It’s due in theaters in five weeks. It has a prestige director — Darren Aronofsky — and Oscar winners Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris.
And a VERY “Rosemary’s Baby” vibe. So they held back on giving us a trailer to preserve the surprise? That could pay off.
Sept. 15 we find out.
Pretty, perky perpetual girlfriend/best friend/second banana Lake Bell makes her second trip behind the feature film camera with a self-written comedy about marriage, “I Do…Until I Don’t.”
It lacks the goofy novelty of “In a World…,” which was set in the insular world of voice-over artists. And she’s still not figured out that comedy requires faster pacing. But she hews close to what she knows — a movie about a movie , a title with an ellipsis — and a winning cast makes the most of its limited possibilities.
A semi-famous British documentary maker, Vivian (Dolly Wells) wants to follow up her edgy cinema verite “Tween Jungle” with a project about the doomed state of marriage in the West. So she’s come to Vero Beach, Florida, to find specimen couples to make her point for her.
“Will you accept that marriage is dead?” She’s convinced “betrothed” means “impending death,” when the true definition — “contract” — would suffice to make her point.
Bell plays Alice, awkwardly married to Noah, and frustrated co-operator of his failing inherited window blinds store. Work isn’t the only place she’s frustrated. She and her husband have sexual peccadilloes that might explain some of their difficulty in conceiving.
Alice is a Vivian Prudeck fan, and she’s determined to get her art degree itch scratched by being in Vivian’s film. She signs them up and lies to Noah about the benefits in order to get him to go along with it. And that’s not the only lie she’s willing to play out.
Her hippy sister (Amber Heard) is in an open hippy marriage with Xander (Wyatt Cenac), and yes, they’re also invited into the documentary’s crucible.
Then there’s the grumpy older couple, semi-retired Harvey (Paul Reiser), who’s just bought a motorcycle, and realtor-at-her-wits-end-over-Harvey Cybil (Mary Steenburgen). She’s got a present for him.
“Is it anthrax?”
The complications here revolve around dishonesty and couples that aren’t in the same places — “open marriage”-wise, retirement-wise, whatever.
And the cute stuff is mostly about Alice trying to find ways to finance her participate-in-the-film dream by taking a job at the “Your Welcome” (sic) massage spa. Sassy Bon Bon (Chauntae Pink) has to explain “happy endings” to naive Alice — “Jerk that elbow to make that bank.”
There’s a funny exchange between Xander and this hippy (Chace Crawford) who hits on his wife, Fanny (Heard) right in front of him. The interloper, just taking advantage of that whole “open marriage” thing, is named Egon.
“Be gone, EGON.” None of this “Namaste” yoga speak for you, pal. “Na mas GO.”
The filmmaker comes off as a big-ol’ lonely phony.
The most crackling interplay is between the Oscar winning Steenburgen — who lets you feel the loathing — and Reiser, who still has the best timing of any comic alive.
The whole doesn’t add up to much more than an ellipsis — an ending foretold by the beginning, and not a lot of funny comic obstacles standing in its way.
But Bell has a beguiling, big-grin screen presence. And her ability to charm a cast into taking on her projects is admirable. Charming a script-doctor or two who could joke the films up would be a big help.
MPAA Rating: R for sexual material and language
Cast: Lake Bell, Ed Helms, Mary Steenburgen, Amber Heard, Paul Reiser, Wyatt Cenac, Dolly Wells.
Credits: Written and directed by Lake Bell . A Film Arcade release.
Running time: 1:43
In “Casablanca,” the arrogant German Major Strasser taunts the neutral American ex-patriate Rick how he’ll feel when German troops parade down the streets of this city or that one, and finishes his quiz with New York.
“Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”
Thus we come to “Bushwick,” a house-by-house urban combat thriller about an invasion of Brooklyn.
We’ve been so removed from any threat of enemy occupation for so long that typically such warfare fantasies involve the zombie apocalypse. Not here.
A young couple (Brittany Snow, Arturo Castro) get off the subway and suddenly notice how empty it is.
“Where did they go?”
Then a guy, on fire, tumbles down the platform stairs. They poke their heads out the entrance into mayhem — black helicopters, black-uniformed commandos engaged in a full-on shootout with the drive-by shooting locals.
It’s InfoWars’ wettest dream, a confusing “us” vs. an unknown “them,” with “us” not exactly coalescing into an organized opposition. The boyfriend is killed, the blonde “home from college” is nabbed by hood rats who challenge her right to be there with a “Think you’re BETTER than us?”
And then a “janitor” with what “Taken” taught us are “particular skills” rescues her, and the quest is on — a house by house, street by street effort to escape a war zone — Aleppo in the Boroughs, Mosul across the river from Manhattan.
“Take it one block at a time,” Janitor Stupe (Dave Bautista) mutters, and so they do.
Co-directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott, working from a Nick Damici/ Graham Reznick script, drag us through a school, apartments, laundromat and church caught up in a sudden conflagration. The randomness of warfare visited upon a civilian population stands out — five people dash across a street, three don’t make it, duck all the way through this block, forget to duck on the next one, you’re done.
Nobody has any information, although there is electricity and you’d think SOMEbody would have gotten a cell alert or picked up a newscast. This is the first big hole in the logic, here. Another is the film’s strained effort to hide the ID of the attackers. Hint, no, this isn’t “Red Dawn.” That happened last Nov. 8.
The violence is visited upon the non-violent, Lucy (Snow), who must either adapt or die. The man of violence Stupe, has to demonstrate a little self-surgery (Ever seen a wound cauterized?) and great skill with a pistol.
And then there’s the New York that cafe owner Rick Blaine was talking about back in “Casablanca.” A diverse, armed and irritable population that has seen the movie or youtube video and knows how to make a Molotov cocktail, that has experienced the best way to hit and run with a foe is by drive-by, that knows its turf.
“Bushwick” doesn’t really work as a political parable, and doesn’t stand up to too much thinking over at all. It shortchanges characters and would have been far better served making more of a statement with folks who were actually local — “diversity” would be a bonus. ]
I mean, when the Hassid attack the attackers as if they’re defending their kibbutz, THAT’s your movie.
It could have been a polarized America take on “Attack the Block,” with over-matched locals — gang members or whoever — battling a well-equipped (no heavy weapons, though) drawling foe. It could have been darkly funny, in addition to violent.
But they needed Snow (“Pitch Perfect”) and Bautista (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) to get financing, and that limited everything the filmmakers wanted to do, from the situations and nature of the quest, to their muted satiric horizons.
As is it, “Bushwick” never rises above bush league, more a missed opportunity than a wickedly on-target winner.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Brittany Snow, Dave Bautista
Credits:Directed by Cary Murnion, Jonathan Milott , script by Nick Damici, Graham Reznick. An RLJ Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:34
The shooting of Michael Brown isn’t re-investigated and the trial of the police officer who shot the unarmed black teen eight times isn’t parsed in the new documentary “Whose Streets?”
Media coverage — some of it bordering on hysterical — is merely sampled, not probed in depth.
This compelling film is a streets-eye-view of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which began with Brown’s body still lying in the background, in broad daylight, for hours as his community rose up to call attention to the shooting and the police culture that led to it.
Filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Harris interview many of those doing the protesting, but wisely rely most heavily on the citizen journalism of scores of folks from that corner of Ferguson (Canfield Green apartments).
Protesters, like the gay couple Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Templeton, protesters turned organizers Kayla Reed and Tef Poe, shout themselves hoarse.
“No peace? No JUSTICE!”
Ordinary citizens captured the tears of Brown’s mother, weeping and enraged as the police wait and wait and wait to remove the body. These uncensored cell camera videos document the growing frustration, the profane shouts and rising emotions of that summer and then fall and winter of 2014, when people took to the streets for peaceful marches and were met by massive, confrontational police presence, which hemmed in their marches.
Local Copwatch citizen videographer Dave Whitt tapes every police action — marchers peacefully walking, holding signs, while legions of cops cover them with the dots of red laser sights from their rifles, dots dancing across heads and bodies of people as they pass.
Didn’t see that on TV, did you?
The riots and looting, seen from inside that insular world, and not from the selective “fire makes a pretty scary picture” editing of TV news, comes off quite differently in “Whose Streets?”
“A riot is the language of the unheard” is one of the film’s chapter headings.
The film captures a protest that grew into a movement, drawing supporters from all over the country as the marches, occupations (stopping traffic, pouring into a Walmart, speaking truth to unsympathetic white people’s faces) that demand attention as the local PD and Missouri justice system attempt to whitewash the shooting and quash dissent.
This film won’t be aired on Fox News, but when you’re protesting on the streets and in public hearings and police are, to a one, wearing black wristbands with “Stand with Darren Wilson” (the police officer whose street encounter with Brown led him to pump eight bullets into him), ask yourself who the antagonists here really were?
Yes, the U.S. Justice Department got involved, and pressure was applied. This scruffy, street-wise and blunt documentary effortlessly shows — with just images and captured police behavior — that was wholly justified. No George Stephanopoulos interiew with the policeman and his “Who, ME racist?” declarations, no talking heads on chat shows are here to spin it.
Here was a police force and City Hall preying on a big chunk of its community, and the bubbling outrage of decades of that is what “Whose Streets?” cell phone camera participants grab, at the moment it explodes.
The scruffiness is intentional and the film has that conventional search for heroes and heroines — who to follow, single-out and build the movie around. But “Whose Streets?” also lets us see how citizens journey from outrage to action, from passivity to protest to influencing public policy, just by standing up and saying “Enough!”
MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity)
Cast: Brittany Ferrell , Tef Poe, Tory Russell, Alexis Templeton, Kayla Reed, Dave Whitt
Credits:Directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Harris . A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:30
The filmmaking is more pedestrian, the visuals a bit too heavy on travel and meetings and phone wrangling.
And the shock and optimism of the Oscar winning “An Inconvenient Truth” is more muted in “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” It’s never self-congratulatory, rarely “I told you so,” although if anybody on Planet Earth is entitled to owning that phrase it’s Al Gore.
“Truth to Power” revisits Gore’s life project, educating the world of the increasingly obvious perils of climate change. It follows him from Washington to Paris, Miami to the Philippines, and lays out the Sisyphean task of convincing the developing world to shoulder part of the challenge and the developed world to stop listening to the paid propaganda of Big Fossil Fuel and its compliant right-wing mouthpieces.
The numbers, statistics and charts are more damning than ever. Just last week, another weather “anomaly” in Miami caused that “once in a century” flooding that the film shows Gore witnessing two years ago. “Hottest day ever recorded” pops up in the news around the globe. In India, the asphalt streets are melting into a scalding quicksand for days at a time. Beijing’s mayor has labeled his city “unlivable” thanks to the polluted air and rising temperatures.
Filmmakers Bonni Cohen (“The Rape of Europa”) and Jon Shenk visit imploding glaciers in Greenland and a typhoon-sacked city in the Philippines. We and Gore witness the smog-clogged skies of India and China and hear out the developing world’s jingoistic pushback against curbing its carbon emissions.
And there is Gore, talking, training others to spread the message, showing his ever-evolving power point presentation and patiently dealing with setbacks big and small.
The biggest? America electing Donald Trump, a climate denier untroubled by facts, truth or insurance rates which will start to bite his properties — should he bother to pay his bill.
The movie meanders somewhat, giving screen time to a failed worldwide climate wake-up call telecast from Paris that had to be abandoned during the citywide terrorist attacks of 2015.
Do we really need to revisit the 2000 presidential election to know how far backward America and the world were pushed, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling?
The film feels also less personal, although Gore comes off as better-informed on the subject than ever, more committed to the task at hand, and when need be — folksy and self-effacing in the face of abuse from the dumbest and most politically cynical voices in America.
When Gore preaches that “despair can be paralyzing,” we get it. When he wades through record flooding in Miami Beach, he can make a crack like “I just wonder how the governor (climate change denier Rick Scott) sloshes through this and doesn’t notice.” sting.
The warnings are dire, and before great progress can be made “on the climate crisis,” we have to fix “the democracy crisis.” He visits the New York Attorney General suing Big Oil to find out how they’re financing misinformation campaigns. This subject was politicized long ago, and it wasn’t politicized by Al Gore.
But he is selling, above all else, optimism. He talks the most with mayors, and those folks — from Miami Beach to Georgetown, Texas — get it. Georgetown is the largest city in America to move to renewable energy.
It’s mayor crows that “It’s the reddest town” in a Red State, but the energy cost savings and moral high ground the city can claim trump even Trump among Trump voters.
A seriously backward town I used to live in, Kodiak, Alaska, used to be powered by a diesel generator plant. Now it’s lauded for running 100% on renewable energy. If it can happen in Kodiak, it might even happen in Florida.
When Volvo announces it is abandoning gasoline engines, and Toyota and Mazda announce plans for a shared North American electric car plant, when solar and wind power take root and take over the power grids of countries from Denmark and Portugal to Chile, there is cause for hope and little chance of giant steps backward.
“Sequel” doesn’t have the novelty of its Oscar-winning predecessor. But it still has its Nobel Peace Prize-winning star, fighting the good fight, riding a tide of changing awareness toward that ever-nearer tipping point, where this issue is no longer debated, even by the most cynically-corrupt and their unthinking lemmings.
MPAA Rating:
Cast: Al Gore, Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump
Credits:Directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, script by . A — release.
Running time:
Years of hype, speculation, studio changes, director/screenwriter, and many many cast changes and FINALLY Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” books have reached the big screen.
And the film may…MAY…take the top spot on its opening weekend. After taking a critical pounding, after Sony hid it from view until the last second, spending $60 million on a potential franchise pic in which they combined a few of King’s books and…after a solid if underwhelming Thursday night opening and decent Friday — $18 million.
Going from J.J. Abrams and Daniel Craig and/or Tom Hardy to Ron Howard and others to an untested director, many screenwriters and Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, it plays as played — as in played-out. They lost their nerve, kept costs down and burned through material and ended up with an exhausted, half-hearted bust.
“Detroit” and “Kidnap” are the other two wide releases opening this weekend, and Halle Berry’s nervy if illogical they-stole-my-little-boy thriller looks to pull in close to $10 million, edging “Atomic Blonde,” which will finish in the $8 million or so range. “Detroit” earned wonderful, Oscar-contender reviews, as befits a harrowing true-story riot and its aftermath picture from the people who made “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” 
It was always going to be a hard sell, and $8 million or so seems its opening weekend ceiling, based on Thursday night/Friday ticket sales.
“Girls Trip” is in that cluster of films selling about $10-11 million in tickets, and will have $100 million in range, if not in sight, by midnight Sunday ($83-85 total).
“The Emoji Movie” has no fresh kiddie/family film competition (“Despicable Me 3” is nearing $240 million) until NEXT weekend, and its still taking a dive — another $10 million putting it close to $50 ($47) by Sunday night.
“Wonder Woman,” Baby Driver” and “War for the Planet of the Apes” are losing screens and pretty much spent, falling out of the top ten this weekend after lucrative runs. “Valerian” may beat one of those three out of the top ten, thanks to it being a big time bust.
It can’t have helped that Stephen King fans and fantasy-horror fangirls and boys spent years breathlessly anticipating a film version of his “Dark Tower” series of novels.
