For the week of January 23rd, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the thriller Inferno to Blu-ray. It's taken three movies and more than ten years, but director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks have finally managed to eke out some fun from their film adaptations of Dan Brown's Robert Langdon thrillers. On the page, Brown isn't reinventing the wheel - he's dumbing down something like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose with a strong infusion of National Treasure - but Howard and his team have mostly whiffed capturing any of the books' pulpy drive; his Da Vinci Code was a grim-faced slog (minus its delightful Ian McKellen performance) that drastically overestimated the willingness of its target audience to find libraries exciting, while Angels & Demons only succeeded in making both a papal conspiracy and a plot to vaporize Vatican City seem like leftovers from a midrange James Bond picture. Inferno, on the other hand, has somewhat of a pulse. Running twenty minutes shorter than Angels & Demons and a full hour less than The Da Vinci Code's extended cut, Inferno wastes no time getting into matters of world destruction, with professor Robert Langdon struggling to prevent a deceased, deranged billionaire (Ben Foster, chewing scenery like a pro) from releasing a virus that will decimate the world's population. Why Langdon is the point person for a case that would better suit the cast of Contagion is beyond me, so we get some dribblings about the virus's connection to Dante's Inferno, and we're off to the races, using Langdon's mysterious amnesia/head injury as a distraction from scrutinizing his involvement too closely. It doesn't really matter. As you could probably guess from that plot summary, everything we're given is abject nonsense, but Howard keeps his foot on the gas this time, using the screenplay from blockbuster expert David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man) as a framework for something that, at its best moments, plays like a reasonably competent blend of Jason Bourne and Indiana Jones. Now, make no mistake: I am damming this movie with faint praise. You'd be better off rewatching Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Bourne Supremacy because as inoffensive as Inferno is, it in no way represents the A-game of anyone associated with it (Howard's Apollo 13 holds up beautifully, while Hanks's Captain Phillips is as gripping a thriller as I've seen in recent years). But this is also the only one of the Brown/Howard/Hanks features that I haven't actively resented as I was watching it, and for that, (some) attention must be paid. You could do a whole lot worse, and if you've seen The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons, then you know what I mean.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "is easily the darkest entry in the series, exploring the very notion of hell, one man's interpretation of it, and another man's vision of mankind's self-destruction into it. The film is much more apt to embrace darkness, distress, and uncertainty than its predecessors. It features a mentally weakened Robert Langdon, effectively taking away his greatest assets: his sharp mind, his quick thinking, his command of his intelligence and, more important, ability to put it all together and put it to use to battle evil and unearth the truth. In Inferno, the audience finds Robert Langdon at his most vulnerable, physically wounded and mentally off his game. It's a terrific little twist for the series and raises the stakes by a considerable margin, particularly considering the backdrop of a plot that pits the hero against a villain with a desire to wipe out the vast majority of human beings on the planet. All for the good of the species, of course."
Still, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons play like the first two movies in The Godfather series when compared to Lionsgate's USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage. The story of the Indianapolis remains as harrowing a tale of World War II history as I can possibly imagine; after covertly delivering the uranium necessary for completing the atomic bomb, a Japanese sub sunk the Indianapolis in the middle of the ocean, exposing survivors to threats both expected (dehydration, starvation, drowning) and horrifyingly otherwise (the man-eating sharks that proved even more deadly to the ship's passengers than the torpedo blast). This saga warrants a great film, and luckily, one exists: Steven Spielberg's Jaws, with its epic, Robert Shaw-delivered monologue about the Indianapolis' misfortunes. In just four minutes, Spielberg conjures a better sense of terror and shock than anything in USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage, although let's give credit where credit's due - if you've ever wondered how to tell an epic story at a scale more befitting a SyFy original movie, you need look no further. This is amateur hour: director Mario Van Peebles has helmed some good movies (New Jack City still holds up, and I'll fight anyone who argues otherwise), but you wouldn't think it to look at the indifference on display here. Peebles is working from a mix of flat dramatic restagings, stock footage, and terrible CGI-effects, and he does so little to integrate the three (bad) tones together that they all seem even more underwhelming as a result. In a sense, Peebles' aesthetic bungling mirrors the narrative problems on display. We're really getting three movies here - a Pearl Harbor-esque propaganda piece, the story of the Indianapolis, and the media/legal troubles that follow the survivors home - but on a budget, and with all the nuance of character you'd expect from the creative minds behind Rage, Heist, and The Prince ("writers" Cam Cannon and Richard Rionda Del Castro). If Pearl Harbor struggled to balance a wartime romance alongside a more hyperkinetic examination of combat, and it had all the time and resources money could buy, is it any wonder that the slapdash USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is even less convincing? I wish that I could tell you the film was of the "So Bad, It's Good" ilk, but it can't even get that right. At 130 minutes, it's just too damn long, belaboring every scene into awkward coverage and terrible line readings (Most Embarrassed: tie between Thomas Jane and Tom Sizemore. Least Qualified: nominal leads Matt Lanter and Brian Presley, for whom Teen Beat modeling might be too taxing), and for those of you wondering, it doesn't give top-billed Nicolas Cage many opportunities for his scene-devouring insanity. He plays it straight and glum, and the movie starts feeling that way, too.