Action

Deepwater Horizon: The Ship Is Sinking, and So Are Profit Margins

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mark Wahlberg in Peter Berg's "Deepwater Horizon"

At one point in Peter Berg’s geopolitical action thriller The Kingdom, Jamie Foxx tells a Saudi official, “America’s not perfect, but we are good at this.” The “this” he’s referring to is criminal investigation, but as Berg’s career has gone on, his films have played as a variation on this central theme of American competence. He makes movies about strong-willed, muscular men and women who excel at problem-solving and crisis management. It’s historical fiction with a nationalist tint; in recreating specific, disastrous events, Berg venerates the broader (and, in his view, distinctly red-white-and-blue) virtues of teamwork, loyalty, and perseverance. The guy who played Linda Fiorentino’s hapless patsy in The Last Seduction has somehow fashioned himself into American cinema’s chief patriot.

Well, maybe vice-chief. Berg’s current leading man of choice is Mark Wahlberg, our great nation’s consensus avatar of blue-collar heroism. In Lone Survivor, the fact-based story of a kill mission in Afghanistan gone awry, Berg put Wahlberg through an especially brutal ringer, chronicling how a brave solider used his strength and his smarts to avoid seemingly certain death. Now the director and his star have returned with Deepwater Horizon, a meticulous reenactment of the explosion (and resulting oil spill) that destroyed a rig off the coast of Louisiana in 2010. The names may have changed, but Berg’s template remains the same: Deliberately establish the players and the setting, then scrupulously illustrate how everything gets blown to hell. Read More

Read more

Jason Bourne: Angry Assassin Remembers, Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matt Damon returns in Paul Greengrass' "Jason Bourne"

Jason Bourne is a superhero. He may not have a costume or a secret identity or alien powers, but he’s nevertheless invincible, terminating his enemies with extreme prejudice and casual efficiency. What made him interesting in the past was his struggle to reconcile his superhuman combat skills with his search for self—there’s a reason that the first novel in Robert Ludlum’s original trilogy was called The Bourne Identity. Doug Liman’s 2002 adaptation of that novel was thrilling not just for its explosive action sequences but for the way it emphasized its protagonist’s confusion and vulnerability, amplified by Matt Damon in a performance of tender brutality. But now, three movies later—four if you count The Bourne Legacy, in which Jeremy Renner stood in for Damon as a Bourne-like surrogate—Jason Bourne knows who he is. The mystery has vanished; all that’s left is the brutality.

When we first meet Jason in this new movie that bears his name, he’s lying low in Greece, numbly participating in underground bare-knuckled boxing matches. (In this, the film oddly resembles the opening of Creed.) Beyond establishing the obvious—that even at age 45, Matt Damon still looks awfully good with his shirt off—this curt opening sequence is designed to demonstrate Jason’s isolation. Yet it tells us nothing we didn’t already know. Jason starts this movie alone, and he ends it alone. There is no character progression, no soul-searching, no catharsis, no real meaning of any kind. Where Jason Bourne was once a superhero, he’s now morphed into a different sort of genre staple: the looming figure who moves implacably toward his quarry, inexorable in his silent bloodlust. He’s the killer in a horror movie. Read More

Read more

Star Trek Beyond: Deep in Space, a Crew Bands Together

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simon Pegg, Sofia Boutella, and Chris Pine in "Star Trek Beyond"

“Things have started to feel a little episodic,” Jim Kirk confesses at the beginning of Star Trek Beyond, the fleet and fun third installment of the rebooted Star Trek franchise. He’s musing about his role overseeing the increasingly routine voyages of the Starship Enterprise, but it doesn’t require a doctorate in meta to connect his observations to the other vehicle he’s piloting, namely the Star Trek franchise itself. Kirk’s opening voiceover articulates the central challenge that every studio-sanctioned cinematic series faces: How do you continue serving your fans but prevent the proceedings from growing stale? Can you deliver something more without just providing more of the same?

Star Trek Beyond—directed by Fast & Furious veteran Justin Lin, taking the reins from J.J. Abrams (who has since migrated to a different galaxy)—doesn’t entirely solve this paradox, but it does thread the needle about as well as a big-budget three-quel can. Light and lively, with a refreshing focus on character and a blessed scarcity of mind-numbing spectacle, it’s a satisfying continuation, one that cannily plays up the franchise’s strengths (interpersonal dynamics, cheeky comedy) while minimizing its weaknesses (lack of stakes, weightless space battles). It may be just another episode in the adventures of the Enterprise crew, but it’s a damn good episode. Read More

Read more

Deadpool: A Wisecracking Superhero Takes Aim at Bad Guys, and a Genre

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds as a smartass superhero in "Deadpool"

There’s truth in advertising, and then there are the opening credits to Deadpool. Soundtracked to Juice Newton’s ’80s ballad “Angel of the Morning”, the camera pans and pulls slowly through a frozen still of interrupted carnage, and amid the suspended bullets and geysers of spurting blood, there peeks out a People Magazine cover. In that 2010 issue, People named Ryan Reynolds the sexiest man alive, so this would seem to be an opportune time for the title sequence to announce Reynolds’s presence in this madcap meta movie. Instead, the credits read, “Starring: God’s Perfect Idiot,” followed by other trivializing labels that summarize the remaining cast members: “a hot chick,” “a British villain,” “the comic relief,” “a CGI character.” The sequence concludes by informing us that Deadpool was produced by “asshats”, written by “the real heroes here”, and directed by “an overpaid tool”.

Is this anarchically funny or pitifully defensive? Who says it can’t be both? An ultraviolent superhero origin story filtered through the self-aware parody of send-ups like 21 Jump Street, Deadpool seeks to eviscerate the formula that pervades the Marvel Cinematic Universe while simultaneously hewing to that very template. (For the record, Deadpool is a Marvel production but is not formally associated with the MCU.) This means that it comes wrapped in a shield of protective irony that makes it virtually impervious to criticism. That is, how do you judge a pointless comic-book movie that so clearly knows it’s a pointless comic-book movie? Many MCU pictures are like schoolyard bullies, browbeating their mass audiences into submission through brute force. Deadpool is more like the class clown; accuse it of being stupid, and it’s likely to retort, “I know you are, but what am I?” Read More

Read more

Spectre: Secret Agent Man, Haunted by His Past

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig returns as James Bond, Agent 007, in "Spectre"

James Bond may be a spy, but he’s also a known quantity. Britain’s most daring and debonair secret agent has been gliding cavalierly across movie screens for the past half-century, consistently dazzling us with his savvy and his pluck, even as we have grown accustomed to his nonchalant displays of implausible superheroism. The sheer volume of the Bond canon—23 films, some inevitably better than others, but all adhering more or less to the same basic template—makes the prospect of a new film featuring Agent 007 both challenging and liberating. It is difficult by now to impress us, we who have watched Bond consistently outfight and outwit his foes, whether via car or plane or parachute. But familiarity can breed opportunity as well as contempt, and recent Bond pictures have illustrated the franchise’s capacity for growth, even as they have dutifully paid homage to their forebears.

Spectre, the fourth James Bond movie to star Daniel Craig (and the second directed by Sam Mendes, following his superb Skyfall), is both the most traditional and the most ambitious of his quartet. It conforms to the established formula with jovial style, bombarding us with outlandish action sequences, beautiful women, luxury cars, and exotic locations. But it also attempts to serve as a conclusion of sorts, a culmination of the franchise rebooting cultivated by the first three Craig-led pictures. The aspiration may be admirable, but the results are decidedly less so. As a classic Bond movie, Spectre is perfectly adequate, a collection of reasonably impressive moments that do little to distinguish themselves from prior entries. But as a piece of serialized storytelling, it is startlingly misguided, a poorly judged attempt to retcon the previous films into the building blocks of a larger scheme. Spectre raises itself up as the Big Bad, but it really just brings the Craig era to its low point. Read More

Read more