Set three hundred years after the events of 2017’s “War for the Planet of the Apes,” the latest film in the Apes franchise continues many of the themes established in the earlier films. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” now playing in theatres, explores topics of power and prejudice, of control and culture clashes.
Generations after the rule of Caesar, the original ape potentate, humans have become feral, while apes, like young chimpanzee hunter Noa (Owen Teague), live in clans as the dominant society. When Noa’s village is destroyed and family displaced by the marauding gorilla warriors of the power mad Bonobo despot Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), he begins a journey of revenge.
Along the way, he encounters the intellectual orangutan Raka (Peter Macon), a disciple of the teachings of the original Caesar. From Raka the young ape learns the fundamental rules; ape shall not kill ape and as apes together, we are strong.
The journey continues with the addition of Mae (Freya Allan), a human Raka befriends—“She is smarter than most,” he says.—on the way to Proximus Caesar’s secret “kingdom,” an expedition that could determine the fate of both human and ape civilizations.
“In their time, humans were capable of many great things,” says Proximus Caesar. “They could fly, like eagles fly. They could speak across oceans. But now, it is our time. And it is my kingdom. We will learn. Apes will learn. I will learn. And I will conquer.”
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is jam packed with big ideas and even bigger action scenes, but feels intimate because of its emotional content. While I have nostalgia for the rubber “damn dirty apes” masks of the original film franchise (1968 – 1973), the motion-capture performances on display here allow the actors to display emotional nuances the Roddy McDowell-era masks simply could not. Small facial gestures of concern, anger and happiness go a long way to creating ape characters that don’t simply feel like anthropomorphic oddities. These new school apes have a wider range of expression and that brings with it an intimate feel to the epic story.
Director Wes Ball ensures the emotional content is never diminished by the action. Not exactly wall-to-wall with action scenes, Ball takes his time with the worldbuilding and introduction of new characters before staging the first of the film’s big set pieces. It makes for a slow start, which makes the whole thing seem over long at two-and-a-half hours. But when it really kicks into gear in the second act, it does so with great stakes and is punctuated by the kind of adrenaline rush finale you expect from a big summer blockbuster.
It is, I suppose, ironic that “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” succeeds because of its humanity, but science fiction works best when its ideas, though presented in a speculative fashion, are reflective of the world in which they exist. This is a big budget summer blockbuster, but has its DNA in Pierre Boulle’s original book, and the “Planet of the Apes” screenplay by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, which value social commentary about abuse of power, prejudice and social divisions over spectacle. In our real world, a mixed-up, shook-up place, those themes resonate.
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” doesn’t have anything as memorable as the first film’s Statue of Liberty reveal, but is a worthy addition to the franchise, and sets up an interesting sequel.
Lots of kids like to play with their food, but the main character in “Abigail,” a new vampire film now playing in theatres, takes it to a new level.
The story begins with a plan to kidnap Abigail (Alisha Weir), the twelve-year-old ballerina daughter of a well-known underworld boss. Ringleader Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) makes it sound simple. He directs his ragtag team, including ex-cop Frank (Dan Stevens), hacker Sammy (Kathryn Newton), medic Joey (Melissa Barrera), musclebound enforcer Peter (Kevin Durand), ex-Marine Rickles (William Catlett) and get-away driver Dean (Angus Cloud in his last completed role), to contain Abigail and babysit her for twenty-four hours until a sizable ransom is paid.
How hard can that be?
With little effort, they pick up the unassuming looking rich girl, and secret her away to a secluded mansion where she is blindfolded and tied to a bed for safe keeping.
Things take a twist, however, when it’s revealed that Abigail is a bloodsucking fiend, quick to kill and drop a witty one-liner.
“I’m sorry about what’s gonna happen to you,” she tells one of her soon-to-be victims.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence, blow the plasma budget, filling the screen with gallons of bloody goo and arterial discharge. In its last half it is a splatter fest that provides the satisfying guts and gore horror fan expect.
But, in its own limited way, it’s also a family drama, a story of lost, lonely people, looking for approval from loved ones. That element gives the movie a nice grace note, but the focus here is popcorn thrills and chills.
As in “Ready or Not,” a Radio Silence movie from 2019, “Abigail” is largely set in a grand old gothic mansion. Trapped like rats in a labyrinth, the kidnappers flail helplessly, looking for, and finding, danger around every darkened corner.
Against that setting, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett stage several memorable scenes. In one, a newly-turned vampire acts as a puppet, performing an undead dance under Abigail’s telepathic control. It’s bizarre, kinda cool and diabolically funny.
The film’s beating heart, or rather, unbeating heart, is Weir, a kinetic presence who blends ballet with bloody vampiric attacks. Her shift from helpless child to two-hundred-year-old bloodsucker is the film’s coup de grâce.
“Abigail” goes on a little too long, puts a bit too much space between the gory set pieces and gives some characters the short shrift, but ultimately delivers a gory good time for genre fans.
Imagine Noah’s Ark, but with killer CGI animals and a wise-cracking serial killer, and you get the general idea of “Primal,” the latest Nic Cage movie to go straight to VOD.
Frank Walsh (Cage) is a poacher in the jungles of Brazil; a loner who traps exotic animals for export to collectors and zoos in the US. His latest capture, El Fantasma Gato, is beyond rare. Worth maybe $1 million. “It’s a white jaguar,“ he says. “Maybe 350 to 400 pounds. Doesn’t like people.“ “Just like you Frank,“ says his kid sidekick (Jeremy Nazario) in the only comment that passes for character work in the “Primal’s” stripped-down b-movie world.
The action begins with Frank transports the animal on the large cargo ship. Trouble is, the US government is using the same ship to transport a psychopathic killer to justice. Held Hannibal Lecter-style in a cage below deck by Navy doctor Ellen Taylor (Famke Janssen) and Government lawyer Freed (Michael Imperioli), Richard Loffler (Kevin Durand) is a former military man turned international terrorist.
This is a B-movie, so no amount of security, chains or wild animals can stop Loffler from causing havoc on the high seas. Only one man, with a special set of skills and a rare white jaguar, can stop Loffler’s rampage. It’s nature gone wild on the high seas as Walsh snorts, “I’m going hunting.”
“Primal” is the kind of movie Nicolas Cage bangs out between visits to his tax lawyer. It’s a film so far beneath has talent you have to wonder why he signed on. Did he always want to work with a talking parrot? Does he get paid by the cliché these days? Hard to know. What is for sure is that “Primal” is one of those movies where the sheer stupidity of the story supplies the only entertainment value. The thrills fall short and the action is almost nonexistent but it’s almost worth the price of a rental to see Cage try and take down Loffler with a poison blow dart gun or argue with his parrot.
“Primal” will make you yearn for the days when Nic Cage movies like “Con Air,” “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “The Rock” promised and delivered offbeat delights. Cage brings his patented oddball performance style along for the ride but even that isn’t enough to give “Primal’s” bland storytelling and lazy action some zip.
The word hardscrabble comes to mind while watching “Mean Dreams,” a new thriller from director Nathan Morlando. The two lead characters, star-crossed teenagers Casey (Sophie Nelisse) and Jonas (Josh Wiggins), don’t have any easy go of it. Her father Wayne (Bill Paxton) is a physically abusive drunk, while Jonas’s dad treats the fifteen-year-old like an adult. It’s a hard knock life, one that forces the two to mature quickly and make grown-up decisions.
Casey and Wayne are new to town. Wayne divides his time between drinking and looking for ways out of their new podunk town. He’s a lawman with little respect for the law, anything or anyone, including his daughter. When Wayne almost kills Jonas, Casey’s new neighbour and love interest, and local law enforcement (Colm Feore) doesn’t seem interested in helping, the young man takes it on himself to put some space between his new girlfriend and her abusive father. Their new life begins with the theft of $1 million in drug money, an action that brings serious consequences.
Echoes of “Badlands,” Terrence Malick’s tale of young love on the run, hang heavy over “Mean Dreams.“ Casey and Jonas are more innocent than Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) and Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) but their journey into antisocial behaviour rings a bell. Director Morlando may not be treading new ground here, but emotionally he veers off the beaten track, adding elements of innocence among the wolves that lends the story a welcome human aspect and motivation for their actions.
The villains—Paxton and Feore (SPOILER ALERT) are suitably villainous, amoral and sleazy excuses for human beings, but it’s too bad they feel like they just stepped out of Central Casting. Paxton is undeniably entertaining as the ruthless and vicious father figure, but he’s a mish-mash of every redneck creep we’ve seen before. Feore is given even less dimension, but is an imposing figure nonetheless.
The real heart and soul of “Mean Dreams” lies with Nelisse and Wiggins. If we don’t care about them, we don’t care about the movie and the two young leads are appealing even when they are pushed to extremes.
The critics hammered “The Captive,” a new crime drama from director Atom Egoyan, when it played at the Cannes Film Festival. Reaction at the French fest was swift and brutal for a film that features some good thriller elements but is sunk by plot holes, logic lapses and simultaneous under and over acting.
Set in Niagara Falls, Ontario the beginning of the movie is a slow burn, using a broken timeline to weave the stories of a young detective (Scott Speedman) transferring from homicide over to the Special Victims Unit run by Nicole (Rosario Dawson) with the mysterious disappearance of Cass (Alexia Fast) who was taken from the backseat of her father’s (Ryan Reynolds) truck as he picked up some food at a diner.
Held captive for eight years by a pedophile (Kevin Durand), the girl is locked in a hidden apartment where she plays piano and watches streaming video of her mother (Mireille Enos) at work as a hotel maid. When she isn’t on lockdown she’s used as online bait for a pedophile ring, a recruiter for other young girls. The police investigation is a dead end until a clue from an unlikely source breaks the case.
“The Captive” has an interesting enough premise, but in an effort to differentiate itself from a score of similarly themed police procedurals, it makes a few wrong turns. The choppy timeline works well enough, helping to build some drama, and the pedophile’s habit of planting mementos from Cass’s life—a hairbrush, a figure skating trophy—in the hotel rooms her mother Tina cleans, and then watching her reactions, is unspeakably cruel.
But, like so much of the movie, there is bad along with the good. Tormenting Tina is creepily effective but it is played strictly for dramatic effect, leaving a major logic hole in the story. Tina doesn’t call the police until she has enough mementos to open a junk shop even though it would have been the best and easiest way to catch the bad guys… unless you’re in a movie called “The Captive.” On “Law and Order” they would have nailed this creep in no time flat.
But this isn’t “Law and Order,” it’s an attempt at a more nuanced style of storytelling, but for us to care about the grace notes of the story we have to care about the characters. The premise is heartbreaking, no parent could be expected to hold up when their child is taken but the parents never become characters. They stop just short, instead acting out the broad strokes of grief. Reynolds is a loose cannon, prone to lashing out while Enos redefines listless, handing in a performance that borders on somnambulistic.
Then there is the Durand problem. A good thriller needs a good baddie but Durand’s performance, which I suppose is meant to be eerily otherworldly, comes across like an Ed Wood Jr. villain, all pursed lips and whispered dialogue. It’s strange and ineffective work that plays in stark contrast to Enos’s understated performance.
Unlike the best of Egoyan’s films “The Captive” doesn’t work on any level other than the surface. Sure, there are multiple stories—a 90’s style police procedural, the aftermath of the kidnapping, the parent’s devastation and the opera singing deviant and his ring of pedophiles—but none are developed past the superficial.
Writing the screenplay for his new film was a tough experience for Atom Egoyan.
The Captive, starring Ryan Reynolds, is a fictional story about child abduction in the Niagara region but it has roots in reality.
Missing child posters in Egoyan’s hometown of Victoria, British Columbia haunted his dreams, giving him a heightened awareness of “this person who created this huge hole in another group of people’s lives.”
Those images, coupled with news of a pedophile ring in Cornwall, Ontario, inspired the hard-hitting story of a the mysterious disappearance of Cass (Alexia Fast), taken from the backseat of her father’s (Ryan Reynolds) truck as he picked up food at a diner. Held hostage by a pedophile (Kevin Durand), the girl is locked in a hidden apartment where she plays piano and watches streaming video of her mother (Mireille Enos) at work as a hotel maid.
“When the results of [the Cornwall case investigation] were announced I just found it so troubling,” he says. “I started writing this script in 2009 and put it aside for a while because it just felt too dark and then I began to think about it as three couples: A couple who are trying to understand what happened to their daughter. One couple who we aren’t sure should be together; the detectives (Scott Speedman and Rosario Dawson) who form a relationship over the course of the case. And then this other couple who you know should not be together, the pedophile who steals a child and holds her captive for eight years.
“When I began to see these three couples and examine the relationships it began to find a form.”
The next hurdle was finding a star. The Oscar nominated director, known for highbrow films like The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica found his leading man Reynolds at the movies.
“If I was to be honest,” he says, “I’d say the reason I was inspired to work with him was Safe House. There were elements in that film that were exciting to me.”
Reynolds says he’s always wanted to work with Egoyan, saying, “growing up as a Canadian kid who loved movies, you’ve got to understand that Atom Egoyan was a kind of Holy Grail to me.”
“That’s very sweet,” Egoyan says. “God, I’m not that much older than him. But I guess I am. I don’t think he saw Next of Kin and Family Viewing or Speaking Parts. He must be talking about starting with Exotica. I found that touching but I found his commitment and his desire to be in the film is what really brought the while film together.”
Last year Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti and homegrown stars Emily Hampshire, Sarah Gadon and Kevin Durand gathered in Toronto to shoot Cosmopolis, a dark drama for director David Cronenberg.
On Monday the cast reunited with their director for a press conference I hosted at a downtown Toronto hotel in advance of the movie opening in theatres on Friday.
The tone of the conference was light, and the camaraderie of the cast obvious. Here are some of the highlights:
“I don’t know what I was more excited about,” said Hampshire, “having David bend over me and show Robert how to get a prostate exam, or Rob bending over me and getting one.”
“You don’t have to choose,” quipped Cronenberg.
Cronenberg also offered up some tongue-in-cheek advice for filmmakers. “I use a little Apple program called iDirector. A little green light goes on if it is OK, or a red light if you need to do another take. It’s pretty straightforward. You can all use it.”
Later the director commented on why he wanted his actors to speak the lines of the script exactly as written. “I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters,” he said, “they’re not designed for that.”
“There were no rewrites,” Pattinson chimes in.
“Normally that is the first thing you think about as an actor. And you are so used to just changing it the whole time, on every single movie, that with this, once you suddenly got to the idea that you are not changing anything, the script is fine, it’s you that are the problem, at least you knew one thing.”
Pattinson has a tour-de-force scene at the end of the film, a 22-page two-hander opposite Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti. The Sideways star took a quick break from shooting Rock of Ages in Miami to appear in Cosmopolis.
“Fortunately the other movie wasn’t terribly demanding on me,” Giamatti joked. “It was a musical that I was doing and I didn’t have to sing or dance. I just had to show up and crack jokes.”
“I was panicked about it,” he says of his quick turnaround in Toronto.
“This thing was intimidating. The length and the language. So I bothered everyone on the other movie to read this thing with me. Fortunately Malin Ackerman made a great Rob Pattinson.
“She was fantastic. I was very disappointed when actually I got here and it was Rob.”
