Action

Quick Hits: No Hard Feelings; Elemental; Extraction 2

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Hemsworth in Extraction 2; Leah Lewis in Elemental; Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings. Like most movie stars, Jennifer Lawrence tends to play the hero. She’s showcased plenty of range in her leading roles—as a resourceful vagrant (Winter’s Bone), as an intrepid messiah (the Hunger Games pictures), as a striving innovator (the underrated Joy), as a frantic parent (mother!)—but she invariably lays claim to your sympathy, wielding a winning combination of innocence and resolve. So what’s intriguing about No Hard Feelings, the new comedy from Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys), is that it finds Lawrence playing a woman who’s selfish, vengeful, and kind of mean. Her character, Maddie, isn’t exactly a villain, but the closest she gets to traditional heroism comes when she’s outracing the cops who are primed to suspend her license, all while a teenager is clinging to the hood of her car.

Maddie’s acrimony isn’t entirely without cause. She’s behind on the property taxes for her beloved Montauk home, and her primary source of income (driving for Uber) vaporizes after her ex-boyfriend, scorned from her prior ghosting, repos her car. She also resents the seasonal influx of wealthy tourists and the creep of gentrification they represent. But Maddie’s bitterness runs deeper than circumstantial irritation, and the trick of Lawrence’s performance is that she has the courage to make the character unlikable while simultaneously depicting her as a figure of nigh-mythical desirability. Read More

Read more

Fast X: Why So Furious?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Vin Diesel in Fast X

Bloat is endemic to all franchises, but the Fast & Furious pictures have a peculiar way of taking on water. For all of their chases and explosions and putative danger, these noisy conflagrations are curiously averse to death, loss, and even long-term conflict; antagonists aren’t defeated but converted into partners—new members of an ever-sprawling family. Fast X, the tidily titled tenth installment, doesn’t attempt to solve this problem, but it does exhibit some meta awareness of it. At one point, a beefy suit named Aimes (Alan Ritchson, from Amazon’s Reacher series), who works for a nebulous government(?) outfit known as The Agency, delivers an expository rundown describing how an erstwhile gang of California street racers gradually shifted from hijacking DVD players to landing on Interpol’s Most Wanted list—all the while turning cops into robbers. It’s a pointless info dump (did you really not know who these guys were before you bought your ticket?), but it also evinces a shiver of discernment. This is our formula, proclaims the screenplay from Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin. These movies have never made any sense—not narratively, not physically, and certainly not emotionally—but at least now they’re owning up to it.

To suggest that Fast X is clever is to travel several suspension bridges too far. All of the saga’s usual flaws—lugubrious characters, limp comedy, outrageous but unconvincing set pieces—remain in place, to the point where the new director, studio journeyman Louis Leterrier (replacing Lin, who departed due to the dreaded “creative differences”), seems to treat them as inherited property. And as was the case with the prior episode, the tedious F9, the franchise continues a misguided attempt to mine its own history—here opening with a recreation of the climactic Rio de Janeiro vault heist from Fast Five, complete with necromantic flashbacks of the late Paul Walker. (If you were concerned the series might actually wrestle with Walker’s death and incorporate it into the story, never fear; a throwaway line that “Mia and Brian are safe” satisfies all interested parties as to their absence, though Jordana Brewster does appear for a short scene of auntly protection.) Read More

Read more

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Role-Playing Maims

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The key to a successful Dungeons & Dragons campaign, as I understand it—my knowledge derives not from personal experience, but from pop-cultural representations in shows like Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks, and Community—is the careful blend of imagination, collaboration, and luck. Honor Among Thieves, the new wannabe D&D franchise-starter directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio), possesses each of these qualities in moderate measure, as though it’s distributing a maximum allotment of points across various attributes. It’s mildly creative, a little fortunate (in the current environment, a non-superhero fantasy epic feels positively refreshing), and boisterously cooperative. It is the last of these traits which rescues it from the crowded bucket of corporatized slop, turning yet another soulless IP extension into a passable diversion.

If that sounds like faint praise, remember that we’re talking about a big-screen adaptation of a fucking board game. Yet the pleasure of RPGs lies in their facility for assembling friends around a table (Daley got his acting start playing one of the nerdy gamers on Freaks and Geeks), so it’s fitting that this Dungeons & Dragons functions as an ensemble heist picture. Sure, there are presumed easter eggs in the form of fancy artifacts, mighty creatures, powerful enchantments, and exotic locations. (As the title promises, we begin in a dungeon before eventually meeting multiple dragons.) But most important, there is a motley gang of roguish outlaws, banding together to accomplish a common purpose. Read More

Read more

John Wick: Chapter 4: Sit Back, Relax, and Destroy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4

During one of the many, many fight scenes in John Wick: Chapter 4, an antagonist named Caine issues a call for expediency: “Let’s get this shit over with.” I hesitate to quibble with Caine, not least because he’s a deadly assassin played with balletic grace by Donnie Yen, but his directive here isn’t just grouchy; it violates the very spirit of the franchise. The John Wick pictures are creatures of excess and extravagance. Their hero may be a ruthlessly efficient killer, but the movies which sustain him are fueled by elaborate martial artistry and ornate mythology. They don’t get shit over with; they deliver some of the craziest shit imaginable.

Chapter 4, the latest, longest, and (potentially) last installment in the series which began in 2014, capably fulfills the franchise’s extremist imperatives, even as it subtly interrogates them. Or maybe not so subtly. It’s been nine years and four films since a group of Russian thugs killed the wrong guy’s puppy, and the plot hasn’t really changed ever since; John is still angry, still hunted, and still—as played with soulful physicality by Keanu Reeves—meting out retribution via manifold means and gruff precision. The prior episode, the bonkers and gloriously operatic Parabellum, essentially finished where it started, with a bloodied but unbroken John vowing revenge against the sinister cabal known as the High Table. Chapter 4 continues this endless battle—a rather lopsided duel in which one person wages war against what seem to be thousands of expendable henchmen (when someone asks John how many people he needed to kill to reach a certain point, he responds, with characteristic curtness, “A lot”)—but it also contemplates the existential toll that time and death have levied on the bearded man in the bulletproof suit. Read More

Read more

Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

Read more