All posts by Brent Leuthold

Reel Views, Review

Hurry Up Tomorrow

Last year saw the release of Trap and Smile 2, two thrillers about fictional pop stars in peril. Hurry Up Tomorrow, the latest ego stroke from real-life megastar The Weeknd, instead signals a perilous potential pivot in profession for the artist formerly known as Abel Tesfaye. Purportedly a companion film to his album of the same name released in January, it’s neither an anthology of segments inspired by songs from the record, nor is it a concert movie or extended music video. Reportedly inspired by an on-tour incident where Tesfaye/The Weeknd lost his voice while performing, the movie uses this inciting incident to spin a tired tale of obsessive fandom and self-destruction. It feels more of a piece with Tesfaye’s disastrous HBO series The Idol, in which he plays a seedy drifter attempting to hijack the career of a troubled pop singer. Just because his character isn’t quite as deplorable this time around doesn’t make the end result any less odious.

In Hurry Up Tomorrow, Tesfaye plays a fictionalized version of his The Weeknd alter ego, who we meet in the haze of a world tour under the guidance of his overzealous handler Lee (Barry Keoghan). Despite his success, The Weeknd remains unhappy, on the tail end of a romantic relationship that ended with vicious voicemails and emotional evisceration. The psychological stress leads to a muscle tension dysphonia diagnosis and a Halloween performance cut short due to the performer’s strained vocals, but not before he locks eyes with the alluring Anima (Jenna Ortega) in the crowd. She inexplicably barges her way backstage and finds The Weeknd, consoling him after the cancelled show and proposing they spend the night together instead. Despite their connection, the harsh light of day reveals that the pair have very different ideas about which direction each of them would like the relationship to go.

Generously, Hurry Up Tomorrow could be described as Tesfaye’s investigation into the The Weeknd façade he created after first releasing music anonymously back in 2009. He’s teased for months and years that he’d like to lay the moniker to rest and the film does connote the “burn it all down” posturing of someone eager to end an era. If it turns out this movie is the final project Tesfaye completes as The Weeknd, it’s a dissatisfying denouement to a music career filled with impeccably-produced pop songs. If it’s his audition reel for future film work, he needs to hurry up and put the brakes on that plan right now. Put bluntly: Tesfaye is not a believable actor in any capacity. When he’s not morosely mugging for the camera, he’s lashing out with the verisimilitude of a vexed chipmunk. I’m not sure I’ve seen a performer struggle this hard to play what’s ostensibly a version of themselves.

Unfortunately, Tesfaye has roped the otherwise reliable writer/director Trey Edward Shults into this shameless star vehicle, which indulges the talented young filmmaker’s worst impulses. Though the composition of shots from cinematographer Chayse Irvin are fleetingly striking, Shults simply has no idea what kind of story he wants to tell here. The threadbare script by Tesfaye, Shults and Reza Fahim only contributes sketches of characters and shadows of motivation when it’s not busy with platitude-laden dialogue. The direction is somehow even more meandering, stacking up pointless scenes of insipid impressionism for the first hour before settling on a horribly derivative storyline involving celebrity kidnapping. When Anima proceeds to fansplain the meaning of The Weeknd’s songs to the tied-up star, it’s as torturous for us in the audience as it is for the supposed protagonist.

Die hard fans of The Weeknd will no doubt be desperate to parse misunderstood meaning out of Hurry Up Tomorrow but its ostentatious pretensions couldn’t be more obvious. All the tired symbolism and vapid interactions point to an ego addict who wants us to feel bad for how rich and successful he is; “Save Your Tears” would’ve been good acting advice to take from one of his song’s titles. The climactic moment is both a stunningly shallow bit of self-aggrandizement and a tragic reminder of how misused Tesfaye’s talent is here. He has a powerful and compelling singing voice, even if he doesn’t quite know how to make the best use of it at this point in his career. If tomorrow holds more promising things for his artistry, it can’t come quickly enough.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, an action sequel starring Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell, extending the journey of IMF agent Ethan Hunt as he continues his mission to stop a master assassin from obtaining an AI program known as The Entity.
Also coming to theaters is Lilo & Stitch, a live-action animated remake starring Sydney Elizebeth Agudong and Billy Magnussen, which finds a lonely Hawaiian girl befriending a dog-like runaway alien, unaware that the visitor is genetically engineered to be a force of destruction.
Streaming on Netflix is Fear Street: Prom Queen, a slasher film starring India Fowler and Suzanna Son, centered around the popular girls of a high school in 1988 who begin to vanish one by one prior to their highly-anticipated prom night.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Fight Or Flight

