Thriller

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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The Shallows: The Bold Babe and the Sea

Jeremy BeckReviews
Blake Lively takes on a shark in "The Shallows"

Water, water is everywhere in The Shallows, and there isn’t a drop to drink, though that’s due less to its salt than its color. Not long into this lean, mean thriller from Jaume Collet-Serra, the tranquil blue of the sea’s waves gets stained with blood, and a peaceful getaway transforms into a harrowing struggle of survival. It never becomes anything more than that, but that’s part of its charm. The Shallows may lack the towering ambition of Gravity or the scrupulous minimalism of All Is Lost, but its gritty flair and appealing star nevertheless make it a worthy entrant in the “man vs. nature” canon. At the very least, it will have you thinking twice the next time you consider wading into the water.

Not that The Shallows‘ opening act is particularly frightening; in fact, if you ignore the scary tone-setting prologue, it’s positively idyllic. Our protagonist is Nancy (a revelatory Blake Lively), a medical student journeying to a secluded Mexican beach that her mother once told her about. It’s as advertised, with golden sand leading into a majestic gulf whose giant waves render this isolated inlet a surfer’s paradise. Read More

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The Nice Guys: Reluctant Heroes Shoot Off Their Mouths, Their Pistols

Jeremy BeckReviews
Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling in Shane Black's "The Nice Guys"

Shane Black loves misfits. His screenplay for Lethal Weapon spawned countless derivative buddy-cop movies, but its heart lay in the fragile eccentricity that made Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs such a dashing and dangerous hero. His script for The Last Boy Scout paired two fallen losers—a disgraced ex-Secret Service agent (Bruce Willis) and a former football star (Damon Wayans)—then watched with glee as they stumbled into a ludicrous plot involving illegal sports gambling. And Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his directorial debut, starred Robert Downey Jr. as a hapless unemployed actor whose motor-mouthed speech was exceeded in speed only by the bullets whizzing past him. All three movies indulge in hard-boiled genre thrills—double-crosses, overbaked conspiracies, larger-than-life villains—but they’re elevated by a writer’s true love for his characters and his words. Now, Black is back with The Nice Guys, a caper-comedy that both exposes the director’s worst tendencies and showcases his unique brilliance.

The flaws of this disposable, delightful film are obvious. It’s too long, its action is dull, its violence is pointless, and its plotting is simultaneously overcomplicated and undercooked. With a different director, these deficiencies might be crippling, but with Black (who shares scripting duties here with Anthony Bagarozzi), they’re trivial. You don’t watch The Nice Guys to see what happens next. You watch The Nice Guys to hang out with the nice guys. Read More

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Money Monster: Angry Investor Wants Answers, or Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack O'Connell and George Clooney in Jodie Foster's "Money Monster"

Money Monster is a fanciful parable rooted in a real-life catastrophe. In December of 2007, the U.S. economy crashed, and the Great Recession began. People lost their homes, their jobs, and a whole lot of their money. The financial markets have since rebounded, but for many, the acrid scent of the collapse still lingers. Attempting to capitalize on this continuing bitterness, Money Monster paints a portrait of Wall Street as a rotted abscess, festering with corruption and venality. You’ve never seen America’s big banks depicted in such an unflattering light. Well, unless you’ve seen The Big Short. Or Margin Call. Or Too Big to Fail. Or Inside Job. Or a newspaper article or blog post that was written at any point in the past eight years.

You get the picture. This movie, which has been directed by Jodie Foster from a script by a trio of screenwriters, isn’t saying anything new. But topicality is hardly a requirement of cinematic worth, and while Money Monster isn’t remotely insightful, it is rarely uninteresting. Some of this is to its benefit: It sports a decent premise, it’s surprisingly funny, and it features excellent actors who take their craft seriously. But the real fascination surrounding this silly, vacuous, ultimately disastrous thriller is of the morbid variety. Watching it, you are compelled to wonder just how a picture of such pedigree could disintegrate into such a puddle of idiocy. Perhaps it’s all a clandestine metaphor designed to mirror the tumultuous nature of the recession itself. It raises your hopes through bluster and recklessness before it crashes—hard. Read More

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Green Room: Beware of Dog and Neo-Nazis

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, and Alia Shawkat, trapped in "Green Room"

“When you take it all virtual, you lose the texture,” Pat says early in Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s lean, nasty, uncompromising new thriller. Pat, played by the squirrelly actor Anton Yelchin, is speaking about his band’s grass-roots approach to music, but he’s also serving as a mouthpiece for his writer-director. A roughneck at heart, Saulnier doesn’t so much defy cinema’s technological advances—like most low-budget filmmakers, he shoots in digital, a relatively newfangled technique—but exploits them to make movies that are primal and proudly unpolished. His previous feature, Blue Ruin, embraced a popular genre (the revenge picture) while simultaneously upending that genre’s conventions, but it was most noticeable for its atmosphere, a queasy aura of sweat, grime, and helpless panic. Now he brings us Green Room, a terror film about a handful of people locked in a tiny space, desperate to escape. Its setup is familiar, but its execution is marvelously visceral. The result is both exhilarating and oddly strangulating—you cannot help but enjoy this movie’s assaultive body blows, even as its hands begin to tighten around your neck.

Pat is the bassist for the Ain’t Rights, a punk-rock four-piece also featuring lead singer Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat, miles from her iconic role on Arrested Development), and drummer Reece (Joe Cole, from the BBC’s Peaky Blinders). They’re touring the Pacific Northwest, though “touring” is a generous term for their ritual, which consists of scrounging for gigs at sparsely populated clubs and siphoning gas from parked cars to keep their rundown van moving. After plowing through a particularly humiliating performance that nets them six bucks apiece, they get wind of another opportunity outside nearby Portland, which they accept eagerly. When they arrive at the venue—a backwoods bar just east of nowhere—they discover that they’ve been mislabeled “The Aren’t Rights” and, more disconcertingly, that the place is populated by skinheads and is adorned with Nazi paraphernalia. Being iconoclasts, they settle on a special number for the opening song of their set: a cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!”. Read More

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