Movie Nation

The tweenage characters in “The Kid Who Would be King” freely acknowledge that they’re living through an endless story, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” they’d say — if they were reading Joseph Campbell at 12.”

“We’re Han and Chewy, Frodo and Samwise!” the nerdy sidekick, gamely played by Dean Chaumoo, offers.

The Harry Potter, “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” comparisons — made by the characters here — abound.

What writer-director Joe Cornish, of “Attack the Block” and “Adventures of Tintin” and “Ant-Man,” has cooked up is a story built on the same “Young hero’s quest” framework, one of the great stories of that narrative tradition — the story of King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone.

He’s leaning, not on J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien’s best-sellers or George Lucas’s equally famous saga, but on the “brand” that preceded them all.

Check out the street where our young fatherless hero Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis, whose father is Andy Serkis) lives with him mum (Denise Gough). “Malory Court” is named for Sir Thomas Malory, author of “Le Morte d’Arthur,” the most famous account of the Age of Arthur.

Cornish relies on Western audiences’ memory of chivalry, swords in stones, ladies in lakes, “the Once and Future King” and Round Tables to deliver a dose of good clean fun — with violence and jokes and a social relevence so obvious even a child could see it.

In a time “When hearts are hollow and the land is lost and leaderless,” when snippets of newscasts play up the violence and division fomenting world wide, a boy with the courage to stand up to bullies, pure of heart and noble of purpose, is bound to run across an ancient sword, cemented and rebarred into a foundation piling on a demolition site.

Well, a British boy is bound to, anyway. That’s what “The Once and Future King” portends — that the sword and the Lady in the Lake will find a new leader when Britain desperately needs one. And none of these inbred Germans masquerading as Windsors will have any say in it.

Alex is always sticking up for best bud Bedders (Chaumoo), who is constantly getting picked on by Dungate School class creeps Kaye (Rhihanna Dorris) and Lance (Tom Taylor).

“Don’t be a hero,” the towering Lance sneers, “It’s not worth it.”

But Alex, who covets the “Knights of the Round Table” book his absent Dad left him, cannot help himself.

Which is why the sword choses him. Or so he’s told by the gawky, hand-waving/spell casting new nerd in school, “Mertin (Angue Imrie).” He’s chosen a name that will deflect any connection to his real identity.

Mertin is really Merlin, a wizard as old as time (or as Patrick Stewart, who classes up the show). He shows up in a stolen Led Zeppelin ’75 Tour t-shirt and utterly upends Alex’s world.

“The penumbra between light and dark” is threatened, Merlin intones. And Alex and Bedders have to put things to right.

As the sword has made its choice, Alex must take it up and commission an order of knights and keep the evil Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) from ascending from the underworld where she’s been imprisoned and enslaving humanity.

The minx.

I used the word “clean” in describing “Would be King” because Cornish has conjured up an Arthurian vision that is free from the clutter of the Hobbit and Harry Potter pictures. Even though there are some cool effects and monsters (fragile flaming wraith-horsemen) to battle, there’s none of this standing around and gawking at this or that “Fantastic Beast.”

Cornish relies on the viewer knowing the bare bones of the story he is riffing on and takes off from there.

And he uses that’s story deep messages, about chivalry and loyalty, the lure of adventure and necessity of compromise and coalition building, to teach his young audience (and those kids’ parents) about how to mend a “divided world.”

Who are the first recruits Alex rounds up for his quest? The school bullies. He is not the only one with a quest, a character arc. The little thugs have to find something nobler in their souls before they can become true knights.

What gets a laugh from any and all of them every time the phrase is used? “The Sword in the Stone.”

Merlin, in either his young Angus Imrie form or wizened, befuddled Patrick Stewart guise, is a goofy delight, sneezing in a cloud of feathers every time he transforms into his spirit animal (an owl), showing up as Old Man Patrick Stewart for the sake of credibility and gravitas, every now and then.

It’s all very English, from its grey skies and cute/posh accents (shared by a diverse cast) to the sort or wordplay the script trots out.

Merlin, in human form, laments his ability to get around in owl form in modern Brittainia.

“Are there NO unglazed windows or unblocked chimneys in this GOD forsaken country!”

The Uther Pendragon and Arthur story, the original “Sword in the Stone” tale, is told in animated form over the opening credits — a nice touch.

The kids are mostly just OK, not the charismatic, dazzling future stars Warner Brothers rounded up for the Harry Potter movies. Ferguson, of the last “Mission: Impossible” movie, makes an adequate villain, not a shake-in-your-boots terror/seductress that Morgana can be.

See the young Helen Mirren’s turn in John Boorman’s timeless “Excalibur” to see what a real fury looks and sounds like.

The few effects are sharp and crackling, though the action beats seem to play out at half-speed and are spread too far apart. Cornish makes the Lady in the Lake sticking her chain-mailed hand out of the water more the object of comedy (lakes, bathtubs) than awe-inspiring or thrilling.

And the movie, clocking in at over two hours, could use a few more thrills, heart-touching moments or those welling-with-pride “There will always be an England” touchstones. You know, like “Excalibur,” which had plenty of those, all scored with Wagnerian overtures or Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

But “Kid Who Would Be King” is still an engagingly topical and smart fantasy film for kids, “good clean fun” that benefits more from “clean” than the creators of Hogwarts and Mordor or The Empire would ever guess.

MPAA Rating: PG for fantasy action violence, scary images, thematic elements including some bullying, and language |

Cast: Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Rebecca Ferguson, Patrick Stewart, Rhianna Dorris, Denise Gough, Dean Chaumoo

Credits: Written and directed by Joe Cornish. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:05

A decent Thursday and big Friday were enough to give STX its first-ever weekend win at the box office.

The studio best known for the “Bad Moms” movies, and “Second Act” and “Molly’s Game” (their lone “upmarket” title, before this) and “The Happytime Murders” bought “The Upside” from the smoldering remains of The Weinstein Co.

And it earned $19.590 million. Not bad for a Kevin Hart vehicle opening in the middle of a Kevin Hart homophobia storm.

That comfortably slipped it past the fourth weekend of Warners’ “Aquaman,” which managed another $17.

“A Dog’s Way Home,” from the guy who wrote “A Dog’s Purpose” and “A Dog’s Journey,” garnered $11 million+ in ticket sales.

Keanu Reeves’ name wasn’t enough to get “Replicas,” a shiny but dim-witted sci-fi thriller, into the black. It didn’t even crack the top ten.

There’s not a lot of dishonor in that, as “If Beale Street Could Talk” opened wider and still couldn’t find an audience, “Green Book” added 176 screens and didn’t get a Golden Globes bounce and “Bohemian Rhapsody” didn’t quite catch “A Star is Born” at the domestic box office off its own Golden Globes bounce. Still $5 million behind Bradley Cooper’s Oscar favorite.

“On the Basis of Sex,” an under-rated under-buzzed Awards Bait contender, opened wide and managed over $6 million.

“Free Solo” added a lot of screens pre-Oscar nominations, and is doing OK in the second 20, as are “The Favourite” and “Mary Queen of Scots.”

“Into the Spider-Verse” added $9 million this weekend as well.

Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Jason Issacs, Nazanin Boniadi,
Anupam Kher and Natasha Liu Bordizzo star in this Mar.22 release, a nail-biting thriller built around the terrorist takeover of the Taj Mahal Hotel in November of 2008, part of a series of Pakistani backed assaults on Mumbai.

Of course, it’s a Bleecker St. release, so few will see it.

It’s the first 2019 movie to be widely previewed for critics pre release. So Fox figures it has a winner on its hands. “Kid” who pulls the sword out of the stone in Brexit Britain features Patrick Stewart and opens Jan. 25th. Fingers crossed.

It started life as a Weinstein Co. holiday season project, and premiered at Toronto in 2017.

And we all know what happened to the Weinstein Co., and the Weinstein who ran it.

