“The Giant” is a colossal waste of time, 100 minutes of underlit scenes filled with (mostly) high school characters whispering every single profundity that writer/director David Raboy can think of putting in their mouths in a story that never engages us or even tries to.
It’s a stunningly dull Deep South thriller about kids trying “make one last memory” after another with a serial killer taking out teen girls from the area, one at a time.
Raboy’s script isn’t so much cryptic as obtuse, with the kids whispering on and on, all nostalgic for the lives they just graduated from, heedlessly partying and hitting The Ole Swimmin’ Hole and attributing the deaths to some unseen, unknowable “giant in the woods.”
Heedless youth ignoring the COVID virus analogies might work, but the film was finished before the pandemic.
Aussie Odessa Young of “Assassination Nation,” “A Million Little Pieces” and the upcoming remake of “The Stand” does a fine American accent. But as Charlotte, her whispered vocal fry here, half-remembering the suicide of her mother, dealing with the deflated but menacing boyfriend (Ben Schnetzer) she’s trying to move on from, mumbling off the attempts to explain himself from her police chief father (P.J. Marshall) is sleep-inducing tedium itself.
That boyfriend is a poet in a pick-up truck, I tell you what — “All this sweat, this humidity…when I felt myself melt into you…I just needed to stand in your light again.”
Charlotte tends to bring that out in people, as in her BFF Olivia (Madalyn Cline), who philosophizes that “sometimes, we need people to not listen to us.”
Our heroine is in a muted, slack-jawed shock over what’s going on here and over Monroeville way. She brushes off Joe, keeps clumsy-flirt Will (Jack Kilmer) at arm’s length and tries to get these shallow ditzes to care.
“We saw Daphne on her last night on Earth.”
Her friends are all “It’ll be over before you know it,” in Bud Light denial.
Raboy tells much of the story after dark, and some scenes are so poorly lit that you can’t tell who Charlotte is sitting with in this car or that truck. Extreme closeups keep Young front and center, the only one meriting light in many of those moments.
The odd “Fi, fie, foe fum” thumping footsteps and screams from the forest should ratchet up the suspense, but dangle here like unanswered questions. Is this some psychic reckoning for careless kids, some payback for a perceived wrong, maybe committed by someone they all know?
From the look of things, our writer-director has no more grasp of the answers to the questions he half-asks than the viewer does.
MPA Rating: unrated, murder, teen drinking, smoking, suggestions of sex
Cast: Odessa Young, Ben Schnetzer, Jack Kilmer, Madalyn Cline, P.J. Marshall
Credits: Scripted and directed by David Raboy. A Vertical Entertainment release.
He was using a Beretta which M took from him and replaced with Ian Fleming’s iconic choice of firearm in “Dr. No.” The Hollywood Reporter typist who wrote this up must have never seen a Bond film, leaving out the “K” in “PPK” twice. Got $250k to bid on it?
From Kyle’s childhood onward, his best friend Mike’s been there for him. Or with him. And here they are, in the Pyrnees, cycling on the day before Kyle’s wedding to his French love, Ava (Judith Godrèche), the groom and his best friend/best man.
It doesn’t matter that Kyle’s out of shape and on a borrowed bike, gasping up each incline. Well, maybe it does. Mike’s got some news.
“Kyle, I slept with Ava.”
“Whu–I’m gonna f—ing KILL you (gasp gasp)!”
“I know. That’s why I waited for the kill.”
Has there even been a more maddeningly-amusing riff on toxic brohood than “The Climb?” Don’t answer that. It’s too early.
You haven’t seen all the relationships Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) jams a monkey wrench into, leaving Kyle (Kyle Marvin) alone and friendless — until somehow, he forgives Kyle and the whole process starts over.
Covino also directed “The Climb,” and he and Marvin co-wrote it, pairing up this guy “everybody loves” with this other guy whom only Kyle loves, the one he pedals inclines with, the one who keeps messing with Kyle’s relationships with women and family, the implication goes, all through life.
Kyle is a nebbish, a bit of a pushover, the sort who “always thinks about other people first,” his mother (Talia Balsam) laments. “People take advantage of that.”
“People” like Mike? Mom doesn’t see things quite that way. That’s why she invited drunken, broken Mike to Kyle’s big family Christmas get together, the one that follows their big Thanksgiving get together.
Maybe Mom has in mind, with Dad (George Wendt) her compliant partner, Marissa (Gayle Rankin, outstanding), Kyle’s college sweetheart, the one he wants to marry some time after the whole Ava thing went South. Maybe that’s why she invited the impulse-control issues Mike to come and do to this coupling what he did to the last one.
Will she and a very drunken Mike get in the way of what Kyle wants, busting up his relationship with a bossy woman who insists Kyle stand up to his overbearing family?
Marvin and Covino break their script up into chapters — “I’m Sorry” and “Let Go” and “Stop It” and so on. This practice has become commonplace, a lazy way for filmmakers to show how they organized their movie on note cards on a bulletin board, a pointless “show your work” Screenwriting 101 crutch.
They added four or five sequences to their short film “The Climb” to turn this into a feature. The chapter headings only underline that process and let us see that the opening scene, the one they turned into a short (and a proof-of-concept plug for the feature) is the strongest.
But all the episodes themselves are invariably funny and revealing. The co-dependency is the organizing theme, but the subtexts include Kyle’s loss of free will (others “know best”) and Mike’s ineptitude — picking a fight with a French driver, picking a fight over a moving truck, disrupting weddings, a funeral and parties with his heart-on-his-sleeve and/or drinks in-his-system clumsiness.
The co-stars/co-writers may have a couple they want us to root for here, in the classic rom-com sense. But there’s wriggle room for us to make our own choice, to fret over the choices Mike denies Kyle the chance to make.
Rankin (of TV’s “GLOW”) is the stand-out performer, although Covino (TV’s “All Wrong”) does well by this lovable lout you kind of love to hate.
Which is why “The Climb” works. Love him or hate him, root for Mike to make Kyle’s life better, or for Kyle to kick him out of it, “The Climb” invites us along for the ride and keeps our interest, whether or not love or bromance, as they say, finds a way.
MPA Rating: R for language, sexual content, some nudity and brief drug use
Cast: Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin, Gayle Rankin, Judith Godrèche, Talia Balsam and George Wendt.
Credits: Directed by Micahel Angelo Covino, script by Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino. A Sony Classics release.’
The rise of “Stranger Things” and the revival of Stephen King’s “It” inspired “They Reach,” a horror tale/period piece in which kid are under threat, and take responsibility for their own deliverance.
It’s a case study in the difference between smart writing with pathos and wit, and witless imitation, between “barely adequate” child actors and ones with charisma that the camera catches.
A prologue shows us father-son demonic possession researchers stumbling into something awful in 1969. Dad’s copy of the “Sanguinium Demonium” (book) should have protected them. Or his .38 snub nose. But no.
Ten years later, science “nerd” and tinkerer Jessica (Mary Madaline Roe) stumbles across the reel to reel recorder that that earlier team recorded their encounter with. Trying to fix it, she cuts herself. Blood is spilled and…damn — a Demonic Nagra tape recorder!
Whispers start in the house. Everybody starts seeing things.
Luckily Jessica has 13 year-old pals, noble and true — Sam (Morgan Chandler) and Cheddar (Edan Campbell.
Quick, grab your Spider Bikes! “To the library! They have these things called BOOKS.”
Yes, that’s real dialogue from this dawdling, dumb dive into demons — how to get them, how to “send them back” through “the doorway.”
A Couple of passable effects show us that “doorway.” Characters are yanked out of the frame, with gooey fake blood splattered all over everything and everyone left behind in the camera frame.
Period touches include kids singing “I Wanna be Sedated,” and my favorite — a ’70s Dodge Charger smoking when it starts, “dieseling” when they try to shut it off.
Just like new!
There would be no movie without overt “borrowings” from Stephen King. That’s not the worst idea. “No movie,” I mean.
The one interesting character, mistakenly assuming what they’re dealing with is “a werewolf” and thus insistent a “silver bullet” will solve their troubles, has the most telling name.
What is Cheddar, kids? How’s it describe this movie?
“Commitment” is something you hope to see from actors even in a movie that might not offer the most ambitious roles, cleverest dialogue or most surprising script.
Malin Akerman and Bella Thorne deliver that with every punch, kick, head-butt and one-liner in “Chick Fight,” a movie they co-produced.
It may be a movie that’s literally nothing more than its billing, a “Fight Club” romantic comedy with women, Mean Girls and “mom jean” jokes. It’s sentimental, tries too hard to be coarse and manages no real surprises, start to finish.
But these two, with the help of stunt coordinator Shauna Galligan and her team, flat out bring it. And they make a middling movie pretty damned likable.
I mean, who could hate a picture where the in-the-ring trash talk goes “there?”
“Are you ready to BLEED?”
“Yeah, but not for another MONTH!”
Akerman plays Anne, a lonely, flat-broke cafe owner in that gorgeous, beachfront corner of Puerto Rico that’s way too pretty to pass for Florida. She’s losing her business, her car’s just been repossessed and her Dad (Kevin Nash) just ended his mourning for her late mother (dead nine months) by coming out as gay.
But Anne has that one sassy best friend, Charleen (Dulce’ Sloan, funny), a cop who introduces her to that thing that can change her life, a fight club for women, where Bear (Fortune Feimster) presides.
“OK, let’s get more prepared to RUuuumble!”
It’s a dizzy, if somewhat brutal scene — stunned “first-timers” looking at shirt and wondering “Is that my blood?” “It sure ain’t KETCHUP!,” librarians choking out or knocking out baristas.
Here, you “Fight it out, then hug it out,” even if you get knocked out. At least there’s a cute doctor (Kevin Connolly) on hand if things get out of hand.
“Oh, I’m a TERRIBLE doctor. Ohio State. I was drunk the whole time.”
One word of advice? Avoid “Kung Fu Barbie,” the “ninja cheerleader” Olivia (Thorne). She’s “super baller,” quick to fire off a “mom jeans” put-down lest this fight club become a “support group for basic b-tches.”
If Anna’s going to do this, she needs training. That might come from the guy who trained Sugar Ray, the local tiki bar lush Murphy (Alec Baldwin). He’s so lame he just lip-syncs his karaoke (Make the effort, Baldwin!). He’s so loaded he spends more time falling down than standing up.
“I like you, Heidi!”
“Anna.”
“OK. we’ll go with that.”
And yes, everything that happens after that is as predictable as everything that came before it. One novel touch? Teaching somebody to punch and “look for the weak spot” with a watermelon. Old School boxing trick?
“Nah, I saw it on Youtube.”
The script is thin on one-liners, which forces director Paul Leydon (“Come Back to Me”) to lean HEAVILY on training montages and fight montages. The soundtrack, laced with Final Child, Qveen Herby, Menace Beach and Bones UK, atones for that.
Riding that “fight movie” formula this hard, and giving it a lot of sisterhood sentimentality, means “Chick Fight” was never going to be all that. Saying it “works” is a tad generous, considering how utterly predictable it is.
But for a bad movie, it’s a fun.
MPA Rating: R for language and sexual material throughout, some violence and brief drug use
Cast: Marin Akerman, Bella Thorne, Dulce’ Sloan, Fortune Feimster, Kevin Connolly and Alec Baldwin
Credits: Directed by Paul Leydon, script by Joseph Downey. A Quiver release.
As funny as a mass shooting at the North Pole, and relying on just such a finale to sell it, “Fatman” is one of the epic miscalculations of any cinematic holiday season.
And I say this as somebody who adored “Bad Santa,” who finds Mel Gibson‘s B-movie Purgatory a fascinating turn in his career (gritty, lowdown action pics) and laughs at pretty much anything Walton Goggins says or does.
Throw all that out with “Fatman.” It’s a Gibson shoot-out sh-tshow pitched as a dark comedy. Eighty-two minutes without a single solitary dying-of-loneliness laugh, then the first and only chuckle arrives and the real mayhem begins.
The writer-director siblings of “Small Town Crime” lured Gibson, Goggins and the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste (of “Secrets & Lies” and the most recent “Robocop” reboot) into a movie with little point and even less entertainment value, a lump of coal just in time for the holidays.
In a cynical time not unlike our own, Chris Cringle (Gibson) has “lost my influence.” His small town (North Peak, Alaska) sweatshop of elves isn’t meeting its numbers any more. Because, frankly, we’ve raised a generation of brats.
“This is Christmas, we’re not handing out PARTICIPATION trophies,” he grouses to a dissatisfied client. “All I have is a loathing for a world that’s forgotten,” he whines to his wife (Jean-Baptiste).”
So it’s no wonder that “the whole operation’s goin’ tits up.” It’s no wonder that he’s hitting his local watering hole for his “usual” (“a Johnny Carson,” whisky and Alka-Seltzer, a “Mad Man” favorite).
Working the phones, begging Elon for contracts, doesn’t cover their nut. Maybe the military needs some cheap labor.
But one of those brats has the means of getting even when he doesn’t get what he wants under the tree. Rich Billy (Chance Hurstfield) has “our friend” on retainer, an enforcer-hitman (Goggins) who ensures that the kid wins every science fair, filling the void the child’s always-absent father leaves.
Billy’s cruelty hasn’t gone unnoticed. Because “he sees you when you’re sleeping,” etc. But seriously, a lump of COAL?
“I’d like you to KILL Santa Claus.”
California’s Nelms brothers bring all that they don’t know about dark comedy to Canada for this production, filling the film’s first hour with Santa’s struggle for fulfillment and making payroll and the hitman’s hunt for “Fat Ass,” as he refers to the fellow in the red suit we never see the Fatman wear.
We do see a reindeer. “That’s Donner. Sometimes he gets a mite nippy.” And apparently Santa’s used to getting shot at, and shot — flying low over GunNut Nation and all. Gibson loves self-surgery scenes.
Meanwhile, our hunter is picking his weapons, Schwarzenegger style, and attacking US Postal workers, Louis DeJoy fashion, in his hunt for an address.
Hilarious.
Even though it’s been a while, we know Gibson can do comedy. Even he can’t turn “I’m just a silly fat man in a red suit” funny.
Goggins has even less to work with. Even his way with an F-bomb falls utterly flat here.
Humor is the most subjective entertainment form to review, and the best anybody can manage is to try and approach a movie like “Fatman” on its own terms. I was primed for this to work.
In this case, that doesn’t help. Nothing does.
Cast: Mel Gibson, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Chance Hurstfield and Walton Goggins
Credits: Written and directed by Ian Nelms, Eshom Nelms. A Saban Films release.
Bill Nighy also stars in this account of Japan’s mercury pollution scandal that turned the city of Minamata into an international symbol of Big Polluters aided in their cover up by their government.
As Depp is staring at the end of his career, enjoy this 2021 release from Vertical while you can.
The five films of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” play like a series of sketches of what we can take to be his experiences growing up in the ’70s and early ’80s among the Caribbean islanders transplanted to the Big Island of Britain.
The series take its title from a Bob Marley song, which declares “So if you are the big tree, We are the small axe Ready to cut you down.” Visit Britain, sample its post-immigration cuisine, culture, music and dress and you get the metaphor.
The films share settings and some characters, but each is a stand-alone in style and theme. “Lovers Rock” is the impressionistic, free-flowing romance and music film of the series, McQueen’s camera tracking through a cover-charge house party circa 1980. It’s immersive, at times almost giddy — with more than a hint of the racial and sexual tensions of the day (and today) packed into its 70 minutes.
We see the prep for the party, the cooking (do NOT watch this hungry), the moving of furniture, the set-up of the sound system with the DJ practicing his rhymed proto-rap patter.
We see the neighborhood primping and dressing up, ready for the night, warily eyed by the white neighbors still living in this corner of what we assume is Brixton, then and now a Little Jamaica in South London.
As the cooks sing Janet Kay’s “Silly Games,” two young women getting dressed chime in with Blondie’s “Sunday Girl.”
“Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up and wait…”
And we meet friends Martha (Amarah Jae St. Aubyn) and Patty (Shaniqua Okwok) as they dress for this Saturday night do like it’s prom night, blending in with the vast crowd, dancing and drinking and sometimes eating.
One running thread through “Lovers Rock” is the incessant to the point of RELENTLESS come-ons from the menfolk there. Every young woman in the place has to fend off advances — most pretty aggressive by today’s standards — just to dance or have a conversation or get into the damned restroom.
At least they’re flirting in that lovely Jamaican patois, that is as entertaining and musical as any variation of spoken English on the planet.
“Wha’yo pappa CALL you, gorgeous? Me a GENTLEman–gentleMAN.”
That one doesn’t work on Martha. But Franklyn (Michael Ward) is intent on figuring out what does.
During the course of the night, nothing happens that we haven’t seen in a hundred other “House Party” movies. It’s the dreadlocked culture and setting that sets the various “Small Axe” films apart, that and McQueen’s polished, ultra-realistic handling of the material. The movies themselves are genre pieces and not the least bit surprising.
But “Lovers Rock” is the most charming — the enthusiastic sing-alongs that go on after the sound system has switched on, the energetic, near-frenzied dancing, men peacocking for the ladies, the women acting underwhelmed.
The message here is that this diaspora — many characters are second generation Brits, like Martha — has adapted, how they fused reggae and disco and soul and house parties into courtship rituals that might have been meat-market messy, but they sure were fun.
And if you want to see how McQueen (“Twelve Years a Slave”) does “giddy,” check out the camera that dances through a near-full-length dance to “Kung-Fu Fighting.”
MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Amarah Jae St. Aubyn, Michael Ward, Kedar Williams-Sterling and Shaniqua Okwok.
Credits: Created and directed by Steve McQueen, script by Courttia Newland and Steve McQueen. A BBC Films release on Amazon.
