The Virtuoso

 

Something was bugging me all throughout watching "The Virtuoso." It's the tale of an assassin trying to reconcile the capricious brutalities of his life while pulling off an especially vexing job in which he's sent to a small town to kill someone -- but he doesn't know who.

Even though the film is engaging and full of plenty of suspense, I couldn't shake the vague feeling that what I was watching was not a movie. A large part of it has to do with the narration, which is done in second-person, present-tense form: "You are very careful. You know never to rush. You always take your time and do not be distracted," etc. 

At first what bothered me about the narration is that it's largely unnecessary. As our titular protagonist, a stern-looking fellow of middle years played by Anson Mount, assesses threats and undertakes risks, we can generally see his mind working clearly. For example, at one point he encounters a body in the trunk of a car, so we know that he knows that the person driving that vehicle isn't who they say they are.

Nevertheless, here comes the narrator to solemnly intone, "But if so-and-so is dead in the trunk, then who is the imposter inside the house?"

It's thudding and it's distracting. In movies it's best to lead your audience to where you want them to go, but don't spell it out for them. Show, don't tell. Less is more. It's better to let them be momentarily confused that always feel one step ahead of the characters. 

This is filmmaking 101 stuff. And director Nick Stagliano is not a newbie with three previous feature credits under his belt. Screenwriter James C. Wolf is a little greener, but they seem adept at pacing the plot it. So why the damn narrator?

It wasn't until the movie was nearly over I figured it out: it's a video game. Watching the movie is an equivalent experience to having your avatar go through the tricks and tumbles of a role-playing game, with the narrator helpfully providing clues and insights you might have missed. 

Should the virtuoso go here and talk to this woman? Or hang back and watch what unfolds? Should he start up his car, or will the taillights give away his position to the enemy? And so on.

It's too bad, because this invasive choose-your-own-adventure warbling keeps getting in the way of a perfectly serviceable story. 

The assassin lives in a shack in the woods, totally off the grid and cut off from all communication or human contact. He gets his assignments through notes in a private mail service box, and can pick and choose his jobs. 

Sometimes he gets a name, location, details, everything. Other times it's just a few clues, and he has to follow the breadcrumbs to find his mark. His only real connection is with his handler, an enigmatic fellow played by Anthony Hopkins. He's essentially an older version of the virtuoso, and even though they work together they circle each other like wary wolves, affection not giving all the way to trust.

You may wonder why a screen icon like Hopkins is doing in a little potboiler like this, and I can say with a lot of confidence that it's all because of one speech the handler gives in a graveyard scene. I'd bet a steak dinner Hopkins was flipping through that script thinking, "This guy doesn't really do much but sit at his desk and answer one of several phones in front of him," but got to that stem-winder speech and said, "I'll take the part!"

Turns out the handler was a soldier who served with the assassin's father, and has taken on a mentor role now that his old man is passed. Hopkins is frisky and a little scary as a man who knows the dark parts of man's heart, knows that duty requires wandering in there from time to time, but understands how to set it aside and move on to the next mission.

The virtuoso is having trouble with this because his last job went terribly bad, so he wants to jump back into the game so as not to stew over it. His next assignment is a doozie, and the handler suggests he pass on it, but he's resolved.

It involves going to a tiny, tiny town in the woods that seems to consist of just a motel and Rosie's Cafe, a roadside greasy spoon where he is to meet his quarry at exactly 5 o'clock. The hitch: he doesn't know who it is, other than it has something to do with "White Rivers."

He goes to the appointed place and finds several potential threats. There's an older loner (Eddie Marsan) in the corner who's carrying a concealed gun. A handsome dude with a wolf's smile (Richard Brake) who appears to be a boyfriend of a woman (Diora Baird). The assassin is trying to figure out who to kill when a sheriff's deputy (David Morse) strolls in to refuel with coffee and danish. Now what?

He subtly enlists the help of the waitress, Dixy (Abbie Cornish), Rosie's niece who is filling in while her aunt is sick. She takes one look at the steely virtuoso and recognizes a choice pick in an unlikely place, and comes on hard to him. He uses her attraction to his advantage, plumbing her for information to scope out the others. Things go from there.

It's a pretty neat setup, although I have to confess I figured out the twist pretty early on, and I'm guessing you will, too. Still, I was never bored watching it all play out.

Mount is an intriguing figure, a guy who has to practice smiling so he'll pass for a normal citizen. He's not a bad person at heart and the collateral damage that sometimes happens weighs heavily on him. Mount, who sort of resembles George Clooney's harder-hearted cousin, gives the virtuoso a sort of polite distant quality -- a gentlemen with a thousand-yard stare.

There's a lot to like about "The Virtuoso," which plays on the conventions of the killer-among-us shtick while offering enough originality to make it seem like not another cookie-cutter flick. I also appreciated that they didn't gift the assassin with otherworldly fighting skills a la Wick or Bourne, so when he gets into a scrape he gets as good as he gives.

If only they would've nixed that damnable "quest hints" narration...

Video review: "World War Z"

The best movie review I saw of “World War Z” was actually a Venn diagram by The Oatmeal, one of the sharpest webcomics around. In the area between the overlapping circles that showed everything the book and the film had in common, it simply read: “It’s titled World War Z.”

Hilarious, and true. Because if you go into this big-budget horror/disaster thinking it bears anything more than a passing resemblance to the novel by Max Brooks, you’re bound to come away disappointed.
Which isn’t to say the movie they did make is terrible. It’s merely OK, with a few highly engaging action sequences interspersed with stuff that is loopy and/or dull.

Good, bad or indifferent, it’s just not the book.

While Brooks opted for a journalistic approach following an ensemble cast of characters, director Marc Forster and his trio of screenwriters went with a standard leading man story. Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator picked to lead the team tracking down the source of the plague rapidly turning the world’s population into a swarm of zombies.

He travels the globe, including a stop in Jerusalem for an epic battle against a horde of undead attempting to scale the ancient city’s walls. He picks up new allies along the way, but also loses many good people.

Forster is ham-handed at the non-special effects action scenes, to the point we sometimes have trouble discerning exactly what’s happening. One fight-and-flight up a skyscraper stairwell looks like it was shot with a camera draped in dark cloth.

Things build up to a decent but rather predictable showdown in a remote laboratory where the ultimate zombie cure can be found. Again, this veers wildly from the book, where the only panacea for the outbreak was: “Kill all the zombies.”

Personally, I would love to see a faithful adaption of “World War Z” – as soon as Hollywood gets around to making it.

Video goodies are so-so. The DVD version gets you exactly nothing, so you’ll have to spring for the Blu-ray upgrade to get any extras.

The highlight is an unrated version of the film featuring more gruesome action that in the watered-down PG-13 theatrical edition. You also get six featurettes on the making of the film, bringing the book to the screen (sort of), and the scientific realities behind zombie mythology.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "World War Z"

The thing you have to understand about zombie movies is that we've reached the point where virtually every example is a hybrid comedy. Winks and smirks have become an indelible part of stories about the walking undead. There's gore and death, but we take it sardonically -- even cheering when a loathsome human takes the bite.

People thought "Shaun of the Dead" was such a revelation, but all it really did was take a genre that was 60/40 horror-to-funny and flip it around.

That changed with the novel "World War Z," which approached the notion of a zombie apocalypse with total earnestness. Author Max Brooks, following up on "The Zombie Survivor Guide," tackled the material with a completely different mindset from the familiar ragtag group of survivors gradually getting chomped.

Brooks had an almost journalistic approach, relating vignettes from myriad different characters and perspectives from all over the globe. Rather than a single dominating story thread, it was a patchwork of diverse tales skillfully woven into a pattern.

The long-gestating movie starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball") takes the mindset of the book, and throws away most everything else. The focus is on Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator tasked with finding the source of the virus that is rapidly turning normal people into ferocious flesh-eaters. Gerry, and nearly everything that happens to him, is a concoction of the movie.

In effect, they kept Brooks' frame but painted a completely different picture inside it. The result is plausibly entertaining, and commendable for the sober way it approaches the concept of a plague of undead.

About those zombies. Like other recent iterations of their ilk, a person can morph into one in a matter of seconds after being bit. They're of the "fast zombie" variety, running and jumping faster than an Olympic-level human athlete, and have a tendency toward spasmodic twitching and clattering their teeth, like they can't wait to sing their fangs into you. They seem to behave with a collectively mind at times, working cooperatively to scale high walls and other feats we've never seen before.

It's a novel, unnerving approach.

After an intro in which Lane gets his wife and two daughters to safety aboard a Navy ship, he's strong-armed into leading an expedition to South Korea, where it was believed the outbreak first started. His further questing takes him to Jerusalem and then Wales, his allies rapidly getting picked off, as he frantically searches for a weakness in the virus.

Some of the story is extremely effective, such as the rapid spread of the virus amongst a jetliner full of passengers. James Badge Dale has a memorable turn as an Army officer cut off from his command, who's adopted a doggedly systematic approach to fighting zombies.

Other parts are just loopy, such as an encounter with a rogue CIA agent who's pulled out all his own teeth and has a nutty theory about the Jews having known about the danger all along. Turns out he's right (!), leading to a sequence in Israel that strains credulity. Although we do pick up another interesting supporting character there, Daniella Kertesz as no-nonsense soldier Segen.

A trio of screenwriters keeps the audience guessing, though some of the contortions of the plot sap energy from the proceedings. The tamed-down PG-13 violence doesn't help, nor does Forster's ham-handed camera work during many of the action scenes. A chase up a building stairwell is so murky and jangled, we can barely tell what's going on.

(Definitely pass on the 3-D upgrade, which hardly makes a difference other than rendering the image even dimmer.)

I like the idea of "World War Z" more than the movie they actually made. I suppose a jumble of random characters wouldn't have been possible for a mainstream movie. But the filmmakers end up jettisoning the very thing that made Brooks' book special.