Tron: Ares review: Jet with the Program

Jeremy BeckReviews
Greta Lee, Jared Leto, and Arturo Castro in Tron: Ares

There has never been a good Tron movie. But Ares, the third installment in this baffling techno-obsessed franchise, is probably the least bad of the bunch. It retains the series’ sleek, color-coded aesthetic while also taking steps to minimize its mythological inanity. Calling it smart would be a stretch, but it reflects enough considered thought to qualify as sensible debugging.

Not that the storytelling in Ares is especially persuasive, or even interesting. In an accidental flirtation with topicality, its screenplay (by Jesse Wigutow) contemplates the rewards and costs of artificial intelligence. Corporate warfare has broken out over the search for “the permanence code,” an electronic MacGuffin that will allow digitized creations to attain lasting physical form. On one side of this commercial conflict is Eve (Greta Lee), an environmentally conscious entrepreneur who longs to continue the work of her deceased sister, envisioning the code as a vehicle for medical and scientific breakthroughs. On the other is Dillinger (Evan Peters), an industrial scion who dreams of commodifying and militarizing the technology; when we first meet him, he’s demoing its capabilities to a brigade of generals who salivate at the notion of a powerful and indefatigable soldier who executes all commands without question. Eve, in contrast, wants to make an orange grove whose trees always bear fruit. You earn no points for guessing which character is the movie’s chief villain. Read More

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The Smashing Machine: Do You Smell What the Schlock is Cooking?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine

Over the past 18 years, Dwayne Johnson has appeared in several dozen films but has been credited as “The Rock” only once (in the wrestling drama Fighting with My Family, where he played a lightly fictionalized version of himself). That he was able to drop his famous WWE moniker and still become one of the world’s most bankable movie stars—headlining a number of original hits (San Andreas, Central Intelligence), supercharging the Fast & Furious franchise, turning Jumanji into a global brand—is a testament to the impressiveness of his career transition; he’s come a long way since the brute who awkwardly lumbered across the screen in The Scorpion King. Yet while Johnson has proved his talents as an action hero and self-deprecating comedian (the latter quality best displayed in his vocal part in Moana, if maybe not its forgettable sequel), he’s rarely found work as a dramatic actor, possibly because his hulking size and booming voice prevented filmmakers from envisioning him as a regular person.

The Smashing Machine, the new biopic from Benny Safdie, represents an effort to change that. Not that Mark Kerr, Johnson’s role here, could fairly be dubbed a normal guy; he’s a muscle-bound giant, the kind of incredible hulk whose sheer mass draws stares in waiting rooms. But he isn’t a spy or a thief or superhero. He’s just an athlete, and his (relative) ordinariness seems designed to reshape Johnson’s image, and to lend his rippling physique a sheen of prestige credibility—the kind of artist who earns Oscars as well as dollars. Read More

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One Battle After Another: Inherent ICE

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another

Did Paul Thomas Anderson just make an action movie? Yes and no. Certainly, One Battle After Another is a robust and muscular production, replete with car chases, kidnappings, and explosions. Yet its most exhilarating sequence—the one that best encapsulates its singular combination of tumultuous suspense and whip-smart comedy—is just a guy talking on the phone.

It helps, of course, that said guy is Leonardo DiCaprio, one of our last true movie stars. He plays Bob Ferguson, a lapsed revolutionary whose stormy past as an ideological militant has long since subsided into a cloud of bong smoke and disorientation. With his scraggly facial hair and his fried brain cells, Bob seems an unlikely hero of a decades-spanning epic from the acclaimed director of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. But One Battle After Another, which Anderson adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, has no interest in being bound by expectation or convention. It is a wildly ambitious picture that takes as its subject no less than the precarity of the American experiment, yet it is also an intimate family melodrama—a poignant tale of darkened souls clawing their way back toward the light. Read More

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A Big Bold Beautiful Journey: Trip or Flop

Jeremy BeckReviews
Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

He doesn’t want the GPS. Who the hell needs a GPS? He can just use his phone. Aha, the saleswoman points out, but what if his phone craps out on him? A few feeble protests later (“I don’t think it will.” “But what if it does??”), he relents and agrees to the upsell, at which point the woman exclaims in triumph, “Fuck yeah!”

There is no small degree of metaphor in this early exchange in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, when a lonely single man named David (Colin Farrell) rents—“has foisted upon him” is probably more accurate—a 1994 Saturn from a strangely persistent agent in a pinstriped suit and pencil haircut (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, presumably improvising her thick German accent on the day of shooting). After all, a GPS is designed to guide you to a preplanned destination, allowing you to surrender your agency and simply obey the device’s rhythmic commands. So when this particular model, which speaks in the soothing voice of Jodie Turner-Smith, suddenly asks David, “Would you like to go on a big, bold, beautiful journey?” he hardly has any choice in the matter, and neither do you. Read More

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Him: Stupor Bowl Sunday

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tyriq Withers in Him

To watch sports is to subject yourself to a vocabulary riddled with hyperbole and cliché. You need to give 110%. The best players eat, sleep, and breathe the game. Athletes are soldiers, and every contest is a war. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Him, the new movie from Justin Tipping, attempts to literalize this sort of inflated rhetoric. It imagines a heightened surreality where a draft prospect’s training regimen takes place at a militaristic boot camp, and where professional success equates to personal survival. It takes the metaphor out of blood sport.

Conceptually speaking, this isn’t a horrible idea. By their nature, movies dramatize and embellish real-life experiences, and the obsessive character of modern sports—the players’ pursuit of excellence, the fans’ deranged zeal, the economy’s spending of billions on advertising and gambling—naturally lends itself to an outsized treatment. So the problem with Him isn’t that it’s absurd. The problem is that it’s stupid. Read More

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