The artefact at the heart of the action in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is a time shifting device called the Antikythera. This ancient, analogue computer with the power to find fissures in time, however, isn’t the only thing about the movie that revisits the past.
Everything old is new again in director James Mangold’s vision of the classic action-adventure. There’s the much talked about de-aging of Ford, the grand old man of action-adventure which effectively brings backs the classic Indy of the original film, and the reappearance of much-loved characters like John Rhys-Davies as Sallah. Even the new characters, like Helena, played by “Fleabag’s” Phoebe Waller-Bridge, feels like a throwback to the characters invented by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas when Ronald Reagan was still in office.
The action begins in 1944. Indy (the de-aged Ford) risks everything to help his colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) keep Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) from getting his hands on
a mysterious dial known as the Antikythera. Used properly, the dial has the ability to manipulate time, and say, change the outcome of a certain war. “Hitler made mistakes,” says Voller. “And with this, I will correct them all.”
Cut to twenty-five years later. America has just landed on the moon, and the nation is jubilant but it is a jubilation the weathered Indy does not share. In the wake of his separation from
Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and the death of his son, he starts each day with a shot of booze and a bad attitude.
On the eve of his retirement from teaching, a face from the past shows up. Helena Shaw (Waller-Bridge) is Basil Shaw’s daughter, Indy’s estranged goddaughter, an archeologist and a thief. Her interest in the Antikythera lures Indy back into a world of international adventure, former Nazis and the echoes of history come to life. “You’ve taken your chances, made your mistakes,” Helena says to Indy, “and now, a final triumph!”
Nothing is likely to ever live up to the adrenaline rush of seeing “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for the first time. The expert balance of action, comedy, suspense and mysticism is a cut above and nearly impossible to duplicate. The retro newness of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is an attempt to recapture the magic, and it does deliver a hefty dose of whip-crackin’ thrills, but like the de-aged Ford in the film’s opening twenty minutes, it doesn’t exactly feel like the real thing.
It is, however, respectful of what came before. Mangold transcends the film’s recycled nature with some exciting action set pieces, and even if the stunts don’t feel as organic as they did the first time around, they deliver a welcome blast of vintage Indy action. There’s even a callback to Indy’s well-known fear of snakes. A highlight is a wild chase through the streets and alleyways of Tangier that mixes humor, action and peril in equal measure.
Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael captures the classic Indy look, an aesthetic and color palette that disappeared sometime around “Crystal Skull.” Visually, it’s like a warm hug that spans back decades.
Of course, the crucial element is Ford. He may need more CGI to hopscotch around on the top of trains and through sunken caves these days, but he brings the OG 70s movie star mojo and a Traveller’s hat full of charisma that has not diminished over the years. There is a poignancy to Ford’s lion-in-winter portrayal of the character, and, as a result, (NO SPOILERS HERE) there is an emotional component to the film’s final reel, as Indy confronts the anguish he feels, that may be the most touching moment in the entire series.
He’s ably assisted by the wisecracking Waller-Bridge and stoically evil Mikkelsen.
The story and action in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” gets slowed down from time-to-time by too much talk of the Lance of Longinus, Polybius Squares and the Ear of Dionysius. Mangold makes up for those moments with John Williams’s rousing, signature score and a wild, and unexpected third reel payoff. The movie may not turn back the clock to have the cultural impact of the original, but it is a lot of fun.
“Vengeance,” a new satire playing in theatres, written, directed and starring “The Office” actor B.J. Novak, mixes-and-matches social commentary, the opioid epidemic and social divides, in a story that plays like a murder mystery wrapped around a journey of self-discovery.
Novak plays New York City writer Ben Manalowitz, a shallow, self-absorbed, know-it-all who wants to host an important podcast that will make sense of America and its current state of divide. “I don’t just want to write,” he says pompously. “I want to have a voice.”
When an unknown number pops up on his phone in the middle of the night, it sets him on the path to finding his voice as a weepy caller gives him the “bad news” that his girlfriend has died.
Girlfriend? Which one?
Turns out it was Abilene (Lio Tipton), one of several women he dated at the same time. The family believes they were in love but Ben has to look up her photo to put a face to the name.
Abbey’s good-old-boy brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) insists Ben come to the funeral in West Texas. “I can’t do this,” Ben says. “None of us can do this,” says the grief-stricken Ty, “and face the future alone.”
Reluctantly Ben agrees to travel to West Texas and even gets roped into speaking at the funeral. “I wish I had known her better,” he says, looking at a picture of her and a guitar. “I wish I had spent more time with her. She loved music and will always be a song in our hearts.”
