When the first Mortal Kombat movie came out in the late summer of 1995, it was amid a string of early attempts like Double Dragon and Street Fighter to adapt fighting video games for the big screen. While all three titles feature fantastical elements, what set Kombat apart was an over-the-top brutality that relied upon a gratuitous amount of gore. New Line Cinema knew an R-rating would hurt the film’s box office viability, so it opted for a PG-13 version that may have pulled punches but brought in enough money to spawn a sequel a couple years later. Times have changed and audiences are now much more receptive to R-rated material, so Mortal Kombat has been brought back yet again but this time, it contains the exaggerated violence and bloody melee that fans pined for the first time around.

Diverting from the source material, the story this time revolves around Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a down-and-out MMA fighter whose dragon-shaped birthmark turns out to be an invitation of sorts to an otherworldly tournament called Mortal Kombat. The dark realm known as Outworld is one win away from taking over our Earthrealm, prompting the lightning god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to recruit marked individuals like Young and brash mercenary Kano (Josh Lawson) to defend their universe. Aiding in their effort are brothers Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Kung Lao (Max Huang), while Outworld baddies Shang Tsung (Chin Han) and Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) summon all manner of bloodthirsty brawlers to hinder Earth’s chances.

With recent successes like Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, Hollywood again returns to the well of 1990s video game nostalgia but things are a bit different with this entry. Those two films were based on kids’ games and remain family-friendly PG fare but Mortal Kombat is, at last, true to the “rated M for Mature” nature of its source material. To that end, its authenticity to the experience of the video game may be enough to satiate the bloodlust of the franchise’s fans but isn’t likely to win over casual moviegoers. New characters are introduced with little fanfare and dispatched with even less regard, while the exposition-heavy dialogue does heavy lifting in between the numerous fight scenes to string together a cohesive yet painfully derivative plot.

1995’s Mortal Kombat was far from a cinematic masterpiece — and its sequel even less so — but that film at least had a knowing sense of how ridiculous the excesses of the video game were and played into them properly. The most disappointing aspect of this reboot is how fatally self-serious it is, giving into Hollywood’s penchant to “grittily reimagine” material that was intentionally corny at the outset. Besides a few well-earned bits of fan service and meta humor from the Kano character, first-time director Simon McQuoid treats this material with bone-headed gravitas intended to revitalize a franchise rather than faithfully render the tone of the video game. When Young inquires “Lord Raiden, can you send anyone anywhere?”, I howled with laughter at his stoicism while asking such a preposterous question but I doubt the movie was laughing along with me.

Fortunately, McQuoid still sees the value in the superpowers these characters possess and the bloody bedlam that they inevitably produce. The video game series is famous for its Fatalities, signature finishing moves of outlandish overkill that translate nicely to this R-rated iteration of the fighting game. My personal favorite implements the sharp-brimmed hat of good guy Kung Lao against the winged terror known as Mileena. But in between these flights of blood-soaked fancy, there is a movie that wants desperately to be taken seriously on the merits of its characters and story. It may be glib to suggest that I’ve grown past this particular franchise but would be more apt to say that we as a society have likely outgrown the need for much more Mortal Kombat kontent.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Premiering on Amazon Prime is Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, an action thriller starring Michael B. Jordan and Jodie Turner-Smith about a Navy SEAL who goes on a path to avenge his wife’s murder, only to find himself inside of a larger conspiracy.
Streaming on Netflix is The Mitchells vs. the Machines, an animated comedy starring Abbi Jacobson and Danny McBride about a family road trip that is interrupted by the sudden worldwide takeover of evil robots.
Also debuting on Netflix is Things Heard & Seen, a horror movie starring Amanda Seyfried and James Norton about an artist who marriage begins to reveal a darkness as she and her husband relocate to a storied new house.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Starting in 2014 with a boots-on-the-ground reboot of Godzilla, Legendary’s MonsterVerse now culminates with Godzilla vs. Kong, an intermittently fun slugfest that embraces the schlock of past creature features but still has too much thickheaded filler to recommend. The franchise’s previous entry, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, was the kind of wall-to-wall melee that I wanted from this universe, packed with all sorts of mythical baddies for the oversized lizard to tango with. After only one standalone movie to his name, Kong: Skull Island in 2017, Kong deserved another sequel to bridge the gap between that film’s 1970s setting and present day. Instead, director Adam Wingard hastily shoehorns in decades of dense exposition just so we can see the two beasts duke it out but the brawl simply doesn’t feel earned within this fictional cinematic world.

