Tag: 2020

The Hunt

  By

★★★★
“Don’t believe the political hype.”

This was a genuine and pleasant surprise. The original release was pushed back due to some severe controversy: not many films get Tweeted about by the President of the United States, who stated this was “made in order to inflame and cause chaos.” Needless to say, the studio ended up riding that publicity when the movie eventually came out. The current pandemic ended up trumping that (pun intended), so the film hit the home markets, just a week after its theatrical release. To my surprise, it’s considerably more nuanced than the “Red State vs. Blue State” concept I expected. And Gilpin has clearly put her GLOW training to good use, becoming quite the thirty-something bad-ass here.

It is, at its heart, another variant on The Most Dangerous Game, with a dozen people being kidnapped from their everyday lives, and taken somewhere that looks much like Arkansas, to be hunted by the rich for sport. The film is very good in the earlier stages at disconcerting the viewer by shifting their focus: you’ll settle in with one character, only for them to be wiped out in brutal fashion. Gilpin’s character, Crystal Creasey, isn’t even seen until more than 25 minutes in. But she makes up for her late arrival in no uncertain style, quickly establishing that the people behind the hunt, led by Athena (Swank), might have made a mistake by selecting Crystal as their entertainment.

What I found interesting is how even-handed this is. Yes, it’s about the elite hunting common people, and on its surface, i.e. the trailer, could be seen as Democrats hunting Republicans. But they’re hardly depicted as heroic, and indeed, it turns out, there’s considerably more to this. The whole thing started as an off-colour joke by Athena that got out, causing the wrath of #CancelCulture, as propagated through social media and conspiracy circles. She then decided, if we’re going to be blamed for something we didn’t do – why not do it anyway, and targets those who were her harshest critics on social media? Neither side gets out unscathed: not the liberals with their virtue signalling and hypocrisy, nor the conservatives with their paranoia and self-deceit. Yes, it is certainly guilty of picking at the raw scab which is the divided state of the nation (something for which the media, in general, must take much of the blame).

But the horror movie as social commentary is something that has been around for at least fifty years, since Night of the Living Dead.  As I’ve previously made clear, I’m fine with that, providing the film works regardless. And you could safely ignore all the satirical aspects, and you’d still have something among the upper tier of movies inspired by The Most Dangerous Game. It all builds to a kitchen battle between Crystal and Athena, that for sheer savagery, is one of the best woman-on-woman brawls I’ve seen since Kill Bill, Volume 2. Providing you are not too blinkered in your political views, the payoff here should be worth putting them to one side for ninety minutes.

Dir: Craig Zobel
Star: Betty Gilpin, Ike Barinholtz, Amy Madigan, Emma Roberts

Underwater

  By

★★★
“Beneath the sea, no one can hear you scream…”

You know the story: A team of experts in a closed contained space, having to deal with ugly monsters and struggling to survive. The blue-print of this variation on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (better known as: Ten Little Indians) was obviously the classic Alien (1979) that introduced us to one of the defining girls with guns, Ellen Ripley. This format was then repeated endlessly by Hollywood, as well as anyone else.

A special sort of subgenre of this story formed in the late 80s, when studios came to the idea of exchanging outer space for the inner space of the (deep) sea. That resulted in usually trashy but mostly entertaining movies such as Deep Star Six, Leviathan, Virus, Sphere or Deep Rising. Heck, even AlienS director James Cameron created a more positive version of the usual underwater interaction, with friendly aliens, in “The Abyss” (1989). But as far as I can see this genre faded with the 90’s. Recent watery efforts were more shark- or crocodile-focused!

The Alien franchise seemd to be stuck in the hands of Ridley Scott, who wasn’t willing to give anyone else a shot at the series, He said, before Alien: Covenant and about Prometheus, “I thought we should move on. I thought the aliens were done.” Well, if what you deliver is worse than what we got before, why bother? And if you think like that, maybe you shouldn’t cling on to ownership of the franchise. Audiences usually wont the same experience they had last time and if you don’t deliver, will be disappointed. Here’s another pearl of wisdom: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! So 20th Century Fox came up with the idea of resurrecting this subgenre under water. And it has to be said, while Underwater is hardly original, and definitely derivative if you know the Alien movies, it is better and certainly more entertaining than the last two Alien entries from Scott. It never drags, and the “idiocy level” that too often comes with this genre and its tropes, is credibly low.

The story in brief: Deep sea engineers are faced with a sudden accident, after water has flooded their facilities, destroying a large amount of the installation and probably killing off many of the workers who didn’t manage to get to the escape pods. A couple of survivors who find each other must go on an obstacle course deep, well… under water to reach these pods. Okay, that plot probably wouldn’t trouble a match-box, but that does not necessarily have to be a negative. I’ve found in the past, that very often those movies with a simpler, more straighforward premise are the ones which are the most efficient in delivering the goods.

So it proves with this. Yes, we all have seen it before – but not necessarily better. When I look at the list above of “underwater horror movies”, most of them were not good at all. And what the Alien franchise itself delivered, starting probably with David Fincher’s life-less Alien 3 (1992) and ending with Scott’s efforts “to move in a new direction,” was also not very satisfying. Considering that, Underwater is actually quite decent. There is no long build-up with character presentations that have tended to fall flat in recent films of this ilk. The movie goes into action almost immediately, hardly giving Kristen Stewart (with her short-cut blonde hair bearing a strange similarity to 90’s Lori Petty) the chance to finish brushing her teeth.

