Video review: "The Rhythm Section"

Blake Lively has staked out a nice little film career in a lot of “pretty girl” roles. She was beguiling in the uneven “A Simple Favor” and spent an entire movie in a bikini in “The Shallows.” She takes a very different and bold turn in “The Rhythm Section,” a rather atypical but quite effective take on the spy thriller genre.

She plays Stephanie Patrick, a young prostitute and drug addict who lost her entire family three years earlier in a plane crash – a flight she was supposed to be on herself. Plagued with guilt and self-loathing, Stephanie seems stuck in an inescapable downward spiral until a journalist (Raza Jaffrey) shows up with shocking news: the crash wasn’t an accident but a terrorist bombing that’s been covered up by international intelligence authorities.

This leads her to Boyd (Jude Law), a reclusive ex-MI6 agent. He instructs her about the mysterious unidentified mastermind behind the attack, U17, and that he’s planning more. Through intensive tough-(no)-love training, Stephanie is gradually transformed into a capable adversary herself.

She adopts the persona of Petra Reuter, a notorious German assassin Boyd himself killed. The trail to the killers leads to Marc Serra (Sterling K. Brown), who brokers in intelligence information; Leon Giler (Max Casella), a slimy New York businessman with sticky fingers and lascivious tastes; Reza (Tawfeek Barhorn), a bomb-maker and errand boy; and Lehmans (Richard Brake), a sickly, half-blind middle man.

One of the things I really liked is that director Reed Morano) and screenwriter (Mark Burnell, adapting his own novel) don’t try to change Stephanie overnight into a superhuman agent in the mold of Bourne or Bond. She still remains very much human, and is capable of being tricked or hurt.

But her will, and her taste for retribution, are unmatched.

It’s Lively’s best role, as she gets to transform both physically and emotionally as Stephanie turns from strung-out dead-ender to a strong woman who finds she has a penchant for the hunt. In a year separated from bigger pictures, this low-key thriller is a gem waiting to be found.

Video extras are solid. They include deleted and extended scenes, and the following making-of documentary shorts:

• Stephanie’s Journey – a look at her physical and emotional transformation.
• Fight Or Flight – filming the stunt sequences.
• Never Leave Second Gear – focusing on the top-notch car chase sequence in Tangier.
• One Shot Explosion – a climactic, concussive scene.
• Designing The Rhythm Section – the filmmakers’ approach to the look of the film.

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Review: "A Simple Favor"

"A Simple Favor" is not a particularly good film, but it is an interesting one. Sometimes it's better to to be mediocre and interesting than decently unoriginal.

At first I thought this was going to be a romcom. Anna Kendrick plays a mommy vlogger who becomes ensorceled with a beautiful, bitchy mother of one of her son's 1st grade classmates, played by Blake Lively. I figured it would be an odd couple romp as they bond while dealing with various man issues.

There is indeed bonding and romantic entanglements, but they're a sideshow to what is essentially a comedy whodunit.

Tonally, this is a brash outlier movie. Coming from director Paul Feig ("Bridesmaids," "Spy), it appears at first blush to be a broad R-rated comedy with the ladies spouting a lot of filthy talk. I haven't read the book it's based on, though it's been compared to "Gone Girl" and "The Girl on the Train" -- pretty much the polar opposite of funny.

But screenwriter Jessica Sharzer, adapting the novel by Darcey Bell, layers in plenty of laughs even as she introduces film noir elements as the two women trade roles as admirer and admired, pursuer and pursued. There are a couple of head-whipping plot twists, though they aren't hard to guess if you've been paying attention.

It starts out fun and flirty, then turns darker, and then darker still, though there are still laughs spliced in between the doom and gloom.

Kendrick plays Stephanie Smothers, a widowed single mom to adorable Miles (Joshua Satine) who makes helpful videos aimed at other mothers. She's sort of a downmarket Martha Stewart, living in quaint (fictional) Warfield, Conn., a New York City exurb. The other moms of their class see her as this busy bee of energy, friendly to everyone but close to no one.

