You’re allowed to be confused by what unfolds in the mix-and-match Italian romance “Four to Dinner.” Not that you need my permission. If you’ve watched it, you got there all on your own.
It’s a thought exercise tale about two couples, bouncing willy nilly between them as they are paired-up with this prospective mate, then that one, playing out all the possibilities of how things might have turned out if this “soulmate” had found that one, or decided that somebody else was a better fit in his or her life.
So it’s a tale of “fate” and “fated to be together,” sort of like “Sliding Doors,” if you remember that far back. Only it makes far less sense, and manages to be far more frustrating as well. Whatever screenwriter Martino Coli and director Alessio Maria Federici were shooting for, it’s not clear they had it figured out, just a winning cast, a lot of coupling (sans sex-scenes) and some vague thesis that “we have many potential ‘soulmates.'”
A clumsy framing device has this story of two couples related by a married couple (Flavio Furno and Marta Gastini) tell some dinner guests how they set these other two couples up. The twist? Husband Luca (Furno) gives the guests a “true” version of the story, and a lot of false ones.
As in “rock star mathematician” Giulia (Matolde Gioli) might have hooked up with womanizing lawyer Dario (Giuseppe Maggio), flirting just long enough to get across the notion how “DTF” she is. But maybe she didn’t stop with him. Maybe she hooked up with “laid back” publishing editor Matteo (Matteo Martari), too. And maybe he was the one who got her pregnant and changed their destinies.
Or maybe wary, smart anesthesiologist Chiara (Ilenia Pastorelli), who is holding out for Mr. Right, was more Matteo’s speed. Then again, maybe she’s “the one” who could make Dario give up his bed-hopping ways.
“It’s just that I don’t go out with guys like you any more,” (in dubbed English, or Italian with subtitles) sounds like a challenge. Maybe Dario will accept it.
Clunky “stories within a story” structure aside, there are a few novel moments and a genuinely sweet one or two. Might Matteo, who hates to “plan,” have taken Chiara to his favorite out-of-the-way restaurant only to find out there’s a wedding booked for the evening, and only the bride’s adorable intervention saves their “first date?” Throwing yourself into an Italian Jewish wedding of strangers is classic “meet cute/date cute.”
Might unromantic Giulia fall in love with the guy who got her pregnant? Might true love be tested by “fated” infidelity?
“Four to Dinner” came close to drawing me in, here and there. Gioli has a beguiling brassiness and vulnerability, and Martari brings an offhanded haplessness to the character he shares his name with.
But the constant jumping back and forth in multiverse-styled timelines is more exasperating than charming, thought-provoking or even entertaining. Perhaps there’s a better way of organizing this, following one story for longer stretches, fewer “two months later” interludes.
Probably not. Once we “get” the “many soulmates in the multiverse” gimmick, the movie needs to get to its point. It never does.
Rating: TV-MA, profanity
Cast: Matilde Gioli, Ilenia Pastorelli, Matteo Martari, Giuseppe Maggio, Flavio Furno and Marta Gastini
Credits: Directed by Alessio Maria Federici, scripted by Martino Coli. A Netflix release.
The lone feature film by American documentarian James Blue is a fascinating cinematic time capsule, a glimpse at the last days of French colonial Algeria. As you might expect from a filmmaker who worked mostly on non-fiction films, it’s a picture that immerses us in a reality, with real locations and “the real people of Algeria” as its co-stars.
“The Olive Trees of Justice” is based on a novel “Les oliviers de la justice,” by its Algerian-born French co-star, Jean Pélégri. A new restoration and release by Kino Lorber reveals this 60 year-old film as no mere artifact or relic very much of its moment. It’s a sentimental but biting remembrance of an Algeria that was by a clear-eyed Frenchman who has returned as the country’s war for independence is ending.