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that the film "is a well meaning affair with a killer (literally and figuratively) concept, but it flounders repeatedly and never really builds up requisite emotional content despite an inherently tragic story that features both bravery and in at least one potent example a certain tragic resignation…While the tank work is quite convincing at times, once the 'disaster film' aspect starts to unfold once the ship is sunk and numerous survivors are spread out in shark infested waters, things just look cheesy and almost humorous at times. The film tries to exploit some visceral emotion in its coda, which concerns the travails which afflicted McVay [Cage] after the tragedy. It's an interesting kind of left turn from where the film has been previously, but director Mario Van Peebles, already kind of an odd choice to helm a film like this, doesn't seem to know how to go for the jugular, or at least the heartstrings. The film therefore ends up sinking much like its titular ship."
From DreamWorks and Walt Disney Home Entertainment comes The Light Between Oceans. For some, this romance will mark the latest step in director Derek Cianfrance's increasing progression towards soap operas. His 2010 drama Blue Valentine remains one of the most wrenching examinations of a relationship under duress; in his intimate, improvisatory focus on character and behavior, Cianfrance evinced an understanding of human frailties that reminded me of John Cassavetes. However, his follow-up feature The Place Beyond the Pines split the difference between realism and soap, starting out as a gritty look at criminality on society's fringes before turning into a florid multi-generational saga of families and sons, and The Light Between Oceans is weighted even more heavily towards melodrama. We're practically in The Notebook territory here: you've got two lovers (Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander) trying to put their lives back together after the devastation of World War I, and how their inability to conceive a child drives them to adopt an abandoned baby, a decision that has unforeseen repercussions once they discover the child's birth mother (Rachel Weisz). You've got windswept shores (New Zealand, doubling for Australia), tearful confessions, and more emotional plot twists than an episode of Dynasty, but Cianfrance proves an unexpectedly savvy manipulator of this maudlin content. He's still the same guy who treated the romantic dissolution between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine like a war zone, and he gives the human interactions here the same vibrancy. I don't think Fassbender has ever been this emotionally open on camera, and I'm also not surprised that he and Vikander became a couple after working together - they create such an intimate, almost uncomfortable chemistry together. And Weisz might be even better: her character is the most problematic from a narrative standpoint, yet her reactions to her missing daughter have such rawness. Plus, the great cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (he lensed all of True Detective's stellar first season) creates a stark, operatic visual palette that matches the honesty of the performances. It's enough to make you wish that The Light Between Oceans stuck the landing better. For about 70%, I was convinced I was watched a new romantic classic on the level of The Notebook or Robert Redford's wonderful The Horse Whisperer, but then we arrive at the third act, where Cianfrance overcomplicates matters. Watching the interplay between Fassbender, Vikander, and Weisz would be enough; do we really need court cases, wrongful death accusations, and a tacked-on epilogue? It's the Downton Abbey effect at work: sometimes there's drama, and sometimes there's Too Much Drama. The Light Between Oceans errs when it tipples into the latter.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "begins with remarkable strength and vision, a sublime story of a man in search of isolation after returning from the horrors of war but ultimately finding his life empty without the companionship of the girl with whom he has slowly fallen in love. The film's first act is a remarkable bit of cinema excellence, one of both mild mystery and settling ease as Tom begins anew. The film, and his journey, are constructed on raw but richly realized internal emotions -- fear turns to hope turns to love -- that are wonderfully enhanced on the backs of Cianfrance's direction and both Fassbender's and Vikander's performances. The movie holds true through its second act, too, but it gradually begins to feels a bit too overly sentimental, manufactured, and forced as it takes the structurally necessary and tonally right but still somewhat expected generic turns as various truths are revealed and the couple's love for one another, and 'their' baby, is tested to its limits...[But] the movie's third act is something of a let down, more trite and expected than unique, [although] it serves the material well enough and takes it through a series of logical permutations."
