Based on the Tony Award-winning smash of the same name, the new movie musical Dear Evan Hansen is an unmitigated disaster, a winding road of cringe-inducing character moments and baffling creative choices paved with good intentions all the way along. After striking out fantastically with the tragically misconceived Cats in 2019, Universal Pictures tries and fails again to translate a Broadway favorite to the big screen. If their goal is to make the division between musical theater geeks and the uninitiated even larger than it already is, then they’re succeeding better than any other major studio at the moment. This is a film that takes on tough and timely themes like teen suicide, mental health and social media but comes up with bad takes on nearly all of the subjects that it covers.

Reprising the eponymous role he created on-stage starting in 2015, Ben Platt plays a troubled high school student whose anxiety and depression stifle his ability to create meaningful friendships. On the advice of his therapist, he writes notes to himself for motivation to get through the day. One such letter ends up in the hands of Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a brusque classmate who is incensed by the mention of his sister — and Evan’s secret crush — Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever) in the note. A misunderstanding begins when Connor’s parents Cynthia (Amy Adams) and Danny (Danny Pino) approach Evan with the note, thinking he wrote it to Connor, who took his own life just days afterwards. Instead of clearing up said misunderstanding, Evan perpetuates the lie and insinuates himself into the grieving family, weaving tales through song of moments that never occurred between Connor and himself.

This premise may seem shockingly cold-hearted and in devastatingly poor taste — don’t worry, it is — but what makes Dear Evan Hansen so despicable is how it expands and doubles-down on its loathsome setup. First, we’re to believe that Evan doesn’t clear up the misconception about the intended recipient of the note and his relationship with Connor because social anxiety kicks in when the Murphys meet with him about it. As someone who has struggled mightily with mental health over the past two years, I’m completely sympathetic to those who battle these issues every day of their lives. However, I also believe that even someone who suffers from a particularly profound case of Social Anxiety Disorder would pump the brakes on this mix-up before a sitcom-style snowball effect would start up.

In addition to deceiving the Murphys, Evan also involves a tenacious classmate who is also battling depression played by Amandla Stenberg, the film’s sole highlight. She proposes The Connor Project, a crowdfunding effort to preserve the memory of their fallen classmate and reopen an orchard where Evan claims to have spent many an afternoon with Connor. Where director Stephen Chbosky and writer Steven Levenson look to cut corners with their shallow protagonist when it comes to visibility into mental health, Stenberg makes up ground with her authentic portrayal of a teen doing her best to overcome. I would have much rather seen a movie centered around her character for many reasons, not least of which being the good it could have done in reducing the stigma of mood disorders among the black community.

But instead, we’re forced to endure a duplicitous creep belt out song after song about his fake friendship while the Likes and Shares inevitably rack up on social media platforms. It’s utterly inexplicable to me that composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who contributed to the miraculous La La Land, could come up with music as cloying and uninspired as this. Perhaps the best of the musical numbers were left on the stage but the ones in this film have the phoniness of bad contemporary Christian music. Only one sequence, set to “Sincerely, Me”, manages to do anything meaningful with the cinematic form but it’s still mired in the movie’s icky subtext of exploitation and deceit. Don’t be thrown by its pretty packaging; Dear Evan Hansen deserves to be marked “return to sender”.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, a Sony Spider-Man Universe sequel starring Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson which finds the titular antihero squaring off against a new alien symbiote.
Opening in theaters and streaming on HBO Max is The Many Saints of Newark, a crime epic starring Michael Gandolfini and Leslie Odom Jr. which depicts the days of the infamous Tony Soprano in his youth.
Premiering on Netflix is The Guilty, an adaptation of a Danish thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ethan Hawke about a 911 dispatcher who receives an emergency phone call from a kidnapped woman.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

As movie theaters around the country still struggle to replicate pre-pandemic numbers, the horror genre could ironically represent the light at the end of the tunnel. Recent offerings like Don’t Breathe 2 and Candyman both exceeded box office expectations relative to their modest budgets and it’s not hard to see why. Scary films have often appealed to younger crowds, who are the most likely to return to theaters despite lingering covid concerns. There’s also something about leaving the safety of one’s home to go into a darkened room with strangers and experience the unexpected and potentially terrifying together that streaming just can’t touch. After all, how scary can something be when you’re half-watching it behind your smartphone? I didn’t see the new horror movie Malignant in theaters but given these factors, I wish I had.

The film tells the story of Madison (Annabelle Wallis), a Seattle-based mother-to-be who is plagued by graphic visions of gruesome murders following an incident with her abusive husband Derek (Jake Abel). She observes these happenings as if she’s in the room when they take place, like a more visceral form of sleep paralysis amid waking nightmares. First, she sees Derek attacked in their kitchen, followed by a woman being abducted in the Seattle Underground. When Madison awakes, she’s terrified to learn that all of these disturbing premonitions are actually events that have already taken place while she was asleep. With more crime scenes piling up, Madison works with her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) and a beleaguered detective (George Young) to put a stop to the brutal violence.

Those worried about another rote scare fest should be heartened by the fact that Malignant is helmed by none other than James Wan, the mastermind behind the Insidious and Conjuring franchises. More pertinently, this is the man who made cars fall from the sky in Furious 7 and made a CGI octopus play drums in Aquaman, which mirrors the kind of devil-may-care attitude he brings to his return to the horror genre. Wan’s direction here is reminiscent of the over-the-top supernatural aesthetic pioneered by Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi, who sadly hasn’t made a horror film since 2009’s minor camp classic Drag Me to Hell. I was also reminded of the lesser-known, Ti West-directed The House of the Devil, which chugs along like a mild-mannered haunted house movie until its bombastic finale.