But no matter. STX picked up “The Upside” in the “Harvey’s Going to Jail Fire Sale” and damned if this Kevin Hart/Bryan Cranston remake of “Les Intouchables” (“The Intouchables”), a French film based on a true story, didn’t win the box office on its opening weekend.

A decent Thursday “preview” night and big Friday are pointing towards a $19-20 million weekend for “The Upside.” 

Reviews weren’t dazzling, and perhaps we’re seeing the impact of Kevin Hart’s homophobic jokes/tweets, that Oscar host blowback and marathon of apologizing he’s been subjected to (with varying degrees of sincerity). So it isn’t a big opening number by Kevin Hart standards.

That’s enough to dethrone Warners’ “Aquaman,” after Jason Momoa and James Wan’s blockbuster has dominated weekends for a solid month. “Aquaman” won’t clear $16.

“A Dog’s Way Home,” a film from the author of “A Dog’s Purpose” and the upcoming “A Dog’s Journey,” the Nicholas Sparks of We Love Dogs weepers, that Sony smuggled into theaters, will clear $11 million for third place.

The other wide release is “Replicas,” and it didn’t do the trick for Keanu Reeves. A critically-trashed piece of trash sci-fi poppycock, it didn’t even make the top ten — $2.4 million.

“On the Basis of Sex” may not have Oscar buzz, but it is safely within the Top Ten on its first weekend of truly wide release — a $6 million weekend.

“Green Book” is on a lot more theaters this weekend, thanks to its Golden Globes wins — picture, supporting actor and screenplay.

It isn’t making a lot more money, nor is Annapurna’s wide release of “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Both are Oscar contenders, neither came close to cracking the top ten, this weekend. At least “Green Book” made a healthy return back in the fall when it first opened.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” closed the gap with “A Star is Born,” box office bucks-wise, with a decent week and wider release this weekend — another $3 million, putting it on the cusp of $200 million.

 

It’s never too early in the year for the first seriously silly sci-fi poppycock to crawl out of Hollywood.

“Replicas” takes that title this year, a banal, thinly-scripted thriller about an amoral scientist (Keanu Reeves) who loses his family in a car wreck, but “brings them back” because he has the technology at his disposal, some of the know-how, dealing with neural pathways and transferring the contents of one brain to another — and an easily-bullied colleague (Thomas Middleditch, best known as a TV pitchman these days) who is a master of cloning.

Virtually everything about this is ridiculous, from its setting — high tech Puerto Rico, which has suffered no debilitating hurricane or criminally inadequate federal response — to the “Let’s skip over that” nature of much of the beyond-cutting-edge science, to the way Reeves and Middleditch try not to crack each other up as they cash gullible Entertainment Studios’ checks and never quite figure out of if they’re playing this as cult comedy — “We’re going STRAIGHT to Hell!” — or straight up B-movie.

All that good that Reeves did his rep with the “John Wick” movies unravels in a performance that requires him to order “Proceed,” and “Do you concur?” to subordinates, as if this is the way humans actually talk, even in a no-safety-procedures privately-funded cloning and human mind transference lab run by the shady Bionyne Ltd — no doubt with lots of tax incentives money to help.

Reeves plays William Foster, who can’t quite make this business of mapping, recording and then transferring the contents of the human brain to a “synthetic”robot work.

He’s obsessed with it, and not just because his not-scary-enough boss (John Ortiz) is running out of patience and budget.

“Would you like a nice reference letter?”

Foster’s wife, Mona (Alice Eve) is a doctor who relocated with him and their three kids to hurricane-proof Puerto Rico, and she’s worried that he’s losing his ability to tell right from wrong. Playing God does that to a scientist — makes him a Mad Scientist.

He insists we’re all just “chemistry” and “neural pathways.” She’s talking about “the soul.”

Sure enough, a car accident tests her thesis and his ability to end his string of failures, as he meekly strong-arms his cloning lab pal Ed (Middleditch) into hiding the accident, disposing of the bodies and setting up a lab where they can clone and then mind-transfer that lost family.

Reeves has to play the “Sophie’s Choice” moment of this sequence — there are not enough “pods” to clone his entire family. It is not a pretty moment, on the script page or in Keanu’s clumsy hands. Much of the movie has him using a VR helmet as a computer interface, waving his hands about as he cuts and pastes and “maps.”

Middleditch aims to be comic relief with his line readings. How’s the 17 day cloning operation coming.

“They’re a foot taller!”

“Hey, let’s pump the brakes on the crazy talk, here.”

A lot of stuff aside from the science — selectively erasing memory is also touched on — is sort of skimmed-over here. Covering up the death of your family is a complicated thing, fraught with ways you can be found out, as any given week’s “Dateline NBC” will tell you.

You may bring the lovely Alice Eve, still totally “Out of Your League,” back to life. But will she be a Stepford Wife?

A review is, by nature, a collection of evaluations of what a writer, director and actors have done right and ways you’d wished they’d done better. But “Replicas” leaves one at a loss as to possible “fixes.”

It opens with what’s supposed to be shocking and scary, and moves to what should play at tragic, sympathetic, dire and emotional. And Chad St. John’s script, Jeffrey Nachamoff’s direction and Reeves’ performance just don’t deliver.

The movie is like Bill Foster’s mad experiment, a dry technical exercise with a functioning heart, but no soul whatsoever.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, violence, disturbing images, some nudity and sexual references

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Thomas Middleditch, John Ortiz

Credits: Jeffrey Nachmanoff, script by Chad St. John. An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1:47

All kids need to know about “A Dog’s Way Home” is that it’s about cute puppies and kitties and a digital cougar.

I mean, there’s a reason “America’s Funniest Home Videos” has stayed on the air for decades and that cute critter videos — especially cats and dogs — dominate the Internet.

It’s got a dog experiencing her first snowfall — “Ice cream is FALLING from the sky!”

And it’s about a dog getting separated from her person and faithfully making her way from New Mexico back to Greater Denver, over a period of years, because “Go home” is the only command a dog absolutely needs to learn.

Parents need to know the story was written by the author of “A Dog’s Purpose” and this May’s “A Dog’s Journey.” And that they’re in the hands of director Charles Martin Smith of “A Dolphin’s Tale.” He would never direct anything that would harm kids.

So even though there’s not a lot of wit or joy to this picture, at least it leans on sentiment and mostly gets away with it. The power of “puppy love,” dogs’ loyalty and therapeutic value to people who are depressed (especially traumatized veterans) have to suffice.

And there is a healthy helping of “peril” as they say in the movie ratings trade. Bella, the mutt (labeled a pit bull by the City of Denver) and voice over narrated by Bryce Dallas Howard, is menaced by a corrupt dog catcher, evil developer, a pack of coyotes and many a roaming dog’s doom — traffic.

As in real life, death crosses Bella’s path.

These scenes have some serious fright to them, but they’re teachable moments and as Walt Disney knew, children can withstand a little scare, here and there, as they develop empathy.

Bella meets good people — a caring gay couple, a depressed homeless vet played by Edward James Olmos, strangers who stop their car on a freeway rather than hit a dog — and bad on her way back to VA employee Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King) and his veteran mom (Ashley Judd).

Bella is stereotyped — she only has to “look like a pit bull” to be banned in Denver (“That’s like racism for dogs!” complains Olivia (Alexandra Shipp), another VA employee who is sweet on Lucas.

“Dog’s Way Home” is aimed at the very young, so don’t expect anything challenging. It moves along but felt limp and kind of lifeless, for all the sentimentality Smith & Co. serve up.

Will Bella make it? Well, what’s the title tell you?

MPAA Rating:  PG for thematic elements, some peril and language

Cast: Ashley Judd, Bryce Dallas Howard, Edward James Olmos, Wes Studi

Credits: Directed by Charles Martin Smith, script by W. Bruce Cameron and Cathryn Michon, based on Cameron’s novel. A Sony/Columbia release

Running time: 1:36

Bryce Dallas Howard voices the doggy in this “Incredible Journey” knockoff.

