Both a satire with not quite enough bite and a creature feature without much of a proverbial bark, Death Of A Unicorn has promising aspects on paper but can’t translate them to movie magic. Alex Scharfman’s directorial debut is being marketed by A24 as an offbeat horror comedy, which isn’t totally misleading as much as it’s overpromising something that’s scarier or funnier than it actually is. Although there are some kills that could satisfy horror nuts and humor that could kill with the “eat the rich” demographic, the movie never fully commits to what it wants to be. To its credit, it puts forth better computer-generated effects than I would expect for a film with a $15 million budget, especially given that it also boasts a stacked cast too. It’s just too bad that all these people and unicorns weren’t brought together for something more impactful.

Death Of A Unicorn finds pharmaceutical lawyer Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) en route to a business retreat when they accidentally hit what turns out to be a unicorn with their car. Unsure how to handle the situation, Elliot stashes the mythical creature in the car and doesn’t mention it to their hosts when they arrive at their estate. Elliot’s cancer-stricken boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) is considering moving him up to a VP position but wants the second opinion of his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and their son Shepard (Will Poulter) first. The still-alive unicorn makes a calamitous escape from the automobile and the group accidentally discovers the healing properties from the creature’s blood. The revelation puts Elliot at odds with the Leopolds’ desire to turn the magic substance for profit and Ridley’s conviction to restoring nature’s balance by returning the unicorn to its family.

Paul Rudd is an immensely amiable screen presence and has been an enduring talent for decades now but Death Of A Unicorn doesn’t make good use of either his comedic or dramatic sensibilities. He’s allegedly playing the movie’s protagonist but we can tell from the way he handles the initial car accident with the unicorn that he’s hardly the paragon of nobility. Elliot has a strained relationship with Ridley and he has numerous opportunities to do right by her that he eschews for career ambition. Not every lead character has to be likable in every sense but Rudd can’t make Elliot’s cowardly impulses come across as character flaws that we want to see him overcome; he simply comes across as a jerk who should get what’s coming to him.

With themes of parent-teenager strife and science meddling with nature, Death Of A Unicorn seems to take cues from Spielberg fables like War Of The Worlds and Jurassic Park. While it obviously doesn’t have the budget of effects-heavy projects like that, Scharfman’s script also isn’t as sharp as it needs to be from a character perspective to make up for the deficit. Fortunately, the actors playing the Leopolds — Will Poulter and Téa Leoni, in particular — make the most out of satirizing the greedy corporatists who are blinded to the obvious by the dollar signs in their eyes. They’re playing similar types to ones Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette took on for Mickey 17 recently but Poulter and Leoni wisely don’t go as over-the-top in their portrayals. Even when Shepard grinds a portion of a unicorn horn into powder that he proceeds to snort, Poulter finds some real laughs in the sheer enormity of his character’s arrogance.

The film’s trajectory is clearly leading to a showdown between the mansion-dwellers and the unicorn family angered by the capture of one of their own. The take-no-prisoners attitude of the unicorn clan is meant to fly in the face of the majestic image we tend to associate with the mythical creature, but it’s a one-note joke that’s not particularly bright in the first place. The rendering of the CGI is admittedly punching above its weight class and the kills at the hands — horns and hooves may be more fitting — of the unicorns generate some fun gore-soaked scenes; one character’s undoing atop a billiard table is perhaps the most inspired. Death Of A Unicorn just isn’t able to find a way to weave its tapestry of conflicting genres and tones together into one enchanting concoction.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is A Minecraft Movie, a fantasy adventure starring Jason Momoa and Jack Black, following four misfits who are pulled through a portal into a cubic world that thrives on imagination, having no choice but to master the world while embarking on a quest.
Also coming to theaters is Hell Of A Summer, a horror comedy starring Fred Hechinger and Abby Quinn, about a masked killer who begins picking off a group of camp counselors the night before their campers are set to arrive for the summer.
Premiering on Shudder is 825 Forest Road, a supernatural horror movie starring Joe Falcone and Elizabeth Vermilyea, involving a man who hopes to start a new life with his wife and sister after a family tragedy, but discovers the town he has moved to has a dark secret.