Finally, Lionsgate gets another release this week with Bryan Bertino's The Monster. In 2008, Bertino directed the genuinely nerve-wracking chiller The Strangers, which pit an estranged couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) against a vicious home invasion. As horror movies go, The Strangers got in your head and stayed there; Bertino showed real flair for staging thrills (the film has remarkably little blood, with Bertino choosing to build tension through long takes and a careful use of the frame) and for taking seriously the emotional journey of his leads: we don't want Tyler or Speedman to die because Bertino gets us so invested in them as a couple. He's trying the same thing in The Monster, contrasting the abusive, emotionally fraught relationship between a mother and daughter (Zoe Kazan and Ella Ballentine, the latter of whom gives an extraordinary performance - she's a child actor to watch) with their nighttime battle against a ravenous woodland creature, and for about a half an hour, you think Bertino's done it again. That same slow, creeping patience is in effect, and he makes his titular monster all the more frightening through how he doles out its initial appearances: a huge tooth here, the shadowy outline of a body there, its head, just out-of-focus behind one of our unaware leads. Once the threat moves into the light, so to speak, The Monster begins to unravel, and Bertino loses control of his two tones. For one, we do see entirely too much of the beast after the film's midpoint, and with it comes some frustratingly vague impressions about its physiology (how come flashlights hurt it but street lamps don't? How come it can ram an ambulance off the road but isn't strong enough to kill a 115-pound alcoholic in one fell swoop?) as well as some unfortunate design flaws in the monster FX (you gotta love Bertino for going with a practical creation, but in the light we realize it can't really open its mouth much). More importantly, though, is the breakdown of the film's central metaphor. Like Jennifer Kent's far more accomplished The Babadook, The Monster refers both to the man-eating beast AND Kazan's insensitive, substance-abusing mother - at the start, she's wholly incapable of caring for her daughter, and we expect that the film will chart her development into a nurturing, protective warrior. Except that never really happens, and the film as a whole suffers for it. Part of that problem stems from the handling of the character (Bertino includes some flashbacks that make her seem too loathsome; and in real life, Kazan is Hollywood royalty, never quite convincing us she's a flailing piece of white trash), but Bertino also bungles the ending, setting up a noble bit of self-sacrifice and then undercutting it through confusing geography and some very stupid character decisions. Ultimately, The Monster is watchable, and it has a handful of genuine scares, yet you have to score Bertino on a curve. He's so much better than a swing-and-a-miss.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "Bertino seems to want to forego a number of horror tropes, including letting the pair be able to 'reach out' to help in the form of a tow truck driver. It probably goes without saying that Jesse (Aaron Douglas), the tow truck driver, is in need of a little roadside assistance himself by the time everything plays out, but this fracas at least definitively determines for Lizzy that there is in fact some marauding creature lurking just out of sight (for the most part, anyway), waiting to wreak havoc at any given moment. At this point, The Monster tips over into a somewhat more formulaic enterprise, though the well delineated relationship between Kathy and Lizzy continues to inform the proceedings and gives the film some of its most distinctive content. One undeniably trite but still incredibly effective moment involves a 'comfort toy' of Lizzy's that ends up causing chaos, but interestingly Bertino diverts attention from this hoary element by having still other potential helpers arrive on the scene. Without posting too much spoiler material, there's an increasingly bloody body count which accrues, even as a seeming weakness afflicting the monster is revealed. The focus slowly shifts from the relationship between Kathy and Lizzy to Lizzy herself in the film's closing moments, though the entire story is linked inextricably to the roiling dynamic between the mother and daughter. In fact one of the most visceral things about The Monster is how clearly it shows that years of a fractured relationship can be at least partially mended when there's an external threat facing former combatants."