For the week of December 5th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Jason Bourne to Blu-ray. For most discerning action-movie fans, the first Bourne trilogy represents some grand apex of studio blockbusters: they are about 90% more visceral and 50% more intelligent than most similar pablum released under Hollywood's auspices. However, fans have been clamoring for the return of series architects Matt Damon (star, obviously) and Paul Greengrass (director following Doug Liman's mostly acrimonious departure post-The Bourne Identity) ever since they closed out the trilogy with 2007's hit The Bourne Ultimatum - it did not help that series screenwriter Tony Gilroy fashioned The Bourne Legacy in 2012, a Bourne-less side-quel that shifted the focus to Jeremy Renner's similarly afflicted super-solider (I'm one of those weirdoes that actually prefers The Bourne Legacy to The Bourne Ultimatum, but even I can acknowledge that public opinion was not aligned with my interests). Jason Bourne, then, offers Damon and Greengrass the opportunity for a victory lap, reuniting them to tell the story about how Bourne (Damon) has to come out of hiding once again in order to investigate a shady global conspiracy. Yet the end result is such that you wish this creative crew would have either stayed the course in the Renner Universe or simply let well enough alone, given how hard Jason Bourne works to tarnish the brand. The script (by Greengrass and Bourne editor Chris Rouse, with uncredited assists from Damon, and if there's a combination that screams "SCRIPT COBBLED TOGETHER DURING PROUDCTION" more than this one, I can't think of it) is both overcooked and underdone, tossing in subplots about CIA infighting (a battle between the old and new guards, represented by Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander's government operatives), the threat of cyber-terrorism (and how it impacts a tremulous tech billionaire, played by The Night Of's Riz Ahmed, who gives the film's best performance), and more revelations about Bourne's Hidden Past, and all while spending almost no meaningful time in any of them, least of all Bourne's. Outside of the Transformers series, I've rarely seen a Hollywood blockbuster that neglects its ostensible lead as much as this one does. Bourne's sole function is to provide the movie with periodic jolts of (admittedly well-shot) action. His presence in the other stories feels like an afterthought, and you can sense Damon's frustration in trying to assay the internal life of a character with no significant plot arc. Damon once claimed he wasn't going to make anymore Bourne movies because he didn't see any new places you could take the role, and he was right. In fact, Jason Bourne retroactively cheapens the character's arc. That original Bourne trilogy hinges on a simple-but-thematically dense question: what if a bad man suddenly became a good one? It was unexpectedly moving watching Bourne spend three movies essentially seeking atonement for his violent misdeeds (that's why The Bourne Supremacy remains the best of the first three - people forget that all Bourne wants to do is apologize to a little girl for making her an orphan). However, this new film retcons that story into something far more simplistic; now, he's a good man who was tricked into becoming a bad one, a revision that sands off Bourne's most interesting edges. Moves like that turn Jason Bourne into a technically competent-but-hollow endeavor. It works while you're watching it (Greengrass has still got the magic touch for making chaos cinema comprehensible, particularly in the kinetically destructive Las Vegas finale) but curdles in retrospect. Everyone involved here is better than that.
Martin Liebman wrote that "the movie introduces Bourne as an underground fighter meant to compliment his strength and define his character's lost soul and quest for truth, turning to the core of who he is to get by, even as he tries to escape from it. Been there, done that. A roomful of intelligence operatives analyze the action from a million computer screens, barking out orders to zoom in, rewind, whatever it takes to catch their man remotely. Operatives on the ground speak into concealed microphones in urgent, hushed whispers about being in position and spotting the target. Bourne uses crowds, vehicles, anything to speed or mask his movements to his advantage. Shaky handheld cameras are meant to introduce both personalization and intensity to a scene. Car chases are big and loud but...they're just more Hollywood car chases. It's frankly almost baffling how a movie this mundane can get made, and how a sharp director like Paul Greengrass can allow it to snowball into one giant pile of derivative repetition...Movies like Jason Bourne are just late to the party. They're tiring rather than thrilling as they fruitlessly hope to dazzle viewers by regurgitating all of it again for the millionth time rather than find a new approach to an old idea. The movie does hold up from a technical perspective, at least depending on one's tolerance for Greengrass' and Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd's nonstop shaky cam and incessant toggling of the zoom switch. All of the various chases are slick and well produced, the technology in play is as cutting edge as it was more than a decade ago, and, well, it's a professional looking movie. Yet the cast appears super bored. All of the faux urgency is phoned in, and the actors seem content to allow the technical mechanics to do the work for them. All of the frenzy is generated from the camera. It's sort of like the opposite of The Asylum, the studio that never allows a moment to pass without score blaring in the background to try and ramp up some sense of enthusiasm, urgency, something to mask the emptiness playing out on the screen."
