“Equity,” a new thriller starring “Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn, bills itself as “the first female-driven Wall Street movie.” Certainly it doesn’t feel like male driven stories like “Wolf of Wall Street” or “The Big Short,” but its welcome point of view would have been better served by a stronger story.
Naomi Bishop (Gunn) lives in a world where multi million dollar deals are done over a meal of Tasmanian Sea Trout. She’s a top flight Wall Street investment banker trying to salvage her reputation after an IPO she steered failed miserably. Her bosses think she “rubs people the wrong way” but her skill in the boardroom places her at the forefront of a new IPO, a social media network called Cachet. “I’m going to take your company public,” she says to the company’s CEO (Samuel Roukin). “Are you ready to be a rock star?”
On the eve of their initial stock offering some ethical issues arise, placing Naomi at odds with her hedge funder boyfriend Michael Connor (James Purefoy), her ambitious assistant Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas) and an old friend Samantha (Alysia Reiner) who also happens to be a state attorney with a speciality in securities fraud.
There’s a good story of financial intrigue buried deep in “Equity” but it gets lost in the languid pacing and by-the-book dialogue. The film, which gives a voice to female characters in a milieu where women are typically unseen and unheard, doesn’t do much with the opportunity. Gunn is formidable whether she is working the boardroom or berating an underling for bringing her a cookie with only three chocolate chips in it, but her motives are never clear. She is a bit of a caricature, a she-wolf of Wall Street who declares, “I like money” but never really lets us in under the hood.
“Equity’s” tale of power and trust lacks the flash and trash that made “Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short” such romps. Instead it’s stoically straightforward, bogged down by procedure and a slight script.
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare asked in “Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” True that, but at the movies a name can make or break a film.
“Anthropoid” is the obscure title of a new thriller starring Jamie “Fifty Shades of Grey” Dornan and Cillian Murphy as soldiers who try and assassinate SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. In real life their operation was called Operation Anthropoid, but in reel life the title sounds like a sci fi story. Will the title resonate with anyone who isn’t a World War II aficionado?
Set in 1942 Dornan and Murphy play Czechoslovakian operatives Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík who return to Nazi-occupied Prague to kill Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. The pair hide out with a family, where the fetching daughter Marie (Charlotte Le Bon) catches Jan’s eye, while her feisty friend Lenka (Anna Geislerová) bonds with Josef personally and in sympathy with his dangerous mission. Their best laid plans are turned upside down, and pushed ahead a few days, when Heydrich’s schedule changes. Rushed, the plan (MILD SPOILER) does not quite go as planned and the men and their compatriots are forced to go into hiding in the basement of a local church as the Nazis mount a massive manhunt.
Much of “Anthropoid” is spent with Jan and Josef as they make their way to Prague and plan the assassination. Unfortunately director Sean Ellis’s attempts to personalize the heroic tale fall flat, with good actors doing bad accents and a stultifying pace that sucks much of the excitement out of what should have been a volatile, dramatic situation. It’s only after the assassination attempt that the character work of the first hour pays off. It’s a shame Ellis couldn’t spread the story’s intensity around a little more evenly.
Tired of good guys? The Captain Americas, ‘yer Iron Men or Wondrous Women? If their virtuous acts and heroic posing are wearing thin or not to your liking, along comes a crew of anti-heroes willing to bend the rules to protect the planet. “We’re the bad guys,” says Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), “it’s what we do.”
Based on the DC Comic of the same name, the Suicide Squad a.k.a. Task Force X, is a ragtag team of death row villains sprung from jail by a secret government agency run by ruthless bureaucrat Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). “In a world of flying men and monsters,” she says, “this is the only way to protect our country.” Waller’s counter-intuitive idea is to utilize their specific sets of skills—essentially creating mayhem—to quell large-scale threats against humanity. In return they are awarded clemency for their crimes. “I’m fighting fire with fire,” says Waller.
The all-star cast of baddies include assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn, a crazed former psychiatrist with a love of beating people with baseball bats and Joker (Jared Leto), deadly boomerangist Boomerang (Jai Courtney), fire-conjurer El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) and the reptilian Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).
