For the week of August 12th, Sony is bringing the first season of NBC's The Blacklist to Blu-ray. The Blacklist proved to be one of the Peacock's most popular scripted dramas after its television premiere last September, and for the first half of the twenty-two-episode season, that success seemed wholly justified. While showrunner Jon Bokenkamp's creation won't win any points for originality it's a fairly standard procedural about Red Reddington (James Spader), a wily former government spook who teams up with rookie FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) to solve crimes at its best it's fleet and enjoyably preposterous (think Fringe without the sci-fi-metaphysics hook), and it has a great asset in Spader, who makes a meal out of Red. On the page, Red is cobbled together from all sorts of infinitely more iconic characters (some Mr. X from JFK here, a dash of Batman there, a whole mess of Hannibal Lecter), but Spader is such a fascinating, singular screen presence that he makes Red seem more complex that he really is. The problem, however, is that the show's central mythology episodes aren't as good as the standalone segments, and the second half starts putting a premium on the former. Bokenkamp loses control of the material, allowing for a vast and unbelievably clichιd conspiracy to ensnare Elizabeth, and this is a problem because a) each twist is more implausible than the last and b) try as she might, Boone simply isn't a forceful enough performer to make us care about what happens to her. The whole thing culminates in one of the least surprising reveals in TV/movie history; by the end, the prospect of Season 2 becomes less appealing than it was at the start of the season. Spader is great all the way through, but you can't help feeling that he deserves better.
From Lionsgate comes the one-man drama Locke. In many ways, Locke is less a proper narrative film than it is an acting exercise; the whole film is Tom Hardy's construction foreman Ivan Locke as he makes a fateful drive from Birmingham to London. It's the eve of Locke's biggest professional triumph, but instead he is on his way to triage the damage caused by his biggest personal failing (a contrived bit of parallelism that mostly works here), and the whole film unfolds through a series of phone conversations that Locke conducts with the important people in his life as he tries to reconcile these two poles. I'm not sure this is a film in a traditional sense: Locke doesn't have a traditional character arc, and the "conclusion," as it were, offers little resolution, with Locke as unsettled as he was at the beginning of the picture. The result is a dramatic experience that isn't fully satisfying it's very possible you will reach the end of this 80-minute feature and think either, "That was a ninety-minute advertisement for the many technical features of a BMW X5," or, "So what?" Yet the journey to that ending proves surprisingly compelling, and that's entirely due to Hardy's towering performance. He works wonders within the compressed temporal and physical spaces, creating a full impression of a man on the verge. Unlike, say, Tommy Riordan from Warrior or Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, Locke is an ordinary man, almost painfully so, but Hardy is able to mine such suspense from the character's human reactions. It's thrilling watching him talk a co-worker (voiced by Sherlock's Andrew Scott) through one crisis after another at his construction site and quietly devastating as he tries to negotiate his way through the fallout of his lone personal indiscretion (a late conversation between Locke and his teenage son is a marvel writer/director Steven Knight lets the moment play out in real time, so we get to watch Locke go from composed to emotionally wrought in a few uninterrupted minutes). Despite some questionable creative choices an attempt at a Welsh brogue that oscillates between note perfection and something that sounds like a bad Indian accent, Knight's decision to have Locke deliver veddy THEATRICAL monologues at an imaginary, unseen projection of his father in the backseat Hardy is spellbinding, and the sole reason to catch Locke.
Disney is putting out a fresh spate of their catalog favorites on Blu-ray this week, and of the four most prominent titles - The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Fun and Fancy Free, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Hercules, and Tarzan - it's Hercules that merits special consideration. At first glance, Hercules is no different from any of Disney's mid-1990s fare: it's got a bland title hero, a scene-stealing villain, and a predictably tuneful musical score from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Pocahontas composer Alan Menken. That said, Hercules is unique in that it turns those seemingly uninspired beats into advantages; along with the Mouse House's underrated 2000 comedy The Emperor's New Groove, Hercules is practically a satire of the conventional Disney template. The whole thing plays like a piss take of the Greek myth, with directors Ron Clements and John Musker giving the proceedings a poppy, goofy charm that undercuts Hercules' "legend." Even Hercules' fundamental blandness feels deliberate, as if both to signify how little his adventure matters and to highlight the far more compelling characters around him. Susan Egan's Megara carries on with a sly, understated wit that's more Katharine Hepburn than Ariel or Belle, and Danny DeVito is his rascally, grumbly self as Hercules' sidekick Phil. But it's James Woods who steals the show as Hades, the film's nominal Big Bad, and I say "nominal" because his misdeeds don't have the sneering villainy of a Gaston or an Ursula. Hades comes off like a sleazy car salesman or a particularly unctuous corporate exec, and he's so hilariously self-satisfied and dismissive of Hercules that he takes the spotlight away from the hero every time he's on-screen. As with Robin Williams in Aladdin, the animators let Woods be Woods, culling together the most appropriate bits from hours of his freewheeling improvisations, and that spontaneity makes Hades...excuse me, Hercules a real treat.
