Review (D) – Page 7

The Equalizer 2

maxresdefault — *There are two types of pain in this world…*

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.

Solo

Image result for solo

We were heading to the theater with reasonably modest expectations when were shocked to see at least a dozen cars in the drive-through line at the Taco Bell. L&D readers probably know that we use the Taco Bell Index (TBI) to predict the quality of the movie we are about to see, and there was clearly a large number of people in east Appleton Jonesing for a chalupa prior to Solo. What could this possibly mean?

Even with the high TBI, it was hard to get too excited for this one after the high of Dead pool 2 last week, and L&D entered a mostly full theater not knowing quite what to expect.

What we got was a very solid three-star type movie, with a reasonable story line, some good characters, a few deviations from the standard love-story fare, and special effects like you would not believe. This “Star Wars story” is the origin story for Han Solo, of course, and so it touches base on how he springs Chewie (Chewie) from the clink, meets Lando (Donald Glover), and comes to own the Millennium Falcon. (Perhaps shockingly, they passed over the origin story for the iconic scar on the chin.) Also included is Emelia Clarke as Han’s possible love interest and Woody Harrelson as his mentor of sorts. Both are pretty convincing and are not given the wooden scripts we suffered through in some of the past episdodes.

This is a Star Wars movie, so we get Star Wars scenes: a couple of bar scenes with wacky characters and gambling, a pod-race type thing in the “great train robbery” scene, and undertones of various vanilla political statements, the standard recipe. The story was pretty solid and the pacing done well enough to keep me awake (a higher bar than you’d probably think). Also on the plus side, Woody is pretty good and Chewie is great. And, I have to say that the movie did not wind down in the way I expected at all, which was great. Indeed, at one point I spontaneously raised my arms in triumph in response to a plot twist that I didn’t see coming. I was reminded of seeing Frozen because it sets up as formulaic, but then that isn’t quite where it goes. So there are some very fresh aspects to the movie that I really liked. Even the really objectionably stupid plot elements (e.g., the big monster with the gravity bong thing) were mostly used to set up the extraordinary special effects that set L’s head a spinning.

But, the big question is review land seems to be why did this movie need to be made? Is it essential? That seems rather pedantic given it’s Disney advancing its general Disney interests. From our perspective, we got a pretty good story, some fun characters, spectacular special effects, and a giant bucket of popcorn. And the crowd was pretty upbeat on the way out of the theater, even if the Taco Bell line was down to just one car by the time we passed on our way home.

Deadpool 2

Deadpool 2 hit the theaters Thursdays, and L&D (with special guest, F) were totally prepared. Unlike the MCU compendium buckshot mess that came out a few weeks ago, this one did not disappoint. After a brief L&D&F discussion about how rare it was to see a quality movie trailer, we were treated to an R-rated (?) trailer for The Happytime Murders, featuring an extended puppet silly-string money shot — one of many indignities on display — that really set the stage for the evening’s entertainment. Next up was the requisite Greg Marcus appearance, this time featuring him in a comedic role as an opera singer, possibly his best work yet as the affable opening act. Did he do this just for DP2?

And on with the show.

Deadpool 2 is a seriously hilarious follow up to the original that co-topped the L&D list for 2016, for its action sequences targeting 15-year old boys and jokes targeting middle-aged men. For instance, this is pretty much straight up a Terminator rip off, with Cable (Josh Brolin, who else?) playing Arnold and Deadpool playing the intermediary instead of that Kyle guy. It also pays a fairly serious tribute to the James Bond films. And Superman. I was catching references to and fro throughout, which leads me to believe I missed a lot of stuff that you will find funny that I simply missed. I ran into a college student who saw it and loved it and she didn’t know it was one big hat tip to Terminator.

How could you not know that? Kids these days.