To keep the baddies on the straight and narrow they are led into battle by righteous team leader Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). Also they are implanted with micro-bombs to encourage them to do the right thing. Complicating an already complicated situation is the Joker’s plan to extract Harley from the group and the appearance of Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), an archaeologist possessed by an ancient evil force.
For the first forty minutes or so “Suicide Squad” is loopy fun. Zippy, it rips along setting up the story and the characters in an extended origin sequence that gives us all the information we need to understand the rest of the movie. It’s a catch-up that non comic book lovers will appreciate. It is also the strongest part of the movie.
When it gets down to the nitty-gritty of the team in battle against “non-human entities” the C.G.I. kicks into high gear, covering every inch of the screen, and “Suicide Squad” becomes considerably less interesting. Set to a classic rock soundtrack the large-scale action scenes are muddled, dark and rather generic, especially given the special skills of each of the combatants.
About the Squad. For a group of psychopaths they sure seem to be OK people. The worst thing they do—minus the wholesale carnage the government allows them to create—is go temporarily AWOL for a drink in between battles. Over cocktails they discuss life, love and motivations. There are rom coms with more edge.
Much has been written about Jared Leto’s commitment to the role of Joker, and I’m sure the stories are true—he apparently sent a live rat to Robbie and a dead hog to the crew—but it’s hard to see the payoff in his method. His take on the character is weird but not as wild as you might want, and considerably less present on screen than you might think.
Smith makes more of an impression simply through the sheer strength of his charisma. Like the rest of the team he isn’t given much to do but he makes the most of it. Robbie makes an impression in a dangerous and flirty role but her New York accent comes and goes with the frequency of a rush hour subway train.
The rest are placeholders, not given enough to do to actually be interesting and even when they are in action, it’s so dark it’s hard to tell exactly who is shooting/stabbing/punching who.
On the plus side “Suicide Squad” doesn’t take itself nearly as seriously as “Batman v Superman.” On the downside director David Ayer took a premise that gave him permission to go as far overboard as he wanted and yet the movie feels familiar, like it is trying to echo the very movies it should be an antidote to.
James Schamus, a producer best known for his Oscar winning work with Ang Lee, makes his directorial debut with “Indgination.” The story of a young man’s coming-of-age isn’t a case of style over substance—it has both in spades—but of character over plot.
Based on Philip Roth’s novel of the same name, “Indignation” is the story of Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), a young working class Jewish man who earns a scholarship to the WASPy Winesburg College in Ohio. It’s 1951 and his enrolment in school keeps him from being drafted to fight in Korea and out from under the thumb of his over protective father.
A studious young man—his roommate says, “He’s a scholar who doesn’t have time for frivolities like the theatre.”—he immerses himself in his classes to the exclusion of almost everything else. The only break in his concentration comes in the form of Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gaddon), a beautiful classmate whose charms, both physically and intellectually, distract him from his work.
On their first and only date something happens (NO SPOILERS HERE) that plunge Marcus into previously uncharted personal territory. Eventually his intensity toward his schooling and Olivia draws the attention of Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts), which threatens his place within the school and provides the film with its best scene.
Like other adaptations of Roth’s work “Indignation” is filled with richly drawn characters. Where it falls down is in the storytelling. Roth’s novel is a personal piece of work loosely based on his own 1950s college experience. It’s a look at life’s decisions and their consequences, intellectual purity and sexual discovery, all themes touched on in the film but without the benefit of Roth’s investigative, haunting prose.
What does shine through are the characters. In a break-out role Lerman holds the center of the movie, doing formidable work in scenes opposite Gaddon and Letts. His scenes with Gaddon brim with sexual attraction touched with longing and sadness but it is with Letts that Lerman does his best work. A mid-movie tour-de-force sees the two showdown in the moralistic Dean’s office, arguing everything from baseball to Bertrand Russell. The verbally jousting is the film’s high point; a lovely bit of acting that could stand on its own as a short film.
“Indignation” is about truth and consequences, unspoken love and inexperience, but mostly its about great acting from a fine cast.