We catch up with the titular oversized gorilla as he appears to be living out his days on his home of Skull Island, until we find that he’s actually residing inside a dome made to resemble the magical isle. It turns out Kong is actually being protected by the tech company Monarch from Godzilla, who laid waste to many a titan in the events of King of the Monsters and would have no compunction about taking Kong out of the picture as well. When Godzilla attacks the headquarters of Apex Cybernetics, another tech company looking to control the monsters, its founder Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir) seeks out theoretical geologist Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) to journey to the center of the Hollow Earth for solutions to their colossal calamity.

It’s often said that people don’t go into these types of movies to fully invest in the human characters, since the monsters are so obviously the main attraction and the people below them are often casualties in the big showdowns anyway. For a movie that shouldn’t care much about them, Godzilla vs. Kong spends far too much time setting them up. The most compelling by a mile are those played by Rebecca Hall and Kaylee Hottle, the former playing a Jane Goodall-type linguist and the latter her adopted daughter who lived with Kong on his native island. These should have been the two main characters in a Kong standalone film, who could have spent the entire movie assimilating the ape to his new surroundings, perhaps similarly to the way the MCU did with Captain America in 2014’s The Winter Soldier.

But of course Warner Bros, perpetually playing catch-up to Disney, rushed this franchise along too quickly and doesn’t have any time to set up Kong as his own entity. Instead, we have to spend time with King of the Monsters characters reprised by Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler, who are here to consider Godzilla’s motives and defend him against the shady Apex corporation. Along on that B-plot are Hunt for the Wilderpeople standout Julian Dennison and the always welcome Brian Tyree Henry, playing a conspiratorial podcaster who manages a few funny lines along the way. If that wasn’t enough, we also get an Apex operative played by the stunning Eiza González, who oversees Skarsgård and Hall in their The Core-like mission with Kong to the Earth’s center.

If you don’t care about any of this and just want to see some cool fights, then the film at least delivers on that front but really only on two occasions. The first big set piece, where Kong and Godzilla fight at sea atop aircraft carriers, features spectacular daytime CGI and makes interesting use of its unconventional setting. The final showdown, comprising most of the film’s final act, shows Wingard doubling (tripling?) down on the garish neon aesthetic of his 2014 indie The Guest as the titular titans pick off the brightly-lit Hong Kong skyline building by building. Godzilla vs. Kong technically makes good on its title but would have been much more satisfying had the producers taken their time to build up the stakes and set up the disparities between the competing colossuses.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Streaming on Netflix is Thunder Force, a superhero comedy starring Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer about two estranged childhood best friends who reunite after one devises a treatment that gives them superpowers to protect their city.
Opening in theaters is Voyagers, a sci-fi drama starring Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp about a crew of astronauts who succumb to paranoia and madness while on a multi-generational space mission.
Available to rent on demand is Held, a horror thriller starring Jill Awbrey and Bart Johnson about a married couple who is terrorized by an unseen force controlling their smart home while on vacation.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Coinciding with the launch of yet another unwanted streaming service, The Spongebob Movie: Sponge On The Run arrives this Thursday on the newly rebranded Paramount+ platform. Though this is the first time American audiences will have a chance to see it, the film was distributed internationally on Netflix last November and even had a Canadian theatrical run way back in August. Sadly, the third entry in the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise comes as an afterthought not only due to its awkward release strategy but also because it adds little to the legacy of the iconic series that has run for over 20 years now. It’s another road trip/buddy movie variation that has even lower stakes than the prior two films and even more transparent fluff to pad its scant 85 minute runtime.

We begin at the start of what seems to be another ordinary day in Bikini Bottom, the quaint underwater city home to all manner of talking sea creatures. The pineapple-dwelling SpongeBob SquarePants (Tom Kenny) wakes up, hugs his beloved mollusk Gary (also voiced by Kenny) and goes off to flip Krabby Patties at the fast food joint Krusty Krab. Plankton (Mr. Lawrence), owner of the rival restaurant The Chum Bucket, has been after the Patty formula for years. After another unsuccessful attempt at stealing it from Krab owner Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), he instead decides to “snail-nap” Gary and hand him over to the vain King Poseidon (Matt Berry) to supplement his skin care regimen. With the help of his trusty friend Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), Spongebob sets out to The Lost City Of Atlantic City to save his treasured companion.

