For the week of May 30th, the two biggest titles of the week are Lionsgate Home Entertainment's fantasy epic Gods of Egypt and Sony Pictures' Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It's an underwhelming pairing, to say the least. On the surface, Gods of Egypt is just bland. Sure, it picked up a lot of heat pre-release for whitewashing its North African cast of characters (with the exception of Captain America: Civil War star Chadwick Boseman, who gives the best performance here), but this is a movie where CGI sprites mingle alongside gods with powers like superheroes: realism need not apply. Ultimately, it's just a lot of pixelated nonsense, with a bargain-basement, Joseph Campbell-esque hero's narrative about a young thief (the beyond-bland Brenton Thwaites) who becomes the unlikely lynchpin in assisting an exiled god (Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) overthrow his corrupt brother (Gerard Butler). You've seen this movie before, and better, too. However, what really galls is that Gods of Egypt comes courtesy of director Alex Proyas. Proyas had one of the greatest one-two punches in genre filmmaking - the violent comic-book thriller The Crow and the noirish mystery Dark City - but ever since then, he's been struggling to fit his unique, idiosyncratic vision within the traditional blockbuster framework: what do we make of the fact that his best post-Dark City picture is the ludicrous Nicolas Cage vehicle Knowing? As with his financially successful-but-hollow actioner I, Robot, Proyas does little to elevate Gods of Egypt; I get that moviemaking can be an impossible job, but I wish the studio system would be a little more supportive of those with talent. Ironically, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies evinces a similar issue. With a name like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, you don't really linger over the subtleties of the auteur theory: from its very bones, this project was a high-concept one, a trendy mingling of Jane Austin's classic novel with various and sundry zombie mayhem (courtesy of author Seth Grahame-Smith). So it goes here, refashioning Austin's iconic heroine Elizabeth Bennet (Cinderella's Lilly James) into a badass slayer of the undead who ventilates the walking dead while balancing her attraction-repulsion to the stuffy-but-noble Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley). And boasting a PG-13 rating, the film is practically a zombie movie for the whole family - you can sense the content frustrations that sent folks like Craig Gillespie, Mike Newell, Matt Reeves, Mike White, Neil Marshall, and David O. Russell fleeing from the director's chair. You certainly don't even helmer Burr Steers, who's likewise stuck in the shadow of his own work. Steers made his debut with the wonderful, Salinger-esque Igby Goes Down, and you'd think Steers could make the strengths he brought to that film work here. He has a keen sense for the vagaries of social strata, enlivened by his biting wit and humor. Austen brought all those qualities to Pride and Prejudice, but here, Steers is limited to staging CGI-augmented fighting and not-as-clever-as-they-should-be quips. If anything, his work here stands as a reminder that not all people are Joss Whedon. Be a whole lot easier if they were.
In his Gods of Egypt Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that he "actually ended up enjoying it, if sometimes for reasons the filmmakers probably didn't intend. The story plays awfully like a videogame at times, something that should appeal to the 'lowest common denominator' in at least the male demographic, and there's no denying that the film is often incredibly sumptuous to behold. One of the prime conceits of the story is that the gods, while human in form (when they're not transforming into their "totemic" personae, anyway), are giants towering over mortals, kind of like Gandalf in comparison to Bilbo (and his kin) in The Lord of the Rings, albeit even more exaggerated. The ingenuity of the VFX team on this film is undeniable, and the 'reality' of the interactions between gods and humans beautifully established (another kind of cool effect stems from the idea that the gods' blood is gold, so when they get wounded, they 'leak' a rather redolent looking liquid)." And of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Martin Liebman noted that "the material isn't good enough to sustain the movie for the long haul. It's enticing at first. Scrumptious, even. Creativity. Glorious creativity! There's something different out there. But the film really can't get past its name and its first few kills. There's a serious sense of repetition to the film and, as it begins to drag, a palpable desperation to sustain it by any means necessary emerges. The answer is only to further convolute the plot, mix up too many characters with too much drama with too much try-hard slick sword- and gunplay...The film's PG-13 rating stymies the zombie side's ability to keep up, to really stretch and show the contrasts and bring the movie full circle. There's some decent zombie gore, a little bit of rotting flesh and some (literal and figurative) teeth to the walking dead, but not enough real mushy, disgusting terrors to put the movie over the top (and there are several instances where blades clearly miss their targets, and by a wide margin, but the zombie reacts as if it's been struck, anyway). That's almost certainly a decision carefully planned and implemented by the filmmakers to lure in Austen and costume-drama fans with a more audience-friendly rating, fans who might otherwise be turned off to zombies, but it's to the overall detriment of the movie's nifty mashup."
