Good Efficient Butchery

BLACK EAGLE
(US - 1988)

Directed by Eric Karson. Written by A.E. Peters and Michael Gonzales. Cast: Sho Kosugi, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Doran Clark, Bruce French, Vladimir Skomarovsky, William H. Bassett, Kane Kosugi, Shane Kosugi, Jan Triska, Gene Davis, Dorota Puzio, Alfred Mallia, Joe Quattromani, Victor Bartolo, Eric Karson. (R, 93 mins)

Perhaps no actor is more synonymous with the '80s ninja craze than Sho Kosugi. He set the standard of Kosugiology with Cannon's ENTER THE NINJA (1981), REVENGE OF THE NINJA (1983) and NINJA III: THE DOMINATION (1984) and was a key figure in the short-lived 1984 NBC series THE MASTER, where he was the recurring antagonist to aging American ninja Lee Van Cleef. After Cannon opted to wave the American flag in the Reagan era with Michael Dudikoff in 1985's AMERICAN NINJA, Kosugi made the same year's 9 DEATHS OF THE NINJA for Crown International before doing 1985's PRAY FOR DEATH and 1987's RAGE OF HONOR for Trans-World Entertainment. In 1988, he tried to branch out with a supporting role in the Hawaii-set coming-of-age teen comedy-drama ALOHA SUMMER. The same year also saw the release of BLACK EAGLE, another departure for the ninja star, this time as a CIA agent battling nefarious Russians in a late-period Cold War thriller. Kosugi's time as an action star was winding down, and BLACK EAGLE would be his last film as a headliner to hit theaters (he would have a supporting role as a bad guy in the 1989 Rutger Hauer blind samurai cult classic BLIND FURY). It's fitting that it also functions as a symbolic passing of the torch, as Kosugi's co-star in BLACK EAGLE is a young Jean-Claude Van Damme, who had already made an impression as the ruthless "Ivan, the Russian" in the hilarious NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER and was in the midst of breaking out as a major new action star, practically in real time, as Cannon's BLOODSPORT hit theaters just two weeks before BLACK EAGLE. A film that holds on to every moment and is given strength by the breath of life, BLOODSPORT was already in the can when Van Damme took the BLACK EAGLE gig, and the Muscles from Brussels likely had no way of knowing it would become a surprise hit and he was about to become the only thing keeping the lights on at Cannon for the next two years.

Though second-billed, Van Damme isn't even the main villain in BLACK EAGLE. Instead, he's the coldly lethal, Oddjob-ish henchman to the chief bad guy, evil Soviet colonel Klimenko (Vladimir Skomarovsky). Klimenko and some Russian military and KGB goons are trying to intercept three US Air Force F-111s with high-tech laser guidance systems and top-secret defense intel that crashed into the Mediterranean off the coast of Malta. Klimenko and mostly silent right-hand-man Andrei (Van Damme) commandeer a Soviet trawler in the vicinity and Andrei snaps the neck of Steve Henderson (Gene Davis, the nude killer in 10 TO MIDNIGHT), a hot-headed CIA agent they capture near the crash site. This leaves CIA chief Rickert (William H. Bassett) no choice but to send his ultimate weapon, Ken Tani (Kosugi)--codename "Black Eagle"--to Malta to recover the classified intel and keep it out of Soviet hands. This is all complicated since the crash of the F-111s had the bad timing to coincide with the two weeks out of the year that workaholic Tani has with his two sons Brian and Denny, respectively played by Kosugi's sons and frequent co-stars Kane and Shane. The CIA doesn't care about Tani's family time, so they send the boys off to meet him in Malta, accompanied by ambitious agent Patricia Parker (Doran Clark), who's of course relegated to babysitter duty (drink every time she notices they're being followed and announces "We got company"). To get near the site and hold the commies at bay, Tani poses as a marine biologist and teams with Father Bedelia (Bruce French), a former agent who left the CIA to become a priest but is reactivated because, well, apparently no one else was available.

Produced by home video outfit Imperial Entertainment and released theatrically by Taurus, BLACK EAGLE didn't do much business in theaters but became a fixture in every video store in America. It was a popular rental, but fans weren't really interested in Kosugi going the espionage route and channeling his inner Jack Ryan. For a good chunk of the film, director Eric Karson (who helmed the early Chuck Norris hit THE OCTAGON) mainly just shows off scenic Malta (there's also location work in Rome and Afghanistan), which admittedly looks lovely on MVD's new Blu-ray (which includes the 93-minute theatrical version and a 104-minute extended cut), just out as part of their retro "Rewind Collection." There's maybe too many scenes of the Kosugi kids walking around sightseeing with Clark, but Karson also stages a few interesting chase sequences, including one along some Malta rooftops that actually looks like how a real and sudden chase might look. Two guys are pursuing Tani and everybody's sweaty and running awkwardly and nervously along ledges, trying not to lose their balance and footing as they get tired and winded. Kosugi's two throwdowns with Van Damme are nicely done--one on top of a cliff and the other at a waterfront dock surrounded by a bunch of flaming barrels. Young JCVD gets a chance to do his signature splits a couple of times, but he's strictly a supporting player in a Sho Kosugi movie, so much so that when he's killed off, it's not even by Tani.

The main lesson Van Damme seemed to take from his experience working with Kosugi was mastering the art of ensuring his significantly less-talented children were cast in far too many of his movies. While Van Damme would go on to become an A-list action star until the latter half of the '90s, Kosugi's career was beginning to wind down, seemingly by choice. After BLIND FURY, his next film, the shogun period piece JOURNEY OF HONOR, which co-starred legends like Toshiro Mifune and Christopher Lee, went straight-to-video in 1992, and he returned to his native Japan for a few TV guest spots and voice work and to direct his son Kane in 1994's THE FIGHTING KING and its same-year sequel. Other than a fight choreography credit on 2002's THE SCORPION KING, Kosugi was MIA until he was coaxed out of semi-retirement to play the villain in the 2009 Wachowski-produced throwback NINJA ASSASSIN, the now-69-year-old Kosugi's last screen appearance to date. While Kosugi's younger son Shane long ago left the movie industry, his eldest son Kane remains active, splitting his time between Japan and the US, most notably co-starring in 2004's GODZILLA: FINAL WARS and with Scott Adkins in 2013's NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR.

HANGMAN
(US - 2017)

Coming off like a shelved pilot for the dumbest CBS police procedural ever, the barely-released HANGMAN, aka DIPSHIT SE7EN, is easily one of the most idiotic, nonsensical, and intelligence-insulting thrillers to come down the pike in some time. There's no logic in its structure or how its characters obtain the clues that lead them to the next crime scene. They just go where the script needs them to go to advance whatever semblance of a plot the filmmakers have concocted. In a non-descript Southern city (this was shot in Georgia but might be New Orleans, as "House of the Rising Sun" is heard a few times because of course it is), former FBI profiler-turned-homicide detective Ruiney (Karl Urban) is assigned to babysit New York Times reporter Christi Davies (Brittany Snow), who's doing a ride-along for an investigative piece centered on her hometown. It isn't long before Ruiney stumbles onto the kind of elaborately-staged, time-intensive murder scene that only exists in movies and TV: a woman hanging outside a school with an "O" carved in her chest, and inside in a classroom, mannequins arranged like students, staring at the blackboard displaying the letter "O" in a ten-letter game of "Hangman." And carved into the teacher's desk? The badge numbers of Ruiney and his retired ex-partner Archer (Al Pacino). Archer has nothing going on except sitting in his parked car people-watching and doing Latin crossword puzzles, so he ends up tagging along on the investigation, which gets more gruesome and exponentially illogical with each new victim and letter.

Where to even start? I guess this is as good a spot as any: why don't they ever try to solve the puzzle? The whole "Hangman" element is ultimately a moot point, and when the word is finally revealed, they don't even explain what it means. The word is Latin, but how does the killer know Archer enjoys doing Latin crossword puzzles? Ruiney is provided with a tragic backstory about his wife's unsolved murder, but it takes Christi catching a nanosecond glance at her file to see the huge "V" carved into Mrs. Ruiney's torso to conclude that she must've been the Hangman's first victim. How could Ruiney and Archer never put that together? Even Archer mumbles "I missed it!" Why? Because the plot needed him to be stupid. Why is such a high-profile serial killer case being investigated by just one active cop, one retired cop, and a "Pulitzer Prize-winning" (as she mentions numerous times) reporter who has no business traipsing through blood-splattered crime scenes? And how does the killer know Ruiney's and Archer's badge numbers? When they finally confront the killer, the Hangman has no idea who Archer is, but then confesses that his whole M.O. is based on a childhood incident involving Archer 20 years ago when Archer was, if the flashback and makeup job on Pacino is to be believed, a 57-year-old rookie patrolman. The story and the motivations don't even make sense from shot to shot, let alone with plot developments and character arcs over the course of the movie. 77-year-old Pacino looks so groggy and sleepy here that he could easily be doing that old Three Stooges trick of drawing eyes on his closed eyelids. He's also dusting off the same inconsistent "Foghorn Leghorn Goes to Mardi Gras" drawl ("He sod-swapped mah caah!") that he used in MISCONDUCT, another instantly-forgotten VOD clunker from a couple years back. It's easily the worst performance of his career, simply because he isn't even motivated enough to liven things up with some vintage Pacino shouting (even junk thrillers like 88 MINUTES and RIGHTEOUS KILL got a little boost from Pacino's unbeatable combo of random yelling and his crazy hair). Remember great Pacino cop vs. serial killer thrillers like SEA OF LOVE and INSOMNIA? Does Pacino remember them? A scowling Urban doesn't fare much better, but he at least does a passable job of looking awake. And if you don't find the story lazy enough, then check out a CGI train wreck midway through where director Johnny Martin (VENGEANCE: A LOVE STORY) and the production design team don't even bother to stage any debris, metal, or anything resembling an accident scene. A train crashes into a car, there's a huge fake explosion, and then...there's nothing there except dirt and track. Even a 25 mph fender-bender will probably leave some plastic from a busted taillight. No one associated with this movie cares about anything. Over two decades after SE7EN, HANGMAN is still trying to scrounge for serial killer table scraps, but even a formulaic, by-the-numbers thriller has to have some kind of internal logic. This is just terrible storytelling, terrible filmmaking, and terrible acting from a slumming living legend who shouldn't have to resort to drek like this to get a lead role. (R, 98 mins)

JUST GETTING STARTED
(US - 2017)

Writer/director Ron Shelton hasn't made a feature film since the 2003 Harrison Ford/Josh Hartnett action-comedy HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE (you forgot all about that one, didn't you?). With that in mind, it's hard telling what prompted the maker of BULL DURHAM, WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, and TIN CUP to end a 14-year big-screen sabbatical with something as generic and depressingly uninspired as the Christmas 2017 box- office bomb JUST GETTING STARTED. Starring in yet another geezer comedy after LAST VEGAS and the pointless remake of GOING IN STYLE, Morgan Freeman is Duke Diver, the freewheeling, fun-loving resident manager of Villa Capri, a posh retirement community in Palm Springs. He's got a pretty good gig: he's well-liked by everyone, treats the petty cash fund like his personal ATM, cleans up at his weekly poker game, and has a rotating cast of lovely retired ladies succumbing to his charms. His party comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of Suzie (Rene Russo), an internal auditor sent by the corporation that owns Villa Capri to take a look at Duke's creative accounting and fire him if necessary. But an even bigger annoyance to Duke is new resident Leo (Tommy Lee Jones), a wealthy mystery man in a ten-gallon hat who's spent time in the military, and regales Duke's lady friends--Roberta (Sheryl Lee Ralph), Lily (Elizabeth Ashley), and Marguerite (the late Glenne Headly in her next-to-last film; she died six months before the film's release)--by quoting Baudelaire and telling tales of his adventures in Machu Picchu. Duke and Leo begin a childish competition trying to one-up the other in chess, golf, weightlifting, and romance, with both vying for the attention of Johnny Mathis superfan Suzie, who finds herself falling for Duke's charms after he manages to get Mathis (playing himself) to play a gig at Villa Capri.

The GRUMPY OLD MEN-derived storyline eventually gets sidelined once the other plot is introduced: Duke is in witness protection. He's a former New Jersey mob lawyer who ratted out his boss and a hit's been put on him by that boss' vengeful wife (Jane Seymour). There's probably supposed to be some mystery as to whether Leo is the hit man, but of course he's not, as Shelton turns the film into a poor man's MIDNIGHT RUN, with Leo and Duke hitting the road and bonding as they evade the assassin sent after Duke. The comedic elements of JUST GETTING STARTED are so lackluster that the film never once displays any real amusement or spark of life. Sequence after sequence passes with jokes that don't land or weren't there in the first place. And the very premise doesn't stand up to any scrutiny: early on, Duke wins some local "Man of the Year" award and declines to go to the awards luncheon, presumably because he's in witness protection and doesn't want to risk being seen outside of his Villa Capri comfort zone. Makes sense. So why then, would he allow himself to be seen smiling at the camera in a nationally-broadcast Villa Capri TV commercial that Seymour's character happens to catch, thus setting the entire story into motion? And hasn't Palm Springs historically been a big mob hangout and vacation destination? What FBI handler would put him there in the first place? Other than the unusual casting of Seymour--which Shelton squanders by completely forgetting about her--no one shines here, certainly not Freeman, Jones, and Russo, who have never looked more lethargic and ambivalent than they do here. Lots of things might read better on paper than they play out in execution. No one sets out to make a terrible film, but sometimes you can watch actors in a movie and you can see on their faces that they know it's just not working. But they're professionals, so they grit their teeth, do what they've been paid to do, and just get it over with. This is such an occasion, as JUST GETTING STARTED simply never does. (PG-13, 91 mins)

THE RAVENOUS
aka LES AFFAMES
(Canada/France - 2017; US release 2018)

Written and directed by Robin Aubert. Cast: Marc-Andre Grondin, Monia Chokri, Micheline Lanctot, Marie-Ginette Guay, Brigitte Poupart, Charlotte St-Martin, Edouard Tremblay-Grenier, Luc Proulx, Patrick Hivon, Didier Lucier, Robert Brouillette, Martin Heroux. (Unrated, 103 mins)

At this point, is there anything innovative that can be done with the concept of the zombie apocalypse? Sure, there's an occasional TRAIN TO BUSAN or THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS that showcase some unique ideas in its narrative but ultimately, they all end up at the same place. The Quebecois, French-language LES AFFAMES, now making its US debut as a Netflix Original film under the title THE RAVENOUS, takes the somber, arthouse approach and is more concerned with creating an appropriately bleak and very downbeat mood (other than one darkly humorous running gag that does succeed in lightening things up a little). The story follows several people who connect and eventually end up at an isolated farmhouse: Bonin (Marc-Andre Grondin) just had to kill his best friend Vezina (Didier Lucier) after he was bit, the two lifelong chums busting each others' chops to the end (Vezina: "No wonder you prefer Roger Moore over Sean Connery"); Celine (Brigitte Poupart), who periodically stops her car and cranks the radio to attract a zombie just so she can let off some steam by hacking it apart with a machete; Tania (Monia Chokri), who's freed by Bonin after he finds her tied to a bed as a precaution after she's bitten by a dog; aging insurance salesman Real (Luc Proulx), who buddies up with shotgun-toting teenager Ti-Cul (Edouard Tremblay-Grenier), bonding over the sad fact that they had to slaughter their turned families; and Zoe (Charlotte St-Martin), a little girl apparently orphaned and taken in by Bonin and Tania after they hit the road. Bonin, Tania, Zoe, and Celine all find refuge at the home of Bonin's mother Pauline (Micheline Lanctot) and her partner Therese (Marie Ginette-Guay). Once they realize the house is in the direct path of an approaching horde of zombies, they abruptly flee, eventually encountering Real and Ti-Cul as they desperately try to reach another safe area.