On the drive back from the funeral, Ty drops a bomb. “Abbey didn’t just die,” he says. “She was murdered. And we’re going to avenge her death.”
Why not just call the police? “In Texas we don’t call 911.”
Ben says, “As a personal boundary, I don’t avenge deaths. I don’t live in a Liam Neeson movie,” but a lightbulb goes off. This is the story he has been looking for.
He agrees to investigate Abilene’s death in the form of a true crime podcast. “This isn’t a story for everyone,” he says. “It’s a story about the need for vengeance.”
Working with his New York based editor (Issa Rae) to shape the story, his investigation leads him into murky territory, both personally and professionally.
The film’s title suggests a blood-speckled search for retribution but “Vengeance” is more interested in provocation than payback. Abilene’s death is the engine that drives the story, but it’s also a McGuffin, an ultimately not important detail in the overall scheme of things. Novak is more interested in our preconceptions about each other in the great red-state/blue-state divide, and how those biases color the way we behave.
It’s a heady backdrop for a neo-western noir, and it starts strong as fish-out-of-water Ben slowly realizes there is life outside his tiny bubble. Ben is a satire of east coast arrogance, looking down on anyone who dares to live outside the borders of New York City. As he digs into Abilene’s passing, investigating if she was murdered or took an accidental overdose, he begins to place old prejudices aside and actually becomes less insufferable. He is pointed in a new direction as his moral compass leads him to wonder if his own caddish behavior may have played a role in Abilene’s fate and, with the podcast, if he is exploiting her family.
Unfortunately, it is also at this point that the film begins to crumble under the weight of broad MAGA characterizations and juicy droplets of pop psychology doublespeak like “everything is everything so everything is nothing.”
As the story splinters off into a satire of true crime podcasts and social media in general, it gets mired in its own philosophies and the fleet-footed pacing of the early sections slows, dragged to a stop by a muddle of ideas.
“Vengeance” is an ambitious movie that bites off a bit more than it can easily chew and digest, but provides enough laughs and intrigue to be worth a look.
“The Cursed,” a new werewolf movie now in theatres, shoots for the moon by throwing the traditional rules of lycanthropy mythology out the window to create a fresh and timely take on an old genre. But does it bite off more than it can chew?
The film opens in the trenches of World War I during the Battle of the Somme. A French soldier is killed with a silver bullet before the action jumps back in time thirty-five years to the ancient province of Gévaudan in southern France and the true beginning of the story.
Coldhearted land baron (is there any other kind?) Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) is unafraid to spill gallons of blood to protect his property, wife (Kelly Reilly) and children. When a Romani clan lay a claim to his land, Laurent retaliates, attacking, burning and mutilating every one of them. “Do you think you can ride into my country,” Laurent sneers as his hired killers laugh and take photographs with the dead, “take my land and do whatever you like?”
As the last victim is being buried alive, she utters a curse, damning Laurent’s estate and entire family.
As the curse echoes in his ears, everything changes. Laurent’s family is soon affected and his carefully constructed life begins to crumble.
Son Edward (Max Mackintosh) suffers for the sins of his father. His weird dreams of creepy scarecrows and a set of strange metal teeth lead him back to the scene of the Romani massacre. When Timmy Adams (Tommy Rodger), the son of one of the other area land barons, finds the metal teeth buried in on the killing field, before you can say, “Werewolves of London,” he puts them in his mouth and bites Edward, piercing his neck. “We will all pay for the sins of our elders,” says Timmy. “We’re all going to die.”
Timmy scurries off into the woods while Edward is tended to at home. When Edward disappears from his bed, a search party is convened but the boy isn’t found. Meanwhile, a bloodthirsty beast, whose bite either kills or transforms its quarry into a werewolf, terrorizes the area.
John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), a visiting pathologist with a personal link to the case, understands what’s going on and knows that the only “cure” for the werewolf outbreak is a silver bullet.
“The Cursed” has a title that sounds as though it should be attached to exploitation fare, bloody with a side of gross. While there are bloody and gross moments sprinkled throughout, the bulk of the running time is quiet and austere, shot in the low light, greyish tones of so much 19th century horror on film. Director Sean Ellis builds to the scares, constructing a sense of dread and suspense that pays off during the attack scenes.
More interesting is Ellis’s reinterpretation of the werewolf legend. The curse and the silver bullet survived from established mythology but he throws the rest away to create a new look and feel for his creatures. These beasts don’t represent the duality of the werewolves of yore, the mix of animal and spiritual. They don’t wait for the full moon to turn. Nor do they look like the customary Lon Chaney Jr. monster. Instead, as one scene memorably details, the victims are enveloped in a werewolf casing.
No spoilers here, but the creatures are primal killing machines, not the tortured souls of other werewolf movies who are trapped by, but fight against, their nature.
“The Cursed” is a fresh take on the werewolf legend but simultaneously feels like a throwback to the Hammer Horror films of old where charismatic Van Helsing types battled creatures and corsets and tailcoats were still in fashion. A mix of elevated and primal scares, of brains and schlock, it contains enough suspense and memorable visuals to make it worthwhile.
Richard hosted a screening and Q&A of the new sci fi thriller film “In the Shadow of the Moon” with the director Jim Mickle and star Boyd Holbrook.
Jim Mickle is the creator of TV series “Hap and Leonard” and director of films such as “Cold in July” and Cannes Fortnight selection “We Are What We Are,” “Mulberry Street,” and “Stake Land.” Actor Boyd Holbrook has appeared in films such as “Milk,” “Out of the Furnace,” “Run All Night,” and “Gone Girl,” and starred as DEA Agent Steve Murphy in the Netflix series “Narcos” and in 2017 he portrayed villain Donald Pierce in “Logan.”
Synopsis: In 1988, Philadelphia police officer Thomas Lockhart (Boyd Holbrook), hungry to become a detective, begins tracking a serial killer who mysteriously resurfaces every nine years. But when the killer’s crimes begin to defy all scientific explanation, Locke’s obsession with finding the truth threatens to destroy his career, his family, and possibly his sanity. “In The Shadow Of The Moon” is a genre-blending psychological thriller that examines the power of time, and how its passing can either bring us together or tear us apart.
Temperament wise, Hugh Jackman doesn’t have much in common with his most famous screen role.
As the embodiment of Wolverine — a mutant blessed with miraculous healing powers but cursed with a bad hairstyle and existential angst — Jackman is the face of the character. But off screen he is as gracious as his cigar-smoking X-Men alter ego is testy.
His Prisoners co-star Terence Howard told me Jackman was, “a sweet man,” while director Josh Rothstein said the actor “leads with smiles and warmth.”
Doesn’t sound much like Wolverine to me.
When he isn’t playing Wolverine he devotes his time to charitable causes like World Vision and Laughing Man, a coffee company he established that sells fair trade coffee and tea, products farmed using ecologically friendly methods and sold for the benefit of the farmer and consumer.
This weekend he stars in Logan, the third solo Wolverine film. In the new movie the X-Men antihero makes tracks to the Mexican border to set up a hide-out for ailing mentor Professor X, played by Patrick Stewart.
This installment marks the ninth time Jackman has slipped on the adamantium claws, and will be his swansong in the role.
Having played the character for almost 18 years Jackman owns the part, bringing real humanity to the mutant in a powerful and accomplished performance.
But, as he told me in a friendly, wide-ranging and informative interview, he wasn’t always as self-assured.
“When I started acting I was the dunce of the class,” he reveals. Success in school, he says, came because of his work ethic, a trait he picked up from his father.
“He never took one day off in his life,” he remembers. “He had five kids he was bringing up on his own. If anyone deserved a day off it was my old man, but he never did. I learned that from him.
“There’s always that feeling of, ‘I have to work harder than everybody else. I’m not born Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I’ve got to just work harder and I’m prepared to do it.”
Being the youngest of five children also contributed to his outlook.
“I always wanted to do stuff and not be left out,” he says, but adds, “I was quite a fearful kid, which I hated.
“I’ve always had a fear of fear. It’s weird to think back now but drama school is a pressure cooker situation. People get kicked out of drama school. You are constantly being judged on how you are doing; are you progressing, are you not?
“Almost everyday you had to get up and do a monologue. Sing a song. Do it in front of everybody. I noticed I was always first. I never wanted to sit there waiting. I’m not saying that out of courage. It was too uncomfortable to sit, stewing. I don’t think I’ve told anyone else that.”
Later, fear of unemployment pushed him to expand his talents.
“When I came out of drama school I was like, ‘I’m going to do anything I can just to keep working.’ In drama school you do Shakespeare to movement to circus skills to singing all in one morning. I know a lot of people hated it but I revelled in it. I loved it.”
Seems hard work and confidence is the X-factor that made Jackman the most famous — and friendly — of all the X-Men.
“Logan” takes a Canadian superhero played by an Australian actor and places him smack dab in the middle of the great American movie genre, the Western. The third solo Wolverine film stars Hugh Jackman in his ninth and final incarnation of the cigar-smoking X-Man but this one is different from the others.
Set in the near future, when “Logan” begins the mutant world seen in the other “X-Men” movies has changed. Mutants are almost extinct, their greatest champion, 90-year-old Charles Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart) is senile and his school, the Xavier Institute, shuttered. Wolverine, a mutant blessed with healing powers but cursed with a bad hairstyle and existential angst, tends to Xavier, but age and a lessening of his powers have reduced the superhero to working as a chauffeur in Texas near the Mexican boarder. “Charles, the world is not as it was,” he says ruefully.
He is drawn back into his old life when he takes a job driving an 11-year-old girl named Laura (Dafne Keen) to a mysterious safe haven in North Dakota called Eden. Turns out the youngster is a chip off the old block, a clone-daughter of Wolverine. Like her old man the silent but deadly kid—she barely speaks a word until the last half of the film—has regenerative healing powers and retractable adamantium-coated bone claws; like most adolescents she’s volatile, with mood swings and the potential for violence.
They are on the run from the Reavers, a team dedicated to the destruction of the X-Men. Led by part cyborg head of security Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant), a surgeon whose father was killed by Wolverine, the Reavers are ruthless and possibly unstoppable.
Like the superhero at the heart of the movie, “Logan” is angsty and dark, a film that drips with sweat and regret. Director James Mangold tosses away the pop psychology of earlier “X-Men” outings, replacing it with something usually lacking in comic book movies, humanity. Wolverine may have super powers, but he’s never been more human than he is in “Logan.” A lion in winter, he’s a mentor, a friend, a warrior nearing the end of his run. “You are dying,” says Laura. “You want to die. Charles told me.” Sure, he can slice your head off with a flourish of his claws but this time around psychological vulnerability is front and centre, not his physical prowess.
Mangold has also done away with much of the computer-generated clutter that have become a de rigour in superhero flicks. He’s turned Wolverine’s valediction into a traditional drama. Think “Unforgiven” with claws. The character is wounded, wracked with regret for a legacy of bloodshed, a life he never asked for. It’s the kind of existential reckoning that fuelled Westerns like “Winchester 73,” “The Shootist,” “Shane” and “Ride the High Country” and while there are no cowboy hats on display, make no mistake, “Logan” is a call back to the days when antiheroes wore their wounds on their sleeves.
The movie works because Jackman digs deep. His portrayal of Wolverine has grown over the years from cartoon cut out to fully realized character. It would have been easy and probably commercially prudent to allow Wolverine to downplay his anguish and simply have him slice and dice his way through the “X-Men” franchise but Jackman rides the line. This is a violent movie that should satisfy fans hungry for action but his remorse, his regret is palpable and the character is more interesting for it.
There are echoes of other comic book tropes in “Logan.” There’s an evil Logan and an “Iron Man 3-esque” child sidekick, but it still feels like the evolution of the superhero movie. A hybrid of brains and brawn it is unafraid to call “X-Men” comic books “ice cream for bedwetters” while at the same time paying respect to one of it character cornerstones.
“Run All Night” plays like an alternate universe “Taken” set in a world where a killer played by Liam Neeson actually feels remorse for all the havoc he has created.
Once again Neeson is a father who will do almost anything to protect his family, including using his very special set of skills, but the situation is very different from the ones that saw him traverse the globe as kick-ass dad Bryan Mills.
In “Run All Night” he plays Jimmy Conlon, a hitman for the Irish mob. His boss is his childhood friend—his only friend, in fact—kingpin Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). They have a bond forged by decades of having one another’s backs. The pair are like brothers, until a disagreement between their sons (Boyd Holbrook and Joel Kinnaman) spirals out of control the two best friends become mortal enemies.
Action man du jour Neeson goes mano a mano with Ed Harris and faster than you can say, “Tell everyone to get ready, Jimmy’s coming,” he goes then mano a mano a mano a mano a mano a mano against everyone else in an exhibition of extreme, grunting manliness. Jimmy is a man who has done some very bad things, and continues to, using a very particular set of skills to nullify anyone who gets between him and the safety of his son.
Unlike the “Taken” series, which is content with straight-ahead action, “Run All Night” attempts to deepen the story by examining Jimmy’s conscious, delving into themes of atonement and guilt, topped off with a “I wanted to save you from having the same kind of life I had” subplot. Neeson really wants us to know that Jimmy is a killer but not a bad dad and the emphasis on adding psychological layers to the character drags the movie down in the last forty minutes.
It’s great fun to see Harris and Neeson ooze testosterone and the movie does have some very stylish action scenes plus a relentless hitman (Common) but its efforts to examine Neeson’s Irish guilt aren’t nearly as interesting or well done as the action story.
