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The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
The Matrix Deconstructed
The Matrix Resurrections is a lot like the boxer who, decades after passing his peak, decides to step back into the ring again. A bit slower in the joints, but there's also a clarity and determination that only time can provide. After the first Matrix film was released in 1999 two sequels were rushed into production. Reloaded did a decent job at expanding on the first film, but the third ran into the dual problem of having exhausted the premise while also needing the bring the whole thing to a close. Now more than 20 years later director Lana Wachowski (flying solo) brings many of the principles back into this world. And like them this Matrix is a bit more world-weary, a bit more reflective of the miles everyone has put on.
The how's and why's of the movie are buried in spoiler territory and add some mystery since, at the end of Revolutions, Neo and Trinity (Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss respectively) were dead, peace had been brokered between the machines and human survivors, and the Matrix itself was coming to an end. But here we meet an older Thomas Anderson, a mentally unbalanced celebrity game designer whose fame has come from a video series that basically encapsulates the first three films. Meta? Oh, hell yes. There's little doubt that The Matrix Resurrections represents both the joys and the frustrations Wachowski has felt about her opus over the years. Probably one of the movie's most insightful moments is a planning section for a proposed sequel to The Matrix (the in-movie game) where people try to cook up marketing-friendly takes on why the original was so groundbreaking.
Where Resurrections goes from there is, as stated before, in the realm of spoilers, but this IS a Matrix movie and for the first time since the original actually returns to its source and lets some new ideas take root and bloom. Where the second and third films seemed saddled by the burden of providing ever larger and louder set-pieces, the action here feels like a secondary consideration. In fact, my main drawback of the film is that the action scenes, particularly the fight choreography, is a step back from the pristine sheen of the trilogy. How big of a problem is this? Depends- if you saw The Matrix as an action series, it'll be a pretty big one. If you saw it as a novel science fiction story you're far more likely to be on Resurrections' wavelength. This is more sobering than slick, particularly near the climax when the movie edges as close as the series has ever come to horror.
Overall, The Matrix Resurrections is not an easy recommend because it's not an easy movie to categorize. You have to give Lana Wachowski credit for not taking the Force Awakens path of a revival that is high on nostalgia and fan service while also being inarguably a bit vanilla. It's a movie that is going to inspire a lot of love and hate, but most of all a lot of discussion between the two, and if that isn't an ironic duality that the makers of The Matrix can appreciate, I don't know what is.
Once Upon a Superhero (2018)
Super Zero
There's a good idea behind this movie: a lone man claiming to be an exiled superhero shows up on Hollywood Boulevard. Is he for real? Is he a homeless man who has created for himself an intricate fantasy world? How will he interact with the other colorful facets of life that populate the Boulevard? What will he learn in the 189 days that the movie spans? These are intriguing questions that "Once Upon a Superhero" could have dealt with. Instead, it quadruples-down on directorial excess while leaving no time for anything like story or character development.
In simpler terms, this is a movie so far up its own ass it is giving itself a prostate exam.
The movie lets us know fairly quickly how much trouble we are in, because we're not even a minute in and we're given a long take of the main character's eye. Director John Kline has other tricks up his sleeve, and he's not going to let you walk away thinking he's afraid to throw every static take, lens flare, and camera effect in the book right on your lap. The movie is basically two hours of a man walking up and down the streets of L.A., but there's barely a moment that isn't assaulted by fancy edits and constant split screens. I'd hypothesize that the director would justify this by saying that this represent's Solar Flare's (our exiled superhero) fractured psyche, when all it really says is "Hey, I know how to use Final Cut Pro!"
The problem with this is that the movie is so crowded by gimmick it leaves its story completely malnourished. On his first day on the Boulevard Solar Flare encounters a stereotypical white rapper, a fake Mayan with prophecies of doomsday (the film is set in the days leading to the Mayan "apocalypse" of 2012). He meets a couple of threadbare self-styled heroes: Doc Compton (Ron Bush) and Captain Boulevard (Jason Hughes). And then... through the magic of an unintelligible mosaic montage the movie jumps 188 days to the supposed last day of Solar Flare's exile. That's right, all the meat that might have given anything in this movie purpose or meaning is just skipped over. After all, we have more screen wipes and jump cuts to get to!
If the first half of "Once Upon a Superhero" is baffling, the second half is downright interminable. It features Solar Flare again wandering around Los Angeles searching for his lost superpowers, all the while we get frequent time stamps to let us know that time is indeed progressing (after a while it becomes hard to tell). The movie's grim conclusion is undercut by relief at a narrative that is finally going somewhere after being jammed in "Manos: Hands of Fate" levels of neutral for the longest time. It may not be a happy ending, but any ending becomes welcome.
It's a shame, because as I said there are great ideas behind this film, but the movie can't stop getting in its own way with its own stylistic showboating. By the end we should be hanging on the question of whether Solar Flare's quest is literal or symbolic. Do we find out? No, but that isn't the worst part. The worst part is that by the end we just don't care.
Us (2019)
A Sophmore Entry That Needed Freshman Ambitions
Watching the trailer's for Jordan Peele's Us I felt intrigued, but also apprehensive. The trailer was such a perfect vector of chaos, mystery, and nightmarish imagery, that I was afraid the movie itself would not be able to deliver on its unsettling nature as potently. Ultimately, I feel like I was right- but not due to a lack of trying.
In fact, trying too hard might be Peele's weakness in Us. This is a movie where my praise and detractions feel like they almost perfectly cleave down the non-spoiler/spoiler line. The characters are (mostly) well-written, the performances are outstanding (Lupita Nyong'o is the stand-out of a strong cast), and many of the movie's set pieces are well thought-out and shot, especially the climax. However, walking away from Us I couldn't help thinking of the movie's inescapable Stephen King vibe, which is both a blessing and a curse. King is probably the best there is at creative horror scenarios and populating them with likable people. He is also not known for restraint, prone to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, even when it works to the detriment of the overall nightmare he's concocting. Us excels at the first part, then falls prey to the second.
The premise comes straight out of a bad dream. On a stormy night in 1986 young Adelaide Wilson wanders off on the Santa Cruz boardwalk and stumbles into a mirrored funhouse where she encounters her doppelganger, dressed exactly like her, hair styled exactly like her, but aggressive and possessed by a kind of feral fury. Jump to present day and adult Adelaide (Nyong'o) is beside herself emotionally as her upper-middle-class family returns to the same beach for a summer vacation This is when they are all accosted by their red-jump suited double who bear scars, malevolent grudges, and incredibly lethal scissors.
If Us had kept its scope to the cat and mouse between the Wilson family and their homicidal "tethers," then Us could have been an excellent thriller, perhaps even an exceptional one. But as the movie progresses you feel Peele's desire to deepen the nightmare, which becomes as unwieldly as a Jenga tower until it collapses in the final two minutes.
*** Spoiler portion of the review begins here ***
I'm not sure where Peele's desire to explain the Tethers and their origin comes from. Perhaps he was afraid audiences would react poorly unless his nightmare had a narrative explanation. Or perhaps the movie's midway mark when it goes from being a home invasion horror to a mash up of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dawn of the Dead is because he felt that the world-ending nature of his attack of the clones calamity better highlighted its haves vs have-nots allegory. I don't think Peele has such little faith in his audience to believe the former, so I side with the latter, although I contend a movie with a smaller scope could have been just as effective at driving the point home.
The worst part of Us is not that it is a bad movie, it is that it is a irreparably broken great one. Everything that Peele had working for him kept me with it, despite the nagging questions that began piling up. How exactly does an organization not only create perfect clones of people, but make sure that the clones will have children that are essentially clones of their topside counterparts? And exactly how many clones are we talking about? One for one with the residents of Santa Cruz? California? The United States (the underground bunker where the final showdown takes place doesn't look anywhere near big enough to work for any of those)? I know I'm not supposed to ask these kinds of questions, which is why I wish Peele hadn't brought them up in the first place. But by the end it's clear he is enamored with the idea of going deeper and deeper down his own rabbit hole (pun not intended) so when the last reveal takes place, a mere few minutes away from the ending credits, it broke me. It's not only a switcheroo because apparently nowadays it's not actually a horror movie unless it has some redefining twist at the end, it's a trick that plays dirty with an audience that has swallowed a lot just to get to that point. It's kind of surprising that a Jordan Peele movie would have me walking out mentally comparing it to certain M. Night Shyamalan films, and not the ones we fondly remember, either. Us isn't a bad film, however the gap between what could have been and what is is the scariest thing about it.
Suspiria (2018)
Dance of Sighs
Luca Guadagnino's Susperia is a twisted, beguiling epic. Born out of the fever dream that was Dario Argento's 1977 visually lavish supernatural slasher flick comes a 2 and a half hour "remake" that stretches the original in every conceivable way, and even turns parts of it on its head. It isn't the scariest movie of the year, but it is one of the best.
The very basic set-up is still the same: Suzy Bannion (50 Shades of Grey's Dakota Johnson) arrives in West Berlin in 1977 at the invitation to be a member of an exclusive dance company, helmed by the creative and obtuse Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). Opening with a gruesome murder in a colorful apartment building, the original wasted no time letting us know evil things were afoot- specifically, the dance company is being shepherded by a coven of witches seeking power and immortality, especially for their decrepit matriarch. Guadagnino's version, however, is set to a slower simmer. It doesn't open as violently, but we do know something is going on as one paranoid and frantic dancer (Chloe Grace Moretz) waxes manically conspiratorial to her therapist, an elderly Jewish man and Holocaust survivor (also played by Swinton in a chameleon-like role) before vanishing for good.
From the opening, Susperia does a lot of things that are either quizzical to down-right counter-intuitive. The 1977 version was basically a haunted house movie, with most of the good-vs-evil showdown taking place within its ornate walls. Here Guadagnino expands the scope in terms of not just geography, giving us an opening credits sequence glimpse into Suzie's Mennonite upbringing, but temporally, morally, and theologically, as well. As well crafted as it was, Argento's movie didn't go beyond a general template of evil people and the good people who want to escape their machinations. When you watch the remake the first time, you sense that there are a few more engines at work here. Guadagnino brazenly tries to drain the coven of much of their mystique, revealing their intentions early, and as they discuss their plans for ritual sacrifice over newspapers and chain smoking cigarettes they come off as self-interested and occasionally petulant, probably not much unlike the dancers in their stable. Television news anchors exposit on the real-life Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking, taking place concurrently with the story. Terrorist explosions go off in the Berlin skyline. The entire story is set in the context of a world that seems to leapfrog from one spate of madness to another. Perhaps Guadagnino's point here is that the coven is susceptible to same disastrous hubris (they are human, after all) as the RAF or the Third Reich. Or, perhaps more subversively, in a way their studio, even with the evil lurking under the floors, is a bit of a haven from it.
For many these tangents are seem just that- excessive flourishes that add an hour to a concept that didn't exactly have a lot of meat on its bones to begin with. But if you pay attention, these threads do come together in Susperia's insane final 20 minutes, a climax which is, oddly, as sweet and redemptive as it is gory and flashy. It's safe to say that this movie was built with multiple viewings in mind, since the ending rewrites the context of everything we've just witnessed- the characters, the dynamics, even the role of good and evil in the world. The 1977 film ended with Suzy walking off into the night as the studio, that haven of unequivocal evil, burned to the ground. This film ends with a bittersweet story told at an old man's bedside. It's a much more hopeful conclusion, the coda to a movie that states that good is never is pure as you think, evil is never as stark as it sounds, and celebrates the humanness of trying to navigate the two.
The Predator (2018)
I... I really... just can't...
Seriously, what the hell happened here? Did Shane Black even want to make a Predator movie? Because make no mistake, every follow up to 1987's Predator, while all being terrible, are still more legitimate Predator movies than this. You could easily swap out the titular character in this movie with any generic outer space monster/baddie and it wouldn't make any difference because in this movie, the creature isn't the star- it's Shane Black's never-ending parade of bad quips and fall-flat references. This is the sci-fi/action equivalent of an unfunny comedian's five minutes on the mic.
The movie starts out with an army sniper (Boyd Holbrook) witnessing the crash-landing of the Predator on Earth. But apparently this Predator has other plans on Earth other than a few days of hunt-and-kill R&R. Hot on his trail is another kind-of "super Predator" trying to hunt him down with the help of Predator dogs (?) and Sterling Brown as a government bad guy who is also- you know what? Forget it. I've already put far more thought into the plot of this mess than the movie has. The Predator doesn't exist to service any kind of story or plot- there's barely a moment when things DON'T happen that seem completely contrary to logic or common sense. What, you mean that the group of soldiers in the woods being hunted by an alien killing machine SHOULDN'T be shouting R-rated one-liners at each other? Perish the thought! This is a Shane Black movie and he's got to make jokes, so make jokes we shall!
I would love to tell you how much better other aspects of the movie, like the action, are. I would love to, but I can't, because when there is actual predatoring going on (which is actually a surprisingly small slice of the film because, you know, JOKES) the movie is cut worse than an MCU film on speed. Forget being able to follow the action, would you like to actually come out the other end of an action scene with some idea of who survived and who didn't? You would? Aw, your optimism is adorable.
Maybe I just don't get Shane Black. It isn't like he's that bad of a writer- his scripts can work when there's a good director to tone down the excesses as necessary. But directing his own material it's way too obvious he's too in love with his own shtick. That's how he made an Iron Man movie with hardly any Iron Man in it. And that's how he's made a Predator movie that's more about an endlessly quipping squad of Three Stooges-ish military rejects than an actual Predator. And when we do get to that Predator, Shane manages to water down any of the terror, threat, or coolness the creature had. Oh well. Maybe if he'd learned to tell a few jokes he'd have gotten a better role in his own movie.
The Equalizer 2 (2018)
A Dunderheaded Slog
Full disclosure- I never saw the first Equalizer film, and The Equalizer 2 does little to make me feel like this needs to change. I was hoping to like it- both Clint Eastwood and Liam Neeson have gotten to play kick-ass action heroes well into their silver years, why not Denzel who exudes more gritty cool than either of them combined?
Except... the first thing an action movie needs is, I don't know, actual action. To be fair, there are a precious few moments of in the first 90 minutes of Washington's ex-Marine, ex-CIA avenging angel righting some wrongs with fast jabs to various solar plexus, but these come in drips and drabs and are tangential to the main plot. Basically, it isn't until the movie has about 25 minutes left that The Equalizer starts any actual Equalizing.
What comes before this is a 90-minute trudge to nowhere. Director Antoine Fuqua sure does love his scenes of Washington listening with stone-faced empathy to the plight of an elderly Holocaust survivor, or giving words of wisdom to a neighbor kid who might be going down a bad path because he stages them again and again and again. If I wanted 90 minutes of someone delivering lessons on manners and how to be kind to others, I'd go back and rewatch "Won't You Be My Neighbor," which at least was more interesting than this.
The most fatal flaw of The Equalizer 2 is that it is all build-up, no pay-off. Besides beating us over the head with repeated examples of McCall's angelic goodness, the movie starts to weave a plot about a CIA friend (Melissa Leo) who is murdered while investigating the death of an agent. For as much time and geography as the movie burns (it literally skips its way from Boston to DC to Brussels and back again over and over), one would hope that it would deliver something in terms of plot, but not really. By the time the first real revelation happens the movie is 3/4 over and the generic bad guys with generic facial hair and generic motives take the stage for the finally, leaving in the dust questions that a good movie might have answered.
And as for that finale... Well, I got to give The Equalizer 2 credit for being better than Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom because it at least waits until its final quarter to act like it's lost all common sense. I won't get too deep into plot specifics other than to say that the it's the kind of closing action scene that probably sounds cool on paper, but is executed in a way to make me wonder if anyone involved in the writing or directing or set work of the movie has every actually been through a real hurricane. An evacuated beach island village where there are barely any puddles on the ground much less waist-deep water threatening to sweep hero and villains alike out to sea? Gunfights in 80+ mile per hour winds? Oh, and the electricity is still working.
Yeah, right.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Like a Jenga tower of Stupid
Every time you wonder if Fallen Kingdom can get any more determinedly, aggressively dumb, the movie winks at you and says "Here, hold my beer." If you thought the lowest this franchise could get was an in-dream velociraptor barking "Alan!" at Sam Neill, then hold your nose- you're about to take a plunge into the deep end.
I'm at a lost as to what can recommend the movie at all, since from the outset there's barely a moment that isn't at odds with common sense. It now turns out Isla Nubar, the site of both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, is also the home of a dormant-now-turned-active volcano. Since the modern geological classification of a dormant volcano is actually "potentially active," building your billion-dollar theme parks here now makes as much sense as building a new Disney World on the slopes of Mt. Saint Helens. Since this would mean extinction for these back-from-the-dead dino-critters, there's now a call to rescue them, including from Jurassic World corporate shill-turned-dinosaur-advocate Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard). This reversal I don't mind. I can see someone going from seeing these beasts as a source of profit to living creatures in need of protection, if we're taken along that arc. Alas, Fallen Kingdom has no time for arcs, character development, or any sort of nuance. It has its characters do, say, and act as the plot necessitates at any given moment. Full stop.
The first third of the movie plays as a weak sauce parody of every other film in the series, as Claire and raptor-whisperer Owen (Chris Pratt doing his Star Lord shtick- minus the charm, charisma, likability, dance skills, etc...) scramble to the island to organize a kind of Cretaceous Noah's Ark at the behest of Discount John Hammond (James Cromwell).
Of course, the Powers That Be are up to no good, and this is where Fallen Kingdom really begins its death spiral. Not only does it double-down on the absurd villain motivations from the last movie (yeah, the dinosaurs are wanted as potential military assets because that makes TONS of sense), but takes on the creepy-house shenanigans of a lame Scooby Doo episode.
If there is any upside to Fallen Kingdom, it's that it might finally put the nail in the coffin of a franchise that's long-since run out original things to say or to show . "Remember the first time you saw a dinosaur?" Claire asks Owen at one point. Yes, Claire, we do. And it was in a much, much better movie than this.