Sure, he’s a proven brand and these books — about alternate worlds where “The Gunslinger” does battle with the forces of darkness, keeping demons at bay and preserving the titular “tower” from toppling, loosing them on other dimensions, including “Keystone Earth” — were particularly popular.
But going through potential directors J.J. Abrams and then Ron Howard, and a cast-list that might have included Daniel Craig, Tom Hardy, Aaron Paul, Oscar winners Christian Bale and Javier Bardem was sure to disappoint.
Truth be told, you do wonder how a type-to-hype machine like StephenKingWorks manages to maintain anticipation for a filmed version of this or that. There’s a remake of “It” is due in theaters in weeks, “Cujo” and “Children of the Corn” rebooted, new TV versions of “The Mist,” and “Mr. Mercedes” replacing the gone-and-not-soon-enough “Haven” and “Under the Dome” — all saddled with King’s dreadful big screen track record .
Is there anything that this guy has churned out that HASN’T been a movie or TV series? “The Shining,” “1408,” “Carrie,” “Misery,” “Dolores Claiborne,” “Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me” stand out among the scores upon scores of King adaptations. The rest were never more than boilerplate, a good gimmick lost in pages and pages of formula, making for mediocre movies, at best.
Are people’s memories really that short? Ah, but critics remember. And if you’ve been in the business long enough to resent the weeks of your life wasted while suffering through “Christine” or “Pet Sematary,” “The Running Man” “The Lawnmower Man,” and “Children of the Corn,” you know better than to get your hopes up.
Which is a VERY long way to get around to what a bust “The Dark Tower” turns out to be. A thriller with tepid thrills, a horror movie with bland frights, a generic fantasy quest story in which we mope along with joyless, heartless characters in an out-of-date celebration of Old West gunplay, this never should have left pre-production.
Tom Taylor is Jake, the New York teen whose vivid nightmares convince him there’s an alternate, ruined world where a Gunslinger pursues the murderous sorcerer, The Man in Black. Everybody else thinks the kid is crazy.
But he’s sketched these dreams, and they’re his guide to a portal in that world. And that’s where he stumbles into a desert and where he meets The Gunslinger of his dreams.
“This is cool. It’s all REAL.”
Idris Elba is Roland, the Gunslinger, who lives by the Gunslinger’s Creed.
“I do not aim with my hand; He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye.
And so on.
Matthew McConaughey, his face polished to some sort of ageless sheen, is the Man in Black, who steals the dreams of “special” children like Jake, who long ago killed The Gunslinger’s dad (Dennis Haysbert) and whose minions (Jackie Earle Haley heads the New York Minion Local) pursue both.
Which is odd, because The Gunslinger is looking for the Man in Black, too. Only they never seem to connect.
Third, fourth or fifth choice director Nikolaj Arcel (he scripted the Swedish “Girl in the Dragon Tattoo”) tries to make something of the script-by-committee, but ho-hum effects and all the many compromises made getting a potential franchise off the ground weigh on the film.
It’s 96 minutes long, feels truncated and just drags.
King fans may find some thrills in seeing things they only imagined on the page realized on the big screen, or in the many Easter Eggs (“Christine” turns up, as do other tidbits of Kinglore).
Whatever literary merits there were to the book, this comes off as claptrap — rushed, cut, pasted together nonsense with a too-passive/too-dull child “hero,” a leading man content to let cool (not really) gunplay do the heavy lifting and a villain here to collect a check and deliver action-movie-villain dialogue so generic it gives genre a bad name.
“Ah. Impressive!”
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material including sequences of gun violence and action.
Cast: Idris Elba, Tom Taylor, Matthew McConaughey, Katheryn Winnick, Jackie Earle Haley, Dennis Haysbert
Credits:Directed by Nikolaj Arcel , script by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, Nikolaj Arcel, based on the Stephen King novels. A Sony Columbia release.
Running time: 1:36
No, Steven Soderbergh’s “retirement” didn’t last any longer than Cher’s — or Tina Turner’s. Or Kiss’s.
But we’ve missed him, and this modest-budget/big-name cast comic thriller could be a nice desert for a summer overloaded with junk food sequels and heavy meals (“Detroit,” for instance). It opens in a couple of weeks, and coupled with the news that its star, Daniel Craig, will return as James Bond, it makes you wonder.
An old Hollywood maxim is that you announce your next project before THIS one bombs or hits. “The Elizabeth Berkley (“Showgirls”) Rule.” So what is Craig saying about this movie in climbing back into the Bond tux?
What were MGM/Sony/DeLaurentis saying about possible other Bonds in pursuing him for another outing?
Idris Elba’s box office upside may crater after “The Dark Tower.” (It’s smelled like a dog for months, now. )
Craig might miss those Bond paydays more than he thought. And if most of what he’s going to be offered is action pictures, why not keep his quote and marketability and profile high by reprising 007?
“Logan Lucky” opens Aug. 18.
A boiling point summer in American race relations becomes a tipping point in American history in “Detroit,” Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s incendiary epic about the 1967 riots that reveal so much about the country we live in today.
The “Hurt Locker/Zero Dark Thirty” team take us into a horrific, harrowing and signal event in those riots — police rounding up, terrorizing and executing suspects in the Algiers Motel — and shock us with its brutality. But the shock really comes in how little we’re amazed by what we see — out-of-control, racist, self-preserving cops, victims with so little faith in the police or the system that simple mistrust spirals into murderous police reprisals that stain race relations and police misconduct to this very day.
And if Bigelow cannot quite bring herself to gracefully end her difficult, challenging movie — which changed studios and finds itself parked in theaters on the tail end of popcorn picture season — it’s because it’s too important a subject to risk shortchanging, too pointed a message to risk letting audiences miss.
Will Poulter (“The Revenant”) gives a break-out performance as Krauss (his real name was Senak), a young officer we meet, packed into a patrol car days into the riots that began after a police raid on an unlicensed after-hours club. Krauss pays wonderful lip service to the tragedy they see unfolding, the injustice that led to it.
Then he and two comrades charge into the fray and he shotguns a young looter running away with two bags of groceries.
The horrors have only begun.
John Boyega (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) gives the other stand-out performance. Melvin Dismukes is an upstanding citizen, a responsible, works-two-jobs private security guard hired to protect a store, a conciliator eager to placate police and National Guard troops called in to keep the peace, to save black lives that fall under their gaze and into their custody.
And his reward? Being called “Uncle Tom” by his fellow young black men.
Dismukes is also there as surrogate and conscience of the audience. He will bear witness to the police assault on a cheap hotel where an insanely ill-timed prank — firing a blank-gun starter pistol out the window at cops and Guardsmen — leads to the tragedy.
Frazzled, embattled names-changed-for-the-movie police (Poulter, Jack Reynor, Ben O’Toole) round up half a dozen black men and two ahead-of-the-tolerance-curve young out-of-town white women (Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever) and demand to know who the “sniper” was.
A host of the party they were attending is dead, having bled-out from a shotgun blast in the next room. And these Detroit cops, with rattled National Guardsmen looking on (the State Police want nothing to do with it) are hell-bent on getting a suspect, finding the gun and justifying their actions — by any means necessary.
The racially-mixing young people push the cops’ racial hot-buttons, which connect to their itchy trigger fingers.
Bigelow stages this nightmarish scene as the ever-darker climax of the movie. And just when you think it and the movie are over…
Dizzying, hand-held cameras immerse us in the riots, snippets of news footage and TV commentaries of the day give the “war zone” and “How could this be happening in America?” take.
And we also meet young people, in near-clueless denial, trying to experience “normal” — a singing group, The Dramatics, and their lead-singer, Larry Cleveland (Algee Smith) brace to take the stage at the soul music revue that could be their big break when curfew closes the Fox Theatre.
Larry Cleveland and his friend Fred (Jacob Latimore) take refuge by checking into the Algiers, where kids, out-of-town visitors and a freshly-returned-from-Vietnam vet (Anthony Mackie) party like it’s 1967.
Music — pointed, on the nose and yet lightly sampled — underscores the tension — “Nowhere to Run,” “Get Ready.”
Like “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Detroit” is a swirling, quick-sketch impression of events and largely unidentified people. John Krasinski plays the baiting defense lawyer for the cops, young Congressman John Conyers (Laz Alonzo) works the streets trying to calm the crowds and an Adam Clayton Powell figure (also a Congressman, then) expresses outrage.
If you know the history, you will be rattled remembering how bad things were, and how much worse things can get when people are harassed out of any hope that things will change.
And if you don’t recall that history, you will be stunned at how much has changed, and how little. A film this intense, this sharp in its criticism and this damning in its evidence (some of which is in dispute) could be instructive and healing, if only the right people would see it.
Maybe the most sickening closing thought of all is that fifty years after the events depicted, released in summer blockbuster season, that’s the one way “Detroit” is sure to come up short.
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and pervasive language |
Cast: John Boyega, Will Poulter, Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith, Hannah Murray, John Krasinski, Jennifer Ehle
Credits:Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, script by Mark Boal. An Annapurna release.
Running time: 2:23
“Kidnap” jams us into a minivan — without seatbelts — with Halle Berry as she plays a frantic mom chasing the rednecks who snatched her little boy.
It’s a dopey but pulse-pounding B-movie that limits itself to that one task — pursue the couple who took her kid. She talks to herself, blurts out “I will never, ever stop” trying to get that boy back, “Dear God, I know I never pray to you any more” and the like.
And somehow, Halle sells it. Director Luis Prieto (“Pusher”) keeps his camera in her grill – circling extreme close-ups — and the pacing intense. As it hurtles along, the Oscar-winning Berry tracks through concerned to manic to freaking-the-freak- out, morphing into a lay-it-all-out-there lioness protecting her six year-old.
But as she puts her Chrysler Minivan through the wringer of New Orleans Interstate cloverleafs, hurtling after an ’80s Mustang GT, we do the mental math she’s doing along with her. What will they do to her child is she lets them get away? What will they do if she continues the chase? How can she keep up, and how far can she push the villains with the metal weapon in her hands?
I mean, who doesn’t know how lethal Halle Berry can be with a car?
The kid (Sage Correa, adorable) is snatched at a fair ten minutes into the movie. Single mom Karla did everything right — watched him like a hawk. Then she takes that one…cell…call.
Prieto, working from a bare bones Knate Lee script, never goes far wrong with Halle behind the wheel. That talking-to-herself thing is stupid and might take you out of the movie if it wasn’t for the stunning stunt-work. Yeah, you can wreck a lot of cars for the money in The Big Easy.
Also stupid — letting us see the villains way too soon, staging a static face-off with them. The film’s suspense deflates — but just for a minute or two.
Don’t go looking for big twists, as the script rather ham-handedly avoids any we could guess.
But that breathless pursuit — damn.
“Kidnap” also taps into every parent’s nightmare, seeing their child snatched with only a minivan to keep him in sight, no cell phone and cops who keep telling her to “wait” for help to arrive.
Standing in a tiny sheriff’s office, hearing the phrase “Calm down,” and seeing a wall covered with posters of missing children, Karla comes to the only conclusion she can.
“That’s what all THOSE people did. They WAITED!”
If you buy into that, you buy her performance and you just might buy into “Kidnap.”
If it’s Berry’s fate to be consigned to genre thrillers like this and “The Call,” she never lets on that she’s not all-in, never lets us forget the stakes. Even as she never stops reminding us of those stakes in a running monologue that only an Oscar winner with a producer credit must have insisted be added to a limited if fiercely focused script.
MPAA Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Halle Berry, Sage Correa, Chris McGinn, Lew Temple
Credits:Directed by Luis Prieto, script by Knate Lee. An Aviron release.
Running time: 1:34
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