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“FINCH”: Fatherhood

November 8, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

“FINCH” My rating: B (Apple +)

115 minutes | MPAA:PR-13

Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks could probably sell refrigerators to Eskimos.

That’s what he does, metaphorically speaking, in “Finch,” a post-apocalyptic science fantasy that is equal parts Cormack McCarthy’s “The Road,” Pixar’s “Wall-E” and Hanks’ “Cast Away.”

If that sounds like an unweildy mashup of unlikely bedfellows…well, it is. But Hanks is such a watchable presence that he makes this one-man show worthwhile.

Fitch (Hanks) lives alone in an industrial bunker beneath the ruins of St. Louis. A decade earlier a sonic flare wiped out modern civilization and left Earth scorched by deadly ultraviolet rays.

Most days Fitch suits up in protective gear to search for supplies. He leaves back in the safety of the bunker the only other living creature in his life, a dog named Goodyear on whom he lavishes affection.

The narrative of Miguel Sapochnik’s feature (the script is by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell) centers first on Finch’s constructing a humanoid-ish robot and programming it to learn more or less like a human child.

This creature, who will eventually name itself Jeff, begins by stuttering static but over time learns to talk (Jeff is voiced by Caleb Landry Jones). It is curious, just like a child, which means that it sometimes gets into trouble.

But it is also loyal to its creator/father and understands that its purpose is to take care of Goodyear should anything happen to Finch. Which seems likely, given the bloody cough he’s developed.

The bulk of the film takes place on the road as Finch loads up Jeff and the pooch into an ancient recreational vehicle in an attempt to outrun the killer storms that are racking the Midwest. They head out West; Finch has it in his head that he’d like to see the Golden Gate Bridge.

There are dangers, both natural and manmade. But “Finch” isn’t so much about reaching a destination as experiencing the possibilities of one’s humanity along the way.

Tom Hanks and “Jeff”

As mentioned earlier, this is pretty much a one-man show. Good thing that man is Hanks, who is able to plumb all sorts of levels without ever pushing too hard, developing his character’s crushing loneliness, his need for companionship, his parental instincts, his fears, his hopes and, finally, his resignation to his fate.

Of course he gets immeasurable help from the designers and animators of Jeff, a creation of metal and plastic that develops a personality before our eyes. I can’t tell you how much of Jeff is puppetry, how much CG, but the results are utterly convincing. Rarely does a human actor get the chance to express a character’s personality through physical performance; it’s rarer still to pull it off with a mechanical contraption.

But that’s what production designer Tom Meyer and his crew have achieved here. Jeff may be all nuts and bolts, but he’s also disarmingly human. This is no small accomplishment.

“Finch” is jammed with improbabilities and explains virtually nothing about Finch’s past or how he came to be in this situation.

But here again Hanks compensates just by being, well, Tom Hanks. His essential “Hank-ness” gently expands to fill the gaps. Watching, we understand that we’re in good hands.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE HARDER THEY FALL”: Back to black

November 4, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Danielle Deadwyler, Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz

“THE HARDER THEY FALL” My rating: C+ (Netflix)

130 minutes | MPAA rating: R

If “The Harder They Fall” is a thematic and narrative mess, at least it’s a moderately entertaining mess.

Jaymes Samuel’s film aspires to Leone-level mythology while delivering an all-black (or mostly black) Western adventure.

Samuel and co-writer Boaz Yakin have come up with a wholly fictional (and wholly implausible) plot, but they’ve populated it with historic figures…or at least characters who bear the names of real African American noteworthies like Bill Pickett, Stagecoach Mary Fields, Cherokee Bill and Jim Beckworth.

Those names are the most realistic thing about the film. The characters are paper thin (they sometimes accrue a simulacrum of substance through the sheer charisma of the performers) and nothing like psychological realism rears its head.

Similarly, the physical production is impressive without ever really being convincing.  This is an oddly spic-and-span version of the West…the horses bleed when shot but apparently they don’t defecate, given the pristine state of the streets.  The wardrobe choices — especially for the women characters — are quite wonderful in their eccentricity, but at the cost of constantly reminding us that we’re watching a movie.

