Film

Tanks for the memories

Fury

Right in time for Halloween, writer-director David Ayer has come up with a genuine horror show in Fury, his take on a World War II tank crew trying to survive in the last days of the war. This film goes full bore in showing the horrors of war, with its very first scene depicting a brutal act of violence that shows Ayer is not playing games. His intentions are to show the effects of war on a group of men who are clinging to the last threads of sanity after years of claustrophobic, blood-soaked terror inside a tank. Brad Pitt leads the crew as Don “Wardaddy” Collier, a grizzled, scarred up individual resorting to arguably insane behavior as he treks across Nazi Germany. When he’s saddled with new recruit Norman (Logan Lerman), his behavior becomes a strange mix of paternal and completely unhinged. Other members of the crew include Boyd “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Pena) and Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal). It’s arguable that Ayer created each of these characters as stereotypical odes to the John Wayne war movies of yore. However, that’s where the common thread to bravado-filled old timey war movies ends. While the word “cliché” might pop to mind looking at the description of these characters, be assured there is nothing clichéd about the way they are portrayed. Much of the film takes place inside the tank, with a few breaks, most notably a scene when Wardaddy introduces Logan to a nice German girl while he has some eggs. The carnage in the battle scenes is unrelenting. A sequence where a group of U.S. tanks go up against a superior German tank is as harrowing as moviemaking gets.

It all builds up to a final sequence where the tank breaks down, and Wardaddy decides he isn’t going to run away from a large group of enemy soldiers approaching. This comes off as somewhat of a suicide mission, with the crew deciding to fight it out alongside their leader. I have to believe that many allied soldiers made similar decisions in taking the by Bob Grimm Nazis down 70 years ago. Not every battle was planned, and the odds were often stacked bgrimm@ against them. newsreview.com Ayer presents a scenario that’s crazy, but perhaps realistic in many ways. No movie 4 could authentically depict the horror that men like those portrayed in this film went through. Ayer and company go to great lengths to show when a nightmare goes well beyond nightmare into something altogether hellish. This is something World War II soldiers went through every day, every minute. Pitt is just a few degrees removed from his Aldo Raine from Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. It’s as if Aldo finished scalping Christoph Waltz, shaved his mustache, and joined a tank battalion. The Aldo comparison is mostly aesthetic and comes across in the accent Pitt employs. Wardaddy is totally lacking in humor. It’s a powerful characterization from an actor who rarely missteps. The tabloids have had a field day with the weird stuff LaBeouf did while making this movie: pulling out his tooth, Nicolas Cage style, refusing to shower and just acting super strange in general. Whatever weirdness he put cast and crew through results in his best screen work to date. As the preacher amongst the crew, LaBeouf is actually quite moving as a man who keeps his faith and finds immense joy in reciting scripture. This performance gives him a chance to get his once promising career back on track. Pena, who worked with Ayer before on End of Watch, is terrific, as usual, as are Lerman and Bernthal. Bernthal, like Pitt, calls upon a past character—the jerk he played on The Walking Dead—for inspiration. Stay away from Fury if you can’t handle onscreen gore. As stated above, this one is quite vicious right out of the gate and straight through its entire two-hour-plus running time. As action films go, it’s a real winner. As war films go, it’s one to be remembered. As horror films go, I doubt you’ll see anything scarier this month. Ω

"But ... what would Lee Marvin do?"

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excellent 2 A Walk Among the Tombstones Liam Neeson plays a former policeman and recovering alcoholic in director Scott Frank’s sometimes interesting and always unpleasant serial killer drama. Neeson’s Matt Scudder, after accidentally killing a civilian during a shootout, has gone rogue since his days on the force. Eight years have passed, and while he’s quit drinking, he’s doing some pretty unsavory jobs as a private investigator. He gets pulled into the world of a drug dealer after his wife has been kidnapped, and a lot of bad, bad things start happening. Neeson is very good in the film, but the script, written by Frank and based on the novel by Lawrence Block, has too many cardboard characters. Worst of all is a homeless kid sidekick. There’s also the strungout heroin addict, the whispery-voiced abductor of women, and the creepy guy who tends the cemetery and keeps pigeons on the roof … and he knows something. I liked Neeson here, and I wouldn’t mind seeing the character again. Hopefully, the next film with this character—if there is one—trims the fat.

2Dolphin Tale 2 Call this one The Empire Strikes Back of Dolphin Tale movies, in that it is slightly better than the original (not much—just slightly), and it has Tauntauns (actually, that’s not true). The likes of Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd and Harry Connick Jr. rejoin annoying child actors Nathan Gamble and Cozi Zuehlsdorff (yes, the Cozi Zuehlsdorff) for another round of gooey sentimentality involving dolphins. This time out, and probably due to all of those current issues involving whales and dolphins in captivity, the story spends a lot of time on rehabbing and releasing animals rather than confining them for human amusement. In addition to Winter, the dolphin with the prosthetic tail, there’s a pretty awesome sea turtle and a kooky pelican that kids will love. The movie kind of works as educational fare, but when it drifts away from the aquarium tanks, it’s a real hell ride. It must be said that Harry Connick Jr. can’t act for beans, Ashley Judd’s career has really hit the skids, and Morgan Freeman just has no business being within a million miles of this film. Gamble and Zuehlsdorff (yes, the Cozi Zuehlsdorff) are, I’m sure, a couple of exquisite human beings, but watching them in a movie is an annoying, tedious task. I love the dolphins and aquatic life in this film. It’s the humans who drive me crazy.