Both fans of Spongbob and first-timers will notice early on in Sponge on the Run that something looks a little, for lack of a better word, off. That’s mostly due to the fact that this is the first Spongebob outing to be completely in CGI, replacing the trademark 2D animation style of the series from which it’s adapted. This gives the characters and settings a brighter sheen that will no doubt draw in the eyeballs of younger audiences but come across as hollow for those who experienced the show from its humble beginnings. The first Spongbob movie, which came out 5 years after the series debuted in 1999, actually has the feel of a supersized original episode of the show but Sponge on the Run retreads storylines from existing episodes without adding much in the process.

It becomes apparent about a third of the way through, with the appearance of a live-action Keanu Reeves as a mystical sage, that this film is going to rely on celebrity cameos even more than the first movie relied on David Hasselhoff. Moments after Reeves’ initial musings, Spongbob and Patrick enter the Inferno Saloon and we’re treated to a completely out of place musical number by Snoop Dogg followed by Danny Trejo as an umbrella-wielding bar-owner. Worse yet are the litany of flashbacks by each of the main characters, which are only included to set up the Kamp Koral, a spin-off series also debuting on Paramount+ this Thursday. Spongebob creator Stephen Hillenburg, who passed in 2018, wanted to conclude the series after its third season for fear that it would jump the shark and sadly, it seems that’s exactly where we’ve ended up.

Of course the movie isn’t totally devoid of jokes that land. My favorite bit, taking place at our hero’s low point, is scored by an ominous portion of Hans Zimmer’s musical contribution, only to reveal that it’s actually the result of Patrick playing around with sound patches on his keyboard. I appreciated the sparing but effective use of Awkwafina as Otto, an automaton whose original function was to fire employees at the Krusty Krab but who ultimately serves as a perpetually unreliable getaway driver. Despite a few amusing gags, The Spongebob Movie: Sponge On The Run wrings nearly all of the goofball charm and surreal wit out of what used to be a shining spot in the world of TV animation.

Score – 2/5

Also new to streaming this weekend:
Arriving on Amazon Prime is Coming 2 America, the belated sequel to 1988 comedy, again starring Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, about an African monarch who searches for his long-lost son in the United States.
Available on Disney+ through Premier Access is Raya and the Last Dragon, a fantasy adventure starring Kelly Marie Tran and Awkwafina about a magical realm where a young warrior searches from the world’s last remaining fire-breather.
Premiering on Hulu is Boss Level, a sci-fi action movie starring Frank Grillo and Mel Gibson about a retired soldier who finds himself trapped in a program which results in a never-ending time loop, leading to his repeated death.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When 26-year-old Orson Welles developed his debut film Citizen Kane in 1941, he famously demanded complete creative control over the project and even though it was extremely uncommon for a first-time director, RKO Pictures wisely heeded his wishes. Almost 80 years later, director David Fincher currently finds himself in a seemingly similar situation of artistic authority with Netflix. Starting out early as an executive producer on their first hit series House of Cards and continuing as a showrunner for the similarly successful Mindhunter, he’s built up enough goodwill with the streaming behemoth to bring a long-gestating biopic to life. It’s difficult to associate the term “passion project” with a director as notoriously analytical and meticulous as Fincher, but whatever soft spot he had for his latest film Mank would have gone better untouched.

It’s 1940 and revered screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) is at something of a low point. After sustaining a broken leg from a car accident, he’s bedridden and perpetually at the bottom of a bottle when wunderkind Orson Welles (Tom Burke) reaches out for help with a new project. Given a 60 day deadline, “Mank” dictates his script one word at a time to his secretary Rita (Lily Collins) as she types out what would become the Oscar-winning screenplay for Citizen Kane. We flip back and forth through time as we see Mank’s apparent influences on his Shakespearean story, including his relationship with powerful magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and Hearst’s gregarious mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried).

Scripted by David Fincher’s late father Jack before his passing in 2003, Mank is undoubtedly well-researched both in regards to Kane‘s towering mythology and to the culture of post-Depression show business. Packed with snappy dialogue from the primary players that cultivated Kane and niche references to the economic and political climate of 1930s California, the exhaustive script is likely on the money when it comes to historical accuracy. But just because it’s right doesn’t mean it’s compelling and even though the majority of the characters are fantastically witty, their journeys and motivations are thoroughly uninteresting. Unless you’re up on your intermediate knowledge of early Hollywood, you may have a hard time following when and where you are in the story but you’ll have a harder time caring either way.