The shame about this next feature, Universal Studios Home Entertainment's Triple 9, is that it could have been so good. Director John Hillcoat's violent crime drama has the scope of a Russian novel, if the characters in, say, Anna Karenina robbed banks and got in pitched gunfights with the police. Matt Cook's script takes a kaleidoscopic look at both sides of the law in Atlanta, Georgia, beginning with a five-man robbery crew (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anthony Mackie, Clifton Collins Jr., Norman Reedus, and Aaron Paul, giving a performance so bad you start to wonder if his great Breaking Bad work was a fluke) indebted to a fearsome Russian Jewish mobster (Kate Winslet, all permed hair and high heels) and then spiraling outwards once the team decides that the only way to pull off a dangerous Homeland Security heist is to use the film's title as a delaying tactic: a "triple 9" is code for "officer down," and it reroutes all local police attention to the officer in jeopardy. We see how Ejiofor's tense professional relationship with Winslet threatens his connection to his son and wife (Gal Gadot), how Mackie's corrupt cop plans the death of his green partner (Casey Affleck), how Paul's tortured wild card puts all these plans at hazard, and all while Woody Harrelson's flamboyantly manic cop cycles around these various parties as he draws ever nearer to the truth. It's an ambitious agenda, to say the least - the last cop-criminal film that mounted anything close to this scope was Michael Mann's 1995 classic Heat, and anyone familiar with Hillcoat's brooding, savage approach to violence (The Proposition, The Road, or the underrated Lawless) knows he's certainly capable of hitting those same heights. However, outside of a few tense encounters - the film's opening heist, a terrifying police raid on a housing project, and Affleck's third-act descent through an abandoned community center - Hillcoat can't pull any of this content together. In many ways, I blame his editor. At almost three hours long, Heat had ample time to study its interlocking cast of characters. Triple 9, on the other hand, runs just under two hours long, and as skilled as editor Dylan Tichenor is (he assembled Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, for God's sake), his attempts to shorthand all the major character arcs for the sake of narrative streamlining do not work. We'll follow one of these storylines for a little bit, but just as we're starting to get invested, we cut away, losing that connection and engagement. I think we're supposed to think Mackie's character is growing unsure about murdering a fellow cop just as we're supposed to find Affleck more resilient than he seems, except we don't spend enough time with either man, so they both feel flat. And these two are, ostensibly, the main characters! It's saying something that of the large, absurdly overqualified cast, only two people really make any impact: Ejiofor, who's the closest thing that Triple 9 has to a central character in terms of screen time (even though it's hard to sympathize with him too much, given how amenable he is to killing a cop), and Harrelson, whose pot-toking, crack-smoking, fake-teeth-having, American-Flag-tie-wearing detective doesn't make a lick of sense but is still the most entertaining thing in the movie (people forget how much fun Harrelson is when he's devouring the scenery). No one else gets enough time to register, and that goes double for Affleck. Affleck is as talented as they come, but he underplays to the point of inaction here. He's so mumbly and recessive that it seems like he's trying to make you forget he's in the movie; Affleck's incessant gum-chewing habit is the most memorable thing about the character, although to be fair, he isn't helped by the editing or a third-act that (almost perversely) takes the narrative agency from the ostensible leads and hands it off to a couple of supporting players. As such, the various twists and turns of the last half-hour barely register because we're so disconnected from the characters. Triple 9 ultimately ends on a baffling non sequitur (if an amusing one, given that it involves Harrelson), but it could have ended at any point after the first hour with little to no impact on the plot. That's never a good sign.