For the week of March 7th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Ron Howard's In the Heart of the Sea to Blu-ray. On paper, this period adventure piece seems like a can't-miss proposition: based on Nathaniel Philbrick's nonfiction text of the same name, the story details the horrific events that inspired Herman Melville's landmark American novel Moby Dick. Anyone trying to make a straight adaptation of Moby Dick might be in for a rude awakening (the whale stuff maybe occupies one hundred pages, with the vast majority trafficking in esoterica far more in line with Melville's Transcendental brothers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson), but Philbrick's account of the whaleship Essex has no such narrative roadblocks, as the whale attack only begins a nightmare on the open sea that involves perilous storms, Cast Away-esque loneliness and starvation, and desperate acts of cannibalism. So why, then, is the film version of In the Heart of the Sea one of the worst big-studio ventures that I've seen in a long time? The answer, unfortunately, is simple - from top to toe, it does almost nothing right. Screenwriter Charles Leavitt (he wrote the abominable Blood Diamond, which should have been a warning sign) does a Frankenstein job of reassembling Philbrick's book; all the parts are there, but none of them work together. The opening hour is supposed to convey the harsh realities of life on the open ocean, except the CGI is so atrocious (Ecco the Dolphin looks more realistic) that we spend all our time trying to ignore the sloppy green-screen effects (it's like you're watching a pop-up book, such is the effect of seeing Actor on Background) and frenetically edited camerawork. Still, I suppose the technical limitations are better than the plot, which finds Leavitt engineering a rote-and-historically inaccurate conflict between Chris Hemsworth's rugged first-mate and Benjamin Walker's snooty captain. Finally, after almost an hour, the whale shows up, an ill-defined, unrendered CGI menace that moves with the targeted precision of a video-game baddie, only to then disappear again in favor of some lifeboat sequences that aren't as tense as Lifeboat nor as visually stunning as Life of Pi. The proceedings are so drab that it's almost a relief when the main cast starts eating one another, albeit in a reserved, anti-suspenseful fashion that occurs entirely off-screen. After a while, you just start feeling bad for the actors. With the exception of Hemsworth, none of the performers make a significant impact - not Walker or New Spider-Man Tom Holland or even the wonderful Cillian Murphy (who's so anonymous here that I didn't even notice when his character suffers a major injury - Howard buries the moment in some sub-Paul Greengrass editing) - and Hemsworth doesn't distinguish himself in a positive way: if you thought his accent in Blackhat was bad, then you haven't heard the linguistic mess he cooks up here, a goulash that wavers between Chicagoan, Bahh-stahn, South African, Australian, Italian, and British, sometimes in the span of just a few seconds. Only Brendan Gleeson delivers a performance worthy of his talent, but he's doing so in the terrible frame narrative, which presupposes that his Essex survivor and Melville (a terrible Ben Whishaw) met (they didn't) and provided the fodder necessary to inspire Moby Dick and cure Melville of his crippling insecurities (also B.S.). Howard isn't protecting anyone or anything, and that lack of focus is surprising. He's not a great director, but he's an effortlessly competent one, and at his best (Apollo 13, Rush, and the underrated Ransom), he's been smart enough to stay out of his story's way while providing just enough aesthetic/narrative interest. Not so here - it's amateur hour, and for his sake, I hope he finds his center again. What a waste.
From Starz and the Weinstein Company comes Justin Kurzel's new adaptation of Macbeth. William Shakespeare's "Scottish Play" has long been one of the Bard's most despairing works, but what Kurzel has done here outstrips the brutality of even Roman Polanski's 1971 interpretation (you know, the one he took on after his then-wife Sharon Tate was savagely butchered by the Manson Family). In telling the story of a Scottish warrior (Michael Fassbender) who, along with his ambitious wife (Marin Cotillard), conspires to take the royal status he believes he deserves, Kurzel and screenwriter Todd Louiso have reduced Shakespeare's traditional iambic pentameter to the barest essentials. This is a film of blood and pain, and the great cinematographer Adam Arkapaw helps to convey this almost primordial world in vivid, striking images. Arkapaw bathes the screen in different color schemes to help convey the characters' roiling internal turmoil: gold for the power of the throne, blue for depression and ennui, red for the many eruptions of gory violence (Kurzel has an affinity for shooting battle scenes with the stop-start clarity of Zach Snyder's 300, and to be fair, these instances of bloodshed are the film's least effective – the speed-ramping is too silly to terrify us anymore). Even the play's lone instance of hope – while we know Macbeth and his wife are doomed, we can count on his righteous counterpart Macduff to rebalance the scales of justice – escapes us in Kurzel's apocalyptic vision: he has cast Sean Harris, a wonderful character actor who specializes in sadists and killers, as Macduff, and as such, our "hero" seems just as grim and tormented as Macbeth is. You've got to admire the totality of tone that Kurzel wants to cultivate, but I don't know if I ever want to see the movie again. For all its aesthetic precision and thematic rigors, this new Macbeth is so content to ladle on the unpleasantness that it quickly becomes wearying. It hits the same note of turgid brutality over and over again until by the end of its very-long two hours, we're about as ready for the proceedings to be over as the main characters are. As an artistic goal, that's admirable. As a film, it's exhausting.
