Grade: C plus

Kong: Skull Island: Doing the Monster Mash, Upriver in Vietnam

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston take a gander at King Kong in "Skull Island"

One of the lasting lessons of Jaws was that shrouding your monster in mystery elevates its threat level; over the film’s first half, we grow to appreciate the terrifying power of its man-eating shark, but we don’t actually see the beast for well over an hour. Kong: Skull Island may aspire to the heights of classic ’70s cinema, but it deems this particular piece of Spielbergian wisdom to be hogwash. Here, we glimpse the titular ape almost instantly, and while he’s obscured by shadow during the prologue, by the time the first main set piece rolls around, we’re treated to the sight of King Kong in all his massive glory. He’s big, he’s mean, and you had better believe that he’s going to knock your puny little helicopter right out of the sky.

Subtle and suspenseful, this is not. But while Kong: Skull Island is undeniably blockheaded, its bluntness is also kind of disarming. Here is an unpretentious big-budget movie that is unapologetic in its prioritization of action and spectacle. If you want thoughtful storytelling or complex characters, go to the art house. Here there be monsters. Read More

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Nocturnal Animals: Brutality Is Skin Deep

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amy Adams is a wreck in Tom Ford's "Nocturnal Animals"

Title sequences can do more than just convey rudimentary information about a film’s cast and crew—they can set the mood, introduce a plot, establish a theme. So what to make of the opening credits of Nocturnal Animals, which impassively present a parade of naked, obese women dancing in slow-motion as firecrackers explode around them? Is this garish display meant to be revolting? Titillating? Provocative? Profound? Forced to guess, one might argue that the director, Tom Ford, is attempting to draw a line between happiness and despair, remarking that beauty and brutality are often intertwined. (To do so, one would first need to ignore the accusations of body-shaming that have dogged Ford regarding the sequence.) But that isn’t quite right, because the dirty joke of this dirty movie is that, much like its jarring opening credits, it means absolutely nothing.

Which is not to say that Nocturnal Animals is unsightly. Far from it. A famous fashion designer making his second foray into cinema (following the well-received, overwrought A Single Man), Ford fails to weave the gorgeous with the grotesque as meaningfully as he’d like, but he nevertheless supplies ample quantities of both. For the former, he casts Amy Adams (always a good start), dresses her in ravishing clothes, and plops her in the middle of an austere, pristinely manicured Malibu mansion. Adams plays Susan, a paragon of first-world materialism; she owns an art gallery, attends fancy parties, and is married to a handsome husband (Armie Hammer) who regularly jets off to New York to close deals and screw mistresses. Despite her wealth and creature comforts, Susan is plainly disenchanted with her life—she needs a jolt of excitement to jostle her out of her ennui. Read More

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Nerve: Gotta Catch ‘Em All, Your Life’s on the Line

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kimiko Glenn, Emma Roberts, and Miles Heizer in "Nerve"

The teenagers in Nerve are slaves to their smartphones, blindly following their devices’ directions even when they appear to be leading them toward certain death. This makes Nerve a very silly movie, though perhaps not as silly as it would have seemed a month ago. The recent Pokémon Go craze—in which people fixated on their Androids have stumbled into robberies, corpses, and murder—lends Nerve more than a whiff of topical relevance. What could have been a stupid and implausible dystopian thriller now becomes something resembling a cautionary tale, a didactic fable that concerned friends can relay to their Pikachu-obsessed peers. Unfortunately, while it’s less implausible than it might have been, it’s still pretty stupid.

Which doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun. Directed with style and snap by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, Nerve is a big-screen experience that takes great heed to remind us how tethered we are to our pocket-sized monitors. Using a variety of flashy tracks—frequent POV shots, distorted camera angles, translucent screens, text running through images both horizontally and vertically—Schulman and Joost keep your eyes busy, soaking the frame in a neon-drenched aesthetic that recalls Spring Breakers. From the outset, Nerve doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and its narrative only deteriorates as it goes along, but it’s consistently eye-catching. Read More

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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

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Black Mass: Cops and Gangsters, Caught in a City’s Undertow

Jeremy BeckReviews
Johnny Depp stars as Whitey Bulger in "Black Mass"

James Whitey Bulger was one of the most notorious mobsters in United States history. What, don’t believe me? Just watch Black Mass, a movie that repeatedly and insistently trumpets Bulger’s legendary place in American gangster lore at every shrill turn. It features no shortage of people, whether harried law enforcement agents or cowed criminal cohorts, braying about Bulger’s illegal exploits and moral contemptibility. Yet the oddest thing about this adequately entertaining movie, which was directed in workmanlike fashion by Scott Cooper and features a dream-team cast, is that for all its vociferous proclamations, it reveals very little about who Bulger was, what he did, or how he eventually became one of the country’s most wanted fugitives. Yes, he kills a few people over the course of the film, and he threatens a few others, and he certainly seems very mean. But to the extent that he ruled Boston’s underworld for two decades as the leader of the Winter Hill Gang, well, you’ll just have to take Black Mass at its word. It presents a litany of testimony swearing to Bulger’s evil, but therein lies its flaw: It tells, but it does not show.

This does not mean that there is nothing to see. To begin with, there is the unforgettable sight of a blue-eyed Johnny Depp. Those eerie cerulean irises (the product of contact lenses), along with slicked-back pale-blond hair and prosthetically rotted teeth, combine to give 2009’s sexiest man alive a truly frightening countenance. And while one might quibble with the subtlety of Depp’s performance as Bulger—which is to say, there is none—it is impossible to deny the ferocious commitment he brings to the role. Often the target of critical ridicule for his unfettered flamboyance (which can, of course, yield spectacular results), he is all business here, those unblinking, alien blues teaming with a snarling Beantown monotone that befits Bulger’s blunt, monolithic persona. He rarely raises his voice, but he is always threatening, whether he’s coolly berating an underling or, in the film’s most quietly terrifying scene, exerting his will over a colleague’s wife. He is not someone you wish to cross. Read More

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