Fincher, who somehow made computer hacking exciting in his Kane-inspired The Social Network, can’t do the same for on-screen script writing. Shot digitally in black-and-white by DP Erik Messerschmidt and scored by Bernard Herrmann-inspired composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Mank aptly apes the inimitable style of its predecessor. Sporting a runtime 12 minutes longer than the film that inspired it, the wearisome biopic also recalls Kane‘s then-revolutionary labyrinthine plot structure by way of superimposed screenplay excerpts that shift the chronological gears more fitfully than a crummy Series 60 Cadillac. Fincher seeks to make clear the inextricable link between his film and Kane but instead gets closer to the unruly and listless nature of another Welles film: The Other Side of the Wind, which was coincidentally revived by Netflix in 2018 after decades of developmental disrepair.

Much like the film in which he’s starring, Oldman is straining hard for Oscar adoration but his performance is stiflingly rote for an actor of his range and caliber. In the film’s inevitable string of award nominations, I fear the Academy will overlook the work of Tom Pelphrey, who was excellent as Ben in the most recent season of Netflix’s Ozark and marks Mank’s brother Joseph as the film’s lone engaging character. The movie’s most engrossing scene, a confrontation between the two brothers about the dangers of releasing the potentially controversial script, comes much too late in the story to set things right. Perhaps the first boring movie that Fincher has ever made, Mank is a frenzied footnote-laden film which aspires to be a Peloton workout for cinephiles but ultimately comes across as a trivial exercise in self-importance.

Score – 2/5

Also new to streaming this weekend:
Debuting on Amazon Prime is Sound of Metal, a music-based drama starring Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke about a heavy-metal drummer whose life is thrown into freefall when he begins to lose his hearing.
Coming to premium on demand is Ammonite, a period romance starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan about a burgeoning relationship between an acclaimed but overlooked palaeontologist and a young tourist.
Also available to rent digitally is Black Bear, a dramedy starring Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott about a filmmaker at a creative impasse who seeks solace from her tumultuous past at a rural retreat, only to find that the woods summon her inner demons.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

From first-time writers and directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz comes Antebellum, an intermittently inspired but ultimately misguided psychological thriller that grapples with the horrors of racism and slavery. The marketing wisely touts the film as having a producer in common with Get Out and Us, two high-concept, race-centric horror films whose critical plaudits Antebellum would understandably seek to replicate. While Jordan Peele used the initial hooks of his movies to further investigate deeper cultural themes and implement various sub-genres, Bush and Renz don’t seem to have much on their minds past the film’s grabby conceit. As we learned with CBS’ latest iteration of The Twilight Zone (incidentally, hosted by Peele), a story’s central idea or message is only as good as its execution.

We meet Eden (Janelle Monáe) as she is carried horseback into a Confederate-run Louisiana plantation along with a new batch of slaves. She is treated cruelly by her master (Eric Lange) and despite being forbidden to communicate with others on the plantation, Eden creates a friendship of sorts with fellow slave Julia (Kiersey Clemons). In a parallel storyline set in modern day, we meet Veronica Henley (also Monáe), a PhD and successful author of a book called “Shedding the Coping Persona” about the struggles that women of color face in modern society. She pals around with her brash but supportive friend Dawn (Gabourey Sidibe) until an unexpected incident separates them. The connection between Eden and Veronica is one that is best left for viewers (ones who haven’t already seen the movie’s trailer, that is) to discover for themselves.

Antebellum opens with an ostentatious but nonetheless impressive faux one-take shot establishing the grounds of the perfidiously picturesque plantation as a young girl skips through a sun-drenched field with fresh flowers in hand. Over the course of a few minutes, the imagery gets more disturbing and violent until we see a runaway slave’s brutal death right before the film’s title card fills the screen. Responsibly depicting the atrocities of slavery on screen has always been a tricky proposition, as filmmakers have to balance the unflinching honesty of the violence without crossing into exploitation. Unfortunately, Bush and Renz do cross that line early and often, slowing down the action and pumping up the overbearing musical score in a way that made me feel uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.

