what they're given isn't the best material for them. This applies especially to Gyllenhaal, who is made to repeat one or two playbook lines in a way that I know is supposed to show him just wanting to de-escalate situations and get him away from emotional victims as quickly as possible, but is then shown so committed to his job that it feels at odds with that robotic "auto-pilot" mode we've seen elsewhere. Jackman is allowed to go to level ten righteous anger and stay there for the duration, Bello starts to medicate, and both Davis and Howard are used well to show the complex emotions of loving parents wanting answers about their child, no matter what it might take. Dano is absolutely fantastic, even if he doesn't say much, and Leo ends up stealing one or two scenes, while Dastmalchian comes along later in the movie to deliver another reframing of the whole narrative (this happens two or three times throughout the film, with Villeneuve and Guzikowski as interested in making viewers question themselves as they are in the journey of the characters onscreen).

It falls short of greatness in a couple of small ways, but Prisoners is very good stuff indeed. It's basically what you'd expect from a director as good as Villeneuve working with a cast of this calibre on a story about grief, pain, well-honed detective skills, and revenge.

8/10

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Noirvember: Payback (1999)

An enjoyable remake of Point Blank (well, a retelling of the tale that Point Blank was based on anyway), featuring Mel Gibson in the lead role of the wronged man out for revenge, and his half of a criminally-acquired stash of money, Payback is a rough ‘n’ tough bit of entertainment that tries to stand out from the crowd by having more ruthless behaviour and bursts of violence than you might expect from a film with such a big star name attached.

Gibson is Porter, a man shot and left for dead after being betrayed during a job that also involved his wife (Deborah Kara Unger) and his best friend (Gregg Henry). Once he starts on his quest to get the money owed to him - not the full amount stolen, just his half - Porter soon finds himself in more and more danger as he has to approach increasingly powerful members of a large criminal organisation.

Directed, for the most part (the production wasn’t exactly smooth sailing), by Brian Helgeland, who also wrote the screenplay, subsequently reworked by Terry Hayes, it’s hard to see why people viewed this as something that needed rescuing. And when I say people I mean “Hollywood suits”. What is here isn’t for everyone, but the same could be said for Point Blank. The fact that the main character is such a shitty person makes it more interesting, especially when you realise that he still has a certain moral code that makes him one of the least shitty people in a world full of much bigger scumbags who inhabit the world he lives in.

Dialogue may not be sharp, and the dour colour palette isn’t exactly a big plus, but plotting is clear, characters are nicely sketched, and Helgeland does some excellent work, knowing what viewers need to see and what they don’t. The unfolding chain of events may be grim, but it’s also somehow still fun . . . right up until it isn’t. And when the fun stops, well, you know the ending is close. You just don’t know if it’s going to be a good or bad ending.

Helgeland helps himself a lot by casting such a great selection of faces. Gibson is great in the main role, doing the kind of tough and unpredictable schtick he could do in his sleep, and Henry has a knack for playing the kind of character you just know could double-cross you at any moment. Unger is sadly underused, but there are two excellent, and very different, turns from Lucy Liu and Maria Bello that more than make up for the brevity of her screentime. There are also roles for David Paymer, Bill Duke, William Devane (one of the most sorely-undercelebrated actors of his generation, in my view), James Coburn, and Kris Kristofferson, as well as one or two others you should recognise. I cannot single out any one of these actors for praise, but that’s because they all get to be equally brilliant at different times in the movie.

I really like this. It’s not as good as the original work it is based on, some better visuals and a more interesting blend of score and soundtrack could have helped (although the opening music from Chris Boardman, playing over the extended credit sequence, is superb), but I think it’s an enjoyably lean, mean, neo-noir that always seems willing to go one step further than viewers might expect. I recommend it.

8/10

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The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor (2008)

The third instalment in this particular selection of Mummy-centric tales, focusing on heroic Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his family, is pretty much what you'd expect it to be, considering the turnaround behind the cameras. It's now Rob Cohen directing, and the writing duties have been taken over by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, but the central concept is still all about someone wanting to come back from the dead and take his place as a beloved warrior and leader. 

There's an opening sequence that explains who the new villain is this time around, the titular Dragon Emperor (played by Jet Li), and then it's time to catch up with the O'Connells once again. Rick is sort of content, but also kind of bored, while Evelyn (Maria Bello replacing Rachel Weisz in the role) seems to be just fine about a life where she's not being put in mortal danger every so often. Or maybe she's just better at keeping up a pretence. Young Alex (Luke Ford) is now old enough to be gallivanting about on his own adventures, which is why he is in Shanghai, as is his uncle, Jonathan (John Hannah). The whole O'Connell family soon ends up in Shanghai, and they end up having to work hard to stop the resurrected Emperor from becoming immortal.

Fraser, Li, Bello, Hannah, Michelle Yeoh, and Isabella Leong, and even Liam Cunningham, all do pretty good here, in relation to the script that they have to work with. It's a messy film that wants to recapture the spectacle of the previous movies without slavishly repeating any of the set-pieces, but it ends up falling flat. I'll put a small part of the blame for that on Ford, playing the youngest of the O'Connell clan. Whether it's a weak script that he can't overcome or just his own inability to emanate any sense of real charisma, Ford is the least of the cast members onscreen here, and that is a problem exacerbated by the way in which his character is foisted upon us as if he could somehow become a natural successor to Fraser's character. I'm maybe being a bit unfair to Ford here. He's certainly not terrible, but he cannot overcome the failings of the script in the same way that everyone else can, because we already know, and already like, most of the other main players.

Gough and Millar obviously wanted to work with a certain structure, but also wanted to keep things at a certain distance from the previous two movies. They want to deliver a nice, comforting, helping of filmic fun that is the same . . . but different. Unfortunately, they completely forget to add the actual fun. Even the fact that the villain doesn't really have any seriously misguided motive for his actions, other than his selfishness, brings everything down a notch. You don't watch this movie for the script, or direction. You watch it to enjoy some of the stars, mainly Li and an underused Yeoh.

Cohen can be a dependable pair of hands for this sort of thing, but he doesn't seem to have any enthusiasm for this story. The plotting has a number of predictable moments you have to trudge through, the set-pieces have their entertainment factor hidden by horrible CGI and cack-handed editing, and any amusing calbacks to past events in the movie series just make you wish that you'd spent your time revisiting the previous films.

It’s a shame that this ended up being the end of this series (although there are a good number of separate The Scorpion King movies by now) because it almost turns the entire trilogy into a warning to others, perfectly illustrating the standard law of diminishing returns for this kind of stuff. I hope to never watch this again, but the completist in me is happy enough that I finally marked it off the list.

4/10

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Shudder Saturday: Demonic (2015)

I think James Wan tends to get a bad rap nowadays, mainly for his part in creating the moneyspinning cinematic blend known as "the Wan-iverse". It is wildly inconsistent, as often happens when movie studios can sells something based on brand recognition rather than actual quality, but Wan himself remains a guy who seems to have taken all of his success with gratitude and an attempt to help lift others up as he continues to scale ever upwards.

He didn't direct Demonic, that job is given to Will Canon, who also co-wrote the script with Doug Simon and Max La Bella, but I have started with some praise of his work because his name looms large here (in a "James Wan presents" capacity). Or I should say that his name looms large here and Demonic is a bad film, the kind of film that represents what many horror fans view as symptomatic of the worst in modern horror movies.

The story is hard for me to convey while retaining any pretence of interest. Some young lad has been having dreams about his mother, who died in a strange way in an old house. And that lad is persuaded to go to that same house, in the hope of recording some supernatural activity. It didn't go to plan. We know this quite early on, because a cop (Frank Grillo) is called to investigate an incident at the house, an incident that resulted in a number of dead bodies, and he calls in a psychologist (Maria Bello) to assist him in his investigation. There are predictable twists and turns, all leading to an ending more tiresome than remotely terrifying.

As much as I like Wan, I like Frank Grillo even more, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was in this. The same goes for Maria Bello. Which should have made me suspicious from the very start, Demonic featuring both of them and yet not having appeared on my radar once over the past few years. They're both perfectly okay in their roles, and definitely help to make the film more watchable, but the rest of the cast are generally poor. They're so bland and interchangeable that I cannot single out everyone. Dustin Milligan is a rather horrible nominal lead, and Scott Mechlowicz and Cody Horn are the two main supporting actors who are roughly on a par with Milligan.

It's hard to be too critical of the cast though, who are all dragging around the dead weight of a script that somehow seems to think it is being entertaining and scary, when it is actually just packed full of jump scares, overdone tropes, and a plot twist that you will have seen in at least a dozen movies over the past few decades.

Canon doesn't help anything with his flat direction. It's unsurprising to see that this is only his second feature, and his first set squarely in the horror genre. He takes viewers through the very familiar territory with the strange confidence of someone who thinks they are showing you a whole new world of strange visions, not bothering to add any showmanship or real style, beyond what he's seen in a number of other poor horror movies in the 21st century.

3/10