Prime Time: Boss Level (2021)

We really need more films from director Joe Carnahan, because I cannot think of anything from him that I have disliked. He may not aim for subtlety (although more people also need to watch the excellent Narc), but that’s no bad thing when you get such inventive ways to use and remix standard action movie tropes. 

Boss Level is, essentially, a timeloop movie. Written some years ago by Chris and Eddie Borey, and then rewritten by Carnahan, it is the story of Roy (Frank Grillo), a man unexpectedly reliving the same day over and over again. And that day is the day he dies, for reasons he is unaware of. As the plot develops, Roy starts to piece together a bigger picture, an actual explanation for his dilemma, and there may be a slim chance to eventually break the cycle. Roy certainly has the skills, being your typically talented ex-special forces type, but the odds are very much stacked against him, with the sheer number and variety of killers aiming to end his life. He also wants to ensure that his son (played by his real son, Rio Grillo) is safe, and maybe even hopes to avenge the death of his ex-wife, Jemma (Naomi Watts) when he starts to suspect that she wasn’t involved in the fatal accident he was told about by her boss, Col. Clive Ventor (Mel Gibson).

Starting right in the midst of an action moment that shows viewers how well Roy knows the routine of his day, Boss Level soon shows that it is made by someone who wants to maximise the potential fun of the premise. Roy dies in a variety of ways, and there’s usually a mix of gore and humour in every death scene, as he makes a number of mistakes on his journey. That’s okay though, because many of his mistakes provide an important learning moment.

Unlike many other timeloop movies, Boss Level minimises the timestamp details. Rather than specific repeated moments, although one or two do stay the same, we get shown the shape of a day, and that shape changes, and extends, as Roy learns more and more, and adapts his strategy accordingly. Some days he just wants to reach a diner and get drunk (with Ken Jeong playing the boss there, and Sheaun McKinney playing a fellow patron who happens to have a useful knowledge base), some days he battles villains until eventually (inevitably?) being bettered, and some days he just decides to take some time to connect with his son.

Grillo is perfect in the lead role here. He has a morbid sense of humour, an understandably flexible grip on his sanity, and a convincing physical presence. He also has a sense of pure grit. Jeong and McKinney are both fun, and the early appearance of Michelle Yeoh, as another diner patron, bodes well for fans who want to see a bit more of her later in the film. You do get that, but it’s sadly only a minute or two. Gibson is an enjoyable big villain, allowing himself a moment or two to deliver some great dialogue when people are right where he wants them, and Will Sasso is a solid henchman. The other highlight is Selina Lo, a sword expert who delivers a fun signature line every time she kills off our hero. Young Rio Grillo and Naomi Watts are involved in the moments that give the film some real heart, and both do well in roles that could have been totally thankless.

I heard the premise of this movie and thought it sounded great, but it also sounded as if it could be very silly, in a way that would make it hard to care about. It IS silly, but in a way that just helps you warm to the main character, and it turns into something more interesting, and deeper, than you might expect. It’s not exactly Kramer Vs. Kramer with added timeloop shenanigans and gunfights, but it’s quite a bit more than the opening act sets it up to be.

Another winner from Carnahan, and I eagerly await whatever he does next. Maybe I will just watch this one repeatedly until then.

8/10

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Birdman (2014)

or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

There are times when it's hard to simply sit back and watch Birdman. It's so busy, so layered, and so consistently technically accomplished that the experience becomes slightly exhausting. This is, however, another fine example of form perfectly matching content.

On the surface, Birdman is about actor Riggan (Michael Keaton) trying to gain respect and attention through a new play that he has written, directed, and will also star in. He is supported in this endeavour by a great suppporting cast: Lesley (Naomi Watts), Laura (Andrea Riseborough), and talented-but-infuriating Mike (Edward Norton). There's also his friend, and right hand man, Jake (Zach Galifianakis). And his personal assistant/daughter, Sam (Emma Stone). These people all want the play to succeed, but don't always seem to be on the same page as Riggan. To be fair, that may be due to Riggan's many flights of fancy, involving him hearing advice from the superhero character that both made him his fame and fortune and then kept hanging around his neck like a dead weight, the titular Birdman. This film could have just as easily been titled Albatross.

Created to look almost like one continuous take, Birdman is dazzling and dizzying in the technical department. The edits are all hidden away, and many scenes are filmed with camera angles that shouldn't be possible (e.g. any showing characters conversing in front of a mirror as the camera moves around them). Yet it's this mix of long takes, great acting, and skilled camerawork and editing that helps to hammer home both the similarities and differences between actors and stars, between worthy works of art and entertaining movies. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu shows that one doesn't necessarily rule out the other.

The script, written by Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Armando Bo and Alexander Dinelaris, is as sharp as can be, mixing in some fantastic one-liners with no small amount of melancholy and great characterisations. It's smart too, packing every scene with huge amounts of information and detail without ever feeling too dense.