Indeed, the model for “The Harder They Fall” is less the traditional Western than a Marvel movie.  Instead of a crew of specially-gifted superheroes we get two competing crews of specially-gifted and peculiarly-costumed gunfighters.

In a prologue we see outlaw Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) invade a remote farmhouse, shoot the husband and wife and terrorize their young son.

Years later that child has grown to be Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), an outlaw gang leader whose specialty is preying on other outlaws.  You see, Nat thirsts for revenge on Rufus, but that killer is serving a life sentence in prison. So he occupies himself with bothering the still-active remnants of Rufus’ gang.

But wouldn’t you know it…Rufus pulls strings and gets himself freed from stir to run amok once again.  You know it’s all going to end with a big shootout that will reduce a frontier town to rubble and a mano-a-mano confrontation between Nate and his nemesis.

The film is packed with terrific actors on both sides of the feud:  Ed Gathegi, Damon Wayans Jr., Lakeith Stanfield. Regina King is too good an actress to be stuck with a cardboard villainess like Trudy Smith, but by God she looks great in her all-black outfit topped by a bowler hat.

Regina King, Idris Elba, LaKeith Stanfield

Zazie Beetz is an alluring explosion of hair as saloon owner Mary Fields, who is also hero Nate’s love interest.

And two members of the Love Gang just about steal the show:  Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffee, a cross-dressing diminutive saloon bouncer and R.J. Cyler as Beckworth, one of those mouthy, pistol-spinning wannabe gunfighters who exude more bravado than common sense.

Oh, and let’s not forget Delroy Lindo as grizzled lawman Bass Reeves, who teams up with one band of outlaws to defeat an even worse bunch.

This is an Old West where white faces are peripheral at best. Most of the action unfolds in all-black burgs, and while one assumes this milieu would have been rife with racism, the film really isn’t interested in making a social statemtent. 

(Although there’s one elaborate visual joke: the black outlaws decide to rob a bank in a white town…and when I say “white” I mean really white.  The whole place — houses, storefronts, hitching posts, boardwalks — have been painted bright white. You’d have to shade your eyes on a cloudy day.)

Samuel gets playful with the soundtrack, employing bits of Morricone mischief but relying mostly on reggae.  

On the downside there are several moments of pure sadism that leave a bad taste. And the screenplay features a couple of long monologues that really only prove how much better Tarantino is at this sort of thing.

But, hey, the film looks great. Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s cinematography lovingly dwells on both the Western landscape and the faces of the players.

If it all never really comes together coherently, at least there’s plenty to look at.

| Robert W. Butler

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“ARMY OF THIEVES”: Nimble-fingered

November 2, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Matthias Schweighofer

“Army of Thieves” My rating: B- (Netflix)

127 minutes | No MPAA rating

The heist-in-zombie-plagued-Las Vegas title “Army of the Dead” was, to me, anyway, a big bloated bore.

Weirdly, I kinda love “Army of Thieves,” a prequel that provides the back story of Ludwig Dieter, the squirrelly safecracker from the first movie.

Combining the whimsey and visual panache of “Amelie” with the well-worn cliches of a caper flick (with, yeah,  zombies lurking in the distant background), this effort from director Matthias Schweighofer (who also stars as the nimble-fingered Dieter) manages to be consistently diverting.

In large part it’s because Schweighofer is so good as Dieter, a safe-obsessed German nerd who in moments of crisis shrieks like a schoolgirl. He’s anything but heroic…in fact, the sorts of manly characters who usually dominate action films are here portrayed as villains.

Dieter has a little-watched YouTube series in which he rhapsodizes about a safe designer from the early 1900s who produced four impenetrable bank vaults inspired by Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

They’ve got names like Siegfried and Valkyrie and each has a specific design guaranteed to discourage any robbery attempts.

Apparently Dieter has one steady viewer. He’s contacted by the gorgeous Gwendoline (“GoT’s” Nathalie Emmanuel) who wants him to join her team of bank robbers.  Her plan is to hit the Ring Cycle safes in various banks across Europe, then move on to the final objective, the massive Gotterdammerung beneath a Las Vegas casino.

(News broadcasts scattered throughout the film inform us that there’s a zombie outbreak in Vegas.  The plague is yet to cross the Atlantic.)

Other members of the team include a master computer hacker (Ruby O. Fee), a skilled if overly-chatty getaway driver (Guz Khan) and the preening Brad (Stuart Martin), an imposing physical specimen who’s a dead-ringer for Hugh Jackman in Wolverine mode.

Turns out the intimidating Brad is also Gwendoline’s current squeeze, a situation that poses additional dangers as our dweeby protagonist finds himself falling ever more deeply for his boss lady’s charms. (Hard to blame him…Gwendoline is pretty charming.)

Shay Hatton’s screenplay (he also penned “Army of the Dead”) is jammed with amusing wordplay (whereas the earlier film was jammed with over-the-top mayhem) and the heist sequences have been paced and edited for maximum tension.

“Army of Thieves” ends pretty much where “Army of the Dead” began…but its pleasures don’t require any knowledge of the earlier movie.  It’s just fun.

| Robert W. Butler

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“NO FUTURE”: Bassett eyes

November 2, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Catherine Keener, Charlie Heaton

“NO FUTURE” My rating: B- (Amazon Prime)

89 minutes | No MPAA rating

A young man has a love affair with his best friend’s mom.

Sounds like not-very-original porn.

Well, “No Future” isn’t porn, at least not in the conventional sense.  Some viewers may find its singleminded obsession with dead-end lives a form of pornography.

What we’ve got in Andrew Irvine and Mark Smoot’s feature (they share both writing and directing credits) is a dour drama about a recovering addict struggling to stick to the straight and narrow and consumed with guilt about the bad stuff he did while under the influence.

Will (“Stranger Things’” Charlie Heaton, who possesses the saddest set of eyes this side of an abused Bassett Hound) lives in what appears to be a small Texas town.  He’s been going regularly to AA meetings, has an attentive and loving girlfriend (Rosa Salazar).

But he’s haunted by his past.  His widowed father (Jackie Earle Haley) can barely tolerate his son…seems that when Will’s mom was dying of cancer the kid pilfered her pain meds.

Will’s past comes back to haunt him in even more immediate fashion with the unexpected arrival of his childhood friend Chris (“Yellowstone’s” Jefferson White), fresh out of prison and falling back into his old ways.  Will was largely responsible for Chris becoming a junkie; now his old bud’s presence threatens Will’s recovery.  He tells Chris they can’t associate.

Chis resignedly accepts this fact, then goes home and overdoses. Accident or suicide? That’s the question that torments his mother Claire (Catherine Keener), who discovers the body.

Despite the 30 or more years separating them, Will and Claire find themselves in a secret physical relationship that oozes grief, guilt and loss. Maybe they somehow assume their affair will make them feel better.

Nope.  A shroud of desperation and doom envelops “No Future”…hell, the title alone should raise red flags.

To their credit, the filmmakers don’t dwell on the sexual nature of this pairing.  Their approach is utterly sincere, soberly non exploitative. 

And the performances — especially from Keener in full anti-glamour mode — are the stuff of heartbreak.

And yet “No Future” is so unrelentingly glum that it’s a struggle to sit through.  Ultimately the experience is so devoid of hope that some may leave the film feeling that recovery is an impossibility.

Surely that’s not the message we’re supposed to take away.

| Robert W. Butler

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“DUNE”: The slow blade penetrates the shield

October 22, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Zendaya, Timothee Chalamet

“DUNE” My rating: B (In theaters and HBO Max)

155 minutes | |MPAA rating: PG-13

In making his new version of “Dune,” director  Denis Villeneuve has followed his own version of the Hippocratic oath.

Rather than “First, do no harm,” his mantra has been “Above all, do nothing stupid.”

And he hasn’t. 

 Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling 1965 sci-fi epic is consistently smart, effectively acted  and  spectacularly well designed.

 If its slow pacing will irritate some and its emotional distance prove problematic, at least there are none of the wince-worthy moments that marred David Lynch’s 1984 version.

Fans of the novel should be overcome with gratitude that a world-class director took on this material with respect and insight.  It’s an astoundingly faithful film adaptation; whatever narrative issues the film possesses are those of the novel.

First things first…even at 2 hours and 35 minutes this is only half the “Dune” story.  It ends with young Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) a fugitive from the brutal Harkonnen  clan who have killed his father and seized control of the desert planet Arrakis and its vast wealth of spice. When last we see him he’s been taken in by the Fremen, the cave-dwelling locals.

