The week after Christmas always finds Blu-ray distributors taking a bit of a break, yet this most recent home-media offering, light as it may be, still offers some notable titles. First up is S. Craig Zahler's horror-western Bone Tomahawk. For a certain cross-section of movie fans, all I need to stay is "Kurt Russell stars in another Western," and that's all you'll need, but Bone Tomahawk has both more and less about which to get excited. The good: as Westerns go, this one indulges in some canny genre-blending. We start in The Searchers territory, as a small-town sheriff (Russell), his addled deputy (Richard Jenkins), a deadly gunsel (Matthew Fox), and an injured cowboy (Patrick Wilson) set off to rescue the cowboy's wife (Banshee's Lili Simmons) from a brutal indigenous tribe, except the tribe in question isn't anything like we're expecting, and our heroes' desperate stand against them leads the movie into, I kid you not, the stomach-churning violence of Cannibal Holocaust. Still, what keeps us watching through the orgy of blood at the end and the more measured trailblazing before the third act is also fairly surprising. Zahler is trying to make an honest-to-goodness Howard Hawks Western, one where a group of professionals overcome their differences to Do the Right Thing, and the interactions between the four leads could have come straight from Rio Bravo. Fox gives his best-ever performance (for the first time in his career, he's actually interesting on-screen), while Wilson, who is the movie's nominal star, does yeoman's work as the noble hero. Still, the best stuff comes from the senior members of the cast. Russell is a Western icon by this point (and he's even better in The Hateful Eight!), so while the movie doesn't interrogate his image much, it doesn't need to - no one does laconic badass better than Russell (he does get one indelible moment, though, a gory-exciting bit of comeuppance that ranks alongside anything Snake Plissken ever did). And in a just world, Jenkins would garner a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work as Russell's sidekick, an ever-loyal bumbler who's equal parts Walter Brennan and a Golden Retriever and who provides Bone Tomahawk with its emotional core. It helps, too, that Zahler's script is so rich and engaging. I thought of the Coen Brothers more than once - his characters aren't content to remain simple genre archetypes, with Zahler's text providing them loopy, off-center dialogues on flea circuses, outdoor living, the nature of the universe, and everything in between. Too bad Zahler the director isn't as interesting as Zahler the writer, and therein lies the rub. For all his facility with actors, for all his linguistic flair, Zahler can barely stage a routine scene to save his life. Forget the big action scenes (only the film's gruesome setpiece, which depicts an act of cannibalism in excruciating detail, has any visceral impact, and I credit the performances and FX makeup more than I do Zahler's blocking): Zahler struggles with simple scenes of exposition and dialogue (the first exchange between Russell and Jenkins has the kind of directorial indifference you'd expect from student filmmaking), and the flat digital cinematography and tinny sound certainly don't help matters. If someone like the Coens or Quentin Tarantino had directed this same exact script, we'd have a near-masterpiece. Zahler's his own worst enemy, and based off Bone Tomahawk alone, I'd recommend he stay far the hell away from his screenplays.
Even more dispiriting is Ken Kwapis' A Walk in the Woods. We have yet another example of a mediocre auteur bungling great source material. The titular novel is a wonder, a wry, moving account of getting old and connecting with nature as seen through the eyes of author Bill Bryson (played in the film by Robert Redford), who decides to hike the Appalachian Trail with close friend Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte). On the surface, nothing much happens, but Bryson's voice conveys so much, how everything - from the minor indignities the men face to the gentle pleasures - forms the spine for a life well-lived. If you stuck to that low-key, delicate tone, you could have a film version that's just as engaging, and I can imagine that had any of the film's previous architects stuck around (at different points in its development, people like Michael Arndt, Chris Columbus, Richard Russo, and Barry Levinson were all connected to A Walk in the Woods), we'd be talking about something really special. However, what we got is this Ken Kwapis-directed, Bill Holderman-penned adaptation, and it is about as unsatisfying a presentation of Bryson's text as you could imagine. I blame Kwapis: a sitcom hack through and through (he's directed episodes of Outsourced and The Office), his big-screen choices skew towards the obnoxiously formulaic (He's Just Not That Into You and License to Wed, anyone?), Kwapis drops Bryson's quiet insights for a hectoring, obvious tone that's either resorting to three-camera-ready gags about how unprepared Nolte's character is for the trip or ladling on the twilight-years schmaltz as Redford and Nolte find themselves. Under Kwapis, watching A Walk in the Woods is like choking on a stale cinnamon roll. Bryson deserves better.
Finally, we end the week with two mediocre thrillers: Hitman: Agent 47 and The Perfect Guy. Hitman: Agent 47 continues the trend of subpar video game-to-movie adaptations; even more than other pictures, you get the sense that Fox should have known better with this particular property, considering that the studio's first attempt at a Hitman movie franchise - 2007's Hitman, which cast Justified's Timothy Olyphant as the title character instead of Homeland's Rupert Friend - impressed exactly no one and made only a moderate impact on the box-office. This Agent 47 iteration isn't any better - it's simultaneously over-complicated and moronic, a reboot that finds Agent 47 coming to the aid of a mysterious young woman (Hannah Ware). That said, you could do a lot worse. The action scenes are watchable, and at a certain point, the film's stupidity becomes kind of charming, especially once you consider the revelations surrounding the film's Big Bad (Zachary Quinto, overacting wildly and having a ball). So it goes with The Perfect Guy as well. Nothing about this romantic chiller surprises, but the film is so grindingly predictable - it's a less-intense Fatal Attraction, which Sanaa Lathan in the Michael Douglas role and Michael Ealy as the Glenn Close psycho - that at a certain point, it actually generates a calming effect. You know exactly where this one is going to go and how it's going to get there, so you don't have to worry about doing any work yourself. It's okay to have a Big Mac once in a while, I suppose.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "to merely say that creativity isn't one of The Perfect Guy's strong suits would be a gross understatement. The year's most derivative movie is built on a story and dialogue that would seem more fitting for a second-rate Romance novel in its first act and a cookie cutter thriller in its second and third. The name is at least fitting, because Michael Ealy's character is the most generically chivalrous individual ever to grace a movie screen and, at the same time, the most generically unbalanced individual to ever grace a movie screen. The film never really explores his split personalities beyond some generic throwaway lines about his childhood, the kind of thing that's always the easy way out for what amounts to a Lifetime movie of the week story held up by slicker big studio production values. Ealy is at least good at it. He's charming and smooth when necessary and dark and devious later on, but even his solid performance can't hide the fact that his character lacks even a smidgen of originality." Then, of Hitman: Agent 47 Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "at least Hitman: Agent 47 doesn't have any outsized ambitions (for better or worse), and delivers some expertly staged set pieces that feature a lot of bone crunching action that may at least temporarily satisfy undemanding adrenaline junkies…From a narrative arc standpoint, then, Hitman: Agent 47 offers very little, but that's not necessarily a totally bad thing. Divorced from most plot mechanics that tend to 'mean' anything, the film is free to simply flit from set piece to set piece, which it does agreeably enough, though by the time the umpteenth chase sequence with hand to hand combat shows up, many viewers will be feeling more than a slight sense of déjà vu. When the film does pause to offer something that supposed to be a character beat, like some lame brained talk about being able to really change, things come to a rather lurching standstill, pointing up the hazards of giving the audience time to actually think about anything."