Hack job
3
Blackhat Turns out, Chris Hemsworth isn’t all that interesting when you take away his hammer, strip off his cape or disguise that bitchin’ Australian accent. He’s actually quite the dullard. Or such is the case with Blackhat, an atrocious cyberspace thriller from the normally reliable directorial hands of Michael Mann (Heat, Public Enemies). by Hemsworth plays Nick Hathaway, a hacker Bob Grimm convict doing time in a maximum-security prison. When a hack job leads to an explosion bgrimm@ newsreview.c om at a nuclear power plant in China, authorities let Nick out of prison under the condition he find the hacker and save the day. If he fails to find the hacker, it’s back to prison, where his hair will still look spectacular despite not having access to premium hair care products.
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When you're running down the up escalator, sometimes it seems like you'll never reach the bottom.
1 Poor
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5
Upon leaving prison, Nick instantly becomes some sort of super detective. Joining forces with Chinese former roommate Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang), Nick can shoot bad guys and beat the crap out of attackers in a restaurant even though he lacks any real training. I guess doing some years in a big prison automatically makes you sharp with a Glock and hand-to-hand combat. Most hackers lack Nick’s innate super detective skills, but they will kick your ass in Call of Duty and Snickers eating contests. Mann and Hemsworth make the fatal error of having Nick be American. This means Hemsworth must don an American accent, something he cannot do without sounding really, really stupid most of the time. There are moments when he sounds Midwestern, others where he sounds like he’s from Long Island and then those other times when he sounds like he’s from Australia because he can’t do an American accent.
excellent
22 | RN&R |
JANUARY 22, 2015
This is one of those movies where the actors are often mouthing words different from the ones we hear because of sloppy looping and editing. One or two slips in a movie might make sense, but this one looks almost like it was dubbed in another language at times. It’s also a movie where … everybody … speaks … really … slow … and …growly. The pace of this film is sluggish, and the likes of Viola Davis—who plays some sort of FBI agent type person—just growl and look annoyed the whole damned time. The movie clocks in at over two hours. I would say there was about 30 minutes worth of plot-worthy material stretched out to over two hours due to the slothful pacing. Somebody seriously needed to light a fire under this film’s ass. As many film aficionados know, Mann does super cool shootouts in his movies. This film has a couple, and they qualify as the only things worth watching in the movie. As for the subject matter, Blackhat feels old before it even starts. When is somebody going to figure out that one of the last things we want to watch as moviegoers is the sight and sound of somebody tacking away on a computer keyboard? Much of this film is people typing, which is so dynamic I just can’t stand it! Nick gets a love interest, because a movie where somebody doesn’t try to make out with Thor is implausible. It takes something like 15 minutes of knowing each other for Nick and Chen Lien (Wei Tang) to get it on. Who can blame her, really? Hemsworth’s shirt is often unbuttoned, revealing his Marvel-worthy chest. This is accompanied by those heavenly bangs hanging down the side of his head in strands of just the right length. Oh … I’m getting distracted. It’s early, but I’m going to go ahead and say that I hated Blackhat enough to suspect it will make my list for worst films of 2015. If it doesn’t, bravo to those 10 idiots who manage to make movies more moronic than this one in the next 11 months. That, in a sad way, will be a significant achievement. Ω
American Sniper
While Clint Eastwood’s film has plenty of problems, Bradley Cooper rises above the patchy melodrama and overly slick segments with his portrayal of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. Kyle holds the American sniper record of 160 confirmed kills, and was killed by a veteran he was trying to mentor on a shooting range. The film works best when depicting Kyle at work in Iraq, constructing some very tense battle scenes and sequences as seen through Kyle’s riflescope. There’s a subplot involving an enemy sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) that feels like an entirely different movie. For some reason, Eastwood employs a showier style in the scenes involving Mustafa, which feel a bit false and artificial alongside the movie’s grittier moments. Saddled with the film’s worst dialogue, Sienna Miller battles hard in trying to make Kyle’s wife, Taya, an intriguing movie character. Cooper, who physically transformed himself for the role, does an excellent job of conveying the difficulties and stress that Kyle’s job entailed. He’s an actor forever taking risks and challenging himself, and he’s a big reason to see this movie.
5
Foxcatcher
Steve Carell disappears into the role of John du Pont, the crazy rich guy who took it upon himself to shoot and kill one of the wrestlers on a team he created. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo are heartbreakingly good as Mark and David Schultz, two Olympic gold medal-winning siblings who, unfortunately, worked for du Pont when he had his breakdown. Down on his luck and living on ramen noodles, Mark gets a call from du Pont inviting him out to his Foxcatcher farm. Mark finds a sense of purpose working with du Pont, and eventually summons his brother and his family to Foxcatcher. What follows is a descent into insanity for the attention-starved du Pont, who lives under the chastising eye of his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and is obsessed with controlling others. The madness eventually ended with the death of one of the brothers, and du Pont living his final years in prison. Carell is amazingly good here; one only need watch a few minutes of the real du Pont on YouTube to know that he has nailed the characterization. Tatum and Ruffalo are equally good as the confused brothers. Mark Schultz is currently protesting director Bennett Miller’s portrayal of him in the film, and he might be in the right on a few aspects of that portrayal. Still, it’s a great film that leaves an appropriately sick feeling in the stomach.
3
The Imitation Game
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, who helped win the war against the Nazis when he and others invented a machine capable of breaking the Enigma code. Morten Tyldum’s film, while a tad cumbersome at times, does do a good job of illustrating the impossible odds Turing and his team were up against in trying to decipher the code. Keira Knightley (who had a nice 2014 with this and Begin Again), Matthew Goode and Charles Dance contribute to a strong supporting cast. Cumberbatch portrays Turing as a disagreeable, unlikeable social outcast who just happened to play a huge part in saving the free world thanks to his talent for solving puzzles. The film also delves into some of the more controversial times in Turing’s life, and sometimes the order of things gets a little confusing. Cumberbatch keeps the whole thing afloat with a typically strong performance.
4
Inherent Vice
Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc, a sloppy private investigator in 1970 Los Angeles who operates, inexplicably, out of a doctor’s office. When an ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterston) goes missing, he conducts a haphazard investigation into her disappearance that involves dead people who aren’t dead, drug dealers and kidnapped real estate moguls. All of these things are being investigated by a guy who’s seriously high most of the time, and just sort of piecing things together at his own mellow, sometimes clumsy pace. Paul Thomas Anderson’s is a simultaneously goofy and complicated take on the Thomas Pynchon novel that puts the director back on the right track after the relatively disap-
pointing The Master. Phoenix is terrific, as is Josh Brolin as a jar-headed cop with whom he’s constantly butting heads. The likes of Martin Short, Owen Wilson and Reese Witherspoon all make sweet contributions. Those who smoke a lot of pot will probably have an easier time with this intentionally spacey movie. Those who have never indulged might find things confusing the first couple of times around.
1
Into the Woods
Here’s an adaptation that renders something that was totally fun into something totally dreary. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1987 Broadway hit was a slightly sick, plucky wink at the audience, an almost mocking look at the dark side of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As captured in the 1991 American Playhouse broadcast starring Bernadette Peters, it was a 150-minute romp with an adult sense of humor. It was hardly the stuff of Disney. Director Rob Marshall has cut his film version to just over two hours, yet it feels twice as long. On stage, the music of Into the Woods was perky, tightly choreographed, consistently funny and almost frantic. In the movie, most of the songs just fart along. The singers search for the emotive, warm, soulful qualities in Sondheim and Lapine’s musical. The problem with that is the original musical didn’t really emphasize those qualities. It was more of an intelligent, operatic goof, not a feel-good musical. Meryl Streep has some good moments as The Witch, but that’s about it when it comes to anything good to say about this endeavor. Johnny Depp shows up for a few minutes as The Wolf in a stupid outfit that makes him look more feline than canine. His “Hello, Little Girl,” a song that is supposed to be rife with innuendo, sounds more like an animal who just wants to eat some food. Marshall and Depp give the number a slow, crooning presentation, taking away its former jaunty, obnoxious edge. It’s just wrong.
3
Paddington
5
Selma
This one got pushed out of 2014, which had me worried it was worthy of the junk heap. As things turn out, this mixed animation treatment of the character created by Michael Bond is actually cute. Ben Whishaw voices Paddington, a Peruvian bear who travels to England looking for a home. He winds up in the abode of the Browns, where he quickly takes to causing major damage, creating a little marital strife for Mr. and Mrs. Brown (a delightful Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins). Nicole Kidman has a lot of fun as the film’s villain, determined to trap and stuff Paddington. The movie has plenty of British charm, a couple of really good jokes, and the likes of Kidman, Bonneville and Hawkins in top form. As for Paddington himself, he looks pretty good, a solid animated creation mixed in neatly with real actors and actresses.
David Oyelowo portrays Martin Luther King Jr. in director Ava DuVernay’s stunning depiction of the civil rights march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. It’s one of 2014’s most accomplished directorial efforts. In an attempt to gain equal voting rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the march despite violent opposition from citizens and law enforcement officers. The film covers everything from MLK’s dealings with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to the bewildering, despicable actions of then Alabama Governor George Wallace (an evil Tim Roth). Oyelowo delivers a star-making performance as King, while Carmen Ejogo excels in the role of Coretta Scott King for a second time. (She played the role in a 2001 TV movie, Boycott.) The very British Wilkinson and Roth do well with their accents and create memorable characterizations. This is one of those films everybody should see.