Overall, we are treated to the same cast of characters and follow pretty much the same formula. Can you follow up that brilliant opening sequence from the first one? Yes, you can. I wouldn’t exactly call it brilliant, but I laughed and then re-laughed as the gag went along. All of our favorite characters from last time were back, and aside from T.J. Miller I think they were all as good or better than what we saw in the first movie. The X-Men in training scene was outstanding, and the super gang sequence that you keep seeing in trailers is superbly ridiculous and fantastic.

This is so much better than Infinity War that I can’t even tell you. That Infinity War has a 68 Metacritic score right now compared to only a 66 for DP2 is both disgraceful and instructive. Once again the theater was packed on opening night, but this time the crowd was raucous and festive and roared throughout the closing credit sequence, which really couldn’t have been any better. The biggest disappointment of the evening is that it didn’t last longer, though the final shot was pretty much a perfect ending. Maybe Marvel will do us all a favor and have Pool come in and save the next Avengers movie.

UPDATE: Not everyone thinks the puppet finishing its business is all that funny.

A Quiet Place

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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.

Avengers: Infinity War

L&D made our way out to join a packed theater for the Appleton Premier of the new Avengers movie Thursday night, and it was an overwhelming experience. To our right was a mom and dad with their eight-year old kid. The kid lost it near the end of the movie (does this movie end?) and the dad picked her up and carried her out, telling his wife that he’d see her back at home.

To our left was a young couple, possibly out on a date night, and at the conclusion of the end scene the young woman expressed her frustration thusly:

“I just can’t with this movie.”

Astonishingly, the movie is generally getting solid reviews, though many of the things posted at Metacritic as favorable didn’t seem terribly positive. As you probably know, the movie represents a convergence of the near-infinite components of the the Marvel universe, including The Avengers, Spiderman, the Black Panther, Dr. Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy characters. The story arc is putatively a continuation of what was going on with these, and we get some good laughs and some decent action as the movie ramps up in its first hour. The scene where Thor meets the Guardians crew is a highlight. The new Spiderman continues to impress and save scenes. And Peter Dinklage as an oversized dwarf was a big plus.

After that, though, it just doesn’t stop. As L again points out — why didn’t he write this review? — if *anything* can happen, there is no suspense. After a few set up scenes we get 100 minutes of non-stop action, brilliant special effects, windows to other dimensions, mortals fighting gods, gods fighting mortals, dogs and cats living together, pandemonium. The movie pretty much suffers from the same flaws as those epic X-Men movies that even TNT wont show, only at an even massiver scale. Yes, I said massiver. Understatement is not the issue here.

As the packed house filed out of the theater, L observed that the mood of the crowd was that of leaving a ballgame after a big loss. If you have ever gone to a game where a frenzied crowd is expecting a W and the home team lays an egg instead, you probably know what I mean. Probably right at the $6 bar, but we paid $10 to see it in 3-D. I think we’re all looking forward to the next one, but not because we liked this one.

Anxiously awaiting Deadpool 2!

Book plug: As part of our first quid pro quo, I would like to tell you about a book former Champaign Mayor Don Gerard calls “a minor masterpiece of modern fiction,” Cocaine Zombies, by Scott Lerner. If you like cocaine or zombies or Urbana-Champaign, there is something for you in this book. It is definitely on my summer reading list when I get around to updating it.

Death of Stalin

Image result for death of stalin

L&D had to venture out of our comfort zone (and discount price zone!) to catch Death of Stalin on the other side of town. The eponymous title is pretty much the story, Stalin dies and then the real class struggle begins to replace him. The acting is remarkable, with Jeffrey Tambor as a serviceable Georgy Malenkov (the heir apparent) and Steve Buscemi as a great Khrushchev (the inevitable apparent). But the star of the show is Simon Russell Beale who is other-worldly in his role as the head of state security, Lavrentiy Beria, with a performance that is so convincing, so troubling, I was physically unsettled for most of the film. Beale’s performance exceeds what we saw with Gary Oldman as Churchill, for sure.