A marriage story disguised as a spy caper, Steven Soderbergh’s latest Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as the partners at the center of this outstanding potboiler. They play George and Kathryn, respectively, both intelligence officers working for the same British organization, who use the phrase “black bag” like a safe word when skirting around confidential intel with one another. George’s boss Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) asks him to investigate the leak of a dangerous software program named Severus and gives him a list of potential suspects within their agency. They include satellite imagery specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela), her boyfriend Freddie (Tom Burke), psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris), and her boyfriend James (Regé-Jean Page). The fifth name on the list, as it should happen, is Kathryn.

Like NEON did with Soderbergh’s Presence a couple months ago, Focus Features is pitching Black Bag as something a bit different than what it actually turns out to be. The ads make it seem like more of an action-packed affair along the lines of a James Bond movie; incidentally, two alumni from that franchise (Harris and Pierce Brosnan in a small role) also appear here. Instead, its story is driven not just on dialogue but the tone and inflection of how the characters, all trained in espionage, carefully deliver their words. Serving as screenwriter for a third time with Soderbergh after Kimi and Presence, David Koepp loads his script with tense exchanges and spy lingo, along with bits of droll humor, to make this tricky, duplicitous world seem plausible.

Even the most adroit script could fall flat with pedestrian storytelling but with Soderbergh working, as he’s often done, as director, cinematographer and editor, Black Bag is quietly riveting. A dinner scene with six guests could absolutely be a ho-hum volley of shot-reverse shot interactions but without getting too ostentatious, Soderbergh finds perfect angles around the corners of the table to pique our interest. George suggests they play a game where each person effectively speaks on behalf of the person sitting to their right and the pacing and composition of the shots turns this normal-seeming party game into something much higher stakes. As with many of his projects, Soderbergh uses natural room lighting here and the globe lights on the table provide enough coverage on each of the characters’ faces but also emit a gauzy halo that smears the frame the way these suspects fudge their facts.

While George is undoubtedly Black Bag‘s central character as the paranoid interrogator, the film gives ample time for each of the main players in the exceptional ensemble cast to shine. The standout for me is Marisa Abela, playing an analyst who is still trying to prove herself early in her career but who also demonstrates she’s more than capable in the art of deception. Following up his role as a war-ready tanker driver in last year’s Furiosa, Tom Burke is back to playing the more conniving and cunning roles that helped him break out in The Souvenir and Mank. Regé-Jean Page and Naomie Harris play things cool and sharp-tongued while still allowing for spots of vulnerability to shine through. Every one of them is impeccably dressed and, yes, everyone in this movie is, to quote Zoolander, “ridiculously good looking”.

Black Bag is certainly a riveting whodunit within this cloak-and-dagger world but I especially appreciated the level of domestic drama Soderbergh and Koepp infuse in this movie. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender also flesh out their characters beautifully, both coming across as unreadable and enigmatic at the outset but slowly revealing the emotional concentric circles that would cause the two to fall for one another. It also helps that the two actors, some of the best we have, possess dynamite chemistry with one another. With almost 40 films under his belt at this point in his incredible career, Steven Soderbergh is simply one of the most exciting filmmakers around and Black Bag is yet another example of how there’s no genre he can’t enliven.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Snow White, a live-action Disney remake starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, retells the story of a princess who joins forces with seven dwarves to liberate her kingdom from her cruel stepmother The Evil Queen.
The Alto Knights, a biopic starring Robert De Niro and Debra Messing, involves a pair of legendary mob bosses — Vito Genovese and Frank Costello — who were rivals for control of a major crime family in the mid-20th century.
Ash, a sci-fi horror thriller starring Eiza González and Aaron Paul, follows an astronaut as she wakes up to find that the entire crew of her space station has been killed and sets course for a nearby planet to find answers.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Dying is easy but comedy is hard in The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’ morbid, but not particularly mordant, follow-up to last year’s outstanding serial killer thriller Longlegs. That film had such an icy solemness to it that even morsels of humor felt like a filling meal but the balance is simply off in the recipe Perkins serves up this time. Liberally adapted from the Stephen King short story of the same name, The Monkey hammers home a monotonous drum beat of gallows humor absent from the source material. The movie certainly doesn’t skimp on any of the gory details — rather, it revels in them — but it barely maintains an air of suspense in between the string of over-the-top death sequences. It’s a horror movie devoid of true scares and a comedy whose best gags were already given away in the superb red-band trailer.