Then she meets the mom of Miles' pal Nicky (Ian Ho), the class troublemaker. Emily Nelson (Lively) is everything Stephanie is not -- tall, flawless, rich, self-confident, careerist and seemingly indifferent to the joys of motherhood. She wears swank suits with vest pocket chains, fedora hats, ladybug shoes and a permanent smirk.

After some play dates and lots of gin martinis, they're soon fast friends. Stephanie is deferential and apologetic, and Emily acts as her muse and mentor to live larger. Emily is like a caricature of feminism: controlling, manipulative, arrogant. We would hope Stephanie would be smart enough to see through her facade to the depth of her problems, but then we wouldn't have a movie.

Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that Emily suddenly disappears after leaving Nicky with Stephanie. Her husband, Sean (Henry Golding), a once-promising writer, was away in London and wasn't aware she vamoosed. Her posh clothing designer boss (Rupert Friend) though she was on a business trip in Miami.

Soon the police are brought in, Stephanie's vlog becomes a hit when she starts doing updates on Emily's case in between making friendship bracelets, and the web of suspicions quickly spreads.

There was a point about two-thirds of the way through the movie where I was literally scratching my head, wondering what the heck was going on and where the film was heading. It felt schizophrenic and weird. But it was also on some level enervating to watch a movie that keeps throwing wild haymakers at you. Many of them don't land, but some do.

I can't exactly recommend "A Simple Favor." But it's a sporadically entertaining flick that has something to say about the state of the mommy wars.

Video review: "The Shallows"

Sometimes you have to resist knocking a movie for what it isn’t and just appreciate it for what it is. “The Shallows” is a modestly ambitious girl-versus-shark thriller that is breezily entertaining and, yes, rather dumb. But it acknowledges and embraces its own simplicity: 87 minutes of Blake Lively in a bikini, battling a voracious man-killing beast.

That really is the whole story. Nancy is a young doctor-in-training who’s taking a break to surf in Mexico after a tragedy. She’s returning to the same remote beach where her mom surfed while pregnant with her in 1991. It’s an idyllic getaway and a chance to heal… until a great white rips open her leg and traps her on some shoals a few hundred yards offshore.

The rest of the movie (directed by Jaume Collet-Serra from a screenplay by Anthony Jaswinski) is Nancy trying to out-think the shark. It circles constantly, more a force of malevolence than a mindless devourer. She has only her medical skills and perseverance to help her survive.

Nancy is constantly verbalizing her plight, which I found distracting, as if the filmmakers didn’t trust their actress and the audience to communicate what the character is thinking without spelling it out for us.

It’s a great-looking picture, with some terrific above- and -below water photography, plus some snappy editing.

“The Shallows” won’t linger in your memory, but it should keep you entertained.

Bonus features are so-so. They include deleted scenes and four making-of featurettes: “Shooting in The Shallows,” “How to Build a Shark,” “Finding the Perfect Beach: Lord Howe Island” and “When Sharks Attack.”

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Review: "The Shallows"

If you think "The Shallows" looks like an excuse to get Blake Lively in a bikini for 87 minutes and scare us with a CGI shark -- but not too scared; this is a PG-13-rated thriller, after all -- you'd be right. But not entirely.

Though at first this might seem like a rocks-in-its-skull-dumb movie, director Jaume Collet-Serra and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski manage to whip up a decently entertaining flick. It's in the tradition of "you are there" filmmaking that's made something of a comeback in recent years with movies like "Gravity." The idea is to put the audience in the protagonist's shoes.

Well, not in this case, since she isn't wearing any... or much of anything, for that matter. 