Jean (Pierre Prothon), in his mid-30s, has returned to the land of his birth and youth to be with his dying father (actor/writer Pélégri). As Jean wanders the streets — filled with locals, but also with French soldiers, barricades and checkpoints — Jean tries to catch up with childhood friends. He narrates his thoughts and impressions, and he flashes back to his pre-World War II youth, when his father owned a vineyard where young Jean played with Arab friends and interacted with Arab farm workers, devout Muslims and others.
Jean never comes right out and says it, but he “gets” this revolt. He may be considering moving back. But when he declares he has no desire to “kowtow to every Arab,” his flashbacks suggest to he recognizes the European privilege he grew up under, the deference and indulgence even much older Arabic men showed him as a child of nine.
Chasing a man’s chickens with his bike might have earned an Arab child a slap. Jean had the immunity of his race. He remembers his father’s sometimes stern and even irritable dealings with his laborers. But the old man, who lost that farm years back, understands what the natives want. He may not approve of some of the acts of terrorism — cutting down vines and olive trees from French farms. But he could see it coming.
“I’m not surprised they’re rebelling,” he tells his son (in French with English subtitles). “Nobody talks to them anymore.”
Blue, using untrained actors for his supporting cast, immerses us in the place and this moment in time. We see childhood memories of the dowsing Dad did, hunting for water to feed his grapevines, of kids playing in the irrigation ditches and workers heedlessly spraying poisonous powder on the vines to protect against insects.
Blue doesn’t give us “The Battle of Algiers.” The war is omnipresent, with soldiers searching Arabs on every street corner, every drive — even the one to bury his father — means passing through checkpoints.
But that’s just one deciding factor in Jean’s pondering moving his wife and son here. The idyllic childhood he remembers is gone. And the sometimes brittle conversations with people from his past tell him that maybe it wasn’t as idyllic from their point of view. He hears how clueless his father’s cousin Louise (Huguette Poggi) sounded then, and even now.
“Force is the only thing ‘they’ understand,'” she hisses, suggesting “it’s in their religion” and that “shooting ten of them” as reprisal for attacks against property might “settle this.”
“The Olive Trees of Justice” is languid but never feels slow. It tells a story but not really with words and dialogue. And it traffics in sentiment without getting lost in sentimentality.
Seeing this on the heels of the latest Sean Baker (“Tangerine,” “The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”) reminds us it wasn’t just the Italians who mastered neo-realism, and such films have never gone away. Here’s a film from the distant past that reminds us this is still perhaps the most immersive way to tell a story on the screen, peppering your picture with real people, showing us their lives and using that to lend authority to the fictional characters they interact with.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Pierre Prothon, Jean Pélégri, Huguette Poggi, Boralfa and Said Achaibou
Credits: Directed by James Blue, scripted by Sylvain Dhomme and James Blue, based on novel by Jean Pélégri. A Pathe film, a Kino Lorber restoration/release.
Running time: 1:22
Posted inReviews, previews, profiles and movie news|Comments Off on Classic Film Review: Sentimental, with an Edge — “The Olive Trees of Justice” (1962) takes us back to Algeria just before Independence
Today’s tale of good actors making horrible choices is “American Night,” an Italian-made American mob war/art swindling debacle that lured Jonathan Rhys Myers, Paz Vega, Emile Hirsch, Jeremy Piven and Michael Madsen with the promise of a working vacation in Italy.
But “working” for writer-director-hack Alessio Della Valle (“The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”) proves their undoing. The lurid, bloody, bullet-riddled fiasco he serves up here is the shiniest turd in the toilet — pretentious, slick, empty and stupid.
It doesn’t convince you it’s shot where it is set — New York and New Jersey. It doesn’t rope you into the fate of anyone — all these criminals, forgers, art experts and couriers caught up in the tangled tale of the stolen “Pink Marilyn” by Andy Warhol that is this story’s MacGuffin.