And it continues at quite a brisk pace, within an economic and more restrained than usual running-time of 95 minutes. We get action, tension, deep sea monsters attacking and reducing the crew, some decent character interaction, a tiny droplet of blood and rather too much of T. J. Miller joking and Jessica Henwick screaming while running around. I’ve seen worse. Much worse, and recently. Indeed, if you are just looking for some good horror survival action and a distraction from your daily routine, this film may do it for you.

Stewart herself seems to have some bad luck. After years making indie-movies in a post-Twilight wilderness, the hope was obviously to return to big Hollywood movies. But this seems to be even more of a financial failure at the box-office than her recent “woke” Charlie’s Angels remake. Though this is actually good entertainment, and free of the usual agenda that has sadly become commonplace nowadays in Hollywood movies. That may have to do with the fact that the movie was already finished – like the upcoming The New Mutants from Fox – in 2017! For reasons I don’t know it was kept back. Did Scott exercise some power to distance it from Alien: Covenant, which also came out in 2017? Did they want to wait until Covenant had squeezed out all possible financial revenues?

Whatever the reason, it became part of Disney when the mega-conglomerate bought 20th Century Fox. And obviously, Disney didn’t really care for the welfare of this movie, so they just threw it out there, with what felt like hardly any marketing. Which is a pity, because it’s a nice bigger-budget horror movie that could have attracted more people in cinemas. I personally guess it might get a second life on Netflix or the new Disney online streaming service later.

The film also stars Vincent Cassel who was the only other actor I knew of the underwater crew, apart from Stewart. Mind you, you are not spending much screen time with most of them. Nevertheless there are some interactions that, if not really going deep, give enough of an emotional connection at least to wish they will get out of this unfortunate situation alive. But mainly it’s a showcase for Kristen Stewart who – and I really have to stress I don’t typically care for her much at all – gives a good and credible performance here.Though you’ll have to deal with the fact that she is playing a deep sea rig engineer here, a role I would probably have associated with a muscle-bound man!

I personally wish the last two Alien films by Scott would have been something like this. It could have been a lot more satisfying than the time we had to spend with David, the Fassbender-android. That said the Alien formula – like the Terminator one – seems to have had its day, thanks to having been exploited what feels like a few hundred times. It’s really time for Hollywood to come out with some new ideas. Therefore only 3 stars from me, albeit well-earned ones!

Dir: William Eubank
Star: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr.

Agent Jade Black

  By

★½
“Someone should go Black to basics.”

This originally was going to be included in my preview for the year, since it showed up in the IMDb with a release date of January 7, 2020. But on Googling, I found it already had seeped out on Tubi, a free movie channel. At time of writing, this would appear to be the first review written about it anywhere, though it should be considered less a preview than a dire advance warning. Indeed, I could condense the whole thing into one word: “Don’t.” For a more pedestrian, poorly-executed excuse for an action film, you’d be hard pushed to find. Right down to the initials of its lead character and the tag-line on the poster (right), this possesses aspirations it fails miserably to achieve. On the plus side, 2020 can really only go up from here.

Jade Black (Burgess) is a globe-trotting agent, working for a clandestine department of the US government under her boss, Malcolm (Flack). Initially tasked with bringing a scientist in from Italy, that mission goes pear-shaped, and the target killed. His laptop survives, and opens the door to a looming plot. He was working on a biological weapon known as “Juliet”, triggered by chemicals the body releases during sex. The shadowy Darrian group are plotting to use this, and the related antidote, for… the usual nefarious purposes in which shadowy groups in C-grade movies engage, including the release of Juliet at a political fundraiser. Front and center in opposition to Jade is Darrian operative Elle (Franklin), another former acolyte of Malcolm. Like Jade, she was rescued by him from sex traffickers as a teenager. Only, in Elle’s case, the psychological damage suffered was too great to overcome, and she went rogue instead.

The above actually sounds kinda interesting – certainly, considerably more so than it is in execution. Part of the problem is the resources are incapable of delivering anything the script asks of them. “Italy” for example, appears entirely depicted by the scientist using an espresso maker. There’s not even any token stock-footage of Rome. When your film is shot entirely in Oklahoma, why mention Italy at all? This kind of ludicrous over-reach peppers the whole movie, considering it can only depict Malcolm’s office by tacking a couple of maps to the wall of a generic room. Spears’ direction is also terrible, though it may be more of an editorial issue. Both individual shots and entire scenes appear to have been cut with a blunt butter-knife, ending too soon or going on too long.

There’s absolutely no rhythm or pacing, with the film lurching and juddering from one moment to the next, and the players exchange one-liners that are less groan-worthy than induce actual nausea. It rapidly becomes painful to watch, despite the best efforts of the cast, who aren’t as relentlessly terrible as the direction or writing. Franklin comes out best, sinking her teeth effectively into her bad-girl role. But you could have had Meryl Streep in this, and she would have been unable to salvage it.

Dir: Terry Spears
Star: Katie Burgess, Sidney Flack, Connie Franklin, Taylor Reich