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is offering up Victor Frankenstein, and with it, I'd like to ask for a moratorium on reboots and remakes. There's a kernel of a good revisionist idea here: the film reimagines the Frankenstein story from the perspective of the Mad Doctor's deformed, loyal sidekick Igor (played here by Daniel Radcliffe), and I can see a version of this story that plays like a horror-centric Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, using Igor's narrow viewpoint to skewer Frankenstein (James McAvoy) and his monster. However, lest we forget, the Victor Frankenstein script comes courtesy of the intolerable Max Landis, who never found a high-concept premise he couldn't make deeply tiresome. As he did in American Ultra and, to a lesser extent, the found-footage superhero picture Chronicle, Landis has a hard time distinguishing between "funny" and "glib," and that condition persists here. As naturally charming as Radcliffe and McAvoy are, they're stuck bantering like buddy cops in a sub-Shane Black knock-off, trading bon mots and dodging tired CGI sprites. We've seen this act a million times before, and it's telling that the movie almost immediately starts normalizing its interesting hook, seeing fit to have Frankenstein transform Igor from a deformed outcast to Radcliffe's far more dashing form. To director Paul McGuigan's credit, he tries to quicken the proceedings with his snappy approach to pacing and action (he is responsible for some of the best episodes of the BBC's great Sherlock reboot, and he even brought along Sherlock players like Andrew Scott and Mark Gatiss to Victor Frankenstein for good luck), but even he can only do so much, especially once Landis' script shifts gear into a third act that gets even more bombastic AND makes a craven effort at setting up a sequel. We need new stories: stop mining the past for the same old thrills.
Still, as uninspired as Victor Frankenstein is, it's small potatoes on the Bad Movie Spectrum when compared to Universal's epic box-office bomb Howard the Duck. From the jump, we know we're in for a huge mish-mash of source material and adaptation; Marvel's Howard the Duck comics eschewed traditional superhero fodder for a flip, sarcastic, and gleefully surreal deconstruction of comic-book tropes and cultural affairs, yet the movie is about as formulaic as they get, opting instead for a fish (duck)-out-of-water tale that sees Howard (voiced by Chip Zien) transplanted from his homeworld to Earth, where he becomes the unlikely champion against a malicious alien species. Essentially, think Thor with an anthropomorphic duck and fewer digital effects (and to Howard the Duck's credit, the pre-CGI FX are pretty nifty, particularly the end battle against a nasty alien beast). However, the devil's in the details, and it's in those that Howard the Duck has been able to maintain its infamy in the Bad Movie Annals. For one, the duck puppetry itself is...unnerving, to say the least - Howard's eyes are lifeless and do not scream "engaging and lovable" - which is a problem, considering we have to buy Howard as a planetary savior AND the suave paramour to Lea Thompson's punk rocker. Yep, you read that right: Howard almost engages in some interspecies lovin', and I can promise you that the coupling of three-foot duck and the once-and-future Lorraine McFly is as creepy as it sounds. That's the weirdest part of the film, sure, but so much is also daffy, from Jeffrey Jones playing a more evil version of his Ferris Bueller baddie, to Tim Robbins' goofy human sidekick, to the "I Love the '80s" iconography powering Thompson's punk musicia. The whole movie is inexplicable in ways that only '80s cheese can be, and to its credit, it's never boring. It's never good, but at least it's never boring.