The motorcycle chase scenes are the stars of the Spanish drug courier-by-bike thriller “Centaur(Centauro).”
Alex Monner (“A Thief’s Daughter, “”Bajocero”) has the title role. Rafa is a Catalan motocross rider who never-quite-made-the-transition to track racing, thanks to inadequate rides.
He’s got the nerve. He’s so bonded-to-the-bike he could be Motaur, that centaur/motorcycle in American TV ads for bike insurance.
Thirtyish and aging out of the sport, he gets one last chance to try out for a Honda team in Barcelona. Team director Regina (Patricia Vico) believes in him.
But wouldn’t you know it, he shows up to pick up his kid only to find baby mama Natalia (Begoña Vargas) has gotten beaten up and robbed. Seems she was holding some drugs for a dude when other dudes showed up.
Sure, she’s acting all “OVER” him. But Rafa, who isn’t that far removed from the streets himself, finds himself “negotiating” with the Colombian Carlos (Edgar Vittorino) to get her out of her fix.
Next thing he knows, Rafa is racing from the docks of Marseilles to drops in Catalonia, dodging cops on both sides of the French and Spanish border, a “two month” job to repay her debt at night, a forklift operator job on the Barcelona docks by day, and damn — those racing team tryouts against much younger guys.
He’ll need some “help” just staying awake.
“Centaur” hews close to the genre formula — rough guy, trying to be legit, dragged into “the life” by somebody else’s mistake, and not nearly tough enough to fight, threaten or trick his way out of it.
Or is he?
The cast is OK, with Vittorino menace incarnate as Carlos, and Carlos Bardem even scarier as the Colombian’s Spanish lieutenant.
But again, the picture lives or dies on wheels, and the track scenes, with chase cars, drone shots and the like, are terrific. Eventually, the street chases and races measure up, too. Eventually.
It isn’t until the late going — as street protests put Rafa on a dirt bike because riots, police lines and street bonfires or not, that darned cocaine has GOT to get through — that the chases jump to the Next Level.
The script takes its predictable third-act turns, and less predictably and disappointingly, starts copping out and copping out hard well before the final cop-out at the end.
Bikers will pick over the riding sequences more than I would. What I found a letdown was this strictly-formula thriller going soft, just when it was getting mean.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Àlex Monner, Edgar Vittorino, Begoña Vargas and Patricia Vico.
Credits: Directed by Daniel Calparsoro, scripted by Yann Gozlan. A Netflix release.
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There’s an almost magical acting moment early in the haunted house thriller “Abandoned.” It’s a scene in which new mom Emma Roberts, playing a new mom with post-partum depression that’s keeping her from bonding with her baby.
She picks the toddler up and regards him, and he regards her. There’s a mutual curiosity in what turns into something of a stare-down. You can feel a bit of “What am I missing here?” in her eyes as baby Liam gawks back with whatever emotion you want to read into a baby’s eyes. Sure, it’s almost certainly a happy accident on the set, but working with babies, you take what you can get.
Whatever subtlety Roberts brings to that moment, and a few others, are essentially wasted in this tepid tale of a young city couple — John Gallagher Jr. plays the husband — who ignore the warning signs and make their “escape to the country” in a house full of red flags.
I mean, how many real estate agents would keep the place’s ugly “murder suicide” history in mind, and even have the crime-scene photos on hand when she’s asked that question they all hate answering (honestly)?
“Why’s it been on the market so long?”
Sara’s “I don’t mind a little haunting” isn’t exactly what we’d expect her to say. But this house and its history, and the creepy neighbor (Michael Shannon) next door, are sure to harsh her “change of scenery” mellow.
Only it doesn’t. Not really. Roberts’ mother is meant to lose her wits, not knowing if she’s seeing things that cannot be, if she will never connect with her baby before whoever or whatever’s in this house threatens that baby or takes little Liam away.
Roberts doesn’t make that journey as an actress. Any suspense, rising sense of terror and manic reaction to her veterinarian husband’s underreaction to the house’s shenanigans and over-reaction to her disinterested mothering, is missing.
Horror movie acting is a particular skill, an Oh-MY-GOD buy-in that she’s got to accept before we buy in to her in this role and by extension, this movie. Roberts shows no sign of having that skillset.
The Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott script is laughably generic, and even the potentially alarming moments are given a cut-rate handling by director Spencer Squire, who hopefully resented the fact that the production didn’t even have money for spectral effects.
The “ghosts” are just actors in a little more makeup than the leading lady, who never convinces us she’s that scared of them or anything going on in this not-exactly-“Abandoned” house.
Is that meant to be a pun, Mom abandoning her kid? I don’t know, any more than I can make heads or tales out of bland husband Alex’s pig farmer client concerns, a subtext that doesn’t have enough correlation to what’s going on at home to merit inclusion.
