A decent Saturday got Melissa McCarthy over, and “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” gave up the top spot at the box office.
“Hardcore Henry” still bombed.
“Big Fat Greek Sequel” is closing in on $50 million. Sticking around. “Miracles from Heaven” has hurdled past “God’s Still Not Dead” on week 2 of GND2.
“Eye in the Sky” is in the top ten. “Demolition” didn’t crack the top ten.
Melissa McCarthy’s new picture, “The Boss,” is set to narrowly lose the weekend to “Batman v. Superman,” just based on Friday night’s numbers.
Her best day is going to be Saturday (today), and “Batman” is fading. Fast. So maybe the critically-crushed comedy has a shot to edge up to near the $22 million mark. That’s what it”ll take to claim a win. Both are $21.5 range, as of Friday night’s numbers.
“Hardcore Henry” is bombing. Fickle fanboys aren’t putting down their PS3 etc. to come see it. Fickle fickle.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s “Demolition” may not crack the Top Ten, opening in under 1000 theaters and enjoying weak reviews.
“Miracles from Heaven” has moved back ABOVE “God’s Not Dead 2,” in the “Christian victimhood” melodrama’s second weekend of release.
“Eye in the Sky” is clinging to the Top Ten one more week. Ditto, “10 Cloverfield Lane” which should finish its run at about $75.
As I noted in my review, it can’t be healthy that Melissa McCarthy is entrusting at least a little of her career to her quite-unfunny husband, Ben Falcone.
It’s “tragic” that he turns out to be, as her co-writer and director, Melissa’s kryptonite.
Now, almost every review is making that point. It would be a crime if this wrecked their marriage. But it would be a shame if she let him direct her again, too. Good luck with that.
Poor reviews overall — very poor — for “The Boss.
“Hardcore Henry” got a big blast of fanboy enthusiasm in its pre-release reviews. Then, that died down. A LOT. As people who aren’t inured to the violence of first person shooter games and who don’t think video game ideas work on the big screen started reviewing it. I can’t be the only one whose head ached trying to follow the shakiest shaky-cam (GoPro?) giving us a jarring, disorienting first-person view of a guy who has been surgically turned into a super soldier, out for revenge or redemption of just to save his own life. Later reviews have beaten that dog down.
Chris Walken and Amber Heard pair up appealingly if entirely too predictably in the lightweight dramedy “One More Time,” but Richard Linklater’s ’80s movie, “Everybody Wants Some” is earning the best reviews among limited releases.
“The Boss”, bad reviews and all, just might edge “Batman v. Superman” this weekend. The Warners title won its first two weekends of release, but the BO take has plunged since that opening. “Boss” is predicted to hit the low $20s, as is “Batman v. Superman.” So we’ll see.
I like the cast I see (Felicity Jones, an interesting actress to hang a picture on, Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, Alan Tudyck, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelson) and I see a fresher take — a chamber piece in the “Star Wars” ouevre, in the approach.
This isn’t “Here’s how we won the War,” using the World War II movie analogy (films which inspired Lucas, along with Samurai pictures like “Hidden Fortress”). This is a “We have a mission for you,” like “Where Eagles Dare” or “Guns of Navarone” or “Mosquito Squadron.” High stakes, but not end game stakes.
Check it out. “Rogue One” opens in December.
“Hardcore Henry” is a dazzlingly ambitious technical exercise, the most wholly-realized “first person” point-of-view action picture ever made.
Writer-director Ilya Naishuller and a trio of cinematographers, strapped up with tiny GoPro cameras, have turned a first-person-shooter (FPS) video game into a big screen experience.
We see what our “hero” sees, shoot, stab and inject what our “Henry” injects, run where Henry runs, flee a tank Henry flees, motorcycle where Henry motorcycles, leap from heights Henry plunges from, hurdle off buildings (parkour style) and plunge into brothels Henry visits — in “real time” adding to the “you’re really there” vibe.
It’s quite a gimmick, requiring painstaking fight choreography, masking your long-take edits (done quite well, at times) with a screenplay that is more engineering than writing, with virtually nothing that you’d call “acting” that makes the viewer feel that most human of emotions — empathy.
Bullets and grenades make heads explode and bodies vaporize in Henry’s eyes as we look down the gun-barrel or follow where he hurls the grenade that will wreak all this havoc. Cool. We tumble to the ground with every blow, explosion or shot that impacts Henry’s head or Henry’s person.
It’s virtual reality (Occulus Rift) without a headset, and “Hardcore Henry” makes you wish you were wearing one.
The scanty story is this. Slo-mo third-person perspective shots show a body taking a deadly beating — knives and bullets penetrating the skin, a brick bashing a man’s head. Then, this stitched-up chap missing a leg and an arm wakes up. A gorgeous scientist (Haley Bennett) whispers to him of their past, their love, tries to comfort “Henry.” It’s a major motivation for all that follows, but the acting doesn’t put this relationship over.
A sadistic albino (Danila Kozlovsky) and his minions show up, terrorizing and killing others in the lab. Henry, whatever he was, has become a super-soldier experiment — super-powered artificial limbs, the works. The scientist, Estelle, flees and takes Henry with her. So begins the chase.
Which is all this movie is, a mad sprint through a lawless, bloody, mercenary-ruled corner of Russia — cityscapes, ruined apartment blocks, anarchic highways and idyllic, explosions-riddled countryside.
Sharlto Copley puts on an acting tour-de-force, or tour-de-guises, playing Jimmy, this helpful fellow who keeps tracking Henry down, giving him new instructions, helping him see who he is and what he must do to stay functional (“alive” doesn’t work) for a few minutes longer. And as in a video game, Henry must shoot and fight his way through mobs of minions and bystanders to achieve each goal, or level of the game/movie plot.
Copley’s Jimmy can be a drunken hobo, an aged hippy, a coke-snorting hedonist or a WWII vintage British commando, “pip pip, spot-of-bother, cheerio” and “Don’t spare the horses.” All that. He has a lot of fun with the part and provides spots of humor to lighten the bloodbath we’re immersed in.
The ticking clock nature of the chase, racing against your own doom, is an old movie trope. It worked much better in “Crank,” for instance, another movie with mayhem, gore and humor hurling breathlessly by us as a hero races against his impending death. The reason it worked? We meet the character. We care about him, and his lady love. Not here.
The FPS POV visual impact of “Hardcore Henry” will be different for some, but I felt a vertigo-induced headache coming on, and a little queasy at times — not just at the ultra-violence. It’s so disorienting, the cameras so shaky, that the visuals never let the eye grab hold of perspective, get our feet under us. Shaky camera first person POV movies have never bothered me before, and I’ve seen all of them. “Hardcore Henry” is jarring and so a-cinematic that I couldn’t enjoy much of the technical razzle-dazzle this ticking-clock monstrosity was hurling at me.
Still, feeling nauseous is still “feeling” something. In a soulless first person shooter video game movie like this, where death is so common and only one death seems to have any feeling to it, feeling anything at all is a feat in itself.
MPAA Rating:R for non-stop bloody brutal violence and mayhem, language throughout, sexual content/nudity and drug use
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Haley Bennett, Tim Roth, Danila Kozlovsky
Credits: Written and directed by Ilya Naishuller. An STX release.
Running time: 1:30
It happens to every big screen comic sooner or later. Eventually, some desperate director, working from a deathly-dull script, pleads into that comic’s ear, “Just get in front of the camera and DO something, SAY something, ANYTHING funny.”
And a whole movie, often an entire career, crashes down around his or her ears when the comic fires blanks.
It’s happening to Kevin Hart, and sooner than he would have expected. And it happens to Melissa McCarthy in the catastrophic comic miscalculation titled “The Boss.”
Scene after scene has McCarthy, as a high-powered corporate titan and inspirational speaker (Think Suze Orman on steroids, the filmmakers certainly want you to.), try out flailing bits of slapstick, or stop and just jabber through every riff she can think of in a given situation.
And as the movie dawdles forward, she riffs into a deafening silence. The laughs don’t even land with a thud. In “The Boss,” they almost never land at all.
Dolled-up in bedazzled versions of wealth-guru Orman’s infamous power Mumus, McCarthy is Michelle Darnell, a role-model to female corporate America. Her seminars are rock concerts (dancing, rapping), her (profanely-titled) books are best-sellers.
She’s got Gayle King profiling her on TV. And yes, that’s your first warning sign this film is a fiasco in the making. If you can’t get Oprah, who can handle comedy, you don’t do the bit. Gayle King has no visible talents other than being Oprah’s BFF. Lose the bit.
Michelle grew up an orphan, returned to the orphanage by every family willing to take her in, maybe the funniest sequence in the movie packaged right at the beginning. She was abrasive at birth. She has, at one point or another, screwed-over every business person she’s ever dealt with, starting with the lover-colleague (Peter Dinklage) she beat out for a career-making promotion. Dinklage, BTW, has never been less funny than as this lisping lovesick corporate kingpin.
Michelle has her bodyguard and “Yes” man, Tito (Cedric Yarbrough), the one who assures her that her butchery of “Who’s on first?” — “Who’s on my baseball?” — is both correct, and hilarious. And then there’s her underpaid single-mom assistant, Claire (Kristen Bell, badly-used), a truth-teller Michelle takes utterly for granted.
Michelle loses it all, goes to prison for SEC violations, and then talks Claire into anchoring her comeback. The movie’s clever conceit, given away WAY too early, is that Michelle sees the Girl Scout cookie scheme — they’re called Dandelions, here — as rife with exploitation (of the girls-as-saleswomen) and ready for a hostile takeover.
McCarthy, who has made money off even her off-days since becoming America’s Plus-size Sweetheart, peppers her scenes with long, awkward lists of once-rich Michelle’s new experiences. Like discovering Doritos.
“Not a cheese found in nature, but cheese-adjacent!”
Or sofa-beds. Or public transit. Hil-arious.
She’s forever starting mom-fights and turf wars with the other Dandelions and their moms, or swearing and drinking and dropping other tidbits about human reproduction and human failings on the pre-teen girls.
“Booze — It’s what makes the Irish so mean. And I can say that, because I’m Scottish!”
It’s impossible not to listen to Michelle’s “All I do is win!” mantra, her “Martha STEWART got it all back, and was MORE beloved” after prison material, and skip past the Suze Orman comparisons straight to Donald Trump. He’s also been known to talk well past the punch-line, filling the air with nonsense, hoping something sticks.
McCarthy doesn’t play the lovelorn “fat girl” card here. Much. Which is refreshing. But the movie is a miscalculation in every other regard.
One brutally unfunny scene chases, ever-so-slowly, the one before it off screen. Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does with a finale that seems invented by desperate people spending somebody else’s millions in search of an idea that works.
The problem here is the script, which is a disaster. McCarthy gets partial credit for it. So does her husband, the actor Ben Falcone. Another problem is the limp, listless, tone-deaf direction, also handled by Ben Falcone. Ben Falcone plays Michelle’s lawyer in the movie. And isn’t funny at that, either.
That day when Melissa M. was stuck, uncomfortably straining, on camera, to save her star vehicle, had to happen eventually. But when it’s the star’s spouse making a hash of her rep and her career just as she’s getting going, it’s all the more tragic.
MPAA Rating:R for sexual content, language and brief drug use
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Bell, Peter Dinklage, Cecily Strong, Ella Anderson, Kathy Bates
Credits: Directed by Ben Falcone, script by Ben Falcone, Steve Mallory, Melissa McCarthy. A Universal release.
Running time: 1:39
“Midnight Special” is a cryptic and suspenseful sci-fi road picture, a thriller so tightly pitched it would work even without the magical science fiction element.
Writer-director Jeff Nichols has done some of his best work with children (“Mud”) and Michael Shannon (“Take Shelter,” “Shotgun Stories”), and here, he recasts the veteran movie heavy as a boy’s hero. Possibly.
Because we aren’t told who he is or why he and another rough-looking character (Joel Edgerton) are dashing through Texas in the dark with a child (Jaeden Lieberher) who is the subject of an Amber Alert.
The kid’s wearing ear protection. He’s got tinted swim goggles on. And he’s reading comic books.
“What’s Kryptonite?”
The men bicker over how to answer that.
“He needs to know what’s real,” Roy (Shannon) gripes.
Turns out, they’ve kidnapped the boy from The Ranch, a Branch Davidian style cult, one led by Sam Shepard. Turns out, Lucas (Edgerton) has some skill in making their getaway. He wears night-vision goggles and races toward the state line with the lights on their primer-covered early ’70s Chevelle turned off. Nothing suspicious about that.
They stop each dawn, taping up the windows of every cheap motel room, keeping out the light. Evenb the peephole is covered in duct tape.
The Fed (Adam Driver) questioning the cult leader seems to have a lot of information about the boy, this Alton Meyer. The preacher (Shepard) and his followers seem pretty straightforward with their answers. That kid is “special.”
“Y’all have no clue what you’re dealin’ with, do you?”
Nichols taps into movie history, with touches of “Sugarland Express,” “Close Encounters,””E.T.” and most pointedly, “Starman,” for this harrowing pursuit picture.
There’s a date and a location, a deadline racing toward them. The Feds, with Driver in the classic Jeff Goldblum (semi-comical science questioner/science explainer) role, are trying to catch them.
And the cult, benign as it might seem, would like the boy back.
“Midnight Special” doesn’t over-explain, doesn’t spoon-feed us the particulars. It relies on those earlier films and our collective filmed science fiction memory to backfill much of the story. We see mass arrests, possibly sinister government overreach, Texas (gun loving) cults, a “chosen one” child, military base interrogations that ask too many of the right questions to not suggest that somebody outside of the assorted getaway cars this trio uses has an idea of what they’re looking for and why.
Shannon wears his menacing baggage, but suggests a soft side with Roy, something he rarely gets to play. Edgerton mimics Shannon’s quiet drawling growl for this film, further connecting the characters and reinforcing the sense that they have history — geographical history. Young Mr. Lieberher (“St. Vincent”) nicely suggests a small child with a calling. He strikes one purposeful pose after another as Alton starts to participate in his own kidnapping or escape, depending on how you look at it.
Kirsten Dunst shows up later as the child’s world-weary/cult-weary mother, a marvelously earthy turn.
As I said, the road picture/getaway elements of “Midnight Special” are so tense and so engrossing that the sci-fi could be excised from it without hurting the film. But it makes for a dazzling upping of the ante, right up to the film’s finale.
That’s where Nichols’ sense of how much to show, how much to explain, fails him. Like another low-budget sci-fi picture, the more comical “Safety Not Guaranteed,” this one blows its effects budget in a finale that spoils the mystery and fails to do what it is plainly set up to do — overwhelm us.
But “Midnight Special” still makes for a creepy peek into the world of cults, of those who escape them (safe houses), of a government that knows more than it should and still doesn’t have “the answers.” And it’s an absolutely chilling road picture, filled with tension, dread and a threat of violence. The longer we don’t know where that threat is coming from, the more suspenseful it is.
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some violence and action
Cast: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Jaeden Lieberher, Sam Shepard
Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Nichols. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:52
The supply of military acronyms is endless and ever-growing, a point reinforced by the superb “Eye in the Sky,” a thriller about drone warfare.
There’s “CDE,” “collateral damage estimate,” and “PID” (“positive identification”).
But when it comes to the most lethal, surgical hi-tech weapon in America’s arsenal for the War on Terror, only one acronym matters.
“CYA”.
“Eye in the Sky” is a tasty ticking-clock thriller parked at the intersection of politics and propaganda, military technology and combat morality. It’s not the first movie about the ethics of drone warfare. The low-budget nail-biter “Drones” beat it to the punch by a couple of years.
But an A-list cast, including the great Helen Mirren, the late and great Alan Rickman, Aaron Paul, Jeremy Northam and Barkhad Abdi of “Captain Phillips,” make this first-rate entertainment and a troubling essay on “collateral damage.”
They play characters tuned-into and elbows-deep on this operation — watching from London, Pearl Harbor, the drone command Air Force base in Nevada and Nairobi itself. And when things don’t go as forecast, nobody is willing to make the Big Decision, leading to all manner of CYA.
Mirren plays a British military intelligence officer about to close a trap on a British ex-pat who has gone terrorist, and she and her team and their boss, the general played by Rickman, are ready to pull the trigger. Or have the Americans who have the drones pull the trigger.
They’ve got a target-rich safe-house in Nairobi, full of terrorists and men suiting up with suicide (bomb) vests.
But the buck is passed up and down a chain of command as time runs out in this ticking clock scenario.
Director Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”, “Wolverine”) has made a troubling, edge-of-your-seat tale that toys with the difference between Americans and Brits — military men and women and politicians, and even movie audiences.
American filmgoers will be muttering “You have GOT to be kidding me,” along with the military folks (especially Rickman, who does a great “Gotta be kidding me” eye-roll). Brits? Will they be more cautious, more understanding of the waffling, the “consequences,” the political fallout from killing a British national and others in a friendly foreign country where they can’t afford bad press?
Abdi has a wonderful part, playing the Kenyan Agent on the Scene, ordered to infiltrate and get PID of their quarry, and kept on the spot and in mortal danger as others keep kicking the decision around.
Mirren shines as a flinty commander willing to bend the rules to accomplish the mission, but willing to let her humanity show, when it serves her purposes. Rickman gets one last droll moment, ironically introduced as his character struggles to buy the right doll for his daughter.
Paul, paired up with Phoebe Fox as the pilot and camera operator on the drone, is a more overt actor and that looks like over-acting with all these wonderfully button-downed Brits and Africans in other roles.
But even in Paul’s corniest moments, Hood keeps our eyes on the target, watching chillingly silent footage from assorted flying spy craft (smaller and smaller) that help make these strikes so seemingly fool-proof.
And once we’ve risen from the edge of our seats to leave the theater, Hood and screenwriter Guy Hibbert keep us focused on the ethical debate at the heart of the melodrama, making us rethink “fool-proof,” and our impatience even as we grouse at the overly patient Brits who aren’t necessarily more moral than us — just more worried about appearances.
MPAA Rating: R for some violent images and language
Cast: H3len Mirren, Alan Rickman, Aaron Paul, Barkhad Abdi, Jeremy Northam, Aisha Takow
Credits: Directed by Gavin Hood, script by Guy Hibbert. A Bleecker St. release.
Running time: 1:42
Spoiler alert — God’s still not dead in “God’s Not Dead 2.” Actually, that’s a better title, but let’s not quibble or chase camels through the eye of a needle.
The faithful are taken to court for this sequel to the angriest “faith-based” hit ever. A high school teacher answers a student’s question about Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi at Martin Luther King Jr. High, and the ACLU hits the fan.
Every name in that sentence has been known to irk conservative Christians, at one point or another.
Christian teacher Grace (Awww), played by former “Teenage Witch” Melissa Joan Hart, refuses to apologize when the administration (Robin Givens) and school board in this corner of Arkansas flip out when word of this “Jesus” discussion gets out.
“I would rather stand with God and be judged by the world than stand with the world and be judged by God,” she declares. Grandpa (Pat Boone) is down with that.
And considering the alleged transgression at issue here, so are we. It’s history class, and Gandhi and MLK both looked to The Bible and Jesus as inspiration. What’s the problem?
