In short: The A-Team (2010)

I’m not sure this actually needs to be said, but Joe Carnahan is a weird director. Extremely talented and an able to turn his not inconsiderable budgets into true crowd pleasers (if for a very specific kind of crowd), most of what he does feels as individual and personal as any auteur-style movie you’d care to mention. Stylistically, he always uses state of the art and budget techniques of the Tony Scott school that’ll make many a critic automatically use the word “edgy”. I’d argue that, when Carnahan is on, he’s not “edgy” but a filmmaker whose films actually have an edge acquired by an uncommon mix of the ability to direct actors and use sometimes grating film techniques to often very intelligent effect. When he isn’t on, he’s making Boss Level instead of Narc.

This star-studded (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Sharlto Copley and Patrick Wilson are certainly quite the 2010 cast list, and would still get quite a few behinds in seats ten years later) variation and prequel to many a nerd’s (including this writer’s) foundational action TV show is somewhere between the two. For my taste, the film’s at its best when it provides its cast with opportunities to play their characters outrageously larger than life or when it comes up with the silliest possible set-ups for action sequences (the thing with the flying tank wouldn’t cut realism muster in a Fast & Furious movie even today). It falters, whenever it tries to hitch the bigness or the silliness to moments of more traditional, semi-naturalistic character work, never really managing to connect the two modes properly. Which is a bit strange, since connecting the outrageous with proper, believable and serious character moments is often one of Carnahan’s biggest strengths.

Conceptually, The A-Team suffers a bit from its apparently unquenchable need to turn the strange innocence of the original series cynically violent. So this movie adaptation of a series where nobody ever died from being shot at with automatic weapons has a body count too large to calculate; in an even shittier move, it also feels the need to treat non-violence as something bad in a man that needs to be gotten rid of and disposed of while the score shits out triumphant music, turning the fun pretend violence surrounding it moment pretty sour for this viewer, and really not helping the film as a whole with its tonal difficulties.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

Warning: I still can’t stand the Conjuring series!

After hapless paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson, or his reanimated corpse, given his even more complete lack of expression this time around) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga, as typical for this series putting more effort in than anybody else involved in the project, and getting nothing for it) cock up another investigation, a young man catches demon and kills his boss/friend while possessed. The idiot couple convinces the guy’s lawyer to go with the old “my client’s innocent on account of demonic possession” defence and proceed to find out what’s actually going on in the case – which they might have done before they attempted an exorcism, which might have made this a movie not based on its protagonists being really bad at their job. Hilarity ensues.

The third entry into the The Conjuringverse’s main series still has man of the problems that made its predecessors so badly to digest for me: there’s – obviously, inevitably – the series’ use of right-wing Christian scam artists as if they were cuddly heroes; a really boring mythology based on the worst US-style Evangelical Christianity has to offer; a general lack of weirdness, ambiguity, or just plain craziness, the series not only being ideologically conservative but also in its approach to the supernatural. To be fair, TDMMDI, as directed by Michael Chaves, does lose at least one central weakness of its predecessors, their total dependency on Big Set Pieces™ and jump scares.

Given that our protagonists are supposed to be crack psychic detectives, the decision to replace much of the loud bits of the earlier movies by showing them committing to an actual investigation makes a lot of sense, too. Unfortunately, nobody of the half a dozen or so people credited with the script seems to have much of a clue of how to write investigative horror. So more than half of the film consists of the Warrens going through one of the slowest and most boring investigations in the history of fictional occult detectives, intercut with scenes of the travails of our main possession victim (Ruairi O’Connor, playing a guy without any character traits perfectly) so that at least some mild spooky stuff happens. Said spooky stuff consists of some random, tired and badly timed horror bits, Chaves showing little flair for the genre.

Ironically, this move away from the series standards actually gives me a whole new appreciation for the comparative care (perhaps even artfulness) the earlier movies in the franchise take with their set pieces and jump scares, and the creators’ willingness to at least entertain their audience. The film at hand is about as entertaining as watching paint dry. To add even further irony – and as a good example of its generally shoddy writing – the film isn’t even good as an example of the kind of Christian religious horror whose rhetoric it espouses: after all, it’s not any power invested by God into a deserving individual (say a priest) or simply the Sweet Baby Jesus who saves the day against the film’s underused antagonist (who is just as wasted as is the great John “I’m only in it for the exposition” Noble), it’s the rather more worldly love between couples and a big damn sledgehammer. Which my secular person does find rather more sympathetic – if only the script had actually prepared this as a thematic element before it used it, or had shown anything of it as part of its background lore. Not even one “Also, demons are allergic to love” comes from Noble.

I really do appreciate that the series attempts to go into somewhat new directions with this, but there’s so little of import or interest happening in this version of investigative horror, it might as well not have bothered. But hey, the title makes clear it’s not the filmmakers who are to blame, so there’s that.

Three Films Make A Post: Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.

Young Adult (2011): On one hand, I have complete respect for Jason Reitman’s willingness to make a film about a woman hitting a tough spot and returning to her small town home that doesn’t espouse small town virtues as the be all and end all of “true” life and adulthood. On the other hand, the resulting film is then - quite consequently – about a character who experiences things but never learns anything from them, who doesn’t change for better or for worse, the only point seeming that some people can’t change, even if they are shitty and broken enough to need it, which is neither news nor particularly interesting to me. Sure, there is a lot to be said against all those movies about the cleansing power of returning home, but replacing hope with nothing isn’t a terrible convincing proposition either, however well Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt are selling this (Patrick Wilson is his usual nonentity, which might be a purposeful casting decision here).

Prince Avalanche (2013): Also not exactly to my tastes is this one, directed by David Gordon Green, in which Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch at least do make something out of their experience of doing – sometimes – road work on a godforsaken road. I’m not terribly convinced by the tone of the affair, though, Green desperately trying to elevate the pretty bare script into something universal but never quite succeeding for me. But then, I usually have the problem with Green’s more serious-minded films of not seeing that he’s actually saying those as much about life, love and the rest he seems to think his films do. That might just be me, though.


Freaks (2018): Let’s finish on this film by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (of Leprechaun: Origins “fame”) which first casts what turns out to be a really bad X-Men movie as an intriguing and atmospheric mystery about a little girl (Lexy Kolker) building the wrong picture of a complicated world her father (hey, it’s Emile Hirsch again) doesn’t bother even attempting to explain to her. The more the film explains about what is actually going on with and in the world here, the more stupid it gets, though, reaching a sort of apex of awkward dialogue, bizarre writing choices and characters who will do any damn shit because it is in the script in a climax that has to be seen to be believed. And to think that much of what’s happened could have been avoided if any of the grown-ups here had at least attempted to explain the world to Chloe, the kid character, something like “some of us have special powers, bad people hunt those with special powers; we have special powers, therefor we must hide, yes, even from ice cream vans and the lady next door”.

The Commuter (2018)

Cop turned insurance salesman Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) is having a very interesting day. He’s fired from his job, leaving him and his family apparently one step from losing their house and the ability to pay their son’s college tuition. Capitalism without a social net sucks, it turns out. This will only be a minor problem on this very special day our protagonist is having, though, for a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) chats him up on his final commuter train journey home and makes him a proposition, a perfectly theoretical one, she says. What if she’d offer him a hundred thousand dollar to find someone one the train going by the codename of “Prinn” (disappointingly not named after Ludwig, it turns out). The only thing to go on is that he or she is not a regular commuter, is planning to get out at a certain station, and is carrying some type of bag apparently containing something they stole. Why the woman would be looking for Prinn and what she wants to do with them stays open. Oh, and by the way, the proposal might not be theoretical at all.

When Michael picks up a twenty-five thousand down payment hidden in one of the train’s toilets, he is shortly tempted to actually do what is asked of him, but he changes his mind back to sanity quickly enough. Unfortunately, the woman and her associates are not at all willing to take no for an answer, so, this being a post-Taken Liam Neeson joint, they are threatening his family if he doesn’t comply. Now Michael has to hustle back and forth through (and sometimes down) the train, trying to identify Prinn, all the while attempting to come up with a way to save his family as well as Prinn and himself.

Yes, this is another highly (some might say too highly) constructed thriller starring Liam Neeson as an aging tough guy stumbling into a thriller plot and having to protect his family and his moral center through violence, and his moral centre in whatever way he can come up with. There’s nothing at all wrong with that for my taste, for while there’s certainly nothing original about The Commuter’s plot, and I could certainly could do with seeing Neeson playing a very different type of character from time to time, this is also a very typical Jaume Collet-Serra film. If you’ve read my opinions on most of his other films, you will know where the next paragraph is going. I like his work so much, I’ll even watch something based on a Disney theme park directed by him.

That is to say, The Commuter was made by a director who can usually (let’s pretend Non-Stop doesn’t exist) take a very standard, overly twisty script and turn it into something very much worth watching by filming even the most clichéd plot in a way that suggests he actually cares about it. So while there are moments of too convenient plotting, a bit of action movie physics (we all know that action scenes don’t care about how trains work, yet neither do I in this context), and a copious amount of clichés on display, they are presented with absolute willingness by the filmmaker to suck his audience in and entertain it in any way possible. There is nothing lazy about Collet-Serra’s treatment of any of the film’s copious suspense scenes, the staging is tight when it should be tight and loose when it needs to be loose, the whole affair doing whatever it can never to be boring for a second, without ever making the impression of trying to pressgang the audience (or, for that matter, of thinking it is stupid).

When it comes to this sort of action-y thriller, getting an audience to suspend its disbelief can be as important as in a film concerning the supernatural if a film wants its audience to care. Collet-Serra achieves this goal through moments of veracity. Michael’s money problems are of course ripped from the headlines but also ground the film in a believable reality, making it easy for an audience that knows this kind of problem well enough to care for him, yet also pulling extra work by making the film’s world more believable. The same goes for the other characters in the train. While all of them are certainly shorthand characters, they stand as shorthand for contemporary types one might actually encounter in real life, again suggesting the film inhabiting a believable world. Collet-Serra’s job here is made easier by the cast. While the bigger names in the cast - Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and his lone facial expression, Elizabeth McGovern and Sam Neill - apart from frequent Collet-Serra collaborator Neeson (who has this kind of role down pat without projecting bored routine) - are only in the film in what amounts to cameo role, the merry cast of character actors in the train does much to sell the story through small but important gestures, keeping the shorthand alive and lively.


As an added bonus, I found myself rather happy with the lack of cynicism in the film. In the end, this turns out to be a tale singing the praises of the decency of random people, even though it tells a tale of twists and betrayals, not exactly something you often find in thrillers about Liam Neeson protecting his family.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

The old West. A pair of drifters and murderers (David Arquette and good old Sid Haig) accidentally desecrate the burial ground belonging to a group of cannibalistic troglodytes. Sid Haig gets himself murdered right quick, but Arquette’s character manages to escape to a nearby town where he raises the interest of local Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) enough to get himself shot in the leg.

Hunt calls in Samantha O’Dwyer (Lili Simmons), the unofficial yet highly competent actual town doctor without a degree - not to be confused with the alcoholic official town doctor we never get to see. The sheriff leaves her to tend to the prisoner under the care of his deputy, and calls it a night. The next morning, he finds a stable boy dead, and Lili, the deputy, the drifter and a bunch of horses gone. The murderers and abductors were of course the troglodytes the drifter accidentally led into town; at first, the Sheriff suggests it must have been an Indian attack, but as a quickly called in Native American diagnoses in a scene that feels a lot like the film holding up a placard with “See, we’re not racist against Native Americans” written on it, these weren’t actual Indians but members of a tribe of a degenerate and cannibalistic monster people dwelling in caves, though they might look like Indians to the unenlightened white people. See, it’s totally okay the film’s not going to give these guys even a single human trait, because the Indian said it’s alright.

Anyway, the Sheriff, his elderly reserve deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), so racist even the Old West characters around him don’t approve John Brooder (Matthew Fox), and Lili’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), who is suffering from a pretty debilitating leg wound since falling from a roof trying to be manly, are all the posse this town gets together to follow the troglodytes to their lair to save the abducted. Things won’t exactly go to plan.

So, did anyone ever really miss the cannibal movie? 2015 finally brought us the return of films about inhuman brown people eating white people nobody asked for, though at least without the real animal violence, because that really wouldn’t cut it today. I very much hope one day one of them will get around to perhaps do at least as much as Cannibal Holocaust did when examining its own assumptions – or, you know, just replace their cannibals with actual monsters and be done with it.

S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk isn’t that film; it is, in fact, not interested in facing the problem at the core of this particular sub-genre head on at all, therefore we get the scene described above, which really seems like an attempt at creating an easy out to me. On the other hand, the scene also suggests the film isn’t really interested in this sort of discussion of race at all and really rather sees its cannibals as representations of the dark heart of humanity, dehumanizing violence and so on and so forth. That’s of course problematic in contemporary parlance, but I’m generally trying to take on films on their own terms, and so am willing to appreciate the film is actually quite clear about its terms early on, giving me the opportunity to take them or leave them. Given how adept the film is at what it actually wants to do, I took them.

Once and if you do, you might just be surprised by the first one and a half hours of film you actually get, because while the troglodytes are introduced early on, for the longest time the film belongs to the calm and unhurried kind of modern western, with dialogue that at first seems to be a bit too indebted to Quentin Tarantino but then turns out to carry a different kind of emphasis and emotional weight that seems specific to Zahler (at least when you’ve read some of the man’s novels which I can highly recommend), and some spectacularly moody landscape shots that stand in strong contrast to the somewhat bland looking scenes taking place in town. There’s very little – though just enough – plot in these first two thirds of the film. Instead, Zahler puts all his considerable talent into creating a sense of a place and its dislocating brutality yet also into making the characters feel deeply human and complicated, even Fox’s vile racist whom most films would turn into an easy target for their audience’s hatred or give a too easy shot at redemption. There’s an honesty to the characterisation that feels special and personal, rooted in certain genre conventions but given space to breathe and live by dialogue that only seems self-indulgent on first contact, and based on a bunch of excellent acting performances.

This does of course make things emotionally harder to stomach when the film finally gets its cannibal movie on; I at least had grown rather fond of the characters and didn’t really want to see them getting ripped to pieces in horrible ways. So in that regard, the film too is quite the success, with one or two scenes that leave you squirming not just because they are unpleasant to watch but because they actually mean something.


Combine that with how uncomfortable I still am with the whole not-really-native-American cannibals, and you have, well, a film I find effective, moving, and meaningful yet also find myself struggling with loving unreservedly not because it’s a bad movie – it is indeed a very fine one – but because I wish it were different in a single aspect I found difficult to overlook in a film made today (well, or 2015).

In short: The Conjuring (2013)

It's 1971. Carolyn Perron (Lily Taylor, putting her considerable talent to dubious yet effective use), her husband Roger (Ron Livingston) and their truckload of children have put all their money - which isn't much - into buying a beautiful house out in the middle nowhere. Unfortunately, as soon as the family has moved into its new dream home, Weird Shit™ begins to happen. Frequent horror movie goers will at once identify their troubles as sure signs of Demonic Infestation™.

When weird turns dangerous, the Perrons ask demonologist couple Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) for help. The diagnosis isn't promising, because the family's troubles are the worst case of Evil™ the Warrens have encountered in their career until then and it'll take all of their resolve to get rid of the unwanted entities.

While I wasn't looking, James Wan turned into quite a horror director. Sure, he still wouldn't recognize subtlety it fell on his head, but he has obviously learned to use loud and garish, even more loud and garish, and incredibly loud and garish so well, his The Conjuring is something of a fun time, if a very empty one. In particular, Wan has now learned to use jump scares in a manner that doesn't induce eye-rolling and loud sighing from me, seeing as he mostly uses them as pay-offs for long and surprisingly effective suspense scenes.

One could argue that a really good director would probably just keep the suspense scenes and get rid of the jump scares completely but that would be too subtle for The Conjuring. For where Wan's efforts are hitting the mark, the script by Chad and Carey Hayes is the sort of concoction I expected (before I read other reviews online) even the mildest of viewers would have a hard time not to describe as outrageously stupid or just plain idiotic. There's really not a single thought to be found in the film beyond "demons bad", "family good", "Jesus awesome", "buy the books of Ed and Lorraine". For most of the time, the script tries to distract from that absence of anything, and from its manifold plotting troubles (just look how plain stupid the Warrens repeatedly act, despite having their own museum of haunted artefacts, and oh so much experience), by throwing one shouty, hopefully creepy set piece after the next at its audience. Thanks to Wan, this distraction manoeuvre is quite effective, though the film never reaches the point of transcendent stupidity, that is to say, the point where stupid turns into awe-inspiringly strange, nor the point where I stopped caring about the stupidity going on.

The Conjuring is always at its weakest when it feels the need to work as an advert for the real-life Warrens and their "demonology" bullshit, really not giving the on-screen couple any mentionable flaws beyond their stupidity, whose existence the film doesn't even seem to realize, and not putting a single thought into what it would actually mean to live in a world as haunted by the supernatural as it and the Warrens argue it is. But then, that would lead to a film that actually has something interesting to say, and we can't have that, now can we?

Still, as far as intellectually and emotionally empty experiences that try to distract from their failings by copious amounts of - real and metaphorical - shouting go, The Conjuring is pretty awesome.

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