You may be forgiven if you, like me, thought about going to see “The Maze Runner: The Death Cure” to catch up on what happened to Shailene Woodley’s character Tris Prior.
Please be advised you have the wrong franchise.
Back in the day of the young-adult-in-peril dystopian trilogies screens were filled with good looking young actors fighting for survival in movies like “The Maze Runner” and “The Divergent Series.” Of the bunch of them only “The Hunger Games” distinguished itself as a go-to movie. The others kind of blended together to form one long post apocalyptic action series that resembled an anti-utopian Guess ad with automatic weapons and artfully tousled hair.
Since the new film, “Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” assumes you’re up to speed with the story I’ll save you the trouble of having to binge watch the first two movies.
Here’s the catch-up:
Based on a series of wildly popular YA books, 2014s “The Maze Runner” sees Thomas, played by “Teen Wolf’s” Dylan O’Brien, plopped into a community of young men surrounded by a labyrinth. The rebellious Thomas wants to see if there is a way to navigate through the ever-changing maze that stands between the boys and whatever is happening in the outside world.
The following year “The Scorch Trials” saw the virtuous Thomas and his gang take on the worst people in the world, W.C.K.D., a group of evildoers that appear to use an Instagram acronym as their name.
After a three-year wait Thomas is back with his stylishly dishevelled hair and chiselled face to break into The Last City, a fortified town where doctors work to find a cure for a plague that turns people into snarling zombies. The good doctors, including Thomas’s former flame Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), are experimenting on the Maze Runners who are immune to the disease. In particular Thomas wants to rescue Minho (Ki Hong Lee), a pal being mercilessly poked with needles in search of a cure.
“Maze Runner: The Death Cure” features lots of ominous music, attractive stars in motion, dusty dystopian landscapes and something gets blown up or shot at every 10 minutes or so. What’s missing is the emotional content that might make you care about Thomas and Company. The movie really wants you to love the characters. The camera endlessly caresses their determined and often tearstained faces but the ham fisted big emotional moments are as empty as the jars of gel thrown in the trash after being used to poof up the cast’s hair. The characters are mannequins mouthing generic dialogue—speeches begin with, “I knew I know you have no reason to trust me,” and every few minutes someone says, “We have to get out of here!”—for two hours and twenty minutes. Think what else you could do with that time!
“Bitter Harvest” is a wannabe historical epic set against the backdrop of Joseph Stalin’s genocidal policies against Ukraine in the 1930s. I say wannabe because despite the sweeping nature of the story this is more melodramatic war soap opera than “War and Peace.”
Set at the time of the Soviet famine of 1932–33, “Bitter Harvest” is the story of two lovers, Cossack grain farmer and artist Yuri ( Max Irons ) and Natalka ( Samantha Barks ). Childhood sweethearts, they are torn apart and will only see one another again if they can survive the Holodomor, a Soviet regime “extermination by famine” policy that claimed millions of Ukrainian lives. Jailed in a Soviet gulag, Yuri stages a daring escape so he can join the anti-Bolshevik resistance movement and find his way back to Natalka.
“Bitter Harvest” is the story of an underreported atrocity, a genocide that didn’t become widely known until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It’s an important slice of history but by the time an evil Russian is forcing Natalka to not only wash his feet, but then dry them with her hair, any hope for nuance has been thrown out the window. Trading in stereotypes of the most banal kind the movie tries but fails to bring us inside the horror of the situation.
Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies, “Patriot’s Day,” “Live By Night” from director-actor Ben Affleck and the terrible “Monster Trucks.”
Richard sits in with Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the big weekend movies, Peter Berg’s ripped-from-the-headlines “Patriot’s Day,” “Live By Night” from director-actor Ben Affleck, the terrible “Monster Trucks” and the sublime “20th Century Women” and “Paterson.”
TODAY! TODAY! TODAY! The worst movie on four wheels! No adrenaline pumping action! “Monster Trucks!” We’ll sell you the whole seat… to make it easy to take a nap!
“Monster Trucks” begins when avaricious oil baron Reece Tenneson (Rob Lowe) insists on drilling through an underground water main to get to “the ocean of oil” that lies underneath despite the possibility of disturbing the life forms that may live down there. “If we keep this quiet will all do very well,” cackles Tenneson. His greed unleashes several strange creatures, sort of land squids with big googly eyes, whom he immediately orders destroyed.
On the other side of town Tripp (Lucas Till) is a curiously old high school student and scrap yard worker. He’s a blonde James Dean type, an outsider more comfortable around cars than people. When one of these creatures shows up at his junkyard he doesn’t set it free, nor does he call the authorities. After discovering oil is this tentacled creature’s mother’s milk, as any true grease monkey would do, he straps it to the underside of an old truck he’s been working on, using it as a super-charged engine, literally turning his old junker into a “monster truck.”
With the help of biology student Meredith (Jane Levy) and the creature—who Tripp inventively nicknames Creatch—our hero tries find out exactly where his oil-guzzling new friend came from.
Fittingly “Monster Trucks,” a movie about automobiles, is my first seatbelt movie of the year. It is a film so bad I needed to a seatbelt to keep me in my chair for the entire movie.
Forget that Tripp looks old enough to be his high school classmates’ hip guidance counsellor or that the sum total of the great Amy Smart’s role is advising her son what to eat for lunch or that a sea monster appears in the landlocked state of North Dakota. That stuff is bad enough, but the thing that really puts “Monster Trucks” on a collision course with the ditch is a complete lack of playfulness.
What might have been a fun action-adventure with a kid friendly sci fi twist is, instead, a collection of lame brained ideas that feel strung and in search of a heartwarming or interesting moment. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” another alien movie, works not because we believe the little rubber alien is real but because we care about the way that Elliot, Gertie and Michael interact with him. Despite the presence of a rubber alien it feels authentic and not cobbled together by a marketing department.
When Tripp’s dad (Frank Whaley) says, “It’s like the earth got mad and let something bad out,” he may well have been speaking about this movie and not Creatch.
Knockaround Guys is an unremarkable coming-of-age story with a gangland twist. The four sons (Vin Diesel, Seth Green, Barry Pepper, and Andrew Davoli) of Brooklyn mobsters bond together to reclaim a quarter of a million dollars lost in a small Montana town run by a crooked sheriff (Tom Noonan). The money belongs to Matt Demaret’s (Pepper) dad, Benny “Chains” Demaret (Dennis Hopper) and his underboss Teddy Deserve (John Malkovich). If they don’t get it back, it’s one of the three Rs for them – roof, revolver or river. Written and directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the same team who wrote Rounders, Knockaround Guys has a straight-to-video feel to it, although the uninspired story is rescued by some very good performances. John Malkovich chews through the screen as Teddy, the conniving Brooklyn Mafioso, and Dennis Hopper is a pleasure to watch in his cameo appearance as the big boss. Of the younger actors, Canadian Barry Pepper shows his chops as the conflicted Matty, while Vin Diesel oozes charisma, but by the film’s closing scenes you wish that these talented actors had more of a script to work with.
“Casino Jack” is a dark look at the American dream. Based on the true story of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s rise and fall, it recreates the heady days of DC’s greediest decade.
Director George Hickenlooper (who died last year at age 47) lays out a complicated story of how Abramoff peddled his influence on Capitol Hill in return for large cheques. The trouble really starts when he defrauds a Native American tribe out of millions of dollars that he then invests in a floating casino. Add to the mix a crooked mattress salesman (Jon Lovitz), a psychopathic gangster (the late, great Maury Chaykin), a kosher restaurant and a trophy wife or two and you get the essence of Abramoff’s strange tale.
The film begins with a bravura scene of Abramoff (Kevin Spacey) delivering a pep talk to the bathroom mirror that sets the tone for the rest of this fast talking film. The movie moves along like a rocket, propelled by Spacey’s performance. One quibble though, throughout the movie Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon (Barry Pepper) stop the action dead time after time by quoting, verbatim, scenes from other movies, complete with vocal impressions and facial tics. It’s annoying in real life when people do that and it is a device that wears out its welcome VERY early on in the movie.
Apart from those missteps there are good performances all round, although this is Spacey’s movie. The only actor who comes close to pulling focus away from the two time Oscar winner is comedian Jon Lovitz, who has a showy and funny role as a devil-may-care sleaze bag.
Hickenlooper pitches the tone of the entire movie around Spacey’s tightly wound performance. The movie is as playful as the performance, which is sometimes at odds with the story. Abramoff was a narcissistic and nakedly greedy character, not qualities to be admired, but the movie seems to be a bit too impressed with him nonetheless. It’s true that he was a complicated guy who gave away much of the money he illicitly earned but despite his occasional good works he isn’t the loveable scamp the movie tries to present. For a different, and more accurate portrayal, of him check out Alex Gibney’s documentary “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”
In recent years I have found Spike Lee movies to be very frustrating. Fifty percent of each movie I really like, but then there’s the remaining fifty percent that just infuriates me. It’s not bad filmmaking; it’s just unnecessary filmmaking. There is a lot of stuff in these films that doesn’t further the story, that is preachy, and simply doesn’t belong there. But the stuff that’s good is really, really good, and I found The 25th Hour to be another example of that.
plays small-time drug dealer Montgomery Brogan, who, after being arrested by the DEA, reevaluates his life in his last 24 hours before beginning a seven-year jail term. Interesting premise. Why then muddy it up with a commentary on September 11th that seems out of place, and kind of badly chosen? Exploring the relationship between Brogan and his two best friends, Jacob and Frank (Phillip Seymour-Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and how their friendship will change once Montgomery goes to jail would have been a great character drama.
Instead Lee adds a September 11th angle that feels tacked on and doesn’t add to the movie. Don’t get me wrong, it probably comes from a very sincere place. Spike Lee makes incredible movies about New York and is passionate about the city and probably felt like he had to find a way to tell this story, but he ties the September 11th angle to Montgomery’s story, and in the context of the whole movie I didn’t really understand the connection. If we are supposed to infer that the life New York was changed by the terrorist attacks just as the life of Edward Norton’s character was changed by getting arrested I think it is a weak comparison, and frankly, inappropriate. The dynamic between the three friends is great. I wanted more of that. Loose the September 11th stuff, some of the peripheral story lines and just tell me that story and it would have been a better movie.
25th Hour is classic Spike Lee – brilliant, fearless but at the same time troublesome.
You may be forgiven if you, like me, thought about going to see “The Maze Runner: The Death Cure” to catch up on what happened to Shailene Woodley’s character Tris Prior.