But nothing would work without the central performances lifting the whole thing from the great to the sublime. A lot of praise has already been heaped upon Keaton, and rightly so. He carries most of the movie with a performance that riffs on a public perception of him, playing the vanity and vulnerability with equal accomplishment, and often glee. Norton also riffs on a persona that, rightly or wrongly, he has been given over the years, and he easily holds his own alongside Keaton, although he also benefits from being allowed many of the bigger laughs. Watts and Riseborough both play women who seem to want very different things, but in very similar ways, and Stone gets to do her best stroppy young lass act, putting up defensive barriers when there really isn't anything, or anyone, out to hurt her at this time. Galifianakis joins the long line of comedic performers who can step up to the mark when called upon to try something more dramatic. His role isn't without humour, none of the roles are, but it's far removed from anything else we've seen from him in recent years. Which is a very good thing.

Birdman looks at ego, art, criticism, the difference between being famous and being famous for something notable. It looks at delusion, even illness, and doesn't necessarily write it off as a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with fantasising about flying high up in the air. As long as you don't rush to dive out of the nearest window.

9/10

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St. Vincent (2014)

Bill Murray is on top form here as Vincent, an old curmudgeonly type, in this heartwarming tale. You could say that it's a film you've seen many, many times before, and it is. But the main difference here is that the main character doesn't change. The moral of the message isn't about changing for the better, it's about our perception of people changing as we get to know more about them, from their backgrounds to the deeds they may not talk about.

Vincent likes to drink, gamble, spend time with a pregnant hooker (Naomi Watts), and generally get up to things that are no good for him, either health-wise or financially. Which makes him far from an ideal babysitter. Yet that's what he becomes when his new neighbour (Melissa McCarthy) is stuck at work and has nobody else to look after her son (Jaeden Lieberher). And, yes, it's not long until Vincent seems to change as he and the boy begin to develop a friendship. Or so it would seem. As mentioned above, it's perception that changes more than any of the characters here, but that doesn't change the overall outcome of the film.

Writer-director Theodore Melfi, who seems to have honed his skills on a number of shorts after making a decent impression with his feature debut, Winding Roads (1999), puts this all together with great care and skill. Yes, it's a pretty simple premise to work with, but he makes the most of it, thanks largely to the great cast and the ever-so-slight twists given to overly familiar moments.

Murray is an actor I have happily watched in any movie for the past two decades. He rarely lets me down, and this performance sits up there with the best of his dramatic work. There are moments, especially in the earlier scenes, in which it feels a bit too affected, but that soon wears away as Murray seems to become more and more comfortable in the role. Lieberher is great as Oliver, the young man who sees Vincent in a different way from so many other people around him. McCarthy needs to mix more films like this into her filmography. She's just brilliant in a role that doesn't ever use any of her comedic talent, allowing her a chance to show just how good she can be without shouting, swearing or acting like a slob. Watts has fun, Chris O'Dowd does well as a Catholic Priest/schoolteacher, and Terrence Howard is just fine for the few minutes he has onscreen.

There's a pretty good soundtrack here, with one or two songs standing out, camerawork that feels nice and relaxed without ever dragging, a number of great lines scattered throughout, and a third act that is as moving as it is fairly predictable.

If you're a sucker for this kind of movie then it's one of the better examples to give your time to. I'll admit that I had a lump in my throat on a couple of occasions. Mind you, I'm a sucker for such emotional manipulation.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/St-Vincent-BD-UV-Blu-ray/dp/B00P1WGIT4/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1417888295&sr=1-2&keywords=st.+vincent

Children Of The Corn IV: The Gathering (1996)

Children Of The Corn: The Gathering is a pretty terrible movie, saved from the bottom of the barrel by at least two great actresses in main roles and some fleeting moments of impressive imagery.

Karen Black plays June Rhodes, a woman who just can't bring herself to move beyond her garden path nowadays. Fear grips her and she can't seem to get to the root of the problem. She's taking medication, she knows that she should be making progress, but nothing seems to improve. Her daughter, Grace (Naomi Watts), comes home to help her, hopefully, along the road to recovery, but before you can say "He Who Walks Behind The Rows" it turns out that the local kids have all started to turn into evil little shits and all adults must die. Or something like that.

It's hard to care about a movie that feels so slapdash. In some ways, this is better than the third movie, but it loses the sense of fun and suffers from a lack of Screaming Mad George (as does any movie that doesn't feature work from Screaming Mad George).

Director Greg Spence, who co-wrote the screenplay with Stephen Berger, puts everything together in a standard movie shape, but he doesn't ever really manage to heat things up at all. There aren't any decent set-pieces. At all. Even the finale fails to muster any excitement. Perhaps the concept was already stretched too thin by the end of the first movie, of course. Indeed, why Stephen King gets a credit on each film is beyond me. If he fought so hard against The Lawnmower Man  then I can only assume that he just doesn't know that these films exist.

Fans of Karen Black will enjoy her performance here, she gets a fair amount of screentime and does the hand-wringing, nervous nellie act very well, and fans of Naomi Watts will have fun seeing her "slumming it" before she became a Hollywood darling. As for the rest of the cast, William Windom is good as the local doc, Brent Jennings is a father alarmed by the violence that he witnesses in his household and young Jamie Renee Smith, Mark Salling and Lewis Flanagan III play some of the affected children.