There's a few scattered bits of splattery zombie mayhem, usually in the form of a shotgun blast to the head, but Aubert isn't really interested in that. When someone gets infected and has to be killed, it usually happens offscreen. We only see the aftermath of some of the attacks. And the zombies have some human qualities that Aubert never really fully explores: they can feel physical and emotional pain (when Celine kills one zombie, its child shows up looking bereaved and devastated), and they can think (there's one creepy bit where a zombie child has camouflaged itself in some trees waiting to attack Vezina). Aubert's bigger concern is presenting the new reality of these characters, like the need to keep quiet, as even the slightest noise or movement is enough to attract an infected (this same idea is central to the upcoming A QUIET PLACE). The focus on the day-to-day, hour-by-hour survival recalls last year's divisive IT COMES AT NIGHT, and there's the obvious shout-outs to George Romero (thanked in the closing credits) and some ambient soundscapes that are reminiscent of THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE, but Aubert has more cineaste aspirations. He captures some effectively eerie images of endless fields and dirt roads in rural Quebec, with several long, static, almost still-life shots, surreal imagery and, later, a fog-choked finale--things that qualify as total Andrei Tarkovsky or Michelangelo Antonioni hero worship or possibly an homage to the prog rock album cover artwork of Storm Thorgerson.

Despite all the arthouse smoke and mirrors, at the end of the day, LES AFFAMES is still pretty much LE WALKING DEAD--just another zombie apocalypse movie, no matter how hypnotic it gets on occasion. It still requires its characters to do stupid things, and has too many predictable jump scares where people are standing there, looking around, camera panning to the left, to the right, to the left, and then a zombie appearing on the next pan back to the right, or a zombie jumping into the frame to scare someone who, logically, should've seen them approaching since it's nothing but open space around them (this Sergio Leone trick and the left-right pans are repeated a few times). The film received significant acclaim in French-Canadian circles, earning five Canadian Screen nominations (Canada's equivalent to the Oscars), including Best Motion Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Poupart, who does get one really good scene where she expresses disgust with herself for still being alive only because she went to get a manicure while her husband and three kids were killed by attacking zombies who barged into their house while she was gone. Ultimately, LES AFFAMES is a mixed bag. It has its points of interest and gets a boost from some arresting imagery, but the references and the homages sometimes get a little too cute and self-satisfied, and Aubert needed to do some deeper exploration with the notion of what makes these zombies different from all their other genre brethren.

DEATH WISH
(US - 2018)

Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Joe Carnahan. Cast: Bruce Willis, Vincent D'Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue, Dean Norris, Kimberly Elise, Beau Knapp, Camila Morrone, Len Cariou, Mike Epps, Wendy Crewson, Stephen McHattie, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Jack Kesy, Ian Matthews, Stephanie Janusauskas, Luis Oliva, Moe Jeudy Lamour. (R, 107 mins)

Shot in 2016 and with its release date bumped once already after the Las Vegas mass shooting last October, the long-gestating remake of the 1974 classic DEATH WISH is finally in theaters, and once again timed in close proximity to another tragedy with the horrific school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Lakeland, FL. Given the frequency of mass shootings in America, it's likely that any DEATH WISH release date would coincide with one and unintenionally leave a bad aftertaste. But honestly, that's giving it too much credit. DEATH WISH '18 is empty-calorie junk-food entertainment that stacks the deck against its vigilante hero and throws red meat at the audience. It's designed to get a response, and judging from the crowd applause at key moments--like one guy getting his sciatic nerve sliced open and doused in brake fluid before a jacked-up car falls and smashes his head like a watermelon at a Gallagher show--it's mission accomplished in "Good Guy with a Gun" fantasy wish-fulfillment. This had a rocky journey from the start: in various stages of development since 2006, with Sylvester Stallone, Liam Neeson, Benicio del Toro, Frank Grillo, Russell Crowe, Will Smith, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt either attached or approached to star, Joe Carnahan (NARC, SMOKIN' ACES, THE GREY) wrote the script and was set to direct until he departed in 2013 over the usual "creative differences." That led to the BIG BAD WOLVES team of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado coming aboard to direct, with Bruce Willis signed on to star. They split when Willis and the producers wouldn't let them rewrite Carnahan's script, but when Eli Roth (HOSTEL) ended up getting the directing gig, the script ended up being completely overhauled by an uncredited Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the writing team behind ED WOOD and THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT. The end result still has Carnahan receiving sole writing credit, even though he left the project three years before production even commenced.

Taking a break from his ongoing, landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series of interchangeable Lionsgate VOD releases, Bruce Willis steps into the iconic Charles Bronson role as Paul Kersey, this time a Chicago ER surgeon instead of a mild-mannered NYC architect. Where DEATH WISH '74, based on a 1972 novel by Brian Garfield, addressed the rise of urban violence and decay in a NYC that was rapidly growing scuzzier and more dangerous by the day, DEATH WISH '18 offers rudimentary commentary on Chicago being one of the most dangerous cities in America, even though the Windy City is mostly portrayed here by Quebec. Of course, that violence hits home when Dr. Kersey is called into work one evening and his wife Lucy (Elisabeth Shue) and college-bound daughter Jordan (Camila Morrone) are the victims of a home invasion by a trio of scumbags. Lucy is killed and Jordan is left in a coma, and a shell-shocked Kersey is inevitably frustrated when well-meaning but ineffectual detectives Raines (Dean Norris) and Jackson (Kimberly Elise) can't do much besides wait for a break in the case. His rage simmering to a boil, unable to sleep or focus on work, and possibly thinking of his Don't Mess with Texas father-in-law (Len Cariou), Kersey lucks into obtaining a gun when a gang-banger is brought into the ER and no one sees or hears his gun hit the floor, which Kersey stealthily stashes into his scrubs. He then tries out the gun at an abandoned warehouse and becomes a crack shot over the course of one split-screen montage set to AC/DC's "Back in Black." Donning a series of hoodies he swipes from hospital laundry, Kersey begins roaming the most dangerous areas of Chicago, blowing away thugs, drug dealers, and every shitbag he encounters, becoming a folk hero and viral video sensation dubbed "The Grim Reaper." In a development worthy of the Plot Convenience Playhouse Hall of Fame, Kersey gets a break the cops never could when a gunshot victim lands in the ER sporting the watch Lucy gave him for his birthday, one of the many expensive items stolen in the home invasion. Of course this leads to Kersey vigilantism getting "personal," with one-step-behind Raines and Jackson (who seem to be the only Chicago detectives on duty at any given time) taking way too long to put it together that Kersey is The Grim Reaper.

Roth offers frequent talking head cutaways to Chicago radio personality Mancow and Sirius XM's Sway Calloway discussing the Grim Reaper phenomenon on their morning shows, and DEATH WISH '18 makes the era-appropriate adjustments with smartphone videos and Reaper memes going viral, but this new take seems to split the difference between the grittiness and social commentary of the 1974 original and its increasingly silly sequels. Bronson's Kersey was shocked and repulsed by his own propensity for savage violence, so much so that he throws up after committing his first murder before finding catharsis in his actions. Willis' Kersey sees those actions making him a hero and smirks like Bruce Willis and starts cracking wise, which didn't happen with Bronson until the sequels (much the way A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's ominous and evil "Fred Krueger" morphs into stand-up comic Freddy Krueger over the course of the subsequent entries). Everyone remembers Bronson's "You believe in Jesus? Well, you're gonna meet him..." from DEATH WISH II and Willis gets his version of that when powerful drug lord "The Ice Cream Man" (Moe Jeudy Lamour) asks "Who the fuck are you?" with the inevitable reply "Your last customer," and...BANG!

Willis' transformation from upper-middle class family man to John McClane circa LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD keeps DEATH WISH '18 from being anything more than a schlocky, instant gratification vigilante thriller, and it's also worth noting that Bronson's Kersey never did find the creeps who killed his wife and left his daughter in a coma, an impossible closure that this new film feels the need to provide. It isn't any better or worse than, say, 1987's DEATH WISH IV: THE CRACKDOWN, but there's some missed opportunities here, particularly one bit that speaks volumes when Kersey's ne'er-do-well brother Frank (Vincent D'Onofrio) shows up at his house when he isn't home and finds his weapons and ammo stash in the basement rec room where he's been sleeping. The entire room is filled with empties, dirty dishes, dirty clothes, and looks like a particularly nightmarish episode of HOARDERS. Surely, Kersey has gone insane to some degree as evidenced by the living conditions in his basement. At one time, Willis would've been interested in exploring that aspect, but DEATH WISH '18 is more concerned with fashioning this as a throwback Bruce Willis vehicle. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since Willis actually shows up and it's probably his best movie i several years simply by default. And for really hardcore cult movie nerds, Roth does include a cameo by Sorcery's STUNT ROCK jam "Sacrifice." It has its moments, but at the end of the day, chalk this up as another remake that's an acceptable time-killer but didn't really need to be.

RED SPARROW
(US - 2018)

Directed by Francis Lawrence. Written by Justin Haythe. Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker, Ciarin Hinds, Joely Richardson, Bill Camp, Thekla Reuten, Douglas Hodge, Sakina Jaffrey, Hugh Quarshie, Sebastian Hulk, Sergei Polunin, Kristof Konrad, Sasha Frolova. (R, 140 mins)

To get a feel of what RED SPARROW is like, imagine ATOMIC BLONDE if written by John Le Carre with an uncredited script polish by Joe Eszterhas and directed by 1990s Paul Verhoeven. It's probably not gonna fly with those constantly looking for something to be offended by, but it's nice to see a major-studio movie with A-list star diving unabashedly into hard-R territory with no reservations whatsoever. Sexually frank and often brutally, sickeningly violent, RED SPARROW is based on the 2013 novel by Jason Matthews, the first in a trilogy centered on Dominika Egorova, played here by Jennifer Lawrence, reunited with Francis Lawrence, the director of the last three HUNGER GAMES installments. As RED SPARROW begins in Moscow, Dominika is a rising star in the Bolshoi Ballet, but her career comes to an abrupt end when her dance partner lands on her left leg and shatters it in the middle of a performance. Left with a limp, depressed, and concerned about caring for her terminally ill mother Nina (Joely Richardson), Dominika is approached by her uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), a high ranking deputy in Russian intelligence, who requests a favor that can maybe financially help with her mother's care expenses. Having caught the eye of shady businessman Dmitri Ustinov (Kristof Konrad), Dominika is to be the bait to lure him to a hotel room, where she's to switch his phone with another implanted with a tracking device. Vanya assures her there's no danger, but of course, Ustinov gets rapey and assassin Matorin (Sebastian Hulk) is forced to intervene and kill him, whisking Dominika away immediately after.

Vanya's bosses--including intelligence director Zakharov (Ciarin Hinds) and General Korchnoi (Jeremy Irons)--need Dominika to keep quiet by any means necessary. In order to spare her life and to provide care for Nina, Vanya sends Dominika to a "state school" (termed "whore school" by Dominika) where attractive male and female "sparrows" are trained in the ways of seduction, psychological manipulation, and espionage by the ominously-named Matron (Charlotte Rampling). Sparrows are taught to use their bodies to gain advantage, they're put through endless psychological and physical rigors, forced to submit to sexual demands and use their sexuality to gain power over an adversary. Dominika, renamed "Katya," butts heads with Matron, especially after she violently attacks a male sparrow during an attempted rape and then sexually humiliates him in front of the entire class when she intimidates him so much that he can't get it up. Dominika has already established that she has a capacity for extreme violence and uncontrolled rage--she finds out that the ballet accident was intentional and done so in order allow her partner's girlfriend to assume her spot in the ballet, and she promptly beats the shit out of both of them--and despite her strong-willed refusal to submit to bend to Matron's will, Vanya pulls her out to give her a mission: get close to Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), a CIA agent on thin ice after a botched intel exchange in Gorky Park with a Russian mole who's been feeding info to the Americans. Nash goes off the radar but resurfaces in Budapest, where Dominika is sent to use her skills in order to find the identity of the mole.

The story takes many twists and turns with the obligatory shifting alliances, double-crosses, and people not being who they're thought to be, and while RED SPARROW doesn't really break any new ground as far as spy thrillers go, it's consistently intriguing, very well-acted, and filled with enough gasp-inducing shocks to keep your eyes glued to the screen, or wincing and looking away if Matorin is skinning someone. Sporting a quite convincing Russian accent, a stone-cold Lawrence is excellent and gets solid support from numerous standouts in the supporting cast, including Schoenaerts as the duplicitous Vanya who can barely hide his sexual desire for his late brother's daughter (can't wait to see him as Vladimir Putin in the inevitable Trump miniseries), Mary-Louise Parker as a US senator's corrupt chief of staff who's got plenty of blackmail baggage and is selling secrets to the Russians, and especially Rampling, who almost steals the film in her limited screen time as the stern, brittle Matron, a woman who's dead inside after giving everything she is to Russia and perhaps sees her younger self in the willful, stubborn Dominika (the sexual power games among the Sparrows-in-training also brings to mind the veteran actress' role in 1974's THE NIGHT PORTER). Though there are several uncomfortable scenes throughout, the knee-jerk response of the perpetually outraged seems to miss the point: Dominika is a strong heroine who proves to be several steps ahead of everyone, refusing to allow herself to be a victim and forcing anyone who wrongs her to pay dearly. Maybe it's because we're in an era where teenagers are the target audience and people have forgotten that movies for adults can still be a thing, but RED SPARROW is pretty strong stuff, with levels of sex, nudity, and violence that you really don't often see in mainstream, multiplex entertainment these days. While this is much more commercially accessible at its core, between RED SPARROW and last fall's MOTHER!, a post-Katniss Everdeen Lawrence (like the career choices made by TWILIGHT vets Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and HARRY POTTER's Daniel Radcliffe) continues to demonstrate that she isn't complacent and isn't afraid to challenge herself and take some risks.

SHOWDOWN IN MANILA
(US/Philippines/Russia - 2016; US release 2018)

Even among those fringe-dwellers who scour the deep cuts of streaming services and deign to examine the merchandise near the bottom of the new release rack at Walmart, Alexander Nevsky remains an enigma. A well-known bodybuilder and media personality in his native Russia, with a towering 6' 6" frame and a passing resemblance to Dwayne Johnson, the 46-year-old Nevsky has been plugging away in DIY fashion for about a decade and a half, overseeing an empire of sorts and trying to establish his action star bona fides the best way he can: by cranking out one movie after another and being wealthy enough that the quality of the films and whether anyone actually likes them are non-factors. After a secondary role as a bad guy in the 2003 Russian-made Roy Scheider/Michael Pare thriller RED SERPENT, Nevsky wrote, produced, and starred in MOSCOW HEAT, which got a straight-to-DVD release in the US in 2005. MOSCOW HEAT set the Nevsky template: he has a genuine affection for cop/buddy movies of the 1980s and 1990s and tries to replicate that whole Joel Silver/Shane Black sort-of vibe. He has enough money that he can lure several past-their-prime big names or career C-listers: MOSCOW HEAT found Nevsky managing to fly Michael York, Joanna Pacula, Richard Tyson, Andrew Divoff, and Adrian Paul over for a Russian vacation. Future Nevsky productions featured recurring BFFs like Tyson, Divoff, and Paul, but also Sherilyn Fenn and David Carradine (2007's NATIONAL TREASURE ripoff TREASURE RAIDERS), Billy Zane, Robert Davi, Bai Ling, and Armand Assante (2010's MAGIC MAN), and Kristanna Loken and Matthias Hues (2014's BLACK ROSE, belatedly released in the US in 2017). For all intents and purposes, Nevsky is to Russian action movies what Uwe Boll was to German tax loopholes in the '00s.

Nevsky's latest film to hit the US is SHOWDOWN IN MANILA, which bombed in Russian theaters way back in 2016. It's partly an homage to the kind of jungle/explosion movies that Antonio Margheriti and Cirio H. Santiago made back in the '80s, crossbred with an '80s/'90s cop buddy movie, but lacking even the basic competence to be a remotely engaging on any level. Nevsky is Nick Peyton, the leader of VCU (Violent Crimes Unit) Strike Force, an elite unit targeting a human trafficking operation run by an international criminal known as "The Wraith" (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). After a botched raid on The Wraith's Manila compound results in the death of his entire team, a devastated Peyton quits VCU in disgrace. Two years later, vacationing FBI agent Matthew Wells (Mark Dacascos, who also makes his directing debut) and his wife (Tia Carrere) run into The Wraith and his chief henchman Dorn (Hues) at a Manila resort, resulting in Wells' death and his wife's abduction and eventual escape. When the cops prove useless, Mrs. Wells hires Peyton, now in a private eye partnership with wisecracking, horndog buddy Charlie (Casper Van Dien). Eventually, Peyton and Charlie bring in the big guns to join them in an assault on The Wraith's base of operation: a quartet of badass mercenaries that includes '90s video store legends Don "The Dragon" Wilson (BLOODFIST), Cynthia Rothrock (CHINA O'BRIEN), and Olivier Gruner (NEMESIS) for what amounts to an EXPENDABLES knockoff that might as well be called THE AVAILABLES.

SHOWDOWN IN MANILA boasts the late Cirio H. Santiago's son and longtime assistant Christopher as a co-producer (also among the producers is Andrzej Bartkowiak, who's actually directed real action movies like ROMEO MUST DIE and EXIT WOUNDS), and back-in-the-day Filipino B-movie fixture Don Gordon Bell has a small role, showing that Nevsky's affection for these sorts of things is sincere (Vic Diaz would certainly be in this if he was still with us), but holy shit, comrade. Between his garbled accent, his wooden delivery, and possessing absolutely zero screen presence, Nevsky is pretty close to the worst actor you'll ever see. Checking his social media feed, Nevsky seems to be an all-around nice guy who loves action movies and numerous on-set photos look like everyone's having a blast, but Alexander Nevsky will never headline an action movie not produced and written by Alexander Nevsky. Van Dien tries to liven things up and seems to be having a genuinely good time (there is one big laugh early on when he turns up on surveillance video having sex with the wife of the cuckolded client who hired them to catch her cheating and tries to explain it away with "I thought the camera was off!"), but he's eventually relegated to the background. Dacascos directs with the same sense of style and mise-en-scene usually reserved for Russian dashcam videos, and he and Nevsky stage one haplessly inept action sequence after another. The CGI explosions are laughable and the fight choreography is so badly-handled that even veteran warhorses like Wilson, Rothrock, and Gruner look like inexperienced amateurs. It's hard telling where Nevsky gets the funding for these things--he's already got one more star-studded vanity project on the way with MAXIMUM IMPACT, whose cast includes Danny Trejo, Eric Roberts, William Baldwin, and Tom Arnold--but make no mistake: SHOWDOWN IN MANILA is the worst Russian production to come down the pike since the 2016 Presidential election. (Unrated, 90 mins)

CON MAN
(US/China - 2018)

There won't be a 2018 film more egregiously disingenuous than CON MAN, a total bullshit biopic of Barry Minkow, a 1980s teenage business phenom whose entrepreneurial skills led him down the slippery slope of Ponzi schemes, securities fraud, insider trading, and other felonies that will keep in prison until June 2019 at the earliest. As WOLF OF WALL STREET-ish as Minkow's story is, it's not nearly as interesting--or infuriating--as what happened during the making of this movie. If you see the plethora of down-on-their-luck stars getting the most dubious paycheck of their careers and think they look a little younger than they are, that's because CON MAN was filmed in 2009 and is only now being released. Not just because it's terrible, but because it was seized as evidence in a federal case involving Minkow embezzling millions from a church that hired him as a pastor upon his parole after he--wait for it--found God while in prison. Beginning in 1984, young Minkow (Justin Baldoni) works part-time at a gym and borrows money from a roid-raging loan shark (Bill Goldberg) to start ZZZZ Best, a carpet cleaning company that he runs out of his parents' garage. With his ingenuity for cooking the books, "check kiting," and creating fraudulent work orders to the tune of $400 million, ZZZZ Best is worth $100 million on paper by the time Minkow graduates from high school. His mom (Talia Shire) and dad (Mark Hamill) are concerned that he's in over his head, but Minkow is addicted to the rush, and at the urging of his construction magnate uncle (Michael Nouri), he partners with mobster Jack Saxon (Armand Assante), which catches the attention of dogged FBI agent Gamble (James Caan). Minkow's scheme eventually and inevitably collapses due to his hubris and, as his mom cries, "You don't have anything because you don't have God!" In 1988, at just 20 years of age, he's sentenced to 25 years in prison on 57 counts of fraud and ordered to pay restitution in excess of $26 million.

Here's where CON MAN, shot under the title MINKOW, gets interesting. Not in terms of the movie itself, which is a jumbled, badly-edited mess and all-around amateur hour, but in terms of what happened behind-the-scenes. Minkow found religion in prison--thanks to prison protector Peanut (Ving Rhames) but in part because of cellmate Michael Franzese, a mob boss and former B-movie distributor who became a Christian motivational speaker and is a real-life talking head in periodic documentary-style cutaways. Minkow financed much of CON MAN himself, and once he's sentenced to prison, there's a time jump to the early 2000s and a paroled Barry Minkow is now played by...Barry Minkow. In addition to working with the FBI on training agents in spotting financial fraud and being a semi-regular on cable news business shows, he becomes a pastor at a church and dedicates his life to helping others, including an elderly parishioner (Nicolas Coster) who thinks he's been scammed out of his retirement savings in a hedge fund overseen by a known Ponzi schemer (Gianni Russo). Minkow then steps in and risks everything to recover his parishioner's $250,000 retirement fund in one of the most ludicrously self-aggrandizing hero scenarios you'll ever see ("I'm doing the work of God! Protecting the weak!" he shouts at one point). It's ludicrous because it was revealed after the film was completed that Christian man of God Minkow was bilking his own congregation of money to get it funded while embezzling from the church and engaging in all sorts of insider trading and investment fraud. During production, according to a 2012 Fortune article, Minkow was even picked up on a hot mic between takes bragging to Caan about how he financed the movie by "clipping" companies. Minkow denied saying anything, even daring someone to produce the tape, forcing director/co-writer Bruce Caulk to do just that and turn the recording over as evidence. He said it. Because of course he did.

Minkow's arrest left the completed film (see original 2010 trailer above) in limbo, since it was intended to be an uplifting--occasionally veering into full-on faithsploitation--look at a criminal's redemption (complete with ridiculous sequences of Minkow, wearing a wire, chasing some bad guys through a hotel like he's an action hero and, in prison yard football game, throwing the game-winning touchdown) and its very existence was due to the crimes he committed to get it made. After the climactic sequence with Minkow looking like a savior by risking his life to save an old man's retirement savings, the film half-assedly addresses his fall from grace faster than THE ITCHY & SCRATCHY SHOW got rid of Poochie. I guess if you're a GODFATHER superfan, you can feel really depressed at seeing Caan, Shire, and Russo back together in the same movie (Caan and Russo do have a scene together near the end, and it would've been nice to see Sonny Corleone and Carlo Rizzi set aside their differences to collaborate on a merciless beatdown of Barry Minkow), but CON MAN is a con job itself, nothing more than Barry Minkow furiously jerking off to Barry Minkow fan fiction concocted by Barry Minkow himself. Fuck Barry Minkow. (Unrated, 100 mins)

THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT
(UK/US - 2018)

Directed by Johannes Roberts. Written by Bryan Bertino and Ben Ketai. Cast: Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson, Bailee Madison, Lewis Pullman, Damien Maffei, Emma Bellomy, Lea Enslin. (R, 85 mins)

Announced almost immediately after the release of THE STRANGERS and in various stages of development for a nearly a decade, THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT is the long-gestating follow-up to the 2008 home invasion hit that's equal parts sequel, reboot, and remake. Ten years is an eternity in the horror genre (to put it in perspective, the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was still a year away), and THE STRANGERS, itself a sort-of riff on Michael Haneke's 1997 downer FUNNY GAMES and the 2006 French film THEM (ILS), was an influence on later similar thrillers like YOU'RE NEXT, THE PURGE, and HUSH. The original's writer/director Bryan Bertino hasn't had much success in the ensuing decade: his terrible follow-up film MOCKINGBIRD played like a found-footage mash-up of Rob Zombie and THE STRANGERS and went straight to DVD in 2014, and 2016's THE MONSTER got some acclaim but, like THE STRANGERS, had a terrific first half diminished by an uneven second. Bertino is onboard as a writer and producer here, with directing chores being handled by Johannes Roberts, whose 47 METERS DOWN was a surprise hit last year. Roberts is probably a better director than Bertino, and throughout this film, he demonstrates a knack for effective shot compositions and has clearly studied the masters--there's De Palma split diopters, there's some Argento reds, there's some shout-outs to the works of Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter, and one neon-drenched sequence in a huge swimming pool that's undoubtedly the highlight of the film. But I've rarely been as back-and-forth after watching a film as I am with THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT. In the ten years since THE STRANGERS, one of the go-to tropes of the horror genre has become the incessant retro '80s fetishizing, particularly the use of throwback, synth-driven scores (YOU'RE NEXT, the MANIAC remake, IT FOLLOWS, STARRY EYES, etc) and the use of pop songs ranging from iconic to kitschy. Roberts really leans hard on that retro feel, with an opening sequence set to Kim Wilde's "Kids in America" before the title appears onscreen in a near-identical replica of the STRANGER THINGS font. That kind of reverence for a beloved era of horror was charming and cool and fun when it started becoming a thing six or seven years ago (perhaps this trend can actually be traced back to Daft Punk's score for TRON: LEGACY), and it has generated a resurgence of interest in that style of music, with Goblin and Tangerine Dream-inspired bands like Zombi and S U R V I V E, and even John Carpenter now releasing albums and going on tour with a live band. But everybody's doing it now, and with that one-two punch less than five minutes into the movie, I was already dismissively sighing, feeling grouchy, and waiting for Larry Fessenden and/or Maria Olsen to show up.

They never did, but THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT is buoyed by some unusually strong performances for a belated horror sequel. With rebellious teen daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison, who looks like a young Katie Holmes) becoming too much of a handful after an unspecified incident involving two other girls, mom Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and dad Mike (Martin Henderson) decide to send her to a strict boarding school. Forcing elder son Luke (Lewis Pullman, Bill's son) to ride along, they embark on the two-day road trip to the school, deciding to stop off for the night at an off-season trailer park campground run by Mike's uncle. Sporting a Ramones tee and chain-puffing smokes without actually inhaling, Kinsey is an intentional stereotype of the sullen, brooding teen, and would rather sulk off on her own than play cards with the family. Mike and Cindy send Luke after her, and while the kids are gone, there's a knock on the door. So begins the incidents familiar to fans of THE STRANGERS: a loosened porch light bulb obscuring the face of a young woman asking "Is Tamara home?" followed by increasingly aggressive knocks on the door, land lines cut, dumb decisions, and cell phones smashed as a sure sign that someone's already in the house. While out walking and talking, Luke and Kinsey find a trailer with its door open and discover the mutilated, dead bodies of Mike's aunt and uncle and are greeted by a hooded figure with an ax waiting outside for them. Both parties (Mom and Dad, Luke and Kinsey) make a run for it, eventually meeting and splitting into two different groups (Mom and Kinsey, Dad and Luke) as the titular trio--Man in the Mask (Damien Maffei), Dollface (Emma Bellomy), and Pin-up Girl (Lea Enslin)--taunt, stalk, and off them one by one.

There's a few genuinely suspenseful sequences throughout, and Roberts uses space and the background very effectively in the way he has The Strangers and their creepy masks materialize out of darkness or enter the frame from an unexpected place. But the retro '80s thing just gets to be too much for its own good, so much so that in the final act, it's difficult to tell if Roberts is making a slasher movie or an infomercial for NOW That's What I Call '80s Power Ballads! Why are The Strangers suddenly '80s pop superfans? Why do they drive around in beat-up pickup blaring Kim Wilde and Mental As Anything songs? In one scene, Man in the Mask sits there with one of the dying family members in a crashed car and keeps searching radio stations until he hears Wilde's "Cambodia" playing. Why? It's exactly like one of the killers in YOU'RE NEXT sitting quietly next to a dead victim (played by...wait for it...Larry Fessenden!) while Dwight Twilley's "Lookin' for the Magic" plays on repeat. It's bad enough that The Strangers are suddenly engaging in the old horror movie staple of evil figures snarking it up in the sequels (as decreed in the Freddy Krueger Amendment, aka the Chucky Resolution) by having Pin-up Girl appear out of the darkness to crack to Kinsey "We're just getting started!" but now they're DJs at '80s-themed office party who need obscure British pop songs to accompany their killing sprees.

This idea actually works in the truly inspired swimming pool sequence--a minor classic of its kind and likely the only thing genre fans will remember about this--set to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which drifts in and out as the characters go under and emerge from the water. And if it was just that, it would've been fine, but then the long, drawn-out finale with multiple endings is pointlessly set to Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing At All." Is this a sequel to THE STRANGERS or Roberts hitting shuffle on his iPod and just seeing what happens? That's the conundrum of THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT: there's some good stuff here but its fixation--obsession, really--with '80s nostalgia, with the overbearing synth and the '80s singles comprising a soundtrack in search of a movie, just gets grating and dumb after a while and almost completely derails it. This film exists in some kind of bizarro world where it thinks it's paying homage to the '80s but goes so overboard with it that it's paying homage to the homages. Isn't it a little premature to be making hero-worship tributes to things like IT FOLLOWS, STRANGER THINGS, and the filmography of Adam Wingard?

THE AMBULANCE
(US - 1993)

Written and directed by Larry Cohen. Cast: Eric Roberts, James Earl Jones, Megan Gallagher, Red Buttons, Eric Braeden, Richard Bright, Janine Turner, James Dixon, Nick Chinlund, Laurene Landon, Stan Lee, Jill Gatsby, Matt Norklum, Rudy Jones, Susan Blommaert, Beatrice Winde. (R, 96 mins)

Though he's not well-known these days outside of cult movie circles, Larry Cohen has had one of the more eclectic careers in Hollywood history. Born in 1941, Cohen got his start writing for TV shows like THE DEFENDERS and THE FUGITIVE in the 1960s. He was just 24 when he created the Chuck Connors western series BRANDED and a few years later, was the driving force behind the Roy Thinnes sci-fi series THE INVADERS before graduating to big-screen writing gigs with 1966's RETURN OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, 1969's DADDY'S GONE-A-HUNTING and the 1970 Jim Brown western EL CONDOR. He made his directing debut with the 1972 blaxploitation/home invasion indie BONE, headlined by a young Yaphet Kotto, before moving on to his breakout 1973 Fred Williamson blaxploitation hits BLACK CAESAR and its immediate sequel HELL UP IN HARLEM. Though he's dabbled in a little of everything from political biopics (1977's THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER) to film noir (writing 1982's I, THE JURY) to cop movies (1987's DEADLY ILLUSION) to high-concept nailbiters (he wrote the 2002 Colin Farrell-trapped-in-a-phone-booth thriller PHONE BOOTH), Cohen is most closely associated with the horror genre thanks to the 1974 mutant baby cult classic IT'S ALIVE. IT'S ALIVE flopped on its initial release but became a surprise hit when Warner Bros. relaunched it in 1977, eventually spawning two sequels (1978's IT LIVES AGAIN and 1987's IT'S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE) and cementing Cohen's place in horror history. 1976's GOD TOLD ME TO also has a strong following, and 1982's Q, with a giant Aztec winged serpent taking up residence at the top of the Chrysler Building in NYC, is one of the strangest cult hits of its decade.

Cohen trucked on through the '80s, with the health-food fad horror satire THE STUFF hitting theaters in 1985 and the sequel A RETURN TO SALEM'S LOT going straight to video in 1987, but his best film from that era is THE AMBULANCE, a gem of a thriller that fell through the cracks and, with its connection to Marvel Comics, is poised to finally get the recognition it deserves thanks to Scream Factory's recent Blu-ray release. Shot in the summer of 1989, THE AMBULANCE was released in Japan in 1990 but was unseen in the US until it went straight-to-video in 1993, likely due to money issues going on with Epic Productions, the company run by cash-strapped former Trans-World Entertainment execs Eduard Sarlui and Moshe Diamant. Sony's Triumph Releasing took over the Epic slate and while some less-deserving films made it into theaters (SKI PATROL, COURAGE MOUNTAIN, GHOSTS CAN'T DO IT), THE AMBULANCE sat on the shelf for four years. That's a shame, because it's got a strange, goofy charm to it that could've made it a legitimate sleeper hit if anyone saw it. In one of his loosest and most uncharacteristically appealing and likable performances, an extremely mulleted (the major sign that it was shot in 1989) Eric Roberts is Josh Baker, a Marvel artist who's introduced flirting with Cheryl (Janine Turner, just before she landed NORTHERN EXPOSURE) when she collapses on a busy Manhattan street. She tells Josh she's diabetic and an ambulance whisks her away before he can get her last name. When Cheryl isn't at the hospital where she was supposed to be taken, smitten Josh begins a citywide search for his dream girl, which intensifies after he happens to run into Cheryl's roommate Jerilyn (Jill Gatsby), who's also a diabetic who gets abducted by the same ambulance, all at the behest of a mad doctor (Eric Braeden) who's using NYC diabetics as human test subjects for his diabolical experiments involving pig pancreases, eventually harvesting and selling their organs when they inevitably die.

Along the way, Josh irritates a lot of people, from irate Lt. Spencer (James Earl Jones, chewing gum by the fistful) to various doctors and nurses, and especially his boss Stan (Stan Lee), who tells him to look for his missing mystery girl on his own time. He does get some support from sarcastic but sympathetic officer Malloy (Megan Gallagher) and aging Elias Zachariah (Red Buttons), a doddering old man who claims to be a reporter and becomes Josh's partner in crime as they break out of a hospital where Josh has been dumped to keep quiet. It's a really a shame the world was deprived of more Eric Roberts/Red Buttons buddy movies because they're quite a team here, whether they're busting each others' chops, sneaking out of the hospital in clothes that are two sizes too big, or just listening to Buttons bitch and complain and drop F-bombs. It's easy to forget what a promising career Roberts had at one point. When THE AMBULANCE went into production in 1989, he hadn't really fully capitalized on his RUNAWAY TRAIN Oscar nomination four years earlier for a variety of reasons (including a drug possession arrest in 1987), but was still regularly headlining movies that would get wide theatrical releases, including 1989's stoner comedy RUDE AWAKENING and the same year's BEST OF THE BEST, a BLOODSPORT knockoff that also featured Jones. With few exceptions (the 1996 AIDS drama IT'S MY PARTY, for example), Roberts would soon fall into the world of straight-to-video and as time went on, for every supporting role he'd get in an A-list blockbuster like THE DARK KNIGHT, there'd be 20 HUMAN CENTIPEDE 3s or A TALKING CAT!?s.

But one thing Cohen always did well was zero in on the strengths of oddball character actors and give them a chance to run with it in a leading role, whether it was John P. Ryan's convincing performance in IT'S ALIVE, Frederic Forrest in IT LIVES AGAIN, or frequent Cohen star Michael Moriarty's bizarre, free-jazz riffing as a junkie petty thief in Q. Cohen allows Roberts to use his peculiar idiosyncrasies to give THE AMBULANCE some seriously offbeat cred that clearly inspired the actor in ways that paycheck gigs like BEST OF THE BEST and BY THE SWORD wouldn't. Going forward, it wouldn't be often that Roberts would be able to conjure some of that quirky and unpredictable energy ("I mean, fuuuuuuck him!") that helped establish him in STAR 80, THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE, and RUNAWAY TRAIN, but the early '80s Roberts is there throughout THE AMBULANCE, and it's one of his best performances. THE AMBULANCE is a terrific little B-movie that would make a great "First Responder From Hell" double feature with William Lustig's Cohen-scripted 1990 cult classic MANIAC COP 2 (both indulge in some really insane Spiro Razatos stunt work) and effectively demonstrates the versatility of Cohen in the way it balances action, suspense, horror, and comedy, even throwing a bone to Stan Lee and the comic book crowd and including a running gag about one pissed-off cop (Cohen regular James Dixon) looking like Jughead from Archie. Cohen was credited with a few largely rewritten screenplays in the '00s (including Roland Joffe's embarrassing 2007 torture porn fiasco CAPTIVITY) and helmed one episode of Showtime's MASTERS OF HORROR in 2006, but he hasn't directed a film since 1996's blaxploitation throwback ORIGINAL GANGSTAS. In recent years, he's opted to go the emeritus route on the convention and Q&A circuit while cashing checks when one of his films is remade (the less said about the dismal 2009 remake of IT'S ALIVE, the better). Cohen's last essential film to date, THE AMBULANCE is a blast that deserves much more recognition than it's ever received.

7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE
(US/UK - 2018)

Directed by Jose Padilha. Written by Gregory Burke. Cast: Daniel Bruhl, Rosamund Pike, Eddie Marsan, Denis Menochet, Lior Ashkenazi, Ben Schnetzer, Brontis Jodorowsky, Nonso Anozie, Mark Ivanir, Angel Bonnani, Peter Sullivan, Andrea Deck, Natalie Stone, Vincent Riotta, Trudy Weiss. (PG-13, 107 mins)

Operation Thunderbolt, the Israel Defense Forces' successful July 4, 1976 raid of Entebbe Airport in Uganda to rescue hostages being held by the far left German Revolutionary Cells and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine stands as one of the most daring military missions in history. It immediately spawned two competing, hastily-shot, all-star TV-movie "events" with ABC's VICTORY AT ENTEBBE (with Anthony Hopkins, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Richard Dreyfuss, Helmut Berger, Linda Blair, and Elizabeth Taylor among others) airing just five months later in December, quickly followed by NBC's RAID ON ENTEBBE (headlined by Charles Bronson, Yaphet Kotto, Martin Balsam, Horst Bucholz, John Saxon, and Peter Finch in his last film) in early January 1977. Future Cannon heads Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus even got into the act, with the Golan-directed Israeli production OPERATION THUNDERBOLT (with Klaus Kinski and Sybil Danning as the hijackers) hitting theaters in January 1977. The Entebbe raid is also touched upon in other films, like THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND and the epic CARLOS, and now, over 40 years later, 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE is yet another take on the same subject.

On June 27, 1976, Germans Wilfried "Boni" Bose (Daniel Bruhl) and Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike), two members of Revolutionary Cells, board an Air France jet during a layover in Athens, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. They and some accomplices commandeer the plane and force pilot Capt. Michel Bacos (Brontis Jodorowsky, best known as the little boy in his dad Alejandro's 1970 cult classic EL TOPO) and navigator Jacques Le Moine (Denis Menochet, looking like he's auditioning for THE NICK OFFERMAN STORY) to reroute to Benghazi, Libya to refuel en route to Entebbe, Uganda, where dictator Idi Amin (Nonso Anozie) has granted them an airstrip at Entebbe Airport. The pro-Palestine Bose and Kuhlmann are far-left ideologues, with Kuhlmann a protege of incarcerated and recently-deceased Red Army Faction leader Ulrike Meinhof, who was found hanged in her cell in what was deemed a suicide but many in German terrorist circles feel was a staged execution. Once the plane lands in Entebbe and Amin gives them passage, the days drag on and as the unstable Kuhlmann keeps popping amphetamines and Bose begins to resent that the Palestinian cohorts who were waiting for them at Entebbe--under the orders of PFLO leader Wadie Haddad--and begin to muscle the Germans aside and start separating the Israeli passengers, moving them to another room and threatening to begin killing them if Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) doesn't release all of the Palestinian terrorists being held in Israeli prisons.

The most compelling parts of 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE are the tense meetings with Rabin, the Israeli military, and testy Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres (a terrific performance by Eddie Marsan, sporting an amazing makeup job), and the debates over Israel's policy of never negotiating with terrorists (staunchly supported by Peres, who believes Rabin is deliberately stalling on a response in the hopes that he can just throw Peres under the bus). Less successful are the arcs of Bose and Kuhlmann. Pike can't do much with director Jose Padilha (ELITE SQUAD, NARCOS, and the ROBOCOP remake) and screenwriter Gregory Burke ('71) whittling her complex character--who blames herself for Meinhof's death--down to a stock "crazy bitch" act that culminates in a ridiculous scene where she calls her lover and pours her heart and her belief in the cause out to him in a long monologue on a pay phone that's not even functioning. The filmmakers don't give a pass to the Germans, but definitely want to engineer some sympathy for them as two idealistic young activists who get in way over their heads, though in one flashback scene, a Revolutionary Cells associate who's trying to talk them out of the hijacking does call Bose out as a bit of a poseur who likes to rant about oppression and the evils of capitalism while owning a small but financially successful publishing company ("You're not oppressed! You're a capitalist!" the guy yells). During the real seven days at Entebbe, Bose apparently did express some concern over the optics of being a German in a hostage situation where Israelis were being threatened with execution, but 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE almost seems like it wants to absolve him of any wrongdoing. If Bose (and, to an extent Kuhlmann, who starts to realize they screwed up when she runs out of pills and is able to clear her head a little) really felt this way as the situation escalated way beyond the statement they wanted to make, it would hardly be the first time ideologically pure and stubbornly uncompromising far-left activists were duped into being the useful idiots that a powerful political organization requires to roll out a far more insidious plan.

For about 85 of its 107 minutes, 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE is a generally involving hostage/political thriller despite some occasional tap-dancing around certain issues and the puzzling omission of key details, like the whole situation with elderly hostage Dora Bloch (briefly seen in a couple of scenes and played by Trudy Weiss), her disappearance during the ordeal and how her Amin-ordered execution is never even addressed. But in the home stretch, as the raid is underway (one of the commanders, and the only Israeli military officer killed during Operation Thunderbolt, was Yonatan Netanyahu--played here by Angel Bonnani--the older brother of current PM Benjamin Netanyahu), Padilha completely shits the bed by intercutting it with some footage of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company. One of the soldiers (Ben Schnetzer) is called to duty and will miss the opening night performance of his dancer girlfriend (Andrea Deck). We see the dance outfit practicing throughout and Operation Thunderbolt is intercut with their performance, with the girlfriend repeatedly falling flat on her face time and again. It's a mystery whether that's a metaphor for something happening with the raid or for Padilha himself, but it completely drains the suspense from what should be the key sequence in the film. Even the closing credits play over some dance routine with a male dancer contorting throughout the frame while a female dancer runs in place in the background. It's one of the all-time climactic derailments of what was an otherwise decent movie up to that point. Sure, it was sort-of an acceptably second-string MUNICH but Padilha's bizarre decision to turn it into what looks like snippets of a justifiably abandoned production of "Bob Fosse's ENTEBBE!" is thus far the head-scratcher of the year for 2018 moviegoing. Sure, the out-of-nowhere violent sex scene near the end of MUNICH was jarring, but it didn't instantly turn the film into a hot mess.

SMALL TOWN CRIME
(US - 2018)

Another entry in the new wave of gritty noirs that's given us acclaimed films like COLD IN JULY, BLUE RUIN, BAD TURN WORSE, I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE, and the similarly-titled SMALL CRIMES, SMALL TOWN CRIME is a terrific thriller that also owes a debt to BLOOD SIMPLE-era Coen Bros. Despite the obvious influences, the sibling writing/directing team of Esham & Ian Nelms (WAFFLE STREET) throw in enough unpredictable twists and turns and interesting characters that SMALL TOWN CRIME manages to find its own voice and place in the subgenre. Character Actor Hall of Famer John Hawkes stars as Mike Kendall, an alcoholic and disgraced ex-cop booted off the force after a traffic stop went bad, resulting in his partner getting shot in the head by the driver, a psycho who had a kidnapped girl in the trunk who was accidentally shot dead by Kendall, who was shitfaced on the job in the police cruiser and just started randomly firing when his partner went down. Unable to get a job and getting so blackout drunk every night that it's not uncommon for him to wake up in a field 100 yards away from his old-school Nova littered with empties on the dashboard, Mike is driving home on one such morning after when he spots a bloodied and barely-breathing young woman lying on the side of the road. He drives her to the hospital, but she dies shortly after. He finds her phone under his passenger seat and has a testy conversation with criminal lowlife Mood (Clifton Collins Jr), who keeps calling the girl's phone incessantly. After being threatened by Mood, Mike draws three conclusions: the dead girl was a prostitute, Mood was her pimp, and he obviously doesn't know she's dead. Even though he's in a drunken blur most of the time, this awakens his long-dormant cop instincts and he's unable to let it go, even after being told to back off by homicide detectives Crawford (Michael Vartan) and Whitman (Daniel Sunjata), both of whom know and, more so with Whitman, still resent him over his exit from the department.

In a plot development more suited for a wacky comedy but pulled off with total straight-faced seriousness, broke-ass Mike pretends to be a private investigator and is hired to the tune of $2500 a week by the dead girl's wealthy grandfather Steve Yendel (Robert Forster who, oddly enough, was also in SMALL CRIMES), who's fed up with the slow pace of the police investigation. Another dead hooker is found, and this leads Mike on the trail of all manner of sleazy criminal activity including, but not limited to, another prostitute (Caity Lotz) who knew the dead girl; a low-rent brothel being run out of a shithole bar owned by Mike's buddy Randy (Don Harvey); two psycho hit men (James Lafferty and Jeremy Ratchford, the latter looking like he got the role because Mark Boone Junior was busy) who start following Mike around and harassing his brother-in-law Teddy (Anthony Anderson), which doesn't sit well with his sister Kelly (Octavia Spencer, also an executive producer), whose family adopted Mike when he was a kid rescued from junkie parents; and a sex tape involving three rich douchebag real estate developers. After Teddy is kidnapped by the hit men, Mike forms an unholy alliance with Mood, the two setting aside their differences and joining forces with a shotgun-toting Yendel to settle this their own way. You really haven't lived until you've seen a scowling Forster as Yendel, already pissed-off and forced to ride shotgun in Mood's rebuilt purple Impala low-rider with serious hydraulics action. Despite the grim subject matter, there's quite a bit of dark humor throughout ("Sometimes, you're just a shitheel, ya know?" a bar waitress tells Mike). Mike's arc is obviously a redemptive one but the Nelmses don't allow everything to wrap up all neat and tidy, especially when it comes to Teddy and Kelly, though the film somehow manages to end on a crowd-pleasing note (I would love seeing Hawkes, Collins, and Forster revisit these characters and team up for another mystery). Released straight to DirecTV and VOD, SMALL TOWN CRIME is genuine sleeper gem that's going to find a solid word-of-mouth cult following once it hits streaming services, and it's a real shame something this entertaining barely got any theatrical exposure. Check this one out. (R, 92 mins)

LIES WE TELL
(UK - 2018)

British-Pakistani double-glazed window magnate Mitu Misra had never even been on a movie set before making his self-financed debut film LIES WE TELL. Based in Bradford in West Derbyshire, an area that's home to a large Pakistani population, LIES WE TELL tries to be both a culture-clash soap opera and a seedy crime thriller, with a central relationship that recalls Neil Jordan's MONA LISA (1986) and a finale that straight-up steals a major moment from Brian De Palma's CARLITO'S WAY (1993), Other than a positively Ed Wood-ian sight of a camera drone hovering over a traffic jam and quickly exiting the frame, obviously not meant to be in the shot, Misra doesn't humiliate himself but he doesn't accomplish much either, relying on the presence of a few seasoned pros who were probably happy to jump aboard once Misra's checks cleared. Melancholy Donald (Gabriel Byrne) is the loyal, longtime driver for wealthy Greek businessman Demi Lampros (Harvey Keitel). Lampros dies suddenly (Keitel checks out less than five minutes in), and in the event of his passing, left Donald specific instructions to keep his family from discovering his indiscretions and clear out his secret apartment where he regularly met Amber (Sibyllla Deen), his 20-something Muslim mistress who's going through law school on his dime. Liberal in her beliefs and the object of scorn by her strict, fundamentalist family, Amber is still under the thumb of KD (Jan Uddin), her cousin and a sketchy Bradford crime lord to whom she was nearly forced into an arranged marriage when they were both 16. Now, nearly a decade later, Amber's parents are forcing her younger sister Miriam (Danica Johnson) into an identical arrangement with the abusive KD. Out of loyalty to his late employer, Donald is drawn into Amber's troubled life and ends up helping her get Miriam out of a bad situation that's made worse when Lampros' weasally, asshole son Nathan (Reece Ritchie) discovers a sex tape on his father's phone.