Despite the crass and tasteless nature of the first act, I started to come around a bit during the film’s next section that takes place in present times. Monáe’s portrayal of Veronica is, understandably, much more open and relatable in comparison to the perpetually stifled Eden. Watching an intelligent and dynamic woman like Veronica navigate the nuances of modern racism was much more interesting than watching Eden scream in agony as one evil act after another was visited upon her. Sidibe is also a welcome presence in this middle section, striking up a believable chemistry with Monáe and giving the movie a much needed boost of energy and self-confidence.

But inevitably, the chasm between Eden and Veronica must be resolved and their correlation leads to a Shyamalan-esque final act twist that was foolishly spoiled in the film’s teaser trailer. It’s the kind of misdirection that makes certain plot holes larger in hindsight and leaves the audience with questions that quickly unravel the flimsy storyline. Despite some strong performances, Antebellum is an empty provocation of a thriller whose message could have resonated better with a stronger script and smarter direction.

Score – 2/5

New movies this weekend:
Streaming on Netflix is Enola Holmes, a mystery movie starring Millie Bobby Brown and Henry Cavill about the younger sister of the famous Sherlock Holmes who embarks on a quest to find her missing mother.
Opening in theaters is Kajillionaire, a crime dramedy starring Evan Rachel Wood and Richard Jenkins about a woman whose life is turned upside down after her criminal parents invite an outsider to join them on a major heist they’re planning.
Premiering on HBO is Agents of Chaos, a two part documentary from Going Clear director Alex Gibney that details Russia’s interference with the United States’ 2016 presidential election.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

The new streaming service HBO Max scores their first big original feature with An American Pickle, a well-intentioned but largely inert comedy that can’t quite capitalize on its clever conceit. Adapted from the four-part New Yorker novella Sell Out, the movie is co-produced by childhood friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg but it lacks the signature brand of raunchy humor that the duo solidified with hits like Superbad and This Is the End. Instead, director Brandon Trost vacillates between broad comedy and saccharine family drama within a stifling PG-13 framework.

Rogen does double duty as both Herschel and Ben Greenbaum, the former a struggling immigrant worker from the 1920s and the latter a meek app developer living in present day Brooklyn. Thanks to a bizarre accident involving a giant vat of pickles, Herschel’s body is preserved for a century and when a drone knocks the lid off of his containment tank, he awakens completely unchanged but in a world that has since passed him by. He then meets Ben, his great-grandson and only surviving relative, who initially welcomes the idea of acclimating Herschel to his new environment but quickly sours to his austere disposition.

The elevator pitch for An American Pickle boils down to a clear-cut fish out of water story, although perhaps “mensch out of brine” would be a bit more fitting in this case. It’s a fun premise, one that could juxtapose a previous generation’s concept of rugged physical labor with the millennial’s more techno-centric workplace, among other things. For some reason, screenwriter Simon Rich sends Herschel and Ben their separate ways early on for contrived reasons and pits them against each other for the majority of the story. This not only makes little sense from a dramatic perspective but also makes the humor more mean-spirited than it needs to be as Ben actively sabotages Herschel on multiple occasions.

Of course, I don’t have a problem with darker comedies; Rogen made quite a good one years ago with Observe and Report and he’s also flexed some impressive dramatic chops in films like Take This Waltz and Steve Jobs. Despite crafting two distinct roles with one requiring that he grow an uncomfortably long beard, Rogen just doesn’t seem to have the assistance that he needs here both on and off screen. Nearly every supporting player gets a maximum of 2 or 3 scenes with one of Rogen’s characters, which naturally doesn’t give them enough time to establish themselves within the story. Given that this is primarily a comedy, it would help if these side characters had funny lines to share but more often than not, they don’t.

The movie gets off on the right foot with a prologue setting up Herschel’s life in the fictional Eastern Europe town of Schlupsk, where a series of shovel-based sight gags amusingly sell our hero’s misfortune. Cinematographer John Guleserian gives these early moments a distinctive visual style, using a 4:3 ratio with a hazy edge of frame that recalls silent films from the era in which the scenes take place. It’s an ambitious place to start a Seth Rogen comedy but past that opening, the film is comparatively much more complacent. With aimless direction and a lackluster script, An American Pickle puts its star in quite the conundrum indeed.

