John Wick is showing his age, as well as accumulated wear and tear, in his third outing. The legendary assassin played by Keanu Reeves, who retired before being pulled back into his own game, has been declared an enemy of the underground and is on the lam in “John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum.”
That last part means “prepare for war,” so you know there’s going to be plenty of bloody mayhem. Fans will certainly not be disappointed in the body count or spectacular action set pieces, where Wick takes on fellow killers by gun, hand, knives, sword, motorcycle and a few other methods of death.
We meet more members of the secret international society of assassins -- some helpful, some lethal. These include Halle Berry as Sofia, who runs the show in Casablanca; Laurence Fishburne as the Bowery King, who’s in charge of the army of invisible homeless; Anjelica Huston as a ballet director with some dark ties to Wick’s past; and the “Adjuticator” sent from the society leadership to clean things up.
My favorite new add is Mark Dacascos as Zero, who runs a sushi bar by day and leads a cadre of ninjas at night. He’s openly worshipful of Wick, so it’s like he’s fighting his own fanboy. We get the sense Zero but equally pleased with being the man who finally kills Wick, or joins his list of the vanquished.
Reeves is no spring chicken, and with Wick’s growing list of injuries -- he’s been shot, stabbed and pummeled over the course of the few days during which the entire film franchise has taken place -- he moves in a lurching, graceless manner.
Personally I preferred the lean, mean, stripped-down ethos of the first two films, directed by stunt coordinator-turned director Chad Stahelski. It felt like the crew had been left to make their own movie after the above-the-title folks had wandered off for a few days.
With a reported budget of $70 million, “Chapter 3” is definitely edging more toward James Bond than grindhouse. There’s even some noticeable cheating through the use of CG imagery or tricky editing, something I appreciated the earlier films for eschewing.
Still, it’d be hard to deny that Wick is still a blast, a little bit of the ol’ ultra-violence in mainstream form.
Bonus features are pretty decent, though you’ll pay more to get the best stuff. The DVD has just theatrical trailers and two making-of featurettes. Spring for the Blu-ray edition, and you add six more featurettes.
John Wick runs like an old man with rheumatoid knees.
Hollywood can do amazing things with faces, but the knees always give you away. Star Keanu Reeves staggers and clomps in a herky-jerky cadence that bespeaks of a man in his 50s who’s more worried about preserving his tendons than achieving maximum speed.
Yes, yes, if you’ve followed the legendary assassin’s journey through the first two movies, you know that Wick’s been repeatedly pummeled, stabbed and shot as he’s pursued by a virtual army of other killers, so that certainly factors into how much he’s slowed down. A couple of other assassins even makes jokes about his lurching ways.
He’s still game for a third go-round in "John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum,” which is a continuation of the story that plays out over a few days' time, during which Wick has waded through an increasingly deep ocean of blood.
The last portion of the title is Latin for “prepare for war,” so you know things are just getting ratcheted up to another level of ultra-violence.
I liked the raw kinetic energy of the first two movies, which were known for putting veteran stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski in the director’s chair, a then-novel approach that has since been much imitated. (And surpassed, imho, by “Atomic Blonde.”) The fights were in our face, unmasked with no jumpy editing or obvious stunt doubles.
The franchise reaches middle age here, relying more on CGI and other cheats, and with some fights that go on way longer than they should. Same for the movie in general, which feels bloated at 10 minutes past the two-hour mark. These sorts of action-reliant spectacles are best at a tight 101, like the first one.
Still, it’s hard to deny the movie’s still a lot of fun, what with all the Glock blasts to the face, people getting thrown through windows, motorcycle sword fights and chop-socky rope-a-dope. There are just enough talkie scenes to act as a deep breath before we plunge in for more slice-and-dice.
It seems in the last film Wick, who was reluctantly drawn out of retirement after five years, had committed the ultimate transgression against the High Table, the fictional ruling part of a worldwide association of assassins. They have their own little pet rules, with sanctuary hotels in each major city, always called the Continental, where killers can trade in special gold coins for refuge and weapons.
