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The Matrix Resurrections: One Skill Makes It Larger, Other Thrills Feel Small

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Resurrections

The white rabbit keeps hopping along in The Matrix Resurrections, the trippy, stimulating, overcaffeinated sequel from Lana Wachowski. It’s a dizzying movie, coursing with energy and teeming with ideas. It’s also kind of a mess; it struggles to wrangle its colliding philosophies into a coherent narrative, and it lacks the spirited visual imagination of its predecessors. But even if it’s a mess, it is very much somebody’s mess. Much like with her prior feature, Jupiter Ascending, which Wachowski made with her sister Lilly, the mistakes of The Matrix Resurrections are errors of commission; they are the consequences of an artist desperately trying to channel her fusillade of thoughts and emotions onto the screen. The blunders on display here are at least failures of personality rather than anonymity.

Speaking of personality: What makes us who we are? That was just one of countless questions posed and pondered by the first Matrix, the crown jewel of the cinematic treasure trove that was 1999. A bolt from the green-tinted blue, it was an electrifying fusion of brains and brawn that made a sizable swath of viewers question their own existence (not that I have anyone in mind), even as it attacked their nerve centers with eye-popping effects and kinetic fight scenes. The ensuing episodes, Reloaded and Revolutions, were less intellectually mind-scraping but were nevertheless heroic achievements in their own right; the jaw-dropping freeway chase in Reloaded remains the gold standard in contemporary action filmmaking, and it’s just one of a dozen-odd invigorating set pieces spread across the two sequels. So the standard challenge which attends any attempt at resuscitating a moribund franchise—the need to revivify a long-dormant universe in a way that both integrates the prior installments and upstages them—is especially perilous in this case. Read More

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Dune, The French Dispatch, and World-Building Great and Small

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Timothée Chalamet in Dune and The French Dispatch

Denis Villeneuve and Wes Anderson are strangely similar filmmakers, even though they make exceedingly dissimilar films. Villeneuve’s movies are grand, sprawling adventures that envision alien life forms and contemplate dystopian futures. Anderson, by contrast, makes tidy, compact comedies whose foremost exotica are their characters’ eccentricities, and which tend to unfold in an unspecified but highly particular recent past. Yet both directors are true artisans skilled in the craft of cinematic world-building; for them, the screen is a coloring book for their fertile imaginations, one that should be sketched in as boldly and minutely as possible. Put differently, Villeneuve and Anderson treat movie-making like a work of galactic creation. One looks to the skies, the other to the soul, but both construct their own universes, packed with detail, whimsy, and awe.

This past weekend was something of a feast for cinephiles, as it brought new films from the two auteurs, both of which the COVID-19 pandemic had delayed for roughly a year. Villeneuve’s Dune, the long-awaited adaptation of the beloved science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, finds the Canadian literally building a brand new world, one teeming with wonder and innovation. Anderson’s The French Dispatch, meanwhile, is more earthbound but no less profligate in its assembly. Both are natural progressions that reflect their makers’ career-long preoccupations, yet while both are undeniably impressive aesthetic achievements, only one fully succeeds as a piece of dramatic entertainment. Read More

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No Time to Die: Do You Expect Me to Squawk? No, It Expects You to Cry

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig in No Time to Die

The pandemic may have delayed James Bond, but can James Bond defeat a pandemic? It’s a piece of unnerving cinematic kismet that No Time to Die, the fifth and final entry starring Daniel Craig as everyone’s favorite martini-drinking secret agent, finds the erstwhile 007 racing to stop the release of a deadly bioweapon. Originally set for release in April 2020 (ha!) before being postponed roughly 35 different times over the past 18 months, this latest depiction of Ian Fleming’s tuxedoed superspy has suffered gravely on its bumpy journey to the multiplex, so much so that its fictional threat—mass distribution of airborne toxins—seems both eerily prescient (the script was completed well before COVID-19’s arrival) and oddly quaint. When compared with widespread vaccine obstinacy, performative litigation over mask mandates, and right-wing disinformation campaigns, how dangerous can a single supervillain really be?

But nobody watches a James Bond flick for the plot; it’s the man with the golden puns we’re after. Every new 007 develops his own signature—the pithy charm of Sean Connery, the jocular cheese of Roger Moore, the arch distance of Pierce Brosnan—and the Craig era has been defined by a brooding intensity that mingles, sometimes productively and sometimes awkwardly, with an emotional vulnerability. The first blond Bond has always been a capable puncher and competent quipper, but his legacy is the sting of loss that lingers over his romantic entanglements; what were once male-gaze rituals of masculine conquest and feminine adoration became, in the new millennium, something resembling genuine, mutual relationships. As the capstone to Craig’s decade-and-a-half term of service in the role of 007, No Time to Die strives to marry the franchise’s more traditional elements—the gadgets and the globe-trotting, the brutes and the babes—with its newfound sensibility of heartache and regret. Read More

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Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: How to Contain Your Dragon

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simu Liu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings could have been a damn good comic-book movie, if only it hadn’t been about the Ten Rings. Neatly ornamented circlets that flash blue-and-purple lightning, these conjoined jewels vest their bearer with cosmic power, which is cool for him but unfortunate for us. I’m sure that blasting bolts of deadly energy from your wrists is an efficient method of laying waste to your enemies; visually speaking, it’s a drag, and so is this film’s prologue, which appears poised to squander the great Tony Leung—saddling him with lank hair and medieval armor, then watching as he magically vaults over and slices through an entire opposing army. He’s lord of the blings, and his growling invulnerability initially marks him as yet another tedious Marvel villain.

Happily, the Ten Rings factor little into Shang-Chi, at least until its predictably torpid climax. Even the tired prologue is something of a feint, seeing as how it’s followed by a second preamble, this one far more elegant. Flashing forward a thousand-odd years to 1996, it finds Leung’s heavy, Xu Wenwu, newly shorn and stumbling into a pastoral grove, where he trades balletic blows with his future wife, Ying Li (Fala Chen); their graceful combat, as much a dance as a fight, recalls the stylish wirework of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And for most of its runtime, Shang-Chi aspires to that level of intimacy and fluidity, eschewing CGI pyrotechnics and globe-altering stakes in favor of taut action and clenched family drama. Read More

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Free Guy: Leveling Up, One Cross-Promotion at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds in "Free Guy"

Once you acknowledge that it’s creatively bankrupt, Free Guy becomes a reasonably diverting time at the movies. It’s a work of benevolent fraud, like an identity thief who steals your credit card and then buys you some cool shit before jetting off to Cancun. It’s also a fascinating document for where it sits in today’s precarious blockbuster landscape: a big-budget original screenplay that nonetheless feels awkwardly bootstrapped to the superior pictures it’s imitating. It’s an original copy—an organic movie with a synthetic soul.

Free Guy was technically directed by the journeyman Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel), but its true authorship is corporate. It’s being distributed under the banner of “20th Century Studios”, which means it was initially developed at Fox before that company was acquired by Disney, the insatiable commercial behemoth that currently owns roughly 98% of the market share. The film’s first trailer, which premiered back during the Before Times of December 2019, winkingly ridiculed the Mouse House’s penchant for recycling old hits (“from the studio that brought you Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King… twice”), but Free Guy occupies a curious double-zone; even as it’s trumpeting its original bona fides at every turn, it’s continually leveraging its preexisting brand in the hope of launching yet another merchandise-friendly franchise. Read More

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