Score – 2/5

Also new to streaming this weekend:
Available to rent on demand is She Dies Tomorrow, an arthouse horror film starring Kate Lyn Sheil and Jane Adams about a young woman whose existential dread manifests itself into a contagious disease.
Available on Netflix is Work It, a dance movie starring Sabrina Carpenter and Liza Koshy about a college freshman who enters a dance competition with a group of her fellow students.
Available to rent on demand is I Used To Go Here, a comedy starring Gillian Jacobs and Jemaine Clement about a writer who is asked to speak at her alma mater by her former professor.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Based on the 1955 C. S. Forester novel The Good Shepherd, Greyhound stars Tom Hanks as Commander Ernest Krause, a steely World War II Navy captain leading up an Allied convoy through the treacherous “Black Pit” of the Atlantic Ocean. Surrounded on all sides by Nazi U-boats, Krause and the men aboard the USS Keeling are threatened day and night by enemy ships outside of their line of sight. We see the Battle of the Atlantic through the eyes of the intrepid US soldiers as they fend off the German fleets and courageously make their way to the ports of Liverpool.

This is hardly Hanks’ first involvement in a WWII project. As the lead in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and executive producer for HBO miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific, he’s been behind some of the best depictions of the War on both the big and small screen. It’s strange, then, that he would come to the well once more for a film that’s so under the pedigree of his previous work. Hanks not only stars in the film but also translated Forester’s book into a screenplay that reads more like an instruction manual for how to steer a boat rather than a script for a feature film.

Ultimately, it’s Greyhound‘s strict adherence to accurate wartime jargon and seaman’s parlance that sinks it. Certainly realism and authenticity are qualities worth aspiring to but not at the expense of fleshed-out characters and compelling dialogue. Often times, it feels like Hanks threw naval buzzwords like “bearing”, “rudder” and “starboard” into a bingo cage, spun it around and penned the selections. Attempts at character development, like a miscalculated flashback to Krause’s love interest played by Elisabeth Shue, fall well short of what we need to emotionally invest in the largely nameless members of the crew. While the film’s impressive action sequences are all well-shot and tightly edited, they could just as easily appear in any other seabound war picture.

The direction by Aaron Schneider is so workmanlike, it makes Ron Howard seem quirky by comparison. Take away the opening and closing credit sequences and the film barely crosses the 80 minute mark. Each extended siege is solemnly bookended with fadeouts to title cards with the times and locations of the major portions of the mission. Even though Schneider has the ability to show us at least some of the enemy’s perspective, he locks his focus on the members of the Greyhound as the supposedly tense scenes of conflict boil down to Krause barking out commands and underlings scribbling down coordinates. Composer Blake Neely tries to juice things up with a predictably bombastic score but the film works best in the quieter moments, especially when one of the Nazi U-boat captains known as Grey Wolf taunts the Greyhound crew with antagonistic rhetoric via radio.

It’s not difficult to see what would draw Hanks to this role, as it’s squarely within his well-defined wheelhouse of All-American heroes like Captain Phillips and Captain Sully. While arguably no one does it better than he does, I’d like to see Hanks step a bit outside of his comfort zone more often at this stage in his career. Perhaps someone could take a crack at writing a believable antagonist role for arguably the most likable actor in Hollywood history. Even with a sturdy performance at the helm, Hanks’ star power alone isn’t enough to keep Greyhound afloat.

Score – 2/5

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When Jon Stewart closed out his 16-year run as the host of The Daily Show in 2015, his departure sparked many questions about what he would do next in his career. Outside of his admirable advocacy and activism on behalf of 9/11 first responders, Stewart has largely spent the past 5 years staying out of the limelight entirely, opting for the quieter life on his secluded New Jersey farm. Alas, the satirist extraordinaire finally emerges as the director and sole credited writer of Irresistible, a toothless and tired political comedy which lacks the deft hand and finger-on-the-pulse urgency that Stewart displayed on each episode of his 22 Emmy award-winning show.

Daily Show alum Steve Carell stars as Gary Zimmer, a political strategist for the DNC who is shell-shocked by the results of the 2016 presidential election. Desperately looking for a rebound for the Democratic party, he finds a town hall video of retired Marine colonel Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper) making an impassioned plea for the undocumented workers of his small town of Deerlaken, WI. Zimmer sees in Hastings an opportunity to restore the recently-decimated Blue Wall and upon meeting him, he convinces Hastings to run for mayor in a historically Republican-run city. Zimmer’s efforts to prop up a burgeoning Democrat in the Heartland catches the attention of RNC consultant Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne) and with the power of Super PACs and wealthy donors behind both candidates, the mayoral race soon becomes headline news.

The overall form of Irresistible is nothing we haven’t seen before: a fish out of water story about a city slicker (a DC insider, in this case) who is forced to mingle with “normal folk” and in doing so, finds out he’s more out of touch than he realized. Where Stewart looks to distinguish his tale is in its lambasting of our broken political system and while he does land a few zingers that cut to the core of the dysfunction, so much of the humor is either too dated or too broad to resonate. Stewart made a name for himself sharply deriding the news media for their bias towards conflict and sensationalism, so it’s a bit of a letdown when his most cutting criticism on the subject this time around involves 12 talking heads bickering at each other simultaneously.

When he does take aim at the folly of the modern electoral process from the tedium of focus groups to the influence of big data, Stewart simply doesn’t offer as much fresh insight as he thinks he does. But the biggest issues with Irresistible don’t reveal themselves until the miserably contrived third act, where the lynchpin argument for campaign finance reform is clumsily unpacked upon the already ridiculously far-fetched plot. Even more insulting are the unfunny tacked-on fake-out credits in the vein of 2018’s Vice and then a mid-credit interview in which Stewart literally grills former FEC chairman Trevor Potter about the plausibility of the events that he just laid out before his audience.

Despite the self-aggrandizement and sermonizing, it would be a lie to say that the film doesn’t score some laughs despite itself. In the arena of more broad humor, Carell and Byrne fare much better with their playfully profane banter as they gleefully cross party lines. Perhaps the funniest lines come at the end of the fake campaign ads, which are paid for by faux special interest groups like Powerful Progressives For Strength and Wisconsinites For Religiously Based Compassionate Empathy. Stewart is a fine satirist, an underrated interviewer and an effective activist but based on Irresistible, he has a way to go as a filmmaker.

Score – 2/5

Also new to streaming this weekend:
Available on Netflix is Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, a comedy starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams about a pair of Icelandic singers who compete on behalf of their country in the titular music competition.
Available on Amazon Prime is My Spy, an action comedy starring Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman about a CIA agent who finds himself at the mercy of a precocious 9-year-old girl of a family that he and his tech support is surveilling undercover.
Available on demand is Run with the Hunted, a crime drama starring Sam Quartin and Ron Perlman about a woman who becomes determined to track down the boy who saved her life as a child and then disappeared.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Unless there’s a particularly compelling reason behind it, a delayed release for an indie feature (or any movie, really) is almost never a good sign. Debuting at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the occasionally disturbing but largely limp The Lodge finally sees limited release over a year after its premiere. Distributed by Neon, who had an incredible 2019 with releases like Best Picture winner Parasite and stellar documentary Apollo 11 among others, the film resembles stale leftovers a week after a delicious meal. Whether it’s the result of early year house-cleaning or not, there just isn’t enough in this snowbound snoozer to justify braving the elements to head to the theaters.

The story centers around brother and sister Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), who are bereft by the tragic passing of their mother Laura (Alicia Silverstone) as her divorce from their father Richard (Richard Armitage) is being finalized. Despite their mourning, Richard pursues a new relationship with the younger Grace (Riley Keough) and to make matters worse, he brings all three to a remote winter cabin in the hopes that it will bring them closer. It doesn’t take long before he’s called away for work, leaving the already tentative Grace alone with the two soon-to-be stepchildren. An awkward situation turns into something more sinister when the isolation and ill feelings dredge up secrets from Grace’s dark past.

In their English-language debut, Austrian directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala reassemble the same elements that made their previous film Goodnight Mommy such a terrifying masterpiece. Once again, we have a mother flanked by two youngsters in a sleek location removed from the rest of the world. Despite working from the same playbook, The Lodge fails both in telling an equally compelling story and in providing the kind of scares that are necessary for even a “slow-burn” chiller. A bigger issue is one of perspective; Goodnight Mommy is always told from the kids’ point-of-view but Franz and Fiala can’t decide this time around if we’re meant to empathize with Grace or with the children.

Despite its indie aspirations, the movie still commits the same boneheaded decisions that you would expect from a more mainstream horror picture. Characters make foolish decisions from the outset — decisions that put them inside the doomed cabin in the first place — and each subsequent poor choice draws them further away from our sympathy. Richard’s stunning level of callousness is never fully investigated but it’s difficult to feel anything but contempt for a character who strands his grieving children with a new girlfriend with whom they’re barely acquainted. Without revealing too much about the full narrative, it’s enough to say that neither Grace nor Aidan and Mia are completely virtuous in their actions as well.

