Grade: B minus

Free Fire: Shots Squeezed Off, Insults Catapulted

Jeremy BeckReviews
Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sam Riley, and Michael Smiley in "Free Fire"

Near the end of David Mamet’s Heist, two rival criminal factions engage in a shootout on a pier. It’s a fairly unremarkable scene, except that standing in the crossfire is Bergman, an irascible fence played by Danny DeVito. As the bullets whiz past him, Bergman transforms from a tough-talking hoodlum into a conciliatory wimp, yelping in protest, “Put the fucking guns down, let’s just talk!” Free Fire, the latest whatsit from the English auteur/weirdo Ben Wheatley, essentially extends this bit of off-kilter gunplay to feature length. It assembles a motley crew of hooligans, junkies, and reprobates, then sets them loose on one another in a display of inept savagery that’s more pitiful than lethal.

That phrase might also describe Wheatley’s prior films, which have relied on showy extremism to enliven themes and narratives that are fundamentally banal. These include Kill List, a glum study of blue-collar ennui that morphed into a grisly and tasteless horror movie, and High-Rise, an initially fascinating but ultimately unwatchable satire that squandered a terrific cast in favor of incoherent montage. (I haven’t seen A Field in England, but Variety assessed it as combining “imagination-teasing ingenuity” with “a startling lapse in basic storytelling competence”, which seems to fit.) Qualitatively, Free Fire represents a dramatic improvement for Wheatley, but what’s most interesting is how he’s improved. No longer straining to confound audiences with his avant-garde brilliance, Wheatley has instead chosen to wield his gifts for the old-fashioned virtue of entertainment. Free Fire has little heart and even less depth, but compared to the arduous nature of Wheatley’s past works, its breezy emptiness is oddly refreshing. Read More

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Ghost in the Shell: All That Glitters Is Not Code

Jeremy BeckReviews
Scarlett Johansson is a troubled android in "Ghost in the Shell"

Is Scarlett Johansson superhuman? In recent years, the one-time ingénue from Lost in Translation has played an assortment of otherworldly women who fit the bill—the sociologically curious alien of Under the Skin, the cerebrally enhanced anomaly of Lucy, the preternaturally gifted warrior of the Avengers films. (The only foe whom Black Widow can’t seem to conquer is the studio that refuses to green-light her own franchise.) But even beyond her portrayals of these exceptional characters, Johansson herself has demonstrated an uncanny, seemingly inhuman ability to dig, well, under the skin, to invest her fantastical creations with quiet longing and simmering grief. That talent proves crucial to Ghost in the Shell, yet another futuristic flick about a faux-human figure wrestling with the concept of her own identity. On the page, the film’s heroine is a fascinating but familiar archetype. Johansson makes her a character.

Good thing, too. Repurposed from the hit Japanese anime from 1995, Ghost in the Shell is a brisk and surprisingly contemplative affair, but it doesn’t have much original to say about the (in)human condition. It’s easy to perceive its central story—set in a glossy dystopia where man and machine have melded—as a greatest-hits compendium of classic science-fiction cinema. There’s a dash of the chilly aesthetic of Blade Runner, a pinch of the caustic irreverence of RoboCop (though lacking the broad comedy of The Fifth Element), a heaping of the cyberpunk chic of The Matrix. Yet despite its composite nature, the dark and sleek universe of Ghost in the Shell still manages to look and feel reasonably novel. It borrows, but it doesn’t steal. Read More

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Beauty and the Beast: A Provincial Remake, But Some New Magic Flickers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dan Stevens and Emma Watson in Disney's remake of "Beauty and the Beast"

“You can’t judge people by who their father is,” Mrs. Potts sagely intones. This preoccupation with parentage is new to this version of Beauty and the Beast, Bill Condon’s half-enchanting, half-enervating remake of the 1991 animated classic. But while Mrs. Potts’ wisdom is undeniable—she speaks in the voice of Emma Thompson, after all—it is impossible to view this latest child of Disney without considering the long shadow cast by its progenitor. Every work of art must be judged on its own terms, yet the question lingers: Was there a genuine reason to make this movie, an artistic justification beyond the piles of cash that the studio is already raking in? Or, to turn another of Mrs. Potts’ observations into a question, is there something there that wasn’t there before?

Yes and no. Operating under the all-seeing mandate of a corporate overlord, Condon and his screenwriters, Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, have transported the original’s two-dimensional drawings into spit-and-glue live action with a predictable degree of fidelity. This immediately lowers the remake’s ceiling; imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is perhaps the laziest form of filmmaking. Yet this new incarnation of Beauty and the Beast, while expectedly faithful to the original, is not entirely a retread. Narratively, it has some additional backstory, which is arguably extraneous but which nevertheless adds heft to the movie’s thematic interest in the bond between parents and their offspring. Musically, beyond the instantly hummable hits from one of the biggest-selling soundtracks of the ’90s, it exhibits a handful of original songs, several of which are lousy but a few of which are actually pretty good. And of course, it features the services of a litany of estimable British and American actors, who help imbue an otherwise commercial enterprise with artisanal craft. Read More

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Magic Takes Manhattan, But Does It Still Spark?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katherine Waterston and Eddie Redmayne are troubled magicians in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"

Standing in the middle of a verdant forest where his bedroom used to be, gawking upward at a supple thunderbird the size of a small whale, Jacob Kowalski confirms that he is not in fact dreaming. “I don’t have the brains to make this up,” he admits. But J.K. Rowling does. The Harry Potter author has a limitless imagination, and the mega success of her seven novels (and eight corresponding movies) derived from her peerless ability to fuse her gift for make-believe with traditional, stalwart stories about bravery, sacrifice, and the coming of age. Among the innumerable virtues of her opus was its deceptive discipline; though the books grew progressively longer, they never felt unwieldy, and Rowling stuck to her promise of concluding Harry’s tale with the seventh volume. (Contrast this with George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, where the writer once wrote a book so long that he had to cleave it in two, and where disgruntled readers—not that I have anyone in mind—are currently gnashing their teeth awaiting the sixth installment.)

Yet while the 2007 release of The Deathly Hallows may have marked the end of Harry’s personal saga—a journey that remains inviolate, untarnished by special editions or alternate versions—his creator has started to gently expand the world he occupies. This began this past summer, when the London stage debuted Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play based on a story that Rowling co-wrote and that centers on Albus, Harry’s troubled teenage son. And it continues now with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Rowling’s first foray into screenwriting. You might consider the very existence of this movie (and the four that are rumored to follow) to be a vulgar cash-grab, a mercenary move from a selfish artist intent on squeezing every possible penny from her adoring fan base. I prefer to view it as a fascinating opportunity. Because Fantastic Beasts takes place in the land of Potter but is not based in any substantive way on her prior work (technically, the title stems from one of Harry’s school textbooks), Rowling has given herself the chance to conceive something both comfortingly familiar and wholly original. She can return to her beloved magical universe and, at the same time, start from scratch. Read More

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The Girl on the Train: Three Women’s Lives, Going off the Rails

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emily Blunt is suspicious and suspected in "The Girl on the Train"

The key test for any whodunit is whether it would still be compelling if you already knew the answer. Sure, the closing reveal in Psycho is legendary, but that shower scene is terrifying regardless of the identity of that knife-wielding woman. (For a more recent example, the least interesting element of The Night Of was the (apparent) confirmation of the actual murderer; the show was far more powerful as a tragic character study and a virulent examination of our justice system.) The “who” in “whodunit” is secondary—what really matters is the how and, more importantly, the why. With one singular exception, The Girl on the Train fails this test. It is so preoccupied with drawing out its central mystery that it never invests that mystery with any real resonance. As a result, its ultimate resolution is unlikely to inspire anything beyond the simple recognition of, “Oh, that’s who done it.”

This is especially curious, given that the majority of this film’s viewers will enter the theater already armed with the answer to its central question. Directed by Tate Taylor (The Help) from a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, The Girl on the Train is based on the best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins, a book that scratched the melodramatic itch of millions of fans of suspense literature, whether railway commuters or otherwise. Given that Taylor can’t pull the rug out from under the feet of readers who have already fallen to the floor, you might think that he would attempt to create a different hook. Instead, he appears to have faithfully—at times ploddingly, at times bracingly—transmuted the novel to the screen, fashioning the film as a persistent guessing game. The Girl on the Train functions as a sort of murderous Whack-a-Mole: Everybody is a suspect, no one can be trusted, and as soon as you peg one character as the culprit, another more likely candidate pops up. Was it the wife? The shrink? The guy in the suit (who is literally credited as “Man in the Suit”)? Who knows? Read More

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