Action

Gemini Man: Twice the Star Power, Quintuple the Speed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Will Smith (and Will Smith) in "Gemini Man".

There’s a reason that movies are classically referred to as motion pictures: They move. Silent or talkie, black-and-white or Technicolor, the quintessence of cinema over the past hundred-odd years is the collective experience of watching images in motion. In the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling imagined portraits wherein the subjects ceaselessly shift and budge, a clever conceit that also underlined just how miraculous real movies are. They’re magic brought to life.

Ang Lee has contributed more to this paranormal art form than most, in variety if not in volume. Over a startlingly diverse 12-year stretch (from 1995 to 2007), he made a Jane Austen period piece, an incisive family drama, a war picture, a martial-arts fantasy, a comic-book adaptation, a romantic weepie, and a political thriller. But in his late period, Lee has taken to tinkering with the machinery of the movies itself, to exploring new ways of beaming images onto a silver screen. His Life of Pi, while narratively and thematically flimsy, is one of the few films to make productive use of 3D; scenes of a young man traversing an ocean with a computer-generated tiger were gripping in their visual splendor. Then came Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which Lee shot not just in 3D but at 120 frames per second (five times the industry standard of 24), a useless flourish which disguised the fact that the movie was the most forgettable thing he has ever made. Rather than course correcting, Lee has now (ahem) doubled down on the gambit with Gemini Man. It’s an ambitious folly that might start cementing Lee’s unfortunate cinematic legacy, that of a once-gifted storyteller who became so obsessed with changing how movies look and move, he forgot to make them good. Read More

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John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum: Still Bloodied, Still Unbroken

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in "John Wick: Chapter 3--Parabellum"

John Wick isn’t picky. He will kill you with a gun, a knife, a car, a dog, a horse, a library book—the particular weapon doesn’t matter, because he is the weapon. He’s a man who is also a murder machine, precisely calibrated to dispense death as proficiently as possible. There is no malice in his lethality, just as there is no malice when an elephant steps on an insect. He does not kill you because he dislikes you; he kills you because you are in his way.

John Wick: Parabellum, the third chapter in this insane and gloriously operatic franchise, is not quite as efficient as its bearded and besuited namesake. It occasionally suffers from bloat and drag, and it doesn’t always move with absolute purpose. For the most part, though, this is another action triumph, a grand and propulsive movie that understands what it is and what it’s good at. And even when its ostentatious trappings occasionally disappoint, its primal heart keeps beating. Read More

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Holiday Gift Bag: Bumblebee

Jeremy BeckReviews
Hailee Steinfeld in "Bumblebee"

As a girl-and-her-robot story, Bumblebee is genuinely playful and affecting. Sure, Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie is a walking cliché, tormented both by memories of her dead dad and by the richer, blonder girls who mock her awkwardness and her relative poverty. But Steinfeld brings real depth to the one-dimensional role, especially once she starts sharing her garage—where she toils to repair her father’s old Corvette, thereby establishing her tomboy bona fides—with the titular transformer. With a canary-yellow paint job and glowing blue eyes, Bumblebee proves to be an agile comic partner, whether he’s grooving to the sounds of The Smiths or inadvertently rampaging through Charlie’s home like the dog from Turner & Hooch. Director Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) has a good handle on social misfits, and he wields some impressive special effects—in addition to those iridescent baby-blues, Bumblebee has metallic flaps that double as puppy-like ears—to make the robot impressively expressive; the computer code becomes a character, one who conveys anxiety, devotion, and fear. His cold steel will warm your heart. Read More

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The Predator: They Don’t Come in Peace. Neither Do the Aliens.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Olivia Munn and Boyd Holbrook in "The Predator"

The eponymous monster of The Predator is very good at one thing, and it’s killing people. Shane Black, the director and co-writer of The Predator, is also very good at one thing, and it’s writing smart, quippy dialogue. But where the Predator is single-minded in its focus—it kills with precision and without mercy—Black is less committed to channeling his energies into his strengths. He’s great with words, but he also loves mayhem, and after appearing as an actor in the original Predator in 1987, he’s clearly overjoyed at the opportunity to take ownership of this franchise as it continues to slice limbs and spill blood. It’s hard to blame him for following his heart, but his ambition can’t match his execution, because as gifted as Black is with masculine banter, he is not an especially skilled director of action.

This is a problem, because The Predator, for all its verbal wit, is an action movie. It is constructed as a series of explosive set pieces, with periodic interruptions for bouts of exposition and exchanges of vulgar, good-natured ribbing. It’s a reliable formula that Black helped create—he penned a number of big-budget screenplays in the ’80s and ’90s, including Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight—though where his earlier scripts tended to be complex to the point of indecipherability, this one (co-written by his old collaborator Fred Dekker) is blunt and purposeful. There’s a murderous alien on the loose in suburbia. A cadre of shady bureaucrats want to capture it, a band of hardy soldiers want to kill it, and a few hapless innocents—embodied by an exasperated biologist (Olivia Munn) and a 10-year-old autistic boy (Jacob Tremblay)—find themselves caught in the crossfire. Read More

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Mission: Impossible—Fallout: Run! Jump! Amaze! Defy Death and Sense!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise returns in "Mission: Impossible—Fallout"

In a movie as relentlessly loud as Mission: Impossible—Fallout—a boisterous extravaganza full of screeching tires, whirring rotors, and crackling gunfire—one of the most gripping scenes takes place in virtual silence; the only sound is supplied by Lorne Balfe’s score, which suddenly drops its pounding percussion in favor of weeping strings. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, duh), eternal superagent and mayhem magnet, is spearheading a raid to extract a prisoner from an armored police convoy. It’s a brisk and bloody sequence, full of bullets whizzing through the air and bodies crashing to the ground.

It’s also a feint; turns out, Ethan was just listening to someone else’s plans for the raid and envisioning it in his mind. But he conceives of a smarter and less lethal way of executing the snatch-and-grab, at which point the film rolls the sequence again, resulting in yet another bravura set piece that begins as a similarly efficient incursion but then transforms into a sprawling vehicular chase. You may think of the initial fakeout as a cheat, but I prefer to view it as a distillation of this glorious franchise’s maximalist ethos. The raison d’être of the Mission: Impossible movies is a bit like the first rule of government spending: Why make one amazing action sequence when you can make two for twice the price? Read More

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