That leads to an attempt by Nathan to blackmail Amber into a similar sugar daddy situation, but the phone's memory card is swiped by an enraged KD, who threatens to show Amber's parents unless she backs off and quits trying to stop the wedding. Mark Addy also periodically appears as Donald's slovenly brother-in-law and roommate, but doesn't really serve a purpose. There's also a barely-explored subplot about Donald's estranged wife (Gina McKee) and their dead daughter, and though he pumps the brakes at shirtless, thus sparing us the familiar sight of the full Bad Lieutenant in the sex tape footage, the whole film seems like an elaborate excuse for 78-year-old Harvey Keitel to disrobe onscreen yet again. LIES WE TELL is dull and dreary, though Byrne and Deen manage to occasionally lift the uninspired material just with their professionalism and natural acting talent. McKee and Addy are pros given nothing to work with, and there's no way Keitel worked on this for more than a day. Other than that ridiculous, bush-league fuck-up with the camera drone, Misra's intentions are sincere, and while this isn't a good movie at all, it's likely the best one you'll see by a West Derbyshire-based double-glazed window magnate by default, so that's gotta count for something. Right? (Unrated, 110 mins)

UNSANE
(US - 2018)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer. Cast: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Amy Irving, Aimee Mullins, Matt Damon, Polly McKie, Sarah Stiles, Michael Mihm, Robert Kelly, Gibson Frazier, Raul Castillo, Will Brill, Stephen Maier, Myra Lucretia Taylor. (R, 98 mins)

Steven Soderbergh emerged from his four-year, big-screen "retirement" (during which he directed an HBO movie and two seasons of the Cinemax series THE KNICK, and produced several projects for others) with last year's charming and funny LOGAN LUCKY. By the time that film was in theaters, Soderbergh had already secretly made UNSANE, described as a low-budget horror film shot entirely with an iPhone 7 Plus, with the exception of a drone camera for some exteriors. Fans of Italian horror with recognize UNSANE as the title of the severely-cut US version of Dario Argento's 1982 classic TENEBRAE, but the comparisons end there. UNSANE was written not by Soderbergh but by the team of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, whose writing credits include such classics as Lindsay Lohan's JUST MY LUCK, Jackie Chan's THE SPY NEXT DOOR, and their crowning achievement, LARRY THE CABLE GUY: HEALTH INSPECTOR. Nevertheless, through the iPhone 7 Plus and other recurring themes, Soderbergh, once again handling cinematography duties as "Peter Andrews" and editing as "Mary Ann Bernard," makes UNSANE his own, and it's a mess. Even the iPhone gimmick isn't original: several years before he directed THE FLORIDA PROJECT, Sean Baker made his indie breakthrough with TANGERINE, shot entirely with an iPhone 5S. Though he's had major box-office hits with films like TRAFFIC, ERIN BROCKOVICH, and the OCEAN'S ELEVEN trilogy, Soderbergh has found some success and critical accolades with more offbeat and, to varying degrees, experimental projects (THE LIMEY, BUBBLE, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, the ambitious four-hour epic CHE), and has even gone "slumming" in genre fare before with 2012's enjoyable Gina Carano actioner HAYWIRE. UNSANE is one of his worst films, but at least it's better than 2002's FULL FRONTAL, his unwatchable, star-studded, self-indulgent homage to French New Wave shot with the Canon XL-1s. There's several scenes in UNSANE, especially in the early going, where Soderbergh's use of the iPhone 7 indeed adds to the sense of unease he's trying to establish, but the longer the film goes on, the dumber and more ridiculous it gets. By the time the heroine wakes up in a trunk and Soderbergh's breaking out the night vision, it's hard to shake the feeling that he's either bored out of his mind or hasn't seen enough low-budget indie horror films over the last two decades to recognize the cliches.

The improbably-named Sawyer Valentini (THE CROWN's Claire Foy) has just moved to suburban Pennsylvania from Boston. She works as a financial analyst and doesn't seem to be well-liked by her colleagues, though she tells her mom Angela (Amy Irving sighting!) that everything's great and moving 450 miles away was a career opportunity she couldn't pass up. She's on Tinder and meets guys for one-nighters, but what she hasn't told her mom or anyone else is that she moved from Boston to get away from a stalker who trailed her for two years, and whose face she still keeps seeing everywhere--at work, on the men she meets--and she never feels safe, which isn't helped by her boss not very subtly propositioning her to go on business trip to New Orleans with him. Feeling a one-on-one session might help sort out her thoughts, she makes an appointment with a counselor at the reputable Highland Creek Behavioral Center. Handed some paperwork requiring her signature after mentioning she had fleeting thoughts of suicide in the past, Sawyer realizes too late that she's been duped into signing an agreement to be voluntarily committed for 24 hours, which turns into seven days after repeat instances of violently lashing out at staff and patients when they refuse to release her. She's endlessly taunted by white trash patient Violet (Juno Temple), but befriends another, Nate (former SNL cast member Jay Pharoah), who's recovering from an opioid addiction and has a secretly stashed phone that he loans to Sawyer after she loses her privileges. She calls her mom, who drives to Highland Creek only to be stonewalled by chief administrator Ashley Brighterhouse (Aimee Mullins), and to make matters worse, the stalker from Boston, David Strine (Joshua Leonard, looking and sounding like Zach Galifianakis), is also at Highland Creek, working as an orderly under a phony name. Or is Sawyer's mind playing tricks on her?

Soderbergh shows his cards too soon with almost every plot twist, whether the orderly is really Strine or what Nate is really doing at Highland Creek. Characters also start doing stupid things when it's convenient for the plot (with eyes everywhere, how does no one ever catch Nate on his phone?). The iPhone 7 approach does yield some initially intriguing results, with Soderbergh keeping the camera at a distance as Sawyer goes about her day, almost like you are voyeuristically stalking her. He frequently plants the camera right in Foy's face, getting you up close and personal with someone who's either cracking up or completely sane and freaking out because she's being gaslighted and can't convince anyone that the new orderly is a lunatic creep. But after a while, when everything becomes clear and there's no ambiguity left, UNSANE devolves into what looks like the kind of no-budget horror indie that might break out and maybe get some attention and help establish a first-time director. To that end, the presence of Leonard, one of the stars of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT almost 20 years ago, can't be coincidental.

For a young filmmaker trying to make his bones--Sean Baker, for instance--a gimmick like shooting an entire movie on an iPhone is a feat of overcoming obstacles and a triumph of DIY aesthetic. But for someone like Soderbergh, an Academy Award-winner who's been lauded as great filmmaker for nearly 30 years, works with the biggest stars in Hollywood, and has several huge hits to his credit, it comes off like cynical wankery. It's not an example of a master filmmaker subverting genre expectations, and if it was made by a young no-namer, it would likely be premiering at your nearest Redbox. UNSANE starts out fine but Soderbergh seems to lose focus quickly, unable to decide if he's making a no-budget indie horror movie or an ERIN BROCKOVICH-meets-SHOCK CORRIDOR-type expose on medical and insurance industry corruption. There's hints at a timely #MeToo or #TimesUp angle with Sawyer's lecherous boss and the way she recoils from a Tinder hookup ("You initiated!" the guy pleads), but that goes nowhere. Foy gives it her all and Pharoah is natural and likable (one very likely ad-libbed line from him gets a huge laugh), but a mannered Leonard is a cartoonishly cliched antagonist and there's also a pointless and distracting appearance by Soderbergh pal Matt Damon in a flashback as a security expert advising Sawyer about stalkers. It all leads to a weak and unsatisfying conclusion that ends the film on a frustrating note. Soderbergh's name and history will get this some significant critical cache since it's a planned move instead of one borne of a stalled career (UNSANE isn't good, but we're not talking Roland Joffe's CAPTIVITY here), but at the end of the day, there's nothing here that a kid just out of film school couldn't have done just as well.

Soderbergh filming UNSANE

PARADOX
(US - 2018)

Written and directed by Daryl Hannah. Cast: Neil Young, Lukas Nelson, Micah Nelson, Corey McCormick, Anthony LoGerfo, Tato, Willie Nelson, Elliot Roberts, Dave Snowbear Toms, Charris Ford, Robert Schmoo Schmid, Tim Gooch Lougee. (Unrated, 73 mins)

Neil Young's most ill-advised contribution to pop culture since his LAST WALTZ coke booger, the Netflix Original film PARADOX is an insufferably self-indulgent, borderline unwatchable home movie from Young and significant other Daryl Hannah. Hannah makes her feature film writing and directing debut, though she's credited with "auteur," which should tell you all you need to know about whether you can make it all the way through. Shot during some downtime when Young and his current backing band Promise of the Real arrived in Colorado for a show that was three days away, PARADOX looks and feels every bit like an improvised project thrown together in 72 hours. It ostensibly deals with a group of outlaws apparently on the lam in a vaguely phantasmagorical frontier realm, either running from a robbery or planning one, as they sit around their makeshift camp cooking, eating marmot stew, playing cards, philosophizing, and listening to their leader The Man in the Black Hat (Young) strum an acoustic guitar. When one of the gang, Cowboy Elliot (Elliot Roberts, Young's longtime manager) says "That's the Man in the Black Hat...I heard he can be kinda shakey," you'll already be groaning if you know of Young's occasional pseudonym "Bernard Shakey." The rest of the gang is played mostly by members of Promise of the Real, a band led by Lukas and Micah Nelson, the youngest sons of Willie Nelson. Lukas plays "Jailtime" and Micah "The Particle Kid," and the latter's big scene involves sharing a two-seated outhouse with Happy (Anthony LoGerfo) and dropping this deuce of wisdom: "Life is like a fart. If ya gotta force it, it's probably shit." Or a Netflix Original called PARADOX.

After more pseudo-insightful musings ("Sometimes things gotta go south before they can go north"), the gang wanders through the woods and encounters a tent with present-day instruments and Young's sound crew as the film pauses so the band can do a run-through of the recent Young song "Peace Trail." Then Hannah cuts to about 20 minutes of live footage from Young and Promise of the Real's appearance at the 2016 Desert Trip in California. After that, they wander around some more, look for treasure, quote Nietzsche and talk about how music is "a preacher and a teacher" before the musicians' wives, girlfriends, and kids spend some time playing in a field and Young's tour bus makes a cameo, ending with Young laughing and strumming a ukulele with a rope tied around his waist, dragging a floating Daryl Hannah behind him. Like his legendary contemporary Bob Dylan, whose own films like 1978's four-hour RENALDO AND CLARA and 2003's MASKED AND ANONYMOUS are hallmarks of testing the endurance of apologist superfans, Young has dabbled in experimental, weirdo cinema before, most notably co-directing (as "Bernard Shakey") 1982's barely-released "nuclear comedy" HUMAN HIGHWAY with Dean Stockwell, the two heading a cast that also included Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn, Sally Kirkland, and Devo. PARADOX is Young's first cinematic vanity project since 2003's GREENDALE, a feature-length music video intended to accompany his album of the same name, a collaboration with his best-known backing band, Crazy Horse. Like GREENDALE, PARADOX is more or less a musical collage (or, in Hannah's words, a "loud poem") with seemingly random selections of Young songs old and new, but it's a tedious, pretentious chore to sit through even at 73 minutes. To give you an idea of just how smug and self-satisfied PARADOX is, there's meaningless chapter titles ("II: Time To Feed the Good Wolf"), and at the end, the screen actually fades to black, followed by a "Fin." In 2018.

These days, Hannah's main concern seems to be her political and environmental activism. Her career hasn't exactly been on fire in recent years. Other than appearing in the Wachowskis' Netflix series SENSE8, she hasn't been in anything noteworthy since Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL and John Sayles' SILVER CITY back in 2004. She's made at least a dozen DTV actioners with Michael Madsen in the ensuing years, including the Italian post-nuke throwback DEATH SQUAD, aka 2047: SIGHTS OF DEATH. Thanks to BLADE RUNNER, SPLASH, and KILL BILL, her place in film history is secure, but her directing style makes you long for the commercial accessibility of James Franco's American lit adaptations. Hannah, Young, and Promise of the Real are having a good time, and Willie Nelson briefly shows up to help The Man in the Black Hat rob a bank, but the only thing saving PARADOX from complete ruin is the music, especially the kickass Desert Trip jam randomly thrown in the middle of the film. Everything else around it serves as further proof that Netflix just needs to stay away from acquiring anything with the word "paradox" in the title.

THE LAST MOVIE STAR
(US - 2018)

He's 82 and shockingly frail, but living legend Burt Reynolds shows he's still got it in THE LAST MOVIE STAR, which is getting an unusual rollout from A24: it premiered on DirecTV a month ago and is being released on Blu-ray three days before its limited theatrical run. In his first significant big-screen role in at least a decade, Reynolds is aging movie legend Vic Edwards, but let there be no misunderstanding: he's playing Burt Reynolds. Edwards was the biggest movie star in the world for six straight years starting in the late '70s, but his fortunes have waned as time and age have shown no mercy. He's been divorced five times. He still lives in a nice L.A. mansion that looks like a Vic Edwards museum, but he hasn't acted in years, he walks hunched over with a cane, is in constant physical pain, and from the opening scene where he's at the vet's office and makes the difficult decision to put down Squanto, his terminally-ill, 15-year-old dog, it's clear that Vic Edwards is ready to say goodbye. He gets invited to the International Nashville Film Festival to accept a lifetime achievement award that he's been told has previously been bestowed upon the likes of Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, and though he's hesitant and thinks it's bullshit, he decides to attend after being prodded by his buddy Sonny (Chevy Chase). Vic arrives in Nashville (after his first class tickets turn out to be coach) only to find that he's been put up in a cheap motel, the festival--which he confused with the Nashville International Film Festival--is being held in the backroom of a bar by local movie nerds Doug (Clark Duke) and Shane (BOYHOOD's Ellar Coltrane), and his promised assistant is Doug's loud, obnoxious, can't even, #whatever sister Lil (MODERN FAMILY's Ariel Winter). She's an aspiring artist whose work veers toward the disturbingly dark (Clive Barker, of all people, provided Lil's artwork), has no idea who Vic is and is too preoccupied with her cheating, douchebag boyfriend Bjorn (Juston Street) to care. Feeling he's been conned, Vic spends the first night of the festival getting drunk and insulting the attendees in Shatner/"Get a Life!" fashion (calling them "losers watching movies in your basement"). When Lil picks him up at the motel the next morning, he makes her drive him three hours away to Knoxville so he can visit his childhood home and try to find closure and meaning to his life and reconnect with the person he was once upon a time as these two unlikely travelers form an unexpected friendship on their impromptu road trip.

Burt is the whole show here, and it's a shame writer/director Adam Rifkin (THE DARK BACKWARD, THE CHASE, DETROIT ROCK CITY), a Reynolds superfan who wrote this specifically for his hero, didn't give him something more consistently substantive. Burt is terrific when Rifkin keeps the focus on him and lets the camera just take in his aged, craggy, cosmetically altered face and the sadness in his eyes. Reynolds is a guy who's burned a lot of bridges in Hollywood over his career. Movies that meant something to him were dismissed by critics and he ultimately stopped caring. He's been smeared by tabloids over his marriage to Loni Anderson and his mismanaged finances and bankruptcies, and was the subject of nasty AIDS rumors in the '80s after shattering his jaw in an on-set accident making 1984's CITY HEAT. He was shunned by industry insiders he thought were his friends, and it all left him with a seething bitterness that's affected his life and career to this day. Sometimes he's been his own worst enemy and just can't help himself, as when Paul Thomas Anderson gave him arguably the best role of his career (leading to his only Oscar nomination) in BOOGIE NIGHTS and Reynolds responded by shit-talking the movie before it was even released. Reynolds has fucked up a lot and he knows it, and he channels that anger and regret into Vic Edwards. Why then, does Rifkin spend so much time on a going-nowhere subplot about Lil being pissed at Bjorn for cheating on her? This is Burt Reynolds baring his soul--no offense to Ariel Winter, but no one cares about Lil. And no one cares about Doug's hurt feelings or Shane's unrequited love for Lil and how she doesn't even know he exists.