Rhys Myers, playing an art dealer and former forger in love-lust with an art restorer (Vega), gets to roll around in paint in the most colorful sex scene ever. He has the added privilege of uttering profundities like this — “Shalom, angel of death. Shalom, angel of fire. Shalom angel of peace.”
Vega? Her best lines might be shouting “JOHN” as he shouts “SARAH” back and forth with her several times at one point.
Piven plays a failing stunt man who finally almost masters the martial arts he’s supposed to know, the step-brother John eventually figures out somehow got the rolled-up painting in a gym-bag-at-the-bar mixup. Piven always looks as if he’s just taken his head out of his hands, struggling to hide his despair every time the word “AZIONE!” is shouted on set.
Hirsch shaved his head for this, just to play a spoiled heir to a Jersey mob family who thinks his spatter paintings — punctured by AK-47 rounds — should be hanging in the Met. It’s his dad’s Warhol painting that was stolen.
“My Marilyn — she’s coming home to me today. Like a woman who’s cheating on you, she always knows when she has to show up.”
Say what?
Madsen, playing a mobster, gets off lightly.
Fortunato Cerlino plays “Shakey,” a mob courier who misplays the whole painting hand-off thing partly thanks to the fact that the “Dead Rockstar Bar” (check out the bartenders — Joey Ramone, Prince, etc.) is hit by not one machine-gun armed gang, but two the same night.
Shakey has narcolepsy and dozes off in moments of stress. I found myself envying him, time and again.
A lot of things blow up, a lot of bullets are loosed and a few stunts are attempted and let’s just hope nobody got hurt making this.
So much blood, so much death — it’d be a shame if any of it was real, not that anything we see here is convincingly real, with or without the excruciating death scenes.
Let’s hope one and all enjoyed their paid Italian vacations.
Rating: R for violence, sexual content, nudity, and language throughout
Cast: Jonathan Rhys Myers, Paz Vega, Emile Hirsch, Jeremy Piven, Michael Madsen, Alba Amira and Fortunato Cerlino.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alessio Della Valle. A Lionsgate/Voltage/Saban release.
Sidney Poitier, an Oscar winning icon of the cinema whose every early screen appearance was a dignified, fiery and eloquent appeal for equal rights and civil rights, and whose later years saw him as an elder statesman, an eminence grise of the screen, has died at the ripe old age of 94.
The first Black man to win an Oscar was also one of the greatest actors of his generation, something he proved over and over again during his years as a matinee idol.
“The Defiant Ones,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Lilies of the Field,” “Blackboard Jungle,” “The Bedford Incident,” stage classic adaptations such as “Porgy and Bess,” “”A Raisin in the Sun,” comedies such as “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Let’s Do It Again,” this is the screen canon of a giant of his profession.
Authority figures, trailblazers, sex symbols and characters without compromise, often icons of “decency” on screen, he kept his classy image, even in lowdown comedies like “Uptown” and “Do It.”
His later acting years, with thrillers like “Little Nikita” and all-star romps like “Sneakers,” were like a decade long victory lap.
He will be remembered for 25 good to great films, and a life devoted to the cause of civil rights in his adoptive country, and around the world.
I met him a few times over the years, interviewing him for “Sneakers,” chatting up and his lifelong pal and fellow “islander” Harry Belafonte at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem. Anybody warning you about not meeting your idols could shut up about Poitier. Old school, old Hollywood elegance incarnate, willing to share a BIG hearty laugh with — or about Belafonte — wholly aware of his “role model” status and never ever tarnishing it.
I distinctly remember the dirty look he gave me when I started in on a question quoting him baiting Belafonte over this or that, and both of them bursting into moist eyed laughter when they figured the white boy was in on their shared teasing.
“The Wasteland” or “The Beast (El páramo)” as it was originally-titled, is a Spanish period piece that inverts that classic horror trope of a mother doing anything to save her child from “evil.”
In a remote corner of 19th century Spain, doted-on-Diego (Asier Flores) eventually figures out that his mother (Inma Cuesta) is the one in real peril from this “Babadook” like “beast.”
The debut feature of direct/co-writer David Casademunt has an arresting, minimalist setting, a nerve-rattling moment or two and some decent performances. But it’s a slow slog of a thriller, playing much longer than its actual 93 minute running time.
A family of three is riding-out Spain’s troubled, war-wracked 19th century in a farm in a near-literal wasteland. The backlit trees are dead, their cabbage and corn are wilted and Salvador (Roberto Álamo) can barely keep them alive with the rabbits he raises.
It doesn’t help that little Diego is in the habit of treating them as pets. Dad’s “He needs to learn to be a man” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) demands, handing the boy a bunny-bashing club, only send the kid running to the comfort of his mother.
Mother and child play games, share a bed and even baths. She tells Diego stories, some of them scary.
But when a bloodied, wounded stranger washes ashore in a boat on the edges of their land, and then kills himself in front of mother and child, Salvador tells his own story. It’s about “the beast.”
“No eyes fill the sockets of its face,” but it “still sees through you,” he warns. It’s another tale told to keep the kid in line, because “There are only bad people out there, people who hurt other people” beyond their land.
So what does Salvador do? He impulsively decides to take the body to “his family,” as if he knows them, as if leaving his own wife and son alone isn’t the worst idea anybody in any horror movie ever had.
That leaves mother and son to deal with the spooky sounds in the wind, Diego’s visions of Dad’s long-dead “beast” victim sister (Alejandra Howard) and Mom’s growing paranoia, firing the family shotgun into the darkness, or at nothing Diego can see in the broad daylight.
The kid’s jobs? Distract her. Reel her back into reality. Follow her instructions for fighting the beast, and learn how to bludgeon bunnies.
The bunny-bashing is one of several unpleasant things Casademunt flings at us. We see crude, spooky homemade dolls, and images of rotting fruit and animal carcasses decorate the setting as Mom despairs of her husband ever returning and Diego starts to figure out Mom’s what this beast wants next.
The slow pacing and elementary mistakes about how to frame, light, film and edit horror to make it shock and awe render this otherwise good-looking, stark and elemental thriller too bland to pay off.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, suicide
Cast: Inma Cuesta, Asier Flores, Roberto Álamo and Alejandra Howard
Credits: Directed by David Casademunt, scripted by David Casademunt, Martí Lucas and Fran Menchón. A Netflix release.
One of those performances you just lose yourself in carries off “June Again,” a sweet and sentimental portrait of dementia, and the “paradoxical lucidity” that gives some sufferers a short respite from the memories, manners, skills and knowledge that disease has stripped from them.
Veteran Australian character actress Noni Hazlehurst is a window into June Wilton, the woman she’s been for five years since a series of strokes left her with vascular dementia — her memory shot, her grasp of time, the present as opposed to the past, unstuck — and the woman she once was.
Hazlehurst, of such recent Oz films as “Ladies in Black” and “The Mule,” lets us see the lost soul June is, the pushy, outspoken bulldozing matriarch she once was and the flashes of panic that cross her face as she feels her “temporary lucidity” about to leave her, perhaps for the last time.
It’s marvelous work at the heart of a story about second chances, making amends and maybe fixing the family world that she slowly figures out has “gone to pieces” since her strokes five years before.
Writer-director JJ Winlove’s debut feature takes us into a life interrupted and the mad dash to take in all that’s happened to her two children, her grandchildren and the family business since she “went away.” While it has a familiar feel that makes this story quite predictable, Winlove trips up expectations by simply erring on the side of “Let’s be realistic,” often as not. And through it all, his star keeps us involved.
When we meet her, June is having trouble distinguishing reality from the flashbacks that come, unannounced, reminding her of relatives who have visited and a romance of long ago. She’s well-cared for at Winburn Rest Home, doted on by the staff whose names she can’t recall. Her doctor (Wayne Blair) makes little headway in even the simplest tests in his evaluations.
“Try to read this and do what it says,” he says. She can’t quite plumb what “Close your eyes” means and what she must do.
She’s pleasant enough, befuddled about forgetting her room number, the combination to the door leading into the yard. But she’s lost. Until one day she isn’t.
“Where the hell AM I?” The staff is startled, but they’ve seen it before. They scramble to get her family over here for this little patch of lucidity. June “does a runner” with the aid of a sympathetic cabbie.
“It’s like a prison in there, the decor ALONE…”
But the house she goes back to has been sold, even though she’s able to steamroll the ballerina-dressed child practicing her violin (“Debussy’s First Arabesque!” June enthuses, recognizing it.) who now lives there into giving her some of her mother’s clothes. The furniture’s long gone, even June’s treasured dresser.
And her daughter and son seem more guarded than delighted at this turn of events. Ginny (Claudia Karvan) endures her “You couldn’t wait until I was in the GROUND?” protests about the house and furnishings, and is helpless as willful June storms back into the family wallpaper business that seems to have gone to ruin. Ginny isn’t wholly forthcoming about the reasons she and her brother Devon (Stephen Curry) are no longer on speaking terms.
As the day unfolds, June learns of the tragedies and trials that her own tragedy kept her from learning about, and presses on with plans to fix things before she loses it again.
“Is there ANYthing that hasn’t fallen apart in this family?”
Winlove largely avoids “cute” in telling this story of June’s journey from oblivious to sentient, only to realize she was another form of “oblivious” back when she was ruling this clan and putting everybody in a position of wanting to please or just appease her.
“Who taught you to hug?” she wants to know of one of her obviously emotionally-stunted kids.
“YOU did!”
There are hints of “The Notebook,” “The Father,” “Still Alice” and “Still Mine” and every other movie about dementia, and even a whiff of “Awakenings” to this bittersweet “Flowers for Algernon” story of the ebb and flow of awareness.
But Winlove is content to keep his story simple and leave the film in the hands of an actress who makes June not just pitiful and sympathetic, but a real piece of work who did a number on her family long before her illness came along and broke their hearts.
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Noni Hazlehurst, Claudia Karvan, Stephen Curry, Nash Edgerton, Wayne Blair and Otis Dhanji
Credits: Scripted and directed by JJ Winlove. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Critic and essayist turned documentary and then feature filmmaker, a director of “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” specializing in nostalgia and homages to the past, a star director who wrecked his career in all sorts of personal, stupid and even tragic ways, there are a lot of reasons to recognize and remember Peter Bogdanovich, who died today at the age of 80.
In hunting down photos of him to do a remembrance, I see some wag’s piece of a few years back that refers to him as “Hollywood’s Favorite Flop.” Oh yes, that fits. He ditched the writer/producer/sounding board wife, Polly Platt, who helped make him a success and took up with starlets, from Cybil Shepherd to Miss “Star 80,” Dorothy Stratten.
He over-reached with his dips into screen nostalgia and struggled, like his longtime friend and mentor, Orson Welles, to stage a comeback. He even managed one, the nostalgic Old Hollywood murder mystery “Cat’s Meow.”
He acted, playing film directors like himself as often as not. He was a hoot on “Northern Exposure,” for instance, playing a version of himself as that director who made it to every film festival that invited him.
And he stayed in the public eye as a critic, historian and enthusiast for the cinema. “Favorite flop” or not, he made a difference.
I talked to him many times over the years, about his Orson Welles biography “This is Orson Welles” (His publisher sent critics cassette copies sampling the taped interviews, which I thanked him for profusely and told him I’d treasure forever. His reply? A droll, “And I knew you would.”), about “Paper Moon,” which he showed at the Florida Film Festival and did a Q & A about, and even about “Cat’s Meow.”
He’d pass on gossip and impersonations — of Cary Grant, whom he knew, and Hitch and Orson. He’d give grooming and fashion tips, always with a hearty helping of fun name dropping.
