Digger review: There Will Be Floods

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise in Digger

The cat seems unwell. Fluffy white felines have long had a place in cinema—it’s been over six decades since Ernst Stavro Blofeld sinisterly stroked the coat of his pet kitty while threatening James Bond—but this little furball isn’t bright-eyed or cuddly. It’s a wheezing, whimpering creature, skin stretched over its bones, incapable of moving or eating on its own. Its strongest display of activity is the yowl it emits when a thermometer enters its anus, but otherwise it lacks the energy to even mewl. Weak and exhausted, it’s waiting for a benevolent executioner to put it out of its misery. The longer Digger goes on, the more likely you are to yearn for a similar act of mercy.

Or maybe not. Digger, the latest misbegotten epic from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, isn’t an especially appealing movie. It’s long, overdetermined, and—as with all of its maker’s films—self-indulgent. But it is also monumentally ambitious, and it unfolds with a level of stylistic bravado that tunes some of its more discordant notes back into harmony. (Speaking of music, the jittery, often insufferable score is by Cosmo Sheldrake.) If it’s a debacle, at least it’s one for the ages. Read More

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Primetime review: This Guy Gives Me the Sweeps

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Primetime

Remember 2006? Reality television was in vogue, LeBron James was in the Rust Belt, and a Republican president had embroiled the country in a senseless war in the Middle East. In other words, not much has changed. But Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s gripping and unsettling depiction of the ickiness surrounding Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator series, feels unnervingly rooted in a particular moment in history, even as it plainly speaks to the media of today. It recalls a time when premium cable was ascendant and networks were grasping to evolve in order to retain their supremacy. Not all of the ideas they latched onto were good ones.

The first time we see Hansen (Robert Pattinson) in Primetime, he’s murmuring sweet nothings to himself (“I will undress you, and you will undress me”), like an actor running lines. But it’s his second appearance, swishing through a makeshift curtain on a balcony, when he really introduces himself—both to us, and to the unwitting target of Predator’s latest sting. “Big night planned?” he purrs in a honeyed rumble, his face sporting the self-satisfied smirk of a cat who enjoys taunting mice. “Take a seat,” he continues to the mystified man standing beneath him (Tony Revolori) who’d arrived with the hope of bedding a pubescent girl, and who soon realizes, with dawning horror, that he’s inadvertently achieved the dream of so many American strivers: He’s on TV. Read More

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Resident Evil review: The Boy Who Cried Wolfenstein

Jeremy BeckReviews
Austin Abrams in Resident Evil

Video games are designed to be played. Movies are meant to be watched. This distinction has thwarted many filmmakers who have attempted to translate the button-mashing activity of the console to the seat-reclining passivity of the multiplex. So when I say that Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s new adaptation of the 30-year-old Capcom franchise, is probably the best video game-inspired picture I’ve ever seen, I’m not bestowing an especially high compliment (nor am I working with a significant sample size). As with many members of its subgenre, it’s deficient on (har har) multiple levels: organizationally repetitive, emotionally thin, and thematically vacant. But it does thread a delicate needle, paying tribute to the aesthetics of its source medium while also operating like a bona fide movie.

This is a matter of both structure and style. The plot of Resident Evil, which Cregger wrote with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 4), functions as a straightforward mission narrative. On a dark and snowy night, Bryan—a slow-witted courier played with dim-bulb charm by Austin Abrams—is tasked with delivering a precious medical artifact to the fictional metropolis of Raccoon City. His seemingly simple quest quickly escalates into a series of fraught, life-or-death predicaments as he arms himself with various weapons and is menaced by supernatural foes. These challenges, which broadly present an increasing degree of difficulty and culminate in a final confrontation (though the identity of the big boss may surprise you), tend to be logistical: climb a ladder, unlock a door, scale a building. You can practically see the life meter in the top corner of the screen. Read More

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The Uprising review: Rebel Goon, a Child of Shire

Jeremy BeckReviews
Andrew Garfield in The Uprising

The plot of The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’ intermittently absorbing, broadly turgid new epic, revolves around death and taxes. This is only fitting, given that the movie substantiates another of life’s inalienable certainties: Greengrass’ inability to craft a coherent action sequence. It’s been a decade since the English filmmaker’s work was widely viewable in American theaters—News of the World was a COVID-19 casualty, while 22 July and The Lost Bus have long since vanished into the streaming abyss—but that hasn’t sapped him of his, er, restless energy. The Uprising is his most quintessentially Greengrassian film since his catastrophic Jason Bourne: hectic, dour, unapologetically bludgeoning. There’s a late fight scene where two muscle-bound men attempt to drown each other in foul-smelling mud—a visual that often approximates the act of watching Greengrass’ movies.

Actually, that’s unfair. Greengrass’ agitated style isn’t to my taste, but it hasn’t stopped him from making some pretty good motion pictures (emphasis on “motion”). His first two Bourne sequels were admirably punchy actioners that balanced their propulsive momentum with streamlined storytelling, while his best film, Captain Phillips, benefitted from its contained setting, forcing him to channel his jittery instincts into dramatic tension. The Uprising, set in England in 1381, is a more sprawling piece of historical fiction—it purports to chronicle the Peasants’ Revolt in the wake of the plague—but there are times when it manages, however briefly, to sit still. Read More

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Labor Day roundup: Onslaught, Fall 2: Deadpoint, The Sun Never Sets, and Finding Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona in Onslaught; Harriet Slater in Fall 2: Deadpoint; Dakota Fanning in The Sun Never Sets; Angourie Rice in Finding Emily

Hollywood generally dismisses Labor Day Weekend as a dead zone—a dumping ground for thinly marketed fare that studios forgot to release in January. In its history, the holiday has hosted exactly one smash hit (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), while only two other films (The Equalizer 3 and Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake) have ever topped $20M for the Friday-Sunday window. This year was no different—the highest-grossing new release was By Any Means, which pulled in just $7.5M, and which I skipped on account of it starring Mark Wahlberg—but the September slate nonetheless provided a range of odd and diverse pictures. Only one is, y’know, good, but two others are at least worth seeing, and all four are conceptually worthwhile.

Onslaught. The only thing worse than the screenplay in Onslaught is the hairstyling. Adria Arjona, one of the most desirable women in the world, is afflicted with a tangled mane, suggesting that her survivalist heroine devoted all of her budget turning her mobile home into a roving armory and thus can’t afford a comb. Drew Starkey, the handsome actor who has recently engaged in steamy on-screen romances with both Daniel Craig (in Queer) and Anya Taylor-Joy (on TV’s Lucky), sports a blond mohawk that he appears to have trimmed with a cleaver. And Dan Stevens, who embodied aesthetic male perfection in I’m Your Man, is fitted with a frightening bald cap framed by tufts of white follicles. The movie places a handful of ordinary citizens in a nightmarish situation, desperate for deliverance, but what they truly need is less a savior than a barber. Read More

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