The movie is ostensibly a black comedy, and there are many, many laugh out loud moments, but I felt guilty laughing because the truth was probably even more horrible than what we were seeing on the screen. It is kind of funny that there are no real doctors left in Moscow because Stalin eliminated them in his many purges, but Stalin really did eliminate these folks. And Beria probably did line up a different little girl to rape every night. And half of the world really was in the charge of folks who wouldn’t think twice about killing you over some real or perceived or contrived transgression. Buscemi as Khrushchev emerging as the voice of reason is both a relief and horrifying all at once.

It’s fair to say that the movie is more than a sum of its acting, as the set pieces, costumes, and general tenor are all convincing and excellent, and contribute to the unease that certainly will fill any thinking person.

So, big, big ups from L&D, with the caveat that maybe it’s better not to think too hard about the fact versus fiction in this one, as the facts are probably even worse than what this movie shows and implies.

Phantom Thread

sniffer — “I smell the blood of an English mum”

We were about 45 minutes into this latest Paul Thomas Anderson piece when I realized I was completely transfixed by a movie about an uptight dressmaker who lived with his very measured sister and was making a lot of dresses for a young waitress. Not exactly Thor for a plot line or for action. I also realized I was pretty excited because I had no idea where this was headed.

The movie is set in 1950s London, and focuses a lot on gender roles and who gets what in a relationship. The central tension is between the dressmaker, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), and his love interest / model / protege / partner, Alma (Vicki Krieps). The other major player is is Woodcock’s sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), who is subtly managing the board to keep her brother on the straight and narrow. In the deeper background is Woodcock’s mother, Woodcock is a mama’s boy, and the questions of matrimony and maternity are paramount throughout, even if the movie doesn’t ever come right out and say it.

So what do you need to know here? First off, the movie is ostensibly about an insufferable male tyrant type, the type of guy who simply cannot start the day with a confrontation because he has no time for confrontations — if he has a bad breakfast, he may never recover. The one who commends his own “gallantry” for eating asparagus that is not prepared the way he likes it. Were you sent here to ruin his evening?

Second off, the movie is actually about the women around him. One set is predominantly populated with the Woodcock label’s army of skilled seamstresses, who spend their days watching Woodcock eye up his dresses, and then work their magic with the needles and thread. This group is skilled but lacks agency. Cyril lets them know when to come and she lets them know when they can go.

There is another group of women with various levels of authority based on either their wealth or their social status — indeed, the Woodcock empire is built on draping wealthy women with unimaginably beautiful clothing. These women purchase Woodcock’s attention.

The third group is Woodcock’s love interests, including Alma, and there is some dissection of how a woman can move into a different social strata based either on her position or her money or on Woodcock’s interest. There is some fluidity here between groups, and in the clumsiest exposition in the film, a competitor for Woodcock’s attentions dutifully (and annoyingly) attempts to undermine Alma’s claim on Woodcock’s affections.

And, finally, we have his sister, Cyril, who represents the meritocratic & perhaps nepotistic element. It is Cyril who enables, encourages, Reynolds’ single-mindedness and surliness, and one suspects that without her machinations, Reynolds may well have gone the route of Bartleby the Scrivener. Cyril evaluates her brother’s potential companions like the second in command looking out for the alpha dog. Indeed, when Cyril first encounters Alma, there is a prolonged scene where she sniffs her, up close like, and susses out why Alma smells the way she does, and then the Woodcock siblings literally take to sizing her up. It is ridiculous and unsettling and evidently as normal as can be in the land of Woodcock. I’m pretty sure I could make the case that she is playing the role of a protective mother, though I think there is something else going on here. At any rate, Lesley Manville is both beautiful and marvelous in this role.

The bottom line is that you can take the movie at face value and you will find it beautiful and possibly that it has a lot to say about cut-throat competition in human interactions. The dresses are certainly astonishing. I’m no fashionista — I leave that to my colleague — yet I enjoyed the sartorial splendor for the women and for the men. Krieps, Manville, and Day-Lewis are all phenomenal. It is straight up quite the show.

But I would urge you to have an open mind about this being a comedy, because the movie is seriously hilarious. After all, the main character’s name is Reynolds Woodcock, a name with tremendous comedic potential. If you don’t agree, I mean, what is wrong with you? Reynolds Woodcock?!? That’s not an accident. Consider this: this is the same filmmaker that brought us Tom Cruise saying unspeakably filthy things, gave us Boogie Nights and all that entailed, and built an entire movie around Adam Sandler arbitraging coupons off of pudding cups. We also have the sniffing scene, Daniel Day-Lewis ordering breakfast like he was expecting a table full of lumberjacks, Daniel Day-Lewis wearing purple pajamas and a tweed sport coat, and a running joke about how annoying toast butterers can be. And then there is the wedding dress for the princess. If you are watching this as a comedy, you are laughing at this dress. Indeed, L&D laffed out loud throughout, and there was audible cackling from all corners the theater. Overall, I can pretty much guarantee that there are more laugh out loud moments in this than you will find in the film actually called Mr. Woodcock.

I encourage you to check it out because it is beautiful, awesome, hilarious, and may well be Daniel Day-Lewis’ last role. As a P.T. Anderson junkie, this is way over the $5 bar for me. L wasn’t completely sold on it, but I don’t think he had buyer’s remorse over his $5. I can see his point and will admit that I was a bit disappointed in the final half hour and don’t think it was tied together as a masterpiece (like, say, There Will Be Blood), but it was certainly thought provoking — we had a good discussion about the differences between Wes Andersen and P. T. Anderson, the parallels to Mother! and The Beguiled (and here) and a bunch of other stuff. I bet L would even put this over the $6 Thursday bar.

The Shape of Water (D)

L&D headed out for The Shape of Water Thursday night and boy are we glad that we did. It’s Beauty and the Beast for the Cold War set, only with a lot more egg imagery and masturbation. The protagonist is a solitaire, semi-beautiful mute woman, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who lives in an apartment above the movie theater next to her neighbor (Richard Jenkins), an erstwhile commercial artist, closeted lonely guy, cat lover. They watch a lot of movies and spend their time being lonely together. Elisa takes the bus to her work at a top-secret government site, where she works on the cleaning staff alongside Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who provides a running stream-of-consciousness one-way dialog throughout the day. The site is supervised by Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), a candy-chomping shitheel who was responsible for transporting an amphibious creature up to Baltimore, and is now in charge of securing the creature for whatever it is the US military and/or its Soviet rivals are going to do with it.

That’s the basic setup, but the movie really isn’t about the story, it’s about a lot of other things. It’s shot beautifully, with a really cool color scheme. The acting is brilliant — it’s hard to imagine Hawkins, Spencer, Jenkins or Shannon being better cast or providing better performances. It has some great writing and some memorable lines (“There is no profit in last week’s fish”). It is laugh-out-loud funny in spots. It is uncomfortable and disturbing in others. It has scenes so excruciatingly painful that I had to cover my eyes, and scenes so beautiful that I forgot how ridiculous the whole thing was. It reminds me of The Purple Rose of Cairo with its running homage to the great movies, and a main character who can’t help but find herself lost in them.

So, this should be on our top movies list for the year, but that ship has sailed. I’m pretty sure it’s not for everybody, but for us it was over the $6 bar for sure. I might even see if the misses wants to check it out. I’m better looking than the leading man for a change.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (D)

Benicio L&D attended a special preview of The Last Jedi Thursday evening, and – we aren’t making this up – they waited for us to show up before starting the movie! We entered to a packed house and a blank screen, and when we sat down they got things going. Our charmed lives continue.