Following up a pair of memorable turns in the drastically different Oppenheimer and Trap, Josh Hartnett continues to stretch his leading man range with the delightfully dopey action comedy Fight Or Flight. Sporting a bleached blonde do and a tight pink T-shirt, he plays Lucas Reyes, a gun-for-hire lying low in Bangkok until he gets a call from his former handler Katherine (Katee Sackhoff). She’s not thrilled to make the call and he’s even less excited about receiving it but with no viable options left, Katherine asks Reyes to board a flight that’s about to take off for San Francisco. On board is a rogue hacker known as The Ghost, in possession of an all-powerful supercomputer that can’t end up in the wrong hands. Reyes takes the mission with assurances from Katherine that completing it will expunge his checkered past but once he’s on the plane, it becomes obvious he’s not the only one after the target.

I was worried when Fight Or Flight began with one of those obnoxious cold opens that concludes with the dreaded “12 hours earlier…” card but once it hits cruising altitude, it becomes fun of the unfasten-your-brain’s-seatbelt variety. The film recalls numerous recent action extravaganzas, most specifically John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and Bullet Train, although the setting is more confined than the former and less try-hard in its humor than the latter. It’s effectively an ultra-violent live-action cartoon, with Josh Hartnett in a Daffy Duck role where he doggedly pursues his goal through an onslaught of physical punishment. At 6′ 3″, Hartnett certainly has the frame to register as a threat for the endless barrage of assassins that stand in the way between him and The Ghost, so much so that it’s a bit surprising he hasn’t starred in this kind of fight-frenzied actioner before.

Of course it makes no sense that a passenger airplane would stay airborne once fights between trained killers broke out, a plot wrinkle that Fight Or Flight barely tries to smooth over. Similarly, the jumbo jet in which the majority of the movie takes place is an impossibly large double-decker that would likely never make it off the ground in the first place. Fortunately for us aground in the audience, we get to observe close-quarters combat in first class, coach, cargo, a luxury restroom with a shower and basically every location that could exist on a plane. James Madigan, making his lead directing debut here after working second-unit on several action projects, also makes clever use of innocuous in-flight accoutrements as deadly props when wielded by assassins. Seatbelt strangulations and service cart stampedes are but a small sampling of the acts that willfully ignore the teachings of the pre-flight safety demonstration.

Fight Or Flight makes some bone-headed mistakes comedically — the aforementioned opener is set ironically to the immensely predictable “The Blue Danube” waltz — but finds its place in between the melee. The jokes are based more around minutia and mannerisms rather than manners mitigating machismo, as we tend to see in other action comedies where two people are duking it out and they have to pause in the presence of bystanders. It’s not that the humor is necessarily more sophisticated but it’s trying to riff on slightly more unique story beats as opposed to recycling tropes. The film is packed with all types of hitmen and hitwomen who bring their own color to the palette but wisely doesn’t try to make every one of them funny. Among the henchmen and henchwomen, Hartnett undeniably remains the star.

Not that it shares much in common with Nicolas Cage-starring airplane-set movies like Con Air or Left Behind but I did detect a bit of Cage’s influence on Hartnett’s performance here. He’s a good enough actor for you to buy him not only as a burnt-out mercenary but also as a wide-eyed patsy, comically overwhelmed by the odds against which he finds himself. There are cackles and guffaws he throws in sparingly that are calibrated right to Nic pitch, as is the “x” sound he holds onto at the end of the phrase “kill box” late in the film. Fight Or Flight concludes with an overly optimistic pitch for a sequel that doesn’t seem likely to get cleared for takeoff but as a chaotic one-way trip, it’s worth booking a ticket.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Final Destination: Bloodlines, a supernatural horror sequel starring Kaitlyn Santa Juana and Teo Briones, following a college student plagued by a recurring violent nightmare who returns home to save her family from the horrific fate that inevitably awaits them.
Also playing only in theaters is Hurry Up Tomorrow, a psychological thriller starring Abel Tesfaye and Jenna Ortega, wherein an insomniac musician encounters a mysterious stranger, leading to a journey that challenges everything he knows about himself.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Deaf President Now!, a documentary which recounts the 1988 protests at the all-deaf Gallaudet University, after the school’s board of trustees appointed a hearing president over several qualified deaf candidates.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Thunderbolts*