“Jesus may or may not exist,” is the straw-man argument presented here. That’s all this movie sets out to do, make that case, one that most historians agree on. Yes, there was a historic Jesus. But the film, as it puts one self-serving author proclaiming “proof” after another on the stand, swings and misses. Their evidence? Circular “logic” about “eye-witness testimony in the Gospels” and “Our calendar, A.D., B.C. There musta been a real Jesus, AmIright?”
Balderdash. There’s evidence out there, but these movies aren’t about science or research outside the “Make Money Selling Books to Believers” crowd. One easy, slam-dunk argument to make, conceded even by those who profess no ties to Christianity, and Team “God’s Not Dead” blows it.
The “God’s Not Dead” movies are about projection. It’s “the progressives” and “humanists” and ” liberal media” and everybody else that is angry, that won’t listen to reason, that seems to accept “no amount of evidence” in making their case. Actually, it’s the would-be martyrs making these mediocre movies who fit that description. To a T.
Ray Wise is the lip-smacking ACLU lawyer representing “the viciousness of the opposition.” His team has a seriously effeminate legal eagle among its members. Got to get the gays in there.
Jesse Metcalfe of TV’s “Dallas” is the hunky, never-shaves non-believer who sticks up for Grace in court. Ernie Hudson is the blustering judge who lets opposing counsels sermonize in the courtroom. Fred Dalton Thompson is the clergyman inveighing against a government demanding copies of every preacher’s sermons — “They tried that in Houston.” That was about preachers politicking their congregations to prevent an anti-gay discrimination ordinance, by the way. And that legal overreach died a quick death.
Not that you’d have to explain the reference to this film’s audience. And let’s skip the “politically correct” euphemisms here, in deference to that audience. “Faith-based” means “Christian Based.” Just so we’re clear.
Jerry Falwell’s not dead, either. That self-regarding, self-righteous smirk just moved to Christian conservative TV talker Mike Huckabee, who makes a blustery cameo.
Characters — the young Chinese man finding Christianity and shunned by his family over it, the curly-mopped Pastor Dave and the lady whose cancer turned her away from the Godless academic played by Kevin Sorbo and into the bosom of the Lord — return from the first “God’s Not Dead” film. They’re shoehorned in, because none of them are angry enough to carry the picture. No actor in the movie makes much of an impression on camera, save for Wise.
In a righteous world, the better-acted, upbeat and faith-affirming “Miracles from Heaven” would eat this angry tirade for lunch. But Christians love the fact that they once were fed to the lions, and in America at least, wear that mantle of victimhood and persecution as an ongoing political badge of honor.
But one thing you can say about this genre is that in the time that has passed since “God’s Not Dead” blew up the box office, Hollywood has gotten the message that “Jesus sells” and has served up a couple of pretty good mainstream movies (“Risen” and “Miracles from Heaven”), along with several bad ones (“The Young Messiah,” “Heaven is for Real”).
Either way, for a culture “under siege” in its own fevered imagination, Christian America is certainly making a mark at the box office. So much for persecution and forced “silence.”
In all fairness, the way Christianity is discussed in the media is nothing that the media would stand for if the slurs were aimed at Buddhists, Muslims or Jews. But that’s what happens when you’re a Faith-on-the-Currency (talk about “In Your Face”),majority, with whole TV networks devoted to your prophets, profiteers and politicians.
The lions in the arena are long gone. Why invent offenses and split hairs to find new things to be angry about?
MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements
Cast: Melissa Joan Hart, Jesse Metcalfe, Robin Givens, Ray Wise, Ernie Hudson, Pat Boone, Fred Dalton Thompson
Credits: Directed by Harold Cronk, script by Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon. A Pure Flix release.
Running time: 2:00
Southern trained/Southern Exposure filmmaker Jeff Nichols sees Michael Shannon in a heroic light, and that’s good enough for me.
“Midnight Special” is a markedly different piece of work from the guy who gave us “Shotgun Stories” and “Take Shelter” and “Mud.”
A supernatural kid, Shannon and Joel Edgerton protecting him, Sam Shepard and maybe Adam Driver in hot pursuit.
Opens Friday. Looks cool.
Movie Nation 