Spice — for any reader who somehow managed to avoid the book as a young person —  is a hallucinogen mined from the sand dunes of Arrakis; its properties make space navigation possible and will fuel the mystical revolution that will undoubtedly dominate a second “Dune” movie. 

But here’s the deal:  I’m not even going to try here to delve into all the story’s plot points: the betrayals, the minor characters,  the allegorical parallels (Paul’s universe-spanning revolt, carried out by religious fanatics from the desert, smacks of our own issues with Islamic fundamentalism).  

I’m gonna assume most of you know the book and want to know how it works as a film.

Well, it works just fine.  Going in I feared that the reedy Chalamet would be just too damn wimpy for the key role of Paul, but you can feel the character grow and mature from scene to scene.

We barely get to spend any time with Zendaya as Chani, the girl-warrior who will become Paul’s paramour (though seen throughout in Paul’s visions, she doesn’t show up as an actual character until the last 15 minutes); but she looks great and exudes the appropriate don’t-screw-with-me desert attitude.

Josh Brolin, Oscar Isaac

There are so many characters here that few get much screen time.  Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson have real presence as Paul’s parents, while players like Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Charlotte Rampling and Javier Bardem barely get a chance to register.

A happy exception is Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho, Paul’s military mentor and friend; I don’t know if it’s good acting or if I just like watching Momoa, but he really makes an impression.

(BTW: Look for Kansas City-reared actors Stephen McKinley Henderson and David Dastmalchian in supporting roles.)

Production quality is off the charts (I was particularly taken with the “dragonfly” aircraft employed on Arrakis) and the costuming hugely effective.

The big battle scenes feel a little generic…the violence is PG-13 and I was a tad underwhelmed.

And while I was never bored by this “Dune,” I was never really moved, either.  It’s a good ride, but I wasn’t blown away.

Still, I’m ready for Part II. The sooner the better.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE VELVET UNDERGROUND”: Tantalizing snippets

October 20, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

The Velvet Underground…and Nico

“THE VELVET UNDERGROUND”  My rating: B (Apple +)

121 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Todd Haynes’ new documentary about The Velvet Underground is a movie made by a fan for other fans.

It presumes a certain amount of shared musical history on the part of viewers. It is most definitely NOT “Velvet Underground 101.”  

It’s not interested in dragging out scholarly arguments about the Velvet Underground’s contribution to punk culture or in laying out a careful chronology of the band’s birth and demise.  There’s no analysis of the place of Velvets Lou Reed and John Cale as formidable  solo artists. Heck, I don’t think even one of the band’s songs is played from beginning to end…mostly we get tantalizing snippets. 

Instead Haynes (who has a history of music-themed films like “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” “Velvet Goldmine” and the Dylan-centric “I’m Not There”) strives to give us a broad  impressionistic view of the personalities behind the Velvets and the early-‘60s Bohemian New York milieu which spawned them.

He draws heavily on archival footage of Andy Warhol’s Factory, with its heady mishmash of visual artists, actors, poets, dancers and musicians, creating hallucinogenic montages — including tons of split-screen effects — that look for all the world like one of those early rock concert light shows.

He interviews the two surviving members of the original Velvets (the viola-playing Welshman Cale and the androgynous drummer Maureen Tucker) and draws extensively on audio recordings of the late Lou Reed talking about his time with the band.

Fellow musician Jonathan Richman, a Velvets acolyte back in the day, pops up frequently to discuss why, in his estimation, the band mattered.

There is, of course, a chunk of the film devoted to the late Nico, the neurasthenic German blonde hand-picked by Warhol to be the band’s coolly sexy talisman and, hopefully, their introduction to the commercial mainstream. (Keep dreaming, Andy…not in a million years.)

On some levels “The Velvet Underground” is maddeningly superficial.  The rift between Cale and Reed that led to the latter secretly “firing” the former is written off as a personality clash.  Well, yeah, but how about some details?

And Reed’s notorious bad behavior (often drug-fueled) at various stages of his career is pushed aside and glossed over.

But to watch this doc is to be plunged into the heady world of early art rock with all its dissonance and angst.  It’s a time machine really, and for Velvet fans it’s a nostalgic trip back to the creation of a band that regarded nostalgia as the purview of losers.

| Robert W. Butler

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“MASS”: Long day’s journey into conciliation

October 15, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimptgon

“MASS” My rating: B+ (AMC Town Center)

110 minutes | MPAA: PG-13

There’s no way “Mass” should work.

Or even if it works, the very premise sounds so unbearable that only masochists would show up for it.

But here’s the thing: Fran Kranz’s feature writing/directing debut (up to now I’ve know him only as the actor who nailed the comically stoned Marty in 2011’s “Cabin in the Woods”) is not only supernaturally well-written, but offers performances of jaw-dropping depth.

The squirm-worthy setup: Two couples meet in a nondescript church parlor to discuss a tragedy more than a decade old. One pair are mourning the death of their son in a school mass shooting. The other are the parents of the killer. This is the first time they’ve spoken to each other without the presence of cameras and reporters and lawyers.

The film’s first 20 minutes are a tease of sorts. Kranz devotes much time to the efforts of two church volunteers (Breeda Wool, Kagen Albright) to prepare a space for the meeting. A rep (Michelle N. Carter) of an agency that deals with this sort of reconciliation makes an inspection and offers suggestions (she’s concerned that the sound of a choir practice elsewhere in the building may drift into the room; also, a table full of refreshments makes it look too much like a party).

We meet the first couple, Jay and Gail (Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton), sitting in their car outside. They’re not sure they can go through with this.

At this point in the proceeding we’re not sure if they’re the parents of the killer or of one of his victims: in fact, that uncertainty lingers for several minutes after the arrival of the other couple, Linda and Richard (Ann Dowd, Reed Birney). It takes some uncomfortable small talk before they get down to discussing what haunts them all and we figure out who’s who.

Over the course of 90 real-time minutes they move from wary politeness to bitterness, fury, regret and eventually a sort of mutual conciliation borne of shared pain.

For while Jay and Gail finally have the opportunity to rail at Linda and Richard for ignoring the signals that their loner son was homicidal, it becomes clear that far from being neglectful, Linda and Richard watched their boy, got him therapy, and were relieved when it appeared (falsely) that he had finally found his place in high school society.

Ann Dowd, Reed Birney

And in the wake of all that horror, Linda and Richard have been dunned with lawsuits, hounded by the media. Their marriage has fallen apart. They’re so sorry, but don’t know what else they might have done.

A lesser writer than Kranz would have penned all sorts of declarative passages to delineate where these characters are coming from. Not here. We pick up most of the details of that tragic day and its aftermath tangentially, assembling a big picture from small reveals.

Watching this all unfold on a single set, one assumes “Mass” is an adaptation of stage play. Nope. Kranz wrote it for the screen. But even then he doesn’t gussie things up cinematically. His camera is mostly stationary (a couple of pans between speakers), there’s no musical track to speak of…the emphasis is on the characters.

And, Holy Shit, do his four lead players come through.

Isaacs nails the American male who nurses his pain within a shell of outward masculinity (you’d never know he was a Brit); Plimpton brilliantly traverses her character’s journey from resentment to generosity.

But the show is stolen by Dowd and Birney as the parents of the killer. Dowd will forever be known as one of the great villains for her turn as the tormenting Aunt Lydia on “The Handmaid’s Tale”; here she is devastating as Linda, pathetic in her attempts to please and crippled by grief and guilt.

And Birney (the least known of the four major players despite a Tony, an Obie and 45 years as one of Hollywood’s most reliable character actors) damn near steals the show as Richard, a white-collar conservative (he shows up in suit and tie) whom many will initially see as perennially in denial. But just wait; before it’s all over Richard will reveal anguish to match that of anyone else.

Hard to believe this Kranz’s first turn behind the camera. I’m dying to see what he gives us next.

|Robert W. Butler

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“NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK”: Time after time (after time after time)

October 15, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr.

“NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK” My rating: C (VOD on Oct. 15)

111 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Time travel love stories — the ones that work, anyway — convince us of the inevitability of two souls finding each other across temporal and spacial eternities.

Basically you’ve got to leave one of these flicks feeling that the love relationship depicted is so earth-shakingly right that it must have been preordained by the fates.

John Ridley’s “Needle in a Timestack” aims for that sort of certainty in love…but comes up short.

It’s not for want of trying. The film has been very well cast; the performances are solid.

And yet it never quite works. Mainly, I think, because it doesn’t believe it’s own line of b.s.

Ridley’s screenplay (based on Robert Silverberg’s short story) unfolds in a near future that looks pretty much like ours. The big difference is that the world now is plagued with “time shifts,” waves of distortion that move across the landscape like a liquid wall.

In their wake some people’s realities are altered. They now have different spouses or jobs…and they have no memory of their previous lives.

Moreover, time travel is now a luxury available to the very wealthy. Despite rules to prevent the retro-retooling of the present, some of these high-tech vacationers do go into the past in order to fiddle with the future.

How did these “time shifts” come to be? Experiment gone bad? Interplanetary collision? COVID vaccine side effects?

The film doesn’t explain. Which is the first strike against it.

Anyway, Nick and Janine (Leslie Odom Jr., Cynthia Erivo) are deeply in love. So they tell us…I never once felt it.

But in the wake of a particularly disruptive time shift, Nick becomes uneasy, convinced that Janine’s ex, the fabulously wealthy tech industrialist Tommy (Orlando Bloom), is using time travel to alter the past so as to reclaim Janine.

Maybe Nick is just paranoid. Or maybe not…his own sister (Jadyn Wang) has gone deep into debt in order to travel back in time to prevent the accidental death of her best friend.

In flashbacks (are they flashbacks, really, or an alternative reality depicting a different time line?) we witness Nick’s doomed romance with Alex (Freida Pinto)…doomed because without him realizing it, he’s fated to end up with Janine.”Fated” may be the wrong word. As Ridley’s dialogue insists on telling us at every opportunity, time is a circle. No beginning, no end, just an eternal round and round and round.

Now that’s a nifty concept, one thoroughly examined in countless pot-fueled late-night sessions in college dorm rooms. But “Needle in a Timestack” never makes its case emotionally. It’s more like a schematic for a Ted Talk.

Ridley, a cinematic jack of all trades (numerous producing credits, a mess of screenplays — “Three Kings,” “Red Tails,” “12 Years a Slave” — and a ton of TV) gets props for eschewing the usual fx-heavy trappings (when late in the film Nick becomes a time traveler, the tech is absurdly low) and concentrating instead on the human issues.

But something has gone wrong. At film’s end my reaction was less “aaaahhhhhh” than “uuuuuuuhhhh?”

| Robert W. Butler

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“KATE”: Girl’s night out

October 13, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Mary Elizabeth Winstead

“KATE” My rating: B (Netflix)

106 minutes | MPAA rating: R

If Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” and the noir classic “D.O.A.” had a baby, it would look a lot like “Kate,” a lean, sleek female-centric actioner from director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan that arrives with a bang, knocks your socks off for 90 minutes, and leaves you limp but weirdly invigorated.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead portrays our title character, an orphan (think “La Femme Nikita”) trained in the arts of assassination by an untrustworthy father figure (Woody Harrellson) and turned loose to do the dirty work of the Yakuza families of Tokyo.

Early on Kate passes out while driving; she awakens in a hospital where (like Edmund O’Brien in “D.O.A.”) she’s informed that she has ingested a lethal dose of radioactive material. She’s got maybe 24 hours.

She’ll use that time to ruthlessly hunt down her poisoner, a high-ranking gangster who believes she knows too much to be allowed to retire. Along the way she’ll kidnap the guy’s teenage granddaughter (Miku Patricia Martineau), who over the course of a long night morphs from entitled brat to Kate’s Girl Friday and avenging mini-angel.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Patricia Martineau

“Kate” doesn’t require an actress as talented as Winstead (check out her exemplary work on the second season of “Fargo” and the criminally underappreciated political/horror spoof “BrainDead”). Mostly she has to look good with a gun…mission accomplished.

But Winstead imbues her relentless killer with very human moments and frailties. After a while it’s positively painful to watch her radiated body fall apart before our eyes; yet our girl always finds the superhuman strength to take on one more bad guy.

