Film

“What did you think would happen? Ever seen Metropolis? The Stepford Wives? Terminator?”

Near miss

While director Luke Scott definitely shows he’s inherited some of his dad’s helming chops, Morgan, his feature directing debut, is hampered by an ultimately derivative script. The son of the great Ridley Scott shows some major visual flair and an ability to draw good performances from his cast, but the movie itself, with Dad producing, is a pastiche of other science fiction and horror films, most notably his dad’s own Blade Runner.

Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy) is an artificially created humanlike being. (I guess that’s the best way to describe it.) She’s only five but looks like a teenager and has superior intellect and physical skills. She’s been genetically engineered to age quickly, and while she is basically a well-meaning entity, her behavioral wires get a little crossed up sometimes, resulting in violent “errors.”

Morgan goes apeshit when she’s not allowed outside. This results in the character played by Jennifer Jason Leigh being on pain meds for the whole movie with a big, bloody gauze on her eye. The “corporation” that helped create Morgan sends icy company woman Lee Weathers (Kate Mara) out to assess the matter and recommend a course of action.

The setting for the film is visually pleasing— an underground laboratory in the middle of a pine forest. This also gives the film a combined sense of isolation and claustrophobia, much like John Carpenter’s The Thing, minus the snow. Morgan lives in a room always monitored through a glass wall and video cameras (shades of Ex Machina).

Giving another great 2016 performance—after The Witch—that puts her in the running for Breakout Actress of the Year, Taylor-Joy gives Morgan some compelling dimension. Dressed in a gray hoodie and sporting a silvery skin tone that makes her look like a skater girl with shit makeup skills, Taylor-Joy rises well above the conventionality of the role. She delivers a tragic android who probably would’ve led an interesting

life had her personality dials been turned down just a tad in the test tubes. Mara’s presence feels a little off, something that the story eventually explains in a fashion that isn’t as shocking as screenwriter Seth W. Owen wants it to be. Paul Giamatti shows up as a behavior therapist who intentionally pushes Morgan’s buttons during a personality test. His part equates to that of the goat tied up for the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, his fate all too easy to see. The cast is peppered with a few more greats, including Toby Jones as the lead scientist with a big, unnatural attachment to his creation. Michelle Yeoh also shows up as another scientist and Morgan’s mother figure, while the aforementioned Leigh has a few scenes that she imbues with her usual reliability. It all looks good thanks to stellar work from cinematographer Mark Patten, who worked in the “camera department” for Ridley Scott’s The Martian and Exodus: Morgan Gods and Kings. It’s an impressive debut for Patten, while Max 12345 Richter provides an excellent soundtrack. Director: Luke Scott All of these good performances, Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, great visuals, and slick sounds Kate Mara, Paul Giamatti make it all the more a bummer that the movie feels a bit stale in the end. I, for one, was not at all happy with the payoff, a big twist that felt completely unnecessary and cheap. Had the movie wrapped up on a more original note, it could’ve qualified as decent enough genre fare. Morgan is a near miss. A few too many scenes play out in a way that will have you guessing accurately as to what happens next. Scott will construct a scene with major tension, but then it falls flat due to the predictability. The Giamatti scene is a major example. It does continue the promising career of TaylorJoy, who almost makes the whole thing worthwhile. She’s not finished with horror films—she will headline the scary-looking Split from the mildly resurgent M. Night Shyamalan next year. As for Scott, he might be a director to keep an eye on. Daddy just needs to find his boy a better script to play with the next time out. Ω

3Blood Father Mel Gibson is a fucking asshole, but he can act with the best of them. As Link, an ex-con with a tattoo parlor in his trailer and a missing daughter (Erin Moriarty), he’s a stunning, grizzly marvel—elevating mediocre material into something completely watchable. When the missing daughter gets herself into some major trouble, she comes back on the grid by giving Link a call. Having never really known his daughter, Link is determined to be the dad he never was thanks to a seven-year prison stint, and he goes into super-protective mode. The two wind up on the run from a drug cartel, and that leads to sights like Gibson on a motorcycle blowing people away with a shotgun. This is a tour de force for Gibson, whose ranting inside Link’s trailer as it is being shot to shreds just might be the best piece of acting he’s ever put forth. Director Jean-Francois Richet lucked out in casting Gibson as this character desperately in search of redemption. It suits Gibson very well at this time, and I can’t think of an actor who would’ve done a better job with this material. William H. Macy is reliably good as Link’s sponsor. Moriarty holds her own against the insane Gibson, and Michael Parks kills it as a former friend and true bastard. If you should choose to watch it, I think you’ll be surprised. (Streaming on iTunes and Amazon.com during a limited theatrical release.)

2Don’t Breathe Three dimwits (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto) try to rob a blind military veteran (a growly Stephen Lang) of his dough in his house. In the course of their heist, they find out a few really bad things about the guy, including his aspirations to be the next Jigsaw (the presently retired, ridiculous villain from the Saw series). Rocky (Levy, who also starred in Alvarez’s Evil Dead) wants to get out of Detroit and move to California with her little sister. She and her boyfriend (Zovatto) have been pulling off minor robberies with Alex (Minnette), using alarm codes from his dad’s security company. They get wind of a boatload of money in the blind man’s house and set out to rob him while he’s home. Yes, the premise is interesting, but things go off the rails pretty quickly when The Blind Man—that’s his actual character name—somehow survives a gassing and interrupts the robbery. His initial thwarting of the break-in is convincing enough, but then the movie becomes all about the robbers standing still while The Blind Man races right by them. Look, I know movies are mostly fiction and much of what happens in them can’t really happen in the real world. Still, I look for a certain amount of reality in movies that don’t contain ghosts, aliens, cyborgs, etc.

5Hell or High Water Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster all destroy their parts in this absolutely terrific modern Western from director David Mackenzie. Pine and Foster play two brothers who come up with a bank-robbing scheme to save the family farm, and Bridges is the soonto-be-retired sheriff trying to stop them. Pine takes his career into all new territories with his work here, making you forget he’s Captain Kirk and totally disappearing into his part. Foster, an actor I couldn’t stand when he was younger, just gets better and better with each film, with this being his best work yet. Pine is supposedly the more sensible one, while Foster is the nut. What’s great about the writing here is how those roles sometimes switch, and the acting by both makes it mesmerizing to watch. What else can you say about Bridges at this point? He’s one of the best actors to have ever walked the Earth, and this further cements that fact. Mackenzie, whose most notorious prior film was the underrated StarredUp, takes a step into the elite class with this one. His staging of car chases and manhunts is nerve-shredding .

4Morris From America Craig Robinson and Markees Christmas are one of the better father-son teams the movies have seen in a long time in this charmer from writer-director Chad Hartigan. Christmas plays Morris, a 13-year-old American living in Germany because his dad Curtis (Robinson) has a job there as a soccer coach. Morris is learning German, trying to make friends, and developing a crush on older girl Katrin (Lina Keller). He’s dealing with the kind of crap you would expect a black American to be dealing with in an all white city. The dynamic between Robinson (easily his best performance) and Christmas makes it seem like these guys are really father and son. They complement each other perfectly, and it’s refreshing to see a father and son talk and deal the way they do in this movie. The relationship between Morris and the somewhat troublesome Katrin is also refreshing in that it never seems false. It’s a solid coming-of-age story in an unexpected and unpredictable locale, with a cast of characters (including Carla Juri of Wetlandsas Morris’ tutor) that scores across the board. This is one of the summer’s great surprises. (Streaming on iTunes and Amazon.com during limited theatrical release.)

4Sausage Party SausageParty, the animated hellcat from writer-producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is the first big studio film in a long time with screaming levels of originality. It’s a profanity-laden, blasphemous middle finger to the movie-making establishment that thinks it’s OK to turn out sequels and comic book movies that suck as long as people shell out for them. It couldn’t be more fun, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before. In a sunny supermarket, a bunch of vegetables, hot dogs and buns wake up and sing a happy song, convinced that today will be the day they are chosen by humans to enter the great beyond—the world on the other side of those automatic sliding doors. What they find on the other side of those doors is nonstop carnage, certain death, and a generally bad time for all things digestible. What makes SausagePartya cut above your average stoner movie full of food items screwing and being murdered is that it’s actually a smart swipe at organized religion and politics.

4Southside with You Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter shine as Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson on their first date in this ultra sweet, enjoyable account of when the future President and First Lady got together for a day and eventually went to see Spike Lee’s DotheRightThing. Writer-director Richard Tanne, above all things, does a great job of capturing the spirit of the late ’80s with his period piece, placing the two icons in a very believable, low-key environment. Sawyers (a dead ringer for Obama) and Sumpter capture the spirit of the couple without exaggerating any of their characteristics. It’s a blast watching a young Robinson, who was actually Obama’s mentor and advisor at a law firm he worked for that summer, keeping a persistent Obama in check with his romantic pursuits. It’s also funny to see the future president lighting up many cigarettes during the course of the movie, including in his very first scene. Tanne’s approach to the subject matter is beautifully understated, allowing for his performers to show us a couple of real people getting to know each other slowly.

1Suicide Squad BatmanvSuperman:DawnofJustice was a skunk blast to the face for most of us trying to have a good time with a superhero movie earlier this year. Suicide Squadlooked like a chance to get DC movies back on the good foot. With David Ayer (Fury, EndofWatch) at the helm, and a cast including Will Smith, Jared Leto and Margot Robbie, it looked like summer was due to get a fun blast of movie mischief. SuicideSquaddoes nothing to improve the summer blockbuster season. It actually sends a big, stinking torpedo of shit into its side, and sends the thing barreling toward the bottom of the bowl. That’s being kind. After a first half build-up/tease that does a decent job of introducing bad guy characters like Deadshot (Smith), Harley Quinn (Robbie) and the Joker (Leto), the movie becomes what can only be described as a spastic colon, resulting in that big turd referred to above.