The last time we saw Benicio Del Toro on screen he was starring in Sicario as a mercenary who collected a handsome paycheque while quenching his thirst for revenge against drug cartel leaders.
He was vicious and malicious, a supreme badass doing the right thing for the completely wrong reason.
That movie’s dark and gritty examination of the drug-fuelled Mexico-U.S. border war stands in stark contrast to his new movie, the optimistically titled A Perfect Day.
“I do believe there is hope in A Perfect Day,” he says. “I agree with you that Sicario is hopeless but in this one there is hope. I was finishing A Perfect Day when I went into Sicario. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Sicario was interesting, because it was the dark side of the coin.”
Set in 1990s Balkans, Del Toro plays Mambrú, a misfit aid worker whose team (played by Tim Robbins and Olga Kurylenko among others) begin their day in the former Yugoslavia trying to remove a bloated corpse dumped in a well to contaminate the water.
The task is complicated by United Nations bureaucracy and the lack of a strong enough rope forcing the crew to navigate not only landmine-ridden roads but their own complicated relationships in search of a solution.
Director Fernando León de Aranoa calls Del Toro the centerpiece of the film, adding, “Working with him means working with a creative partner.”
“There are some ideas that can come from anywhere that are golden,” Del Toro says on improvising on set. “I would like to say that I wish I could recognize good ideas when they are out there whether they come from another actor or they come from myself.
“If there is a good idea I do believe that if you don’t take advantage of it while you are making the film it’ll be gone forever. If there is a good idea I am game to explore.”
Del Toro, who is currently filming Star Wars: Episode VIII, says the script appealed to him because, it was about, “people trying to do good and just how complicated it can get, but with elements of humour…. It was like a riddle to solve,” he says.
“Can the movie balance these two things? I think it does. The darkness of the war and the job with the humour.”
One point of reference was Robert Altman’s black comedy M*A*S*H about medical personnel stationed at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War.
The actor says he discussed the 1970 movie, “with the director and Tim Robbins a little bit but the other film we talked about was No Man’s Land by Danis Tanović. It takes place in that part of the world and deals with the comedy and the darkness. The comedy in a ridiculous way.”
More importantly, he met with his character’s real-life counterparts.
“I had met some aid workers and I will tell you, they all have a good sense of humour. They tell you some dark stories but they do have a sense of humour. It’s a way of dealing with the darkness of their experiences and the pain.
“At the end of the day when you do a movie like this you learn about how valuable these people are. How courageous they are. Aid workers. Doctors Without Borders. How much energy and compassion for humans they have.”
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “The Intern” with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, Adam’s Sandler’s “Hotel Transylvania 2” and “Sicario,” starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “The Intern” with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, Adam’s Sandler’s “Hotel Transylvania 2” and “Sicario,” starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.
Fresh from a festival run—TIFF and the Cannes Film Festival where it competed for the Palme d’Or—comes Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin in a drama about an idealistic FBI agent working with an elite task force to stem the flow of drugs between Mexico and the US. One critic in Cannes referred to it as a “French Connection for the drug-fuelled Mexico-US border war,” so expect tension, moral ambiguity and no happy endings.
After a grizzly discovery courtesy of the Mexican drug Cartels, by-the-book CIA kidnapping specialist Kate Macer (Blunt) volunteers to be part of a special task force led by freelancers Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the enigmatic Alejandro (Benicio del Toro). She thinks they’ll be trying to stem the flow of drugs from the US side of the border, but soon she learns that she’s working in a situation where the boundaries have been moved. On her first assignment a wild public shootout leaves a dozen people dead, but yet violence is so common that a showdown at the US -Mexican border is hardly news. “This will make the front page of every newspaper in America.” “No, it won’t even make the paper in El Paso.”
The plan is to disrupt the cartels. Despite prosecuting twice as many drug cases in one year as the previous two years combined, none of the arrests have made a difference. To truly get at the heart of the drug trade they have to break the rules, and, as Graver says, “shake the tree and create chaos.” That means bending the very principles that Macer holds dear.
“Sicario” (it means “hitman” in Spanish) begins with a tightly wound sequence and doesn’t go slack for the next ninety minutes. Director Denis Villeneuve has made a slow burn of a film, deliberately paced, that weaves complex quasi-morality with a sense of hopelessness into an edge of your seat story.
Leading the charge is Blunt. A multifarious mix of vulnerability, stone cold confidence and outrage, she’s the most interesting female action star since Imperator Furiosa.
Del Toro is a badass supreme as a man caught between doing the right thing completely the wrong way. Vicious and malicious, he doesn’t mind collecting a handsome paycheque while quenching his thirst for revenge against the cartel leaders.
The third part of the triangle is Graver, a jovial rule breaker who calls the shots. Brolin, the manliest man currently working on film, is an edgy presence joking and laughing his way through one dangerous situation after another.
The real stars here, however, are director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Villeneuve treats the story like an onion, peeling off layer after layer, taking his time to get to the core of the story. Deakins, an eleven time Oscar nominee, turns aerial shots of sprawling cities into metaphors for the magnitude of the problems facing the police. Later he transforms a standard night vision raid from videogame action to a wonder of texture and tension.
“Sicario” isn’t a feel good movie about winning the war on drugs. Instead it’s a powerful look at a seemingly unwinnable battle and the toll it takes on its soldiers.
On Tuesday, March 3rd, two-time Academy Award nominee, director Mark Osborne was in Toronto to give an exclusive presentation at the TIFF Bell Lightbox about the making of “The Little Prince.”
In the presentation followed by a Q&A hosted by Richard, Osborne spoke about the concept of the animated feature, the making-of, completing production n Montreal, and showed some select images, clips and b-roll from production. Osborne also revealed that Orson Welles once planned an adaptation of “The Little Prince” as a follow-up to “Citizen Kane.”
From Entertainment One: With the voices of Rachel McAdams, Jeff Bridges, Marion Cotillard, James Franco, Paul Rudd,Benicio del Toro, Paul Giamatti, Ricky Gervais, Albert Brooks, Bud Cort and Riley Osborne.
Through an inventive narrative concept, the movie will offer a family experience on a grand scale: the audience will be invited to discover a fantastic, dreamlike universe.
Like its star Benicio Del Toro, “The Wolfman” is a little wonky but strangely appealing. The film, which has more to do with the atmospherics of Hammer horror than, say, the theatrics of the lame “Underworld” series, is a perplexing beast that mixes some fairly good shocks with a lifeless lead performance.
Del Toro is Lawrence Talbot, a Victorian-era actor who returns to his ancestral home outside London after his brother is attacked and killed by… something. Awaiting him at the dusty old country house is his estranged (and just plain strange) father Sir John (Anthony Hopkins) and his brother’s fiancée, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt). Determined to find out who or what mauled his brother, he launches an investigation that leads to a gypsy encampment on a full moon. Guess what? He gets bitten by a werewolf and every full moon transforms into the thing he hates most.
Director Joe Johnston, (the helmer behind “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” and “Hidalgo”) proves he has a knack for old school horror atmosphere—the film is all cobwebs, shadows and candlelight—and action scenes but absolutely none for dealing with the heart and soul of the film—the characters. The Talbots and Gwen dominate the movie but are more sketches of horror movie characters than fully drawn individuals. Hopkins (who gets the movie’s best intentional laughs playing the Worst. Father. Ever.) and Blunt squeak by on acting chops alone, but Del Toro, who is in nearly every scene, isn’t so lucky.
Perhaps he was poorly cast or perhaps he isn’t really trying, it’s hard to tell. He doesn’t have a natural flair for the courtly dialogue that seems to roll off the British tongues so easily, but then again, the dialogue doesn’t exactly sparkle. When your most memorable line is, “I will kill all of you,” (repeated twice for emphasis) you know more time was spent on the set decoration (which is great) and the transformation scenes than the words.
Despite lots of dramatic moments—long stares, meaningful glances—there is little actual drama. The story is pure B-movie horror and exists solely as a vessel to keep things afloat until we get to the action scenes and the Holy Grail of every wolfman movie, the all important man to beast transformation.
On that score the movie entertains. Blood squirts, a disembodied hand shoots a gun and more blood squirts. It’s a gory little flick that takes off after a slow start with some decent jolts (once it gets over using loud sounds to create tension) and two great transformation scenes courtesy of special effects wiz Rick Baker.
“The Wolfman” isn’t going to do for werewolves what “Twilight” and “True Blood” have done for vampires—werewolves are too hairy to be sexy—but despite its flaws is a howlingly fun Saturday afternoon matinee movie.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