When THE LAST MOVIE STAR is about Vic, it's very good, and Reynolds rises to the occasion. For fans who have followed him for several decades, it's difficult seeing the Bandit taking slow baby steps and grunting with nearly every physical action, watching him mourn the loss of his dog and going grocery shopping alone, buying prune juice and Hungry Man TV dinners. There's a devastating scene late in the film where Vic visits his long-estranged, pre-fame first wife Claudia (Kathleen Nolan), who's in a Knoxville nursing home in the late stages of Alzheimer's. THE LAST MOVIE STAR needs more of these moments, or at least visually clever ones like Vic disappearing into his memories as present-day Reynolds is CGI'd into scenes from his old movies and converses with the Bandit during a SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT car chase or lounges in a canoe marveling at himself from DELIVERANCE ("Damn, you're good lookin'!" Vic tells his much-younger self). Since Burt is basically playing Burt, maybe a better film could've been made by dropping the film festival angle altogether and doing more things like that, like putting Burt into scenes from his old movies and reminiscing about them or what was going on in his life at that point, like a sort-of visual journey through Burt Reynolds' memories, guided by the man himself. THE LAST MOVIE STAR is filled with touching, heartfelt moments, but in the narrative constructed by Rifkin, the story is predictable and the dialogue too often trite, as when Burt is forced to say "I look in the mirror now, and I have no idea who that person is staring back at me." THE LAST MOVIE STAR is a real mixed-bag: there's enough good stuff here that Burt fans need to see it, but they'll probably walk away from it wishing it was something else. (R, 103 mins)

I REMEMBER YOU
(Iceland/Norway/Denmark - 2017)

There's some great chilly atmosphere in this very slow-burning Icelandic thriller based on a novel by Yrsa Sigurdardottir. The story, at least in director/co-writer Oskar Por Axelsson's adaptation, tries to juggle a few too many elements to reach a wholly satisfying conclusion, but the big twist is such that you'll be wanting to go back and take another look at seemingly minor details in the early scenes that end up having a major impact later on. Having said that, viewers well-versed in twisty mysteries and thrillers of this sort are almost certainly going to figure out one late-film reveal long before psychiatrist Freyr (Johannes Haukur Johannesson, best known to American audiences for his brief stint as Lem Lemoncloak on GAME OF THRONES) and his detective friend Dagny (Sara Dogg Asgeirdottir) overtly spell it out for them. Freyr is still grieving the loss of his son Benni, presumed dead after he went missing three years earlier, last seen in footage from a security camera outside a nearby gas station. Every lead and tip led to nothing and Benni's case has gone cold, with Freyr and his ex-wife Sara's (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir) marriage imploding in the traumatic aftermath. Dagny calls Freyr for a medical opinion on a suicide case where an elderly woman named Halla hanged herself in a room with crosses and the word "Ohreinn" ("filthy" in English) drawn on the walls, and crosses--both fresh and several years old--carved into her flesh. The crosses and the handwriting match the vandalizing of a church 60 years ago, where the child culprit--a persistently bullied boy named Bernodus--disappeared immediately after, never to be seen again. Why Dagny has called Freyr is that Halla is the seventh elderly person found dead in an inexplicable fashion, with a photo from 1956 showing that the seven were all classmates of Bernodus and all of their faces have been scratched out. One such classmate happens to be a schizophrenic and virtually catatonic patient of Freyr's who tells him, out of the blue, "Benni is at the bottom! Everything is green!"

Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline (yes, this is one of those where it's a waiting game to see how two completely unrelated plots converge), Gardar (Porvaldur David Kristjansson) and Katrin (Anna Gunndis Gudmundsdottir) are a married couple still picking up the pieces after their son was stillborn a year earlier. They and their third wheel friend Lif (Agusta Eva Erlendsdottir) have traveled to a seaside ghost town to renovate an abandoned house that's been empty for 60 years. It isn't long before a love triangle rears its ugly head, and erratic Katrin starts seeing spectral flashes of a little boy, followed by the discovery of a long-mummified corpse in the cellar, its fingers clutching an old black & white photograph. There's a lot of plot for I REMEMBER YOU to cover, and the clunky shift from procedural to the supernatural comes off as a little forced. Things head in a direction that's equal parts Shyamalan and THE ORPHANAGE and while it isn't an in-your-face, jump-scare chiller, its foreboding mood and relentlessly downbeat tone make it a flawed but generally effective mystery for fans of Scandinavian gloom. (Unrated, 105 mins)

THE DEATH OF STALIN
(France/UK/Belgium - 2018)

Directed by Armando Iannucci. Written by Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows. Cast: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Isaacs, Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Friend, Paddy Considine, Adrian McLoughlin, Dermot Crowley, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi, Richard Brake, Diana Quick, Karl Johnson, Tom Brooke, Gerald Lepkowski. (R, 107 mins)

Best known in America for creating the HBO series VEEP, Armando Iannucci has been one of the most respected names in British comedy for over 20 years. He co-created Steve Coogan's signature "Alan Partridge" character, seen in several British TV series and the 2013 film ALAN PARTRIDGE, and was the brains behind the scathing BBC political satire THE THICK OF IT. That was spun off into the hilarious 2009 film IN THE LOOP, both of which centered on the stunningly profane central performance of Peter Capaldi and more or less set the style and tone for VEEP. Iannucci stepped down as VEEP's showrunner after its fourth season, and he's back with his second feature film, THE DEATH OF STALIN, based on a 2017 French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. The trademark Iannucci tone and endless, gloriously foul dialogue are here in all their glory, but THE DEATH OF STALIN is much darker than what we've seen from Iannucci in the past, largely because it depicts a series of actual events but runs them through its maker's uniquely skewed perspective and pitch-black comedy filter. This isn't just comedy of discomfort--it's comedy of unease. In less capable hands, it could've been an uneven and potentially tone-deaf disaster--after DR. STRANGELOVE, you can probably count on one hand the number of dark political comedies that are simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. Perhaps it takes a cynical master of bullshit-calling like Iannucci to properly convey the unattainable heights of narcissistic sociopathy mixed the ego-driven, thorough incompetence displayed by the powers that be, with the resulting film being a vicious beatdown of dictatorial regimes embodying the adage of absolute power corrupting absolutely (the film was banned in Russia earlier this year after the Culture Ministry deemed it offensive), and though the film is set in the Soviet Union over 60 years ago, analogies can be drawn much closer to home in the here and now.

That's not to say it's all gloom and doom. THE DEATH OF STALIN has the expected uproarious quips and sarcastic one-liners that have become synonymous with Iannucci. In the Soviet Union in 1953, Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) is at the height of his dictatorial reign. He regularly draws up death lists, has people hauled off to gulags, routinely orders executions for minor infractions, and even those in his inner circle are constantly walking on eggshells so as not to have any comment be misconstrued in a way that will make this day their last as they live and die at the whims of a mercurial madman. When he dies suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage, the underlings and sycophants in his immediate orbit begin a war-like campaign of endless backstabbing, double-crossing, and shit-talking power plays as they jockey to assume power. Nothing is off limits and it doesn't matter how often they change policies or contradict themselves and everything for which the Union stands. In the hours and days following Stalin's death, his deputy secretary Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) is the next in line of succession and assumes temporary control, but other players are already plotting their next moves, namely the ruthless head of the NVPD secret police and security chief Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) and wily, pragmatic Central Committee politico Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi). Malenkov immediately proves ineffective and indecisive, prone to easy manipulation by Beria and Khrushchev, with other Committee members Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), Anastas Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse), Nikolai Bulganin (Paul Chahidi), and Lazar Kaganovich (Dermot Crowley) caught in the middle waiting to see how things pan out. Others figuring into the chaotic proceedings include Stalin's daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough), son Vasily (Rupert Friend), and highly decorated war hero Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs), who helps Khrushchev lead the final coup to muscle out Malenkov and silence Beria for good.

The power struggle unfolds like a buffoonish chess game, with one of the unexpected highlights being the intentional decision to have the actors not attempt Russian accents and instead just talk like they talk. Hence, Buscemi is a wiseass Khrushchev who sounds like he's from one of the Five Boroughs, Tambor is an insecure Malenkov who talks like George Bluth, and Isaacs (channeling Capaldi's THICK OF IT persona) plays Zhukov like a Cockney thug in a Guy Ritchie movie. Once the political gamesmanship is underway, the insults and the ballbusting fly fast and furious, and Iannucci doesn't hesitate to play it blue, like Khrushchev dismissively responding to whiny Vasily pleading "I want to speak at my father's funeral" with a curt "And I wanna fuck Grace Kelly." There's also some more subtle jokes, particularly with some standout comedic timing by the great Palin, who's a joy as Molotov, getting long-winded and speechy during a vote that must be unanimous, and everyone around the table keeps raising and lowering their hands because they aren't sure what to do and need to keep up appearances. It's no spoiler to anyone who knows their history that Khrushchev ultimately emerged victorious in the plot to permanently succeed Stalin. That is, until he himself was ousted nine years later, having not learned what Iannucci shows in the closing scene at a concert being given by renowned and politically outspoken Russian pianist Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko), where new Soviet leader Khrushchev is oblivious to ambitious Leonid Brezhnev (Gerald Lepkowski) sitting diagonally behind him, looking over his shoulder, his wheels turning and another coup already being set in motion.

THE TITAN
(US/UK/Spain/Germany - 2018)

Directed by Lennart Ruff. Written by Max Hurwitz. Cast: Sam Worthington, Taylor Schilling, Tom Wilkinson, Agyness Deyn, Nathalie Emmanuel, Noah Jupe, Corey Johnson, Aleksandar Jovanovic, Diego Boneta, Aaron Heffernan, Alex Lanipecun, Naomi Battrick, Steven Cree, Nathalie Poza, Francesc Garrido, Kyle Soller. (Unrated, 97 mins)

It's another week and another dud Netflix acquisition with the sci-fi/horror outing THE TITAN, a potentially interesting sort-of reverse MARTIAN with hints of the underrated and sort-of forgotten SPLICE. It looks great and benefits from some beautiful Spain and Canary Islands location work, but its intriguing concepts are rendered moot by lax execution and a typically bland performance from AVATAR's Sam Worthington, who they're apparently still trying to make a thing. Completed in 2016, THE TITAN is set in a post-apocalyptic 2048 where the west coast is uninhabitable due to nuclear fallout and huge sections of the US and much of the world are turning into overpopulated, war-ravaged hellholes. As NASA scientist Dr. Martin Collingwood (Tom Wilkinson) explains, "Time is running out and we've outgrown our world." His plan? Populate Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Its atmosphere is largely methane and nitrogen and thus impossible for humans to live, but Collingwood's multi-billion project involves using US soldiers in an experimental program to alter their DNA and biological structure to adapt to Titan's atmosphere, explaining that "Humans must adapt rather than reshape planets in our image." One test subject is Air Force Lt. Rick Janssen (Worthington), who moves his family--doctor wife Abi (Taylor Schilling of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK) and young son Lucas (Noah Jupe)--to a top-secret NATO base on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean. Collingwood promises Rick and the other test subjects that they'll be enhanced, superior versions of themselves. "You'll be you, but better." Clearly, they've never seen a body-horror movie with a deranged scientist before.

Things go smoothly at first, with Rick's biological enhancements allowing him to swim at high speeds and stay underwater for over 40 minutes. But then the trouble starts: mood swings, clumps of hair falling out, a bad reaction to surgery intended to alter the aperture of his eyes to allow him to see through darkness but instead leaving him temporarily blind and bleeding from his eyes. Then scaly masses start forming on his skin. Abi, whose career as a doctor is mentioned often but never called upon in a story capacity, breaks into Collingwood's office (well, he leaves the door unlocked for maximum plot convenience) and looks at his notes: past experiments have found him blending human DNA with amphibians and bats to allow test subjects to sprout gills and potentially fly. He's even labeled them "Homo Titanus" in his intent to create the next stage of evolution. In time, Rick's human appearance morphs into a combination of the later, redesigned Gill Man from 1956's THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, a human-sized Dr. Manhattan from WATCHMEN, and "Dren" from SPLICE, as Abi desperately tries to save her husband from what Collingwood has done. It's hard to believe he gets away with what he's been doing, especially after a video conference call with an enraged NASA official where we learn Collingwood has gone rogue and completely veered away from his original assignment, and is revealed to be a quack with dubious theories on evolution. It seems like NASA or the President or somebody from NATO would head to this base and maybe relieve Collingwood of his duties since he's turning soldiers into bat/Gill Man-hybrids. Schilling takes this a lot more seriously than she should, Worthington is too dull to make this his version of Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY, and Wilkinson just seems to be amusing himself on his Canary Islands vacation by choosing odd ways to pronounce words like "methane" and "Pentagon." German director Lennart Ruff, making his feature debut, has a good eye for shot compositions and the film certainly looks more expensive than it likely is, a good indication that he'll be getting journeyman gigs on big-budget Hollywood movies soon enough. But at the end of the day, THE TITAN is an intriguing idea that just gets sillier and dumber as it trudges along to its unsatisfying conclusion.

THE SOLDIER
(US - 1982)

Written and directed by James Glickenhaus. Cast: Ken Wahl, Alberta Watson, Klaus Kinski, William Prince, Jeremiah Sullivan, Joaquim de Almeida, Peter Hooten, Steve James, Alexander Spencer, Jeffrey Jones, Zeljko Ivanek, Ron Harper, Ned Eisenberg, David Lipman, Tom Wright, George Strait. (R, 88 mins)

Ken Wahl was poised to be a Next Big Thing on more than one occasion, but fate and some really bad luck repeatedly intervened to prevent it from happening. Born in either 1954, 1956, or 1957 depending on the source, Wahl debuted to much acclaim in Philip Kaufman's THE WANDERERS (1979) and was soon co-starring with Paul Newman in the gritty time capsule FORT APACHE, THE BRONX (1981). The 1981 adventure RACE FOR THE YANKEE ZEPHYR was an Australian/New Zealand co-production that only made it into a handful of US theaters in 1984 under the title TREASURE OF THE YANKEE ZEPHYR. 1982 saw Wahl clashing with Bette Midler on the set of the troubled box-office bomb JINXED, a doomed project that almost ruined the careers of everyone involved and ended up being the great Don Siegel's final film as a director. The same year, he starred in the international espionage thriller THE SOLDIER, writer/director James Glickenhaus' follow-up to his 1980 surprise hit THE EXTERMINATOR. THE SOLDIER didn't do much business in theaters, but like TREASURE OF THE YANKEE ZEPHYR, it found a home in its seemingly daily airings on HBO throughout the '80s. It's a convoluted Reagan-era spy/terrorism thriller with KGB agents embedded in the US by Soviet spymaster Ivan (Jeremiah Sullivan) hijacking a plutonium shipment and taking it to an oil field in Saudi Arabia, where they threaten to detonate it and destroy 50% of the world's oil supply unless Israel withdraws from the West Bank. Believing Islamic extremists are behind the plutonium hijacking, the US President (William Prince) is prepared to attack Israel if it means saving the oil, but the CIA chief (Ron Harper) proposes another solution: "The Soldier." A nameless covert ops agent who officially doesn't exist, The Soldier (Wahl) and his team (including Peter Hooten, Joaquim de Almeida, and future Cannon regular Steve James) go to work. The Soldier teams with Mossad agent Susan Goodman (Alberta Watson), and eventually figures out that the Soviets are behind the heist, which becomes obvious after an attempt is made on The Soldier's life by duplicitous KGB agent Dracha, played by legendary cinematic and real-life madman Klaus Kinski, putting in a day's work at an Austrian ski resort.

THE SOLDIER is best-known for one sequence, but it's one for the ages: where Dracha traps The Soldier in a ski lift and has one of his guys try to take him out with a rocket launcher, only to have The Soldier jump out and lead Dracha's guys on a truly incredible ski chase with the stunt guys doing some pretty death-defying stuff. There's also a memorable scene in a shitkicker bar where Steve James beats the shit out of some racist, redneck urban cowboys while a just-breaking-out George Strait and his band play. There's also some fantastic bloody squib work throughout, but otherwise, THE SOLDIER is a strange and oddly-paced film. It runs a brief 88 minutes but still seems padded with tons of filler, and Wahl is absent for several stretches throughout while we see his team do their thing, infiltrating a missile silo in Kansas to aim a nuke at Moscow if the Soviets don't withdraw from Saudi Arabia. There's a long meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister and his cabinet, a long meeting with the President and his national security adviser (Jeffrey Jones), and a long interrogation of a terror suspect by Susan, and other than an opening sequence where The Soldier cleans up any trace of a CIA hit in Philadelphia, Wahl doesn't really join the main plot until 25 minutes in. It's also marred by a weak conclusion that looks like the crew just stopped and called it a wrap, almost like a climactic action sequence that should be there is missing. While it's admirable that Glickenhaus demonstrated some ambition and tried to make something a little more substantive in terms of its political storyline, it too often feels like a 42nd Street grindhouse version of a John Le Carre novel, and that's a mix that just doesn't work well together. After THE SOLDIER and JINXED, Wahl appeared in 1984's barely-released PURPLE HEARTS with Cheryl Ladd before his career faced its first setback when he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident on his way to meet with Diane Keaton about co-starring in MRS. SOFFEL (Mel Gibson eventually got the part). Wahl was out of commission for a year and upon his recovery, found his movie career was stalled and he shifted to TV, where he eventually landed his career role in 1987, starring as undercover FBI agent Vinnie Terranova, infiltrating the mob on the CBS series WISEGUY.

