Movie Review: The Courier (2019)

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There are two things I learned while watching The Courier. If you're planning to assassinate the only living government witness before he anonymously testifies against a New York mobster and you want to get away with it, you're going to need a patsy. And as far as patsies go, it's never a good idea to choose someone with a background in black ops, as the villains of director Zackary Adler's new thriller discover when they send an unnamed courier played by Olga Kurylenko on an unknowingly lethal errand shortly into the movie.

Left holding the bag when the package she delivers to a witness in protective custody takes out the room, the ex Ukranian military specialist makes it her special mission to protect the witness (Amit Shah) so that he can live to testify another day.

Of course to do that, she'll have to get out of the parking garage, which is where the courier and the witness soon find themselves trapped by the villainous B-team who — not wanting to fail like their colleagues upstairs — have chained up every exit and started patrolling each level like enemy territory during wartime. Outfitted and armed to the teeth with everything from smart guns that only their trigger fingers can fire to security cameras, walkie talkies, and drones, Kurylenko has no choice but to pick them off one-by-one with whatever means she can find, whether that's through hand-to-hand or vehicular combat.

Die Hard by way of P2 except with a Jane McClane instead of John McClane in the role of our protagonist, former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko is sensational in this ambitious gender swapped B-movie that dares to have a woman guard a helpless dude-in-distress while flipping the script on traditional genre fare.

Maximizing its bare bones set piece as action dictates plot, although eventually The Courier's otherwise inventive fight scenes grow so repetitive that it devolves into torture porn as Adler continually ups the stakes in its final act, overall it serves as an ingenuously conceived reminder that filmmakers are limited not by budget as much as by their own imaginations.

So wholly engrossing in its one setting in fact, the film loses us whenever it ventures from London to New York for filler scenes with Gary Oldman's cartoonishly over-the-top mobster, who — conducting opera like he's back in Leon: The Professional — belongs in an entirely different movie.

Written by a veritable committee of writers (numbering four), who each seem to have a different goal or genre in mind, The Courier flirts with Jason Bourne-ish conspiracy and De Palma gangster camp in just two of its dead-end subplots. Set largely in real time, while admittedly, the film never fully comes together, there's still enough excitement throughout for us to disregard the sum and focus instead on its many electrifying parts.

Tethering it to the realm of grindhouse action whenever Adler's gritty thriller starts to stray, the fully committed Olga Kurylenko is there to deliver the film's one final lesson. Bobbing and weaving to head off danger as she looks for any opportunity to get the upper hand, the quick thinking Courier convinces us that — rather than a patsy in the middle of a conspiracy — all we really need for ninety-nine minutes is a woman in a parking garage who's ready to kick ass.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: The Warrior Queen of Jhansi (2019)

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It's all fun and filmmaking until someone almost loses an eye.

After years of building up her comfort level on horseback and getting in fighting shape to portray The Warrior Queen of Jhansi in the script she wrote alongside her filmmaker mother Swati Bhise and Olivia Emden, dancer-actress Devika Bhise knew it was time to get even more serious about her training. Studying Kalaripayattu, the world’s oldest martial art form with Jackie Chan’s instructor Gopakumar Gurukkal, Devika Bhise dove headfirst into her lessons so literally that she required emergency surgery after a shard of metal weaponry flew into her eye.

While most people would've jumped ship at this point, Bhise didn't let the injury sideline her for long. Latching onto another weapon — the long, thin, whip-like sword urumi — Bhise got right back on the horse in a move that no doubt would've impressed Rani Lakshmibai, the real life heroine she brings to life in Warrior Queen.

A headstrong commoner turned wife, queen, and widow of the maharajah by the time she’s in her early twenties, Rani finds a new calling when the royally aligned, corrupt mercantile trading corporation the British East India Company tries to steal back the land they'd given to India and claim Jhansi as their own following her husband's death.

Going from widowed queen to warrior general when diplomatic measures fail, Rani Lakshmibai begins training the women of Jhansi to fight in order to stand up to British tyranny and assert their independence, ultimately leading her countrywomen (and men) into war in producer turned first time feature filmmaker Swati Bhise's exciting if overwrought biopic.

Cramming hundreds of years of backstory into the film's slightly confusing first act, Warrior Queen is ready for action from the very first frame. In fact, hindered by a weak narrative throughline, Bhise’s film is so eager to get to the battlefield that — prioritizing conflict over character — it forgoes the vital step of endearing us to Rani, which is a major problem since she's the one at the heart of the picture marching us into the fray.

While chronicling Rani's efforts to unite her people as Jhansi's revolutionary war against the British gets underway in the 1850s makes the film seem like a natural fit for American audiences from an academic perspective, Queen suffers from the same affliction that most war movies do in that it's hard to care about characters that we don't know know very well.

Though her early actions, such as her bold refusal to shave her head (as is the archaic custom for women in mourning), speak volumes, the film doesn't trust itself enough to rely on more small acts of rebellion to help define our leading lady throughout.

Preferring instead to have Rani constantly voice her thoughts and goals aloud in anachronistic twenty-first century platitudes, while the undeniably well-intentioned feminist passion project wears its heart in its shots, the push-and-pull it faces between the film’s setting in the past and the script written in the present proves to be an even bigger battle than the one onscreen against the British.

Uncertain of precisely which tone it is that Bhise wishes to strike, the film opens like an epic from the 1950s (and indeed the last Rani Lakshmibai biopic, The Tiger and the Flame was made in 1953), but then veers into modern Wonder Woman territory as soon as our queen becomes a warrior. Collaborating with the stunt coordinators who worked on the Patty Jenkins helmed superhero film, Marcus Shakesheff and Glenn Marks turn Devika Bhise's Indian Joan of Arc into a wonder woman on horseback for the film's impressive battle sequences.

Veering away from the frenetic urgency of war shot in a breathless contemporary style to a classically framed walk-and-talk as we see Rani’s royal side, just when Bhise's film starts to draw us in, Warrior Queen loses its momentum by drifting back and forth unevenly between the two modes of filmmaking.

Giving Rani an ally and potential love interest in the form of Robert Ellis (Ben Lamb), a sympathetic British envoy who's inspired by the beautiful royal, as well as linking her plight as queen to that of Queen Victoria in England (played by Jodhi May), the screenwriters attempt to augment their one-note heroine in a study of compare and contrast. At this point, however, it's too little too late.

A handsomely photographed, thematically appealing tale of an underdog heroine standing up to injustice (as well as any man who crosses her path), while it's fine on the surface, the awkwardly paced and clunkily scripted film fails to find the rhythm it needs to work as well as it should.

With little in the way of staying power, thanks to the lack of a real connection to its titular heroine, although it's entertaining enough for a casual viewing, once the final credits roll, The Warrior Queen of Jhansi vanishes quickly from our minds. And unfortunately in this case, unlike the impressively skilled Devika Bhise, we’re unable to blame our filmic amnesia on something as cool as learning to fight and taking a shard of metal to the eye.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Papi Chulo (2018)

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When the heartbroken Sean (Matt Bomer) brings Ernesto (Alejandro Patiño) home to paint his deck, one of the first things that the Latino day laborer does is turn the light in the tool shed on. A light that Sean didn't even know he had because the shed was the domain of his ex, Ernesto's ability to find the light and turn it on with ease is something that the single weatherman desperately wants.

Except, having been sent home on leave when he suffered a breakdown live on air, in Sean's case, the light he needs to locate is the one that will put his life back on track. And in Irish writer-director John Butler's first American movie, Papi Chulo, it's a light that Sean thinks Ernesto might be just the right person to help him find.

A gently comic tale of unlikely friendship between a white, gay, well-to-do white collar weatherman and a straight, married Latino day laborer who barely speaks English, on the surface, of course, it's just the latest in a long line of films about white people learning to navigate life better with the aid of a new minority friend.

Impossibly, however, Chulo works much better than it should, thanks to the performances of its two charismatic leads as well as the sensitivity of Butler's writing. Giving Ernesto his own conflicting views on the proceedings that mostly come to light in English subtitled, Spanish phone exchanges with his wife, Butler never lets us forget about the unequal power dynamic that exists between the two men.

Likewise, refusing to sugarcoat just how flawed Sean is (from mildly annoying to dangerously alarming), much like the winds of Santa Ana that he was covering when he broke into uncontrollable sobs on air, Butler's film is propelled by a strong undercurrent of sadness, both owing to the end of Sean's recent serious relationship as well as the feeling of loneliness that only a film set in L.A. can exude.

Waiting until an hour into the ninety-eight minute running time to let us in on a key detail that might have otherwise colored our understanding of the situation as early as the very first scene, Chulo meanders off course within its last act.

Focusing more on Bomer's lead, which makes us feel the absence of Patiño onscreen as acutely as Sean does, when the film veers away from the home court advantage of Sean's upper class existence to give us an all too brief glimpse of Ernesto's world, we feel the imbalance of power even more, which paints their dynamic in a new, melancholy light.

Bonded by a genuine affection for one another that transcends backgrounds, Butler reminds us that although the two men have fun singing Madonna's "Borderline" together in the backseat of a Lyft, the realities of their situations are vastly different, and we live in a world that wants to keep those border(lines) separate.

From the casual racism hurled at Ernesto where people make Driving Miss Daisy jokes to a grocery store employee mistaking one Latino day laborer for another, although as a gay man, Sean knows a thing or two about prejudice, it's nothing compared to what Ernesto endures on any given day. And while the aggressively friendly, lonely Sean latches onto Ernesto right away, Butler doesn't let you imagine that they're suddenly pals.

In a early scene that most would play simply for laughs, Sean takes the older man boating on what he views as a break but Ernesto (of course) considers work, insisting upon rowing the weatherman around the lake just like he insisted upon carrying the equipment from the hardware store into the house when Sean first brought him home.

In fact, it isn't until the two bond over family during a hike that we feel as though we're seeing "off the clock" Ernesto, even if he's still on it, and this duality keeps the film from playing like a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie from the 1990s.

Talking in paragraphs as he gives voice to his insecurities (even if Ernesto can't understand much of anything that Sean says), although the two do form a tentative friendship, we never forget that much of it is just what Sean is projecting onto a man to whom he pays two hundred dollars daily for his time. Liking Sean but needing the money, Ernesto feels similarly conflicted, and we know before they do that eventually these issues will need to be addressed.

Masquerading as just another chronicle of friendship against the odds, Papi Chulo is a film with much more on its mind than typical genre fare. Refreshing on the one hand, it's frustrating on the other when we discover that, just like the movie's characters don't know how to translate and decipher the words and thoughts of one another, it's clear that Butler doesn't know quite what it is in Chulo that he wants to say.

Brought to life by its immensely likable leads, while it's Sean's arc we follow from start to finish (and Bomer's star power could light up the entire state of California), Butler definitely misses out by not devoting more time to Ernesto, which is evident when the film falters in the home stretch.

A sweet, simple story told with dark complexity, in Papi Chulo, Sean takes the long way around to realize that, whether in a tool shed or on the water, we all must find our own source of light. Luckily however, the search goes much better if we keep our hearts open and bring someone along to guide the way.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: 10 Minutes Gone (2019)

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10 Minutes Gone is a risky title because if you multiply that by nine, you'll have what you'll feel at the end of this movie when you realize that it took eight-nine minutes (of your life) to lead you to a conclusion so predictable that it's telegraphed within the first five.

In a nutshell, Gone is one of those VOD heist flicks where a group of crooks said to be the best call each other by their real names during a big score that inevitably goes wrong. Only this time, Michael Chiklis is knocked out after a botched job and wakes up ten minutes later with the loot gone, his brother (and partner in crime) dead, and no idea who made it happen.

Not mano a mano but robber a robber, with Bruce Willis breathing down his neck because somebody pocketed the jewels that he hired them to steal from a bank vault, Chiklis tracks down everyone involved one by one to see if he can figure out just what exactly transpired during those ten crucial minutes.

Bringing along his brother's girlfriend who — hindered by a bad script and an unconvincing portrayal by Backtrace's Meadow Williams — reacts to the news that her lover died by flatly saying “That can't be right. Shit,” Chiklis travels from one shootout to the next.

An awkward film which suffers from third rate crime movie dialogue delivered by actors who look as though they had just been told their lines before cinematographer Peter Holland's cameras started rolling, what the script by first time feature screenwriters Kelvin Mao and Jeff Jingle lacks in logic, 10 Minutes Gone makes up for in guns and squibs.

By now a veteran of the video on demand filmmaking trade, perhaps knowing that on paper, this thing is not the sharpest tool in a safecracker's shed, director Brian A. Miller does his damndest to ensure that his action sequences are there to distract.

Spending a majority of the film's budget on visual effects to make each gunfight pop as though every battle was the standoff at the O.K. Corral — only set in nondescript warehouses with indistinguishable production design — 10 Minutes Gone serves up some of the most impressive shootouts of Miller's filmography so far.

While Willis' suave presence looks good on a poster and he turns in a serviceable, if slight performance, besides the action, the real thing elevating Gone from being a flat out awful movie is Michael Chiklis who carries everything on his ample shoulders.

Registering more emotion throughout the film than the entire ensemble cast combined, Chiklis reminds us just how effective he is on the screen in — as he acknowledges in a behind-the-scenes Blu-ray featurette — the same type of role he's played throughout his career while carving out a niche in the cops and robbers genre. And even though he deserves something worthier of his talent, he's routinely strong here, regardless of whom he shares a scene with or the wooden dialogue being exchanged before the bullets start flying.

Yet action and Chiklis aside, unless you're a superfan of the actor or it shows up on cable TV when you're in bed with the flu, in the end, there's just not enough to salvage Ten Minutes of being worth ninety of your time.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: My Son (2017)

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Original French Title: Mon garçon

You don't want to mess with Guillaume Canet.

Wrapping a lamp cord around the man he suspects might be responsible for abducting his seven-year-old son from sleepaway camp, when Canet's Julien doesn't get the answers he's looking for, he drives the bound man over to the police station himself for further questioning.

Unfortunately, while these sort of dad-on-a-mission tactics work well for Charles Bronson or Liam Neeson, they just don't elicit the same response in polite French society, which Julien soon finds out when the officers on duty slap their cuffs not on the man he delivered to them all tied up as if in a bow, but the quick thinking, lamp cord wielding Julien instead.

When the desperate father is released, Julien fine-tunes his approach to keep a lower profile. With his head down, he goes back to work, undeterred in his quest, and even more determined than he was before because the clock is running out and, with every minute he wastes, his son might just as well be getting further and further away.

A gripping tale of suspense about a parent's worst nightmare, brought believably to life by the strong, fiery performance by Guillaume Canet at its center, director Christian Carion went to the greatest of lengths to ensure that Canet's plight was nothing if not one hundred percent authentic.

Keeping his Joyeux Noel star in the dark in this, their third pairing together, after an extensive rehearsal period was completed with the rest of the film's cast using a stand-in for Canet, Carion dropped the actor into filming and let him go on instinct and intuition, without showing him a single page of the script.

Shooting the film in chronological order in quick succession over six emotionally draining days, My Son is improvised to mostly stellar effect, which is apparent very early into Carion's film as Julien gets into a fight with his ex-wife Marie (well played by Melanie Laurent) in a standout sequence of domestic strife.

Guilt ridden by the absenteeism in his son's life that he's created by putting his globe-trotting career ahead of everything else, Julien's pain borders on an anguish he knows he cannot fully stop and face if he has any chance of finding his son.

Eyes widening and foot on the gas, in Son, Julien proves that he's willing to do whatever it takes to bring the boy home, whether that means yanking out a lamp cord to use as a restraint or, when the investigation turns on him, buying a prepaid phone and sim card to go off the grid. And the way that Canet's head is on a constant swivel here — adrenaline maxed and ready to take in anything that might be a clue — you get the feeling that the Tell No One filmmaker would make one hell of a good detective, if he ever tired of cinematic storytelling.

While the film is in ardent need of at least one more twist to strengthen its sagging arc as Carion's experimental approach creates sections where the narrative feels meanderingly unfocused, the eighty-five minute film is wise to hold fast to Julien's primal mission.

Drawing us into the gripping narrative alongside Laurent and Canet as we chase down leads, the film asks us to check our own personal biases in the process. Picking up momentum as it speeds toward its conclusion and arrives at a snowy, desolate potential crime scene, My Son reaches a final showdown so unbearably tense that I caught myself actually holding my breath as if I could help Canet keep quiet.

Letting you into the unorthodox filming process, the film, which was recently given a brilliant transfer to Blu-ray from Cohen Media Group, arrives on disc complete with a making of documentary and behind-the-scenes featurette, . . . lamp cord not included.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Quartet (1981)

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When we hear the phrase "Merchant Ivory Productions," most of us picture handsomely photographed period costume dramas featuring ensemble casts of award-winning British actors. One thing we don't think of, however, is sex. But as director James Ivory explains in a fascinating interview included on the Blu-ray release of the newly restored 1981 feature film Quartet, adultery is a recurring obsession of Merchant Ivory's catalog, showing up as a major theme in at least seven different movies . . . and Quartet is no exception.

Embracing not only adultery but polyamory in the film's overt depiction of the seesaw like power dynamics that play out in a ménage à trois at the heart of its storyline, Quartet, based upon Jean Rhys' autobiographical novel, is set during the Golden Age of Paris in 1927.

With her Polish art dealer husband Stephan (Anthony Higgins) arrested for something that might relate as much to stolen artwork as to his tendency to talk about the Bolshevik Revolution — which made Parisian authorities nervous — the native "West Indian" Marya (played by Isabelle Adjani) is left penniless for a year, and with very few resources she can use to fend for herself.

"A decorative little person" used to being the subject of speculation wherever she goes, Marya makes the acquaintance of the wealthy, well-liked H.J. Heidler (Alan Bates) and his painter wife Lois (Maggie Smith) who offer Marya a place to stay in their home. A particular habit of theirs, unbeknownst to Marya when she accepts, it seems as though H.J. has an extensive history of seducing the young women or "crushed petals" whom he lets stay in his spare room.

Letting him indulge himself and sow his wild sexual oats, out of fear that otherwise the bored man might leave her, Lois puts on a good front to the world at the cafes and bars that she and her husband frequent with the young woman. In private, however, the passive aggressive artist sublimates her rage by playing mind games with Marya. And though the trio evolves into a quartet after Stephan's release, which —  coupled with feelings of love —  makes the dynamic even more complex, James Ivoy's film suffers by making the "open" relationship so closed off that the audience is never able to penetrate it.

Distant and icy, the film might take place during a hedonistic time where people sought to find themselves by ironically losing themselves in drugs, drink, or sex, but the unmistakably beautiful Quartet —shot by gifted cinematographer Pierre Lhomme — feels like a virtual museum piece, roped off and hung up in a temperature controlled room on a wall behind a thick pane of glass.

Bravely accepting what Ivory acknowledges is the undesirable role (of the wife who looks the other way but speaks her mind) that many actresses turned down, Maggie Smith is one of the film's saving graces, alongside Isabelle Adjani, who won the award for Best Actress for this film as well as Possession at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival where it premiered.

Championed by its strong performances that keep you watching when you might otherwise want to tune it out, Quartet is worth a look for Merchant Ivory completists but there's a good reason why Ruth Prawer Jhabvala knew instinctively that she didn't want to adapt the Rhys novel she had been reading when Ivory suggested the film.

Trying to make the characters much more dramatic than they were —  just drinking and sitting around — on the page, Prawer Jhabvala did her best to elevate what she felt was rather "downbeat" material. But even with the film's intriguing motif of mirrors, which beg the characters to take a real, hard look at themselves, in the words of 1920s Paris contemporary Gertrude Stein, "there is no there there."

A below average Merchant Ivory movie, although it resembles any one of their other productions on the surface, regrettably, just like Lois fears that her husband might get bored and leave, you're probably better off if you leave the dull Quartet behind. Then, after grabbing one of their other films that you prefer instead (like The Remains of the Day), you can pay homage to the production team's favorite theme, and — leaving Quartet aside to play something else  — go ahead and cheat.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.