And the fight scenes…wow. They come with clockwork regularity and have the furious intensity of a John Wick confrontation. Guns, knives, swords, feet, knuckles…Kate employs them all to leave behind a long trail of dead Yakuza.

The film is crammed with little homages to other movies: “Kill Bill” (a nightclub with an all-girl band, a duel with samurai swords, a deadly schoolgirl), “Aliens” (Kate chops off her hair into a mayhem-friendly Ripley ‘do), “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” (the adolescent sidekick) and a slew of others.

Plus the Japanese players have been cast for their unique facial features. Talk about a passle of memorable mugs.

Director Nicolas-Troyan is the guy behind the “Snow White” franchise, which I’ve found visually interesting and dramatically inert. But here he boils things down to pure movement — there’s a nighttime shootout involving dozens of gunmen, all armed with laser-equipped automatic weapons, and the ballet of zig-zagging light beams, bloody eruptions and shattering glass is like nothing I’ve seen before.

“Kate” doesn’t go deep, but it is unquestionably the most satisfying of the recent crop of tough-girl action films. Just enjoy the ride.

| Robert W. Butler

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“SOUTH OF HEAVEN”: Nice guy with a gun

October 9, 2021 by butlerscinemascene

Evangeline Lilly, Jason Sudeikis

“SOUTH OF HEAVEN” My rating: C (Glenwood Arts and VOD)

120 minutes | No MPAA rating

Thanks to the awards magnet known as “Ted Lasso,” 2021 is going down as Jason Sudeikis’ year. Not even a misstep like “South of Heaven” will change that.

What we’ve got here is a multiple-personality crime yarn about an ex-con who gets caught up in ugly (and wildly improbable) events.

We first meet Jimmy (the KC-reared Sudeikis) at his parole hearing in a Texas prison.  He tells the board that after serving 12 years of a 15-year sentence for bank robbery, he’s ready to return home and nurse his childhood sweetheart, who is dying of cancer.

“Lasso” fans may be struck with deja vu.  Jimmy has more than a little in common with the Kansas-bred coach.  There’s no ‘stache, but he shares with Ted a laconic nice-guyness and an innate sweetness. (In fact, Jimmy seems way too copacetic to be a career crook; eventually we’ll learn that the botched bank job was his only foray into crime.) 

Moreover, both characters have that aw-shucks Midwestern way of talking. The big difference is that Ted is bent on amusing us, what with all his witty literary and cultural namedropping. Jimmy, on the other hand, isn’t deliberately funny and doesn’t have all that much to say.

Initially Aharon Keshales’ film (co-written with Kai Mark and Navot Papushado) presents itself as a tear-jerking love story.  The paroled Jimmy returns to his gal Annie (Evangeline Lilly with a blond pixie cut); he’s devoted to making her last months count.

But staying straight ain’t easy.  Jimmy’s parole officer, Schmidt (Shea Whigham, a fine actor here shamelessly overacting), is a creep who threatens to send Jimmy back to prison if he doesn’t serve as a mule in Schmidt’s mini crime syndicate.

On Schmidt’s behalf our reluctant hero finds himself running afoul of both a Hispanic drug lord (Amaury Nolasco) and an African-American gangster (Mike Colter).  (Why are the heavies minorities? Just curious.) At one point the latter kidnaps Annie because he believes Jimmy has made off with a half million of his ill-gotten gains.

Mike Colter

A desperate Jimmy responds by snatching the gangster’s entitled tweener son (Thaddeus J. Mixson).

Yeah, there’s way too much plot here, all of it ending in a most unromantic blood bath.

The screenplay alternates between moments of ghastly violence and sadism and genuinely thoughtful interludes, like the odd friendships that develops between Annie and the gangster and Jimmy and the gangster’s kid. 

If Jimmy seems a sort of dry run for Ted Lasso,  Colter’s erudite gangster is a reprise of his recurring character in TV’s “The Good Wife.” 

Sudeikis gives it the old college try, but I so love his gentle comedy that I felt like he was playing an ex-con in an “SNL” skit…you know, just a second away from donning a silly track suit and doing a goofy dance. It’s hard work reconciling the actor’s affable essence with the avenging angel he becomes in the last reel — like watching Mary Poppins mutate into Steven Segal.

| Robert W. Butler 

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