For the week of October 3rd, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing X-Men: Apocalypse to Blu-ray. This latest installment in the X-Men franchise finds director Bryan Singer returning to detail the fallout of his hit X-Men: Days of Future Past. In the altered, Sentinel-free timeline, Professor Xavier (James McAvoy, giving the film's best, most consistent performance) is mentoring a new crop of young X-Men, but the machinations of centuries-old mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac, doing work that probably won't make it to his Academy Awards Highlights reel) force Professor X to conscript his untested wards into battle, especially once Apocalypse secures an alliance with the emotionally devastated Magneto (Michael Fassbender). That's a lot, but what studio blockbuster doesn't try to shoot the moon, and you can sense a good movie here trying to break free. In the wake of Days of Future Past, the rejiggered X-Man dynamic could be the source of new tensions that would only intensify once Apocalypse entered the fold (hey, it worked for Captain America: Civil War). But for every smart choice that Singer and Co. make - finally embracing the elastic, pop aesthetics of the comic books (visually, this is the brightest, peppiest of Singer's at-bats - I even kinda like the Power Rangers-esque design of Apocalypse), or taking a break from the "Wolverine and the X-Men" structure of most X-Men features to refocus on the team itself (including Mud's Tye Sheridan as young Cyclops and Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner as a teenage Jean Grey) - they stumble their way through four or five real groaners. Despite its insistence on highlighting the team, this franchise just doesn't know how to quit Wolverine: Spoilers - Hugh Jackman returns for a Weapon X-inspired cameo that you could lose entirely without wreaking any larger narrative violence. Fassbender gets a great introduction (why can't we get a standalone Magneto movie?), but once he joins Apocalypse's fold, the film relegates him to grimacing heavy. At least he's more distinctive than the other member's of Apocalypse's "horsemen" - of the other three, only Olivia Munn makes an impression, and I'd be lying if I said her costume wasn't doing 99% of the work for her. The action scenes, while expensive, don't have the spatial clarity of Singer's best works, and the lone standout - a Quicksilver (Evan Peters)-centric setpiece - feels too derivative of the best scene from Days of Future Past. And the less said about Jennifer Lawrence, the better. As talented as she normally is, Lawrence seems miserable both in and out of her Mystique prosthetics, turning in the single most apathetic performance of her career. Even the time period becomes an unfortunate distraction. Apocalypse is set in the 1980s, but outside of a few feathered hairstyles, there's little here to dramatically evoke the era, and even less to suggest a definite continuity between this feature and Days of Future Past - it's at least seven years later, but none of the returning characters look any older. It feels like a soft reboot with the same cast and crew, and this choice a) denies us the kind of growth and development we see in Marvel Studios' output and b) is more than a little repetitive, given that Days of Future Past just hit the reset button. I get that returning to the status quo makes the studios very happy, but this is just ridiculous.
Far better a sequel is Universal Studios Home Entertainment's The Purge: Election Year. This new film opens a few years after the events of The Purge: Anarchy, with public opinion souring so heavily towards the yearly Purge that a crusading Presidential candidate (Elizabeth Mitchell) hopes she can cancel this brutal event once and for all. Her opponents (personified by the sneering, venal pairing of Kyle Secor and Raymond J. Barry), however, are determined to extinguish any and all serious objections to the Purge, so Mitchell must go on the run with her chief of security (Frank Grillo, reprising his role from Anarchy) during a series of calculated assassination attempts on Purge Night. Here's the thing: as a piece of formal, reasoned art, The Purge: Election Year is an abject failure. On the screenplay level, it is such a crude, obvious piece of work (there isn't a line of exposition writer-director James DeMonaco won't repeat three or four times past its effectiveness), and minus the wonderful performance he gets from Grillo (he played Crossbones in the Captain America movies, and he has the same understated badassery here as Charles Bronson), DeMonaco directs all his actors to the same level of unchecked hysteria, with Forrest Gump's Mykelti Williamson the worst offender. Williamson has done fine work elsewhere (he played one of the most memorable side characters on FX's Justified), but he comes off here like a low-rent Samuel L. Jackson, improvising poorly and screaming his lines to the rafters (actual line from the movie: "There are a whole bunch of N-----s coming this way. and we're looking like a big ol' bucket of fried chicken." Sam Jackson would have a tough time making that one sing). Plus, the movie just looks ugly - in terms of scope, Election Year is easily the biggest of the Purge films, but it's still so low-budget that you get the sense the filmmakers had to pull resources from one area to expand the sets and effects (the cinematography, in particular, looks like low-grade digital mumblecore from the late 1990s). That said, this might be one of the most topical mainstream features playing in cinemas this year. For all its faults (and they are legion), Election Year offers the most overt, striking condemnation of fearmongering politics that I've seen outside of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The villains are white, rich, hypocritical churchgoers who'll jerry-rig politics to serve their own ends, and the heroes are the poor, the disenfranchised, the racially/ethnically persecuted. The script name-checks the ills of insurance companies; the phrase "Make America Great" gets bandied around once or twice, too. Plus, if nothing else, Election Year works a bit of disreputable, fast exploitation cinema. After all, its social grievances don't get in the way of its desire to show lots of people killed in awful ways. Sometimes, we need The Wire, but just as often we need The Jungle. Upton Sinclair would be very pleased with this one.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "as a flick that's just about violence and the fight back against it, it's not half-bad, but nothing special. It's mildly gruesome and more unsettling than it is visually revolting. It can be seen as a cautionary tale. It can be viewed as a preview of the world's direction, where moral decline is on the rise and it seems the globe is teetering on the brink of multiple collapses. The conspiracy theory crowd might view it as 'conditioning' and 'programming,' another example of Hollywood using mainstream moviemaking as a means of normalizing the process of dehumanizing. There's even the notion of violent depopulation of the lower classes or 'undesirables,' a conspiracy theory that dates back decades and was, in a way, even the subject of the film Logan's Run. Writer/Director James DeMonaco, whose career in recent years has not diverted from The Purge pathway, has crafted a seriously interesting film open to multiple interpretations, many of which will reflect one's own life experiences, moral code, and view of the modern world. The nuts-and-bolts of the movie isn't that interesting, but the rest of it is truly fascinating if one is willing to move beyond the basic depravity and explore what it is the movie is saying and how it fits into the world in which it was made."
But the best film of the week is Lionsgate and A24's singular buddy comedy Swiss Army Man. On plot description alone, Swiss Army Man merits your attention; Paul Dano stars as a delirious, shipwrecked misfit who has finally decided to kill himself...until the sudden arrival of a bloated corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) gives him a new lease on life. And that's just the first five minutes! The strangest thing about Swiss Army Man isn't just that it keeps topping itself in terms of weirdness - Said Corpse has a deep repository of unintentional benefits that Dano uses to survive, including a water fountain in his mouth, a projectile-like launcher in his throat, and a constant stream of digestive gas that Dano uses to propel him along - it's that for all its bizarre twists, the film maintains a core of human insight and feeling. The more time we spend with Dano, the more we realize that his isolation persisted long before he got lost at sea, and his whole journey assumes the tone of an emotionally nuanced