In director Charles Officer’s crime-noir “Akilla’s Escape,” now on digital & VOD, a drug robbery goes sideways, opening the door for the title character’s reckoning of his past, and the future of the young man who held a shotgun to his head.
Drug dealer Akilla (Saul Williams, who also composed the film’s score with Robert 3D Del Naja) wants out. Marijuana is about to become legal in Canada, but his days as a violent, mid-level drug runner are over.
Almost.
His ‘retirement” is postponed when he walks in on the robbery of one of his boss’s operations. As shotgun and machete wielding gang members invade the place, Akilla locks eyes with Sheppard (Thamela Mpumlwana), the youngest of the thieves. As things turns violent, Akilla subdues the teenaged Sheppard, knocking him unconscious.
Instead of seeking revenge in the name of his employer, Akilla forms a bond with the young man, recognizing in Sheppard parallels to his own life and the trauma that put them both on the path to a life of violence.
“Akilla’s Escape” is a stylish crime story laced with social commentary. What it lacks in pulse racing action scenes, it makes up for with tense, tightly wound performances, illustrations of toxic masculinity and a nicely rendered story that jumps back and forth in time.
Taking on a double role, Mpumlwana plays both Sheppard and, in flashbacks, young Akilla. It’s a clever casting trick, but it works to skillfully reveal the similarities in their lives. The two characters may have been led down a similar path, but Mpumlwana’s work ensures the characters are distinct and interesting throughout.
The core of the movie is the rock-solid performance from Williams. World-weary and contemplative, he’s part criminal, part social worker and is the film’s heart and soul.
“Akilla’s Escape” is a study of how generational trauma and poverty shapes lives. It errs on the side of exposition in several scenes, but the power of the story lies in what isn’t said as much as what is. The film is at its best when Williams and Mpumlwana are showing, not telling. In those moments “Akilla’s Escape” is powerful, mature and impactful.
“Trigger Point,” a new action movie starring Barry Pepper and now on VOD, is stylish looking and features good actors but suffers from a bad case of been there, done that.
Pepper is Lewis, a retiree leading a quiet life in a quiet upstate New York town. His days are spent at the local diner, flirting with waitress Janice (Nazneen Contractor) and sipping tea at the quaint local book store.
His home life, however, isn’t so quaint. His cabin-in-the-woods is a veritable fortress, complete with high tech surveillance gear and drone security.
Turns out Lewis is actually Nicolas Shaw, a former superspy for a shady operation called The Agency. In hiding after his actions resulted in the assassinations of his entire team, he’s brought back into the dangerous world of international intrigue by his former handler Elias Kane (Colm Feore).
Kane’s daughter Monica (Eve Harlow) has been kidnapped by the shadowy figure who may have been responsible for the methodical murder of Shaw’s team.
So, just when he thought he was out, Shaw is dragged back to the underworld to rescue Monica and search down the man responsible for his professional and personal undoing.
“Trigger Point” director Brad Turner has a long and varied list of television credits, including episodes of “MacGyver,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Hawaii Five-O.” He knows how to shoot action and where to put the camera so the movie looks good when the bullets are flying.
He’s also good at casting interesting looking, solemn-faced actors like Pepper, Feore and Carlo Rota, all of whom have tread this territory before.
It’s in the storytelling that things go south. Weighed down by tough guy banalities, there is very little in “Trigger Point” that we haven’t seen before and done better. The actors breathe whatever life they can into this collection of clichés but no amount of grim determination can elevate this above the level of a forgettable direct to video time waster.
Raw talent and artistic ambition drive Darren, played by “Letterkenny’s” Kelly McCormack, to take extreme measures to make ends meet in “Sugar Daddy,” a new drama now on VOD.
Like many young, struggling artists Darren has a roommate and several part time jobs but still has trouble paying her bills. When she gets fired from a catering gig, she turns to a website that sets up paid dinner companions with older men who want company but not commitment.
Her friends think the job is turning her into a commodity, but she stays with it, spending time with Gordon, a wealthy business man played by Colm Feore, who appears to share her love of music.
As her life spirals, she connects with a lost sense of self-esteem and creates experimental music that bares her reshaped soul.
“Sugar Daddy” is a coming-of-age story about an artist finding her way.
Darren is a prickly character, indecisive, often rudderless but she’s utterly compelling. Director Wendy Morgan uses a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio to ensure we can’t ignore her, but it is McCormack, who also wrote the script, that captures the character’s brilliance, capriciousness and self-centeredness. It is a multi-layered performance that edges into stereotypical tormented artist territory before finding grace notes in the Darren’s lessons of empowerment.
“Sugar Daddy’s” ideas on patriarchal structures in the arts and the people who create aren’t as experimental as Darren’s music and videos but they lay a solid foundation on which Morgan and McCormack to build a carefully constructed character study.
Set back in the days when e-mail was “a new trend that will phase out,” “My Salinger Year,” now on VOD, is a coming-of-age story of an aspiring writer who finds herself enmeshed in the shadow of one of the great, reclusive authors of the twentieth century.
Tired of analyzing other people’s work Joanna (Margaret Qualley) drops out of Berkeley to move to New York City to write. “Isn’t that what aspiring did?” she says. “Live in cheap apartments and write in cafes?” She gets a foot in the door with a job with Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), the old-school literary agent of “Catcher in the Rye” author J. D. Salinger. The reclusive author is alive and well, and still writing but unwilling to actually publish any of his work.
Margaret has lots of rules. No computers, no opened toed shoes and no need to wear stocking in the summer. Above all, no talking to Jerry, as in Jerry Salinger. “Jerry doesn’t want to hear about how much you love ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ she says, “and he doesn’t want to hear about your stories. Just say, Yes Jerry, ‘I’ll tell my boss you called.’”
Jerry also doesn’t want to hear from his readers, even though fans send letters by the truck load. Instead, the letters are read, that’s the bulk of Joanna’s new job, and responded to with a form letter.
Soon though, her secretarial role takes on a different dimension when she finds herself emotionally invested in the letters; the stories from fans about how Salinger’s work affected their lives. “I can’t send them a letter that says, ‘Dear Kid, J.D. Salinger doesn’t care about you.” Instead, she secretly begins personalizing the letters, discovering a new inner voice.
“My Salinger Year,” based on the 2014 memoir of the same name by Joanna Rakoff, is a coming-of-age story about pushing insecurity aside to find a path in life. Far from another “The Devil Wears Prada” knock-off—although Weaver has fun playing Joanna’s cantankerous, computer-hating boss—it’s subtler than that.
It works best when it focusses on Joanna’s time at the literary agency. Less so when she’s washing dishes in the bathtub of her cheap NYC apartment she shares with her Socialist boyfriend Don (Douglas Booth). Joanna’s relationship with Salinger (Tim Post, heard but barely seen) and Margaret are the gateways that define her need to step away from the life she knew; to be extraordinary. That’s the film’s most compelling journey, the rest feels shopworn.
“My Salinger Year” is about momentous changes in Joanna’s life, but it doesn’t feel momentous. Qualley is effective but emphasizes the character’s naiveté in a way that underplays Joanna’s journey. A third act dance number, one that visualizes Joanna’s reaction to reading “Catcher in the Rye,” brings the life the story deserves, but by then it’s too little, too late.
Despite the name “Astronaut,” a new film starring Richard Dreyfuss, is a decidedly earth-bound drama.
Dreyfuss plays Angus, an elderly, retired civil engineer grieving the loss of his late wife. As he prepares to sell the home they shared he stays with daughter Molly (Krista Bridges), son-in-law Jim (Lyriq Bent) and grandson Barney (Richie Lawrence) before taking the next step of moving into a retirement home. In frail health, he senses the end is near but is given a boost when he gets the chance to fulfill a childhood dream courtesy of a contest from billionaire Marcus Brown’s (Colm Feore) Ventura Space Program’s private shuttle launch. It’s a “lottery for someone who thinks big” that will send twelve lucky people into orbit. Angus is too old and too sick, but he has always dreamed of going to space. “People have been looking up at the stars forever,” he says, “and I think it’s always for the same reason. To see where we belong.”
“Astronaut” never quite gets airborne but has its charms courtesy of the straightforward storytelling and nice performances. It’s lovely to see Dreyfuss in a film that allows him to show the character’s humanity while still looking at the stars. It also stirs up nostalgic feelings, like a lo-fi revisit of his character from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” He anchors the film, whether he is interacting with his grandson or relating to Len (Graham Greene), a non-verbal resident in the nursing home, in a performance infused with the gravitas of an older person trying to assert his worth.
“Astronaut” makes some obvious choices that prevent it from fully taking flight—a dance sequence at the nursing home is particularly awful—but has enough to say about aging and following your dreams to earn it a look for family audiences.
Imagine being frightened of your own child. That is the terrible situation of young mom Sarah (Taylor Schilling) in “The Prodigy,” a new psychological horror from director Nicholas McCarthy.
Schilling is mother to Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) an extraordinarily gifted child who spoke at twenty weeks and could generally outthink everyone by the time he was old enough to walk. “Nothing wrong with this little guy,” says a doctor. “He’s very aware. Here’s what we call a smarty-pants.”
Soon though he displays antisocial behaviour. He can’t seem to connect with people at school, perhaps because he beat a classmate with a wrench in lab class. In his sleep he angrily mumbles some kind of foreign language. “You were having a bad dream,” mom says waking him. “It wasn’t a bad dream,” he says. “It was a good dream.”
Concerned that something is amiss Sarah takes Miles to a psychologist. Unable to find a medical reason for Miles’s condition the doctor refers him to another specialist, a professor (Colm Feore) who believes there is a battle being waged inside Miles. Most of the world believes in reincarnation he explains, wondering if could Miles be an old soul having another go at life. “These souls return for a reason to complete a task,” he says.
If Miles is sharing a body with an invading soul, what job must he complete? Which one will become dominant?
As far as creepy kid movies go “The Prodigy” is a six out of ten. The kid, with his blank stare and mismatched eyes gives Damien a run for his money—especially when he says stuff like, “Sometimes I leave my body when I sleep. I do it to make room.”—it’s the details that earn a demerit or two.
Director McCarthy does a good job at building tension and sets up some good set pieces but he’s undone somewhat not by the silly-but-fun premise but by ridiculous things that don’t make sense that distract from the main story. How is Miles still allowed to attend school after he wacked a kid with a wrench? Why does Sarah leave some material that clearly gives away what she’s about to do where Miles can see it? It goes on. I’m not looking for credibility in a movie about (MILD SPOILER!!) a reincarnated serial killer but virtually everything that doesn’t make sense also could have been avoided without changing the DNA of the story one iota.
“The Prodigy” is a little heavy-handed—Miles washes off his Halloween skull make up, but only from one side of his face, leaving behind an image that represents the duality of his personality—but it embraces the wild nature of its story, providing just enough uncomfortable moments to earn a recommendation.
After an eleven-year the break emotional, brash French-Canadian cop David Bouchard (Patrick Huard) and cold, calculating Upper Canadian constable Martin Ward (Colm Feore) are back on the beat. Their original pairing, “Bon Cop, Bad Cop,” was a Two Solitudes parody that became one of the highest grossing Canadian films of all time. The new film changes their dynamic but keeps the corny cultural comedy.
In “Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2” when the odd couple meet again Bouchard is working undercover with a ring of car thieves. Ward raids their chop shop hoping to nab two crime bosses but instead is reintroduced to his old friend. The straight-laced Ontarian fake arrests Bouchard to maintain his cover and the two get reacquainted.
Bouchard is still a hot-headed provincial police officer for the Sûreté du Québec while Ward has moved up. Now an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Ward has increased responsibilities and a compelling personal reason to follow this case to its conclusion. After clandestine meetings at curling rinks the two grudgingly decide to work together again but soon discover the car theft ring may have links to terrorism.
What to call “Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2”? It’s a buddy flick, a slapstick comedy, an equal opportunity caricature of Canadian stereotypes and a family drama. It is all that and yet, somehow less than the sum of its parts.
It is at its best when Feore and Huard are on screen together. The two spark, sparring over temperament, culture and even hockey but the film gets bogged down in details. You know what made “Law & Order” great? You never knew much about the personal lives of the characters. It was always about the case and not the periphery. “Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2” could have taken a page from that playbook. The script—written by Huard—errs on the side of sentimentality and is cluttered with family turmoil and illness instead of trusting the chemistry between the two actors to carry the story.
“Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2” is billed as a Canadian comedy but for every line like, “That’s not the best way to talk to a separatist with anger issues,” that connects with CanCon culture there are five that feel as though they were torn from the pages of any generic American cop story. The first film was ripe with clichés, but at least they were Canadian clichés.
Add to that a climatic action sequence that makes virtually no sense—instead of calling for back up they say things like, “We have no choice, no time to go for more help.” Do they not have cell phones in Quebec?—where they do everything in the most spectacularly hard way when easier and more obvious solutions are readily available. The action, and everything else, is played at a heightened level that plays into old fashioned stereotypes—small town Americans are dumb, Bouchard is playfully reckless and the single character of colour is a villain—that feels out dated and borderline offensive.
“Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2” leans toward the latter part of its title.