Lively plays Nancy, a nice wholesome girl from Galveston, Texas, who's come to Mexico to seek out the same beach where her mother went surfing while pregnant with her in 1991. Eventually we learn that mom has recently died and Nancy dropped out of medical school as a result. She's a typical screen heroine: smart, braver than she thinks, wary, a little disconnected from others.

She finds the beach alright and soon enjoys a marvelous day of tube-cutting and cork-rolling, or whatever surfers call it. (People of my hue stay away from the beach, as a rule.) She shares the cove with a couple of local guys, including one using a helmet with a waterproof camera to record his exploits, which we know will become important later. 

Then Old Mr. Shark shows up, trapping Nancy on a shoal just a couple hundred yards from shore. She's left with a nasty bite on her leg, which she patches up using her doctor skills. Meanwhile, the deadly predator circles and feints, clearly not going anywhere until he's got himself some Texas-style sushi. She sits and frets, watching her foot slowly turn purple as thirst and exhaustion leech the life out of her.

The photography and editing are quite good (courtesy of Flavio Martínez Labiano and Joel Negron, respectively), giving us some dazzling views above and below the water, and some quick cuts to stoke our sense of peril.

The film's biggest flaw is telegraphing too much of what's going on inside Nancy's head, rather then letting us watch her and figure out what she's thinking. For instance, as the tide rises, threatening to send her perch back underwater, she gazes at a distant buoy and says out loud, "Too far." 

It's almost like the filmmakers didn't trust their actress to convey her internal struggle using just facial expressions. Think about the long wordless stretches of "Cast Away" with Tom Hanks, and how effective they were without any verbal support.

Speaking of which, Nancy gets her own "Wilson," the volleyball Hanks befriended. In this case it's a wounded seagull, who got his wing bent in the same shark attack that injured Nancy. The filmmakers use this device for a little while, then set it aside.

"The Shallows" doesn't stack up against "Jaws," but then how many movies do? It's a short, engrossing film with modest goals, which it accomplishes well. 

Video review: "The Age of Adaline"

A bit of romantic trifle with a science fiction twist, “The Age of Adaline” is most hurt by its main star, and most helped by a late-arriving supporting player.

Blake Lively isn’t given enough to do by the script, which posits her as a San Francisco woman whose strange, electrified car crash in 1929 prevents her from aging any more. She wanders through time, trading identities every decade or so to prevent suspicion, her only permanent connection being her daughter, who today has become an old lady played by Ellen Burstyn.

Still, Lively’s performance is drab and emotionally unaffecting. She becomes a Zelig-like figure, someone who shows up everywhere but leaves little trace of their passing.

Adaline has been careful to avoid romantic entanglements for obvious reasons, but now a new beau (Michiel Huisman) has wandered into her life and knocked over some emotional furniture. Soon they’re an item and making long-term plans together – longer, perhaps, than he knows.

It’s a pretty straightforward story, with some flat, dry narration to make things even duller than they might already be.

Then Harrison Ford turns up about halfway through the movie as Adaline’s boyfriend’s dad, and suddenly the movie takes off. Ford, not exactly known as an overly emotive actor, shows us all kinds of vulnerability and doubt that we don’t usually see from cinema’s most reliable heroic everyman.

I won’t give away the details of what transpires, other than to say some old painful memories are dredged up.

Despite the slow start and the underwhelming protagonist, “The Age of Adaline” eventually finds its footing.

Director Lee Toland Krieger provides a feature-length commentary for the special features, which are the same for both DVD and Blu-ray editions. There are also deleted scenes and three featurettes: “A Love Story for the Ages,” “Style Throughout the Ages” and “Discovering Young Harrison Ford: Anthony Ingruber, An Online Sensation.”

Note: Ingruber gained notoriety for his YouTube impressions of Ford and other famous actors, which eventually led to this gig. He is indeed eerily reminiscent of a 1970s Harrison Ford.

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Review: "The Age of Adaline"

"The Age of Adaline" is a movie with a little going for it.

It wants to be a lush romantic tale with a science fiction twist -- beautiful young woman suffers a strange accident and remains young and beautiful forever. Like Dorian Gray and Orlando, Adaline Bowman wanders the decades, eschewing love but eventually drawn into entanglements that inevitably end with pain.

Emotionally, though, it's a remarkably staid film, with neither lead actress Blake Lively or the story providing much in the way to cause our hearts to go pitter-patter.

Until, that is, Harrison Ford shows up in the second half and almost rescues the picture with his raw, naked vulnerability.

Which, I'm aware, is a strange thing to say. Whatever else you think of Ford's thespian skills -- I happen to believe he's been gravely underestimated over his four decades of acting -- he's never been known as a particularly emotive performer. Gruff, hard everymen who occasionally let their veneer slip is more his line.

So to see him stripped bare, stammering with eyes that seem just on the edge of tears, is quite a thing to experience.

The rest of the film picks up on his tragic energy, and concludes with a great deal more emotional momentum, even if the plot is a bit predictable. It's like the movie suddenly remembers to get out of its own way.

Lively plays Adaline, born to a wealthy San Francisco family in 1908. She led a pretty normal life, we're told -- the strangely flat, precise narration is a pure bust -- until the age of 29. During a rare California snowstorm, her car crashed into an icy river, where she went into hypothermia and was then revived by an electrical current from lightning.

All this caused her DNA to undergo "electron compression" and ... actually, don't bother trying to figure out the science-y gobbledy gook; it all just means that she stopped aging. She soldiered on with her life, raising her daughter, until it became clear that she could no longer fool others with talk of miracle Parisian face creams to explain her unaging appearance.

Adaline went on the lam, taking up a new identity and existence every 10 years. And never let her guard down, we learn, except once.

Flash to 2015. Adaline, now going by the name Jenny, celebrates her 107th birthday with her daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn), who is now quite elderly, and her only confidante. She's preparing to spend her next decade on a farm in Oregon, until she runs into an effusive man named Ellis, played by Dutch actor Michiel Huisman, who pronounces his name as "Alice."

He isn't a particularly interesting or engaging character. He's that tiresome cinematic canard, the charming guy who got fabulously rich at a young age but doesn't make a big deal out of it because, y'know, it's just money.

(Axiom: the only people who say they don't care about money are those who already have gobs and gobs of it.)

Ellis/Alice woos Adaline/Jenny with a fierce urgency bordering on creepiness. She eventually succumbs, of course, because otherwise there wouldn't be a movie. They go on a trip to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his parents, played by Ford and Kathy Baker ... and there I'll have to stop, to prevent giving away too much.

It may seem an odd comparison, but this movie reminded me in some ways of "Funny People." That 2009 Judd Apatow comedy started out very strong, but then about halfway through we stumbled upon a new character and storyline that knocked the whole movie off its rails.

"The Age of Adaline" is the opposite: it wanders the wilderness for nearly an hour, then Harrison Ford rides in like a white knight. Neither film winds up a total success, but it's better to gain vigor than watch it dissipate.

Video review: "Green Lantern"

"Green Lantern" is one of the weakest comic book superhero adaptations we've had in awhile, but I still couldn't quite bring myself to hate it. Sigh with disappointment, maybe, but the strongest feeling I had was the lack of one: I was colossally indifferent to this movie.
Part of it is Ryan Reynolds. I've seen Reynolds do good work, but he's started down an unfortunate career path that I'm not sure he can pull out of. He always plays the glib, fast-talking charmer who comes to realize he's out of his depth, and (usually) rises to the occasion.

I've seen this guy many times now, and I don't like him.

Here he plays Hal Jordan, a reckless and cocky test pilot who encounters a dying alien who bequeaths him a ring of power. It seems the Green Lantern Corp patrols the farthest reaches of the universe, 3,600 of them in all, and Hal's been tapped to take over this neck of the woods.

Alas, Parallax -- the ancient enemy of the Corp -- is released and begins wreaking havoc, manifesting as a giant blob of space goo. Some of his space goo finds its way to Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), a nerdy scientist and childhood friend of Hal's, causing his head to swell to melon size and gifting him with telekinetic powers.

With his ring Hal can fly and create objects out of green energy, which is the Force-like energy generated by the willpower of all living creatures.

I certainly don't have the willpower to sit through "Green Lantern" again.

Video extras are quite paltry for DVD, but improve quite a bit with Blu-ray. The DVD has only promotional pitches for you: a preview of a Justice League digital comic and another for the Green Lantern animated TV show.

The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack adds two making-of documentaries, one about the Green Lantern universe and another about casting Reynolds in the green-and-black suit. There's also an extended cut of the film and deleted scenes. The centerpiece is a picture-in-picture mode with video pods with tidbits about production.

Movie: 1.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "Green Lantern"

"Green Lantern" is one of the weakest comic book superhero adaptations we've had in awhile, but I still couldn't quite bring myself to hate it. Sigh with disappointment, maybe, but the strongest feeling I had was the lack of one: I was colossally indifferent to this movie.

Part of it is Ryan Reynolds. I've seen Reynolds do good work -- he showed great comic timing in the first half of "The Proposal" -- but he's started down an unfortunate career path that I'm not sure he can pull out of. He always plays the glib, fast-talking charmer who comes to realize he's out of his depth, and (usually) rises to the occasion. I've seen this guy so many times now, and I don't like him.

After the screening -- held on a Wednesday night specifically to preclude most print reviews -- one of my fellow critics commented that in many ways "Green Lantern" is strikingly similar to "Iron Man." The protagonist is a hedonistic playboy who cares not a whit for the rest of the world, until circumstances and a really awesome super-suit force him to play hero. It's attractive as a story concept, but is so familiar now I kept thinking Lantern's costume looked moldy.

In this case, the hero's powers do not actually reside in the suit, but in the ring that is bequeathed to him by a dying member of the Green Lantern Corp. There are 3,600 of them split up to guard the entire universe against evil, and the greatest of them, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), is fatally wounded in a clash with the Corp's ancient enemy, Parallax (voice by Clancy Brown). Parallax is released from his imprisonment on a distant planet, and turns into some sort of wandering space blob with a head that looks like one of the aliens from "Mars Attacks!"

Meanwhile, Abin Sur crash lands on Earth and orders his ring to find a suitable replacement, and Hal Jordan (Reynolds) is selected. He's a cocky test pilot haunted by the death of his father, another pilot who was consumed in a fiery blaze before Hal's eyes when he was a boy. This has given him, needless to say, issues.

There's an inevitable scene where Hal discovers his powers after getting jumped by some toughs outside a bar. As soon as the scene shifted to the bar, I knew some thugs would appear shortly to serve as Lantern tenderizer. It's practically encoded in the DNA of movies like this.

Then there's a long, unnecessary sequence where Hal travels to the Lanter Corp's home planet for training, and to be told by head cheese Sinestro (Mark Strong) that he's not good enough to wear the ring. A big burly Lantern appears to teach him "ring slinging 101," which seems like an  unlikely name from such a hallowed crew.

In the grand tradition of poor super-hero movies that can't come up with a worthy antagonist, there is a second villain to buttress  the space goo guy. Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) is an introspective scientist brought in to examine Abin Sur's corpse, but he gets zapped with a bit of the space goo and his head swells to melon proportions. Oh, and he can move stuff with his mind.

The powers of Green Lantern are vague. He can create anything he can imagine out of the green energy harnessed by the ring, which is supposed to consist of the willpower of every living creature in existence. It's like The Force, except for some reason willpower manifests itself as neon-green energy on the Corps home planet of Oa. Even more powerful, but less stable is yellow energy, which comes from fear. That's space goo guy's stock in trade.

So Green Lantern conjures race cars, machine guns, swords, shields and all sorts of other things in combat. He can also fly and fire energy bolts.

The totally unneeded love interest is played by Blake Lively, a childhood friend of Hal's who now runs the big corporation he worked for (until he shoots down two of their super-duper new drone fighter planes). She does have one great line where Hal, after first appearing in the Green Lantern outfit, immediately recognizes him because he only wears a tiny mask covering his eyes. "What, did you think I wouldn't recognize you just because I can't see your cheekbones?" Fourth wall humor, but still funny stuff.

So space blog guy keeps getting closer to Earth, Hector's noggin keeps growing bigger, and Hal learns to focus his willpower and overcome his fears.

I'm bored writing about this movie, just as I was while watching it, so I'll stop now.

1.5 stars out of four

Review: "The Town"

"The Town" is such a well-executed cops-and-robbers drama dripping with Boston flavor, it takes us a while before we realize it's built on a mountain of Hollywood clichés.

Ben Affleck, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay, plays a careful bank robber who tosses his professional detachment out the window for the damsel-in-distress: The manager (Rebecca Hall) at the last bank he robbed.

Throw in a headstrong FBI agent (Jon Hamm) hot on his tail, a trigger-happy partner in crime (Jeremy Renner) and a local mob boss (Pete Postlethwaite) who won't let him walk away from the "family business," and the film practically churns itself out of a Screenwriting 101 class.

Oh, I almost forgot: This is the Affleck character's "one last job" before he calls it quits and heads to Florida.

(The film could have been even more pat -- I haven't read the novel on which it was based, Chuck Hogan's "Prince of Thieves," but I understand in the book the cop falls for the same girl.)

This review is sounding like a pan, but read the first half of the first sentence again: Affleck gives such a confident, authentic performance -- both in front of and behind the camera -- that these familiar tropes take on a lively, at times electric quality that make us feel like we're discovering them anew.

Renner is particularly good as Jim Coughlin, a crook and killer with two strikes against him, and swears there won't be a third. He accepts who he is, and is resigned to whatever fate a life of a crime holds for him. "If something goes down, we'll be holding court in the streets," he vows before a big heist.

When they were teenagers, Jim killed a guy to protect his best friend Doug MacRay (Affleck), doing nine years in prison without a peep. Maybe that's why Doug keeps him around as a wingman, despite Jim's tendency to shoot first, and ask no questions at all.

Affleck and his co-writers, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, take pains to make Doug a sympathetic character. He methodically plans out his robberies, right down to knowing the biographies of the bank guards and nuking the surveillance video tapes in the microwave, so we respect his attention to detail -- especially his efforts to prevent violence.

Things go awry when Jim kidnaps Claire (Hall). She's released unharmed, but Jim is jumpy that she might gives clues to the feds. She cooperates with Special Agent Frawley (does the FBI have regular, un-special Agents?) but fails to pass on a key detail.

Doug agrees to shadow Claire, ends up bumping into her, and finds the attraction powerful, and mutual. Though they don't have a lot of scenes together, Affleck and Hall make the romance seem fleshy and real. I especially liked the undercurrent of class rivalry between them, with Doug a palooka Townie and Claire a yuppie interloper, or "Toonie."

That brings us to the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, whose rough-hewn, cloistered personality bleeds into every scene. Affleck and the rest of the cast nail the Beantown accent -- with such success, in fact, that I occasionally had trouble understanding them -- and the great cinematography (by Robert Elswit) captures the hardscrabble charm of the mean streets.

Affleck's always had screen presence, and with his hair starting to gray a little, it gives him a bit of authority he didn't have during his matinee idol days. "The Town" isn't quite as good as Affleck's directorial debut, the terrific "Gone Baby Gone," but clearly this is the work of a guy who knows how to tell stories.

Imagine what he could do with something a bit more original.

3 stars out of four