head-trip, of all things. His external space becomes just as knotty as his internal realms, and that certainly include his relationship with Radcliffe's rotting corpse. The two are all things to one another: lovers, brothers, parents, children. Yet even that designation of Radcliffe as a metaphor for Dano's struggle to connect with people is too restrictive. Radcliffe's dead body is a real character, full of burgeoning wonder and frustration at the world, and his arc proves just as satisfying as Dano's (also he's not quite dead). At times, we could be watching a hyperkinetic Waiting for Godot - filmmakers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert direct like they're never going to get another chance, creating a cinematic space that owes just as much to Nicolas Roeg and Terrence Malick as it does to Monty Python and Looney Tunes. I've never seen a film that moves and acts quite like this one does. Now, Swiss Army Man isn't quite a perfect first film. For its first two-thirds, I thought I was watching the best film of the year, but the third act lets some of the tension go; while I love how it treats Radcliffe's character, some of the complications involving Dano get needlessly convoluted. But it's also purely, fully its own beast, and so inventive that even its less inspired moments feel improvisatory and fresh. The most unique film experience of the year.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "what ensues is a 'buddy' film quite unlike anything most viewers will have seen…The problem with a 'high concept' outing like this (and I'm sure there will be some wags who will accuse co-writers and directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan of being high when they made the film) is that it needs something to support its outright freakishness. One might think of any given Tim Burton film as a point of comparison, where even in outlandish setups like Edward Scissorhands Burton seems to be hinting at something metaphorical or even allegorical. What is one to make of Swiss Army Man's premise, other than that it is sui generis and quite unlike anything in recent memory? The 'Daniels' (as they bill themselves) actually manage to get a bit of emotional resonance into the story, mostly due to the efforts of typically hangdog looking Dano, but if there's a hidden meaning here, it certainly escaped this particular reviewer. I was almost expecting something along the lines of an Incident at Owl Creek twist at the end, but no such revelation was forthcoming. The film coasts on its completely eccentric plot, but without punning too horribly, Swiss Army Man simply ends up running out of gas."
Finally, to commemorate the death of the late, great Prince, Warner Home Entertainment is putting out the Prince Movie Collection, which includes all of Prince's brief, semi-storied Hollywood filmmaking run. That means we get Purple Rain, of course, which is still his most beloved feature. At times, though? It's hard to see why. The story of a musician (Prince) trying to balance his ambitions with the demands of his personal life, Purple Rain plays like a tired mix of hagiography and Hollywood musical - director Albert Magnoli has no flair for this kind of heated melodrama, with the first forty minutes, in particular, plodding along through reams of narrative bloat and uninspired music setpieces. Plus, for much of the film, Prince isn't even the best thing: that honor deserves to go to Morris Day and the Time, who might not have Prince's musical virtuosity but completely outstrip him in terms of comedic timing and screen presence. Yet the film retains a compulsive, dated charm (save for its approach to gender - poor Apollonia), and Prince even manages to command the screen through a few wonderful performances, the best being "The Beautiful Ones" and "Let's Get Crazy." Still, you may look upon Purple Rain more favorably than I do - I'm one of those weirdoes who prefers his 1986 follow-up Under the Cherry Moon. Unfairly maligned upon its theatrical release, Under the Cherry Moon is an improvement over Purple Rain in almost all regards. It's a funny, sexy ode to the Franz Lubitsch comedies of the 1930s, with Prince starring as a dashing gigolo whose schemes to seduce and swindle a rich heiress (Kristin Scott Thomas) go awry when he - you guessed it - falls in love with his mark. There isn't an original beat in this movie's body, but it's breezy and charming all the way, and Prince evinces such a flair for light comedy. He even proves to be a more-than competent director, pulling out more invention in any given three minutes of Under the Cherry Moon than Albert Magnoli manages in all of Purple Rain. Of course, it helps that he's partnered with Martin Scorsese's longtime DP Michael Ballhaus, who dresses Under the Cherry Moon in shimmering, dynamic black-and-white cinematography. The film's biggest demerit? The music just isn't that great. That said, it's so much fun that it merits a critical reappraisal all the same. Too bad the same can be said for Graffiti Bridge, or as I like to call it, Sorry, Prince - You Can't Go Back to the Well. Graffiti Bridge wants to be Purple Rain so much it hurts (even Morris Day and the Time return, despite the fact that they were a cultural footnote by 1990), except it lacks that film's campy appeal. It's just indulgent and slight, and Prince deserved better.