THE SOLDIER opening in Toledo, OH on October 1, 1982

THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS
(US - 1991)

Directed by Sidney J. Furie. Written by Rick Natkin, David Fuller and David J. Burke. Cast: Ken Wahl, Matt Frewer, Harley Jane Kozak, Robert Davi, Lee Ving, Branscombe Richmond, Lyman Ward, Michael Bowen, William Prince, George Wyner, Tony Ganios, Ken Swofford, Raymond Singer, Bob Golic. (R, 96 mins)

Ken Wahl found more success with WISEGUY than he ever had on the big screen. He was nominated for an Emmy and won a Golden Globe in 1990, the same year he abruptly left the series at the end of its third season over "creative differences" with the network. They decided to carry on without him, bringing in Steven Bauer (SCARFACE) to play a new character investigating Vinnie Terranova's disappearance, possibly at the hands of South American drug cartels. Nobody was really happy with the retooling, and CBS cancelled WISEGUY nine episodes into its fourth season. Freed from his commitment to the show, Wahl was given another shot at movie stardom with the DIE HARD ripoff THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS, directed by his PURPLE HEARTS helmer Sidney J. Furie (THE IPCRESS FILE, LADY SINGS THE BLUES, IRON EAGLE, SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE), a career journeyman going back to the late 1950s who's still directing today, well into his 80s. A casualty of the bankruptcy of Orion Pictures, THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS only made it to about 500 theaters and grossed just $940,000 when it was eventually released by Columbia in the fall of 1991. It's a spectacularly dumb movie, but it's endlessly enjoyable, and a perfect snapshot of 1990-91, from Wahl's amazing mullet to a burglary montage set to EMF's "Unbelievable" and cop cars crashing and Wahl taking out bad guys with ninja stars to the tune of Faith No More's "Epic."

Wahl is Boomer Hayes, an aging pro quarterback who ends up in the middle of an elaborate Beverly Hills heist being pulled off by a crew of renegade, disgraced ex-cops. The plan? A hoax chemical spill that forces the evacuation of the city, sending the residents to a ritzy hotel out of the quarantine area while they raid all the empty mansions of their owners' valuables and assorted priceless possessions. Boomer missed the evacuation warning, since he was in his hot tub waiting to score with Laura Sage (Harley Jane Kozak), his former flame and current girlfriend of Robert "Bat" Masterson (Robert Davi), a wealthy Beverly Hills businessman and the owner of Boomer's team. Unaware that Boomer is a person (they assumed Laura was talking about a dog when she kept yelling "What about Boomer?" as she was herded onto a departing bus), the criminals go about their business while Boomer throws on his jersey, shoots his bum knee with cortisone and plays through the pain, teaming up with doofus cop Ed Kelvin (MAX HEADROOM's Matt Frewer), who went along with the heist because he was told no one would be hurt, but who comes to regret his decision and helps Boomer when the body count starts escalating. Mismatched buddy duo Boomer and Ed join forces to take back the town and expose the heist's mastermind (gee, could it be asshole "Bat" Masterson?)...if they don't kill each other first!

THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS is no classic, but it's a shame it didn't get much of a chance. It's pretty much DIPSHIT DIE HARD, but it's a lot of fun and Wahl was never more loose or funny than he was here, moving from street to street through Beverly Hills (this was actually shot in Mexico) while uttering ludicrous dialogue like "I am a master at moving downfield and they don't even know I'm in the game!" and "I'm through playing defense!" and, of course, "Touchdown, asshole!" while throwing ninja stars and literal Hail Mary bombs and Molotov cocktails that blow up Masterson's chief henchman Varney (Fear frontman Lee Ving as Alexander Godunov to Davi's Alan Rickman). The film is so beholden to the DIE HARD formula that at one point Masterson even derisively calls Boomer "Hopalong" as opposed to "Mr. Cowboy." THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS gives you all that plus Branscombe Richmond as another Masterson flunky who commandeers a tank and actually gets set on fire at one point in an example of the kind of practical stunt work that's become extinct in the era of CGI. Around the same time he shot this film, Wahl (with almost the same mullet) co-starred with Kozak in the romantic comedy THE FAVOR, which featured Elizabeth McGovern and a young Brad Pitt. THE FAVOR was also an Orion release that ended up being shelved until 1994, by which point Wahl's career was essentially over.

Wahl at the height of his WISEGUY fame

In 1992, Wahl broke his neck in what he initially claimed was another motorcycle accident. Years later, he revealed that he fell down the stairs at the home of Rodney Dangerfield's girlfriend and future wife, who was also seeing Wahl at the same time, and concocted the motorcycle story to respect her privacy. Wahl underwent multiple surgeries and was unable to walk for over two years. His limited movement caused a significant weight gain and he lived in constant, debilitating pain and developed a serious drinking problem. He managed to shed some pounds but was noticeably heftier and stiff as he struggled to get through the one-off 1996 WISEGUY reunion movie for CBS, but following that, Wahl effectively withdrew from public life and, to date, hasn't acted since. He hasn't given a print interview since 2004, instead finding his new calling as an activist for US military veterans, organizing a "Pets for Vets" charity that offers animal adoption services to provide pet therapy and companionship for disabled and/or emotionally troubled vets. He was also a frequent call-in guest on NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch's now-defunct radio show. Wahl is a conservative who's active on Twitter (though not in a crazy way like, say, James Woods) and has been married to Shane Barbi--half of the modeling duo the Barbi Twins--since 1997. He stays busy with his activist concerns, but he's largely reclusive, does what he does from home, and he adamantly refuses to be photographed on a rare occasion when he is spotted or recognized in public. Both THE SOLDIER and THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS have recently been released on Blu-ray and to no one's surprise, the Howard Hughes-esque Ken Wahl is MIA on the bonus features for both.

Wahl in the promising early days of his career, with Paul Newman
on the set of 1981's FORT APACHE THE BRONX.

THE SECT
aka THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER
(Italy - 1991; US release 1992)

Directed by Michele Soavi. Written by Dario Argento, Giovanni Romoli and Michele Soavi. Cast: Kelly Curtis, Herbert Lom, Tomas Arana, Maria Angela Giordano, Michel Adatte, Carla Cassola, Angelina Maria Boeck, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Niels Gullov, Donald O'Brien, Yasmine Ussani. (Unrated, 117 mins)

The second and final collaboration between director Michele Soavi and producer/co-writer Dario Argento (following 1989's THE CHURCH), THE SECT is finally out on Blu-ray in the US, where it's fallen into relative obscurity over the last quarter century since its VHS release as THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER. There was talk that Anchor Bay was planning to release THE SECT during the big Eurocult DVD explosion around 2000 or so, but it never materialized, possibly due to expensive music rights clearance issues with the prominent inclusion of America's "A Horse With No Name" over the opening credits and into the first scene. A visionary filmmaker with an eclectic group of mentors--he was an actor and a regular assistant to both Argento and Lucio Fulci, and he found an unexpected fan in Terry Gilliam, who saw his 1987 film STAGEFRIGHT at a European film festival and hired him to handle second unit on THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN--Soavi's films from 1987 to 1994 constitute the last gasp of greatness from the golden age of Italian horror. Things had been on the decline for years, with aging directors moving to TV, Fulci ailing and effectively retired, and Argento beginning the long, slow descent into mediocrity that's ongoing to this day. Soavi was supposed to be the savior of Italian horror, but its fate was sealed long before the health problems of Soavi's young son, born with a rare liver disease that he wasn't expected to beat, prompted the director to put his career on hold indefinitely following his 1994 masterpiece DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, aka CEMETERY MAN, which is more or less the end of an era. By the time Soavi's son beat the odds and bounced back from what was considered a terminal illness, Italian horror was over aside from the occasional Argento disappointment, and Soavi found a home on Italian TV, where he remains a busy and in-demand hired gun to this day.

THE SECT is absolutely brilliant on a technical level. There's inspired visual flourishes and fluid and often tricky camera work that makes it a dazzling and colorful film to look at, but the script feels like a patchwork hodgepodge of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE WICKER MAN, with recycled Argento elements (particularly INFERNO, with its secret gateway to Hell and a murderous evil arising during lunar eclipse) and Soavi foreshadowing some DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE motifs to come, most notably a briefly reanimated corpse and the changing appearance of tiny figures in a snow globe on the heroine's bedside table. The film opens in southern California in 1970, when a group of free-spirited hippies are slaughtered by members of a cult ostensibly led by the very Charles Manson-like Damon (Tomas Arana), who quotes Rolling Stones lyrics and is revealed to be a middleman who answers to a wealthy, unseen figure in the back of a nearby parked limo who tells him to wait patiently, that his time will come, and it "may be years down the road." Cut to Frankfurt, Germany in 1991, as a young woman has her heart cut out by a deranged man (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), who is cornered by police in a train station and insists "They made me do it!" before grabbing a gun and blowing his brains out. A shabbily-dressed old man (the legendary Herbert Lom) is nearly run over by schoolteacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis), who takes him to her house to get some rest. He dies the next morning after going through a door and finding a hidden basement beneath the house with a deep well with very blue water, leaving behind a shroud with his face outlined on it. Numerous other bizarre occurrences take place around Miriam: the mother of one of her students vanishes; her colleague Kathryn (Mariangela Giordano of BURIAL GROUND) is attacked by the shroud when it gets caught in a wind gust and promptly starts to behave in a possessed manner before being stabbed to death and coming back to life in the hospital; strange ribbon-like turquoise strands start appearing in Miriam's tap water; she finds a creepy woman wandering around in the basement; and she starts getting messages on her answering machine from the dead man, who is revealed to be Moebius Kelly, the leader of the Satanic cult and the man in the limo in the 1970 prologue. His plan is, of course, to use the innocent--and presumably virginal--Miriam as the vessel to deliver Satan reborn, as she faces the terrifying realization that almost everyone in her life--present and past--is part of a conspiracy to ensure that this happens.

It's a tough call, but THE SECT might be the straight-up strangest film in Argento's entire filmography. If it feels like it's pieces of several scripts stitched together, that's because it was. Soavi incorporated parts of a still-unfilmed script he wrote in the '80s titled THE WELL, while Argento is said to have had the biggest input in the 1970 prologue. While this wasn't a Steven Spielberg/Tobe Hooper, POLTERGEIST situation, Argento's paw prints are all over both THE SECT and THE CHURCH. As was the case with Lamberto Bava's two DEMONS films, producer/co-writer Argento was a constant presence on the set (look at any behind-the-scenes photo from DEMONS and Bava is standing there listening while Argento is pointing and appearing to give instructions), and it's been documented that Soavi was slightly frustrated by Argento's insistence on being involved in every aspect of THE CHURCH. Argento toned down the control-freak act and backed off Soavi a bit during the production of THE SECT, but his involvement is felt throughout, mostly from a recycling of ideas and images from INFERNO and, to a lesser extent, SUSPIRIA, so much so that one could arguably view THE SECT as an unofficial spinoff of the "Three Mothers" saga. Other bits obviously conceived by Soavi either foreshadow DELLAMORTE (the snow globe, the corpse of Kathryn coming back to life and attacking Miriam, the mythic elements of death and rebirth) or reference THE CHURCH, most notably the idea of a demonic sect operating in a secret underground location of a building that's a portal to hell (see also SUSPIRIA, INFERNO). It's very deliberately paced and even a tad overlong at just under two hours, and there's some moments that just don't work: the shroud attacking Kathryn is unintentionally hilarious; the constantly-invoked rabbit motif is overdone, especially the part where Miriam's apparently sect-controlled pet bunny watches TV and uses the remote control, resulting in a bunny reaction shot when it sees a magician (Soavi) pulling a rabbit out of a hat on a TV show; and a late-film sexual assault of Miriam by a demonic stork that crawls out of the basement well probably read a lot better on the page than it looks on the screen.

THE SECT is a flawed jumble of a film whose story is frequently an unwieldy mess, but it's so well-made and carefully crafted on a visual level, and so bizarre if looked at as a nightmarish fever dream that its lofty ambitions carry the weight and help it hit more often than it misses. The script really could've used one more draft and a final polish to tighten the plot a bit, but it mostly works. Lom, in what's probably his last great role, commands the screen as Moebius, and Arana makes the most of his limited screen time, with one memorable shot of the stoned Damon glaring into the camera as Soavi dissolves to a blazing sunset that's one of the most effective images of the filmmaker's career. Curtis, the eldest daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, is fine as the naive and almost childlike Miriam. Soavi settled on the actress after his first choice, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 and 5 star Lisa Wilcox, turned him down when she found out she was pregnant. Curtis, two years older than Jamie Lee, never found the level of fame and success enjoyed by her younger sister, but she never really vigorously pursued it either. She worked as a stockbroker after graduating from college in the late '70s and into the early '80s before giving acting a shot when Jamie Lee got her a tiny part as one of Dan Aykroyd's former fiancee's friends in 1983's TRADING PLACES (she's wearing the blue headband in this clip). Other than THE SECT, her only starring role in a feature film was in an obscure 1987 German comedy called MAGIC STICKS. She had a few guest spots on TV shows like THE EQUALIZER, HUNTER, and STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, but her most prominent role after THE SECT was as a regular on the 1996-99 UPN series THE SENTINEL, which she left after the first season. Curtis' last acting credit was a guest spot on a 1999 episode of JUDGING AMY, and from then on, she's been credited on several of her sister's films as her personal assistant.

A QUIET PLACE
(US - 2018)

Directed by John Krasinski. Written by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and John Krasinski. Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward, Leon Russom. (PG-13, 90 mins)

Even in the most tightly-written screenplays, there's going to be things you can pick at and call a "plot hole," though most people using that term rarely do so correctly. A QUIET PLACE isn't exactly airtight in its execution, with a couple of head-scratching "plot conveniences" or "plot inconsistencies," let's call them, but it's a chilling, visceral, stomach-in-knots experience in horror moviegoing that we just don't see much anymore. It's PG-13 and the gore is minimal and fleeting, but A QUIET PLACE knows how to manipulate an audience and in the process, director/co-writer/star John Krasinski (yes, that John Krasinski) creates one of the most fascinating social experiments in recent memory. Can you recall the last time you went to a see a movie in a packed theater on its opening weekend and the audience--the entire audience--behaved perfectly? No talking, no phones lit up, no loud snacking, only an occasional cough and some relieved exhaling after any number of well-executed suspense set pieces (that bit with the nail will have you holding your breath with dread). I don't even think anyone got up to use the restroom. A QUIET PLACE dives right into its story in medias res (the opening title card reads "Day 89") and essentially conditions its audience to go along because no one wants to be the asshole who breaks the silence and ruins it for everyone. I won't go so far as to call Krasinski the DGA equivalent of Ivan Pavlov or Stanley Milgram, but let this film serve as proof that civility and courtesy can be part of present-day multiplex attendance. Nevermind the Oscars or the Golden Globes--Krasinski's accomplishment here practically qualifies him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Produced by Michael Bay, of all people (Krasinski starred in his 13 HOURS), and set in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic America in the very near future, A QUIET PLACE opens with an unimaginable tragedy: a family witnessing the death of their youngest member after he's attacked and whisked away by a barely-glimpsed creature moving with lightning speed. In the minutes preceding this, we're introduced to the dad (Krasinski), mom (Emily Blunt), deaf teenage daughter (Millicent Simmonds), and pre-teen son (Noah Jupe) silently procuring supplies at an abandoned store and walking home barefoot. A toy rocketship grabbed by the youngest child (he's four) at the store--and he put the batteries in with no one looking--starts making noises unexpectedly, alerting the creature to their location, killing their third child before his father can save him. Cut to "Day 472," and the family has their survival routine down. It seems some kind of alien invasion wiped out much of America and, it would seem the world, with some bands of survivors in scattered rural pockets (from atop a grain silo, there's a few observable campfires in the distance, but with one brief exception, we meet no one else), and the common knowledge now being that you're safe if you're silent. They have paths made around the farm, paint marks on the steps to delineate where to walk to avoid creaking boards, and they're in the midst of constructing a soundproof room in anticipation of the next member of the family, due in two weeks and certain to generate a lot of noise (and of course, that water's gonna break at the worst possible time). The first third of A QUIET PLACE just shows the daily routine and how, with kids being kids, noise will be made regardless of how careful they are (especially a concern for the daughter, who can't tell if the floors creak as she walks). Because the daughter is deaf (as is young Simmonds, as Krasinski pushed for a hearing-impaired actress for the part), the family knows sign language. Conversations are conveyed in subtitles, and the first audible line of dialogue doesn't even occur until 40 minutes in, when father and son are able to have a regular conversation while hiding under a waterfall while out fishing.