Of Hercules, Kenneth Brown wrote that the film "clips along with brisk abandon, tossing out any joke that might stick. Some do. Others don't. No matter. Whatever the hit rate, an unmistakable electricity pulses through each scene and drives the film forward even when groan-inducing gags threaten to drag it down. Donovan, DeVito and Egan press the advantage, settling comfortably into the groove and rhythm of the comedy, and manage to make a boy scout demigod, sarcastic femme fatale and gruff Mickey Goldmill sendup likeable and fairly memorable. Engaging as they are, though, it's better to be bad, and Woods steals the show with a laugh and a wink, leering, sneering and temper tantrumming his way into Disney villain infamy with ease...Even when writers Ron Clements, John Musker and Barry Johnson needlessly manufacture more conflict through a betrayal in Hercules' ranks, Hades and the creatures continue to provide real entertainment and all the titan-clashing necessary to propel the film through an exciting third act. Predictable? Yeah, but plot twists and surprises haven't exactly proven to be Disney's strong suit...It isn't as effortless as Disney's best, though, even if its spunk, moxie and spirit suggests it is. Ah well. I advise powering down the critical portions of your brain and just having as much fun as you can with everything Clements and Musker have on tap. It isn't the co-directors' finest hour, but it offers a healthy dose of laughter, and laughter goes a long way."
Finally, Warner Archive is bringing the film noir Out of the Past to Blu-ray. This is one of the genre's titans, a bleak, twisty thriller about Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum, giving one of his most iconic performances), a down-and-out P.I. who agrees to find the missing girlfriend (Jane Greer, as terrifying and seductive a noir heroine as the genre has ever produced) of a very bad man (Kirk Douglas, all shark's-teeth menace). It should come as no surprise that Markham does, or that he also falls in love with the femme fatale (it's the biggest mistake he'll ever make), but Out of the Past really isn't interested in shocking us. There's a simmering, low-lying fatalism to the proceedings that suffocates Markham even before the movie really gets going; director Jacques Tourneur begins the film in medias res, well after Markham has already doomed himself, and the rest of the picture unfolds like a slow-moving train wreck. The whole thing's a perfectly calibrated exercise in mood and style, with Tourneur making brilliant use of DP Nicholas Musuraca's chiaroscuro photography - as Roger Ebert, who was a huge fan of Out of the Past, put it in his "Great Movies" review, "few movies use smoking as well as this one; in their scenes together, it would be fair to say that Mitchum and Douglas smoke at each other, in a sublimated form of fencing...Musuraca throws light into the empty space between the two actors, so that when they exhale, the smoke is visible as bright white clouds" and Daniel Mainwaring's acid-tinged script, which received uncredited assists from Frank Fenton and noir master James M. Cain. Other movies have tried to emulate its greatness (and Greer even co-starred in one of them: Taylor Hackford's not-half-bad 1984 remake Against All Odds, which had great work from Jeff Bridges and James Woods in the Mitchum and Douglas parts, respectively), but for pure noir thrills, there's no beating this one. Along with Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, and Nicholas Ray's criminally underseen They Live by Night, Out of the Past stands as one of the most important film noirs of the 1940s.
Michael Reuben's Blu-ray review noted that "along with Double Indemnity, which appeared three years earlier, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past is one of the classics of film noir, but unlike Billy Wilder's morality play about lust, murder and insurance, Tourneur's stylish tale of a detective sauntering toward his doom wasn't immediately recognized as a masterpiece. Out of the Past needed time to find its audience. One reason was that the film wasn't produced by a major studio, which helps explains why it wasn't showered with the Oscar nominations that greeted Double Indemnity. Another reason was that its director was best known for horror films like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie - profitable fare, but not serious work, by the standards of the time. But probably the main reason is that Out of the Past is a more challenging work than Double Indemnity. Its story, adapted by Daniel Mainwaring from his own novel (under the pen name Geoffrey Homes) winds, twists and doubles back on itself, with essential plot information casually tossed off along the way. It's a film that requires (and rewards) strict attention from the viewer and multiple viewings. In that sense, the film was ahead of its time. It had to await an audience that was ready for it."