In short: Robin Hood (2018)

This godawful thing directed by Otto Bathurst is a sad attempt at making the Robin Hood legend “topical”. So expect crusaders in the Middle East carrying their bows as if they were assault rifles while wearing armour that’s meant to look like modern combat armour, our main character wearing a leather hoodie that makes him look rather a lot like the TV version of a certain Robin Hood inspired superhero, and a lot more in the spirit of an idiot’s idea of modernist theatre. Now, this sort of thing can be perfectly interesting – if perhaps not exactly what I’d want from a Robin Hood movie – if written with thought and care, but the responsible parties for the script, Ben Chandler and David James Kelly, treat their conceit with all the thoughtfulness and care of elephants waltzing through a porcelain store, never having encountered a thought they’d be able to actually follow through on.

Because this isn’t bad enough, the film’s plot is, absurdly enough, full of the worst attempts at your typical superhero movie’s narrative beats I’ve seen in quite some time, because obviously, it’s not enough for this one to be a shitty message movie, it also needs to be a really bad medieval superhero movie, too, with dialogue so bad, I started to fondly think about the Daredevil movie with Ben “I can’t do superheroes for the life of me” Affleck as the much superior film.


But hey, at least there’s some spectacle on screen, right? Well, unfortunately not, for Bathurst shoots the whole mess as if it actually were the amateur theatre production its writing reminds me of (probably mumbling something about Brechtian techniques), having never encountered a set he can’t make look like cardboard, and no action scene he can’t turn into nonsense by always choosing the least effective set-up, the worst camera angle, and so on and so forth. It’s honestly astonishing to me how a production that’s made by an actual production company and a director with experience in properly budgeted modern TV can look quite this shoddy. Need I even mention that the actors make the impression of having gotten no direction at all, so their performances meander wildly, with only Jamie Foxx actually giving the impression of playing the same character from scene to scene?

In short: Ready Player One (2018)

In the bad future of the 2040s, the world is a greyish brown craphole, so large parts of society escape into the virtual world of Oasis, a random assortment of pop culture and videogame tropes nobody actually playing MMOs today would believe to be successful or not sued into oblivion for copyright infringement. Oasis was apparently mostly built by a cliché tech nerd named Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his only, later bought out, friend Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg, doing to an American accent what he has already done to a Scottish one). For his death a couple of years before the plot sets in, Halliday has hidden away a Big Secret as well as the ownership of Oasis as an Easter egg inside of the virtual world. Until now, nobody has been able to find the secret, despite hordes of fans as well as an Evil Corporation™ trying very hard.

The film follows the meandering adventures of Halliday superfan Wade aka Parzival (Tye Sheridan), his best online bud H (Lena Waithe) and the mysterious Artemis (Olivia Cooke, who actually gets to do more stuff than you’d expect from a female character for this sort of film with this particular guy in the director’s chair) when they actually start to unravel Halliday’s increasingly stupid riddles while fighting off EvilCorps's Saturday morning cartoon goons.

I don’t think the critical mauling of this Steven Spielberg flick based on the insufferable novel by Ernest Cline is completely undeserved, seeing as its first hour or so mostly consists of mediocre animated characters wandering through an ugly and random animated world mostly based on 80s and 90s pop culture – speaking of actual design seems uncalled for – with characterization and dialogue on the level of a YA novel for particularly dense teens (which is still preferable to the smug winking of Cline’s book). Worst of all, it has a joyless feel you don’t usually encounter in a non-serious Spielberg movie.

However, then, after an hour or an hour and half of boredom, something strange happens: the pop cultural references start to cohere, visual gags sometimes become funny, and Spielberg finally falls back on his talents as popcorn cinema storyteller extraordinaire, suddenly hitting well-worn plot beats with heft and energy, making the up to that point absolutely lifeless film feel vibrant and lively. The plot is still pretty stupid, mind you, but now it is presented with a sense of excitement and fun Ready Player One had before been missing completely. The ending is complete pap, of course, but then, how are you sensibly going to end a film whose final philosophy is “reality is real” (insert sound of your favourite dead philosopher rotating in their grave), that wants to criticize consumer culture, but not so much as to anger any of the myriad of product placers involved in it, and that thinks virtual reality is awesome, but you need to take two days a week off to snog Olivia Cooke?


But hey, there are at least 45 entertaining minutes in here, which is quite a bit more than I’d say about the novel it is based on.

In short: Killing Them Softly (2012)

Squirrel (Vincent Curatola), a small-time criminal, has a plan for his even smaller-time acquaintance Frankie (Scoot McNairy), and Frankie's junkie friend Russell (Ben Mendelsohn): the two are supposed to raid an illegal gambling room belonging to the local mob. Usually, this sort of thing has lethal repercussions, but Squirrel has it all figured out. This particular game is held by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). Markie had already hired people to raid one of his own games in the past, so, Squirrel thinks, he'll be the guy the mob will make responsible, leaving his friends and especially his planning hand untouched and unknown.

Not surprisingly, Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), the fixer the mob calls in to mete out appropriate punishments, does not fall for that particular trick: Markie surely couldn't be that stupid. Not that it matters much. A business has to uphold appearances, so Markie has to die even though Jackie knows he's innocent. Frankie and Russell, on the other hand, could actually get away scot free if not for Russell's loose tongue. Clearly, things won't end too well for anybody except Jackie.

Andrew Dominik's adaptation of a George V. Higgins novel, on the other hand, is the good stuff, at least if you like your hardboiled crime movies laconic, grim, with an underlying sneer towards the American Dream yet also a sense of compassion. Not that this compassion saves even a single one of the characters here: Late capitalist America is not the kind of place where compassion plays an active role in anything anymore, no matter what the politicians on TV might say about ideals (and as we all know, ideals that aren't followed by actions are worse than no ideals at all).

It's really rather fascinating to see how alive the old tropes of this sort of thing can still feel in the hands of a director and writer who knows how to make them sing without having to use grand gestures or letting his cast do all-caps ACTING. It's not that kind of gangster movie, but one that concerns itself with the losers, the lost, and the people at the bottom of the criminal food chain, so all grandstanding would be completely out of place.

Instead, direction and performances go for nuance, a sad somewhat bitter humour, and dialogue that is intensely stylized to take on the appearance of naturalism. One could accuse Killing Them Softly of silently wallowing in the sordid. The lack of glamour, however, is rather the point of the whole affair, with characters whose lives don't so much fall apart - there hasn't been much whole about anyone's life here for a long time - but just end the same way they have always been.

Killing Them Softly is a fantastic piece of work, with a director and an ensemble cast (there are also James Gandolfini as depressed killer and Sam Shepard as mob councillor to mention) that completely disappears inside the material.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,crime,andrew dominik,brad pitt,scoot mcnairy,ben mendelsohn,james gandolfini,sam shepard