“Never button your shirt sleeves,” he said, citing Audrey Hepburn’s advice. Gives your arms a “willowy” look when you walk. “Never touch your face with anything but water,” Cary Grant advised, and he passed on.
Below is one of those chats, just a catching-up with a film buff’s film buff, a filmmaker who was an even bigger cinema fan than his more successful doppelganger, Steven Spielberg. This piece came from 2007.
Starting off with the thrilling sniper at a drive-in thriller which gave Boris Karloff a last moment in the spotlight (“Targets”) Peter B. wasn’t everything he might have been. But he had a pretty good run and made an eloquent spokesman for Hollywood history, Orson Welles and the cinema’s Golden Age.
There’s a Tom Petty rockumentary to finish and a possible film project, “The Broken Code,” about a real-life scientific stink over the secrets of DNA.
He appears in the upcoming films “The Dukes “(with Chazz Palminteri), “The Fifth Patient” and “Humboldt County.”
But active on-screen and off-screen career aside, Peter Bogdanovich, a former “boy wonder” of the cinema has, in many ways, gone back to his roots. At 67, he has become a guardian of the cinema’s history. This student actor-turned-curator and film journalist-turned-director is once again focusing on the thing that first brought him fame — preserving and honoring the filmmakers of the past.
Before directing “The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up Doc?,” “Mask” and “The Cat’s Meow,” he was, film scholar David Thomson notes, “a valuable, French-inspired critic who insisted on the director as auteur [author of the film], so much so that many Americans began to take directors more seriously because of what he wrote.”
Today, Bogdanovich hosts a classic movie channel for online-movie service ClickStar (cstar.com). He has written extensively on his friend and mentor Orson Welles. And he is in talks to edit Welles’ last, unfinished film, “The Other Side of the Wind,” tied up in French courts for more then 30 years.
“It’s like Bleak House,” Bogdanovich jokes. “It just went on and on and on.”
Bogdanovich is this year’s recipient of the Florida Film Festival American Visionary Award. Friday night, his Oscar-winning Dust Bowl comedy, “Paper Moon,” will be shown at 6:30 at the Enzian, followed by a Q&A with the director.
“That was a tough picture,” he says of “Paper Moon.” “Personal problems between my ex-wife, who was working on the picture, too, and me. Making a picture with an 8-year-old lead [Tatum O’Neal, who won an Oscar] was tough. She didn’t know how to read yet, much less act. She was adorable, but she wasn’t a pro. I was so anxious to finish it and get out of there that we came in four days under schedule.”
Bodganovich has always been known for a fondness for nostalgia, both in subject matter and in style. He has made period pieces, 1930s-style screwball comedies, an acclaimed tribute to filmmaker John Ford and an old-fashioned Cole Porter musical.
One thing he hasn’t done before is a music documentary. His Tom Petty film is a music story and a Florida story. It “begins in Gainesville and ends in Gainesville. We looked at a five-hour cut the other day, a little long. But Marty Scorsese spent three and a half hours on just six years of Bob Dylan’s life. We’re trying to cover 30 years of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a very interesting story, drama, tragedy, personality conflicts, humor. Guys who grew up in Gainesville, went to L.A. to try and make it in the record business. And they did.”
The Orson Welles project is another visit to the past, one he shares with the great filmmaker. In the early 1970s, as his fame was growing, Bogdanovich appeared in and helped Welles make “The Other Side of the Wind,” a movie whose cast included John Huston, Dennis Hopper, Mercedes McCambridge, Edmund O’Brien and Rich Little. A movie about the last day in the life of a legendary moviemaker (Huston), the film’s Iranian backer and Welles fought over the unfinished project, and it wound up in court, and in limbo.
“One day when we were on the set, Orson turns to me and says, ‘If anything happens to me, promise you’ll finish this movie.’ I didn’t want to think about that, or talk about it. But we had no way of knowing it wouldn’t be finished then, or even 10 years later, when Orson died. It fell into the French courts in 1976.
