Run All Night Review

Run All Night 
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
Released in 2015

Blood runs thicker than water in Run All Night, but the water might as well be out to kill you, too. Enraged Irish mobsters, crooked cops and one smooth assassin are merely the humans out for Liam Neeson and his son, as rain, fog and blasts of fire also engulf their surroundings with a hostile agency. The inevitability and omnipresence of violence on display is downright Biblical, and mature in a way that the revenge camp of Taken, the movie that started this whole party, is not. If director Jaume Collet-Serra does not match the smooth classicism of Non-Stop, his genre jewel from last year and the finest Neeson vehicle yet, then he lacquers Run All Night’s unremarkable script with enough grit to make for some essential, elemental action cinema.

Jimmy Conlon (Neeson) must protect his estranged son, Mike (Joel Kinnaman), because he himself killed the son of his best friend, Shawn. The kid (Boyd Holbrook) was about to shoot Mike, and he was a brat who insulted Jimmy on the regular, and Shawn pulled out enough hair over his son’s delinquency to end up being played by Ed Harris, but when your son ends up clipped in a Brooklyn kitchen, you are not too open to being eased by words that start, “Well, in the long run…” So Shawn releases the hounds, so to speak, ordering his people to snuff out Mike’s life first so that Jimmy will feel firsthand the pain of losing a son.

Jimmy and Mike do a lot of running through streets, subway tunnels and the projects, obviously. But the many chase scenes do not grow tedious, because Collet-Serra opted to shoot on location and cinematographer Martin Ruhe knows how to lens New York City. Even when flanked by neon, these men are bisected by shadows, which naturally populate the dingy corners in which they find refuge. Fight scenes draw attention to bloody mouths, trembling heels and the scum on bathroom floors as much as punches swung. The violence is literally too dark and the scuffles too messily desperate for Jimmy’s particular set of skills to provide fodder for “oh, snap!” humor à la Taken.

Brad Ingelsby’s script has only one good line, I think. It’s when a platoon of police cars and helicopters surround the project where the two are hiding, and Jimmy turns to his panicked son and says, “It’s a big building. We got some time. Let’s wait.” The rest is merely serviceable, while many of Shawn’s lines sound lifted from what Don or Michael Corleone once said (“I am a legitimate businessman,” “There’s not enough money in the world to pull me back in”). Of course, Harris makes it all work, embodying through his ghoulish mask and rising cadence the unhinged volatility that comes with grieving while searching for blood.

Playing an unapologetic killer many shades darker than his Matt Scudder from last year’s ace A Walk Among the Tombstones, Neeson can’t do much to make him sympathetic but play up his quotidian flaws: alcoholic, sickly, single. Jimmy remains bad to the bone, and one senses his father bear instinct is conflated with a renewed taste for blood. When pointing a gun, Jimmy hardens his face before taking the shot, leaving a brief pause between reaction and life-ending action. He is so good at killing that he has time to consider and perhaps even savor it, which must cycle back into an unending, bloodletting feedback loop.

While the computer-generated scene transitions that fly over broad swathes of cityscape do their best to distract from this fact, Collet-Serra has a talent for capturing the minute, physical gesture. He wrings suspense from the act of reloading, and how, in the heat of battle, those with empty clips must compromise by using their knees or tips of their fingers to do so. He rarely brings bodies together in proximity or even in the same shot, since everyone is out to kill one another. Only after one character lands a fatal shot on the other, near the end, does Collet-Serra allow the two adversaries to unite again and lean on one another in a heartbreaking display of belated gentility.

The film turns into a horror show when Common pops in as a ruthless, machine-like hired gun, with a night vision eyepiece that hammers comparisons with the Terminator into almost-fact. His character is a cliché, though Common brings the cool, which anyone who saw him earlier this month at Bailey can testify he has in spades. An interesting twist is that the aforementioned fog and smoke screws with his night vision piece, and so multiple times he is forced, mid-fight, to tear it off, making him a chump like anyone else. Maybe God is raining down all that hellfire not to kill the Neesons, but to force his enemies to treat him with a little respect.