Of course you may ask "Why can't the monsters hear the water?" Or "Why do they have picture frames precariously hanging on the wall?" A QUIET PLACE works as long as you go along for the ride, though it's one of those films where you're riveted while watching it but you're asking questions by the time you get to your car and have had time to think about it. In a way, it's a throwback to M. Night Shyamalan in his prime (SIGNS, especially), and like the good Shyamalan films, your first experience with it will be the best experience, because you're aware of everything on subsequent viewings. There's no Shyamalanian twist to A QUIET PLACE, and it's tense and involving enough to warrant repeat viewings, but some of the more plot-convenient cracks, structural flaws, and lapses in logic will be more apparent. It's tough to pull off a movie that's largely silent except for some infrequent whispers and some Marco Beltrami music cues, but credit to Krasinski and his actors for pulling it off. As a director (this is his third feature, after 2009's BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, which is about as watchable as you'd expect a David Foster Wallace adaptation to be, and 2016's little-seen drama THE HOLLARS), Krasinski graciously leaves the biggest dramatic moments to his offscreen wife Blunt and an impressive Simmonds, whose character is reaching that age where headstrong rebellion is innate and she's tired of the unintentional marginalization by her father due to her disability and his possibly passive-aggressive blaming her for the youngest child's death (she handed the toy back to him after Dad took it away, but this kid does at least three other things in the first two minutes that could've gotten them all killed). Almost every thought and emotion has to be communicated silently in A QUIET PLACE, and it's a gamble that pays off. The audience was with this from the first ominous moment until the crowd-pleasing final shot. Even in big tentpole movies that make $200 million in their opening weekend, you'll have people talking, texting, checking Instagram, Snapchatting, fidgeting, getting up, walking around, and being generally insufferable pains in the ass. In an era where the viability of cinemas is constantly in question due to streaming, VOD, and ever-changing distribution platforms, A QUIET PLACE is the kind of communal moviegoing experience that serves as a welcome reminder of how satisfying seeing a good, scary movie with a equally captivated audience can be.

PATERNO
(US - 2018)

Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Debora Cahn and John C. Richards. Cast: Al Pacino, Riley Keough, Kathy Baker, Greg Grunberg, Annie Parisse, Larry Mitchell, Steve Coulter, Kristen Bush, Ben Cook, Sean Cullen, Peter Jacobson, Tom Kemp, Michael Mastro, Jim Johnson, Murphy Guyer, Julian Gamble, Darren Goldstein, William Hill. (Unrated, 105 mins)

There was once an air of prestige surrounding HBO's original movies, particularly in the 1990s glory days which saw them regularly producing top-notch films like BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON, THE TUSKEGEE AIRMEN, THE LATE SHIFT, GIA, IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK, and INTRODUCING DOROTHY DANDRIDGE, just to name a few. For the last decade, the network has specialized in at least one fact-based drama or biopic every spring, with some highlights being 2010's YOU DON'T KNOW JACK, with Al Pacino as Jack Kevorkian, 2012's GAME CHANGE, chronicling the Republican side of the 2008 election with Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin and Ed Harris as John McCain, and 2013's BEHIND THE CANDELABRA, with Michael Douglas as Liberace. The HBO spring movies have been slipping in recent years, content to rely on painstaking makeup jobs as opposed to the solid writing that made their 1990s films so memorable. 2013's PHIL SPECTOR is arguably the worst of the bunch, a slobbering Spector apologia from David Mamet, with Spector played by a frizzy wig attached to the head of Al Pacino. Last year's THE WIZARD OF LIES cast Robert De Niro in a perfect recreation of Ponzi scheme poster boy Bernie Madoff, but otherwise felt content to serve as a live-action version of Madoff's Wikipedia page, with director Barry Levinson indulging in some predictable Scorsese worship, right down to De Niro using some of his leftover Ace Rothstein schtick from CASINO.

Levinson also directs PATERNO, which goes through motions in such a "Movie of the Week" fashion that it doesn't even work up the enthusiasm to rip off Scorsese. PATERNO reunites the director with his YOU DON'T KNOW JACK star Pacino for a chronicle of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal that broke in late 2011 and quickly took down beloved, legendary football coach Joe Paterno, who died of lung cancer just two months later in January 2012. Pacino absolutely looks the part and is in appropriate "restrained Pacino" mode here. Where PATERNO drops the ball is that, like THE WIZARD OF LIES, it just goes through the story as if the script is a series of bullet points. There's nothing here you don't already know if you followed the story as it broke, and the filmmakers aren't really interested in going beneath the surface for anything substantive. It could've been so many things, especially if you're aware that when HBO originally announced the project way back in 2013, it was called HAPPY VALLEY (also the name of a 2014 documentary on the scandal from THE TILLMAN STORY director Amir Bar-Lev) and was to have been directed by Brian De Palma. Pacino was attached as Paterno from the start, and veteran character actor John Carroll Lynch (FARGO, ZODIAC) was cast as his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who retired in 1999 and was ultimately convicted on 45 counts of child molestation and corruption of minors among other charges, with boys as young as 10 years of age. HAPPY VALLEY was put on hold during pre-production for "budget concerns" and was subsequently rechristened PATERNO when HBO gave it the greenlight once again in 2016, with Pacino but without De Palma and Lynch. It's telling that the film is now simply called PATERNO, since Sandusky (now played by eerie lookalike Jim Johnson) is seen fleetingly on maybe three occasions and has one audible line of dialogue. PATERNO opens with "JoePa" in a hospital MRI machine reflecting on the just-breaking scandal. And if you know the story, then you know the rest.

Levinson and writers Debora Cahn and John C. Richards could've taken just about any other approach and made a stronger film. They could've set it in 2001 when Paterno was allegedly first made aware of Sandusky's heinous crimes after then-graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary (briefly played here by Darren Goldstein) witnessed him raping a boy in the Penn State locker room, to which Sandusky still had access post-retirement, and would often take victims he procured from his Second Mile charity. Or, they could've focused on Sara Ganim (Riley Keough), the Patriot News reporter who first broke the story and encountered all manner of stonewalling, cover-ups, vanishing police reports, and a conspiracy of silence that would've made for a riveting investigative drama along the lines of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, ZODIAC, or SPOTLIGHT. In terms of setting the film in 2011, the crux of the story is "Did JoePa know or not?" and at that point in time, Ganim's pursuit of that answer and jumping every hurdle in her way would've been more compelling and revealing, at least as an examination of how football is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of Penn State, thus leading to the "protect the shield" attitude of the school, the students, and the community.

Or, they could've given Pacino something more to do that look doddering and befuddled as the 84-year-old Paterno. In a way, that's accurate, as Paterno clearly comes off as a man whose football-focused tunnelvision made him pretty much oblivious to, if not everything else around him, then at least the seriousness of Sandusky's crimes. This was a man who spent over 60 years in coaching and concerned himself with little else. One of the more interesting moments comes when he doesn't even get the optics of how bad it would look if he admitted waiting two days to tell the university higher-ups what he heard about Sandusky because he "didn't want to ruin" their weekend. More details like that would've helped, but scene after scene just has Pacino's JoePa puttering around, looking confused, and unable or unwilling to understand the gravity of the situation as if to say "Why is this happening to me?" But this approach is a cop-out: by never really substantively getting into JoePa's head and relegating Ganim to the sideline for much of the second half, PATERNO never has to take a stand, it never has to risk criticizing its subject, and it never has to do anything beyond ensuring that Pacino gets nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe next year. BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON, and their HBO contemporaries of the '90s didn't earn their deserved accolades by sidestepping the issues, pulling their punches, and letting the makeup department do the heavy lifting. PATERNO offers a generally fine Pacino performance that his fans will want to see, but this film should be more than a showcase for its iconic star.

BEIRUT
(US - 2018)

Directed by Brad Anderson. Written by Tony Gilroy. Cast: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Dean Norris, Shea Whigham, Mark Pellegrino, Larry Pine, Jonny Coyne, Douglas Hodge, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Idir Chender, Kate Fleetwood, Leila Bekhti, Hicham Ouraqa, Ahmed Said Arie, Sonia Okacha, Mohammed Attougui. (R, 109 mins)

At the risk of sounding wistful or cliched, BEIRUT is the kind of movie you don't see in theaters very often these days. It's a smartly-written, mid-budget political thriller whose target audience is middle-aged adults. It's a star vehicle for Jon Hamm, whose place in pop culture history is cemented thanks to MAD MEN but who hasn't really had a breakout leading role on the big screen, instead standing out in supporting roles in films like THE TOWN and BABY DRIVER. With Hamm's biggest success being on TV and SESSION 9 and THE MACHINIST director Brad Anderson settling comfortably into hired-gun TV journeyman mode in recent years (FRINGE, TREME, BOARDWALK EMPIRE), BEIRUT almost feels like the kind of period piece project that's designed more for a limited series on HBO, FX, or Netflix. On one hand, that's a depressing commentary on the changing landscape of mainstream moviegoing over the last couple of decades that a solid piece of suspenseful escapism like BEIRUT seems like a pleasant surprise. However, in the capable hands of veteran screenwriter Tony Gilroy (the BOURNE series, MICHAEL CLAYTON, and most recently, ROGUE ONE, for which he also handled the reshoots when director Gareth Edwards was relieved of his duties), BEIRUT, which does share a few core plot ideas with 2000's Gilroy-scripted PROOF OF LIFE, is a riveting thriller about the delicate nature of political gamesmanship and double-crossing diplomacy making an already volatile region even more dangerous and unpredictable.

Opening in 1972, Mason Skiles (Hamm) has a pretty cushy gig as a US diplomat based in Beirut. He's a smooth negotiator and spends most of his time schmoozing and entertaining visiting politicians and intellectuals. He and his wife Nadia (Leila Bakhti) are hosting a dinner party when his State Department buddy Cal Riley (Mark Pellegrino) shows up with CIA officials who want to haul in Karim, a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan the Skileses are currently sponsoring and hope to adopt, for questioning. Skiles was unaware that Karim had an older brother, Abu Rajal (Hicham Ouraqa), who is being hunted by Mossad agents for his role in the Munich massacre that killed eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team. Abu Rajal has been in contact with his little brother, and Cal has photographic evidence. As Skiles attempts to placate the agents with as little disruption to his party as possible, Abu Rajal and his men storm Skiles' house, whisk Karim away, with Nadia among those killed in the ensuing skirmish.

Cut to 1982, and widower Skiles is an alcoholic wreck, living in Boston and skating by as a mediator on various local union disputes as something to do during the day until he can get to the bar in the evening. He's summoned by the State Department and told he's needed in a civil war-torn Beirut. He's offered $6500 and a passport and is instructed to be on a flight in six hours. Once on the ground in Beirut, everyone--State Department guys Gary Ruzek (Shea Whigham) and Donald Gaines (Dean Norris), and glad-handing US politician Frank Shalen (Larry Pine)--hems and haws about why he's there and why he's been provided with CIA handler Sandy Crowder (Rosamund Pike) to babysit him. Skiles has been requested by name to lead the negotiation to release a kidnapped Cal, who's being held by a splinter group of the PLO. A meet is arranged and Skiles comes face to face with the group's leader, a now-grown Karim (Idir Chender), who's threatening to kill Cal if Israel doesn't turn over his brother in exchange for Cal, and he knows Skiles is the only negotiator sharp enough to get it done. Skiles meets with multiple Israeli officials who agree to look into Abu Rajal's whereabouts and all come back with the same story: "We don't have him." Things get even more complicated, forcing Skiles to go rogue when Ruzek and Gaines reveal their true motive: making sure Cal, who's been based in Beirut for 13 years and is a walking encyclopedia of classified intel, doesn't talk about the things he knows, both on and off the books.

Given Gilroy's expertise in screenwriting, the cynical BEIRUT does a good job of keeping the copious exposition of the various Middle East conflicts as concise and succinct as possible. It also gets some terrific location work from Tangier doubling as Beirut, with some chilling atmosphere throughout as we see the almost nonchalant, business-as-usual reaction of citizens when guns and bombs go off around them. Hamm displays enough gravitas to convey Skiles' cut-the-shit attitude once he figures out that Ruzek and Gaines consider Cal expendable, even if "Mason Skiles" is a name that could only exist in a Hollywood screenplay. Likewise, we of course get the obligatory scene where the drunkard hero finally his shit together and pours all of his booze down the drain while regarding his aging visage in the mirror and pondering What I've Become, but Gilroy and Anderson aren't making a documentary here. They do, however, incorporate actual events and historical elements into a fictional story that's tense, fast-paced, and well-acted by its cast. Pike, in her second terrorism thriller in the last month after the inexplicably dance-crazed 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE, does what she can with an underwritten role (Sandy is dismissed by Gaines as a "skirt," but then Pike still isn't given that much to do other than yell at Skiles when he needs a kick in the ass), but Norris is perfectly cast as a duplicitous, untrustworthy dick with an Oscar-caliber rug, while Whigham is at his sneering best, barely tolerating Skiles' meddlesome involvement in the entire negotiation process. But BEIRUT is Jon Hamm's show from start to finish, and he proves himself a capable leading man who probably would've been better served by Hollywood movie studios if he was around in the '70s and '80s. He's displayed a gift for comedy and proven his versatility in supporting roles and ensemble feature films, and BEIRUT leaves no doubt that he can carry a movie but it's an anomaly in today's distribution model that declares everything a disappointment if it doesn't make $100 million out of the gate. BEIRUT is the kind of mid-range film that used to turn into a word-of-mouth sleeper hit in April or September and maybe make $25-$30 million and everyone would be happy. But those days are gone. It's not going to make a ton of money, but it'll enjoy a long life on streaming and cable, acquiring fans shocked that they'd never heard of it before.

Retro Review: BLACK EAGLE (1988)

On Blu-ray/DVD, Special "Slumming Legends" Edition: HANGMAN (2017) and JUST GETTING STARTED (2017)

On Netflix: THE RAVENOUS (LES AFFAMES) (2018)

In Theaters: DEATH WISH (2018)

In Theaters: RED SPARROW (2018)

On Blu-ray/DVD: SHOWDOWN IN MANILA (2018) and CON MAN (2018)

In Theaters: THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT (2018)

Retro Review: THE AMBULANCE (1993)

In Theaters: 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE (2018)

On Blu-ray/DVD: SMALL TOWN CRIME (2018) and LIES WE TELL (2018)

In Theaters: UNSANE (2018)

On Netflix: PARADOX (2018)

On Blu-ray/DVD: THE LAST MOVIE STAR (2018) and I REMEMBER YOU (2017)

In Theaters: THE DEATH OF STALIN (2018)

On Netflix: THE TITAN (2018)

Retro Review: THE SOLDIER (1982) and THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS (1991)

Retro Review: THE SECT (1991)

In Theaters: A QUIET PLACE (2018)

On HBO: PATERNO (2018)

In Theaters: BEIRUT (2018)