The author of “A Dog’s Purpose” wrote it, and reliable kids-and-animals director Charles Martin Smith (“A Dolphin’s Tale”) is behind the camera.

Yeah, the trailer seems a tad insipid, but I’m still not sure why Sony shied away from previewing this one. Must be marketing on Nickelodeon and The Disney Channel.

There’s something comforting in the way the ageing action star Jean-Claude Van Damme is wearing his years. He’s letting the mileage show, and not losing a lot of sleep about the fact that his punches aren’t what they once seemed to be, his kicks not quite the fight-ending footwork they used to be.

The “Muscles from Brussels” is well-cast as “The Bouncer,” a Belgian thriller (in French, Flemish and English) tailor-made for a world weary man of violence. The thriller, about a nightclub bouncer with a mysterious past caught between the local mobster he works for and blackmailing cops who want a piece of that hoodlum, isn’t all that. But Van Damme’s screen presence carries it as far as it goes, even if that isn’t all the way to a satisfying finish line.

“Lukas” (the film’s title in the rest of the world) is living in his native Belgium, a single dad raising a young daughter (Alice Verset) on a the salary he earns at a local nightbclub.

He spends his evenings breaking up fights, picking up ODs, defending waitresses and generally cleaning up the mayhem in the maelstrom of thumping techno in a club illuminated in flashes of blue and grey.

He injures a guy who was shoving a waitress around and loses his job. But his younger got-your-back boss (the rapper Kaaris, an arresting presence) knows of “this strip club in Ixelles.” Lukas has, at least an interview.

Here’s the first JCVD moment in “Bouncer.” Lukas shows up at the Funny Pony, is led to the basement where there are many other candidates for the job.

“It’s simple,” the boss (Kevin Janssens) growls. “The last man standing gets the job.”

Lukas is bloodied and dropped in the brawl that follows. But never count out the Muscles from Brussels.

Things turn complicated when the cops want to ask him questions about losing that previous job. Charges have been filed, and the police notice this Lukas is a man without a past, whose daughter is in private school under a false name.

“Who are you hiding from?

It’s OK, the EU agent (Sami Bouajila) assures him. Inexplicably, based on the accident that happened to the punk in the club, the EU special police want Lukas on their team and are willing to blackmail him — get the charges dropped — to get him to agree to it.

They want to know what the ruthless, mob-connected club owner (Sam Louwyck) is up to.

And Jan, that club owner, has his own questions of his new employee.

“Where are you from? Nobody knows you. You have one number in your phone.”

He, too, is instantly impressed with Lukas, entrusting him to guard the valuable Italian blonde (Sveva Alviti, given too little to do), bringing Lukas along for the hard jobs — kidnapping the expert drug cooker, etc.

The plot is strictly hash, with coincidences, obvious clues and twists we see coming, with a couple of half-speed fights and half-hearted shootouts and car chases tossed in for variety.

The director gave the world “The Assault” and “The Crew” and the screenwriter scripted “The Night Eats the World.” So as we say in English, not Flemish or French, “It is what it is.”

But Van Damme, wearing a hoodie over a hoodie in most scenes, eyes cast down, staying on task, is a mesmerizing presence at the heart of it all. He’s not just playing a guy who has seen it all before, fought his way through this sort of thing too many times to count.

That’s sort of who he is now, a grizzled, melancholy tough guy — at least in the movies.

He was never Mr. One-Liner, never quite Stallone or Statham or the rest, even as they all aged into action heroes who relied on prop guns instead of fight choreography to get by.

And unlike the rest, he’s letting the years and miles show even if the movies shrink to fit his diminished screen profile as he does.

MPAA Rating:  R for violence, language and brief nudity/sexuality

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sami Bouajila, Sveva Alviti, Alice Verset, Kaaris, Kevin Janssens

Credits: Directed by Julien Leclercq, written by Jérémie Guez. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:34