If you’re exhausted by the relentless march of Marvel movies, it may help to know that you’re not alone, as some of the characters themselves share the sentiment. “Maybe I’m just bored,” a recalcitrant Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) surmises while jumping off a gigantic Kuala Lumpur tower at the opening of Thunderbolts*, the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She’s going through the motions, both literally and figuratively, completing shady clean-up missions under the thumb of CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Still mourning the loss of her sister and the distancing of her stepfather Alexei (David Harbour), Yelena doesn’t know what she wants but she knows it isn’t this. If the ethos of The Avengers was “success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm,” then Thunderbolts* would be summed up by “if you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Yelena tells Valentina she wants out and is sent on a final mission to an off-the-map facility to destroy evidence of illegal scientific operations being run under de Fontaine’s purview. After she breaks in, Yelena’s confronted by super soldier John Walker (Wyatt Russell), who says he’s been sent there to kill her. Not a moment later, another assassin Antonia (Olga Kurylenko) engages John and then yet another assassin Ava (Hannah John-Kamen) shows up to take out Antonia. The group takes a beat to recognize the presence of a bystander named Bob (Lewis Pullman) and collectively realize they’ve been sent there to kill one another. Narrowly escaping from de Fontaine’s trap, the group of “disposable delinquents” (as Ava dubs them) solicit the help of now-congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to settle the score with their conniving employer.

It’s impressive how the Thunderbolts* incorporates so many well-worn tropes — in addition to being a “one last job” and “ragtag band of misfits” movie, the film’s climax finds city dwellers running from a scary thing in the sky — and still comes out on top. Perhaps it’s partially due to the low bar set by some of Marvel Studios’ more recent output but director Jake Schreier and his team seem to have their eye on behind-the-camera diligence in ways that have eluded recent products of the Marvel machine. The tone here is indeed more serious, delving into the darkness of the past lives that haunt the movie’s characters, but doesn’t get too mired by glumness that it can’t have a few laughs along the way. Most importantly, these are characters who start out as odds and ends left over from previous MCU chapters but over the course of the movie, we care about them individually and collectively.

Sadly, Thunderbolts* is subject to the concrete-mixer color grading that has plagued numerous entries in this franchise but the lighting and cinematography is a cut above what we typically get in green-screen affairs. Light and shadow is an important component thematically but visually, DP Andrew Droz Palermo also uses the contrast to signal an all-encompassing menace that’s challenging and creepy. Even things like blocking and editing feel a bit more back-to-basics in a good way, with scenes arranged engagingly and the repartee between these antiheroes managed deftly. Technically, most of these characters have superpowers but the combat scenes still tend to focus more on hand-to-hand as opposed to being reliant on CG effects. It’s nice to have a superhero movie that doesn’t hinge only on gargantuan action setpieces.

When Black Widow came out in 2021, Pugh’s Yelena had to play second banana to Scarlett Johansson’s titular Avenger but Marvel wisely trusts Pugh as the face of this new crew. She’s been remarkable in film after film and she brings her all to this role, balancing a world-weary malaise with hard-earned optimism and empathy. David Harbour is even more giddy here than he was in Black Widow as the goofy Red Guardian, who’s primarily just excited that Yelena is on a team again for the first time since being a part of her winless soccer squad in childhood. On the villain side of things, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ corrupt politician gets to volley Veepesque snipes like “righteousness without power is just an opinion” at her assistant. After several projects that have signaled a decline in the brand, Thunderbolts* proves that the best way to course-correct is to focus on fundamental filmmaking. You can always count on Marvel to do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Shadow Force, an action thriller starring Kerry Washington and Omar Sy, following an estranged couple with a bounty on their heads, who must go on the run with their son to avoid their former employer, a unit of shadow ops, that has been sent to kill them.
Also playing in theaters is Clown In A Cornfield, a slasher movie starring Katie Douglas and Aaron Abrams, set in a fading midwestern town in which Frendo The Clown, a symbol of bygone success, reemerges as a terrifying scourge on the town’s teens.
Streaming on Netflix is Nonnas, a food dramedy starring Vince Vaughn and Lorraine Bracco, involving a man who risks everything to honor his recently-deceased mother by opening an Italian restaurant with actual grandmothers as the chefs.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Sinners

