Category: $5 Marcus Special

Hunter Killer is nostalgic.   It’s nostalgic for some of the great submarine drama films like Das Boot and Hunt for Red October and Grey Lady Down (one of the first movies I can remember seeing in the theater; it gave me nightmares).   It’s nostalgic for a time when men were men and were at one with their careers.   And, it’s nostalgic for the time when people thought Hillary Clinton would win the presidency.   That’s a lot of nostalgia for just $5!

The movie stars Gerard Butler (no relation) as Joe Glass, a tough-as-nails, salt-of-the-earth, macho man first-time submarine captain — but not so heartless that he would put an arrow through a mama caribou out for a walk with all her little cariboos.  Joe takes the helm of a submarine en route to the icy waters of eastern Russia (or was it western Russia?), where he is to investigate the mysterious disappearance of another American submarine.   He explains to the crew that he is one of them, a career man, worked his way up from swabbing the deck and cleaning tubes and that he has saltwater in his veins.  This is a central point of the movie.

Glass’ counterpart on the Russian sub is also a career man who has dedicated his life to his underwater duties. This is clearly explained to us at least one point in the film, possibly four.  The Russian commander is decidedly shorter than Glass.

Meanwhile, back on terra firma, we have a team of rugged Navy SEAL-like characters, led by Toby Stevens, kicking ass and kicking more ass.  They are going to get  dropped into the s-h-you know what and things are going to get hot.  There is some great commando action for sure.  Stevens, it turns out, has also dedicated his life to the cause.

Back in Washington, we have Gary Oldham, who inexplicably shares top billing with Butler here.  This is not inexplicable because Oldham doesn’t have Butler’s acting chops; it is inexplicable because his character is so poorly written.  Oldham spends most of his time on screen pretty mad, possibly because he got cast in such a lousy role.  If you told me he was playing the role because he got drunk and lost a bet with Gerard Butler, that would make more sense than whatever actually happened to get him to waste his talent here.

Oldham is joined by, among others, Jayne Norquist (Linda Cardellini) in the military intelligence corner of the film.  Although Norquist is not in uniform, she does have a higher level of security clearance than her uniformed counterparts in the room.  But despite her elevated egghead standing, she has not dedicated her life to the cause, arriving at the crisis center war room straight from one of her kid’s school events.  The movie does not give you the sense that double duty as a mother is a mark in her favor.

Finally, in the fourth corner of the movie, we have some action taking place just off the icy waters of western Russia (or was it eastern Russia?) involving the Russian President (Alexander Diachenko) and assorted military personnel.   This is pretty interesting and not terribly generous to the Russians, perhaps explaining why the film distributor is having trouble releasing it in Russia and the Ukraine.   That’s probably a pretty interesting story in and of itself.  Google it and let me know.

Despite my objections to some of the cliches, the wooden story lines, and the pervasiveness of retrograde mentality, the story is compelling and the throwback action is generally fantastic.   If you long for a movie with some great scenery and lots of military tech on display, I’m guessing you will find a lot to like here.

As for the thematic elements, there is a guest appearance by a would-be Hillary Clinton-type presidential character (Caroline Gooodall), suggesting that production started prior to the 2016 election!  I suppose there is something interesting to be said about a movie that longs for days when men’s identities were at one with their careers would tacitly imagine a Clinton victory in 2016.   I’m just not sure what that is.

Overall, above the $5 bar for a fun story, good action in many “theaters,” a couple of compelling characters, and pretty awesome visuals along the way.  It won’t join the canon of awesome submarine thrillers, but the location scouting was magnificent, and this one should be enjoyed on a very large screen somewhere.

“Box Office Don’t Lie” is a favorite aphorism of my favorite movie review partner, and our feature this week appears to be a case where the 35 rating on Metacritic is perpendicular to the audience reaction.  Indeed, Marvel’s newest offering, Venom was the dominant offering over at the Marcus Cineplex the night we attended, and yet we sat in amidst a packed house to see last Tuesday night’s late screening.  To the extent that east central Wisconsin has its finger on the pulse of the box office, this one is headed to blockbuster status.

To those non-aficionados of the comic-book genre, Venom is an alien life form that instigates a symbiosis with a human carrier to elicit truly terrifying results.  That human is typically Peter Parker’s nemesis at The Daily Bugle, Eddie Brock, and we last saw the character in Spiderman 3, played by Topher Grace (and Parker himself also got venomized for a spell in that movie).  Spiderman 3 was a disaster of a movie that brought that particular story arc to a screeching halt (there there have been two more major studio arcs since, for those of you keeping score).  And, in the spirit of if at first you don’t succeed….

