Three Films Make A Post: I stopped caring a long time ago

Samaritan (2022): If ever you wanted to see a cross between Over the Top and The Dark Knight Rises, director Julius Avery, writer Bragi F. Schut and an expressionless rock formation named Sylvester Stallone have made the movie for you. Apart from badly ripping off the least regarded Nolan Batman movie, this is a film whose makers ignore the last three decades of superhero movies, instead preferring the eldritch horror of using a child as their viewpoint character, and the bad child acting that belongs to this sort of thing.

There’s a big reveal you’ll see coming ten minutes in but that still takes more than an hour to happen, and whose early use would have made the film and its characters a million times more interesting, action sequences that can’t see the difference between low-powered and badly structured, and a lead actor who either can’t act anymore or simply doesn’t on general principle. That the dialogue is dreadful and the plot harbours neither surprises nor interesting ideas and can’t even hit generic plot beats well should come as no surprise in this context.

Nope (2022): The new movie by Jordan Peele, on the other hand, fails on a much higher level. But then, even in this, his by far worst film, you can’t help but see that he’s still an excellent director. Just one who lets himself down as a writer this time around, creating a film that bloats a ninety minute plot up to more than two hours. I’m all for slow horror and spending lots of time to get to know characters as well as to build up dread, but in this case, the characters and their relations are simply not interesting or complicated enough to reward the time spent with them, and the monster that’s the film’s major threat is not the kind of thing for which “dread” is the appropriate feeling. Worse, the film’s attempt at a commentary on people’s drive to win cheap entertainment fame has little that intrinsically or metaphorically connects it with the horror movie parts of the affair, which makes the film not just feel sluggish, but also somewhat disconnected.

Requiem for a Village (1975): Most films about traditional country ways getting swallowed by the New and the city do tend to have a certain reactionary undertone in which the old is somehow always better than the new. David Gladwell’s documentary about the memories of an old country man coming to life on a graveyard is not such a film. There’s a deep longing for disappearing ways of living running through the film, yet it is also painfully honest about the harshness and cruelty of country life and country people, often seeming to suggest that only the good bits of the Old are swallowed by the New, while the violence, the rape and the cruelty just continue on in other clothing.

Cleaner (2007)

Former cop Tom Cutler (Samuel L. Harris) has retired into owning his own business, a small cleaning company specializing in crime scene and general biohazard clean-up. He’s taking care of his daughter Rose (Keke Palmer) by himself, for his wife was murdered when he was still a cop. The killer was himself murdered in prison, and Tom and his partner and close friend Eddie Lorenzo (Ed Harris) only escaped jail time of their own for organizing the murder because Tom made a deal with one Vaughn, the godfather of the city’s corrupt cops, though Eddie doesn’t appear to no that part of the deal.

It’s clear that this past is something Tom dearly wants to bury under meticulous cleanliness, avoidance of all his old cop buddies including Eddie and, the good old medicine of pretending the bad shit didn’t really happen. The time for pretending is quickly coming to an end, though, when Tom is called into cleaning up a crime scene that will turn out not to have been an official one afterwards. Worse, Tom hasn’t just cleaned up the remnants of a crime, the victim’s a guy who turned witness against Vaughn. At first, Tom hopes if he continues his well-worn technique of ignoring the situation and hoping it will go away, nothing will happen, but neither this little problem nor his past will quite so easily stay buried.

The 21st Century parts of director Renny Harlin’s career are full of surprises, unless you share the distaste for the man’s body of work most mainstream film critics seem to have quite independent of the actual quality of any given film he turns out. Probably because pretending only tasteful middle brow directors making tasteful middle brow films are worthwhile is still a rather big thing in those circles, a gospel given unto them by the sainted Roger Ebert. If your background is in exploitation and cult cinema like mine, automatically disliking Harlin’s usually interesting, sometimes ridiculous and nearly always (that nearly is obviously important) worthwhile body of work after his time as Hollywood’s second greatest action cinema director seems somewhere between insane and hypocritical.

For its first two acts, Cleaner is very typical of this phase of Harlin’s career by not being typical whatsoever. Instead of the slam bang action he would have made out of this material in the 90s, the film at hand is a stylishly (but not so stylish it becomes distracting), slick, and calm (some may say slow) movie that’s much more focussed on its actors doing proper grown-up acting, with Harlin doing his utmost to step out of their way. Given that this is mainly Jackson’s and Harris’s show – with some very effective help from Luis Guzmán, Palmer, and even Eva Mendes – and these guys could obviously be involving and interesting when shot by an idiot on a phone or Stephen Soderbergh, this is certainly the right approach to the material, also providing the film with a human grit it needs to counteract the visual slickness a little.

This works well for the film, until the third act starts, and the whole film breaks down a little. It’s not just that the revelation of what’s going on is more than a little clichéd, it is also obvious from pretty early on. The way to that “revelation” is rather too messy, also, so messy, in fact, that even Jackson and Harris have a hard time actually selling the whole affair in the end. It’s also deeply unsatisfying in how little the film seems to realize how cynical its ending, where the only crime that’s actually punished is the one committed out of love and where all corrupt cops can merrily ride into the sunset, actually is, and how much it actually undercuts the whole “family first” shtick it is apparently trying to sell.


But then, the first two acts really are rather good.

In short: Animal (2014)

The by now for all practical purposes proverbial quintet of young, attractive friends (let’s just list Keke Palmer and Elizabeth Gillies) are making a short, day-long hike into the deep dark woods. Alas, when night breaks, an ugly, hungry monster makes its presence known, and soon the quintet’s not a quintet anymore. The thing chases the friends into the just as proverbial cabin in the woods. They are not alone in there, though, for the thing has already chased earlier victims into it who in their turn had already found parts of the house barricaded. Some of these people are even still alive, so everything’s set for a little siege scenario where every one of the character’s plans is thwarted and their numbers are slowly whittled down.

On the surface – and very often below it too – Brett Simmons’s Animal looks like a very generic monster movie like you might see on the SyFy Channel if their films had better photography. However, as I might have said before (and before, and before that) with this sort of traditional approach to horror film, a film wins or loses my eyes and heart with how well it executes the traditions. On that point, Animal does very well, with Simmons making excellent use of the claustrophobic situation, working from an exceedingly well paced script.

The character work is often a bit crude but I think something deeper and more complex would actually hurt this particular movie by slowing it down too much. At least, the characters are generally likeable (except for the one who isn’t supposed to be likeable at all), so I didn’t find myself rooting for the monster, and while there’s not really the feeling of watching real human beings under horrible pressure, they do engage one on more than just the level of pure monster fodder. Okay, there’s one strangely misplaced scene where Paul Iacono’s Sean feels the need to confess he had a crush on one of the other characters’ boyfriend that puzzles me by the sheer virtue of its uselessness for the proceedings, but if that’s the worst the film gets up to, I’m fine with it. And while the characterisation isn’t exactly original – at best slightly updating the spam in a cabin character clichés for 2014 – the film does take care to change up little things like the order in which they bite the bucket, even going as far as playing with who our actual hero is.

It’s, as I already said, not deep stuff, but it does keep Animal lively even when there’s no monster attack going on. And, since the monster attacks themselves are all engaging (and even fun), that’s all the character work needs to do.

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