Despite having no reason to actually exist, this film almost manages to be watchable, mainly thanks to Watts and Black. The fact that it falls short is thanks to Spence and Berger.

4/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Children-Corn-IV-The-Gathering/dp/B004WJRUYY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1379016784&sr=8-1&keywords=children+of+the+corn+4

Eastern Promises (2007)

David Cronenberg followed up the magnificent A History Of Violence by reteaming with leading man Viggo Mortensen and creating something that works as both a companion piece and also a flipside to their preceding movie. A here and now of violence, if you will.

Events are set in motion by a young girl who gives birth to a child, but dies in the process. Naomi Watts plays a nurse named Anna, present at the birth and worried about the future of the newborn child. She takes a diary that belonged to the deceased girl, finds out that it's in Russian and sets out to get it translated, in an effort to find a family for the baby. Unfortunately, in her attempt to do a good deed she finds herself mixing with some bad people. Bad Russian gangster types. The big boss is Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), messy situations are created by his son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and everything gets cleaned up by Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who constantly refers to him as just a driver. As Anna gets more involved with these people she puts herself, and others, in a very dangerous situation.

Unhurried, unfussy and completely unglamorous, Eastern Promises is a typically cool look at some unpleasantness by Cronenberg, working from a fantastic script by Steven Knight. Set in London, he matches his usual style with the great cinematography by Peter Suschitzky with outstanding results. London isn't the collection of buildings scattered around Big Ben and Notting Hill that it so often is in other movies. It's simply a big city, a place full of areas and buildings that you could pass by every day without a suspicion of what has gone on there.

But it's the acting that really lifts this up to a fantastic viewing experience. Naomi Watts is very good in her role, believably strong in her eagerness to do the right thing while also visibly unnerved. Armin Mueller-Stahl is great as the typical, cold gangster boss and Vincent Cassel is always entertaining as Kirill, the son who can never seem to do any right for doing wrong. The film belongs to Viggo Mortensen, however, and his performance is almost perfect. Okay, there may be problems with the accent to those who have a better ear than I do, but it's not too bad. Not too bad at all. His dialogue is also backed up by a physical performance arguably better than the one he delivered in A History Of Violence. Able support also comes from Sinead Cusack, Jerzy Skolimowski and even Tamer Hassan, in a small role that still allows him to feature in the most memorable sequence in the entire film.

Although the movie has quite a few moments of violence in it, none of them are flippant, "easy" movie deaths. This is a film about every bloodletting sending a message, about every body telling a story (be it through tattoos or fatal wounds) and about how much some people will risk in order to make a difference for the better. It's all that, PLUS it's a fantastic gangster movie AND it has one of the best and boldest fight scenes set in a bathhouse since . . . . . . . . . . . well, since ever.

9/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Promises-Blu-ray/dp/B0010VXMQW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1370799643&sr=8-2&keywords=eastern+promises

J. Edgar (2011)

Written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by Clint Eastwood, J. Edgar is the biopic of J. Edgar Hoover and it's a pretty decent film. The sad thing is, however, that it could have been a great film. It seems that Eastwood is content with sitting on his laurels lately instead of delivering the quality of movies that he was giving to audiences not more than five years ago.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays the main character, starting the movie made up as an old man. It's an important time in his life, time to think back over everything that he's done and to get his memoirs written and as he tells his story to a young man typing everything out the audience gets to see many episodes from his life. They may not all be true interpretations of events, sometimes J. Edgar Hoover would say whatever would place him in the best light, but they all add up to paint a picture of the man who started off with great ideas and ended up with great, many would say too much, power. As Mulder might put it he "put the eye in FBI."

Considering the subject matter, this is a surprisingly dull movie at times. Various episodes do, of course, provide some excitement, but when it comes to the central character it does seem as if the script, and in turn Eastwood, is content to just barely scratch the surface. Perhaps he didn't want to upset those who are now working in the house that Hoover built.

It's a shame that the script and direction are so unimaginative and unexciting because the cast all do well and have the potential to do better. DiCaprio, in particular, is excellent in the main role. His performance isn't unlike the performance he gave in The Aviator, especially as Hoover becomes more and more driven and paranoid. Naomi Watts is fine as Helen Gandy, the woman he takes on as his secretary and also the one person he seems to trust completely. Armie Hammer is superb as Clyde Tolson, the man who may or may not have been Hoover's lover, but was certainly a close, dear friend and colleague. Then we have Judi Dench, who may not be in the movie for all that long, but does her usual great work as the mother who casts a long shadow over Hoover's life. Small, but enjoyable, turns from Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney, Stephen Root and Denis O'Hare help keep boredom at bay, but only just.

J. Edgar is certainly not a bad movie, in my opinion, but it feels like a wasted opportunity for almost all of its two-hour plus run-time even though it has enough interesting elements throughout to make it worth at least a one-time watch - the look at Hoover's self-aggrandising version of events, the rumours about his sexuality, the film even takes one moment to hint at the alleged cross dressing. I don't think many people will love it, but some people may like it a bit more than I did.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/J-Edgar-Triple-Blu-ray-Region/dp/B005RYA5XQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361915312&sr=8-1