Movie Review: The Virtuoso (2021)

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As we watch him execute his target at the beginning of the largely lifeless “The Virtuoso,” Anson Mount's unnamed hitman regales us with tongue-twister levels of alliteration. In his clunky voice-over narration, Mount describes the tricks of his trade. This means that for professional killers hoping for pristine, precise hits, it’s of paramount procedure to follow the protocols of planning and position in order to persevere. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but as Mount punches those alliterative words with purpose – undoubtedly trying to make sense of it all – it's hard not to feel like you're getting hit in the face by the “P” key of an old-fashioned typewriter for how often they're used.

Following up one surgically precise assassination with a rushed hit that goes wrong almost as soon as it starts, writer James C. Wolf's “Virtuoso” screenplay loosens up after that. Abandoning the emphasis on “P,” as though one consequence of the botched job was to cause the pages of Wolf's thesaurus to become unstuck, we watch as our virtuoso killer is lured away from his rustic, self-imposed isolation in the woods by his trusted employer (a game yet wasted Anthony Hopkins).

Making a horrifying meal out of a matter-of-fact monologue about the time his character was ordered to slaughter men, women, and children in Vietnam, Hopkins proves why he and he alone is the film's true virtuoso. Dropping in like a veritable hired gun for a few scenes before he presumably goes off to work on grander fare like “The Father,” Hopkins is easily the best thing in this self-important mess of a B-movie.

Sending Mount on a cryptic assignment where the quarry is given a code name like he's The Riddler in a Batman movie, our virtuoso ventures to a country town in the middle of nowhere. After a chance run-in with a few suspicious strangers at a gas station, he suddenly finds himself in a diner full of shady figures he's supposed to covertly assess as potential targets. Forgetting his lofty voice-over protocols of planning and precision, illogically, Mount just starts running the code name past people, quickly becoming the most conspicuous man in town.

One of those films with classic or neo-noir ambitions that at times you think might've been attempting to strive for “Key Largo” or even “Identity” like atmosphere and tension with its ensemble cast of characters in a small setting, the most surprising thing about director Nick Stagliano's muted, muddied “Virtuoso” is just how unsurprising it is from start to finish.

Almost as soon as one particular stranger is introduced, genre conventions tell you precisely where this thing is headed and like its hitman (well, in the first hit anyway) it doesn't deviate from its plan. Saddled with wooden dialogue and zero chemistry between the leads, “The Virtuoso” spends the rest of its 110 minute running time trying to make you believe another twist is coming. Sadly, it doesn't take long to realize that, despite the film's allusions to the contrary, Mount's visibly bored main character is many things but a virtuoso is not one of them.

Hoping to stack the deck, the movie is loaded with terrific character actors like the aforementioned Hopkins as well as Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, and David Morse, some of whom appear for only the briefest of scenes to hopefully follow Hopkins' lead to show up, do the work, collect the paycheck, and get the hell out.

Still, whether it's with its talented cast, the film's few bursts of violence, or its near-bookended, gratuitously clinical depictions of nudity/sex which only call attention to themselves, no matter how hard “The Virtuoso” tries to command our attention, it's impossible to camouflage just how dull it is overall.

Bowing into theaters in some markets (including Phoenix) only five days after Hopkins garnered his second Oscar and four days before it bows onto DVD and Blu-ray, since curiosity over Hopkins' involvement is sure to drive some people to see this on the big screen, the timing of the film couldn't be better. Reinforcing Mount's words about the importance of his many professional “P”'s, what “The Virtuoso” lacks in pristine precision, its marketing team more than makes up for with their plan to persevere with a little help from gold.

 

Text ©2021, 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 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 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: Wild Mountain Thyme (2020)

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While intellectually, I know that I saw several films in the theater before this one, for whatever reason, the movie-going memory that's seared into my brain as the first live-action feature that I ever saw is from 1987.

Following a busy morning running errands, as three generations of Italian-American women – a fact that would only become significant with time and understanding – I accompanied my mother and grandmother to a matinee screening of “Moonstruck” when I was six-years-old. Although it didn't mean that much to me as a first grader and my love for the film would grow exponentially over the years, I have a vivid memory of not only the uproarious laughter that filled the theater but also the overwhelming interest and focus that seemed to reach a fever pitch whenever the instantly magnetic Nicolas Cage hit the screen.

Years later, I jokingly began to blame the film, which has since become one of my favorites, for my obsession with character actors like Cage, and of course, my unrivaled love of epic monologues, like the ones which were penned in the film by the Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Patrick Shanley. Shanley, who had already written the terrifically underrated film “Five Corners” would follow up the smash hit “Moonstruck” with decades of unpredictable work for both the stage and screen, including two directorial efforts with the cult comedy “Joe Versus the Volcano” in 1990 and 2008's controversial conversation starter “Doubt,” which he adapted from his play.

Shanley's third time at bat as a filmmaker arrives this week with “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which, like “Doubt,” first got its start on the New York stage. Described by Shanley as the most pleasurable experience that he'd ever had as a writer, “Outside Mullingar,” was inspired by his own family's Irish roots following a life-changing trip to his ancestral home in Ireland as an adult. 

A love story about two lonely, eccentric thirty-somethings living next door to one another in the Irish countryside, “Thyme” introduces us to the headstrong Rosemary Muldoon (a divine Emily Blunt) who has spent more than twenty years pining for her sweet yet shy neighbor Anthony Reilly (Jamie Dornan). Hoping that when his father Tony (Christopher Walken) leaves the family farm to him that he'll finally get the courage to propose so that they can start their life together, after Tony announces his intent to sell the farm to his wealthy American nephew Adam (Jon Hamm), decades worth of family drama and pent up romantic frustration come to a head.

On the surface, of course, “Wild Mountain Thyme” finds Shanley back in his “Moonstruck” sweet spot spinning multigenerational, slightly mythic yarns about love, family, and the way that both can throw a wrench into your best-made plans. Unfortunately, however, that's where the similarities between the two romances end, at least in terms of their overall quality. As awkwardly cumbersome as “Moonstruck” was smooth and free-flowing, although “Thyme” is filled with his trademark memorable speeches and pithy lines, there is something utterly laborious and exhausting about the way that it is all presented.

Opening with a fast-paced flashback meant to establish Rosemary's love for Anthony that doesn't get the gravitas or the screentime it needs to truly invest us in her plight, “Thyme” further steamrolls viewers by launching us into the middle of a debate with huge stakes for the characters before we clearly understand just who exactly everyone is and what's really going on. A film that seems to begin in the middle and then back up and change course altogether when suddenly Jon Hamm arrives like a cool breeze from what feels like an entirely different movie, although “The Prince of Tides” and “Closer” cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt's lush photography of west Ireland's County Mayo is warm and inviting, there isn't a lot about “Thyme” that's worth recommending. 

Featuring another epic “Moonstruck” level moment of musical theater derived intertextuality as not the glorious opera “La Boheme” this time but the classical ballet “Swan Lake” becomes the touchstone for our feisty heroine, Emily Blunt is clearly up to the task of bringing one of Shanley's great, complicated, middle-aged women looking for love to life. And indeed, Blunt is “Thyme”'s great shining light to the point that scenes not featuring the actress tend to drag. Shockingly, we feel this most when the usually reliable Christopher Walken and Jamie Dornan try to generate our interest in a contentious but loving father-son dynamic that plays as though the film's most important scenes necessary to understanding their relationship have been left on the cutting room floor.

It's a major disappointment given the level of the talent involved and how much I was rooting for the film, especially since we have a noted deficit in modern filmmaking when it comes to sophisticated romcoms for adults. And while it works as a passably average travelogue of Ireland, complete with a few musical moments featuring Emily Blunt, as a film in its own right (and even without my cherished memory of “Moonstruck”) when compared to the rest of Shanley's oeuvre, “Wild Mountain Thyme” is wild to a fault but nowhere near as bright.

Text ©2020, 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 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 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: Amulet (2020)

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So notorious for taking notes during film screenings that a man in my life jokingly dubbed me a court reporter, by the time a movie ends, I'm usually left with several pages of notes to keep me company as I write. Mostly done involuntarily, from memorable lines of dialogue I've jotted down to random observations or rudimentary drawings of shot composition, while sometimes I can't make sense of everything I've captured on paper in the dark – and often only 5 to 10% of my work winds up in the finished review – it's an intriguing look at my unfiltered reaction to a film.

With this in mind, it came as a total surprise to find that when I hit stop on “Amulet,” I was faced not with four pages of thoughts but four terse sentences, all circling back to one common theme, namely just how much I loathed this movie.

The type of ambitious art film I saw far too often in film school which aimed to distill highly complicated philosophical ideas about sex, gender, power, violence, war, and politics down to their essence and filter them through the lens of abstract horror, talented actress turned writer-director Romola Garai's feature filmmaking debut is as subtle as a staple gun to the forehead.

A true disappointment considering how much I respect Garai as one of her generation's greatest actresses (her “Emma” is a treasure), although it's technically well made with impressive old-school visual effects as her interrogation of gender roles masquerades as a play on “Exorcist” like horror, it's an altogether uninvolving slog of a movie.

In the film, Alec Secareanu stars as Tomaz, a veteran of an unnamed foreign war who now finds himself haunted by what he's done and homeless on the streets of London. Taken under the wing of Imelda Staunton's nun Sister Claire, Tomaz is given a place to live in an eerie, falling-down home inhabited by a sheltered young woman and her bedridden, violently demanding, dying mother, in exchange for him helping out around the house with badly needed repairs.

Positioning Tomaz as a male savior while simultaneously dismantling this role in flashbacks, Garai telegraphs exactly what's going to happen in her film from start to finish. Zooming in on certain props and lingering a precious few seconds too long on the film's talented ensemble cast (including Carla Juri and Angeliki Papoulia) as they deliver lines laced with double-meaning, nothing about “Amulet” comes as a surprise. And this is even the case when Garai takes her thesis about sex and gender to ludicrously over-the-top extremes in a graphic sex-as-horror payoff during the film's – pun intended, I'm sure – climax.

Adding salt to the wound that is the film itself, the action is punctuated by a gratingly insistent score from Sarah Angliss filled with xylophones, bells, and tribal singing so annoying that it was actually the first note I made during the very first ten minutes of “Amulet.” Although I admire Garai's intent to query gender roles and raise questions about sex and violence – all while hiring a 70% female crew where every head of a department (save for editing) was a woman – there is absolutely nothing in this film to recommend it.

So painfully protracted that even I, the opposite of a horror buff, knew how things would eventually play out, after “Relic,” “Amulet” is the second independent work of horror made by a woman to be released in the summer of 2020 that was inspired by Jennifer Kent's brilliant 2014 grief-as-horror treatise “The Babadook.” A cool source of female-directed inspiration to other female filmmakers, although I do urge you to check out “Relic” from Natalie Erika James, when it comes to “Amulet,” trust the fourth and final sentence I wrote down when I watched it, which summed up the film in one word: no.

Text ©2020, 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 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 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: Samurai Marathon (2019)

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Alternate Title: Samurai Marathon 1855

A velvety timbre that contains equal parts smolder and menace in the sounds of a rich baritone, actor Danny Huston's cognac of a voice is tailor-made for screen villainy. And indeed it's his voice that cuts through the ceremony of Commodore Perry's (Huston) sudden visit to Japan in 1855 when — having arrived from America uninvited on a purported mission of friendship from President Fillmore — he tries to interact with the Japanese officials greeting the Americans getting off their "black ships" with suspicion. 

Unable to translate Perry's words since the man whom the Japanese lords have brought with them to do the job speaks Dutch instead of English, they have no idea how to interpret the language being uttered by that devilishly seductive voice. Trying to meld the context clues of Perry's smile with the mixed signals of the presents he offers when he lands, although Perry begins harmlessly with a daguerreotype, the stakes are suddenly raised when he hands over Kentucky bourbon and a .45 caliber single-action Colt army revolver, ironically known as "the peacemaker."

Introducing a faster way to kill and dominate with these American "gifts," a direct correlation is made between the debut of the gun on Japanese shores with the end of the samurai in director Bernard Rose's handsomely crafted but woefully uneven Samurai Marathon. 

Testing the samurai to ensure that they have what it takes to stand up to the Americans and their weapons, which can kill quickly from afar, a thirty-six-mile marathon is held across tough, hilly terrain for all men under the age of fifty who serve the lord of the Annaka clan. Fearing this signals a future war, an Annaka accountant (played by Takeru Satoh) who privately serves as a Shogun spy sends a coded message to those in Edo before he has all of the facts. Though written in earnest, Satoh's note escalates things, setting in motion a hefty amount of chaotic swordplay, gunfire, and violence that follows as he tries to right this wrong. Added to this mix is the rebellious Princess Yuki (Nana Komatsu), who, after rejecting her father's candidate for marriage, slices off some of her hair and joins the marathon as well.

One of those period pieces which tries to excuse away its ludicrous plot machinations by centering the action on a historical event in the form of the samurai marathon (which later became the Japanese marathon and is still run to this day), the film starts to lose us in the very first act. Breathlessly jumping from Huston's veritable cameo to Satoh to Komatsu, rather than endear us to our two leads, Marathon is never sure which story it wants to tell, let alone the tone it should take.

Working from a novel by Akihiro Dobashi, throughout the film, it's obvious that Rose and his co-writers Hiroshi Saitô and Kikumi Yamagishi have no shortage of enthusiasm or ideas. Utilizing an everything and the kitchen sink approach — from weird flashes of humor that feel incredibly out of place to one harrowing sequence involving a mass shooting that's spliced into what could otherwise be described as a ho-hum chronicle of a marathon — this film goes everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Even underwhelming from an action perspective, although it's painted with a masterly brush by cinematographer Takuro Ishizaka, whose frames are jaw-droppingly lush, there's little to recommend the film as a whole. Given a typically impressive high gloss transfer to Blu-ray high definition from Well Go Entertainment, although it might be of morbid curiosity to fans of Bernard Rose as this seems to work as a cross between some of the most diverse entries in his head-scratcher of a filmography (including the horror favorite Candyman and say, the underrated Immortal Beloved), others should steer clear.

A lackluster samurai film that's about as exciting as watching a thirty-six-mile marathon run by nobody you know, though it impressively follows up the promise of duplicity in the guise of Danny Huston's symphonic voice with the strains of a notable score by legendary composer Philip Glass, Rose's Samurai never quite manages to find its rhythm.

Text ©2020, 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 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 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.

Movie Review: Lucky Day (2019)

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A funny thing happened on my way to review writer-director Roger Avary's new movie Lucky Day. I watched his first picture Killing Zoe, which is a film I could've sworn I'd not only seen but also liked, only to discover that I hadn't and I didn't. In fact, I hated every aggressively nihilistic, dispiritingly misanthropic second of it.

Still, in Zoe, it's clear that Roger Avary — who won an Academy Award for his story contributions to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction screenplay — is a man of ideas both good and bad. And now with twenty-five years of life and professional experience at his disposal since Zoe, I was cautiously optimistic to see what he'd create next.

A far more polished endeavor, Lucky Day wastes little time before indulging in Francophile Avary's many creative whims, starting with an incongruous Days of Heaven style opening voice-over track performed in English by eight-year-old Beatrice (Ella Ryan Quinn), who then speaks nothing but French for the rest of the movie.

The ode to all things français continues as we're introduced to Crispin Glover's psychopathic French villain Luc who speaks with a hammy Pink Panther accent. Visibly relishing in the role, in his first scene, Glover teases out every ridiculous vowel like the sound of his own voice thrills him before we realize that Luc is a tornado looking to land.

Having just arrived in the United States, Luc is on the hunt for Luke Bracey's newly paroled safe-cracker Red, who's eager to just lay low with his French wife Chloe (Nina Dobrev), a pretentious artist who — much like Uma Thurman's wig in Pulp Fiction — wears her hair like Anna Karina did in the 1960s.

Filled with Pulpisms including surf rock and pet names like Honeybun and Bumblebee for Red's wife and daughter, while Lucky's Tarantinoesque elements feel about as fresh in 2019 as they did in the late 1990s after one new Pulp Fiction knockoff after another was released into theaters, the actors all have fun with it.

Trying to sell each new quirk as though it's the one crucial ingredient needed to make up an authentic personality we can believe in, on top of daughter Beatrice's insistence that she speak only French, Avary's film informs us that she can make herself invisible by touching her nose. Rounding out the eccentric cast of characters, we also encounter Dobrev's lecherous Harvey Weinsteinish boss Derek (David Hewlett) who tries to threaten her into sex while wearing a garish painted on mustache for no apparent reason. Two otherwise intriguing character ideas that might've paid off better if more time had been spent on them, the light whimsy of Beatrice versus the camp of Derek represent just two wild swings in tone for Day, which strives to reinvent itself in a different genre with each successive scene.

Though slightly more mature than Zoe, Lucky Day invokes some troubling racial stereotypes and caricatures throughout the film as it establishes a pattern of using minorities as a diversion to laugh at or kill off in absurd ways. Featuring stereotypical portrayals of African American, Asian, and Latino supporting characters, Avary's film is especially cruel to its female minorities and feels at times as if he's channeling Bret Easton Ellis' novels, which he adapted and directed twice in the early '00s. From an Asian woman whose last name sounds like a nickname for the male anatomy to an African American woman who is simply there to be used for offscreen sex and slaughtered within the very first act, as well as a Mexican woman who's racially insulted, humiliated, and faces a similar fate later on, Avary's (hopefully unintentional) bias is on full display.

Well shot and chopped, even though on a professional level, the quality of this film is light-years better than Avary's first, despite the sweet family unit at its core, Day's attitude remains just as mightily misanthropic, ugly, and misogynistic as, in addition to minorities, it takes a few cheap shots at cops, critics, and passersby along the way.

Evolving into a demented Wile E. Coyote cartoon, Avary temporarily redeems himself with a fast paced shootout and chase sequence that begins at a snooty art gallery and ends up in the basement of our main character's workplace (or front). An elaborately choreographed action set piece that wears its Raising Arizona style inspiration proudly in every frame, as Red's personal and professional worlds collide and his family ends up in Luc's crosshairs, Avary raises the tension and pulls us in an unpredictable high stakes pursuit. And while it does bode well for him as a writer-director of comedic action fare, unfortunately, in a film that finds him throwing absolutely everything at the wall to see what sticks, it's too little too late.

A modest improvement over Killing Zoe yet one that enjoys making its nonwhite and female characters the cruelest of punchlines, Lucky Day is bolstered by its accomplished cast, who commit to the picture like nobody's business. And honestly, for the (very few) moments it works, it works well. Yet in its current form, Avary appears to be making three very different movies at the same time — a cynically over-the-top ultraviolent thriller with a larger than life villain, a work of Madeleine-esque French child centric whimsy, and a subversive camp dramedy about a horned up sexual harasser in the workplace.

Needless to say, Roger Avary is a man with no shortage of stories up his sleeve. Although admirable indeed, Lucky Day makes you wish that idea man Avary would take a step back to see which of his ideas translate the best to the tale he's trying to tell and which ones make about as much sense as an English language voice-over in a crime film by a girl who speaks French and turns invisible.

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.  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: Crypto (2019)

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Having written a compliance report that ruffled feathers on Wall Street, anti money laundering officer Martin (Beau Knapp) is sent back home to Elba, New York like a kid who acts out at summer camp.

Not bothering to change out of his department store suit the entire time he's home — or even when he goes hiking with Alexis Bledel — it's no surprise that his sudden return to audit a local bank rubs people in as wrong of a way as his report.

Confronted by his tough, veteran big brother (a strong Luke Hemsworth) who later picks a bar fight with him, Martin has enough to deal with on the home front even before cryptocurrency, the Russian mob, and money laundering are added to the mix.

A film that seems like screenwriters Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio — working from a story by Jeffrey Ingber — tried to squeeze as many buzzwords as they could into the otherwise oddly passive movie's plot, Crypto is a family drama, a cyber thriller, and a crime film unconvincingly rolled into one. With at least three different storylines wrestling to see which one gets to take the lead, aside from knowing that our lead will always be in a suit for no reason whatsoever, we never quite know which version of Crypto we're going to get from one scene to the next.

Still, after a weird introduction to the mob through a campy, sexually aggressive art gallery owner who seems to have wandered over from a David Lynch set, the film settles into a nice groove for awhile.

Playing like a watered down, abridged version of the John Grisham movie The Firm to the point that we almost want to call Martin Mitch McDeere (I mean he's got the suit and all), just when it starts to get interesting, Crypto veers off once again.

And while the Grisham approach might've served director John Stalberg Jr.'s film well enough if it'd been carried throughout, the film's A-list talent objects by hitting the screen and changing our mind with a vengeance.

As Martin's proud father hoping to save his struggling farm and son (Hemsworth), Kurt Russell turns in a terrific if all too brief supporting performance that makes you wish they would've focused on Martin's family tree and dropped the poorly developed Russian mob subplot once and for all.

Trying to tie it all together with yet another idea involving cryptocurrency and Martin's convenient hacker friend, by the time we reach its increasingly illogical third act, the sleepily directed Crypto has all but fallen apart.

The only upside? Luckily, Martin's suit holds up.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  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.

DVD Review: American Exit (2019)

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Say what you will about Dane Cook. If you've seen Mr. Brooks — where he managed to not only hold his own but actually steal a few scenes away from Kevin Costner — you know that with the right role and the right material, the guy can act.

And while we never buy him as an influential art dealer, Cook is quite good in a key scene late into American Exit where he takes his estranged son to his late mother's favorite place to paint and delivers a heartfelt monologue about art and life that's so strong, it's probably why he accepted the role in the first place.

I say "probably" because at some point he would have had to have read the rest of the script, which somehow takes a premise involving the theft of a million dollar painting originally stolen by the Nazis in WWII and uses it as a mere two minute long inciting incident for a half-baked melodrama.

Heist wise, watching Cook pull one over on his shady boss Anton (Udo Kier) is about as exciting as watching a kid try to steal a candy bar from a gas station. And while there's no gas station in sight, a kid is indeed involved as, before he boosts the painting, Cook's Charlie does the same to his teenage son.

A father at the end of his rope — plagued with crippling health problems and debt — in writer-directors Tim McCann and Ingo Vollkammer's Exit, after Charlie picks up Leo (Levi Miller) at school without his ex's permission, he uses him as a distraction with Anton before heading south on a road to nowhere.

Neither thrilling as a genre movie nor compelling as a drama, the film veers wildly from one moment to the next, unsure of not only what it wants to be but also who its main characters are. Asked to swing for the fences, within his first thirty minutes of screen time Miller inexplicably moves from hating his father on behalf of his mother to getting excited about thrift store clothing to insulting strangers to asking Charlie if he can drive with little to no warning.

It's so ridiculously uneven, it's like they told the kid to watch Three Faces of Eve about three hundred times in preparation for a character revelation that is never expressed on the screen. Although undoubtedly used to help drive not the car this time but the aimless film forward, the histrionic hoops that Miller is asked to jump through are so annoying that as a viewer, you actually get to a point where you wish Charlie would just leave the kid on the side of the road.

Trying his best to bond with his son amid the chaos (and what we quickly gather is his own failing health), the screenwriters build a fascinating backstory in Charlie's past centering on his own relationship with his parents and his ex that would've made a far more interesting tale than the one we see here.

Interrupting any attempt at dramatic momentum in a series of cliched mini showdowns with Anton and his fellow art goons, although Cook fares better than Miller (who deserves hazard pay for playing a new role at the drop of a hat), Exit continues its series of starts and stops for the rest of its eighty-six minute running time.

Unable to change lanes for longer than a few minutes at a time, sadly by the time we reach Cook's moving speech, most viewers will have already longed for a real exit and turned the damn thing off.


Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  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: The Aspern Papers (2018)

Now Available 

With three generations of Redgraves linked to three productions of The Aspern Papers, by this point you could say that bringing the gothically romantic Henry James tale to life is officially a Redgrave thing.

Originally published in 1888 and in three parts no less, the novella — inspired by the letters that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned for his wife Mary Shelley's step-sister, Claire Clairmont, which Claire kept until her death — was first brought to the stage by Michael Redgrave in 1959.

Later revived in 1984 in an award-winning production starring Michael's daughter Vanessa Redgrave (opposite Christopher Reeve who acted alongside her in a big-screen Merchant Ivory version of Henry James's The Bostonians also in ‘84), now more than thirty years later, Redgrave gets the chance to bring Papers to life once again.

Changing with the times by taking on a new role in this effort from first time feature filmmaker Julien Landais, which, produced by James Ivory is based on a French scenic adaptation by Jean Pavans, in 2018’s The Aspern Papers Vanessa Redgrave passes the torch to daughter Joely Richardson who slides into her old part.

A sudsy drama about an obsessive American editor, the film stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Morton Vint who — using whatever guise and lies are necessary — travels to Venice to track down the letters of his literary idol Jeffrey Aspern.

Posing as a man on holiday, he rents a room from Redgrave's Clairmont inspired Juliana Bordereau and sets out to win over the woman's sheltered, spinster niece Miss Tina (Richardson).

While ordinarily Rhys Meyers can play the role of a seducer in his sleep and make you believe it, he's visibly uncomfortable in Aspern, turning in a performance that's half Lestat from Interview With the Vampire and half Elvis Presley, whom he portrayed to well-deserved acclaim in a 2005 television miniseries. And although yes, I'm aware that he also played Dracula recently on the small screen perhaps, as with Aspern, the less said about that the better.

As disinterested as it is overly strong, Aspern's acting is a mess to say the least and indicative of a much bigger problem, which is the film itself. For in his uncertainty throughout, Rhys Meyers is far from alone.

All three of the film's performances feel like they belong in three entirely different James adaptations. While Redgrave easily dominates as a cross between Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond and Film Noir era Joan Crawford, Richardson tiptoes quietly around the others, playing her part as though she'd just stepped onstage in The Glass Menagerie.

Filled with clunky, heavy-handed narration and odd moments of Eyes Wide Shut homage that belong in a fragrance ad (which makes sense considering the director's background helming fashion shorts, commercials, and music videos), although the Venetian backdrop is stunning and thespians will relish the opportunity to see the Redgrave family command a scene, this is easily the worst Henry James adaptation I have ever seen.

Unsure just what exactly it is that he wants to say, Landais seems much more interested in using the characters — namely Vint — as a jumping off point to explore his own ideas and identity.

And although it's apparent that Landais is a visual thinker with some kind of story to tell, it's easy to deduce within the first few monologues by the Redgraves who know it best that The Aspern Papers isn't it.


Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  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: Backtrace (2018)

Now Available 

A veritable chameleon with a particular knack for playing disabled and/or fragile characters with the utmost of sincerity, while there are no false notes about Matthew Modine's performance in Brian A. Miller's direct-to-disc actioner Backtrace (aside from the laughable idea that one can have a spinal injection and instantly go bounding up and down stairs), the same cannot be said for the film itself.

Hoping to use Modine's talent to distract from the Grand Canyon sized holes in logic and common sense on display in the script by Mike Maples, which, in an attempt to outdo McQuarrie, Shyamalan, and Nolan, never settles for one twist when three might do, Backtrace finds the actor in disabled mode once again.

Busted out of a prison hospital by three people hoping that a cutting edge drug might inspire the amnesiac bank robber to remember where he stashed twenty million dollars in loot seven years earlier, while initially we give in to the fine if admittedly far-fetched Phillip K. Dick flavored Noirish set-up, Maples loses focus and the plot quickly spirals out-of-control.

Determined to find the escapee he's sure has been faking amnesia for seven years (X-rays be damned!), a thoroughly bored looking Sylvester Stallone graces the screen from time-to-time in half-hearted '80s cop movie mode, but sadly, the combined star power of Modine and Stallone isn't enough to save the film from its thoroughly ludicrous conclusion.

Doing the best he can with a limited budget, Miller gets a chance to stage more exciting action sequences in Backtrace than he did in the recent Reprisal and while the latter was more successful from a storytelling perspective, this film makes you wonder what he could potentially do with a bigger budget and a script that actually makes sense.

Written with a "look, ma, no hands!" glee, while invariably taking away an illogical twist or four would probably disappoint Maples, underneath the absurdity, there are moments in Backtrace where you can almost see a much better film hiding — just like Modine's twenty million dollars — in plain sight.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  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.