Warner Home Entertainment's "Black and Chrome Edition" of George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road has no such problems. This release only confirms something I suspected when I first caught the film during its successful 2015 run: that it's one of the nine or ten greatest action movies ever made and a gonzo, extreme film about an antisocial loner (Tom Hardy's Max) navigating a world at chaos. That said, this isn't really Max's movie. He's an integral character, to be sure, and repeat viewings reveal how crucial Hardy's gift for comic understatement is in grounding the bugnuts stunts and action. Hardy has a way of staring cockeyed at the most extreme vehicular chaos that recalls Bugs Bunny or Wile E. Coyote in a Looney Tunes cartoon, and the contrast between the florid mayhem and his dry reaction shots gives Fury Road necessary humor without damping any of the suspense. But as for the main character…well, those duties go to Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa. After serving as loyal subordinate to the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in the first Mad Max) for many years, Furiosa goes rogue and flees her venal overseer, although not without first grabbing a War Rig (a tricked-out diesel truck that looks like the nitro-boosted equivalent of the gas truck from the end of The Road Warrior) and all of Joe's sexually subjugated breeders (Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton). And with that, the chase is on, as Joe marshals a fleet of suicidal War Boys to kill Furiosa and retrieve his women, and Furiosa finds an unlikely ally (in the most unlikely of ways) in the near-feral Max. Fury Road is Furiosa's story, and she gets more screentime than Max, all of which Theron makes a meal. She's an action icon for the ages, right up there with John Rambo and Ellen Ripley, but Theron plays her beautifully in moments large and small. And she's got to be that good to make an impression, given how boldly Miller stages the almost-nonstop chases and action sequences. We never tire of watching all the ways he's dreamed up for cars to smash into one another (and with comparatively minimal CGI, to boot), and when you think he's run out of options, he'll toss in some kabonkers detail you didn't expect, like the "pole cats" bobbing on flexible rods above moving cars or a literally explosive sandstorm the size of Texas or the marsh-land crow-walkers or the guitar-shredding "Doof" that scores Joe's pursuit. The action is so pervasive and overwhelming that you almost overlook Miller's political agenda. If the prominence of Furiosa wasn't hint enough, Fury Road is a savage critique of the patriarchy, with the female leads empowered thinker-fighters and the male leads ranging from, at best, addled lunatics (Max) to, at worst, inbred psychopaths (Joe and his cronies). Miller clearly blames his male characters for the downfall of the species, but he's, at heart, an optimist – when his male and female characters work together, they can accomplish great things, and you need look no further than the sniper sequence between Max and Furiosa or Max's unusual way of cleaning blood from his face. We often dock Hollywood blockbusters for being too much, but when they're as exciting, as funny, as strange, as inventive, as moving, and as well acted as this one? Bring 'em on. This "Blood and Chrome" version offers as unique a director's cut as I can imagine - it changes the color grading to black-and-white in order to reflect Miller's preferred vision. I don't know if it's my favorite Fury Road iteration. I do miss Miller's hallucinatory use of color, especially in the sandstorm sequence or the nighttime standoff between Max and a few of Joe's men. But the aesthetic changes do even more to tie Fury Road into film history. The film now resembles nothing less than a $100+ million version of Buster Keaton's landmark chase picture The General, and that comparison just feels right.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that "Miller has always been an expert at choreographing and photographing action without sacrificing narrative coherence, but the removal of color from the frame makes Fury Road's complex interplay of people and vehicles even clearer and easier to follow. Some of the production design's humorously absurd touches get lost (e.g., the Doof-mobile, with its flame-throwing guitar), but it's a small tradeoff for the gain in clarity of action. The nighttime sequences integrate into the film more smoothly in B&W, shedding the artificial blue that distinguished them from daylight in the color version. Are there sacrifices? Of course. The five wives are less visually distinctive without their individual hair colors (Capable's carrot top is particularly missed), and the troops commanded by Immortan Joe, the People Eater and the Bullet Farmer are less individuated, blending into an undifferentiated mass of hostiles. The same effect applies to the hordes of Joe's subjects at The Citadel, who merge into a writhing crowd of bodies. The use of Max as a 'blood bag' is more abstract and less obviously exploitative without the red flowing through the tube. I suspect that one's reaction to these various tradeoffs in the B&C Edition will largely depend on one's pre-existing attitude toward B&W photography, but for my money the net effect of Miller's re-imagining is to enhance Fury Road's sense of epic adventure and, especially with Max and Furiosa, to consolidate their stature as figures of legend. In this latest presentation, you can't help but notice how often Miller situates his two heroes as lone figures facing a vast wilderness. Each of these lost souls has traveled a long and painful road, and an even harder one stands between them and the redemption they both seek. In the B&C Edition, their paths appear even more daunting."
Dark Sky Films is offering a restored "30th Anniversary Edition" of John McNaughton's chilling Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. There are some schools of thought that might question the need for this thriller to receive a full-scale digital restoration; produced for barely over $100,000, Henry has always derived much of its effectiveness from how drab it looks. To McNaughton, the scariest serial killers weren't pop caricatures like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees, but rather ordinary people drifting through an unremarkable American landscape. That's Henry (a remarkable, affectless Michael Rooker) to a T: he occupies a world of gas stations and cheap motels, the kind of anonymous figure you don't notice until he's behind you with his hands around your throat. The flatness of Henry and his world only work to underscore how disturbing the whole film is. Although the MPAA initially branded Henry with an X rating in 1990 (after it sat on the shelves for four years over concerns about its subject matter), there's really little overt violence or graphic gore. Most of Henry's killings occur off-screen, with the film's most notorious scene - the brutal killing of an entire family - unfolding as a grainy VHS projection, so what we're focusing on the actual murders less than the reactions of everyone to them. Henry seems to derive no pleasure or pain from his actions, while his friend Otis (Tom Towles) kills with a disconnected zeal that seems more calculated to please Henry than to satisfy any of his own twisted whims. That leaves Otis' sister Becky (a heartbreaking Tracy Arnold) to assume the role of moral exemplar, but for much of the movie, she's unaware of what her brother and his friend are doing in their spare time. She can't really influence their decisions. They kill, eat, sleep, and then kill some more, and the universe just shrugs. That existential indifference proves more horrifying than any geek shots, and a lasting testament to Henry's cold power.
But that's not all! Well Go USA is giving another horror all-timer a restored Blu-ray edition: Don Coscarelli's classic Phantasm. For a film that spawned a five-movie-strong franchise (more thoughts on Movie Five in a minute), the first Phantasm has the singular, one-off quality of a nightmare. I could tell you about the film in the abstract - - and that description would, I guarantee, make more sense that much of the finished film does. Characters disappear (or die) and reappear with frequent abandon, the world seems to swell into other dimensions on a whim, and the shock ending reverses and reverses the clichéd "it was all a dream" horror climax so as to completely unmoor us from reality. Even the film's miniscule budget ($300,000, and cobbled together over a two-year shooting schedule) adds to Phantasm's delirious atmosphere: it has the handmade quality of a student film, like if the Devil were mucking around on a video camera with his friends. Yet Coscarelli still maintains this incredible control that belies the often-slapdash nature of the endeavor. As Phantasm production lore goes, Coscarelli had a three-hour first cut, but he whittled down to just under half that length on his own accord - he realized, apparently, that the best version of the film didn't answer all (or even most) of the viewers' questions, that something more elliptical and mysterious would linger far longer. He was right. And given the measurable aesthetic improvements of this restored Phantasm (something that I hadn't given Coscarelli enough credit for: he makes the movie look good, cheap as it might be), his film takes on the lush surrealism of a David Lynch chiller. It's a stone classic, and a reminder of how good resourceful independent cinema can be. Pity the same can't be said for the fifth entry in the Phantasm series, Phantasm: RaVager. I applaud Coscarelli's desires to expand the world of Phantasm, and certainly RaVager is his feint towards blockbuster territory. Problem is, the budget isn't that much more than the first picture, only SyFy-level CGI has replaced the practical effects. Even Coscarelli's been replaced - while he wrote the screenplay, David Hartman took over behind the camera, and he lacks Coscarelli's gonzo flair. Stick with the original.