In this Venom incarnation, we don’t get any mention of Spidey, but we do get Eddie Brock, living in San Francisco having been chased out of Gotham some eastern city.  Brock finds himself as the investigative vlogger for the San Francisco paper / media concern, while living with his gorgeous lawyer girlfriend, Anne (Michelle Williams).  And it is Brock, played by Tom Hardy, that is pretty much the sole focus of the film — not as Hardy-centric as, say, Locke, but I would bet Hardy takes up over half of the screen time.  In contrast to the typical portrayal of Brock as a sniveling little weasel, Hardy plays it up more as a somewhat misguided urban hipster, lovable, but prone to bad judgement.  And once Brock and Venom become one, his back and forth with the alien symbiote push this one well over the $5 bar, even without the popcorn.  Indeed, I would argue that Hardy’s brilliant acting definitely undermines the credibility of the consensus panning of this one.

In fairness to the critics, there is plenty to complain about here.  First and foremost, the villain is weak.  If there is no Spidey to stop Venom, what exactly is going on in this movie?  And that is pretty much the rub.  The film trots out Riz Ahmed as the mad scientist, sort of an Elon Musk type who we also see loosely in Tony Stark and Norman Osborn and Lex Luthor, among others — the Big Brain, megalomaniac, world-conquerer type. Above the law and making his play to improve on the human condition.

Well, as we have remarked before, the villain / foil is really a key to a good action movie (e.g., Hans Gruber, the Joker, the Wicked Witch, Sam Gerard), and this movie doesn’t have it.  The best that can be said about the Ahmed character is his house on the banks of the Pacific just over the Golden Gate bridge is pretty cool, even if it does look remarkably like Tony Stark’s house further on down the coast in SoCal.  So, score one for the critical consensus on this front.

I suppose you could argue that Venom is Brock’s foil, and this relationship worked pretty well.  Kudos for that.  The audience repeatedly erupted in laughter from the alien commentary.   And, on that score, give it up for Tom Hardy.   His comedic, Men-in-Blackish portrayal of the alien’s host is good theater.  And, Hardy has now played two of the greatest comic book villains that DC and Marvel have offered up, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises and now Venom in Venom.   It is too bad the idiotic story lines in both of these efforts failed to keep pace with his considerable talents.

With all that said, it is no big surprise that this is one that audiences love and critics hate.  For this coming Tuesday’s showings, our local Marcus Theater is presenting 15 Venom showtimes, compared to 16 combined for Bad Times at the El Royale and First Man.  Box Office don’t lie, indeed.   I guess when you are sizing this one up you have to ask yourself:  if you had been newly endowed with superpowers, would you take a leap off a tall building, or would you take the elevator down?   L&D recommend that you take the leap on this one.

L&D were a blank slate settling into the new Mark Wahlberg vehicle, Mile 22, not realizing that the movie has been (appropriately) panned by many of our critic brethren.  Wahlberg sort of reprises his misanthropic, fast-talking Sergeant Dignam role from The Departed.  Only here he plays the on-the-ground savant leader of a special ops team of last resort, called on when diplomatic and militaristic solutions fail.   And, it’s pretty cool to see the moving technological parts of these ops, reminiscent of Enemy of the State from so many years ago.  This movie is not nearly as good, unfortunately, though I would guess that those responsible thought  it would be a home run worthy of at least one sequel. I guess we’ll see.

The plot centers on Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan and former UFC phenom Ronda Rousey (among others) tasked with transporting Iko Uwais to an airstrip 20-some miles away as a quid pro quo to stave off a large helping of cesium-enhanced terrorism.  If you don’t know about the horrors of cesium, Wahlberg will enlighten you along the way; he’s pretty knowledgeable.  By my estimate, this trek absorbs the last two-thirds of the movie and is effectively an extended action sequence through the streets of somewhere in Columbia or Georgia, I guess (though the plot was ostensibly set in Indonesia).

The movie does possess a couple of strengths.  The technology stuff is mostly well done and cool to look at and sort of overwhelming to keep track of, sort of like surveillance-state technology, I suppose.  As for the players, Wahlberg is a compelling character with his verbal rat-a-tat-tats and band-snapping intensity. Rousey is also pretty good and well cast.  But the action hero here is the asset, Iko Uwais, who is like a supercharged kung fu god, just beating the living hell out of everyone who gets in his way.  Even being handcuffed to a table can’t slow him down.  He is unbelievable.  He steals the show.   He wins the movie.

There are a couple of downers, as well.  The story line with Cohan is ridiculous, irritating filler, though she does have one great sequence where she is on the losing end of some WWF-type action from a much larger foe.   And John Malkovich shows up with a pretty cool new haircut, but otherwise it is pretty disappointing to see his talent wasted like this.

As for the action, there is certainly a lot to choose from.  Unfortunately, it’s often disorienting with those multi-camera blur sequences, and occasionally hyper violent (causing L&D to cringe laugh so loudly at one point that the small smattering of our movie-going brethren turned to see who was laughing at a man falling on his head in such a way that his neck and shoulder are perfectly parallel, ouch). It is violent even by today’s standards, though not too much in the way of gross-out gore. This is a movie not afraid to shoot you in the face.  L points out that this is another one of those first-person shooter movies, a la John Wick or, the gold standard, Hardcore Henry .  For our New Year’s Resolution, we will revisit the latter and provide a review.   What a breath of bloody phlegm that movie was.

But back to Mile 22 — the movie seemed longer than it was, and as it ended I credibly thought it might have another half hour.  My guess is that Wahlberg and the other producers thought going in that it had another hour and a half in the form of a sequel.   I have my doubts.  A better use of Wahlberg’s time might be an exploration of what that Sgt Dingham character is up to all these years later.  Or Ted 3.

So maybe at the $5 bar for this one.   Fortunately, I’ve been racking up these Fandango VIP points that effectively give me $3 for every movie I see, so we were in and out of this one, popcorn included, for just $2.   So let’s just say it soared over the $2 bar with the added bonus that we didn’t have to sit through an extra hour after the popcorn was gone.

L&D were a little nervous heading into The Equalizer 2, having missed the first installment of the series.  OK, so that’s a joke we have leaned on before, but it was somewhat apt in this case, as it isn’t clear exactly who the Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) character is fashioned after.   It could be a James Bond / Jason Bourne type.  Or maybe a Charles Bronson / Bruce Willis vigilante justice warrior.  After some deliberation, I’ve settled on Jack Ryan, the brains and the brawn.  The film spends almost as much time with McCall studying and sleuthing as he does with him kicking ass and taking names, going out of its way to make McCall a cerebral character.  They even go so far as to show his ability to solve mysteries from a few thousand miles away through some sort of out-of-body, mental transcendence method.  It’s a neat trick.

But although McCall is sort of an amalgam of modern action heroes, what we get here is a movie about tying up loose ends, with McCall himself — ironically, perhaps — being the biggest loose end of all.   There are by my count four main plot lines that don’t quite converge, and getting to the finish mixes a bit of intrigue with a lot of syrupy absurdity to get to tie it all back together.  The main plot line involves McCall getting dragged out of his anonymous life of a Lyft driver and back in with the old gang within the deep state.  The gang includes the brilliant Melissa Leo and the super smoldery Pedro Pascal, both who are blessed with the ability to make you care even when there’s not much there.  We are also treated to a boilerplate father-figure story line focusing on Ashton Sanders.

Amdist the primary action hero drivers, there are some attempts to introduce some non-trivial meditations on social justice — including Denzel providing Sanders with a copy of Between the World and Me, a father-figure moment if there ever was one — but there are no serious attempts to elaborate or explore, so these angles ultimately turn out to be trivial.  If I’m not mistaken, the gang members who are exhorting the Ashton Sanders character to go on a murdering spree are listed as his “buddies” in the credits.   Did I read that correctly?

But all that said, the production values in this are exceptional and enjoyable.  The opening sequence with McCall driving around Boston as a Lyft driver kicked things off in style, and I would have been happy watching that for an hour.   The first hour or so set at least one plot line nicely, and the movie only began to unravel once the bad guy is revealed, culminating with the kill the bad guys in reverse order — from least relevant to most relevant.   Even so, you had to admire the production values as this went on.

A meh from L&D on this one, though we did enjoy cavorting about it afterwards (though we spent more time talking about the Bruce Willis Death Wish movie that about the Equalizer). The summer blockbusters seem to have hit a soft spot, so if you have a coupon or or out and about on bargain Tuesday, this is a good movie to munch some popcorn to.  But I am guessing this will be upstaged by the Thursday release of the latest Mission: Impossible incarnation.   I guess we will have to see.

L&D braved the first major lightning storm of the year to sit through the ultra-creepy A Quiet Place.   The film is set in some post-apocalyptic world, with John Krasinski and family doing their farming and fishing and, um, reproducing in relative isolation and near-absolute quiet, steering clear of whatever is on the prowl outside.  I will admit to curling up in a ball a few times and jumping out of my seat once or twice, perhaps three times.   Maybe four.   The Marcus deluxe recliners were virtually perfect for squirming purposes.

The best part of this movie is its pacing and its ability to create suspense and tension.  This is the rare film that you say you should see in the theater because of the lack of sound — the silence was seriously unsettling and destabilizing.   I also liked that it took care of business and then some in under 90 minutes.  Well done.   (It also features the best illustration of the dangers of a grain silo since Witness).

The worst part is that the setting and resolution are so wildly implausible that L wouldn’t keep quiet about it on the way home.   But, even so, he agreed it was pretty scary — I’m pretty sure he closed his eyes and missed the climax!   We both agreed that that this movie was as advertised, and we even reminisced about the high-quality suspense and mystery created in 10 Cloverfield Lane, a movie we both liked, but I don’t think we reviewed.

So, if you like being scared without too much in the way of blood and gore, you should check this one out.