Up to this point, director and writer Ryan Coogler has made a name for himself working within frameworks like the Rocky and Black Panther franchises but his latest, Sinners, takes things to — to borrow a phrase — a whole ‘nother level. It’s a staggeringly ambitious blockbuster, an epic Southern Gothic equally inspired by the feverishly sensuous artwork of Ernie Barnes and the devil-may-care, us-against-the-world actioners of John Carpenter. Understandably, it’s been marketed most prevalently as a vampire movie, which it assuredly embraces eventually but decidedly takes a bit of time to show its fangs. But genre-blending and influences aside, this is Coogler’s most lived-in film so far, with such an evocative sense of character and conflict that its slight sins of cinematic coherency can easily be forgiven.

Taking place over a 24-hour period in October 1932, Sinners introduces us to a pair of brothers known as the Smokestack Twins, comprised of Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan). After working for years in Chicago under Al Capone, they’ve decided to return to the Jim Crow South — the Mississippi Delta in particular — to open a barrelhouse called Club Juke. We watch the Twins recruit proficient blues players like Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) for their opening night, hoping to start things off with a bang. Along the way, Smoke reunites with his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), while Stack crosses paths with his lascivious ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld).

They all convene at the Club as the sun gets low, with singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) belting out tunes and Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) acting as bouncer at the entrance. The music and atmosphere attract many, including Irish immigrant Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a musician who is particularly taken with Sammie’s transcendental blues guitar chops. Despite offering money well over the cover price to gain entry, Remmick is turned away at the door but develops a following of his own outside the juke joint. After a patron is assaulted by Remmick and his crew after stepping outside for a moment, it becomes clear that the gang outside is composed of vampires bent on trying to gain access to the club to turn the partygoers into bloodsuckers. Using the limited resources they have available, the Smokestack twins and the Club Juke staff aim to defend their establishment by any means necessary.

Sinners is an interesting beast because those going in expecting a straight-ahead vampire tale could be put off by how long it takes for horror aspects to lock into place, but those going in without expectations could be put off by what’s effectively a period drama turning into a monster movie. Coogler is at his most “yes, and” here as a filmmaker, embracing both the high-minded films and schlocky cinema that contribute to his voice as a storyteller. It’s the kind of exquisite gumbo that you can only cook up with this kind of budget once you’ve already proven yourself on the big stage, which, these days, essentially means within the superhero milieu. My hope is that other studios like Warner Bros. continue to see the value in putting their money where their mouth is by backing visionary directors with stout budgets.

The money, as they say, is on the screen with Sinners. Shooting on 65mm film for a superlative IMAX presentation, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw delivers a sumptuous, supersized silver screen experience. Also reteaming with Coogler on the crew is composer Ludwig Göransson, who continues to push himself stylistically with a dobro-led score that’s completely different from the other film music he’s put out thus far. In addition to the original score, the movie is packed wall-to-wall with existing tunes from various cultural backgrounds that deepen the aural canvas. In a film with almost too many great music moments to count, a sequence set to “Pale, Pale Moon” is perhaps the most luminous. Missing out on Sinners while it’s in theaters would be a sin.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Accountant 2, an action thriller starring Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal, reuniting the titular auditor/hitman with his equally lethal brother as the two track down a group of assassins responsible for a Treasury chief’s murder.
Also playing only in theaters is Until Dawn, a supernatural horror film starring Ella Rubin and Michael Cimino, following a group of friends trapped in a time loop, where mysterious foes are chasing and killing them in gruesome ways, must survive until dawn to escape it.
Premiering on Netflix ix Havoc, an action thriller starring Tom Hardy and Jessie Mei Li, about a detective must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s estranged son, unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Drop

Anchored around a single location like Phone Booth and Red Eye before it, the gripping new thriller Drop chooses a high-rise restaurant in downtown Chicago as its locale du jour. 38 stories above the hustle and bustle, single mother and therapist Violet (Meghann Fahy) grabs a drink at the bar while waiting for her photographer date Henry (Brandon Sklenar) to arrive. It’s Violet’s first night out with a potential suitor in four years, the wounds from the traumatic death of her abusive husband still lingering, while also bearing the responsibility of raising son Toby (Jacob Robinson) by herself. Thankfully, her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane) has stepped up and agreed to babysit Toby for Violet’s special night out and mom can even check in virtually with a video feed from her phone. Henry arrives, apologetic for his absence, and the two get seated but it doesn’t take long for their evening to take a turn for the terrifying.