And boy, does Malignant ever have one of those itself. This is a film that dares you to solve what’s really going on in real time and if you’ve seen a horror movie in the past 50 years, there’s a good chance you’ll guess the broad strokes of what screenwriter Akela Cooper has cooked up. But the devil, as they say, is in the details and Wan saves the most outlandish reveals for the third act, paying off some clever bread crumbs of foreshadowing while taking things further than the Conjuring crowd may anticipate. In this way, Malignant has the most in common with another Wan feature that kicked off a mega franchise: Saw. He peppers in loads of visual cues to that surprise 2004 success, from moodily lit shots of decaying bricks to a skulking, trench coat-wearing killer who moves like the Jigsaw Killer from the Saw movies.

As distinct an impression as Malignant leaves in its final 30 minutes, I wish the film had been a bit lighter on its way there. Wan and his editor Kirk Morri could’ve cut off about 15 to 20 minutes from the runtime and I doubt much would have been missed. A movie like this really shouldn’t stick around much longer than it needs to, lest the audience give themselves time to subject the narrative to further scrutiny and uncover plot inconsistencies. There’s also heavy subject material at the beginning, involving miscarriages and child abuse, that is tonally inconsistent with the kind of campy conclusion that Wan is ultimately setting up. Malignant could have used a bit more of a surgical approach to carve out its scares but Wan proves that, even with blunt instruments, he can get the job done well.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters and on HBO Max is Cry Macho, a neo-Western starring Clint Eastwood and Dwight Yoakam about an ex-rodeo star who is hired by his former boss to kidnap his Mexican son and transport him to Texas.
Opening only in theaters is Copshop, an action thriller starring Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo about a wily con artist on the run from a lethal assassin who devises a scheme to hide out inside a small-town police station.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, a coming-of-age musical starring Max Harwood and Sarah Lancashire about a teenager from Sheffield, England who aspires to be a drag queen.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Netflix’s newest action-packed offering Kate stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the titular role as ruthless, Japan-based assassin working under handler and father figure Varrick (Woody Harrelson). Ten months after a botched job in Osaka, Kate contemplates early retirement before Varrick chides (“two trips to Walmart and you’ll be back”) and convinces her to take one last assignment. High atop a Tokyo skyscraper, she lines up her shot but gets violently ill before a doctor gravely confirms acute radiation poisoning soon afterwards. With roughly 24 hours to figure out who tried to have her killed, Kate storms her way up the Yakuza pecking order while unwittingly recruiting an impressionable young girl named Ani (Miku Martineau) along the way.

While Kate isn’t as dispiritingly derivative as Gunpowder Milkshake, another rowdy Netflix dud released earlier this summer, it offers very little new to the saturated sub-genre of tough-as-nails, female-led actioners. Yes, it seems a handful of movies every summer (see also Jolt and The Protégé, both released within the past few weeks) are vying to be the next Jane Wick, even though few, if any, women are involved in the creative decisions behind these projects. Along with writer Umair Aleem, director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan seemed to look to the work of fellow Frenchman Luc Besson a bit too closely. Kate borrows liberally from the “ticking time bomb” conceit of his Lucy along with the assassin-with-a-heart-of-gold feel (and even a specific Gary Oldman line) from Léon: The Professional.

Thankfully, Nicolas-Troyan’s background in visual effects for the Huntsman and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchises translates to some kinetic action scenes that make up Kate‘s backbone. Easily the most impressive is a superb Kill Bill-esque brawl in the film’s first act, which includes brutal beats like Kate reloading her gun off of a baddie’s face and pure white shojis being painted with streaks of red. A subsequent street shootout showcases more dynamic gunplay with some neat camera tricks that are just the right amount of showy for this sort of movie. By the time we get to the final showdown, the outcome seems inevitable but the staging and editing still allow us to suspend our disbelief up to the last moment.

Though it’s well under two hours, Kate sadly peters out around the end of the second act and much of that can be attributed to the remove at which the protagonist has held nearly every character in the film. It was around that time that I simply stopped caring about Kate, her motivation and her goals. Winstead is a talented actress but she’s stuck with a one-note character whose coldness and single-mindedness become laborious after a while. She does have some quality bonding scenes with Martineau, who pushes things a bit too hard, but I can’t say that I felt fully convinced of their relationship and its consequences on the story. While it’s not totally uncommon for an all-out action movie like this, nearly every other character is essentially just fodder for Kate to eventually cut, shoot or stab through.

Perhaps it’s an issue of timing more than anything but after seeing Asians be featured so thoroughly and colorfully in Shang-Chi, it’s a bit depressing to watch Kate offer so little for its Japanese characters. While that Marvel outing had its narrative letdowns, it should be commended for filling its story with characters who had agency and development every step of the way. If Asian-cast characters aren’t being served up one by one to the violent protagonist in Kate, they’re whispering platitudes about honor and family that ultimately have no bearing on the outcome of the narrative. I’m not expecting an action movie to give every henchman a backstory but after watching Asian representation being built up on-screen over the past few years, Kate feels regressive in its efforts to sideline its non-white characters.

Score – 2/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters and also streaming on HBO Max is Malignant, a horror thriller starring Annabelle Wallis and Maddie Hasson about a woman plagued by waking dreams of grisly murders that she discovers are, in fact, terrifying realities.
Playing only in theaters is Show Me The Father, a documentary which features captivating stories interwoven with inspirational truths about the fatherhood of God.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Come From Away, a live stage recording of the 2017 musical of the same name, which tells the true story of 7,000 passengers who were stranded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in a small town in Newfoundland.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup