Movie Nation

The “Maze Runner” sequel, “The Scorch Trials,” starts at a sprint and hurtles at us for a good long, stretch, before it stops to catch its breath.
The conspiracy grows deeper even as the mystery unravels. The chases, brawls and gunfights are more intense, the cast broader, with more “name” players adding credibility.
But it runs out of gas at about the time it starts to look like just another riff on the zombie movie. And there’s nothing that happens after that — new characters, big action flourishes — that can jolt this middle film in the trilogy to life.
Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his fellow survivors of “The Glade” are back. They were tested by that first deadly maze, and there are more mazes here, though they’re not identified as such. They’re put into the barracks of a fortress, to be trained. For something. By the not-quite-confidence-inspiring Janson (Aiden Gillen). Thomas is the one who listens to the hooded, guarded Aris (Jacob Lofland).
Something isn’t quite right, here. And it smells “wicked” (WCKD).
Patricia Clarkson is in charge of the World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department. She has plans for these kids. “Coma” plans, for those who know their sci-fi.
Thomas must lead his crew — Minho (Ki Hong Lee), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), Frypan (Dexter Darden) and Winston (Alexander Flores) — out of the desert fortress, into “The Scorch,” the sand-covered wasteland that surrounds it. He must find those in revolt against WCKD.
“You kids wouldn’t last one day in The Scorch!”
Not only is the environment unforgiving, but the zombies infected by The Flare are everywhere. Fast-moving zombies. And they’re hungry.
Giancarlo Esposito and Rosa Salazar play characters who have formed an outlaw collective for self-preservation in the ruins. Alan Tudyck presides over a party at the end of civilization. Barry Pepper and Lili Taylor show up later.
And all the while, Thomas & Friends are on the run — from WCKD hunters and zombies (  called “cranks” here) and others who mean them harm.
The dystopian production design is of a higher order in this second film. That and the action beats give us hope that this overlong actioner (2:11 seems 30 minutes heavy) will skate by on excitement. The script, based on James Dashner’s ridiculously derivative novel, is not.
“Hope is a dangerous thing!”
Tudyck is the most colorful of the new characters. Esposito (TV’s “Revolution”) has played too many versions of this end-of-the-world might-be-villain to make this one stand out.
Clarkson has a mincing, bureaucratic menace about her. But we’ve seen this character before, too.

The original “Maze Runner” prompted a scorching “Saturday Night Live” parody that hit all the marks in how these teens-save-civilization pictures, from “The Hunger Games” to “Enders Game,” “Divergent” to “The Gift,” share. It’s a simple formula, one which reveals itself even to its teen target audience while binge watching these copycats.
But nobody’s abandoning it, not while these movies — repetitive though they are — are making a mint.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for extended sequences of violence and action, some thematic elements, substance use and language

Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Rosa Salazar, Ki Hong Lee, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Patricia Clarkson, Giancarlo Esposito, Barry Pepper, Lili Taylor, Alan Tudyck
Credits: Directed by Wes Ball, script by T.S. Nowlin, based on the James Dashner novel. A Fox release.

Running time: 2:11

This is what filmed spectacle used to look like — a  trip to a place or time most of us could never see, high drama built on the fissures of human nature, where the menaces come from our flaws, our hubris and unforgiving nature itself.

The most special “special effect” of “Everest” is the gigantic mountain itself — so absurdly imposing it can seem digitally created, even in scenes where it’s not.

“Everest” is about that infamous 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest, when the burgeoning business of escorting well-heeled climbers to the most forbidding and previously exclusive mountaintop on Earth got its comeuppance, courtesy of Mother Nature.

Jason Clarke (“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) is Rob Hall, the New Zealander who invented this “Nanny Mountaineering.” For a big fee, he and his team would give climbers with deep pockets a chance to cross the ultimate Adventure Vacation off their bucket list.

The people in his group weren’t novices. But the Rich Texan (Josh Brolin), the spend-it-all-on-this-trip mailman (John Hawkes), the Japanese woman collecting ascents to the Seven Highest Peaks on Earth (Naoko Mori) would need help, a LOT of help — oxygen tanks planted at points on the way, ladders hung and ropes strung by Sherpas, porters and professional mountaineers, guides to push and pull them and hold their hands.

Like Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cheery, swaggering competitor who liked his drink and had yet to find his limits of endurance. Scott was dragging his own paid entourage of vanity climbers to Everest, as were many others in that spring of 1996.

The script, by “Gladiator” vet William Nicholson and “Slumdog Millionaire” writer Simon Beaufoy, sets up the backstories — the pregnant wife (Keira Knightley) waiting for Rob to come home, the nonplussed Peaches (Robin Wright) at home in Texas with the kids as her money-makes-me-immortal husband, Beck (Brolin) indulges one last great adventure.

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur (“Contraband”) takes the screen time to let us absorb a little of exotic Nepal — crowded cities, ancient monasteries and breathtaking mountain vistas and high suspension bridges are just appetizers for the real treat — Everest itself.

And then the test itself, Everest, climbed methodically, scientifically, by teams that train for the thin air that client and magazine reporter Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly) will immortalize in his book, “Into Thin Air.”

If there’s a weakness to the script, it’s the way everything is underlined as “foreshadowing.” Whoa, that Russian guide doesn’t believe in packing oxygen up there because no one who can’t handle the altitude should be there? Sherpas showing a competitive streak? Scott’s mania for pushing himself to absurd extremes? Rob’s “promise” and financial obligation to get this person or that one to the top? The traffic jams that the many competing teams/guides create on the mountain?

And for all that goes terribly wrong, all the superhuman efforts called for and the fury at others’ ineptitude, there’s no swearing. What, nobody cursed a blue streak at his bad luck or bad climbing mates?

The word the ancients built many a classic drama around — “hubris” — hangs over “Everest.” These weren’t bad people, or even careless ones. But to a one, they were shortsighted, arrogant and self-absorbed. Picking out the weak links in the chain, the ones who will fail when the chips are down and the winds are up, is totally absorbing.

The mystery — for those who don’t remember the large format science museum movie about this event, or Krakauer’s book — is who will survive, and who won’t?

Sam Worthington took a smaller role as a guide pitching in to manage the mess when it starts to unfold. Guy is one of many characters to use that fatalistic phrase — “Your call” — when leaving it to people to accept responsibility for their own fates.

Clarke gives Hall a nobility, but lets us see the gambles and compromises he feels, as a businessman, that he needs to make.  Brolin gives a soft edge to Beck, a character who could easily have been pitched as a brash Texas caricature (lawyers be damned).

Knightley, Watson and Wright deliver pathos to a story that could easily take on the shrug of “Well, what did they think would happen, spending their money to knock on death’s door?”

But I particularly liked the way the Outside Magazine writer Krakauer comes off. He is more than the observer he was in the magazine and the best-selling book “Into Thin Air.”  Here, he’s a catalyst — a willing or unwilling one. When base camp director Helen (Emily Watson) ponders the bad events leading up to the tragedy, she frets over appearances.

“What’s Jon Krakauer going to say about that” in Outside Magazine?

And when the chips were down, the seen-it/done-it-all rock star outdoor writer comes off as human, not heroic.

Which is perhaps the moral to this intimate, large-scale epic. There’s facing the end with dignity and grace and fatalism. But for most of us, that’s a reach. Especially when all we’re doing is risking our lives and others’ lives for bragging rights, the chance to say, “for the rest of your life, ‘He’s the guy who climbed Everest.'”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense peril and disturbing images

Cast: Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Robin Wright, John Hawke, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emily Watson, Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, Naoko Mori

Credits: Directed by Baltasar Kormakur, script by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:01

Can Johnny Depp still surprise us? After all these years, all those earrings, all that “Yo ho ho,” can he still deliver, as an actor?

The answer that “Black Mass” gives us is “Yes.” As Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger,” he never gets the “Southie” accent. The contact lenses that render his eyes gunmetal grey never cease to startle.

And truth be told, this character is never much more than Jack Nicholson in “The Departed,” Jack-lite, just as the movie lacks the artistry and Scorsese tension to be anything other than “Son of the Departed.”

But within moments of his arrival on the screen, Depp makes us forget that’s him underneath the slicked back white hair. He becomes this monster of monsters, a mobster who reminds us that there’s nothing glamorous about “Thug Life,” nothing romantic about stone cold criminals who turn their limited intellects toward the illegal, whose sole “code” is self-preservation.

That’s not the way F.B.I. Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton of “The Gift”) sees this world. A fellow Southie boy “who made good,” he figures “blood, honor and loyalty” are what matter the most in life. So he approaches his old friend with a proposition.

“We all need friends, Jimmy. Even you.”

Jimmy/Whitey, a cold-blooded killer and low-rent Southie hoodlum, will be an informant for the F.B.I. He’ll help them fight “the REAL enemy,” the Mafia. Or as the Feds and mobsters alike call them, “the Wops, the Dagoes.” Hey, they’re just making the world safe for Micks, right?

That’s in 1975. Thus begins Bulger’s rise, climbing up over the bodies of his rivals — some of whom he kills, some of whom the Feds take down, perhaps thanks to his inside information.

Director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) delivers the doubters — Kevin Bacon is the F.B.I. boss who questions Bulger’s value (his intel was useless) and wonders what deal with the Devil they’ve made. Adam Scott plays another agent cowed by Connolly’s insistence that Bulger is their savior.

Edgerton has the most interesting part to play, that of a man whose “good” intentions are quickly perverted, who lost sight of the mission as he went deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.

The Robin Hood touches given Bulger — he was nice to little old ladies, let his mother beat him at gin rummy — don’t for a second humanize him. A father, he lectures his little son on how to settle a grudge with a classmate.

“If nobody sees it, it didn’t happen.”

Dakota Johnson plays the baby mama. Even she’s afraid of Whitey, or of calling him “Whitey.”

Benedict Cumberbatch keeps the cards close to the vest as Bulger’s very public and politically powerful brother Billy, long-untouchable in Boston even as Whitey’s depredations grew in notoriety.

There’s little detail of Bulger’s growing power and control of the drug trade, just a hint of his arming the I.R.A. and a mania for self-preservation. You mention his name in a police interrogation, you’re dead. Because Connolly was doing everything he could to preserve his “informant.” Including handing Bulger the names of “rats.”

Cooper gives us Scorsese-serious mugs in a lot of supporting roles. Guys like Jesse Plemons were born to play enforcers of the Irish variety. These guys had none of the garish style or media-friendly panache of the “Teflon Don” and his ilk.

But there’s no real style to the film, little of the urgency of “The Departed.” Cooper’s killings are abrupt, just a trip to “The Bulger Burial Ground,” a sudden strangulation or shooting.

Most of these guys seem too old to play their roles (Peter Sarsgaard is a stoner-impulsive Miami hitman). Corey Stoll is nicely impatient as a new federal prosecutor not Irish and not enamored of this “source” that he thinks should be in jail.

And Juno Temple should fire the agent who keeps getting her cast as hookers.

But Cooper keeps the tale on solid, factual footing. And Depp, in a performance that doesn’t quite sing “Oscar nomination,” strips away the glam and delivers the dirt.

The “banality of evil” was never so hypocritical, so banal and so evil.

MPAA Rating: R for brutal violence, language throughout, some sexual references and brief drug use

Cast: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard
Credits: Directed by Scott Cooper, script by Mark Mallouk  and Jez Butterworth, . A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:02

Americans with any pop culture mileage at all remember the story of a chess player winning the Cold War. It’s right up there with a hockey team winning the Cold War, and Olympic officials and a basketball team losing it within the American myth.
This was “Bobby Fischer vs. The World,” as a recent documentary about the event named it. And so it was, a volatile, almost-certainly-mad scientist of the chess board, battling his demons, chess officialdom, the Russians and their champion, Boris Spassky. He could have lost to any one, or all of them, at any time.
“Pawn Sacrifice” gives us a wild-eyed Tobey Maguire as Fischer, a cocky young champion whose paranoia and poor sportsmanship grew with every passing day. It’s a brilliant performance, thanks in part to how Fischer is explained by his coach/second, a priest played by Peter Sarsgaard.
“This game, it’s a rabbit hole,” he says to Bobby’s fan-manager (Michael Stuhlbarg of “A Serious Man”). It will “take you very close to the edge.”
In Edward Zwick’s film, Maguire goes to that edge and others explain how his version of Fischer got to where he is. He was the child of a single mom, a brilliant, Swiss-born Jewish communist (played by Robin Weigert). Her son grew up to be a virulent anti-communist and raving Anti-Semite and something of a misogynist.
But that came later. First came glory, titles and championships in his teens, a shot at the Soviets, who ruled chess for decades, passing it off as proof of “Soviet intellectual superiority.”
Manager Paul Marshall (Stuhlbarg) comes along to help Fischer capitalize on his success, and make his confrontation with The Evil Empire happen.
“I’d like a front-row seat when the good guys win!”
Father Bill Lombardy (Sarsgaard) is the hard-drinking, swearing ex-chess champ priest Bobby wants as his second, a guy with a limited tolerance for Fischer’s mood swings and tantrums. Sarsgaard sells the “magic” in Fischer’s playing with just a look, with a role that has his character explaining the game and the temperament to the audience.
It’s a trifle anti-climactic, and a little on-the-nose in the ways it uses period pop music to underscore (heavy handedly) the big moments. Zwick kind of blows the presentation of “the greatest game ever played.”

But “Pawn Sacrifice” is very good, almost the first great movie of the fall.
And for me, it’s Liev Schreiber who makes it so. As the gimlet-eyed rock-star Spassky, he has impeccable manners, swagger and the confidence of a man sure he will crush this wack-job across the table in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Schreiber effortlessly gets all that across, plus this. He lets us feel how unnerving it must have been to sit down at a chess board with a madman. There’s unease in his eyes. And defiance, before his shoulders sag into resignation. Fischer must have worn on people just this way.
As volcanic as Maguire needs to be, it’s those who react to Fischer most tellingly — Sarsgaard’s priest, and Schreiber’s Spassky — that make “Pawn Sacrifice” the gripping and entertaining history lesson that it is.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language, some sexual content and historical smoking

Cast: Tobey Maguire, Liev Schreiber, Robin Wiegert, Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg
Credits: Directed by Edward Zwick, script by Steven Knight. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:54

The first hit film of the fall is an utterly generic, totally predictable stalker thriller aimed at an African American audience.

Sanaa Lathan is the super-successful lobbyist Leah, parking her Caddy in front of her designer house, stepping out in her designer wardrobe with her live-in lawyer beau (Morris Chestnut).

But Leah wants it all, and that includes married. And children.

“I’m dated out.”

Dave (Chestnut) doesn’t.  So that’s that.

Enter the guy she locks eyes with at the coffee shop. Carter (Michael Ealy) has those dreamy Michael Ealy bedroom eyes, just the right stubble, a vintage Dodge Charger he borrowed from Vin Diesel and just the right lines.

He loves kids, charms her friends and parents (Charles Dutton is her dad). Even his job sounds “perfect.” He’s a corporate Internet security expert. He “makes people feel safe.”

He doesn’t need to ask for her number.

“It’s 2015, and I’m an IT expert!”

Leah melts, gives in to passion in a club bathroom, and is all warm and fuzzy over Carter. Until he snaps. And snaps again.  He’s got a temper for the ages.

And trying to get away from an obsessive, grudge-carrying IT expert in 2015 is every bit as difficult as you’d expect.

“You’d expect” is the key phrase here, as in every line pops into your head a few seconds, or minutes, before it pops out of a character’s mouth.

“I’ve never done anything like that before…You know I’d never hurt, you, right?”

Seriously, there’s an app that can whip up this crap.

The foreshadowing (an elderly, busybody neighbor is played by Tess Harper, and Leah has a cat) is laughable formulaic.’

The most original writing scripter Tyger Williams came up with was inventing that adorable first name. The direction (David M. Rosenthal, me either) is pedestrian in the extreme.

The cast is solid, game, competent. And the you can’t fault an audience for seeking a little female victimhood/female empowerment in their romantic thrillers.

But really, everybody involved should hold out for something better than this.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, menace, sexuality and brief strong language.

Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Michael Ealy, Morris Chestnut
Credits: Directed by David M. Rosenthal, script by Tyger Williams. A  Sony Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:44

The young Walt Disney’s struggles to start his career in animation seems like promising fodder for a bio pic.

Seeing the young man fail and fail again at something his father disapproved of, fight his personal demons, meet and team up with animators Ub Iwerks, Friz Freleng, and those Harmon and Ising chaps, that sounds like a movie, maybe even one those “dreamers” at Disney might tackle.

Perhaps all the chain smoking keeps The Mouse from making it.

“Walt Before Mickey” is a seriously malnourished, talent and charisma-starved look at those years, when a small town boy tried to make a go of it, first in Kansas City, then in Hollywood itself.

The cast has hints of competence, if not a lot of experience smoking or wearing (each man’s first) mustaches. But the script offers no places for them to shine. It was a troubled production — director replaced a week into shooting, etc. The replacement director (Khoa Le) doesn’t seem to give anyone, ANYONE, a second take that allows them to do anything. Time constraints? Not enough to excuse the bloodless/lifeless performances.

And the whole period piece, shot in and around Deland, Florida, looks like it was lit by a wedding photographer. If ever a movie screamed out for sepia toned treatment (hiding some of the lack of production polish), this was it.

See Walt (Thomas Ian Nicholas, recently seen in “Red Band Society”) start and lose his first company, and fall so low in his spirits and finances that he takes on a pet mouse. Which he can’t afford to feed. Disney dumpster diving isn’t exactly in the company biography of the man.

“This story is drawn in my own blood!”

See his sickly WWI vet brother Roy (Jon “Napoleon Dynamite” Heder) take on running the nascent fresh start Disney Studios’ finances.

See their struggles to make those “Alice in Movie Land” semi-animated shorts with almost no money, an assortment of less- than-talented live action girl stars playing “Alice,” and little precedent for everything they were trying in this still-new medium.

Meet the team — Iwerks (Armando Gutierrez, who barely registers — Did they mike him?), Freleng (Taylor Gray), Hugh and Fred Harman, Rudy Ising, names attached to many an animated short over the ensuing decades.

Meet Lillian (Kate Katzman), the secretary/inker Walt hires and falls in love with.

“You will never be a failure! You have too much goodness inside of you!”

Watch Walt get screwed over by the Mintzes, his distributors, which savvy viewers will see as the moment his anti-Semitism hardened into something the “official” biographies don’t like to acknowledge. There’s also a smidge of his future anti-union/anti-taxes ethos.

And keep an eye peeled for the “Eureka” moment, when Walt finds the character and business approach — total control — that would make Disney famous.

“I wished upon a star and look what it gave me!”

It’s a tough subject to, um, animate — just guys, sitting at drawing boards, making magic. There’s a reason Disney World’s Animation tour closed, and not all of them have to do with shipping those jobs to Asia. The film begs for more and livelier scenes of the DIY nature of the work, sketches becoming moving characters, characters turning into moving pictures. A few snippets of pre-history Disney films liven up the film, many more were needed. Copyright issues?

The dialogue is dull, boilerplate corn, the performances are flat, the cinematography is flatter.

Walt would have never become DISNEY if he and his wish upon a star had been this modest.

MPAA Rating: PG for period smoking throughout, mild thematic elements and language

Cast: Thomas Ian Nicholas, Jon Heder, Kate Katzman

Credits: Directed by Khoa Le, script by Arthur Bernstein and Armando Gutierrez. A   Voltage release.

Running time: 2:00