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review presented a far more positive view of the film, noting that "there are two factors at play that make Triple 9 something of a success, not so much a unique take on its genre but certainly an interesting and welcome addition to it. First is the skilled craftsmanship that infuses the story with a much-needed edge that generates a tangible darkness, enhances the movie's bleak undertones, and underscores the deeper human interest narratives at play. Director John Hillcoat certainly knows his way around effectively bleak storytelling, and with the movie's sprawling character roster, complex narrative, and multi-layered plot devices, Triple 9 gives him no shortage of room to explore. But even with all of that at his disposal, the film never strays. The movie is tight and streamlined, managing its pieces with both efficiency and intimacy. Bloody violence, deep characterization, and difficult emotions are enhanced by moviemaking that's effectively slick but, more than that, realistic in approach and execution. Several scenes exemplify that, including the opening bank heist, a house clearing sequence midway through, and a key explosion of violence late in the film. All of them are intimately character-driven, but Hillcoat nails the surrounding details, giving the movie a realistic edge that draws the viewer into the film and enhances both the broader plot points and character details, helping the film to shed its lack of original storytelling with an honest approach by way of dark and gritty realism."
Finally, Arrow Films gets the coolest release of the week with its two-disc Blood Bath set. What is Blood Bath, you might well ask? That's a complicated question, albeit one that Arrow answers handily. The film began its existence in 1963 as Operation Titian, a joint Dubrovnikan-American production co-financed by independent film maven Roger Corman; Corman bought the rights because wanted something that he could re-edit and re-distribute to American audiences, and this decision became the most prescient one he made during Blood Bath long, long production and post-production process. See, he hated the (first) end result, which was a near-unintelligible spy thriller, and so he re-edited the film to turn Operation Titian into Portrait in Terror, which downplayed the espionage stuff a little and took out about fifteen minutes of rambling character and establishing-scene content. But Corman still wasn't content - as far as he was concerned, he hadn't maximized the full genre potential from this project - and he brought in Spider Baby's Jack Hill, and later, The Student Nurses' Stephanie Rothman, to reshoot new material that resulted in the film's most drastic re-edit yet: now called Blood Bath, the picture had mutated from a spy movie to a horror film about a psychotic artist who uses his victims' bodies in his sculptures AND is also a vampire. The last version, Track of the Vampire, is basically just Blood Bath with almost twenty minutes of interminable filler added. None of these iterations are good, although Blood Bath is certainly very entertaining in a "so-bad-it's-good" way, but Arrow's Blu-ray set is essential for film buffs. You watch these four versions, and you receive a crash-course in both the power of editing as well as Roger Corman's relentless drive to get the most from his cheap, fast brand of exploitation cinema. One of the year's best releases.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "what's really fascinating about all of this is that the source material is surprisingly rather incredibly stylish, obviously highly influenced (as Tim Lucas discusses) by Orson Welles (I'd add German Abstract Expressionism and Welles' The Third Man collaborator Carol Reed to the list, as well). Framings are often Baroque (to say the least), as are the European locations, and the film suggests both the Carol Reed classic as well as (in one climactic moment, at least) Welles' own The Stranger. The later accretions rarely match the style of the original Yugoslavian elements (directed by Radoš Novaković), though at least one of Hill's set pieces comes close. While the resulting versions are kind of inevitably hodgepodges, there are generally quite winning performances and (in the horror outings at least) some gruesome moments that should satisfy fans of that particular genre. No amount of compelling content on screen could probably ever match the intriguing behind the scenes story of Blood Bath, though, and it's that story that may well offer the most appeal to film fanatics in this new set from Arrow."