Violet asks if she can keep her phone on their table so she can receive updates from Jen, to which Henry agrees, but her phone instead keeps pinging with messages sent anonymously from someone in their midst. The Digi-Drops — a facsimile of Apple’s AirDrop technology, so as to not clash with their “no villain clause” — start as obnoxious memes but quickly become more personal. The sender soon reveals their intent and instructions: Violet must kill Henry before the end of their date or the masked hitman in her house will murder Toby and Jen. The disguised “dropper” seems to have eyes in the sky and ears on the table, informing Violet that they’ll also make good on their threat if she tips anyone off or tries to leave the restaurant. Most of us have been on bad first dates but the one at the center of Drop is about as dire as it gets.

Just last Christmas, Netflix had a holiday hit with the nail-biter Carry-On, which also involved a high-wire act of coercion from a criminal communicating covertly with our protagonist. While the identity of the caller in that cat-and-mouse game is revealed about halfway through, Drop makes us sweat out the source of the messages, and their motives, to the very end. Along with screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, director Christopher Landon knows the fun of this tale is in us trying to figure out which of the restaurant patrons is responsible for terrorizing Violet. She’s waiting for Henry at the bar long enough to meet several potential suspects but once the Digi-Drops come flooding in, Violet’s bandwidth for sleuthing is strained between heeding the commands from her phone and keeping her date unaware of her predicament.

While Brandon Sklenar is a bit of a drip as the well-meaning but mostly bland date, Meghann Fahy is outstanding in her first big lead role on-screen after breaking out in The White Lotus two years ago. Given the baggage that Violet brings to the table, this evening out would be difficult enough for her as is but as the plot necessitates, it becomes exponentially more demanding. As a survivor of domestic abuse, she unfortunately understands all too well how to put on a brave face and conceal her anxiety under horrific circumstances. Violet knows her son and sisters’ lives are also in jeopardy if Henry decides to ditch the date, so she somehow has to be good company while also constantly monitoring her phone for updates. Fahy is brilliant in the way she balances these conflicting tasks as an actress and her work alone makes the film stand apart from similarly-plotted thrillers.

Naturally, Drop isn’t immune to the plot contrivances that keep thrill rides like this ticking along and some may argue it commits more than its fair share of narrative faux pas. It’s not a plot that necessarily holds up well under scrutiny and there’s one particular story beat that makes absolutely zero sense in hindsight. But Landon and his team certainly do everything they can to keep us on our toes at all times and do so while getting us fully immersed in this gorgeous setting. The restaurant where the majority of the film takes place is an immaculately-rendered and beautifully-lit set that encourages us to look around with our protagonist to suss out the situation. Ironically, Drop is an ideal date night movie choice for those adventurous enough to take the ride.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Sinners, a supernatural horror film starring Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld, about twin brothers who return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
Also coming to theaters is Sneaks, an animated comedy starring Anthony Mackie and Martin Lawrence, involving a sentient sneaker who unwittingly finds himself lost in New York City and has to rescue his sister with the help of other talking shoes.
Streaming on Shudder is Dead Mail, a period thriller starring Sterling Macer Jr. and John Fleck, in which an ominous help note finds its way to a 1980s post office, connecting a dead letter investigator to a kidnapped keyboard technician.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Deep Downey: Zodiac

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

The poster reads “There’s more than one way to lose your life to a killer” above a fog-obscured shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, the illuminated suspension cables resembling mournful eyes weeping over the Bay Area. This haunting one-sheet sets the stage perfectly for David Fincher’s quietly devastating Zodiac, a thorough and thoughtful retelling of one of the most infamous unsolved cases in United States history. Having spent his childhood in a small town 20 miles north of San Francisco, Fincher had a personal connection to the material, hearing terrifying stories about the elusive Zodiac Killer at an impressionable age. But the film also follows a theme that can be found in many of the other works throughout his career: monomaniacal focus in one’s professional life at the expense of one’s personal life.

