I’m not sure if we needed another “Maleficent” movie with Angelina Jolie dolled up in demoness makeup and ebony wings. But the truth is the sequel, undertitled as “Mistress of Evil,” is actually an improvement on the original from five years ago.
If you’ll recall they took the villainess from “Sleeping Beauty” and turned her into the star of the show. Here she’s a misunderstood figure, the queen of the Moors, the land where fairies and other oddball creatures live, protected from malevolent human hands by her magic. Aurora (Elle Fanning), aka Sleeping Beauty, is still here and no longer sleeping, and in fact as the story opens she’s about to marry some slack-jawed excuse of a prince.
That means meeting his parents, and it turns out the groom’s mother is Ingrith, queen of the neighboring kingdom of Ulstead. She’s got a major jones for fairy-hate, so pretty soon Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) has managed to stoke inter-family resentments and started a war between their countries.
A side plot involves the discovery that Maleficent isn’t a unique creature, but part of a lost race called dark fey. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays their benevolent leader, while Ed Skrein is the young upstart with just as much bloodlust as the humans.
Despite the dour setting, there’s actually plenty of humor and light moments in “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” which leads to a more enjoyable picture. I don’t know if I’d call it magic, but sequels that surpass the originals is a rare trick indeed.
Bonus features are pretty decent. They include outtakes from the set, two extended scenes and a music video by Bebe Rexha, “You Can’t Stop The Girl.” There are also four making-of documentary shorts: “Origins of Fey,” “Aurora’s Wedding,” “If You Had Wings” and a visual effects reel.
I was somewhat ambivalent about “Maleficient” from five years ago, liking the idea of the movie -- the villainess from “Sleeping Beauty” recast as a troubled protagonist -- more than the one they actually made. Certainly visually it was striking, with otherworldly beauty Angelina Jolie done up in horns, death-white flesh and strangely angular cheekbone prosthetics.
It made a boatload of money, so here’s another.
If I sound jaded, it’s because I am. But even though this sequel seems unnecessary and rather ham-handed at times, I found I enjoyed it more than the first one.
It has fewer pretensions about doing a truly dark and brooding movie while still retaining the family film label and PG rating. Jolie still gets to scowl and threaten as the winged witch of the north, though this time it’s played for laughs. At one point someone actually urges her to smile more, but not enough to show fangs.
The expectations society has for fairy demonesses these days! You must smile, but not too much, take a human lover but later kill him.
If you’ll recall the story from the first film, Maleficent is queen of the Moors, the shrouded land of fairies bordered (on all sides, it seems) but human kingdoms. Her human boyfriend betrayed her, cutting off her wings in order to secure the throne of his kingdom. For revenge Maleficent cursed his daughter, Aurora (Elle Fanning), though later grew close to her and even became her godmother.
Five years have passed, and now Aurora is set to wed her comely-but-disposable gentleman love, Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson). This means Maleficent must meet his parents, King John (Robert Lindsay) and Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) of Ulstead, in a celebratory feast. And before you ask: Yes, the film milks the obvious “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” joke.
Things.,. don’t go well.
It doesn’t take much thought to realize that John is a wise and peaceable king, while Ingrith harbors Cersei-ish inclinations. Before you can say “poisoned needle,” she has launched a war against the fairies, intending to wipe them all out in one go. It also seems she’s the one who has been spreading nasty rumors about Maleficent all these years so humans will fear her.
It’s basically high school, but with curses instead of gossipy texts.
The really interesting thing is that all though we had thought Maleficent was one of a kind, it turns out there’s a whole lost race of them. Called “dark fey,” they’re sort of a cross between feral hawks and indigenous natives, covering their bodies in paint or scars.
They’ve been exiled for centuries on an island that is apparently just a 90-second flight away from Maleficent’ s kingdom, which shows you how much of a homebody she is. Their leader is the benevolent Conall (Chiwetel Ejiofor) while the younger and hunk-ier Borra (Ed Skrein) calls for war.
It’s a bit strange that Ingrith has engineered the creation of an entire war machine of specialized weapons deadly against the fey, despite never having any knowledge that they existed. Warwick Davis crops up as her pet weapons master, experimenting upon captured fairies and using their most sacred flower, “tomb blooms,” in his dank dungeon laboratory.
There are plenty of action scenes, including lots of deaths, though fairies tend to just sort of “phsh” into clouds of dust or pollen rather than bleed out. There’s quite a menagerie of creatures, with my favorite being the giant tree golem creatures with woody skull faces and no eyes.
The “Maleficent” sequel a big, colorful, fun and not terribly plausible movie that weaves its silly spell well.
I was not a fan of “Kung Fu Panda 2.” It seemed like an indulgent sequel made for the sake of having a sequel (not to mention critic-proof box office $$$). I enjoyed being able to brag that I’d never walked out of a movie or fallen asleep during one; after “Panda 2,” I could no longer assert the latter.
So I’m happy to report “Kung Fu Panda 3” is a return to joyous form. Perhaps because it’s been nearly five years since the last one, the filmmakers took a little time to figure out what they wanted to do on a third go-round. Here Po (Jack Black), the tubby bear who became the unlikely choice to hold the mantle of the mighty and beneficent Dragon Warrior, gets to rediscover his roots and find his true inner panda.
If you’ll recall (I didn’t), at the end of “2” we see an older panda in a remote mountain village having a transcendent moment: “My son is alive!” Now the old man turns up in Po’s village looking for him, voiced agreeably by Bryan Cranston. Of course, because these movies are comedies first, the two don’t recognize each other -- despite being the only pandas around.
Needless to say, the reunion gets happier from there. Though not for Po’s goose adoptive dad (emotively voiced by James Hong), who feels threatened by a competing paternal figure. Especially when Po decamps to the hidden panda village to learn the secret of controlling his ch’i.
That’s the Chinese word for the energy source for all living things, which according to legend the pandas used to heal the sick and wounded -- in between downing mountains of food. (Think “The Force,” but with dumplings.)
They need a master of ch’i because there’s a new baddie on the horizon: Kai, a power-mad bull who was banished to the spirit realm 500 years ago by Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), the turtle kung fu master who first anointed Po. Snortingly voiced by J.K. Simmons, Kai has found a way back to the mortal world by stealing the ch’i of Oogway and the other masters.
Other familiar characters return, notably the Ferocious Five (now simply called The Five): stern Tigress (Angelina Jolie), wisecracking Mantis (Seth Rogen), as well as Viper (Lucy Liu), Monkey (Jackie Chan) and Crane (David Cross), whose personalities sort of get pushed to the sides. Wise-but-crotchety Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) and his pupils try to make a stand against Kai, but like the others get their spirit absorbed by him and turned into jade zombies, which Po quickly dubs “jombies.”
Directed by Jennifer Yuh and Alessandro Carloni from a screenplay by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger – who have been script men for all three films -- “Kung Fu Panda 3” has the same nice mix of martial arts action, humor and tugging emotions as the first movie.
For instance, one of the running jokes is that Kai announces himself wherever he goes as this infamous world-conquering destroyer, but nobody’s ever heard of him. And, of course, there are plenty of bits about Po’s fellow pandas being self-indulgent feasters and slackers -- they prefer rolling down hills to walking.
When Po sees even the little pandas putting away the grub he quips, “I’ve always felt like I wasn’t eating up to my full potential.”
This is one of those animated flicks intended for kids but with enough cleverness and little flourishes to keep the adults fully engaged, too.
“Unbroken” is the sort of story that if it weren’t true, people would dismiss it as Hollywood hoo-ha. But Louis “Louie” Zamperini really lived this life: Olympic athlete who competed at the 1936 games in Berlin, WWII bombardier whose plane crashed into the Pacific, surviving 47 days at sea before being captured and subjected to two years of torment as a prisoner of war.
This movie, which I think one of the most powerful of the year, hasn’t received much love from other critics, and I find that puzzling. Is it the presence of Anjelina Jolie as director, and a certain snootiness towards glamorous movie stars stepping behind the camera? If so, I’ll just remind them people said the same thing about Clint Eastwood and Mike Nichols … and they didn’t turn out too bad.
To my mind, Jolie acquits herself splendidly, hitting the emotional high and low notes just right, as well as staging a few daring action scenes. Clearly, she’s got a future behind the camera if she carries out her threat to abandon acting.
Chiding of the screenplay seems more well-placed. The script has some big names on it – Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, William Nicholson – as well as being based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, who also penned the splendid “Seabiscuit.”
But it is a fairly conventional narrative presentation. And, as others have pointed it, it almost seems to combine elements of three famous Oscar-winning films into one: the Olympics sequence from “Chariots of Fire,” the lifeboat part from “Life of Pi” and the POW stuff from “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Oh well. The historical record is what it is. The movie also truncates the latter portion of Hillenbrand’s book, which deals with Zamperini’s (unsurprisingly) difficult transition to civilian life and religious awakening.
Jack O’Connell is solid as Zamperini, but I do think this sort of movie might have been better served by having a more recognizable actor in the main role. Since the screenplay doesn’t really attempt to get inside the character’s head, but observes his trials and tribulations from without, audiences might have a harder time connecting emotionally with him. We need more of a touchstone.
The supporting cast is terrific. I especially liked Domhnall Gleeson as Phillips, the pilot of the bomber that crashes into the ocean, who has a sort of reserved grace, and Jai Courtney and Garrett Hedlund as fellow POWs, who know they can’t help him directly when the guards are beating him to a pulp, but cheer on silently.
If I have one serious complaint with the movie, it’s Japanese singer/actor Miyavi as the sadistic head guard the prisoners refer to as “The Bird,” because he sees everything. Most of what’s depicted really happened – the Bird was sent into hiding as a war criminal after Japan’s surrender.
OK, so he’s a bad guy. But the film turns him into a cloying, effeminate monster who sidles up to his charges and whispers in their ear before delivering a beating. His eyes even look odd, like he’s been made up with excessive mascara or something. The end result is the Bird feels like a cartoon, much like the Michael Fassbender character in “12 Years a Slave.”
It’s like they’re trying to cram all the evil of an era into a single figure, and it rings false.
Still, “Unbroken” was one of the most riveting cinematic experiences I had this year. The lesson of Louie Zamperini isn’t that he was tougher and braver than everyone else, but that this power to withstand desperate challenges resides in all of us if we can find it.
Hollywood likes to boast of big stars in big movies that “no one else could have played the part,” but in the case of “Maleficent” I think that’s demonstrably true. Only Angelina Jolie has the requisite combination of compelling screen presence, supernatural beauty and somewhat eerie star persona to play in this revisionist take on the Sleeping Beauty fable.
In many ways it’s surprising that Disney would commission such a dark twist on one of its most iconic animated films. Jolie plays the villainess as a maligned antihero who has everything she loved torn away from her, and responds in kind.
In this version, Maleficent is a powerful fairy who falls for a human boy, only to have him betray her and cut off her wings in order to gain the throne of the kingdom for himself. She dubs herself the queen of the Moors, the land where the magical creatures hide, and later places a curse on the new king’s daughter, Aurora (Elle Fanning).
As the years pass Maleficent finds herself spying on the girl, from whom goodness shines like the sun, and eventually befriends her. Despite her hatred for Aurora’s father, she finds herself regretting her curse, which says the girl will fall into a deathlike slumber upon her 16th birthday.
Tonally it’s a tough act to pull off, to balance this oft-mesmerizing mix of woe and whimsy, and not one that first-time director Robert Stromberg is entirely up to. (Reportedly they even had to bring in a more seasoned filmmaker to “help” with reshoots.)
Still, it’s a visually captivating journey, and certainly one that’s never boring. Jolie’s get-up as Maleficent, with her horns, ebony dresses and facial prosthetics, is can’t-take-your-eyes-off amazing. I only wish the story equaled the eye candy.
Video extras are quite good, though you have to opt for the Blu-ray combo pack in order to get the best stuff. The DVD comes only with “Aurora: Becoming A Beauty,” a featurettes focusing on Fanning’s casting and transformation.
The blur-ray includes a half-dozen making-of featurettes touching on all aspects of the production, including the special effects to create Maleficent’s look and the film’s battle scenes. You also get a handful of deleted scenes.
I think I may have actually nodded off during "Kung Fu Panda 2." This is surprising, because I have never fallen asleep in a movie theater before. Also, because it happened not during the talkie scenes but in the middle of the martial arts action.
It may amount to no more than 10 seconds I missed, but I still feel compelled to report it. I've sat near famous critics who snored halfway through a screening, and it troubled me when that didn't show up in their review. It may be largely subjective, but movie criticism is still journalism, so it's our duty to report the whole of our experience of a film.
To wit: "Panda 2" literally put me to sleep -- albeit very briefly.
I'm not an ingrained panda-hater; I very much enjoyed the first film from 2008. The mix of excellently-detailed CG animation and goofy kid-friendly humor made for a jolly good time that appealed to adults as well as tykes.
But the sequel is just going through the motions. The comedy is again built around the slacker sweetness of Po, an animated version of Jack Black as a tubby panda. It worked last time around because he was a nobody poser who dreamt of fighting alongside the Ferocious Five: Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu) and Crane (David Cross).
But as we learned at the end of the last film, Po completed his unlikely journey to become the Dragon Warrior, the culmination of kung fu mastery. His pratfalls and clumsy antics don't jibe now that he's the baddest bear in the land.
Although I must say that for the beast who's supposed to be the best of the best, both Tigress and their teacher Shifu still seem to have his number.
Speaking of Shifu, voiced by Dustin Hoffman, he's kind of kicked to the curb in the sequel, showing up for a few scenes near the beginning and end. He speaks cryptically about a new threat that could "destroy kung fu," which is like saying you're going to destroy gardening. Even if you kill all the best gardeners, there's still going to be plenty of people around who know a thing or two -- same with chop-socky.
The new villain is Lord Shen, a peacock who dreams of conquering all of China. He's well on his way to doing it, too, thanks to a new invention: the cannon. (For a brief time, the movie had a subtitle, "The Kaboom of Doom," that seems to have evaporated.)
Gary Oldman does a good job making Shen a somewhat sympathetic figure with some parental abandonment issues. He's also a lot more menacing than you might imagine a brightly-hued peacock could be -- for those cascading feathers hide a small arsenal of knives.
Screenwriters/producers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who also wrote the original film, make the unwise choice of giving Po some backstory to explore. Po has a goose for a father, and one thing I liked about the first movie was that no one seemed to question this ornithological oddity.
But now Po is sent to chase after the memory of his missing parents, and it gives the sequel a downbeat fibe that sucks the life out of the lighter material.
Rookie director Jennifer Yuh's fight scenes don't have the crisp clarity of the last movie -- the action is either flying by too fast, or they dial up the slo-mo so far it's like we're stuck in molasses.
But mostly "Kung Fu Panda 2" just lacks the novelty of the original, which found a sweet spot in between martial arts and goofy animated critters, and milked it for every last laugh. This one feels like leftovers that have curdled.
It seems like most of my video columns lately have spotlighted movies I felt got a raw deal: "127 Hours," "Morning Glory." Well, I'll continue the roll: "The Tourist," flayed by critics (20 percent on the Tomatometer) and largely ignored by audiences -- at least American ones; it cleaned up overseas -- is a thoroughly enjoyable bit of popcorn moviemaking.
This spy thriller starring Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp and the city of Venice is a skillfully-made bit of weightless piffle. No, it will not become a fixture in the annals of cinema. It's a fancy sundae, a concoction of sweet thrills and empty calories. We shouldn’t take too long admiring it, because it’ll melt if we do.
Just scoop it up, enjoy the sugary rush and smile.
Depp plays Frank Tupelo, a sad-sack math professor from Wisconsin riding the train to Venice for a lonely vacation. Onboard he meets an exotic, dangerous woman named Elise Clifton-Ward (Jolie), who brazenly flirts with him. It's soon revealed that she's a spy on the run, who's merely using Frank as a patsy.
The rest of the movie is one long bit of chase-chase, a classic Hitchcockian convoluted plot of double-crosses and MacGuffins. Something about Elise's long-lost lover duping a British mobster out of billions, with Paul Bettany starring as the unctuous spymaster hunting everyone. There's a glamorous formal ball, a boat chase or two -- it's Venice, how could there not be? -- and some rooftop hi jinks.
It may not make much sense, but the ride is brisk and fun.
Video extras are good no matter what format you choose.
The DVD version has a feature-length commentary track by director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a reel of outtakes and goofs, an alternate title sequence done in animation, and two featurettes on staging the fancy ball scene and the film's take on Old Hollywood glamour.
The Blu-ray edition includes all these features, plus three more featurettes: "Action in Venice," "Canal Chats" and "Tourist Destination: Travel the Canals of Venice."
No digital copy of the film, though. Now that is a raw deal.
I enjoyed "The Tourist." It's a skillfully-made bit of weightless piffle. No, it will not add anything memorable to the cinematic lexicon, or the filmographies of its stars, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. But has its charms, and they are not to be easily dismissed.
The film is directed by German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck -- I had to check his name six times to make sure I had the spelling right -- who directed the outstanding film, "The Lives of Others," in 2006. (If you haven't seen it, get thee to a Blockbuster, or your Netflix account.) The film is gorgeous to gaze upon, with its loving, almost fetishistic ogling of the city of Venice. If I were working for the Venice Visitors Bureau, I'd be pre-ordering copies of the DVD by the barrel full.
For viewing pleasure there is also Angelina Jolie. I commented to some of my fellow critics after the screening that watching Jolie is practically a sustaining entertainment unto itself. If a movie consisted of just footage of her walking around her house, doing chores and such, I'd probably watch it. Yes, I've heard people (mostly women) comment about the strange, sinewy contours of her body and how they don't match her face. Personally, I think that's part of her appeal -- she has an otherworldly quality. She's like Galadriel from "The Lord of the Rings" -- so beautiful it is in some ways terrifying.
Johnny Depp is not nearly so lovely -- after decades of defiance, his boyish face is finally starting to swell and droop a little -- but I adored the sad quality he gave to his character, Frank Tupelo, a community college math teacher from Madison, Wisconsin. Frank is a mark, a patsy. Elise Clifton-Ward (Jolie) chooses him to sit next to on the train from Paris to Venice simply because he matches the height and build of another man. Elise, who you may have figured out by now is a spy, is using Frank as a decoy to convince the small army of other spies and gangsters tailing her that Frank is the man they're after.
But she begins to feel badly for flirting with him, because Frank is such a sweet sad sack of a man. He smokes one of those fake electric cigarettes so he can get his nicotine fix without annoying others, wears his hair long and his beard short, and favors clothes that resemble what The Tramp character dresses like whenever he strikes it rich in one of Charlie Chaplin's movies. Frank tells Elise that his wife left him, though the spies -- who are constantly photographing and checking everything -- soon learn that she died in a car accident.
The plot is a classic Hitchcockian one built around false identities and double-crosses and a MacGuffin. In this case the red herring is Frank Pierce, Elise's former lover and the one everybody is after. Shaw, the British mobster (Steve Berkoff) Pierce stole billions of dollars from, wants his money back and a pound of flesh. The British government, with the aid of the local Italian police, wants Pierce for back taxes -- though how a government can tax stolen money is a bit unclear. Paul Bettany plays the unctuous spymaster pulling all the strings.
The story makes little sense, but it's not supposed to. There's a big ballroom scene, simply so we can look at a lot of gorgeous people dressed to the nines. There's a boat chase or two, because it's Venice, damnit, and not having one would be like setting a movie at Niagra Falls and nobody goes over. There's a big surprise ending, though if you're cleverish you'll have guessed at it long before it arrives.
You've probably guessed by now that I'm not really interested in reviewing this movie, but I like talking about it. Maybe that's because it's like a fancy sundae, a concoction of sweet thrills and empty calories. We shouldn't take too long admiring it, because it'll melt if we do. Just scoop it up, enjoy the sugary rush and smile.
I found it really interesting that in this movie, wherever Angelina Jolie goes, every single man (and many of the women) stop whatever they're doing to stare at her. I don't mean sneak furtive glances, but stop in their tracks, turn their heads and watch as she walks by. It actually grows to be comical. I mean, I just wrote a few paragraphs ago about how I think she's so hubba-hubba, but c'mon -- the entire world doesn't halt just because a pretty girl is in the vicinity.
It reminds me of some feminist film theory I read back at NYU that had to do with looking. The camera gazes at women in much the way that men do, the thinking went, and it becomes a game of ping-ponging voyeurism: We watch the woman being stared at by the men, and she's aware of their gaze and responds to it, and so forth. I thought it mostly hooey, but they'd have a field day with this movie.
I'll keep going. Jolie's other big movie this year was "Salt," in which she also played a spy. There was a scene early on where she has to escape out of the CIA building where she had been a double agent, and there's a long sequence where she gets trapped outside on a ledge, barefoot after dumping her unwieldy pumps, and we get quite a leering look at her legs. I remember a lot of female observers saying the whole setup was just an excuse to show off Jolie's assets. Maybe so.
Except in "The Tourist," Johnny Depp gets stuck in almost the exact same situation: On the run, out on a ledge and traipsing across rooftops without shoes and wearing only his PJs. So there. Although I'll admit Depp's legs aren't as comely.
"Salt" could've been like a hundred other super-spy movies, except for three things: Angelina Jolie, Phillip Noyce and Kurt Wimmer.
You may have already heard that this thriller originally was supposed to be about a male character, until someone had the idea to cast Jolie in the lead. As an American CIA agent suspected of being a turncoat for the Russians, Jolie exploits the duality of her star persona -- fringe rebel/U.N. goodwill ambassador, man-stealing harpy/loving mother.
Like the shifting tabloid portrayal of Jolie, we never quite know exactly who Evelyn Salt is, but we find ourselves identifying with her and instinctually cheering her on as she wades through elite security forces like a hot knife through butter.
Lacking clear loyalties, her sheer dangerousness becomes her identity.
There's a great scene early on where Salt, on the lam from her American colleagues, quickly changes her appearance. She pulls out a false dental front, removes colored contacts, and dyes her flowing blonde locks obsidian. Then we realize she's not putting on a disguise, but removing one.
Director Noyce is an old hand at cloak-and-dagger material ("Patriot Games," "The Quiet American") and again shows a confident expertise at keeping the audience misdirected. He keeps the plot moving at breakneck speed, and then slows up just enough to reveal that everything you've seen may not be what it seems.
One day a crusty old Russian agent (Daniel Olbrychski) wanders into Rink Petroleum, a front for the CIA, and announces that during the Cold War days, hundreds of children were raised to be deep-cover moles spread throughout the corridors of power in the West.
On a fateful Day X, the best of those double agents will assassinate the Russian president, setting off a nuclear confrontation between the former enemies, now wary allies.
That agent's name: Evelyn Salt.
Salt's longtime partner, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), doesn't believe this wild story and wants to give her a chance to defend herself. But Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the counter-terrorism boss, is a by-the-book man and demands Salt be put in lockdown. While the spooks are distracted by other events, Salt makes good on her escape, demonstrating incredible daring and ingenuity in the process.
At this point, Wimmer's original screenplay -- yes, they really do still exist -- becomes one big game of chase-chase. Except we never know if Salt is running away from the American authorities or toward some other, possibly nefarious goal.
Wimmer plays with the audience's expectations cunningly. We keep hoping Salt will reveal herself as a white knight caught in very bad circumstances. And then she does a really bad thing from which there would appear to be no going back.
As soon as you think you've got the convoluted knot of intrigue puzzled out, another sharp turn sends you deeper into the labyrinth.
Jolie is a convincing action star as she punches, kicks, shoots and otherwise dispatches her entirely male adversaries. In this age of hyper-quick editing of disembodied appendages impersonating hand-to-hand combat, Noyce proves a delightful throwback in actually depicting who did what. It grounds the action in reality, which gives it an authenticity MTV editing never will.
Clever, fast-paced and filled with neck-wrenching twists, "Salt" adds plenty of spice to a tired spy genre.