The movie is actually more of a movie than a commercial and cultural obligation that we often see, with a plot about a zillion times better than the galactic trade tariff squabble nonsense that stupefied an entire generation of fans. There is also a brazen effort to beef up the moral ambiguities that pervade warfare that involves large-scale killing of the other side and its people. There are moments where the film heads toward moral nihilism, though it generally puts on the brakes before it gets there.

The action is pretty good, but there is no drama to it. There isn’t much left to be done with the star fighter dogfight that we didn’t see in the first eight movies, but it’d be hard to have a Star Wars movie without these scenes. The film makers seem to acknowledge this by opening with a comedic twist and somewhat unconventional blasting away, though it quickly devolves into a full-scale dog fight that looks increasingly awesome, but has all the suspense of watching a dog eat a bowl of food in the morning. The film is replete with Star Warsian Boilerplate: The pod race is now a horsie chase. The bar scene is a casino scene (has anyone ever written on the pervasiveness of gambling in the Star Wars universe?). The walkers are back, not nearly as deadly, but with some sort of big cannon thingie with them (where do those bad guys store all this hardware? Damn).

The action isn’t great, but we do get some drama. The big story here, is that maybe, just maybe, the Jedi aren’t such good guys after all. This has been a rather obvious dissenting view for some time now (even among us non-Straussians) but the dissent in Episode VIII comes from none other than Luke Skywalker questioning the whole Jedi order. It wouldn’t take much to forward some “what about” hypotheticals that are far worse than what is purportedly bothering Luke, but that’s probably unfair, since at least 15 years of the series was all about trying to sell action figures to pre-teenage boys. I liked the Rashoman sequences, which explored the idea that heroes aren’t without their flaws. Well, I liked the idea better than the execution, but it was still a big plus here.

The main plot pairs intertwining stories concerning the Rey character (Daisy Ridley), who we last saw tracking down Luke Skywalker and get him to rejoin the rebellion. With Mark Hamill back as Luke this line of the story certainly pays homage to the great western, Unforgiven. The other part of that story is the weird interface of Daisey with Kylo Ren, and this one seems to have the legs that will carry us through Episode IX. Ridley is pretty great in her role and the movie would pretty much suck if she hadn’t been.

My biggest beef is that the villains are weak, and the writers just dropped the ball here. The enormous head of Snoke is bigger and wrinklier than the now-deposed Emperor, but his motives are as transparent as they are uninteresting. His masked red henchmen lack the intrigue of, say, Darth Maul (the most grotesquely underutilized asset in the history of the series), though the Reds do have these cool, bendy light sabers that are seen but not heard, really. Indeed, the whole Snoke angle is so underdeveloped that you wonder why they bothered. Oh, man, is that guy evil! That leaves Kylo Ren to take up the mantle of this generation’s Darth Vader, but Kylo Ren is no Darth Vader (then again, who is?).

A couple of other notes:

Benicio del Toro gets to play an unrepentant mercenary, and he is exactly as good as his script allows. The film makers would be fools to leave him out of the series finale.
Wait, isn’t Carrie Fisher dead? You wouldn’t know it from watching this film. There is definitely something weird going on with that.
Laura Dern is dashing and decisive as the next in command, though she didn’t get the best the script had to offer (although she did use the term “cockpit”, emphasis on the first syllable, to malign testosterone-fueled bravado). The yin to her yang is the Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) character, and this plays out tolerably.
The story line involving Finn and Rose was disposable, and the would-be bromance between Finn and Poe Dameron will have to wait if it is to blossom. Finn was the big loser as far as the script goes.
The days of non-humans as principal characters has mercifully come to an end. There are smatterings of non-humans, but mostly they are relegated to the more traditional status as non-humans. Chewie is the big exception and he is a very bit player here.
And, keeping up the great westerns, there is even a homage to the final scene Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
This is probably the funniest Star Wars yet. Not a high bar, but still

The verdict is good, but not great (see L’s review for the same verdict). If you see it you will probably enjoy most of it, though it’s at least 20 minutes too long. Maybe 30 minutes too long. Maybe more. It’s way too long. The story winds up pretty much exactly where you think it will, but not quite in the way that you are expecting. There are also a couple surprises a long the way that will cause even the most hardened among us to crack a smile and shed a tear.

Well, maybe not, but it’s still pretty good.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Frances McDormand and Peter Dinklage

The people responsible for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri made some great choices, but they did not make a great film. The plot centers around the aftermath of a rape and murder of a young woman in Ebbing, whose mother, Mildred, (Frances McDormand) puts up billboards calling out Police Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) to make some headway in the case. Chief Willoughby says he doesn’t have much to go on, and it’s no wonder: his right-hand man is a dipshit racist (Jason Dixon played mostly brilliantly by Sam Rockwell), and the rest of the gang is a bunch of brazenly white guys that don’t seem to be doing too much in the way of police work. On top of that, Willoughby has his own problems. Indeed, everyone in this movie is damaged goods in one way or another, and the film does a really good job of conveying the complicated emotions for all involved.

Despite these emotions, the story is told with this sort of a screwball comedy vibe, and this tension in the production never gets resolved. On the way out of the theater, L wondered aloud how he didn’t like the movie even though it was a good movie. I think the answer is that the film makers didn’t want to go completely Altman and let it be built on character pieces, and they didn’t have the stomach to cut the good material they were working with in order to tighten it up to make it a great drama. The former is tough to do (and probably tough to sell in Hollywood), and the latter would have required cutting out some great acting and dialog. So what we are left with is something that is sort of a mush of some of the best and the worst of the likes of Twin Peaks, Fargo and Mystic River. This will go down as a movie where people remember some great scenes and amusing dialog, but will scratch their heads at some of the plot holes and other peculiarities.

The positives include the cast and characters, and the casting is brilliant top to bottom: Red (Caleb Landry Jones) is the semi-principled ad exec, Robbie (Lucas Hedges) is Mildred’s son who has to deal with the blowback from his mother’s antics, and Charlie (John Hawkes) is Mildred’s ex-husband, a wife beater now living with the unreasonably good looking “19-year old” Penelope (Samara Weaving). On the negative side, Penelope is caricatured as a ditz, though she works as an animal trainer and reads about horses in her spare time. Even more unfortunately, although the movie takes some stabs at race issues, the several African American characters are not developed at all. Even Chief Abercrombie (Clarke Peters), who is eventually sent in (by whom?) to replace Willoughby, is just a place holder, not a character. There is possibly a metaphor I am missing here.

Another positive is that there are some lucid scenes, including a a “date” between Mildred and the alcoholic used car salesman and midget, Peter Dinklage. The meal takes place for what passes for an upscale restaurant in Ebbing, and the ex-husband arrives with his young girlfriend about midway through. This allows Dinklage to rattle off a brief monologue that lays bare life’s prospects for the likes of these folks, and there is probably a thesis of the movie in there somewhere. We all play the hand we were dealt. Other scenes, particularly the one where Mildred dresses down the Catholic priest, aim high and miss the mark.

Finally, at the risk of introducing spoilers, during the end of the film I was reminded of one of the great and mysterious lines of the 1993 movie, Tombstone, where the Val Kilmer Doc Holliday character says of Wyatt Earp:

“Oh, make no mistake, it’s not revenge he’s after; it’s a reckoning.”

A reckoning is a resolution and an ending, but that is not really what these characters are after. And even if it were, a reckoning isn’t attainable, is it? Finding the girl’s killer might offer some clarity along some margin, but it doesn’t change much of anything else. So there will be no revenge, no resolution, no reckoning, and ultimately no justice. That’s just the way it goes in Ebbing, Missouri.

So this makes its way over the $6 bar for some compelling characters and some good scenes. But, too many question marks and not enough Woody limit its upside. So despite the gaudy critical acclaim elsewhere, this one won’t be filling space in the Best of L&D for 2017, which is coming sooner than you probably think!