“According to Orson, he shot everything he needed to finish the film except for what he called ‘trick shots,’ effects. The footage with the actors was all done. I haven’t seen all of it, just an hourlong cut of it. So we may do those shots, which would be easier to do in the digital age, or we may not. We’ll try to cut it together in the unusual style Orson intended.
“It was a movie 20 years ahead of its time, at least. It’s amazing how contemporary it is — splintered, fragmented. It was a mockumentary, before there was such a term. It’s important to Orson, to how we remember him, that it be finished. I think it’ll be something extraordinary.”
Posted inReviews, previews, profiles and movie news|Comments Off on Peter Bogdanovich, “Paper Moon,” “Mask,” “Last Picture Show” and “The Cat’s Meow” director dies — 1939-2022
On paper, “The 355” looked a lot better than it turned out. A glossy, fast-moving and violent B-movie, an espionage thriller built around five acclaimed actresses — two of them Oscar winners, another a two-time nominee — this could have been an action romp that decorated every resume in the lot.
But good stunts and the always-cool 360 degree pans of our five furies in action can’t cover for a clumsy, contrivance-filled script and listless direction from the guy (Simon Kinberg) who killed the X-Men franchise. It starts with promise, hits the wall at the one-hour mark and nonsensically goes on and on after its climax.
Jessica Chastain stars as “Mace,” a CIA operative who loses a bag of cash, the device she was supposed to buy, and a partner “with benefits” (Sebastian Stan) in a hand-off followed by a chase and melee in Paris.
Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o is Khadija, an MI6 technological threats expert who used to be a field agent, summoned to give a little off-the-books help to her pal Mace in retrieving a “drive” that is the ultimate hack — from power grids to jetliner, finance and military systems, it’s a classic “They get this thing, they start World War III” movie MacGuffin.
These two, joined by other women somehow mixed-up in this gadget and the hunt for it, spend the entire film getting and losing the cell-phone shaped device. Diane Kruger trots out her action chops and multi-lingual profanity as the German agent Marie, and Oscar-winner Penélope Cruz plays a Colombian secret police shrink named Graciela lassoed in because of the operative (Edgar Ramirez) who first grabs the drive from a drug lord who figures to sell it to the highest bidder.
And Bingbing Fan makes an appearance as the obligatory kickass Chinese presence in the chase, which climaxes in Shanghai.
Veteran screenwriter Theresa Rebeck, whose credits date back to TV’s “LA Law” and “NYPD Blue,” director and co-writer Kinberg (“Ex-Men: Dark Phoenix”) and Bek Smith (“Maleficent: Mistress of Evil”) reduce the assorted characters into “types” — Chastain as the chilly, two-fisted professional, Kruger as “the most screwed-up” of the lot, Fan as the martial artist, Nyong’o as the tough-broad peacemaker among the warring factions and Cruz as the “normal person” who cries that “I am not MADE for this.”
The actors, as well as they handle the shoot-outs and fight choreography, never overcome this pigeonholing. The odd bit of “I need to call home” suggestion of a love life/home life, which raises the stakes, doesn’t make the characters any less predictable than the plot, whose only surprises are the eye-rolling detours it takes from what’s logical.
The picture stops sprinting and begins to lurch, with scenes and twists that make no sense and even the title’s explanation — they take their name as a “team” from the code-number of a female spy in George Washington’s employ — slapped on as an addendum.
“January release” or not, it’s still a shame that all this talent, an epic fight in a fish market and some cool shootouts and chases were wasted this way.
Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, brief strong language, and suggestive material.
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Bingbing Fan, Edgar Ramirez and Sebastian Stan.
Directed by Simon Kinberg, scripted by Theresa Rebeck, Bek Smith and Simon Kinberg. A Universal release.
Movie Nation 