The Fate of the Furious
Dir. F. Gary Gray
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This eighth entry into the Fast and Furious franchise begins in Havana, with everyone's favorite bald-headed lead-foot, Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), in a street race using a battered, broken-down crap box car. He still wins, of course ("It's not the car, it's the driver"), but it's hard not to read into this first scene as a metaphor for the series as a whole - really how much longer will the motor run on this franchise before it catches fire and blows up? The first Fast flick after the tragic death of Paul Walker, the unwieldy-titled The Fate of the Furious does its best to one-up itself with some increasingly fun action scenes and car stunts, but with an incredibly generic story and meat-headed characters that are alternately annoying and uninteresting, you need to have some serious patience between the big set pieces to enjoy this gloriously stupid movie.
The story begins after Brian and Mia's "retirement," while Dom and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are on their honeymoon in Cuba and the rest of their crew are living a seemingly normal life again (the impossibly-jacked Dwayne Johnson even lets out his inner soccer mom by coaching his daughter's team). However, they all get sucked back into their super-spies-with-cars lives when a mysterious hacker actually named Cipher (Charlize Theron, under a ridiculous blonde Jonathan Davis-from-Korn wig) forces Dom to betray his "family." Kurt Russell then recruits the grease monkey Avengers to help the team find Dom, capture Cipher, and manage to accrue huge amounts of property and vehicle damage while doing it!
OK, so the story is as lame as you can get - the whole "hacker" angle has been done to death in the action genre since the early 2000s and Theron's ultimate plan is to get Dom to steal the nuclear codes from the government. She might as well be putting her pinky up to her lip and requesting a billion dollars. But what you're probably coming to this movie for are the car stunts, and there are a number of fun ones in here (though none reach the same heights as Fast 5 or 6 in my opinion): you get cars vs. submarines, a massive chase through New York City, a giant prison-break sequence, a fun Havana street race, and my personal favorite, Jason Statham on an airplane paying homage to the gun-fu craziness of John Woo's Hard Boiled. The only problem is, these great action scenes are just a handful of moments in a 2.5 hour movie. When the characters aren't in cars, the movie is an embarrassing slog to get through.
First off - you somehow get Charlize Theron in this movie. Someone who I and many others consider one of the best actresses working today, and surely proved to be one of the best action stars today after Mad Max: Fury Road and the upcoming Atomic Blonde. But riddle me this Batman: why the hell didn't she have a single action scene in this movie?! Theron doesn't even get to drive a car! All we see her do is give the same smoldering look and sit behind a computer while a bunch of chrome dome muscle-heads drive around miles away. Even Vin Diesel gets more emotional scenes in this film (need I reiterate this man's acting limitations?)! Many other cast members are annoying - Tyrese Gibson as the "comedic relief" feels like a kid trying to be funny in class and Scott Eastwood falls flat as Russell's number two. The only saving graces are The Rock, Statham, and Helen Mirren, totally owning her extremely exaggerated Cockney accent in a small role.
Unlike a box of chocolates, you know exactly what you're going to get when you walk into a Fast and Furious movie. So from that perspective, I guess this movie is a success. The car scenes, although a little too "CGI" for my taste, are thrilling in a kind of over-the-top, silly way, and the cast seems to be having a blast with it - logic and continuity be damned. But at this point, this series is definitely seeming to have run its course (not box office-wise), and the only territory it has left to explore at this point is outer space. The Fast flicks "jumped the shark" long ago, but count me excited if Fast and the Furious: A Space Odyssey becomes a possibility.
Rating: C+
Colossal
Dir. Nacho Vigalondo
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If you have not seen Timecrimes - drop what you're doing and watch it immediately. That was my first exposure to Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo, and it's possibly the best time travel movie ever made! However, nothing Vigalondo's made since has captured that same level of Hitchcockian craft as that 2007 feature. I was hoping Colossal might be a return to form for him - his quirky kaiju movie starring Anne Hathaway as a hard drinker with a surprising connection to a 300-foot tall beast terrorizing South Korea. It's certainly weird, and I commend Nacho for coming up with a new take on a crowded genre, but ultimately, unlike Timecrimes, Colossal falls under the weight of its own illogical premise and doesn't seem to know what to do with itself in its final half.
The movie follows Gloria, a party girl whose lifestyle results in her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) dumping her. Returning to her hometown to make a fresh start, Gloria reunites with a childhood friend, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who runs a bar. After a few drinks, they discover that a giant monster is terrorizing Seoul, and soon realize that Gloria has a special "connection" with this monster. It's clear right away that this is not your typical monster movie, and the creature in South Korea is clearly some kind of manifestation of Gloria's personal problems, but sadly, the two clashing tones (monster movie and rom com) don't quite gel as well as intended.
Hathaway is great as the somewhat air-headed Gloria, and Sudeikis is solid as well (though his character makes a dramatic shift partway through the film that didn't work for me), but overall, this movie was kind of a strange, but interesting, mess. I don't tend to read many reviews before writing my own, but I couldn't make heads or tails out of the relative meaning of what I watched by the end. Just like Gloria's identifiable quirk in the film, I was left scratching my head.
Rating: B-
Gifted
Dir. Marc Webb
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After his romantic indie hit (500) Days of Summer, Marc Webb was given the major opportunity to direct Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man reboot with Andrew Garfield. Unfortunately, likely due to behind-the-scenes studio meddling, his two web-slinging films didn't quite hit the mark with fans and critics (I still believe he was only hired for that gig due to his last name). With Gifted, Webb returns to his independent, actor-driven roots, telling a small-scale family drama about a very smart little girl and the custody battle surrounding her. This is exactly the type of thing Webb excels at, and Gifted is a wonderful little middle-of-the-road tearjerker that you could feel secure taking your mother to.
The story follows Frank Adler (Chris Evans), a blue collar single man from Florida raising his feisty young niece Mary (Mckenna Grace), who's a child math prodigy. Despite the efforts of his formidable mother Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), Frank wants Mary to live a normal school life and make friends. However, Evelyn refuses to let Mary's potential go to waste, and fights Frank for custody of Mary, wanting to place her in advanced "think tank" programs to fast-track her towards a Nobel Peace Prize. The result is obviously a messy family drama, with tears, laughs, and a cute one-eyed cat.
The acting is fantastic, with Chris Evans and Octavia Spencer (playing a motherly neighbor) having an unlikely Snowpiercer reunion. Jenny Slate was perfectly casted as Mary's elementary school teacher, and Lindsay Duncan is likewise impressive, as she plays Frank's mother not as some one-dimensional kid-stealing monster, but as a complicated woman with regrets and problems of her own. The stand-out though is 10-year-old Mckenna Grace, who is a total natural on screen and cries more realistically than most adult actors. Between Dafne Keen in Logan, Garance Marillier in Raw, Shira Haas in The Zookeeper's Wife, and now Mckenna Grace in Gifted, 2017 is shaping up to be the "Year of the Young Actress," apparently.
Overall, while Gifted a little sappy and cliched, it still totally worked for me and, judging by the symphony of sniffles I overheard in the theater, I think it worked on the old ladies sitting around me as well.
Rating: B
The Lost City of Z
Dir. James Gray
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The Lost City of Z, based on the nonfiction book of the same name, is kind of like the "culturally-sensitive," serious version of Indiana Jones. The film tracks the story of 20th century British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), who's sent into the Amazon in a last effort to protect his family name, tasked with charting and mapping out the dangerous South American jungle. Fawcett returns home to his wife and children enamored with the indigenous cultures, and grows obsessed with proving through further exploration and artifact-finding that there was an advanced civilization that once lived there. However, these repeated years-long explorations away from his family takes its toll on his wife and kids, and he becomes a literal laughing stock in the scientific community who believe the loincloth-wearing tribespeople are nothing more than savages.
What sounds like an exciting story about a man's self-destructive obsession with discovery and charting nature (not dissimilar to Aguirre: The Wrath of God or The Revenant) is told with a slow, plodding, uncharismatic, monotone blandness. While the cinematography and location shooting are stunning to look at (like with The Immigrant, James Gray brings a kind of "old school" feel to his films), I never once cared for any of the characters. As Fawcett, Hunnam is unable to command the screen further than giving impassioned speeches, and his "first mate," a drunk unrecognizably played by Twilight's Robert Pattinson, is lifeless and impossible to understand under his mumbling tone.
The reviews on this one makes me think I'm in the wrong, but to me The Lost City of Z was just very bland, not able to excitingly capture the obsession or spiritual determination of its main character that other "exploration" films of its type have.
Rating: C
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