An interesting cameo by Paul Schneider, as a psychotherapist who makes house calls, might be the movie’s “tell.”
The character seems annoyed at being there, quick to judge Sara and quicker to suggest medication.
Is he talking to her, or to us?
Cast: Emma Roberts, John Gallagher Jr., Paul Schneider and Michael Shannon.
Credits: Directed by Spencer Squire, scripted by Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott. A Vertical release.
It’s a staple of the vampire/werewolf/witch hunting genre, that moment when some cocky wiseass takes a gander at his or her quarry and asks a colleague that fateful, fatal question.
“What’s so special about THIS one?”
Holmes, you’re about to find out.
“The Witch: Part 2, The Other One” is writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s everything-but-the-Korean-kitchen-sink sequel to 2018’s “The Witch: Suberversion.” The director of “I Saw the Devil,” my favorite Korean horror movie, throws a lot of very cool effects and some beautifully-conceived supernatural throw-downs as he parks his tale squarely in franchise territory.
The fact that he takes an exasperating hour to get to “the good stuff,” that he fills the screen with characters reciting epic-length chunks of back story and exposition, often in the form of insanely-long questions, and that he lets things turn cute and even cutesy in the middle of all this slaughter and blood, works against the film.
He’s stuffed his story with competing witch hunting factions from The Ark (research institute), Chinese and Korean witch hit squads, “civilian” mobsters out to settle scores, caravans of black sedans and SUVs rolling up on our “other one” witch (Shin Si-ah, aka Cynthia) expecting to catch or dispatch her.
“What’s so special about THIS one?” will be answered in blood.
The whole enterprise plays as cluttered as those “Underworld” movies, where it’s hard to keep track of which villains are in play, and working for whom.
“The good stuff” is worth a bit of waiting and wading through, but man, “The Other One” can be a chore.
Our teenaged patient, a high school girl kidnapped in an elaborate school field trip heist, regains consciousness, her hospital gown covered in blood, her hospital plastered in gore. She silently wanders out and away, with barely the barest hints of flashbacks telling us who she is and what’s she’s done.
A van full of goons nabs her. They’ve already been roughing up this woman (Park Eun-bin) in the back seat, who protests that the new hostage “doesn’t KNOW anything, let her go.” All it takes is one poke or jab too many for the blood-spattered teen to snap hands and arms and send thugs flying through closed doors, which are blown off as the van hurtles into a crash.
The woman Kyung hee thinks about abandoning her savior, this “mental” patient. But she takes pity and drags her off to get her wounds tended and offer her shelter with her teenaged brother (Sung Yoo-bin).
A couple of supernatural displays later, the brother wonders “Is she an alien?” before noticing “You’re kind of cute.” Oddly, the teen girl has forgotten the pleasures of food and other human fixations while in the hospital. But there’s barely time to experience the wonderland that is a Korean supermarket before the ongoing threats make themselves obvious.
The gangster (Jin Goo) shows up with a mob, wondering who beat the hell out of his other mob. Korean and Chinese teams converge on a remote farm. It’s all about to go down.
The first two acts hint at what’s to come, but Park choreographs a symphony of violence for the third.
All the talk of the original witch from the first film, the mysterious Dr. X (Dr. Baek, but she’s also in a wheelchair) who runs “the Ark,” of the Transhumanist faction vs. Union vs everybody’s favorite villain, the Chinese is just here to provide a framework for a franchise, and more fodder for The Other One to fling, hurl, stab or explode.
The factions fight it out amongst themselves as well, blade-on-blade brawls on rooftops.
Park is a directing original who flirts with bits of “Blade” and “Twilight” (the jump-cut effects of characters thrown through walls — of distant buildings) as well as “Underworld” at this distinctly Asian view of a witchcraft undergrojund.
The effects are good even if the characters are barely sketched in, despite the pages and pages of dialogue.
Once it finally gets going, “The Witch: Part 2, the Other One” is impressive. But there’s nothing here that transcends the genre, and what is here is a simple, slow-moving witch-hunt story whose clutter keeps it from ever truly getting up to speed.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Shin Si-ah (aka Cynthia), Park Eun-bin, Sung Yoo-bin, Jin Goo, Kim Da-mi, Jo Min-su , Seo Eun-soo and Lee Jong-suk
Credits: Scripted and directed by Park Hoon-jung. A Well Go USA release.
This looks like Austen with a wink, and may work. Richard E. Grant and Henry Golding are in the supporting cast. Don’t recognize the hunk she swoons over.
My favorite version of this novel introduced much of the world to Ciaran Hinds. But that was decades ago.
Movie Nation 