Even if the story isn’t as engaging as it should be, the film always has a handsome aesthetic thanks to some top-tier production design and terrific camerawork. Cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, who brought a similarly chilly approach to The Killing of a Sacred Deer, shoots the claustrophobic hallways of the rustic lodge with haunting stillness and Kubrickian remove. I also appreciates how Franz and Fiala foreshadow Grace’s presence by obscuring her figure behind frosted panes and icy car windows until finally revealing her fully around the 30 minute mark. The table is all set for a solid horror hit but The Lodge only manages to serve up a mish-mash of tropes that we’ve been served plenty of times before.

Score – 2/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
The Call of the Wild, starring Harrison Ford and Dan Stevens, updates the classic Jack London novel about a grizzled explorer and a resilient dog who team up to find his way home.
Brahms: The Boy II, starring Katie Holmes and Ralph Ineson, follows the titular eerily life-like doll as he stalks a new family who moves into his mansion.
The Photograph, starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield, is a romantic drama about a relationship between the estranged daughter of a famous photographer and the journalist assigned to cover her late mother.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Out in time for Halloween, the new teen horror flick Countdown stars Elizabeth Lail as Quinn, a bright young nurse on her way to becoming an RA. While treating a patient, she discovers that he’s downloaded an app called Countdown that allegedly tells the user, down to the very second, when they will die. On a lark, she downloads it herself and is shocked to find out that her ticker only has three days left, which is made even more alarming since her patient’s countdown turns out to be deadly accurate. Searching for answers, she meets Matt (Jordan Calloway), whose phone tells him he’ll go mere hours before Quinn does and the two set out to find the supernatural force behind the ominous app.

Despite having a fun, high concept premise, the film is essentially lifting core conceits from two other franchise favorites of the genre. It borrows both the ticking clock concept crystallized in The Ring (although our characters here don’t even get the full seven days) and the idea of “death having a design” from Final Destination. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the horrifying imagery of the former and thanks to the PG-13 rating, it also lacks the gruesome, Rube Goldberg-esque kills of the latter. Instead, we mainly observe characters looking down incredulously at their phones as the seconds tick by, which is about as interesting as it sounds.

In Countdown, nearly every character can’t resist the temptation that the titular app presents and immediately checks when their number will be up without a moment’s hesitation. While I don’t doubt there would be some curious individuals who would give it a shot, the film exists in a universe in which everyone can’t stop talking about this app. The screenplay by writer/director Justin Dec is packed with tin-eared dialogue about how we interact with smartphones and given how prevalent technophobia has been in the horror genre recently (this year’s Wounds also revolves around a killer cell phone), his script leaves much to be desired. It also pads the paperthin story with unnecessary subplots like one about a lecherous doctor that seems shoehorned in from the Time’s Up movement.

Despite all this, the movie isn’t quite as poor as it could have been and the fact that it’s simply derivative and boring means that it will ultimately be more unmemorable than if it had been worse. Even in one-dimensional roles, the performers seem to be doing what they can to leave an impression. Lail does a fine job as a increasingly determined heroine and will hopefully have more luck in the future if she chooses to continue down the scream queen route. PJ Byrne and Tom Segura doggedly score some laughs in their comic relief roles, including a dig at the Marvel Cinematic Universe that genuinely caught me off guard.

Ultimately, the film just can’t seem to rise above the genre conventions that plague it at every turn. We get dumb teenagers making dumb decisions, we get priests reciting passages of Latin within a magic circle of demon-busting powder and a computer-generated creature so cliche that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the default setting for “death monster” within Photoshop. If you’re a teenager who’s looking for a scare or two in a theater around Halloween, then you could probably do worse than Countdown. Other than that, I can’t see much of a reason not to stay at home and let its timer run down to zero.

Score – 2/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
Terminator: Dark Fate, starring Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, retroactively serves as a sequel to Terminator 2 that finds Sarah Connor teaming up with a cyborg to protect a young girl.
Harriet, starring Cynthia Erivo and Leslie Odom Jr., tells the true story of Harriet Tubman as she escapes from slavery and leads many other slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad.
Motherless Brooklyn, starring Edward Norton and Bruce Willis, is Norton’s passion project 20 years in the making about a private investigator with Tourette syndrome solving crimes in 1950s New York.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup