Movie Nation

A dog dumped into the dog (movie) days of August, “Hitman: Agent 47,” arrives as the “worst reviewed movie of the summer.”

But is it the worst of the worst? Not if you’ve seen “The Curse of Downer’s Grove,” or “Amnesiac.”

A violently stylish Euro-thriller that serves up the architectural wonders of Berlin and Singapore in its exteriors, and Zachary Quinto battling Rupert Friend in its interiors, it’s like every other killer-in-a-black-suit since “Pulp Fiction.”

Only no fun, no thrills, no empathy for anybody. Yes, it’s based on a video game. Surprised?

Katia (Hannah Ware) could use a little empathy. She’s on the run, hunted by this menace (Rupert Friend of “The Young Victoria”) with a shaved head and a bar code tattooed in the crease of his neck. He is “Agent 47.”

“That’s not a name.”

“No, but it is mine.”

He’s been sent to get Katia, daughter of a famous scientist who’s gone into hiding. He has a black suit, bulky with pistols packed underneath it. He wears a black overcoat and carries a black bag loaded with black knives and guns and killing toys. He always gets his quarry.

John Smith (Quinto, of “Star Trek) shows up and offers to save Katia. He, too, wants to know where the scientist-dad is.

The movie has all of the promise a thriller with Quinto brawling, shooting and trash talking Friend can offer. Which isn’t a lot. Ware’s Katia evolves from helpless “package” to active participant, as Katia has the ability to reason out situations super-fast with a kind of genetically-engineered clairvoyance.

Director Aleksander Bach manages the obligatory car chases and shootouts with skill, if not panache. He puts Ware into a swimsuit and gets his product placement (Beretta firearms, Audi automobiles) in. Veteran character actors Thomas Kretschmann and Jurgen Prochnow have thankless bit parts.

It’s all perfectly silly, and Friend, at least, strains to put his tongue in his cheek through all the mayhem.

It often seems that “Agent 47” is more concerned with landscape, buildings, offices and subway stations than it is with characters. It’s a lost cause and we lose interest long before we’re shown the exotic architecture of Singapore.

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong violence, and some language. |

Cast: Rupert Friend, Hannah Ware, Zachary Quinto, Ciaran Hinds, Thomas Kretschmann, Jurgen Prochnow
Credits: Directed by Aleksander Bach, script by Skip Woods and Michael Finch. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:36

There’s always been an edge to Jason Bateman that showed us a nasty piece of work waiting to get out. That’s nicely exploited in Joel Edgerton’s “The Gift,” a psychological thriller about a husband and wife inconvenienced, then harassed by a former high school classmate of the husband.

It works for the film in giving Bateman his meatiest role in years, playing a man who dismisses the “loser,” the guy nicknamed “Weirdo” Gordo back in school. It works against the film because we can see it almost in an instant, long before his wife (Rebecca Hall). But knowing that doesn’t rob “The Gift” of its third act surprises, which are numerous and doozies.

Simon and Robyn are shopping to furnish their huge home when Gordo recognizes Simon in a store. He’s awkward, plainly less sophisticated. It says something of Edgerton’s skills that the guy a scary, hulking presence in “Animal Kingdom” and “The Great Gatsby” (he was Daisy’s brutish husband, Tom) physically shrinks, here. His face and his screen baggage suggest “menace,” but the performance has a bit of kicked puppy about it.

Gordo insists they exchange numbers, and Robyn is a little surprised when a gift turns up on their doorstep — How did he get their address? — and a bit more surprised that Simon didn’t call him to thank him. Gordo starts showing up during the day, looking for Simon, so Robyn invites him to dinner. He seems needy, gifting them for every kindness.

And Simon is a little testier and snarkier than usual around him. “Did he seem right to you?” Robyn starts to wonder what’s in the two men’s shared past. And we start to wonder about Robyn’s history, too.

Meanwhile, Gordo gets needier and more intrusive. Simon mocks him behind his back, to their neighbors and his colleagues and to Robyn. Robyn’s sympathy is aroused.

Edgerton, whose writing credits include the tight Aussie thrillers “The Rover” and “The Square,” ratchets up the tension without really ramping up the suspense. We know bad things are coming, but we cannot figure who is the most responsible.

But Simon’s confident assertiveness to this “nuisance” in their lives is too telling. That’s not Bateman’s baggage. Edgerton’s passive response to this aggression isn’t his baggage, either. We’re distracted, a little, by the guessing game we’re playing with the filmmaker when we should be drifting toward the edge of our seats.

Robyn, a “door half-open” kind of person, according to her husband, always wants to err on the side of kindness. But Hall, as she has in many films, seems too passive even as Robyn is starting to unravel the history and figure out what to do.

Still, when the payoffs arrive, they are jarring and at least possible, if not entirely plausible. That ensures we don’t take this “Gift,” a smart, adult thriller, for granted in a summer swamped by comic books and jokey spy pictures.

MPAA Rating:R for language

Cast: Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall, Joel Edgerton
Credits: Written and directed by Joel Edgerton. An SFX release.

Running time: 1:48

The difference between an “authorized” biography and one that isn’t sanctioned by the subject and his or her family/company is laid bare in “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”

“Official” biographer Walter Isaacson, whose all-access, occasionally unflattering biography is the basis of a feature film starring Michael Fassbender this fall, is nowhere to be found in Alex Gibney’s documentary, “The Man in the Machine.” Even though CNN produced it and Isaacson used to work for them, he’s a no show.

But match the honored biographer’s work up against America’s greatest documentary filmmaker, and the movie scores in a lot of the most important regards. Gibney, whose Scientology and Enron (“The Smartest Guys in the Room”) and Wikileaks and CIA torture films (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) are compelling, damning indictments, turns his camera not just on Jobs, but on the Cult of Apple. And the mirror shows just how much spin, hype and makeup it takes to hide all of the beloved company and its iconic founder’s blemishes.

Gibney begins by scratching his head over all the North American weeping over Jobs’ death.

“What accounted for the grief?”

After all, he was just a guy who made and sold stuff, right? And he didn’t even make it, took credit for things he badgered others into designing and exploited cheap Chinese laborers to manufacture.

“The Man in the Machine” proceeds to answer that question. Jobs saw himself as a paradigm shifting figure, someone who would change the way we relate to technology. And to millions the world over, he was. Through marketing and advertising and design, he made computers friendly, phones more connective, music more personally accessible.

The film traces the evolution of the man, his early exposure to gadgets and tech, his absorption of the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” his embrace of Eastern philosophy and pursuit of elegant, human-scaled design.

His contemporaries might gripe about credit hogging, idea-theft and “short-cuts” he took — with employees, patents, taxes and business practices — until the day he died. But Jobs changed the world.

Gibney finds the contradiction in Jobs’ pursuit of zen practices through travels and his mentor. But time and again, he finds a spoiled, cruel predator and technocrat more at home naming a computer “Lisa” than accepting his firstborn child of that name as his own.

He was a man “with the focus of a monk, but none of the empathy.”

And all these people swooning over the “stuff” Job kept selling them (at staggering markups)? They’re the real story, here — more connected to the world, electronically, but quite possibly disconnected from it inter-personally. Like their hero.

“His STUFF was beloved. HE wasn’t beloved.”

Gibney goes further than the decades of “Yeah, he’s a jerk BUT” accounts of Jobs, finding the mania for the work but also the flawed philosophy Jobs espoused but never let himself practice. Was what he was doing making the world a better place, as Jobs’ guru asked of him?

The film burnishes Jobs’ image for an hour, taking him to the iPhone announcement peak and covering familiar ground. It’s the second half where the darkness takes over, the tax dodges, bullying the press, anti-competitive conspiracies that have kept Silicon Valley wages low and altered American immigration policy to suit Big Tech’s needs.

The Gizmodo iPhone “leak” episode, a bit of strong-arming that Jobs carried out even as he knew was dying and what it would do to his legacy, steps front and center. Jobs had a special Silicon Valley police force raid the house of a reporter who came into possession of a prototype phone, brutal harassment that showed his true colors to all.

Gibney uses interviews, fresh and archival, and a court deposition and reporters’ memories of long-exposure to Jobs for his evidence. And it’s damning, from the financial cheating to the lack of philanthropy to the arrogance that let him think he knew better than modern medicine how to treat his cancer.

For all his bluster about Apple and “Think Different,” Jobs had more in common with the 19th century robber barons than with pick-your-sainted-visionary. He was more Edison than Tesla, more Rockefeller than Carnegie.

And if the film of Isaacson’s book doesn’t touch on this, then it’ll feel like a whitewashing.

MPAA Rating: R for some language.

Cast: Steve Jobs, many who worked with him and knew him

Credits: Written and directed by Alex Gibney. A Magnolia/CNN Films release.

Running time: 2:08

Bret “Less Than Zero/American Psycho” Easton Ellis never quite got over the ’80s.

You can see it in every movie he has a hand in, since that’s where the novelist seems to make his rent money these days.  He’s not even doing adaptations (“The Rules of Attraction”) any more. Crap like “The Canyons” is where he dwells, all young and beautiful white folk getting into sexual and pharmaceutical trouble, ennui upon ennui.

“The Curse of Downer’s Grove” has to represent some sort of nadir for the onetime ’80s icon. It’s a Godawful thriller with a supernatural come-on, a dead teenager movie with the B.E.E. stamp of sordid approval.

The aptly-named Downer’s Grove (Illinois, of course) is where Chrissy Swanson (Bella Heathcote of “Dark Shadows”) lives and goes to school. Dad’s a meth head who abandoned her, her brother and mom (one-time Supergirl Helen Slater). Ellis has updated the drug problem of choice, you think. But yes, cocaine makes an appearance later.

“The suburbs are the ghettos of the meaningless,” Chrissy narrates. And we’re bored already.

Her high school seems cursed. Every year, some graduating senior dies just before graduation. Forget “Maybe it won’t happen this year.” Chrissy is all “See you guys later,” “Maybe you WON’T.”

With her equally skinny-gorgeous pal Tracy (Penelope Mitchell), Chrissy tests the limits of teen immortality by hitting a party with some pushy jocks, led by Chuck (Kevin Zegers). When Chuck tries a little date rape, Chrissy almost gouges one of his eyes out. And it’s on.

He stalks, he threatens, his beats up. Can Chrissy defend herself, or will her mechanic beau Bobby (Lucas Till, of “Bravetown” and “X-Men: Days of Future Past”) stop flipping his perfect hair long enough to administer a beatdown?

The violence escalates, and the cops want nothing to do with it. No adults do. Ellis might have reached for some comment on cops protecting jocks, but that’s beyond his experience. Apparently.

Meanwhile, “The Curse” is sort of tossed aside. For a long while.

Downer’s Grove is all “What’s a girl like you want with a grease monkey like me?” Plainly, she’s been eyeing the vintage Plymouth Duster, and other muscle cars in the garage where Bobby and Bobby alone presides.

“Curse of Downer’s Grove” is so awful it’s no fair to lay it all at the feet of the c0-writer, who didn’t direct or cast this disaster, after all. There are nightmare montages hinting at “The Indian burial ground” the town was built on, the violence to come. The pretty young things doing the acting make us feel that at least they weren’t blessed with talent to go with their runway-ready looks.

Tom Arnold has a psychotic “Friday Night Lights” scene — a single scene, mercifully — beating up his quarterback-son for getting his eye poked out and future ruined.  Boys nobly face life-threatening beatings to spare their lady loves.

And in 85 minutes or so, we can stop trying to gouge our own eyes out. Our ears? Too late to save them from this tripe.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug use, profanity

Cast: Bella Heathcote, Lucas Till, Kevin Zegers, Penelope Mitchell
Credits: Directed by Derick Martini, , script by Bret Easton Ellis and Derick Martini. An Anchor Bay/Starz release.

Running time: 1:28

Here it is, every arrow in the Butterscotch Stallion’s quiver.

With “No Escape” dumped in the No Hit Zone of the end of August (Aug. 26), Wilson is in the latter stages of his film stardom. But here’s a video tribute to his favorite lines. Songwriters used to pitch tunes in Nashville by writing songs that had words and phrases they knew this star or that one loved to sing (Eddie Arnold, “Woooooorld” is the most famous).

So it is with Wilson. Enjoy.