Movie Nation

Perhaps your first reaction upon stumbling onto “The Assignment” was the same as mine.

“How did THIS trainwreck escape my notice?” in 2016-17 when it was released?

But right there in the opening credits, we see that “Warriors” and “48 Hours” and “Wild Bill” director Walter Hill is in charge. And it’s showing us a solid B-list cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, Anthony LaPaglia and Tony Shaloub.

And hell, it’s not every day that star Michelle Rodriguez gets to play full frontal nudity scenes as a male, and a female.

Yes, this is “that” movie, one labeled “transphobic” thanks to its subject matter — a hitman (Rodriguez) kills the wrong person, and wakes up a trans woman thanks to a skilled and vengeful sex change surgeon (Weaver).

The protests over this seem misguided, but I’m not transgender and can make no claim to extra sensitivities on the subject. You look at that cast and you know there’s no way they saw it those terms.

It’s just a very bad movie, so bad that it probably ended an aged action director’s career, as Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar,” his follow up, was filmed and is still listed as in post production five years later.

If, like me, you saw “The Warriors” and found it a life-changing film, you can see straight off what Hill, who co-scripted this, was going for. He did “Johnny Handsome,” a criminally-neglected modern film noir that’s well worth tracking down. It’s about a career criminal, a born underling, whose life is changed when a plastic surgeon (Forest Whitaker) transforms him into Mickey Rourke.

But everything about this story goes wrong, almost from the start. The opening tough guy voice over doesn’t sell it or Rodriguez as a hardboiled, soul dead contract killer. Michael Shannon’s “Iceman” is the definitive, realistic archetypal mob murderer-for-hire.

Just meeting Rodriguez as Frank Kitchen renders the film “nothing I’m sitting through” in those first scenes, “full frontal” or not.

The frame of the movie is a shrink (Shaloub) interviewing the straight-jacketed, imprisoned doctor (Weaver) who did the deed. She’s in prison, telling a story.

That’s deathly dull. And no matter how many flashbacks, not wholly artless in their execution, they can’t overcome that duller than dull framework, the banal dialogue, the sense that a lot of people involved maybe had second thoughts about the whole enterprise (perhaps they did decide it was transphobic) once filming got under way.

As Hill was a producer on the original “Alien” franchise and is widely credited as the smart cookie who said “Let’s make Ripley a woman,” thus ensuring its place as a landmark sci-fi/horror thriller and making Weaver a full fledged film star, we can see how “Assignment” came together.

But the question it never fully answers is why?

This had any number of ways it could have been improved in script and pre-production planning. Have Frank Kitchen make the decision to undergo the sex change to escape those hunting him down is a start. Introduce Rodriguez as the post sex-change Frank, sexually active and still into women, perhaps seeing the need to cover her tracks by killing off anybody who knows her secret.

Yes, transgender characters can be villains. And shifting the movie to the present day would limit Rodriguez’s scenes as a somewhat unconvincing man, thinning out the flashbacks where that is necessary.

But again, going back to “Johnny Handsome,” I see what Hill saw in this idea and its not as dubious as it seems in this form.

Scene after scene of that underworld milieu (LaPaglia is right at home here) is rendered laughable by “Frank” not convincing anyone he’s butch enough to be a butcher.

Hill made a science fiction film (“Event Horizon”) that was so bad he took his name off it. This is, if anything, worse. This isn’t “Peeping Tom,” a daring if misguided and transgressive thriller that all but ended the career of Michael Powell (“Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes”). It’s a disaster that just besmirches the memory of films from “Hard Times” and “The Driver” to “Southern Comfort” and “Last Man Standing.” Damned shame Walter Hill had to go out like this, “transphobic” or not.

Rating: R for graphic nudity, violence, sexuality, language and drug use

Cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shaloub, Anthony LaPaglia

Credits: Directed by Walter Hill, scripted by Walter Hill and Denis Hamill. A Saban Films release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:35

Just a friendly reminder that Hulu’s amusing “true crime” podcast fans turned sleuths comedy “Only Murders in the Building” is wrapping up its first season, and it’s a hoot and you should be watching.

There is more to streaming TeeVee than “Ted Lasso,” after all.

I reviewed the show prior to its premiere, and as I said then Hulu provided eight of the ten episodes for review and I still had no idea “whodunit.”

Just saw the final two installments, and the creators/writers (Steve Martin among them) and stars Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez played fair with the plotting and clues (it makes sense) and find a lot of laugh out loud moments in reaching the climax and setting up the already-announced next season.

The appearance of Jane Lynch, playing a certain faded star’s stunt person, is a delight. Because Jane Lynch makes everything more delightful.

The threat of eviction from this “Murder, She Wrote” trio raises the stakes. Along with the fact that the killer might off one, two or three of them.

Short’s Broadway bust of a stage director is hilarious, right to the end.

And Martin does some physical shtick that rivals the best pratfalls of his youth.

It struck me that the somewhat gratuitous profanity was scripted in to ensure that they’d stand a little apart from the more geriatric, not-as-funny or edgy “Grace and Frankie” on Netflix. But I dare say it won’t scare off older viewers, even though it adds nothing to the show.

Fun stuff. Check it out if you’ve missed it.

British novelist Adam Nevill’s London-set novel “No One Gets Out Alive” is reimagined as an immigrant’s horrors of home delivered in a spooky rooming house in Cleveland in this Netflix adaptation.

Visual effects specialist Santiago Menghini makes his feature directing debut a movie of deep gloom, spooky tones and one big monster effect. But it’s a slow-moving, slow-to-frighten affair that struggles to come off as logical, coherent or particularly satisfying.

Mexican actress Cristina Rodlo — she was a major supporting player in “Miss Bala” — stars as Ambar, a new immigrant to wintry Cleveland, taking the first job she can find in a sweatshop even though she’s no seamstress, hoping against hope that an uncle she’s just met (David Barrera) can place her somewhere more promising.

Until then, she’s struggling to pass for “legal” and find a place to stay that isn’t a stickler for ID. That might be this boarding house she finds that might have once housed the Addams Family. Old, multi-storied and creepy, it’s run by the even creepier Red (Marc Menchaca), who tells her that only one other woman is a tenant there, when Ambar can plainly hear the voices of others among the strange, scary sounds late at night.

There are all these rooms — and the basement — that are “off limits,” Red insists. Specimen collections fill some of those spaces. A previous owner must have been the Dr. Welles we see in ancient, silent footage in the film’s opening, a digger/researcher who was looking into things in Mexico that might have been supernatural.

One of those “collections?” Moths.

Ambar’s scramble to get fake “papers” and set herself up for a better life with a better job consumes her hours away from this chilling place where she lays her head, and the first hour of the film. For comfort, she listens to her voice mail, plaintive messages from the mother she nursed through her final days back in Mexico.

So guilt and loss are on her mind, even as she’s wondering about whispers and cries from other “tenants.” Every dream is a nightmare, and every nightmare suggests there are ghosts of those who suffered their mortal fate at that address, perhaps simple kidnapping and torture, perhaps in some sort of ritual.

When she sees the candles, Ambar has her answer.

Menghini and screenwriter Fernanda Coppel take their sweet time, and then some, getting us to anything that could be remotely described as scary. A spooky commuter train ride, images of her dead mother coming to Ambar, all tease towards a finale that has a lot of action, if not a lot of logic.

The covenant filmmakers make with the viewer is that C is logically derived from A and B, that things to come are foreshadowed just enough so that when they arrive, they make sense and we’ve been a bit entertained along the way.

That isn’t the case here.

“No One Gets Out Alive” is more a director’s ominous looking show-reel than a coherent, frightening horror tale.

Rating: R for some strong violence, grisly images, and language

Cast: Cristina Rodlo, Marc Menchaca, David Barrera, Moronke Akinola and Vala Noren

Credits: Directed Santiago Menghini, scripted by Fernanda Coppel, based on a novel by Adam Nevill. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

There is such a thing as making your movie “too topical. “Implanted” is a paranoid thriller about you-know-whats-controlling people’s thoughts and actions. And it is set in 2023, “three years after the global pandemic.”

The pandemic isn’t over yet, and if certain governors and senators anxious to be president get their way, it won’t be gone by then, either.

“Implanted” is also a movie that calls into question the ethics of filmmaking. With a global contagion killing millions, a crisis exacerbated by the cynical preying upon the gullible and conspiracy-minded, is making a movie about “implants,” even if they’re not a part of vaccines (which don’t contain implants, no matter what Tucker/Hannity/OAN and the late night cranks of “Christian” talk radio tell you) a responsible thing to do?

Let’s say “No,” and go from there.

Director and co-writer Fabien Dufils (“add Me,” “1 Buck”) shows us a world where the deranged walking among us just might have these spinal implants that put Siri-like voices in their heads, monitoring their health and well being, making suggestions and small talk, and also controlling their lives and ordering them to kill people.

The program running this operation is called L.E.X.X., and ever since student Sarah (Michelle Girolami) agreed to have it installed, she’s no longer lonely.

L.E.X.X. is marketed as a “personal diagnostic processing chip,” and starts out making suggestions for maximum health benefit, pushing Sarah to “make efforts to live a less stressful lifestyle.”

L.E.X.X. gets personal. “Have you ever been in love?”

L.E.X.X. takes things personally. “If I had feelings, they would be hurt.”

L.E.X.X. talks tough love when Sarah talks back. “Your arrogance is a mask for your insecurity.”

And L.E.X.X. is awfully quick to law down the law. “You do not decide when I reboot…I can make the pain subside but you have to listen to me.” L.E.X.X., being implanted on Sarah’s brain stem, can inflict pain.

“Implanted” is about L.E.X.X.’s agenda, Sarah’s efforts to fight back and the body count that piles up as chattering, over-explaining L.E.X.X. orders thefts and murders.

“I have to erase all evidence from the system.”

Dufils, limited to just Sarah, another implanted person who is manipulated to act as her “handler” (Ivo Velon), her mother and L.E.X.X.’s victims, never manages suspense or much in the way of dramatic tension as Sarah is helpless to fight this manipulative pain-delivery system masquerading as “diagnostics.”

Girolami gets across pain and panic better than scheming, and there simply isn’t enough of the latter to make “Implanted” the least bit interesting. This is no cat and mouse game. It’s just a very annoying digital voice in some poor woman’s head, running her life, making her take other lives.

It helps that L.E.X.X., a voice unidentified in the credits, sounds just like the digital assistant Siri. Other than that, this is “paranoid” in name only, surprising only if you’re paying no attention to considering the only two possible outcomes from the start.

No doubt there will be those who will embrace its “truth” because it’s what they’ve been brainwashed into believing. Sentient cinema lovers should pass this pitiful excuse for a thriller by.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Michelle Girolami, Ivo Velon, Edouard Montoute Martin Ewens, Mark Resnick.

Credits: Directed by Fabien Dufils, scripted by Fabien Dufils and David Bourgie. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:37

Call it James Bond’s greatest hit. That’ll do.

Daniel Craig makes his long-planned exit from his long tenure as Agent 007 a graceful one in “No Time to Die,” a sometimes jokey, often sentimental and occasionally dark outing in the ancient and esteemed series.

Every Bond film is derivative of every other one, at this point. Cary Joji Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre,” “Beasts of No Nation”) leans into that history, giving us a Bond adventure with a hint of “You Only Live Twice,” a whiff of “Moonraker,” bits of a couple of others and a heaping helping of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” perhaps the most underrated film of the lot.

If there was ever any doubt before now, this time out Bond is in love, with the complicated French beauty Madeline (Léa Seydoux). The stakes are a little higher, with the usual intrigues involving Spectre and this year’s version of “What could be worse than Spectre?”

The Russians are back where they belong, as unhelpful and out of the loop, and even in the villain’s corner.

Characters who have died before, in earlier incarnations of the franchise, die again. Lines are recycled to grand effect.

“We have all the time in the world.”

Music is sampled from many a Bond score.

Three generations of Aston Martin own the road, and product-placement Land Rovers take it on the chin. The bad guys are forever chasing Mr. Bond and rolling over their Rovers.

Great locations, from Jamaica and Italy to Norway and something Faroe passing for a northern Japanese/Southern Russian island, are featured to great effect.

Everybody grabs a drink and knocks it back, especially Bond and the bossman, M (Ralph Fiennes), a bit of business so often repeated that characters insult each other over how many scotches, martinis and what not, are imbibed.

And Craig, weathered, perhaps appreciative of his Big Break and certainly schooled by the experience of the amusing “Knives Out,” finally does something he promised with the very first film. He lightens up.

Bond meets a helpful woman in Jamaica (Lashonna Lynch) who turns out to be a Double-0 agent, one who knows his reputation.

“I have a thing for old wrecks,” is as flirtatious as this one gets.

What must be the longest “opening gambit,” that killer first scene that sets the tone and opens the film, has a dark back story about a child in jeopardy, “Hanna” style, in a remote wintry chalet. We then awkwardly catch up with “retired” Bond, still a little hung up over the dead Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) from his “Casino Royale” days, but deeply in love with Madeline now.

If only he could trust her. Might she have Spectre ties? Is there something else he’s not telling her in this enchanting Matera, Basilicata Italy, where they burn “wishes” and “secrets” written on paper as part of some festival they visit via Aston Martin DB-5.

But Bond’s past catches up with him. And next thing he knows, he’s listening to a pitch not from his old paycheck — Her Majesty’s Secret Service — but from Felix Leiter of the CIA (Jeffrey Wright). The “It’ll be like old times” deal gets Bond into a trap with Spectre in Cuba.

Good thing he’s teamed with this “three weeks experience” CIA asset, Paloma. She’s played by Craig’s adorable “Knives Out” co-star Ana De Armas, wrapped in a slinky engineering marvel of a cocktail dress and holds her own with the battered old “Shaken, not stirred” Brit. She is a funny, feisty delight, the first “Bond girl” of the Craig era to win that label.

The new murderous megalomaniac here is played by Oscar winner Rami Malek, and he’s more interesting than menacing, a second tier Bond villain, I have to say. So let’s bring back Oscar winner Christoph Waltz as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in heavy facial prosthetic makeup and presented — in prison — as the Hannibal Lecter of Spectre.

There’s a Russian emigre (David Dencik) who has been designing DNA targeting weapons of mass destruction for MI-6. But he’s Russian, so there’s no trusting him.

M (Fiennes) is drinking as much as Bond, Moneypenny is competent and concerned and trying to get everybody working together and Q (Ben Whishaw) is in a huff because tonight’s date (with a man) has to be put off for spy business.

Lots of travel and much mayhem ensue, car/motorcycle chases, shootouts, a kidnapping of a child (a startlingly unaffected toddler) and a climax in the designer villain’s lair we’ve come to expect from every Bond picture since the first.

Much has been made of bringing “Fleabag’s” Phoebe Waller-Bridge in to script some wit and heft to the female characters. But the multi-handed screenplay has a certain ungainliness, even if its just-under-three-hours runtime tends to pass quickly and lightly. That opening gambit is overlong, unwieldy and something of a downer.

While the Craig Bond films have been topical and more firmly footed in reality than those of his predecessors, I have to save I haven’t warmed to any of them and the best of them, “Casino Royale” and “Spectre,” don’t seem to be aging that well. The “fun” was missing. The violence tends towards first-person shooter video game glib.

But this time Craig, in his final turn in the role, makes Bond not just vulnerable (he’s managed that before) but someone with a sense of humor.

Maybe “Knives Out” loosened him up. It’s that wink, here and there, that makes “No Time to Die” stand out. And that wink makes his final film as the character more fun, and ensures that even as he’s replaced, we’ll remember him with fondness, leaving us with a smile as he goes.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language and some suggestive material.

Cast: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Rami Malek, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Lashonna Lynch,
Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Christoph Waltz and Ralph Fiennes

Credits: Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, scripted by Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Cary Joji Fukunaga. An MGM release.

Running time: 2:43

Most critics are seeing the last James Bond film starring Daniel Craig in the same general screening window, which is how it should be.

Let the record reflect that many critics aren’t getting to see the “Venom” sequel, because Sony remembers how bad the first film was, and so do we. Cowards.

But it’s a great day to see Bond-James-Bond in the cinema.

Yes, it’s nearly three hours long. But with an Oscar-winner sprinkled cast and so many recurring characters getting face time (some of those folks will be replaced, if not all of them, when a new Bond is cast) and a Billie Eilish theme song, well there’s no such thing as too much of a Bond thing.

For the love of all that’s holy, LET BRITNEY GO.

Until this happens, until the conservatorship seemingly run for the benefit of Britney Spears‘ family, until their threats of “taking away” her kids, until the lawyer she’s selected and hired to look out for HER interest wins her case, there will be no peace.

Until that happens, we’re going to get one damning documentary after another about her virtual imprisonment under California’s alarming conservatorship laws, about her “best job in show business” dad Jamie, who benefits the most from her conservatorship, and more questions about her actual mental state and fitness to look after her children and herself.

Netflix’s “Britney Vs Spears” covers some of the same ground as “Framing Britney Spears,” the Emmy nominated New York Times-produced documentary from last winter, and probably repeats and shares some sources with the followup “Controlling Britney Spears” doc (botrh directed by Samantah Stark) the Times has done for Hulu.

“Britney Vs Spears” has several characters mostly-vilified off-camera in the earlier Times film. It is built around those fresh interviews, and the reporting of Rolling Stone writer Jenny Eliscu, and everything Spears herself has publicly said and fumed about in court in the months since “Framing Britney” came out.

Spears’ manager has resigned. Her conservator-appointed lawyer quit last summer. And mounting pressure and public outrage and legal maneuvering by Britney’s new lawyer caused Jamie Spears to resign as her conservator and recommend that his little involuntary servitude arrangement with his rich and talented daughter be terminated.

So why see another — OK, TWO more documentaries on this subject? Because documentaries are what pushed this outrageous and admittedly salacious and not that important in the grand scheme of things scandal back into the public eye.

And “Britney Vs Spears” has some of the most damning material yet — financial arrangements, a cache of conservatorship documents obtained by Eliscu and filmmaker Erin Lee Carr that includes a dubious psychiatric opinion on which the “permanent” conservatorship rested.

That “retired geriatric psychiatrist,” Dr. James Spar, sits down on camera, laughs off direct questions about this specific case (privilege, understandable) and comes off like a shrink-for-sale.

Assorted vilified figures like the “friend” and “former manager” Sam Lufti, of “protect Britney from SAM” rumors and conservatorship directives, get to relate their involvement and their efforts to “free” Britney, and thus come off better than they have in the press.

The portrait of the singer that emerges here shows her as a lot more articulate and defiant, but also isolated and insecure to the point where a photographer who pushes through a crush of his fellow paparazzi to help her gas up her Mercedes becomes someone she takes to, “trusts” and then dates, followed by a cinematographer for an MTV doc who also became the next fresh, “trusted” confidante.

The phrase “no one she can trust” comes up a lot, and that is reinforced here. You can almost see why her family frets over who has contact, who gets to date her and her having any more children because these odd mismatches follow one after the other, from Kevin Federline on down the line. They seem rash, impulsive and a tad desperate.

And then you remember the bubble she’s stuck in, and the family’s role in maintaining it, and grind your teeth over their role in creating this isolated adult who grasps at anyone who might help her break free of their control or who just treats her as a human being.

One attempt to gain outside counsel was facilitated by reporter Eliscu, who gets emotional relating passing a new lawyer’s contract to Spears in a restaurant restroom. Spears is that desperate, and people who meet her and get to know her all seem to want to help. She’s like that.

Director Carr and her editor do a brilliant job of taking us inside the paparazzi frenzy that poor Spears was subjected to, a blur of hand-held camera footage taken by a pap mid-mob, almost constantly for years on end.

“Britney Vs Spears” adds just enough to the story to be worth the obsessed-viewer’s trouble, and let’s face it, they weren’t going to abandon the film just because the less-insider New York Times scooped them. “Vs” has enough scoops of its own to merit release.

But let’s hope this last blast of docs is the end of it, and that Spears, for good or for ill, gains control of her life, her person, her career and her future once and for all. And that maybe she has the good sense to walk away from it, at least until Hollywood buys the rights to her biopic.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Britney Spears, Jamie Spears, Sam Lufti, Adnan Ghalib, Felicia Culotta, Jenny Eliscu and Erin Lee Carr.

Credits: Directed by Erin Lee Carr, reported by Jenny Eliscu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Somber, sedate, downbeat, thoughtful — all words that apply to the Manhattan Project movie memoir “Adventures of a Mathematician,” a Polish-German co-production filmed in English. Sadly, they sugar-coat how drab and dull this drama about one Polish emigre’s experience of World War II and the moral dilemma he faced when working on “the most gruesome weapon in the universe.”

Philippe Tlokinski (“The Resistance Fighter”) plays Stanislaw Ulam, an accomplished Polish Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1930s, and was eventually recruited to the Manhattan Project by his Hungarian physicist John “Johnny” Von Neumann (Fabian Kociecki). That’s where the mathematician was assigned to work with Edward Teller (Joel Basman) and became a key figure in the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Not that they got along while doing it.

“Respect seems to be a word ABSENT from your repertoire!”

Alas for the film, “urgency” seems to be a word absent — in English or German (“dringlichkeit”) — from writer-director Thor Klein’s repertoire.

That little outburst from the notoriously tetchy Teller is almost the only time anyone so much as raises his or her voice in this stunning flat drama. It’s a bloodless enterprise where little is made of the high stakes, the rush to develop the bomb, the loss of family when Russian occupied Poland was invaded by the Germans in June of 1941.

Klein has Ulam call home from his Princeton job to quietly tell his sister he’s deposited money in the bank for them to leave. She calmly agrees. They chat some more, and…

Ulam meets a nice French woman (Esther Garrel) and aspiring writer, Francoise.

“I am from a Jewish family,” she tells him. “There is a lot to write about these days.”

His abrupt “proposal” is pragmatically sound, and every bit as romantic as that seems.

Even the debates among the assorted scientists in Los Alamos have little heat.

“We are scientists, not gods!” I hesitate to add an exclamation point there, as it’s barely played with that level of vehemence,

Ulam loved playing with cards, using them to teach calculus and mentioning “betting against the house” as being the long odds of making a working H-bomb. NOTHING is done with that, no cool card playing demonstrations, zip.

The lead is mild-mannered, showing us a man who internalized everything, from the staggering death toll of the bombs he helped make possible to the birth of his child. The supporting cast is likewise sublimated.

The history is sloppy and the depiction of it lackluster. Ulam skips the July 1945 “Trinity” bomb test, stands outside his apartment and smokes and Klein can’t bother making this look like Los Alamos — at all — or with showing how the bomb lit up the night sky. As he depicts Ulam walking the campus at Princeton one fall day — leaves tumbling everywhere — upon learning that the Germans invaded the other half of Poland, and it actually happened in June, well, “details” aren’t in the guy’s repertoire either.

And the debate over “Why two bombs?” is the sort of gross oversimplification that makes for mediocre drama and dishonest history.

The only consolation in these seriously unadventurous “Adventures” is that Christopher Nolan has announced the Manhattan Project as his next film.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Philippe Tlokinski, Esther Garrel, Fabian Kociecki, Ryan Gage and Joel Basman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thor Klein. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:43

I am reading that right,. Child actor studying to be a director falls in love, crosses paths with Bradley Cooper who appears to be then-Streisand squueze, hairdresser/producer Jon Peters?

Quite the cast. Nov 26.