3 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

You're Liking It Wrong

‘Tis the season for best-of-year list-making to once again consume the minds of tastemakers, both actual and wannabe. For us clammy, opinionated few in the Sun arts section, that means a lot of time murmuring, alone, at a shared GoogleDoc spreadsheet, worrying why FlyLo’s “Never Catch Me” is not on every ballot and casting shade at everyone else’s taste through snarky comments and Tim & Eric GIFs.

That explains my experience, at least. Truth is, all this antagonizing comes from a playful place, not from any legitimate, swirling anger directed toward the tastes of my peers. Part of this ease stems from my acceptance, sometime over the last two years, that there is no “Best” anything, especially when decided en masse. Midway through last awards season, when movies become racehorses and cease to be seen as art, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott observed, “Criticism rests on the independence and integrity of the singular.” Words I can live by.

With the power to judge works on a personal level comes the profound yet, in this clickbaitian epoch, devalued responsibility to respect the opinions of others. I know that sounds like a cat poster, but it’s true, and it requires a few more words to unpack. So let me first backtrack and pose a new question: Is it possible to take issue with someone who likes a movie that you do but for totally different, and therefore wrong, reasons?

In short: Yes, you most certainly can, you definitely should and this should not come as a surprise to any of you. One of the more implicit and important lessons to a humanities education comes in the recognition that there are not just other people in the world but other minds, too, all equally vast and treacherous. That is humbling to admit, and crucial to remember until the day you die, but it does not mean we should keep quiet. Every person is a precious flower, yeah yeah, but growth stems from these little intellectual quarrels, when we form an argument addressed at a formidable friend or foe and secretly, unconsciously hope his or her retort is good enough to keep the volley going.

You think The Grand Budapest Hotel is just a barrel of laughs and pastel colors? I’d say you missed a great deal of sadness, fascist metaphor and meta-commentary on the iterability of storytelling. Boyhood is “relatable” and nothing more? I’d say it’s an upsetting depiction of the ways we both change and fail to change, or even retain agency, over time and how our messy lives never fit into neat narrative arcs. Non-Stop and Lucy are trash and thus worthless? Well … you should know where I stand on those two by now.

Of course, no one else shares my takes on every film. Not because mine are right or better than anyone else’s, but because they are influenced by my own subjective experience, which is something I have elaborated on a couple times this semester. I have put in the time to develop what I hope are rigorous and interesting readings of a great deal of films, yet I recognize that these readings coexist with a million different others. Just because I say something specific about, say, the tracking shots in 2001: A Space Odyssey does not cancel out, in my eyes, the validity of an opposing interpretation.

I hope others think I’m “getting at something” or that I’m “right on the money” with my piece on [insert film here], but deep down I know any supposedly perfect review could be countered by a perfectly reasonable alternative written from a different frame of reference. I still own what I believe in, and I will defend my position with fire if required, but I’m not going to lose sleep because one friend or the Tomatometer disagrees. All I have in this world is my taste, which is true only to me no matter how adamantly I believe otherwise, but I’ll do my best to sustain the illusion with a marvelous grace.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here. 

A Walk Among the Tombstones Review

A Walk Among the Tombstones

Directed by Scott Frank

Released in 2014

There is something to be said of knowing your job and doing it well. That is the draw of an old-school, R-rated thriller like A Walk Among the Tombstones, the latest installment in the ongoing and glorious ReNeesonance.

If you pity me enough to still be reading, know that Google returned no results for that word, so I’m claiming it. And we got to call the last few years something, right? Since 2008’s Taken, Liam Neeson has starred in an improbable number of action films, first as an Old Testament-angry father figure and then, with 2012’s The Grey and this year’s Non-Stop, as a disgraced enforcer who starts each film at rock bottom and slowly redeems himself through wit, instinct and shocking physicality. He smuggles a lot of pain into these archetypes, but these films keep getting made because, like all true movie stars, Liam Neeson does one thing the public wants to see again and again: He kicks ass.

Like the cult of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, the paeans to Neeson’s badassery have resounded through culture with queasy insinuations: Violence is awesome, morality is black-and-white and women are helpless or, in Skyler White’s case, shrill nags. This response has less to do with the texts in question than the appropriations of them, which strangle out any nuance with a macho fist. But as exhilarating as Taken was and still is, those readings stick, which is why the uptick in quality (a.k.a. complexity) in Neeson’s films since The Grey has been most welcome, if scarcely noticed.

A Walk Among the Tombstones, an adaptation of Lawrence Block’s novel of the same name, suffers from a few careless lapses into cliché and does not set its ambitions too high to begin with, but it may be the most moral movie yet of the ReNeesonance (I just shuddered typing that again). Neeson plays Matthew Scudder, a former police officer and now unlicensed detective tasked with finding the pair of serial killers who kidnapped and, after taking a ransom, murdered the wife of drug trafficker Kenny Kristo (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens). The story goes through the procedural motions, but because Neeson and director Scott Frank know what they are doing, it is often unfairly compelling.

This is one of those movies to fail the Bechdel test (which only serves macro-industrial critique, not individual artistic analysis anyhow) for a reason. Look at the opening credits: The camera pans over a young woman’s pale, nude body, which is washed out from oversaturated lighting. A hand reaches into these frames to caress her hair and skin, and the sensitivity of his touch looks almost loving. Yet the woman does not move apart from breathe, and the single tear rolling down her face hints at something off. The final shot of this sequence tilts up to show us her mouth, which is silenced with duct tape, and for the first time we see both of her eyes, piercing us with terror.

Psychopathy, victimization, the male gaze, the opening titles from Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the shower scene from Psycho: many keywords apply. The credits upend expectation and frame the violence that follows as caused not by an excess of men but by an absence of women. Since the serial killers target drug traffickers only, due to their reluctance to phone authorities, camaraderie develops between the male criminals whose wives and daughters have been taken from them. They relish in the opportunity to harm the murderers, as shown when Kenny inspects a butcher’s cleaver just as the pair earlier fondled wire, handcuffs and linoleum knives in Dexter-esque slow motion.

This is all to say that you, the viewer, very much want these serial killers to die, too. Over a slow but deliberate 113 minutes, this film whips you into a bloodthirsty frenzy, where you eagerly root for Scudder to compromise his morality in order to realize brutal, satisfying ends. The movie gets darker and darker up to its seemingly saccharine final scene, which features a drawing by TJ (Brian Bradley), a droll, vegetarian, Raymond Chandler-quoting inner-city kid who becomes Scudder’s unlikely sidekick.

Idiosyncrasies aside, TJ feels like a plot device for most of the movie, but his contribution to the final scene indicts the self-mythologizing nature of most genre — action, crime, superhero, etc. — fiction. Just because Neeson growls into a phone again and this time says, “Motherfucker,” does not make him a model citizen. It’s too rough a world for another white hat versus black hat. A Walk Among the Tombstones knows that, but for the sake of getting you to pay to see it, it hopes you do not.

Final Verdict:

3 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Non-Stop Review

Non-Stop

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Released in 2014

If you really love movies, you must respect the genre film: the not-quite-blockbusters, shot for $50 million or less, serving time-worn action, horror, sci-fi and Western thrills. To revere Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann and dismiss those following in their footsteps is a most common hypocrisy amongst film enthusiasts today. Genre films bring home money instead of Oscars, yet the best of them exert intelligence and an impeccable command of cinematic technique. Non-Stop is not the best of the best, but it is up there. While Liam Neeson reprises a more nuanced take on the badass paternal figure he has been playing since 2008’s Taken, director Jaume Collet-Serra situates his actor in a story and setting packed with more post-9/11 commentary than its poster would have you expect.

It all starts pretty Screenwriting 101: In slow motion, a pair of hands tip a flask into a coffee cup, stir the drink with a toothbrush and reach for a wrinkled photo of a little girl. Bill Marks (Neeson) is a grizzled alcoholic with a sad, yet-to-be-explained backstory sitting alone in his car when he receives a call that, yes, he has one last job to do. He works as an air marshal, despite being scared of plane takeoffs, and this flight from New York to London should keep him on his toes. There is a reticent Muslim (Omar Metwally), a non-PC cop (House of Cards’ Corey Stoll) off to see his “fairy brother marry a guy with a British accent,” Julianne Moore yapping in the seat next to him and, worst of all, a giggling supermodel (Bar Paly) cuddled with her beau behind him. It’s all clichés, tropes, been there, done that for the first few minutes.

But you stick with it, because all Liam Neeson movies these days start the same, and this one gets a whole lot better than any of them, save for The Grey. Midway through the flight, over the Atlantic, Bill receives cryptic text messages over his secure network that if he does not wire $150 million to an account in 20 minutes, a passenger will die. Neeson’s Savior Mode activates, as he recruits Moore and a familiar flight attendant (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery) to look for conspicuous cell phone use. But this is 2014, so everyone is a suspect. The Agatha Christie vibe escalates once 20 minutes elapse and, through Bill’s direct actions, a passenger ends up dead in a bathroom stall. The TSA traces the terrorist’s bank account to Bill Marks’ name, and it looks like our imperfect hero has been framed. People keep on dying; you keep on watching.

At this point, I could describe the fight scenes, which are scarce but claustrophobic, intense and awesome. When reviewing a bad action film, you can adjectivise hand-to-hand combat and fill six paragraphs. Thankfully, Non-Stop is quite good, so there is more going on than Neeson kicking ass and, therefore, much to talk about. In fact, the story’s momentum depends on Bill Marks backing himself up, through tactical miscalculations, into a corner for most of the movie. Targeting the Muslim on-board proves to be a prejudiced and rushed judgment, as does singling out a black man wearing a hoodie for search. The issue of profiling criminals according to race and gender vexes Bill throughout his mission, and the diversity of the flight’s passengers represents a microcosm of America at large. Lupita Nyong’o, the beloved Mexican-Kenyan actress who won fame and an Oscar on Sunday as Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, can be found roaming the aisles as a little-seen flight attendant. Her do-nothing character stands against the provocative questions the film raises, but I mention her because the world is in love with her right now and two minutes of Lupita is better than none, I guess.

The matter of security — its necessities, limits and enforcers — in post-9/11 America also haunts Non-Stop. When the possibility arises that Bill, their avowed protector, may be the terrorist, the passengers fret over what action to take. They know what happened on United 93 and recognize that Hollywood and U.S. history posthumously (and rightly) valorized the civilians aboard it because they took decisive, selfless action. Meanwhile, the irony that a federal agent assigned to defend would turn and hijack a plane proves too appealing for news pundits to ignore. There is a great shot of passengers plugging in their headphones and watching, on those back-of-headrest screens, talking heads accuse Bill of terrorism or worse on live television. The isolation of today’s media — everybody has their own screen — prohibits conversation and connection, for we prefer to take for truth the words of a suited man before a camera than whatever a real, beat-up human being seated next to us might say.

The politics of Non-Stop are difficult to decode, but they are there. Collet-Serra leans Jack Bauer conservative, in that homogenous bureaucracies often distort and lie while flawed but passionate agents wield their dogmatism to best unfavorable odds (Take note of what the omnipresent Shea Whigham, as Agent Marenick, says over the phone at the very end). The script stoops to two sappy, on-the-nose speeches about such themes — grandstanding, from heroes and villains, is sort of a requirement in a movie like this. Take them with a grain of salt, for Collet-Serra embeds his own perspective through camera placement, text message superimposition and other cinematic techniques alone.

Prior to its release, Reverse Shot critic Nick Pinkerton tweeted, “What sort of human garbage gives a poor review to Non-Stop?” I don’t think he was being facetious, and neither am I. Non-Stop follows the book, yet it fills in its margins with questions, patterns and Liam Neeson. The challenge here is to enjoy the superficial thrill of it all while daring to appreciate it as, if not art, then seriously smart entertainment. Balance those two tasks and you may just save America.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Taken With Liam Neeson: The Last Action Hero

On 60 Minutes Sunday night, Liam Neeson opened up about the death of his wife, actress Natasha Richardson, five years after the fact. If you do not recall the circumstances, she sustained a traumatic brain injury after falling on a ski slope at Mont Tremblant. Among other things, Neeson said, “[Her death] was never real. It still kind of isn’t. There’re periods now in our New York residence when I hear the door opening, especially the first couple of years … anytime I hear that door opening, I still think I’m going to hear her.”

Shot in tight close-up, the interview stands against the action star persona Neeson has fashioned for himself since 2008, when he sprinted down Parisian alleys, growled about his “very particular set of skills” and made Taken into an unlikely hit. Universal Pictures presumably planted Neeson in the 60 Minutes hot seat to plug Non-Stop, which looks to be a very typical Neeson-kicking-ass vehicle set aboard a hijacked airplane, opening Friday. What they got instead was an emotional confessional about the pain of loss and this rather candid aside about his unusual typecast: “I’m 61 years of age, man, you know? Going around, fighting these guys, yeah, I feel a wee bit embarrassed, you know?” He said something similar to Dublin station 98FM around the time of Taken 2’s release, downplaying the probability of a third installment because his character’s daughter “can’t get taken again … that’s just bad parenting.”

There will, of course, be a Taken 3, because you don’t just say no to a $20 million paycheck, but I would like to hone in on those words “bad parenting.” Tragedy foregrounds the important things, in this case being a parent, both on- and off-screen. As CIA agent Bryan Mills in Taken, Neeson turns into a kind of Super-Dad, singlehandedly bucking the human trafficking trade in order to prevent his daughter from becoming another crime statistic. In the 2010 A-Team reboot, Neeson chomps a cigar for almost two hours as Hannibal Smith, the papa of a quartet of mercenaries who “loves it when a plan comes together.” These days, Neeson not only often plays the oldest member of an ensemble but its most assured, intelligent and dexterous one, too. It must feel great — even consoling, on a deeper level.

The Neeson brand of middle-aged wish fulfillment appeals to male Baby Boomers who have children of their own and next to no chances to clock a two-dimensional bad guy in the face. More telling is the zeal with which millennials — at least, based on the sample pool I know — have latched onto Neeson. If I could venture a guess as to why I so wanted to see Taken when it came out, I would say irony had something to do with it: Old Oskar Schindler, shooting fools, jumping through windows? Sounds awful. Let’s see it! As age and experience teach us, though, one invokes irony to mask feeling, especially feelings we may find embarrassing to share. With the exception of Battleship and Wrath of the Titans, I have seen every Liam Neeson action movie since Taken. So, why?

I see in Liam Neeson a father figure, one even greater than the individual characters he portrays. I approach each new movie of his expecting pretty much the same guy, in that I do not waste much energy scrutinizing, say, what his motives are this time around. In exchange for this dumbing down of character and abandonment of realism, I admire Neeson’s ever-growing  mythology. Old-school Hollywood used to sell movies this way, with a star’s name guaranteeing a certain personality in the character he or she played. There is a comfort in getting what you expect, and yet there is something more when the expected dispenses evil in such a thorough, pleasurable way that his actions provide comfort on their own. While Neeson’s movies sell flattened, superficial lies on how to deal with the problems in the world today, his hero’s familial focus — always after those who wronged his family, or after some lost feeling of love — channels his violent tactics to a higher, more compassionate purpose.

This current image of Liam Neeson also leans on his earlier, more spectacular work. Schindler’s List tackles too real and devastating a monstrosity to contribute much to Neeson’s persona these days. Instead, I think to the Christ-like mentors he played in Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace and The Chronicles of Narnia. We hardly saw a peek into the inner lives of Qui-Gon Jinn or Aslan, which in turn only reinforced their mythic proportions. In the 2008 video game Fallout 3, Neeson voiced the soft-spoken, genius scientist James, known simply as “Dad” for most of the game, for he is the father of the character you play. You are tasked with finding your dad for most of the story, so that sprawling open-world game ultimately boils down to an odyssey of child reuniting with his or her father. Fallout 3 heralds Neeson’s Taken turn with a saintly and sterile manifestation of the paternal savior he would soon define.

Only in The Grey, an underrated 2012 thriller, does Neeson bridge the resourceful man of action with the tortured soul he surely was following his wife’s death. Stranded in the Alaskan wilderness, his character, Ottway, writes letters to his ailing wife, and you can sense that Neeson is mining a core painfully, tragically accessible to him. This is the greatest Liam Neeson performance in years, where he refuses to reiterate his valid, if one-note, Super-Dad and chooses, instead, to find meaning in his real-life suffering. In The Grey, Neeson embodies the quintessential cinematic father figure of our time: you trust him with your safety, but more than anything else, you feel like he could use a good hug.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

The Grey Review

The Grey

Directed by Joe Carnahan

Released in 2012

In my minutely-partitioned movie collection, there is a little section I like to call “old men kicking ass.” The subgenre hit its peak in 2008 when Hollywood realized the youth demographic revered the aging action stars from the 70’s and 80’s  (Chuck Norris jokes may be somewhat responsible). We saw Clint Eastwood and Michael Caine pulverize punks in Gran Torino and Harry Brown, and Sylvester Stallone slurred at anything that moved in reboots to the Rocky and Rambo franchises, not to mention regrouping the Rogaine collective in The Expendables.

Guilt by proximity places the Liam Neeson of Taken in this category as well, as a 56-year-old clearing a yacht full of machinegun-wielding thugs using only a pistol and no apparent shortness of breath strikes us as rather exceptional. Neeson may be a few years under the median of the rest of these gentlemen, but his association in the badass elder enclave stands strong.

When I buy Mr. Neeson’s latest film The Grey — which I will do considering it is, itself, rather exceptional — I will not place it besides these vigilante senior pictures. This film has something profound to say, not (wolf) skulls to crush, though the aggressive marketing campaign insists on the latter. The Grey creeps into heavy philosophical territory without pretension but with the innate terror — and, conversely, Zen — these situations carry. For me, that trumps any mindless action rehash, even with the novelty of an old man holding the gun.

Ottway (Neeson) is at the end of the line. He addresses ambiguous notes to his unseen wife and finds himself pulling a gun to his brain in the plot’s first five minutes. Symbolic events ensue and he ends up on an airplane with a crew of oil drillers headed to Northern Alaska. They do not make it there. In a stunning scene, the plane rips from the sky in a whirling blur of chaos, silence and light. Seven survivors plus one dying one make it through the crash. That man’s death — which Ottway softly eases him into — throws the film as far away from the hyper pulp of Taken as possible, if the initial suicide attempt did not already come to that conclusion.

The terrible plane crash actually brings Ottway back to life. Not to the extremes of Locke’s reaffirming rebirth in Lost, but more a solemn commitment to save those still with him. His official job in the oil operation is to snipe encroaching wolves, so he knows a few tricks to sustain survival. Unsurprisingly, the crash reduced his rifle to splinters so the circling wolves indisputably have the upper hand.

These savage canines — whose depiction conservationists call deceptive while Joe Carnahan, the director, defends as plausible — pick off the survivors one-by-one, with different tactics each time. The realism of the wolves’ stalking, strategizing, bloodletting may be questionable, but I have seen enough Planet Earth to know that nature is cruel, and it would not surprise me if apex predators, evolved to dominate in the harshest of climates, could wipe out our truly weak species.

Carnahan takes cues from Spielberg by keeping the wolves off-screen for the most part. Relegating the animals to blurs of grey fur and echoing howls creates creatures far more terrifying than what Canis lupis truly are: a few nucleotides away from Air Bud. Jaws set the precedent for the unseen, and thus omnipresent, monster (actually due to malfunctions on-set that Spielberg took in stride). These wolves could be anywhere, but are always in mind.

But enough about these damn wolves, sharks and boogeymen, for the story cares little about them. Instead, it thrusts men into the most primal of scenarios, where it is not only necessary to kill, but almost impossible to do so. This crew of ex-cons, fugitives and thieves — “men unfit for mankind,” as Ottway describes, though others might just call them “manly men” — falls victim to the elements with shocking passivity. Diaz, played by Frank Grillo and by far the most captivating of the supporting characters, brutally dismembers a wolf carcass as the rest of the survivors watch in concern. It is not a look of disgust as much as fear that this loss of humanity lurks around the corner for them, as well.

Dread as bleak as Alaska’s whiteout tundra permeates every scene of this film, though spiritual catharsis joins in tandem for a few provocative moments. Prayer is both futile and vital. Under such duress, most would turn to a higher power for aid, but what can He do? Screenwriters Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers play the middle ground, leaving the message fulfilling to those with and without faith. Distributor Open Road Films actually released a companion pamphlet aimed at Christian audiences, saying The Grey “provides men with an opportunity to discover the many ways in which they can better face a life in which spiritual warfare – the battle for our individual souls – is a hard reality.” Perhaps pushing the card a bit, but the poetic last scene will leave it up to any interpretation.

There is one scene that will sear into your conscience. A character gives up, but not in the way you would expect. Carnahan stages an incredibly long shot, proving great courage on his own part (he directed the bombastically mediocre A-Team reboot after all) and balances terror and serenity with minimalist precision.

The solid cast of I’ve-seen-that-face-before character actors and the script’s decency to give us a decent look into their humble lives brings a complete, circular structure to the plot and themes. It is a heavy movie for the multiplex, especially considering many are expecting Taken 3 (2011’s Unknown was the spiritual sequel) and do not anticipate a Jack London-esque contemplation on nature, death and faith, in all the agony and peace and yin and yang that they carry.

This strife serves as the perfect vehicle for the film’s titan, Liam Neeson. His rugged but mortal face completely fills the poster. It is a handsome face, well-suited for close-ups, not unlike the symbolic tarmacs of Clint Eastwood or Dustin Hoffman. His presence guarantees quality regardless if the rest is camp or craft. He dominates the screen. How could wolves think they stand a chance?

Final Verdict:

4 Stars out of 5




This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

The A-Team Review

The A-Team

Directed by Joe Carnahan

Released in 2010

When walking into a theater to watch the latest summer blockbuster, your standards for enjoyment are set much differently than they would be if you were seeing, say, Doubt. An explosion or two, or three or four, and a familiar cast of macho men and pretty ladies are all that is really necessary for a hit. Audiences love it when this plan comes together, to paraphrase Col. Hannibal Smith, but critics usually do not. I like to think of myself as not too snobbish in my opinions (I took Iron Man 2 for the glitzy fun it was), but I have to side with the evil pundits on this one. The A-Team is a reasonably fun time with a few particularly sharp action sequences, but it is drowned in many flat attempts at humor, a ridiculously predictable plot, and, most shocking of all, a lack of real excitement. 

To paraphrase Hannibal Smith again, the plot is so banal and predictable that you can always see three steps ahead. That being said, it is serviceable for this brand of brainless cheese. As we all know, this movie is based off the absurd television show of the 80s. The premise of that series, in which four Vietnam veterans are charged of a crime they did not commit and subsequently fight for peace through covert means, is used here. The only edit here is, instead of the Vietnam War, these soldiers served in the Iraq War, which actually ends near the beginning of this movie. Let's bring that detail to life, please. Nonetheless, the A-Team is comprised of four members:  the leader, Hannibal (Liam Neeson); the philanderer, Face (Bradley Cooper); the brawn, B.A. (Quinton "Rampage" Jackson); and the deranged, Murdock (Sharlto Copley). Throughout the film, their status oscillates between heroic acclaim or unjust ostracization by the military. This fluctuation of stature provides a constant conflict, on top of defeating the antagonists, but, in the end, there were one too many double crosses for a senseless flick like this to handle properly. 

As trailers will attest to and the cast alone shows, this is a man's film. At least, that is what I believe. For every scene of B.A. piledriving a fool, you get about five minutes of shirtless Bradley Cooper. This puzzled me, perhaps more than any other aspect of this movie. Sure, the guy is in great shape and is, to quote Hannibal for the third and hopefully last time, "really tan." But, unless you are a bodybuilding monster like an 80s Stallone or Schwarzenegger, a topless male lead will not appeal that much to the masculine crowd this film is meant for. If it is trying to reel in (Steely Dan references are incessant in this movie as well) a female audience, every other aspect of this film, such as Jessica Biel's near useless role as nothing more than eye candy, screams otherwise. The wise middle ground? Try the guinea tee, a la Bruce Willis in Die Hard, for a mix of muscle and moderation. 

Digressions aside, there is still enough masculinity to appease the average action junkie. Liam Neeson chows on enough fat cigars to make J. Jonah Jameson blush, and the ridiculous stunts (assisted by a nagging presence of CGI) are so bombastic that they will appease anyone who only values spectacle. There are many ludicrous explosions, more so than necessary, but that was the point of the original series in the first place. The special effects and action could be better, as all the hand-to-hand fight scenes are shakily filmed in a way that aims for Greengrass' Bourne films but fails to achieve that sense of palpable grit. It should not be this way, as the director Joe Carnahan also did Smokin' Aces, a movie with a more outrageous storyline but some really innovative, spectacular action sequences. 

There are a few noteworthy scenes to mention, however. It will send any physicist to an early grave, but there is a part in the movie when the team is "piloting" a military tank...in the sky...freefalling...reaching terminal velocity......by shooting the cannon at certain degrees. Hannibal barks the angle placements with such timed certainty that you cannot help but laugh at the preposterous premise this scene holds. Their solution is to land in a small lake, where an old couple is using dynamite to fish no less, so learning to accept the nonsensical science, or lack thereof, is mandatory to get through the film. Less egregious is a Dark Knight-esque skyscraper assault in which the A-Team truly fulfills its potential by incorporating grapple hooks, flashbangs, and a low-flying helicopter into one shocking attack. This scene is the one that sticks out in the end as what the film could have been if everything was done with such care.

Unfortunately, said care was not paid to most of the film. The finale throws (literal) fireworks at the audience with its large setpiece and liberal amount of fiery detonations, resulting in an ostentatious display of soulless action. It adds insult to injury when the screenwriters underestimate the intelligence of the audience when they constantly throw a barrage of flashbacks on the screen just to make sure the viewer knows how certain plot twists relate to previous events. It infuriates me when a sleight of hand maneuver that was furtively done five minutes before is interpolated between the unfolding action, only with an added video filter or two to exclaim, "HEY, REMEMBER THIS? Well...you didn't see that move coming did you?" Sorry, but everyone did. Everyone.

The team of four leads are all fine actors in their own right (though I am not too acquainted with Quinton Jackson's acting career), but the material that they are given does not make them particularly compelling or even comical. The mentally ill pilot, Murdock, is positioned to be the key comic relief for the film, but some of his lines simply fall flat. This is no fault to the magnificent actor filling his role, District 9's Sharlto Copley, as he takes bad lemons and attempts to make fine wine. There are welcome instances when his character is legitimately hilarious, such as his Braveheart parody or any teasing badinage between him and B.A..  When the main antagonist, Pike, not only watches but offers assistance to his own bumbling supposed executioner as he struggles with attaching a pistol suppressor, a successful scene of hilarity is made. But a lack of real laughs is an Achilles heel for any popcorn action film as self-aware as The A-Team, and considering some bad lines even repeat themselves (Enough with the toast points, B.A.), it is obvious more effort could have gone into the script. 

Speaking of Bosco "I ain't gettin on no plane!" Baracus, the UFC fighter slides into the vintage mohawk rather well, but he is still a perplexing character. Mr. T's original portrayal of the character included a fear of flying, which is humorously explained in the [very, very long] intro, but this film takes it farther by attempting to make him a pacifist as well. This leads to an odd character progression in which he starts as a cold blooded killing machine, reforms to an enlightened student of Mohandas Gandhi, but then returns to his bloody ways at the end. This makes him a pretty weak character in a sense, and he is not on screen as much as one would expect anyway. I would be lying, however, if I said I did not grin at watching Jackson kick a hapless, capoeira-twirling enemy into a wall about seven feet away. Now that is why I went to see this movie in the first place.

Bradley Cooper is mildly nagging in his dominant role, perhaps usurping Hannibal for on-screen facetime (sorry, could not resist the pun). He was a great fit for The Hangover, but this dude is not cut out to be the Tom Cruise that seems to be the aim here. On the other hand, Liam Neeson continues to put forth so much effort in roles that demand so little, as he did with Taken two years ago. The delightfully tacky line, "I love it when a plan comes together," is repeated a few times, and Neeson continually delivers it with such defined authority that the perpetually delayed Spielberg biopic, Lincoln, in which Liam plays the eponymous president, seems like the best idea of all time (seriously, get on that). 

Overall, The A-Team  is a superficial, fun time at the movies that always feels like it is failing to meet its real potential. Explosions ring left and right, but there is nothing between the ears. In the end, you may feel shocked that you were not actually shocked by any particular scene or plot twist in the movie. We have all seen it before; these are not the droids you are looking for. Adjust your expectations accordingly, for enjoyment can be had here in more than a modest degree, but I pity the fools behind this who did not deliver on all cylinders. 

Final Verdict:

3 Stars Out of 5