“Jason Bourne,” the first Matt Damon led film in the series in nine years, proves that actions speak louder than words. Damon speaks a mere twenty-five lines of dialogue as he kicks, punches and crash-boom-bangs his way through this spy thriller, letting the action do the talking.
Damon’s fourth go-round as amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne begins with him tormented by his violent past. Most of his memory is intact, but he’s eaten away by guilt for the terrible things he did as a government programmed killer. “I remember,” he says. “I remember everything.”
To get his ya-yas out he goes all Fight Club, bare-knuckling any and all contenders but he’s drawn back into the international spy game—the movie never met an exotic location it couldn’t use, whether it’s Berlin, Reykjavík, Athens, London or even Vegas—after his former-handler-turned-hacker Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) tells him of a collaboration between CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, whose face is one forehead wrinkle away from becoming a caricature of an old man) and Silicon Valley kingpin Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed). They’re working on Edward Snowden’s worst nightmare, a new program called Ironhead, a system of full spectrum surveillance; watching everyone all the time.
Wanting Bourne out of the way Dewey uses every newfangled asset at his disposal—like state-of-the-art global surveillance—to find the agent before turning to the old ways and bringing in an assassin known as, appropriately enough, The Asset (Vincent Cassel) to take care of business. “I’m going to cut the head off this thing,” says Dewey.
Flitting about the edges of the intrigue is the CIA’s cyber ops head Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who helps Bourne in an effort to keep him away from The Asset’s deadly gaze. “Bringing him in is the smart move,” she says. “There’s no bringing in Bourne,” Dewey says. “He needs to be put down.”
Cue the carnage.
If nothing else “Jason Bourne” proves once and for all that you can’t keep a good man down. Shot, beaten, dropped from a tall building or whatever, he’s the Energizer Bunny of international spies. He just keeps on ticking. We expect that from Bourne and we also demand feral fighting scenes, crazy car crashes and action, action, action. Make no mistake, there’s plenty of Bourne battle and bloodshed and some of it is quite exciting but it doesn’t have the finesse of the earlier films. Director Paul Greengrass’s signature handheld you-are-here style is in place but doesn’t feel as fresh as it did in the other films. Often frenetic instead of pulse-racing, the action sequences are frequent but not as memorable as the magazine-in-the-toaster gag from “Bourne Supremacy” or “Bourne Ultimatum’s” hardcover book punch. Still, you might not make it quite to the edge of your seat, but the combo of action and intrigue will shift you out of a reclining position.
“Jason Bourne” has its moments. Damon brings a grizzled power to the role and Vikander is a welcome addition, even if her motives are sometimes are hard to understand. There are interesting messages about online personal rights versus public safety that would have been moot in 2002 when the series debuted, a labyrinthine plot occasionally weighed down with unnecessary exposition and an unhinged Vegas climax—Bourne must really hope that whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—that would not be out of place in an Avengers movie. I just wish the ending felt less like an Avengers scene—with cars comically flying through the air—and more like a Bourne moment.
From the comedy minds who gave us “The Hangover” comes another trio. This time it’s less a Wolf Pack than it is a Coffee Klatch of moms fed up with the burden of having to be perfect. It has its raunchy moments—thanks to Kathryn Hahn’s spirited performance—but by and large “Bad Moms” might better be titled “Tired Moms.
Amy (Mila Kunis) is a thirty-two-year-old frazzled mom struggling to keep up with her family life and work. She has two kids, the overachieving Jane (Oona Laurence) and Dylan (Emjay Anthony) and a husband (David Walton) “who sometimes feels like a third child.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” she sighs. “That makes it sadder,” replies Jane.
When an epiphany turns her from stressed mother to bad mom, she sleeps in, lets her kids make their own breakfast and drinks loads of wine with two other exhausted mothers, Carla (Hahn) and Kiki (Kristen Bell). Having tossed the shackles of the daily grind of motherhood aside, Amy is reborn, but not everyone is pleased. Her newfound freedom puts her in the crosshairs of the fascistic PTA president Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate).
The mothers in “Bad Moms” aren’t bad moms, they’re simply fed up with trying to live up to the expectations. The movie has laughs, mostly courtesy of Hahn’s laser sharp delivery of lines like, “I feel like everything that comes out of your mouth is a cry for help,” but mostly this is a manifesto for taking a breath and giving both yourself and your kids a chance to enjoy their childhoods. As Amy becomes the Norma Rae of mothers, she discovers taking a step away from what she thought she should do as a mom is the best way to discover the joy of parenthood.
It’s a story of the power of friendship and despite the promise of raunch “Bad Moms” is filled with gooey warmth. The set up is formulaic—you know the bond between children or parents will only grow and get stronger by the time the end credits roll—but despite the obvious story, and some obvious plot holes, the movie succeeds because underneath it all it’s not just about them talking about their kids, their exhaustion or how to best to dress for a night out. It’s about taking control of their lives, standing up to injustice and, yes, getting a date with the handsome widowed dad (Jay Hernandez) who drops his kid off at the playground everyday.
In this mixed-up, shook-up world there are fewer and fewer things we can count on as absolutes. One of them is that there will be a new Woody Allen movie every year with a jaunty jazz soundtrack and credits written in the Windsor Light Condensed font. His new film, “Café Society,” the story of a frantic young romantic trying to find himself in 1930s Hollywood, is slice of comfort cinema with all of Allen’s trademarks intact.
Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) is a native New Yorker who jumped coasts to take up in Los Angeles. The slightly neurotic east coaster is not a natural fit in Tinsel Town, but his powerhouse uncle Phil (Steve Carell) helps out, giving him a job at his powerhouse talent agency and introducing him to a beautiful secretary named Vonnie (Kristen Stewart). By day he does odd jobs for Phil—“Menial errands are my specialty,” Bobby says, “but I don’t see a great future in it.”—while on the weekends he slowly falls for Vonnie. They share a disdain for industry talk and Hollywood’s catty innuendo and a love of cheap Mexican food but she doesn’t share his feelings. Unfortunately (for Bobby) Vonnie has a mostly absent boyfriend.
Enter romantic plot complications and Bobby hightails it back to New York where he goes into the nightclub business with his gangster brother Ben (Corey Stall). Finally successful, he marries and has a child with Veronica (Blake Lively), who he nicknames Vonnie, betraying the feelings he harbours for his west coast love. When Vonnie number one returns to New York for a visit the film offers up a line that sums the situation up, “Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer.”
A light-hearted tapestry, “Café Society” is embroidered with the odd punch line and hints of melancholy. It’s a comedy tinted with heartbreak, a look at true love and unsatisfactory options. It returns Allen to the fertile ground he ploughed with “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” and while this film isn’t a classic on those terms, it’s an engaging look at life and love buoyed by great performances.
Eisenberg does the best Woody Allen impression we’ve seen on screen in some time, but there’s more to him than simply aping the master. His journey from nebbish to notable is believable and gives the movie its heart.
Co-star Stewart hands in what may be her first truly adult role. She plays Vonnie as level-headed in a sea of dreamers. When Bobby describes Joan Crawford as “larger-than-life” she replies, simply but compellingly, “I think I’d be happier life-sized.” It’s the line that sums up her character and Stewart makes the most of it and Vonnie.
“Café Society” is a welcome uptick after Allen’s last two films, “Magic in the Moonlight” and “Irrational Man.” For Woody’s fans it may feel familiar but in the most soothing of ways.
At the beginning of “Star Trek Beyond” James Tiberius Kirk’s (Chris Pine) life on board the U.S.S. Enterprise has become a grind. Sure Sulu (John Cho) is gay and Ambassador Spock is dead, but Kirk is three years into a five-year mission and he is, personally lost in space, trying to find meaning in his mission. “It can be hard to feel grounded when even gravity isn’t real.”
Director Justin Lin, taking over the rebooted series from J.J. Abrams, does his best to spice things up for the good captain. The director, best known for his “Fast & Furious” films, knows there is nothing like a wild alien attack to snap James T. out of his funk.
Because the movie is pretty much an all-out action flick I’m not going to waste a lot of words describing the plot. Put it this way, there’s an artefact, a piece of a deadly old weapon that an ill-tempered villain named Krall (Idris Elba) desperately wants. Why? “To save you from yourself!” Kirk and the Enterprise crew don’t want the wrinkle-faced alien saving them from anything, particularly when every word out of Krall’s mouth sounds like it was lifted from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” “Unity is not your strength,” he growls. “It is your weakness.” Couple that with the destruction of their beloved ship and they have more than enough reasons for Scotty (Simon Pegg) to jerry rig the warp drive, Bones (Karl Urban) to grumble and complain and Lieutenant Uhura (Zoe Saldana) to excitedly push buttons on her colourful control board.
Lin knows how to stage high-octane sequences, so the film bursts into frenetic action scenes every few minutes. Chekov (the late, great Anton Yelchin) plots a course through the stars and BOOM! action ensues. Spock may be inured but that won’t stop him from being at the center of maelstrom after crazy maelstrom. Lin doesn’t seem to know what to do with the characters, but he sure knows how to entertain the eye with gravity defying actions scenes.
As a result “Star Trek Beyond” doesn’t feel so much like a “Star Trek” movie as it does a sci fi action adventure with some familiar characters. Everyone you expect is present and accounted for—and there’s even tributes to the first generation TV Trek crew—but they are reduced to cartoons, spouting jokey platitudes and techno gobbledygook. Lin can’t decided what’s more important, the science or the fiction.
For all the talk of fighting humanity’s battles, this is the least human “Star Trek” yet. Purists may resent the vaguely detailed characters but those simply looking to have their eyeballs dance around the screen to expertly staged space carnage will find much fast and furious action.
An outer space acorn adventure begins the earthbound struggle for survival in “Ice Age: Collision Course,” the fifth instalment in the popular animated series.
Fans of the franchise will recognize Scrat (Chris Wedge), the dogged squirrel whose endless pursuit of an acorn is at the heart of each of the movies. He is the “Ice Age’s” equivalent of Wile E. Coyote, a lovable but psychics defying acorn hunter often humiliated but never daunted in his quest for the elusive nut. This time his journey leads him to deep space where he puts a series of event in motion that endangers the lives of Manny and Ellie, the Wooly Mammoth couple voiced by Ray Romano and Queen Latifah, macho tiger Diego (Denis Leary), the annoyingly unlucky sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo) and the rest of the gang.
On earth the mammals are preparing to celebrate Manny and Ellie’s anniversary. All is going well except that Manny forgot to get Ellie a gift. Then, when the sky fills with beautiful colours it looks like Manny has arranged a fireworks display for his bride. In fact, the well-timed meteor shower that got Manny out of an anniversary pickle will lead to other world changing problems for he and his friends. “Manny’s love is killing us,” squeals opossum Crash (Seann William Scott). Enter Buck (Simon Pegg), a one-eyed weasel and a dinosaur hunter (“You may be Jurassic,” he sings to the dinosaurs in a Gilbert and Sullivan inspired tune, “but I’m fantastic.”), who has a plan to go toward the “planet killing space rock” rather than running away from it. “I know it sounds a sub-optional,” he says, “but we can change our fate.”
Mixed in with this story of survival are Peaches’s (Keke Palmer) upcoming nuptials, hockey lessons, a dance number and even a science lesson from Neil Degrasse Tyson. Each of these digressions from the main story does little more than bulk out the running time to a feature length of 94 minutes.
Like the other movies in the series “Ice Age: Collision Course” is less concerned with telling a story as it is with coming up with premises they can populate with characters that can be spun off into videogames and toys. Episodic and disjointed, there is none of the elegance of Pixar’s storytelling, just one event loosely connected with the one before it, after another. The result is a movie with few laughs and too many subplots masquerading as a story.
The best thing in the movie is Scrat who lives in perpetual desperation, always hankering for an acorn to call his own. He’s a classic cartoon creation, an elastic faced throwback to the Looney Tunes era. If they make another one of these let’s have more of him please, and less of the other mammoth bores that fill the screen.
It might be time to put the “Ice Age” movies on ice.