Wick killed a member of the Table on Continental New York grounds, so now he’s hunted -- excommunicado -- with a $14 million price on his head with nowhere to turn for help. A mysterious “adjudicator” (Asia Kate Dillon) shows up and deems that others are at fault too, including Winston (Ian McShane), the gravely manager of the Big Apple hotel, and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), who runs the seedier side of town with an army of winos.
They helped John Wick before, and now must pay their own pound of flesh.
Halle Berry is a new face as Sofia, who manages the Continental in Casablanca and owes him an old favor. Ditto for Anjelica Huston, a Belarus matriarch who runs the ballet school where Wick grew up. That at least explains his grace with guns and knives, twirling in place like Nureyev as he takes one life after another.
Wick even gets his own assassin fanboy (Mark Dacascos), who runs a streetside sushi bar by day and commands a cadre of ninja assassins at night. He keeps telling Wick how honored he is to be fighting him, which is a hint of his long-term prospects.
Bedecked in a sleek black suit, long hair and scraggly beard, Reeves is more a force of vengeance than an actual person. But this is not the sort of movie you go to for dialogue and character development. It’s a gleeful orgy of bullets and bruises, film noir as bloodbath.
Drink deep, because it looks like we’re in for a whole lot more of these.
“Kingsman: The Secret Service” was a dashing, original and highly entertaining flick that spoofed the conventions of the spy genre while generally adhering to them. Its much-anticipated sequel, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle,” is none of those things.
This bewilderingly limp follow-up brings back the same cast and creative team, yet fails to recapture the magic. It’s got too many characters, a non-scary villain and seems too in love with itself to spare any affection for its audience.
You may remember that in the last movie, veteran superspy Galahad (Colin Firth) was killed, shot through the head. This proves only a mild inconvenience, as he’s resurrected in short order, minus one eye and lacking any memories. Though we just know his killer skills are residing there, Bourne-like, underneath the timid exterior.
Galahad protégé Percival (Taron Edgerton) takes center stage, as nearly the entire Kingsmen coterie of spies is wiped out by Poppy (Julianne Moore), who controls the world’s drug trade from her secret headquarters deep in the jungle, which she’s built to resemble her nostalgic middle America childhood. She has a plan to hold the world’s drug addicts hostage unless the governments pay her a massive ransom.
The key new wrinkle, the introduction of an American version of the Kingsmen, turns out to be the film’s biggest disappointment. They’re Statesmen, Kentucky whiskey-brewin’ cowboys in Stetsons – which suggests the British filmmakers can’t distinguish the New South from the Old West. Channing Tatum turns up as their best and brightest, but he’s soon sidelined in favor of a lesser operative (Pedro Pascal). Jeff Bridges chews his dialogue like cud as their top kick.
Director Matthew Vaughn still has the chops for some seriously fancy action scenes, as the camera spins around the combatants like an untethered raven, the action speeding up or slowing down as aesthetics needs be.
Whenever the bullets and blades aren’t flying, though, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” is a cringe-worthy retread that’s more embarrassing than enjoyable.
Bonus features are pretty decent. The DVD comes with the “Kingsman Archives,” a collection of concept art photos and behind-the scenes stills, plus “Black Cab Chaos: Anatomy of a Killer Case.”
Upgrade to the Blu-ray edition and you add a feature-length making-of documentary film focusing on everything from the Kingsmen and Statesmen’s respective gear, “Suited and Booted,” to visual effects and Elton John’s guest-starring appearance.
I absolutely adored 2015’s “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” It was a dizzy, daffy parody of the spy genre that nonetheless was in unabashedly in love with cool gadgets, dastardly plots and slo-mo action scenes. And it featured a bunch of dashing guys in swanky British suits to boot.
So here comes the sequel, subtitled “The Golden Circle,” using the same core cast and creative team, and it’s a discombobulated hot mess of a movie. It's like going to a party where you like all the people, but somehow the conversations are lame.
What I enjoyed about the first film was the brash, giddy tone that combined R-rated mayhem with sharp comic zingers. It featured Colin Firth as Galahad, the oh-so-suave top agent of the Kingsmen, a private spy agency working secretly to keep the world safe. Their cover is as tailors, so they all sport the same style of clothes, right down to the striped tie and spectacles, which double as X-ray goggles and tactical display.
So why does the follow-up go so awry? Director Matthew Vaughn is back along with his co-screenwriter Jane Goldman, based on “The Secret Service” comic books by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Firth also returns -- despite the slight inconvenience of Galahad being killed in the last movie -- along with Taron Edgerton as Eggsy, his young Cockney protégé, and Mark Armstrong as Merlin, their Bond equivalent of Q, the master outfitter.
I’m not giving anything away by saying that Galahad does indeed turn up again, missing an eye and most of his memories, though he does put all the pieces back together again in the end.
(Well, not depth perception...)
It’s also not a spoiler that the Kingsmen are attacked and mostly wiped out by this movie’s villain named Poppy, a bubbly billionaire drug dealer played by Julianne Moore, who’s built her own 1950s nostalgia town in the middle of a remote jungle for reasons that are never entirely clear. Her signature thing is burning a solid gold emblem onto her henchmen.
She’s got some robot guard dogs, a huge meat grinder (guess where that's heading!) and a plan to poison the entire world population of drug users, holding their lives hostage unless the U.S. president (Bruce Greenwood) legalizes narcotics.
Never mind that that would immediately put her out of business. But the conniving POTUS -- who seems to be a cocktail of the worst traits of Clinton, Bush and Trump -- has his own chess move to make.
The other big twist is that Galahad, Eggsy and Merlin team up with their American counterparts, the Statesmen, who are in the whiskey business and dress as drawling cowboys. I guess the Brit filmmakers don’t understand the difference between Kentucky and Wyoming.
Jeff Bridges shows up as their boss, and we think Channing Tatum is going to team up with the Kingsmen, but then something happens. Their real pardner is Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), who carries a mean electrified whip and a few grudges of his own. Halle Berry plays Ginger, their counterpart to Merlin, who secretly yearns to get into the field.
The action scenes are energetic and fun, as the camera swoops around the combatants, the speed picking up and slowing down as needed to highlight an especially nifty move. This movie’s not nearly as gory as the last one, which may be a relief to some but was a letdown for me.
Elton John shows up as himself, kidnapped by Poppy and forced to play his songbook for her entertainment, right down to the iconic feathers-and-star-glasses outfit. It’s one of the most bizarre celebrity cameos I’ve ever seen, bloated and peevish and dropping f-bombs all over the place. I can’t imagine Sir Elton needs the money, so somebody must have talked him into this.
I haven’t even mentioned Poppy’s cyborg lieutenant, Eggsy’s Swedish princess girlfriend or the European rock concert where a tracking device is implanted in a very squirmy location. This movie has too many characters and a lot of moving parts, and many spin merrily in their own, untethered orbits.
“Kingsman: The Golden Circle” feels like pieces from three or four sequels, cut into bite-sized pieces that aren’t enough to satisfy and don’t taste good together.
It has been my considered opinion that any work of fiction based on the dubious psychological diagnosis of split personalities is doomed from the start. This sort of movie was already clichéd back in the 1970s, and since then many mainstream scientists have come to the conclusion the whole notion of different identities living inside the same body is bunk.
So I was prepared to detest “Frankie & Alice,” the new drama starring Halle Berry (who’s been slumming a whole lot since her Oscar win). Though I should point that calling this film “new” stretches the limits of the word. Shot in 2008, it was given a brief theatrical release in 2010 to qualify for award nominations – which were scant in arriving – before being dumped into theaters this past spring.
In short, everything about it screams “bomb.”
So I was surprised to discover a reasonably engaging movie featuring a strong performance by Berry, and another one by Stellan Skarsgård, who plays her doctor. The writing is at times amateurish and sloppy – with no less than six credited screenwriters, plus two others for story, this film is a prime example of the pitfalls of screenwriting by committee. But director Geoffrey Sax wisely keeps the focus on what’s best, the tense interaction between patient and doctor.
A delicate dance between mistrust and empathy, Frankie’s treatment by Dr. Oz gradually makes progress in uncovering her various personalities – who vary widely in blood pressure, IQ, left- or right-handedness and even race.
Set in 1974, Frankie is a veteran stripper at a swank club (who nonetheless manages to keep everything covered) and party girl on the side. Her tendency for sudden mood shifts, even violent outbursts, eventually lands in her in a mental hospital.
Dr. Oz uncovers two “alter” identities: Alice, a vain and bitter white Southern belle, and Genius, a timid preadolescent girl who acts as Frankie’s reluctant guardian.
The plot unfolds almost like a crime procedural, with the doctor’s psychoanalysis coupled with flashbacks to Frankie’s past providing clues to the wellspring of her mental breakdown. Phylicia Rashad shows up as her devout mother, who tends to turn a blind eye to her daughter’s dark spells.
“Frankie & Alice” isn’t entirely successful, but it smartly focuses more on the characters than the kooky psychology.
Extra features, which are the same for both DVD and Blu-ray editions, are limited to a single featurette, “The Making of Frankie & Alice with Halle Berry.”
I’m not sure what’s harder to watch: a movie that starts out well and then flushes itself down the toilet, or a film that never had any idea how to be good in the first place.
You’d think the truly awful flick would be torturous. But it’s the good-movie-gone bad that tends to be more disappointing, since at least for a while it was on the right path. That’s the case with “The Call,” a tightly-coiled thriller that is really suspenseful through the first two acts and then rolls off a cliff during the last half-hour.
Halle Berry plays Jordan, a veteran 9-1-1 operator working at the Hive, the massive emergency response station that handles all of Los Angeles. Night after night she receives calls from people in distress. Usually it’s just a stumblebum blathering intoxicated come-ons or routine disturbances.
But on one fateful night Jordan receives the most harrowing call of her career – and she blows it. A serial killer brutally slays a young woman, and Jordan believes it’s her fault.
Six months later she’s finally back on the job, and relives the same scenario over again. This time, Jordan will do anything to save the girl’s life. Staying in contact with an abducted teen (Abigail Breslin) throughout her ordeal, Jordan tries to thwart the killer from afar.
Things go great, until director Brad Anderson and screenwriter Richard D’Ovidio take a left turn into disaster.
Instead of continuing the restriction of Jordan trying to prevent a crime from her work station – much like a laid-up James Stewart in “Rear Window” -- she ventures out into the world to take on the mastermind herself. The result is a lot of silly boo-gotcha moments and other horror-film tropes.
After an hour of terrific storytelling choices, “The Call” makes exactly the wrong one.
The DVD is decently stocked with extras, including a commentary track that includes the filmmakers, Berry and Breslin, and a making-of documentary.
Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo edition and you add deleted/extended scenes, an alternate ending, on-set tours, a featurettes on stunts and Michael Eklund’s audition for the role of the creepy killer.
A grand, brave, often mesmerizing but just as often puzzling cinematic experience, “Cloud Atlas” takes a book generally thought to be unfilmable and delivers something rather astonishing. The Wachowski siblings, best known for the “Matrix” movies, team up again (also joined by co-writer/director Tom Tykwer) to create a sprawling story that encompasses dozens of characters spread over several time spans, with a universal message about the sanctity of the soul.
If that sounds a little full-of-it grandiose, well, that’s because it is. But even as you struggle to understand the accents of Tom Hanks and Halle Berry or even figure out where and when you are, most observers should find the experience thrilling.
Hanks and Berry are joined by a number of other actors, each playing several roles – though it’s often a challenge to recognize them buried under layers of costume and prosthetic makeup. The action jumps from the 19th century Pacific Islands to America in the 1970s, and then to a dystopian future Korea and a post-apocalyptic time in which the Earth is nearly deserted.
Though it may not be up everyone’s alley, “Cloud Atlas” is an innovative and ambitious piece of science fiction drama that’s worth a look.
Extras are rather decent, though you have to upgrade to the Blu-ray edition to get the best stuff. The DVD version only comes with a making-of documentary.
It’s not surprising that the notoriously publicity-shy Wachowskis chose not to record a commentary track, but they make up for it with six more featurettes covering everything from casting to special effects, plus philosophical musings about reincarnation.
Like with Hitchcock's "Rear Window," "The Call" is challenged by having a protagonist who is more or less stuck in one place. Unlike "Rear Window," this new thriller manages to siphon off dramatic tension instead of building it, taking a strong opening and leeching away anything resembling suspense during an ill-thought-out final act.
Instead of being lamed by a broken leg like Jimmy Stewart, Halle Berry's Jordan Turner is tied to her desk. As a 9-1-1 operator for the city of Los Angeles, she spends hour after hour sitting in front of a high-tech station receiving emergency calls, some of them truly frightening, but most routine and rather dull.
For instance, there's a drunk who seems to get thrown into jail every single night and uses his one free call to dial up his "sugar" to purr come-ons and lament his fate. (Even though The Hive, the massive L.A. emergency center, has dozens of operators, his calls mysteriously always come straight to Jordan.)
At first, director Brad Anderson ("The Machinist") and screenwriter Richard D'Ovidio use the main character's immobility to great dramatic effect. Jordan's job entails hearing all the gory details of a crime, but without a police officer's resolution of finding out how things turn out.
One fateful night she gets a call from a teen girl whose house is being broken into, and it's a terrifically tense sequence as Jordan talks to the hysterical young woman, keeping her calm and using a clever ploy to make the intruder think she's escaped. But then Jordan makes an error in judgment, the killer is alerted to her presence and the girl ends up dead.
The situation gets repeated six months later when another teen named Casey (Abigail Breslin) is kidnapped by the same man.The first part of the chase is quite engaging, as Casey talks to Jordan via cell phone from the trunk of her assailant's car. Jordan comes up with all sorts of clever ways for Casey to alert other drivers that something's amiss -- though it doesn't turn out so well for one Good Samaritan (Michael Imperioli).
Meanwhile, Jordan's (boy?)friend cop Paul (Morris Chestnut) leads the chase from the ground, always one step behind. It's good dramatic intercutting of the different urgencies, with the girl's frantic pleas for help, Jordan's calm advice with an undercurrent of panic about blowing it again, the twitchy kidnapper (Michael Eklund) trying to avoid detection and the police on the hunt.
But then, well...
Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that the filmmakers take the exact thing that was working for the movie and flush it down the toilet. As if this weren't bad enough, they do it in a totally artificial and unbelievable way, with a huge sequence of ridiculous events that strain the credulity of the audience.
What had been a fairly zippy crime thriller suddenly devolves into a ham-fisted horror movie, with the audience compelled to shout directions at sub-moronic avatars: "No, don't go in there! Turn around! He's right behind you!"
Watching this movie is a reminder that, if one day in real life you are being hunted by a relentless killer, and against all odds you manage to incapacitate him, your job is not finished until you have observed vampire protocol -- aka stake in the heart, head comes away form the neck, and a little holy water wouldn't hurt. (If the police ask questions, just tell them "I really wanted to be sure...")
Berry is smart and effective in her role, at least until things go screwy. Breslin is forced to spend a good chunk of the movie half-clothed, which is a bit off-putting for people who mostly remember as the precocious tyke in "Little Miss Sunshine." Eklund has a few effective notes as the seemingly bland white dude with a Buffalo Bill thing on the side. But the rest of the actors are constrained by characters who only exist to service the plot.
It's too bad "The Call" went off its wheels, because if you swapped out the final third or so you could actually have a decent thriller on your hands. Alas, this movie mis-dialed the ending.
Having not read the novel by David Mitchell, my guess is that "Cloud Atlas" is one of those books that was considered untranslatable to the big screen. The Wachowski siblings, the creative team behind the "Matrix" films, and their writing/directing partner Tom Tykwer, have accomplished about as successful an adaptation as could be hoped.
It's a sprawling, ambitious, troubling, occasionally glorious and often vexing film. A hair under three hours long, it links dozens of characters across a multitude of time settings, with the same set of actors playing multiple parts. These stories do not unfold in temporal sequence, but instead cut back and forth with no transition for the audience. The abruptness is intentional.
So, one moment you can be watching Tom Hanks playing Zachry, a suspicious but good-hearted hunter in a post-apocalyptic primitive society hundreds of years into the future, and in a blink he has become Dr. Henry Goose, a nefarious physician/charlatan in the Pacific Islands circa 1849.
The theme here is that these actors are not simply inhabiting different roles, but represent different incarnations of the same eternal soul replicated over and over again throughout the eons, but facing much the same challenges in each reincarnation.
For instance, Hanks' character(s) struggle with summoning the courage to do the moral thing. For Dr. Goose that battle was obviously lost some time ago. For Zachry it's an ongoing struggle, with the forces of suspicion and hatred represented by Old Georgie, a devil in a top hat who whispers vile thoughts into his ear.
Zachry's time era is probably the most critical, acting as a framing device for the other stories. Sometimes we see the same person decades apart in their lives, but for the most part it is new incarnations each time around.
In Zachry's time, he is suspicious of Meronym (Halle Berry), a representative of a more technologically advanced alien culture, or possibly the remnants of humanity that survived the "Big Fall" of mankind. Meronym and other people of her ilk seem to have electronic devices implanted under the surface of their skin, while Zachry and his people have extensive facial tattoos.
Meronym has ingratiated herself into the people of the valley's tiny community, where they struggle to survive against wretched tribes of cannibals who raid from time to time. Meronym says she's there to help, and indeed heeds Zachry's plea to save the life of his niece, but it's clear she's there with an unspoken mission.
Other significant settings are the Pacific Islands in the mid-19th century, Cambridge of 1936, 1973 San Francisco, modern-day London and Korea somewhere in the 23rd century.
Jim Broadbent plays Timothy Cavendish, an itinerant publisher who hits the big time when his thuggish author executes the dream of what every writer wants to do to a critic, becoming a celebrity in the process. But money troubles and a hateful big brother leave him incarcerated in a mental hospital, which builds up to a septuagenarian version of "The Great Escape."
Ben Whishaw is Robert Frobisher, a brilliant but poor musical genius who takes on a position as assistant to a once great but now forlorn composer. Jim Sturgess plays Adam Ewing, a young man making a highly profitable business trip for his slavemaster father-in-law, and encounters the unexpected friendship of a runaway slave (David Gyasi).
In 1973 Halle Berry plays Luisa Rey, a crusading young journalist who uncovers a nefarious plot at a Three Mile Island-ish nuclear facility, and finds her life in peril.
Perhaps the most evocative setting is Neo Seoul of the future, a nightmarish landscape that seems to combine the worst elements of "Blade Runner" and "The Matrix." Here Doona Bae plays Sonmi-451, a "fabricant" -- aka synthetically created human slave -- who serves as a waitress in trendy restaurant. One day she's liberated by a leader of the rebellion against this totalitarian society, and finds herself becoming the image and voice of a movement (and later, in Zachry's time, something much more).
"Our lives are not our own," Somni intones, underscoring the film's message. "From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and each kindness, we build our future."
I will say that time does not drag while watching "Cloud Atlas." I looked at my watch exactly once, and was astonished to see that 2½ hours had already gone by.
But the various actors each playing three, four, five or more roles ended up being distracting, especially as I attempted each time to puzzle out who was who under the heavy layers of prosthetic makeup. I found that the mental energy I expended in this exercise left me unable at time to get emotionally engaged the characters' plight.
I also admit to being uncomfortable with some of the transformations. At various times Caucasian actors are made up to look Asian, and Asians as Caucasians, and African-Americans as whites or Asians or Latinos, and none of it very convincing. I did note that at no time was a non-African-American actor made up to look black. Consciously avoiding that risk of an unpalatable accusation of blackface only serves to make the other cross-racial portrayals seem even more squeamish.
"Cloud Atlas" is a bedazzling cinematic experience, though one that will no doubt leave some audience members confused and frustrated. For me, there was enough enchantment to overcome the head-scratching.