The Monkey centers around the Shelburn family circa 1999, with pilot Petey (Adam Scott) deserting his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and twin sons Hal & Bill (both played by Christian Convery) one day. When rifling through their dad’s left-behinds, the boys find a wind-up toy monkey that seems to cause a random person to die horribly every time its key is turned. After several ill-advised turns and subsequent drum rolls, Hal & Bill attempt to destroy, and eventually bury, the simian souvenir before it can do any more damage. 25 years later, Hal & Bill (both played as adults by Theo James) are estranged from one another but when their aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) dies near where they trapped the monkey, they must reckon with the malevolent force for good.

Much of The Monkey delights in what kind of violent scenarios this evil device can supernaturally conjure from seemingly innocuous circumstances, similarly to how Death works in the Final Destination series. While not all the killings are fashioned with Rube Goldberg-like synergy, some involve multiple elements conspiring together for sudden carnage, like the one in the gut-spinning prologue set in a pawn shop. Others are such comic overkill, as when 67 horses trample on top of a camper in a sleeping bag, that we’re not meant to be terrified by the circumstances as much as amused that such random tragedy could even take place. To this end, Osgood Perkins does come up with creative enough demises to make The Monkey almost work as a tongue-in-cheek splatter film.

But Perkins wants to have his blood-battered cake and eat it too and there’s not enough else here to keep one’s stomach full. Much of the drama hinges on the fraught relationship between Hal and his son Petey (played by Colin O’Brien) but their story isn’t nearly interesting enough to hold as the centerpiece of the plot. The acting between Theo James and O’Brien is stilted and unconvincing, even given that they’re playing two characters who aren’t on good terms with one another. There are well-known actors who only pop up for one scene each, while there are others lesser known who stick around for much longer but aren’t exactly a welcome addition. Heading up the movie’s best running joke, Nicco Del Rio hits the sweet spot as a beleaguered young priest tasked with leading increasingly bizarre funerals on behalf of the small town.

The inevitability of death is certainly a weighty central theme for a horror film to tackle but the issue is that The Monkey really doesn’t bother exploring it in an especially nuanced manner. “Everybody dies and that’s life,” Lois laments — the phrasing in the film’s official tagline is decidedly more colorful — but the sentiment isn’t really unpacked beyond that in the text. It’s more intriguing to infer what Osgood Perkins, whose parents both had tragically notable ends to their lives, feels about the chaotic cruelty of the universe assigning each person an inescapable demise. Now that Oz got The Monkey off his back, here’s hoping he can return to the staid supernatural scares that seem to better speak to his sensibilities as a storyteller.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Last Breath, a survival thriller starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu, which tells the true story of seasoned deep-sea divers as they battle the raging elements to rescue their crew mate trapped hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.
Also coming to theaters is My Dead Friend Zoe, a dramedy starring Sonequa Martin-Green and Natalie Morales, about a female Afghanistan Army vet who comes head to head with her Vietnam vet grandfather at the family’s ancestral lake house.
Premiering on Netflix is Demon City, an action movie starring Tomu Ikuta and Masahiro Higashide, telling the story of an ex-hitman out for revenge after he’s framed for his family’s murder and left for dead by masked “demons” who have taken over the city.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup