Review: ‘The Girl on the Train’

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From the director of “The Help” and “Get On Up” comes an adaptation of yet another global worldwide bestselling phenomenon of a book featuring the word “girl” in the title. This particular girl does not have any visible tattoos, dragons or otherwise, and while there IS a girl in this story who is indeed gone, our main character is not this person. Instead this is “The Girl on the Train,” the story of a sad sack alcoholic divorcee who gets herself wrapped up in some missing person’s case in between bouts of stalking her ex-husband and his new wife and their baby.

Rachel (Emily Blunt) rides a train to and from New York City everyday, and on her route the train stops just oh so perfectly so she can always see the backyards of her old house and her neighbors’ house. It is her “old” house because her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) lives there with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and Rachel spies them from train with drunk, watery eyes. She also watches their neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett) and HER husband (Luke Evans) snuggling and sexing it up through the windows of their house, and she becomes envious of their affection and love making. She also has a habit of stumbling drunk through this old neighborhood of hers, causing problems with people there, so when Megan goes missing and Rachel was seen in the area at the same time while black out drunk, she finds herself a person of interest in the investigation. So she decides to do her own drunk investigating. Because that’s what sensible people do.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Hell or High Water’

HellOrHighWater_MoviePoster“Hell or High Water” is a modern western, a story about cops and robbers, set in dusty West Texas, featuring bank robberies and shoot outs and Mexican stand offs, and the “updated setting coupled with classic motifs” gambit often pays off in artistic endeavors, this being one of those times. But additionally, this movie fits another genre, one that sprang from the murky mess of the 2007-2008 housing market crash which catapulted the world into a global recession and saw the concept of The American Dream finally popped and deflated, and that’s the genre in which honest and good people find their lives on the edge of complete ruin thanks to believing in a system that failed them, with the ultimate “bad guys” being banks or bankers or anyone callous enough to be rich and openly uncaring during a time of great strife for many other people, you know, folks inflicted with “Scrooge McDuckitis.”

In “Hell or High Water,” Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is the kind of anti-hero seen in these types of movies, the ones that explore how the American Dream turned into a Waking Nightmare. When we meet Toby, he has already crossed that line, having decided to stage a series of small bank robberies in order to raise enough money to save their family farm from mortgage foreclosure. As if that’s not enough motivation, Tony also has children with his now-divorced wife and he’s determined not to let them continue down the path of poverty that afflicted his family for generations. Toby wants to secure his home and a future for his family. He’s a good dude. That’s what we are supposed to notice when we see him walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and demand money from the frightened tellers.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘War Dogs’

WarDogs_MoviePosterAn indictment of the for-profit war machine and sloppy government pandering…from the director of “Road Trip” and “Old School” and “The Hangover” trilogy? It happened, and it is called “War Dogs,” a cinematic adaptation of this 2011 Rolling Stones article detailing how two twenty-something dudes from Miami managed to get rich off of fulfilling government contracts for military weapons and supplies. One guy was sociable and worked very hard, and the other was a sociopath with the big vision and gumption to make things happen, and they enabled each other to dream bigger than ever, which as we all know in a story like this, could only lead to ruin. But what a ride on the way there.

David (Miles Teller) is fresh out of dropping out of college and he’s trying to make ends meet while living in very expensive South Beach Miami by massaging rich men for $75 an hour and trying to sell bed linen to retirement communities. When his stupidly hot girlfriend (Ana de Armas) lets him know that she is pregnant, he finds added pressure on him to find a way to make money and be a provider to the woman he loves and the baby he is stuck with because come on it’s not like they planned that shit yo. And those very one-dimensional descriptions of her character are apt because she only exists in this movie to provide motivation for David and to try to get some sympathy from the audience. She’s not a character. She’s a plot device with ridiculous eyes.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Alex Cross’

alex_cross_ver5_xlg“Alex Cross” is a boring, fairly hackneyed attempt at a crime procedural thriller, ably acted by Tyler Perry and Matthew Fox but weakly directed by Rob Cohen, who seems far too concerned with what’s cool as opposed to what’s smart and right for the story, and failing at both aspects anyway. What could essentially be an episode of any random network television crime procedural television show, “Alex Cross” really offers nothing new to the genre and doesn’t do anything fun or interesting with the old clichés, which results in a boring 101 minutes.

Detective Dr. Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) heads up a small team that apparently focuses on women killers, as the movie starts with them tracking down a kidnapper and saving a young girl, both of whom are unrelated to the rest of the story. Cross is pretty great at what he does, displaying a Sherlock Holmes level of crime scene deduction and reasoning that is always right and never is questioned, but he does come across a dangerous foe in the form of a random hired killer (Matthew Fox), who is hired to kill three people, and goes after them one at a time. Fox plays this role with a level of obvious insanity, all wide eyes and shaved head, and he definitely seemed to have fun playing this sadistic and crazy character, and he pretty much acts as the one watchable and somewhat interesting thing in this whole film. So Fox and his team try to catch this guy and the whole movie is a game of cat and mouse, with the killer taking out people close to Detective Dr. Cross, making it personal and forcing Cross to go out on a righteous search for retribution.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Infiltrator’

TheInfiltrator_MoviePoster“The Infiltrator” is based on the true story of the US Customs official who helped take down a huge money laundering syndicate in the 1980s by going undercover and tracking all the Colombian drug money back and forth between Colombia and America via complicit banks set up both abroad and in America. While going undercover, though, this fella maybe starts to lose sight a little of who his friends really are and also seems to enjoy being this fake mob-associated kind of guy and also it is destroying his marriage and also he’s in a lot of danger because he got in over his head a little. But while that may seem like a lot to throw into a movie that is barely over two hours long, rest assured, it IS a lot, too much in fact, so that while this movie tries to be about a lot of things, it ends up being about nothing.

Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) has been going undercover for years and he’s tired of making so little progress in the war on drugs, so he convinces his bosses to allow him to take a different approach, one that we’ve all heard before in many contexts, which is to “follow the money.” By getting his foot in the door with Pablo Escobar’s people by presenting himself as a big time money launderer, he’s hoping to amass the evidence needed to find out what they do with their money, who it goes to, and how it gets back to them “clean.” He doesn’t get along with his partner Abreu (John Leguizamo) but that is an issue for all of one scene early on in the film and then they work together with no problems for the rest of the movie. So most of “The Infiltrator” is Mazur pretending to be some made up guy named Bob Musella, and he uses this alias to embed himself with the drug cartel, starting out low on their totem pole and slowly working his way up to their bigger bosses. Along the way, Mazur and Abreu are forced to involve an agent going undercover for her first time, Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), and the three of them work together to try to bust as many people at one time as possible.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Purge: Election Year’

the-purge-election-year-movie-poster“The Purge: Election Year” is the capper to the trilogy no one saw coming, the third film in a series written and directed by James DeMonaco, and if you’ve been following along since the first movie, then you will be a little surprised to see the scope of this world opened up even more, and now a rather complete picture has been painted in a very visceral manner, with the thematic elements of class warfare and wealth inequality become the driving force behind an insane premise for a movie, let alone three of them.

The basic premise was barely laid out in the first movie, in which Ethan Hawke played a guy who installed security systems in the homes of people who could afford to barricade themselves up during Purge Night, the one night of the year in which all crime is legal for 12 hours, in an effort to let people “get it out of their systems” so that they would be cool to each other for the other 8,748 hours of the years. His character quickly discovered even his family wasn’t safe, as a bunch of psychopaths broke into their home and terrorized them all. The second movie drops this character and picks up with a new guy, who was going to use Purge Night to kill the guy who DUI-manslaughtered his son, but instead wound up saving people out on the streets and not going through with the murder. In this second movie, it is explained that people suspect the Purge was a tool by the government to eliminate the impoverished portions of their constituency. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Neon Demon’

The Neon Demon poster“The Neon Demon” is the latest fetishistic ode from Nicholas Winding Refn to the violent and off kilter exploitation films of the 1970’s. His movies like “Only God Forgives” and “Drive” and “Valhalla Rising” center on a violent, malevolent entity roaming through life and dispatching others in increasingly intense and terrible ways, and this violent entity has morphed into something altogether different, into a terrible malaise and overriding sense of danger, definitively draped over the entirety of “The Neon Demon,” as we enter a surreal world of modeling that takes more from Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” than it does any Victoria Secret catalog or runway fashion show. What if David Cronenberg and David Lynch teamed up to make “Zoolander?” That’s the direction we’re going with in “The Neon Demon,” equal parts gorgeous and grotesque, a nightmarish descent into the seedy underbelly of models and haute fashion.

And while being beautiful and striking to look at and definitely unique when compared to the rest of the movies out there for consumption right now, I do wish that “The Neon Demon” was better because while I liked it, I did not love it like I wanted to, and that’s because while it is beautiful it is also pretty vapid. Now, is that itself a remark on the fashion industry? Is this a snide critique of models and their chosen profession? More than likely it is a coincidence that a movie involving fashion is almost entirely artifice but it fits the subject matter nonetheless. And a movie does not have to be profound or “deep” to be good or entertaining, but if it is going to be shallow, than it better move briskly and efficiently, and unfortunately “The Neon Demon” does take a little while to get to the real craziness and once that’s done, the movie has about three different places it could have ended but decides to do one more scene. And then one more. And then one more. The overall film could have been tightened in editing, that’s for sure. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Shallows’

TheShallows_MoviePoster“The Shallows” is a surprisingly good killer shark thriller, a straightforward story of survival against all odds, a classic mankind versus nature tale, well shot and well acted by the one actor tasked with carrying a huge chunk of this movie on her own. It gets tense and exciting and even a little scary here and there and at just under 90 minutes long, this is the kind of movie that gets started quick, hits the gas pedal the whole way and slams headlong into a pretty spectacular ending.

Outside of “Jaws,” the killer shark movie bar has been set VERY low and “The Shallows” does a good job of elevating this bar much higher, eschewing the goofiness and campiness of the much more baffingly popular killer shark movies out there and going for more of a naturalistic approach, allowing the intensity of the situation and the bleakness of our main character’s odds to be the prevailing characteristics of this story.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Money Monster’

MoneyMonster_MoviePoster“Money Monster” is a kind of confusing movie, though not in the way one would think initially. The plot itself is quite easy to understand and there are no major twists or turns that take any effort to understand; no, in this instance, the confusion comes from the movie’s weird vacillation between broad satirical comedy and dark, edge of your seat thriller. If there could have been a better blending together of these two styles, it could have made for a nice scathing satire, but instead it seems like they just settled for fast paced thriller featuring George Clooney occasionally doing silly dances whilst wearing goofy accessories.

Lee Gates (Clooney) is a TV show host on a cable news network, like a CNBC or FOX Business type, where he talks about the stock market and gives people advice on how to invest their money, all while smacking a big red button that cues up all sorts of dumb videos that emphasize whatever he is yelling at the camera. Sometimes some girls come out and dance with him. Subtlety and nuance are most certainly not the order of the day when it comes to this portrayal of this kind of Mad Money with Jim Cramer style of show. The day after a “glitch” in some algorithm used by an investment firm lost $800 million of their customers’ money, Lee is taken hostage on his live show by a young guy named Kyle (Jack O’Connell), who lost his meager life savings in this company’s crash and only had his money invested in them because Lee suggested it on his show a few weeks prior. So who is to blame for Kyle losing all his money?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Green Room’

GreenRoom_poster “Green Room” is quite simply not for the faint of heart. Intense and foreboding, with the constant specter of gruesome violence hanging palpably over every scene, this is a movie that gets to a point in which every move and decision can lead to something unimaginably disastrous. A simple set up leads to almost unbearable tension which eventually explodes, leaving an impressive body count in its punk rock wake. In this story, no one is safe and everything is on the line, and when it gets down and dirty, watch out.

A struggling band takes a gig somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, and they take it knowing that they would be playing for a bunch of skinheads and racists. But they need the money so they accept the gig, and just try to get in, play their set and get out. Those first two parts went down just fine. Getting out becomes impossible when one of the band members (Anton Yelchin) walks into the green room moments after a murder; he sees the dead body, tries to call the police on his cell, gets stopped by the people running the club, and it is on from there. They put the whole band in the green room while they sort it out, and the band turns the green room into their holdout, knowing that these backwoods racists wouldn’t just let them walk away.

And the tension builds. And builds. And builds. Until…pop. Continue Reading …