Tag: movie review

Movie Review: The Hateful Eight (2015)

Quentin Tarantino’s been flirting with a film like The Hateful Eight for awhile now, a beautifully shot, well designed film that goes beyond feeling minor (the way Death Proof feels, for instance) and just ends up being bad. An inverse of Django Unchained, where the bounty hunters and rogues are just as despicable as the murderers and thieves they encounter, The Hateful Eight plays on the director’s obsessions with race and torture and whimsical men who are good at murderin’ folks, but with so little in the way of narrative pull that it often seems like Tarantino is just playing with himself, making a movie for the sake of making a movie, without a hint of impulse control.

The Hateful Eight concerns eight men and women who are all on their way to Red Rock, Wyoming, a blizzard nipping at their heels. Some of them are bounty hunters. Some are bounties. Some are working men. Not everybody is who they say they are, but there’s hardly any mystery to that considering the cast of regulars Tarantino’s assembled and the kinds of roles they’ve played for him in the past. Our lead bounty hunters—”Hangman” John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson)—are suspicious of everyone they encounter, and they’re usually right in their suspicions. Ruth encounters Warren on a trail, sitting atop a pile of dead bounties after his horse died in the snow. He’s on his way to Red Rock with Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an outlaw who is worth $10,000 dead or alive, and he prefers taking them in alive so as to not cheat the hangman, hence the nickname. The conversation between Warren and Ruth is intense—Tarantino is at his best when staging conversations between hypermasculine strangers—and when they pick up another snowbound traveler, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the new sheriff—things get more tense. This is just after the Civil War and there’ still tensions between Union soldiers and Rebel ones. Ruth and Warren belonged to the Union. Mannix’s father led a battalion that continued fighting the war in the face of unconditional surrender. None of them could be said to’ve been good men, and Domergue, when she’s not getting punched or spitting up blood, watches them argue with glee.

With the blizzard on them, the stagecoach holes up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, where four other men are already gathered around the fireplace. There’s a fussy British gentleman (Tim Roth), a cowpuncher (Michael Madsen), a Mexican (Demián Bichir) who says he’s looking after the place for Minnie while she visits her family, and a Confederate General (Bruce Dern) who is familiar with Major Warren, even if he doesn’t know it. The idea, according to Tarantino, is for these characters to get together and tell stories to one another like an arc on a western, each person trying to figure out the intention of the other. This has been a pretty basic mode of narrative storytelling for a long time now. You can go farther than westerns like Gunsmoke and The Virginian to Rashomon or The Canterbury tales, people telling stories about things seen and unseen, only here, as Tarantino often has it, our storytellers have guns. Those are mostly holstered until a blood-soaked finale, so much of The Hateful Eight is talk and menace, a locked room there’s only one way out of.

That means lingering, for a long time, on the decisions Tarantino chooses to make. One of them, shooting in 70mm and keeping his characters mostly indoors, is ponderous, but there is a lot of loving detail put into Minnie’s Haberdashery and the sense that something’s off with it. The way-station is a one-room saloon with a couple of beds in it, but Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson make use of cinematic space such that the Haberdashery feels both open and claustrophobic at the same time. There are eight people in the room, eight different perspectives of a single unfolding narrative, and were that narrative any better than it was, the way The Hateful Eight cuts from one to another would be invigorating. But it isn’t. So again, you get to linger with the decisions Tarantino makes. You have three hours to wonder how, even in a movie where he’s only the narrator, Tarantino manages to give himself the film’s most troublingly racist dialog, or why he figures on adding a race allegory to a film about eight miserable bastards to begin with. Sampling, as he has been for some time now, from spaghetti westerns, the Confederate/Union line is one Tarantino plays with and tries to extend to today, but he frankly isn’t good enough to make a salient point, even though Samuel L. Jackson is the man making it. After Christoph Waltz’s Jew Hunter in Inglourious Basterds and Leonardo DiCaprio’s impassioned speech on eugenics in Django—both characters and monologues that Tarantino luxuriated in—it’s hard to take him seriously when he tries to inject social consciousness into The Hateful Eight, which is otherwise the director’s career-long fascination with bondage and torture writ large and gracelessly.

It takes a long time for The Hateful Eight to go anywhere, moving as slow as the stagecoaches that transport the players to their stage. Tarantino, as he’s done time and again since Kill Bill, is trying to make a film about outlaws and gunslingers who stand as legends that are of their time and outside it, but it just doesn’t work here, where he’s convinced to the marrow of his bones that it’s worth keeping the company of eight sadists who don’t have all that much to say. It’s a formula Tarantino has used effectively before, but here that formula is used to the point of exhaustion. And when everybody starts pulling guns on one another, as is Tarantino’s guarantee? More of the same, more of the same.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

With Samuel L. Jackson (Major Marquis Warren), Kurt Russell (John Ruth), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Daisy Domergue), Walton Goggins (Chris Mannix), Demián Bichir (Bob), Tim Roth (Oswaldo Mobray), Michael Madsen (Joe Gage), Bruce Dern (General Sandy Smithers), James Parks (O.B. Jackson), Zoë Bell (Six-Horse Judy), and Channing Tatum (Jody). Directed by Quentin Tarantino from a screenplay by Tarantino.

December 25, 2015
Movie Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

At last, our long national nightmare is over: There is a new Star Wars movie, and it’s pretty good. It feels like we’ve been living with the fact of J.J. Abrams‘ The Force Awakens for as long as we’ve lived with the franchise itself—since Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas, the possibility of more Star Wars became the inevitability of Star Wars, and the cultural stewardship of this sainted popular object passed, once again, from people to the corporations that sell things to people. If you ate food, drank water, or breathed air at some point between the release of the first The Force Awakens trailer and now, odds are that its controlling bodies had signed a licensing agreement with Disney so it could stamp BB-8 or Kylo Ren on the box.

As such The Force Awakens is a film designed to play as wide as possible, to get as much right as it can for the largest number of people. It’s a huge, exciting popcorn spectacle that both painstakingly sketches out its post-Rebellion world and has no real need to hit any beats that weren’t established by the original trilogy. Its heroes are orphans. Its villain is pulled between the light and dark sides of the Force. Decades have passed since the fall of the Empire and governments and regimes have changed, but this change, which is actually quite boring when played out in Senate chambers and offices, is mostly felt in costuming and set design tweaks, and what time has done to heroes like Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). No longer controlled by an Empire, the galaxy is stalked by the First Order, a frightening band of sleek new Stormtroopers that seems to have found a balance between adherence to the force and belief in fascistic military rule. With Luke Skywalker vanished, The First Order and the Republic-backed Resistance are in a race to find him in a star system whose map has been compromised with the fall of the Empire. Like in A New Hope, that vital information is stored in the files of an otherwise unassuming droid that ends up stranded on a desert planet, searching for a way to a secret base that finds itself menaced by the enemy’s planet-destroying power.

It’s hard to fault Abrams for nostalgia—Star Wars has largely been a callback machine since Return of the Jedi, and his script, co-written with Lawrence Kasdan, is at least using familiarity to push forward into new territory. That script is unbelievably smart when it comes to handling the legacy of the original films. Luke Skywalker is a mythological figure, the stories about he and his companions rendered unbelievable in the totality of his disappearance. The Force’s role has shifted somewhat, too, from science to sorcery to religion. Leia and Han, having taken their respective roles in the new world, are at the periphery—our principals characters are the cocksure pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Stormtrooper deserter Finn (John Boyega), and desert-bound scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley). They’re an engaging trio, propelling Abrams’ vision of a Star Wars for the future while burnishing the figures they encounter as the legends of the past.

As for its villains, Abrams really dials up the Riefenstahlesque staging to mark the First Order as the terror of the galaxy, and for however terrifying Darth Vader fanboy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) appears, the fact that he’s a relative novice to the force means that the banners-and-battle-stations pageantry of these new, sleek Stormtoopers actually means something. The difference between Abrams’ conception of evil and George Lucas’ is stark. In the first action sequence, which is among the best in any Star Wars film, Stormtroopers disembark from a landing craft and fire into a crowd of villagers. Their laser bolts strike, accurate and deadly. There is blood. Finn, yet unnamed, is on his first battle mission and shakes. Dameron fires his rifle at Ren, who freezes the bolt. It hangs suspended in the scene for a minute, then slams home into a piece of machinery after Dameron’s capture. Later sequences don’t have the same impact, but they look like they were staged, directed, and shot by a crew that was having fun with everything, somehow unburdened by the fact that they are making a Star Wars for the sake of getting the gears turning again.

That The Force Awakens is fun is probably Abrams’ biggest accomplishment. For years, he’s been laboring in the shadows of Lucas and Steven Spielberg, making epics that lived and died by the same principles as the epics of his heroes. Given the sandbox he’s so clearly wanted to play in for awhile, Abrams puts on a show that manages to rival his predecessors, creating some of the most indelible images in any Star Wars film to date. The best of these take place on the desert planet of Jakuu, which is littered with the hulks of Star Destroyers abandoned after an unseen battle, an elephant graveyard that scavengers pick scraps from to clean and sell for food. The economy of Jakuu works well as a metaphor for what The Force Awakens represents, which is the stirring of a great machine that will run much longer than anyone can account for. Some of those scraps are just junk, useless pieces of space debris that look cool but serve no real purpose. Some of those scraps are the Millennium Falcon, begging to be taken to lightspeed. This one’s all lightspeed.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

With Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Carrie Fisher (Leia Organa), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker). Directed by J.J. Abrams from a screenplay by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt, based on characters created by George Lucas.

December 18, 2015
Movie Review: Southpaw (2015)

There is an undeniable poetry to boxing, or there was, at least: To the ebb and flow of two bodies in the ring, weaving and ducking and lashing out; to the roar of the crowd; to the spare lyricism of a fighter’s oratory; to the satin finish of a ring robe or the gleam of sweat or a sudden burst of blood from a ruined nose. Though boxing’s popularity has been and still is in decline, films like Antione Fuqua’s Southpaw keep the embers glowing, using the pugilist’s chiseled body and dazzling fight choreography to create an impression of the sport that it is increasingly incapable of producing upon its own canvas.

As shot by Mauro Fiore, Southpaw has a dazzling grace between the ropes despite its lead’s strategy of taking punches to the face. Billy “The Great” Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) is battered from the start, bleeding from the mouth and dripping onto the canvas like a splatter artist, but even with a gristly cut over his eye he is in firm control over his opponent. It takes him longer than expected to put his challenger down, but he is an aging fighter who was born punching, a product of the system who has spent time in orphanages and in lock-up—getting beaten up is how he motivates himself to finish off his opponents. His wife (Rachel McAdams) is rightly concerned that if he keeps fighting the way he fights, he’ll end up punch drunk before retiring.

If Southpaw were just that, an examination of a declining championship boxer caught between his motivation to headline pay-per-views and his wife’s desire that he live a long life, it would have been something interesting, a realtime take on some of the darker corners suggested by the later, poppier offerings of the Rocky franchise. For Fuqua and Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, decline is not enough. After that first successful fight, Hope (notice the name) has to survive an odyssey of melodrama to arrive at a somehow fight-hungry nation’s much-wanted bout against number one contender Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez). His wife is shot and killed by an associate of Escobar’s during a charity event, and, lost in a tumult of grief, Hope loses everything: His will to fight, his championships, his money, his promotor, his house, and, after nearly killing himself while driving under the influence, his daughter (Oona Laurence). Picture somebody snapping their fingers—that’s how fast Hope loses everything.

This is, of course, necessary for the former champion, out of place in his opulent mansion and buying bezeled watches for his crew, to find himself at the mercy of an old pro turned trainer (Forest Whitaker) who believes in boxing as a tool by which men make themselves men. The relationship between the two is effective, as Whitaker has long brought soul to even thankless roles like cornerman, and Gyllenhaal has become one of the most interesting actors working today. Both Billy Hope and Tick Willis are men as wounds, one trying to heal and one that can’t. That Willis wants to teach Hope how not to get punched, to control the anger that was both his advantage in the ring and, the trainer presumes, the thing that got Hope’s wife killed, adds some necessary texture to a training montage that otherwise would have been all-marveling at Gyllenhaal’s amazing physical transformation.

Southpaw plays out as one might expect it to, as a boxing movie about a man named Hope must. Its use of every boxing film cliche and its inclination to fridge Billy Hope’s wife (not to mention a young fighter at Willis’ Gym) feels tired—cynical, even—but Gyllenhaal’s deft touch, his body language in scenes where Hope is dealing with grief and his failure to be a father, redeems the material to the point that it’s possible to enjoy its fights regardless of what they mean narratively, as pure, violent spectacle. Sutter has called this film a spiritual successor to 8 Mile, the clumsy, working-class fable about a hardscabble white rapper who makes good on his phenomenal talent, and that explains a lot of the choices Southpaw makes and doesn’t make, the way the pyrotechnic flair of the protagonist’s occupation is meant to make up for the flatness of his surroundings and the script’s failure to examine the nature of Billy Hope’s second chance. Of course the boxer redeems himself. That’s what our culture demands.

Southpaw. With Jake Gyllenhaal (Billy Hope), Forest Whitaker (Tick Willis), Rachel McAdams (Maureen Hope), Naomie Harris (Angela Rivera), Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (Jordan Mains), and Oona Laurence (Leila Hope). Directed by Antoine Fuqua, from a script by Kurt Sutter.

July 29, 2015
Movie Review: Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

Fifty Shades of Grey is a movie based on a book about an undergraduate English major who works in a hardware store. Her apartment—an immaculately appointed two- or three-bedroom brick loft with a ton of open space that she shares with another undergraduate—is nicer than most houses. How does she—or anybody—in her position afford such a place? How killer is the hourly rate at the hardware store? How hit was Washington by the economic downturn that this apartment might be the nicest place Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) ever lives? It’s unrealistic, I know, for an erotic sex fantasy to opine at any great length upon the real estate it happens to occupy, but Fifty Shades of Grey is just as turned on by space and material possession as it is Christian Grey’s (Jamie Dornan) extensive collection of riding crops and silk blindfolds. It draws up a long, involved contract detailing its heroine’s sexual boundaries but has no clue about the dimensions of its own space. I found this curious, at first, then irritating. With each passing setpiece meant to wow us not with Christian Grey’s worth as a human being or a sex object, but with his bankroll, I wondered at Anastasia’s motivation for seeing her mysterious billionaire paramour and, not being able to realistically pin that on his wealth or the way he displayed it, was left wanting to know why so many people found this white, white, white, white, white dude so appealing.

Fifty Shades of Grey is staged as a series of interrogations, all of them at least verging on creepy. In the first one, the powerless Anastasia interviews Christian—a god-king by comparison—for the school newspaper. He is cool and composed behind his desk, the Seattle skyline at his back. She is trying to collect herself after tripping and falling on his office carpet. Roger Ebert used to call contrivances like this Meet Cutes, and this is the prototypical one except that Anastasia falls and Christian does not help her. And then Anastasia keeps falling and falling and falling, and again, Christian isn’t helping. In fact, more often than not, he’s the one pushing her down. Later, he’ll say that it’s “for her pleasure.” He says this clinically, the way a pack of Trojan condoms claim to be ribbed for the same purpose. But first there is this scene, where it is all too obvious that the two should never see each other again. They are almost literally from two different worlds, and Grey is too obvious in lording it over his guest. The interview, of course, is a disaster, but Grey sees something in her—considering the impossible number of supermodel blondes working reception in his office tower, maybe its her hair—and decides that the two must have relations, but not a relationship.

The implications of the film’s plot are disturbing, but considering that long stretches of it take place over iMessage, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey do a good (if thankless) job of making E.L. James’ globe-conquering novel look like it belongs on the screen. This is an achievement, really, because I can’t think of too many movies where one character confesses to not knowing something, only for the other to tell them to Google it. Fifty Shades‘ problem goes beyond the fact that it settles for telling over showing—too often, its characters are the ones telling each other what they mean instead of showing it, which, given the allegedly sensual content the film deals with, is particularly disappointing. It’s good that Anastasia often finds herself in beautiful environs, even when her face is buried in one screen or another, as Christian Grey himself is as sexy as a PowerPoint presentation. He drones on and on about contracts and playrooms and pleasure like the words, on their own, are enough to convince a near-complete stranger of the worth of anal fisting. Considering the success of the franchise that bears his name, perhaps he is not wrong.

One of the film’s posters, depicting a reclining Dakota Johnson, asked a simple question: “Curious?” And, I’ll admit, I was. Until Fifty Shades of Grey was optioned by Focus Features, it was destined to live in my memory as a series of novels that gave rise to a million breathless TV spots where embarrassed journalists uttered the words “mommy porn” and pretended such things were beneath their Kindle. It was an awful display, so many major media outlets rushing to condemn the very thought of women—gasp—having an interest in something beyond vanilla sex or objectification, but now we’ve got this movie and the promise of two more, all of which feed back into this negative, patriarchal portrayal of women as weak-willed naifs without one wit of the Twilight Saga‘s camp or batshit lunacy. When Christian Grey is involved, Fifty Shades of Grey is so male gaze-y that it’s hard to believe that women directed, wrote, adapted, produced, and edited the film. As a malevolent presence (that has been mocked in remixes of the film’s other semi-iconic poster), Grey is omnipresent. If he’s not shaming Anastasia for being a virgin or not immediately being into the idea of butt plugs, he is dropping everything at his job of being the CEO of a vaguely-defined multinational corporate entity so he can fly to Arizona to break up a much-needed conversation between Anastasia and her mother, the whole thing playing out like he’s a man out to reclaim a piece of stolen property. When he takes her on a date to go glider flying, it’s to once again remind her of all the great things she’ll be missing out on by not signing the contract and becoming his weekend lover. Not mentioned, however, is the biggest perk of refusal: A decided lack of Christian Grey hovering over you, making even the largest spaces claustrophobic.

When Anastasia finally has the gumption to reject Christian (something she does not once, but several times), the moment isn’t so much victory as temporary relief. The outcome of this series being all but a foregone conclusion, however, even that relief is fleeting. I want to believe in a film ecology that has space for mainstream films about sex that are driven by women, but as each of Fifty Shades of Grey‘s 125 minutes passes, it became more and more clear that this was, really, our one shot at such a thing, and no matter how profitable it ends up being, we’ve rather spectacularly blown it. If my curiosity dictated that I wanted to see something where women are humorlessly, horrifically tortured psychologically for the sake of a man’s pleasure, I could have chosen almost anything else. Hell, some of them would have at least been films.

Fifty Shades of Grey. With Dakota Johnson (Anastasia Steele), Jamie Dornan (Christian Grey), Eloise Mumford (Kate), Jennifer Ehle (Carla Wilks), and Marcia Gay Harden (Grace). Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson from a screenplay by Kelly Marcel, adapted from the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James.

May 25, 2015
Movie Review: Furious 7 (2015)

Let’s start here: Furious 7 is the latest in a growing list of action movies that I found myself simultaneously awed and troubled by. While I am continuously surprised that a franchise as pleasurable as this one frequently is came from the same film that spawned listless spinoffs like Torque and Biker Boyz, the seventh installment of The Fast and the Furious‘s now thankfully untangled universe spends a not insignificant amount of time arguing that, in the right hands, global surveillance is a good thing. You’ve seen this before—Batman, needing to find the Joker, convinces his tech guy, with little more than a shrug, to let him jack into every phone in Gotham City. Superman flies up, up, and away so that he can listen very carefully for the heartbeat of the one specific person in Metropolis he’s looking for. Professor X builds a machine that can let him listen to the thoughts of hundreds of thousands of human beings at once so he can identify the mutants in the crowd, show up on their doorstep, and give them a hug. The Avengers spent half a movie trying to fix a flying boat that was being used to spy on the world and only got upset about it later. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is a superhero, too, perhaps the 21st century’s first original one, and here, in 2015, when a government agent named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) tells him that there’s a flash drive that’ll let him or whoever has it tap into every Internet-ready device on the planet, he is completely unfazed. Hell, that kind of thing might even be useful.

Furious 7 means nothing by its MacGuffin, of course. Mr. Nobody promises that it can be used to track down Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), a shadow who has been hunting Toretto and his makeshift family for crippling his brother in Fast & Furious 6, but Shaw is never exactly hiding, unless that’s what he’s doing by showing up on a mountain pass with a specially rigged car designed to force Toretto and his crew off the edge of a cliff. Dom’s proposed alternate plan of hanging out and drinking Corona until Shaw found him probably would have worked, truth be told. But as all the fancy computers in the world bleep and bloop until they’re locked on to the face and voice of a computer hacker who is trying to bring this spy system down with a prayer and a digital readout screen, one can’t help but wonder how important these big, dumb, exciting action spectacles will be in normalizing the already near-constant state of surveillance we live under.

Director James Wan, taking over for Justin Lin, is taken by quick-edited establishing shots of Furious 7‘s many foreign cities and rapid-fire montages of female anatomy just, you know, standing around during the series’ now perfunctory drag racing and beachfront sequences, a somewhat goofy throwback to the series as it was before Lin made it a canvas for spectacle. That nostalgia serves both narrative and extra-narrative purposes, though, as the film is at least nominally about the creation and evolution of a makeshift family, and is absolutely about giving deceased star Paul Walker a final bow. As Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) struggles with her memory and her place in the crew, Furious 7 wrings the most tension out of the action sequences revolving around Walker’s Brian O’Conner, a new father who would be struggling with his adjustment to the domestic life if Deckard Shaw’s revenge plot didn’t involve cutting every branch of the Toretto family tree. The Fast and the Furious has struggled in the past to make Walker and Jordana Brewster’s domestic quibbles seem relevant to the business of whipping around exotic cities in cars capable of lightspeed, but if Furious 7 isn’t focused on these characters (and Brewster has been relegated to pregnancy and staying back at the fort for some time now), then it is at least dedicated to giving them a real ending, a thing not often afforded to the main character of a decade-spanning action franchise.

The attention paid to the core characters from The Fast and the Furious means that there is less for the ancillary characters to do, Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) getting their tech guy/comic relief licks in from the fringes of the film so that Kurt Russell can wax sarcastic about the shadowy government organization he works for. Dwayne Johnson, whose character completely changed the scope and tenor of the series, spends most of this installment hospitalized. When he’s in play, though, he’s in play: flexing, waggling his eyebrows, spouting catchphrases—Hobbs is Dwayne Johnson in “The Rock” mode, pure brain candy. With each film he appears in, it’s clear that Johnson is on another level as an action star, bringing together physical presence and charisma in a way that suggests peak Schwarzenegger or Stallone, if either of those men were capable of having fun with themselves as living action figures. He and Diesel are compelling foils to each other and to the Schwarzenegger/Stallone rivalry, Johnson’s best vehicles being those where he is all mega-watt charm and Diesel’s being those where he can brood and menace. Diesel is forever the philosopher-king of the quarter-mile, and it’d be easy for a movie with Furious 7‘s purpose to get lost, gazing into its own navel. If Furious 7 is the last film in the series that suggests a family barbecue and a return to normalcy is ever going to be possible for these characters, Toretto is going to need his buddy Hobbs around to remind him that there’s a whole world out there to simultaneously save and destroy, one car at a time.

Furious 7. With Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto), Paul Walker (Brian O’Conner), Jason Statham (Deckard Shaw), Michelle Rodriguez (Letty), Jordana Brewster (Mia), Tyrese Gibson (Roman), Ludacris (Taj), Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs), Kurt Russell (Mr. Nobody), Nathalie Emmanuel (Ramsey), Tony Jaa (Kiet), Djimon Hounsou (Jakande), and Ronda Rousey (Kara). Directed by James Wan, from a screenplay by Chris Morgan.

May 22, 2015
Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Max Rockatansky is not his own man, never the focal point of the franchise that bears his name. He’s a cipher, a way for writer-director George Miller to slip into a ruined world, a world that’s too stupid to live and too stubborn to die. If the doomsday prepper set is right and there is something left of our world once we’re done hollowing it out and wasting it away, it’ll take more than a bunker full of Gatorade and beef jerky to survive what’s coming. Beyond any extreme, beyond Beyond Thunderdome, the argument George Miller has made over the course of four films and 36-years is that survival, on such a vast and awful scale, is not something you can prepare for, but is something that’s thrust upon a person, something one suffers until the world stops playing with its food and swallows whole. Max Rockatansky is mad, but he’s never his own man for long. First he’s eating, then he’s the property of a marauding band of chalk-painted dieselpirates, personal bloodbag for a dying lunatic soldier who’d like nothing more than to dip himself in chrome and punch his ticket to Valhalla. It’s one way of living when nothing’s meant to live, at least.

Mad Max: Fury Road starts hot and never lets up. It is two hours of tight, ferocious lunacy, audaciously shot and deftly edited, ugly to the point of surreal beauty, a bomb dropped in an era of action filmmaking cowed by expectation and formula. There has been nothing better since Terminator 2: Judgment Day. There has never been anything quite like it. Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself the hood ornament of a suicide engine that’s chasing after a woman, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who has made off with the brides of a warlord (Hugh Keays-Byrne) that figured out a way of pumping clean water up from the bowels of the earth. That he has carved something beautiful out of the desert is beyond the point—Immortan Joe can turn the water off and on as he pleases, and that makes him the figurehead of one of the most perverse cults in film history. He counts his army not in henchmen, but in lumpen blobs of flesh and apocalyptic guitar players, chalkfaced worshipers at the altar of American muscle and syphilitic bankers who kill for sport while complaining of the cost. The goal for Furiosa and the brides—several of whom are pregnant via rape—is unspecific even by the standards of a Mad Max film, a “Green Space” where they can live, provided for and protected. Immortan Joe wants these women back. His warriors hope that he will escort them to Valhalla. To say that Furiosa’s cause is doomed is obvious. In a world like this, all causes are.

Of course, Miller’s film has unending potential as thinkpiece material. That The Vagina Monologues‘ Eve Ensler was hired as a consultant and that Furiosa is ostensibly the protagonist in a film bearing the name of a man made Fury Road the subject of a pitiful boycott on the part of the toxic men’s rights movement. The women in this film seek revenge and/or redemption from their rapist. Max spends nearly a third of the film strapped to a cross, giving his blood to an undeserving sinner (Nicholas Hoult). Immortan Joe calls his water supply Aqua Cola, which is something of a throwaway line until you remember that companies like Nestlé have been working for years to privatize that very resource and are run by men who have flat-out said that water is not a basic human right. Yes, yes, but all of this is secondary to the filmmaking, which is trash-beautiful to a point I didn’t believe even George Miller capable of. If you can call the grease and grunge and engine exhaust of Mad Max an aesthetic, then this permutation of the series is that aesthetic at its peak, inviting us to delight and disgust in its orgy of mutants, cars, and war.

Fury Road is fast, and not in an illusionary sense. Too many action movies are edited to compensate for a lack of physicality, the absence of actors in real space or a dearth of body to body contact. Think of how The Avengers cuts from a CGI Iron Man punching a CGI Hulk to Robert Downey, Jr.’s face, eyes scanning a CGI computer readout. Or how an action movie sans an “action star” cuts away from a punch, using rapid editing and sound design to imply the force of a blow. Miller and cinematographer John Seale want something more. They want us to taste gasoline in our mouths and feel the sun blazing on our necks. They want every bullet to matter and every twisted wreck to cause one to wince. Their camera hovers over Immortan Joe’s armada like a buzzard looking to pick clean the bones of whatever dies first. I don’t want to say that every action movie should be shot like this, but if every action movie had even an ounce of this one’s unflinching courage to just be different, there’d never be cause to leave the multiplex. But that’s not the world we live in, and, as such, Mad Max: Fury Road is less a breath of fresh air than it is one giant gulp after another after clawing oneself out of an airless grave. We emerge to a world ruined beyond any hope of repair. Increasingly, it’s the only one left to love.

Mad Max: Fury Road. With Tom Hardy (Max Rockatansky), Charlize Theron (Imperator Furiosa), Nicholas Hoult (Nux), Zoë Kravitz (Toast), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Immortan Joe), and Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus). Directed by George Miller, from a screenplay by Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris.

May 15, 2015