3The Equalizer Based on a TV show from the ’80s that I never once watched, Denzel Washington plays Robert McCall, a quiet employee at a Home Depot-type store. Robert likes to go drink tea at a local diner and read his book, and it appears that there's very little to him. When a young prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) gets into trouble with Russian mobsters, Robert springs into action, and major details of his past are slowly revealed. Washington is pretty damned great in the role, playing a sweet, gentle man who can tear your face off in an instant without blinking an eye. The film is directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), and while Fuqua resorts to a lot of visual clichés (slow motion, rain), he totally owns those clichés. Marton Csokas is good and scary as Teddy, the film’s main bad guy. His confrontations with Robert are quite memorable. The movie doesn’t offer much when it comes to new things, but it does provide solid entertainment through and through.

5Gone Girl David Fincher set out to make the nastiest, most poisonous movie about marriages gone bad ever made, and I think he succeeded. Fincher and Gillian Flynn, the author of the novel and screenplay, came up with a toxic cocktail, laced with dark humor, scabrous satire and blistering performances. On the day of his fifth anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns to his home after sulking at the bar he owns with his sister (a funny Carrie Coon) to discover his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), is missing. Nick calls the police and the in-laws, and quickly finds himself sucked up in a media circus that leaves him dazed and confused. His demeanor in public is a strange combination of a malaise and ill-timed smiles. Yeah … he’s a suspect. Through a series of narrated flashbacks, we hear the story of the Flynne marriage from Amy’s perspective, chronicled in her diary. Then, at about the halfway point, the movie goes completely, wonderfully insane. For those unaware of the plot twist, my best advice to you is that you should accept it—even though it’s totally bug nuts—sit back, and enjoy the rest of this messed-up ride. Anybody who goes to this movie thinking they’re going to see something grounded in reality will be setting themselves up for disappointment. Gone Girl is nightmarish fantasy, a hyper-sensationalized “what-if” that thrives on its implausibility. Had this movie tried to stick closer to reality, it would’ve killed too much of the fun. Pike, a British actress perhaps known best for Jack Reacher, gets the role of a lifetime with Amy, and she devours it. Affleck shows what’s been true all along in his career: He’s a fine actor capable of great nuance and a movie star of the highest order.

1The Judge The prospect of Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall sharing a movie together is, in a word, awesome. So what does director David Dobkin, with Downey as producer, do with such an opportunity? He gives us a movie so cliché-ridden that the occasional inspired moments scream out at us like a lost puppy yelping while being swarmed by rabid bats. Downey plays Hank Palmer, one of those typical movie lawyers who gets bad guys sprung free in Chicago and pisses, literally and figuratively, on lawyers trying to put bad men in jail. Just before he gets another baddie off the hook, a call comes in from home. It turns out his mom died while tending to her flowers, so Hank is off to his hometown for the funeral. In that hometown is his lousy dad, Joseph (Duvall), the town judge and a major league prick. Hank hates his dad. Oh boy, oh boy, does he hate him. Joseph hates his son. Gee willikers, does he hate that little son of a bitch. The reasons for their mutual hatred are slowly revealed, and not a one of those reasons comes as a surprise. Hank does the funeral, and is all ready to bolt and go deal with his newly developing divorce when he gets called back to town. Turns out dad’s Cadillac and, consequently, dad are being investigated in a possibly intentional vehicular homicide. You know what this means? Court drama! Downey Jr. and Duvall try their best to make something out of this, but their work is attached to a lame script that wants to be too many kinds of films at once. It’s overstuffed, boring, mawkish crap.

2The Maze Runner The maze in the title is a fun spectacle full of shifting walls and weird spider robots. When the movie is in the maze, it is good. When it’s out of the maze, it kind of stinks. Dylan O’Brien plays Thomas, a teenager transported to a camp surrounded by a large, constantly shifting maze. The camp is inhabited by other teens, including Alby (Aml Ameen), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Gally (Will Poulter). They are all clueless about why they have been put there and how to escape, but they do send a squad of “runners” into the maze to map it out and search its outer reaches. The searches are fruitless until the mysterious Thomas takes charge. The mystery of the maze is intriguing, but the payoff is blah. The Lord of the Flies drama between the leads is typical, boring stuff. I liked the design of the maze, and the maze turns out to be the film’s most interesting character. Second place goes to Poulter, who is a long way from the comic territory he staked out in We’re the Millers. Too bad the rest of the movie feels like a patchwork of many movies before.

1Men, Women & Children Director Jason Reitman delivers a terribly boring, lethargic and woefully predictable look at humans and the way they interact with the internet in a movie that winds up being nothing more than an ugly commercial for the Ashley Madison dating services. Adam Sandler plays a sex-addicted married man who jerks off to internet porn and eventually graduates to an escort service. Meanwhile, the wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) has started having sex with men she meets on Ashley Madison. Oooh … the internet is bad. Jennifer Garner plays a mother who obsessively stalks her own daughter’s (Kaitlyn Dever) internet activity, while Judy Greer plays a mom who has no problem creating a provocative website for her daughter (Olivia Crocicchia). That darned internet! Everybody in this movie is either maddeningly morose or completely deranged. Reitman might think he’s delivering some sort of time capsule movie showing us how technology is the destroyer of relationships and real human communications, but there is absolutely nothing provocative or probing about what he’s saying in this movie. It’s a total drag, squandering a talented cast and offering nothing new.