After depicting a brutal 4th Of July shooting at a Vallejo highway lookout point, Zodiac introduces us to the main players involved in trying to track down the titular slayer. The San Francisco Chronicle is one of several news outlets to receive encoded letters from the killer who calls himself “Zodiac”, striking immediate and intense curiosity in the paper’s political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). The Chronicle’s head crime reporter, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), is skeptical at first, but when Graysmith makes a correct prediction before the first letter is deciphered, Avery becomes the Bernstein to Graysmith’s Woodward. More killings and more letters follow, causing police inspectors Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) to head up the case but as years go by, promising leads turn to dead ends.

Though it’s a movie about a well-known, real-life serial killer, Zodiac doesn’t follow in the footsteps of other mystery thrillers, where we’re shown evil deeds but can feel better having witnessed them knowing justice is served in the end. Fincher and his screenwriter James Vanderbilt did copious amounts of research investigating the true identity of the Zodiac Killer but they don’t present one theory here as absolute truth. It’s as much of a police procedural and news journalism movie as a thriller, given that the search for the killer is the actual story as opposed to their unveiling. How can we reconcile that the details of unspeakable acts can remain forever unknowable to everyone except those involved? How do we collectively move on from cases that are ultimately deemed unsolvable? Zodiac follows two central characters who believe in their bones that we can’t and we don’t.

On the morning the Chronicle receives the first letter, Avery blithely offers 20 bucks to whoever decodes the killer’s name before heading to the nearby watering hole Morti’s for an early drink. Though he acts indifferent initially, Avery’s intrigued after the letter is deciphered that Graysmith correctly predicted the killer wouldn’t reveal their name. He introduces himself to Graysmith — even though they’d already been working together for 9 months — and asks “how does one do that?” with inquisitive snark when Graysmith works to figure out the “leftover symbols” from the Zodiac’s first note. Thus commences the beginning of an unlikely professional partnership, where earnest curiosity and cynical scrutiny produce a nexus of all-encompassing fixation. Gyllenhaal and Downey Jr. play off each other brilliantly as these opposite personalities collide with one another.

Look no further than the sequence following the Chronicle getting their second Zodiac letter, when Avery invites Graysmith to Morti’s intent on pressing him why he’s been going through his trash but instead getting hung up on his drink order. The bartender slides a distractingly blue cocktail Graysmith’s way and after a minute of labored conversation, Avery quips “alright, this can no longer be ignored: what is that you’re drinking?” Graysmith defends his Aqua Velva and after Avery takes a long sip following a short pause, Fincher smash cuts to Downey Jr. with his head resting on a booth table with six empties in front of his face. With an ace song choice of “Crystal Blue Persuasion” playing in the background, Avery drunkenly asks Graysmith what he wants out of all of this sleuthing, explaining “it’s good business for everyone but you.”

Downey Jr.’s sardonic wit is the highlight of these early interactions — and remains one of his most indispensable assets all these years later — but Avery’s self-destructive streak created a pathway for a more tragic performance. After Avery receives a Halloween card from the Zodiac, ominously portending “you are doomed”, crime reporters begin sporting “I Am Not Paul Avery” pins, cheekily signaling they don’t want to be targeted next. Though Paul himself clips it to his lapel and says of the Killer “he wishes to remain anonymous; I wish to remain infamous”, the stresses of the unwanted attention take their toll. Avery buys a gun, smokes like a chimney and takes enough day trips to Morti’s to put his position at the Chronicle in jeopardy. A third act scene set on Avery’s houseboat hammers home how his involvement in the case led to a heartbreaking downward spiral.

Downey Jr. has made it clear through several interviews that his time shooting Zodiac was not especially pleasant. Fincher is well-known to be an exacting filmmaker, sometimes demanding dozens of takes for even seemingly simple scenes. Needless to say, Downey Jr. didn’t have any room for looser line readings or improvisation and Fincher’s penchant for perfectionism inevitably led to long days of shooting. Downey Jr. found his own way of protest by, according to Fincher, leaving mason jars of urine on-set in lieu of loo breaks. Years later, Downey Jr. would work with Christopher Nolan on — and ultimately win an Oscar for —Oppenheimer and the experience working with another similarly precise director seemed to give him a renewed appreciation for the process. Speaking in 2023 with co-star Mark Ruffalo, Downey Jr. admits “I called Fincher recently because, in retrospect, everything changes. 15 years later, you have such a different perspective on stuff, you know?”

Reel Views, Review

The Amateur

Based on a 1981 film of the same name, the espionage tale The Amateur is a movie filled with smart characters who are trapped in a movie that isn’t as smart as they are. Our protagonist Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is said to have an IQ of 170 and we believe it. He works five levels below the ground floor of the CIA headquarters in Decryption And Analysis, scrolling through endless lines of code and finding connections that no one else would see. He chats with an anonymous source he believes is in Eastern Europe, with whom he exchanges eyes-only files; if the premise of the hit show Severance was real, Charlie would be a prime candidate for the titular procedure. Throughout the film, he is consistently multiple steps ahead of those pursuing them, so much so that he outpaces director James Hawes and his screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli in the process.

The opening of The Amateur has Charlie seeing his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) off as she heads to London for a conference. The next day, Charlie’s boss Director Moore (Holt McCallany) shares horrible news with him: Sarah has been killed after being held hostage by terrorists. Moore swears those responsible for her death will be held to account but Charlie doesn’t trust that the agency will avenge Sarah’s death the way he feels she deserves. In a bold move, to say the least, he threatens to leak classified material unless the CIA trains him as a field operative so he can carry out his revenge. With his back against the wall, Moore tasks Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) with turning the cerebral and diffident Charlie into a cold-blooded killer.

Because of the nature of the premise, The Amateur asks us to believe that one man — albeit a highly intelligent one — could evade a manhunt from one of the most formidable government agencies in the world. As Charlie’s rogue mission finds him traveling from numerous European countries, it becomes more unlikely that he would actually be able to continue his pursuit unabated. Along the way, a couple characters reappear to coerce Charlie to give up his dangerous undertaking but this feels like a much more kid-gloves approach than the CIA would take in actuality. These tactics spur on subsequent plot holes and leaps in logic that begin to add up, especially in the movie’s last 15 minutes; a character moment towards the very end actually made me cock my head to the side like a dog hearing a strange noise.

All of the performances in The Amateur are convincing but at the same time, none of the actors are being asked to do much outside of their current capabilities. Malek is doing a slight variation on his lead character in the tech thriller series Mr. Robot, although he has to dial up a bit more emotion into the flashback scenes between Charlie and Sarah. Oddly, Brosnahan is relegated to a stock “dead wife” role, even though she’s going to appear as the much more pivotal Lois Lane in Superman this summer. Talented supporting players like Julianne Nicholson and Jon Bernthal, the latter of whom is only in two scenes, are only given sketches of actual characters. More prominently, Fishburne has some fun zingers in his training sequences with Malek; “at point blank range, you might have a 50/50 shot at hitting something,” he smirks in front of a shooting target at a gun range.

The Amateur isn’t a bad movie from a technical perspective. Despite some misjudged shaky cam, it’s well-shot and edited in a way that makes its 2-hour runtime move along briskly. It’s just not a film that distinguishes itself enough from other revenge or spy films we’ve seen already. Its release comes just a few weeks after Black Bag, already one of the year’s best, which also follows spies chasing spies but does so with much more panache and thematic heft. This movie feels like it never expands on its initial hook of taking a lab rat out of his environment and placing him in a more menacing setting where his technological skills don’t mean nearly as much as killer instinct. The Amateur is professional enough on its surface but could use some training in developing a more robust storyline.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Drop, a mystery thriller starring Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar, in which a widowed mother’s first date in years takes a terrifying turn when she’s bombarded with anonymous threatening text messages on her phone during their upscale dinner.
Also coming to theaters is Warfare, an action film starring D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Will Poulter, which follows a platoon of Navy SEALs in real-time as they embark on a mission through insurgent Iraqi territory in 2006.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is G20, an action thriller starring Viola Davis and Anthony Anderson, which finds the U.S. President defending her family and fellow world leaders when terrorists take over the G20 summit in South Africa.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Death Of A Unicorn

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.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup