For the week of April 3rd, Lucasfilm and Disney are giving a Blu-ray release to Rogue One. We've seen prequels before, but I don't think we've ever seen this: a prequel designed to rectify one of the most glaring plot holes in blockbuster cinema history. You'll find no bigger fan of Episode IV than I, yet even I'll allow that the end hinges on a patently unbelievable lapse, that the nigh-impenetrable Death Star has a special access opening just the right size for a guided missile. The smartest and best thing about Rogue One is how it triages this lapse. We learn that, forced against his will to work on the Death Star's construction, the brave Imperial scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) builds a kill switch, essentially, that will provide the Rebels with the path to destruction they need. Mikkelsen doesn't have a lot of screen time, but he makes the most of what he has, and this simple act of defiance becomes the film's most stirring conceit. I like to imagine a version of Rogue One that centers around Erso, that documents the daily acts of skullduggery he must commit to keep his plan a secret - ideally, it'd be pitched somewhere between U-571 and A Man Escaped. But this Rogue One isn't terribly interested in charting out any narrative or moral surprises, so what director Gareth Edwards and writers Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy have engineered is another cliched hero's journey, this time focusing on Galen's daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones) as she tries to get her hands on her father's Death Star plans. Jones is a spirited, empathetic performer, but she's saddled with Plucky Heroine 101 - her Jyn is an anti-authoritarian wild card who'd love to stick it to the Empire, and while I guess I'm glad that she's not related to the Skywalker family (she's not, right?), the Weitz/Gilroy script makes her trot dutifully through many of the same narrative beats we saw in A New Hope. As a means of compensating for her lack of personality, she gets a Dirty Dozen-esque team of reprobates to offer background assists, and together, they constitute about 2.5 interesting characters. Riz Ahmed's Bodhi is likeable but underwritten; Diego Luna's Cassian is boring and underwritten; and Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, and Alan Tudyk walk away with the movie through sheer force of personality as, respectively, two Force-sensitive warriors and a sassy Droid. Cliches all, but no less entertaining for it. The team really never coheres, and in much the same way as the opening ninety minutes, which stops and starts in a manner that's considerably less propulsive than even the worst of the Star Wars. I got so tired intercutting between characters announcing they were going to find Ahmed's character with scenes of Ahmed's character announcing why people might be looking for him, and if ever you needed evidence of the film's massive reshoot schedule, look no further than this opening 65%, which proceeds in fits and starts and struggles to invest you in any of the proceedings. Luckily, Rogue One sticks the landing - its last forty minutes play like a mix of war epic and heist movie (thank you, Tony Gilroy, for righting the ship) and are so enjoyable you wonder why the rest of the movie couldn't have followed suit. Look, I didn't hate Rogue One like the prequels - Greig Fraser's widescreen cinematography is too beautiful, and Ben Mendelsohn does lovely work as the Empire's equivalent of the worst middle manager you've ever had - but it's a bit of a mess, and nowhere near the polished triumph that Lucasfilm may have wanted. But what do I know? It made a billion dollars, and I didn't.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "balances that difficult line between freshness and working around a known outcome, building up and concentrating on the how rather than the why. It's the same problem shared by the prequel films, but with the possible exception of Revenge of the Sith, Rogue One handles it better. The movie is ridiculously entertaining and engaging, even if it's just a linear tale of action and espionage and a movie that more than makes up for its shortcomings with a remarkably well-versed recreation of the Star Wars universe, a particular challenge for this film given its close proximity to A New Hope, easily the most recognizable and well-known in the franchise. Every little touch is dead-on right. It's not fan service (though a few fun little bits are included...a porky minor character 'Red Five,' which would be Luke's callsign in A New Hope, meets a quick demise in this film), it's exacting production design. Every little texture is right. Whether on ships or clothes or props or environments, anything and everything has been crafted with attention to detail that, maybe more than anything, makes the movie work. Even the way interfaces work and the way things plug in fit in exactly within the Episode IV timeframe. It's exciting to revisit the most cherished moment in the Star Wars universe, and Edwards doesn't disappoint, even if the traditional Star Wars staple lightsaber battle, always a part of the climax in every other main entry (though coming earlier in the film in A New Hope), is understandably absent. "
Warner Archive is bringing the Sam Peckinpah classic Ride the High Country to Blu-ray. Peckinpah aficionados routinely cite the film as one of the director's best, and I can see why. Even after such later-stage triumphs as The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs, this 1962 oater still might be the most beautiful film Peckinpah ever made; he uses Lucian Ballard's beautiful cinematography as the perfect counterpoint to his leads, two aging cowboys (Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott) tasked with protecting a much-desired gold shipment. Peckinpah was making revisionist Westerns before anyone really knew what that sub-genre was, and unlike his famously butchered Major Dundee, Ride the High Country represented Peckinpah's full vision, elegiac and sad as it might be. On one hand, both Scott and McCrea's characters see this mission as a last stand before retreating into their twilight years, except Peckinpah immediately complicates their relationship to viewers and to one another. See, Scott is secretly planning to steal the gold himself, and his moral dilemma - take the money but betray his partner in the process - turns Ride the High Country into a proto-Wild Bunch, a way for Peckinpah to gently debunk the black-and-white moral codes of the genre. However, I'm not as keen on the film as most. While I respect Peckinpah's vision, I prefer the often-brutal nihilism he brought to The Wild Bunch or his underrated Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. There's a sentimental streak running through Ride the High Country, particularly once Ron Starr and Mariette Hartley's winsome youths get introduced into the story. Furthermore, Peckinpah isn't being as original as he thinks - Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott covered much of the same ground in their 1950s Western collaborations, and with far more wit and narrative economy. I'll take the lean, grimly funny Seven Men From Now over this any day.
From Well Go USA comes Johnnie To's latest thriller Three. To remains one of the most prolific action-movie filmmakers working today, and Three (his seventh film in a little over four years) represents the best and worst extremes of To's prodigious work output. On the surface, Three is a three-handed set in a hospital, focusing primarily on a depressed surgeon (Zhao Wei), a driven cop (Louis Koo), and his very wounded quarry (Wallace Chung). For much of the first hour, we could be watching To's attempts at a soap opera, given the melodrama he ekes from his leads' interpersonal dramas - Wei has bungled a few key surgeries and is desperate to save Chung's criminal, even though the latter is refusing medical treatment as a way of sticking it to Koo, who is responsible for his near-fatal head wound - except To attacks this material like Brian De Palma directing General Hospital. We get an orgy of technical bravado as To blends long takes, gliding Steadicams, and a few beautifully placed split-diopter shots (as well as a wheelchair accident that plays like To riffing on The Untouchables' Battleship Potemkin riff), all of which help To generate intrigue from essentially nothing. The story, as it were, is so thin it would evaporate if To weren't juggling his cinematic tricks like a madman to keep us interested, and kudos to him for galvanizing what plays like a slightly bigger-budgeted version of an ER bottle episode. The culmination? A what-feels-like a five-minute, unbroken camera take capturing the chaos that unfolds when Chung's cronies try to bust him out, yet this viscerally impressive set piece also underscores Three's biggest shortcomings. Despite To's best efforts, there's just no there there, and the whole experience ends up feeling like an exercise in pure cinema: for all its sound and fury, the shootout yields little in the way of stakes, and it resolves itself in so perfunctory a fashion that the end credits took me by surprise. Now, there's nothing wrong with pure cinema on its own, but the shift to action frenzy is so fraught with obvious CGI assists that it's easy to lose sight of To's staging/shooting mastery. Maybe I'm more critical because the last To film I watched was Drug War, which might be his career high-water mark, but them's the breaks when it comes to being prolific - you got to take the crookeds with the straights. Three just has more of the crookeds.
Finally, Mill Creek Entertainment is offering budget-priced releases of two '80s perennials: the thriller Little Nikita and the dramedy Punchline. Neither picture remotely approaches classic territory, but for a whole subset of '90s Kids (of which I count myself), they aired on TV so many times that we can quote large swaths from memory. Little Nikita is the most problematic AND most fun. Like Peter Yates's The House on Carroll Street or even Sylvester Stallone's Rocky IV, Little Nikita belongs to a genre that essentially amounts to anti-Soviet propaganda. It plays like a thinner, dumber version of The Americans, with River Phoenix as an all-American teen who learns from a driven FBI agent (Sidney Poitier) that a) his parents (Richard Jenkins and Caroline Kava) might be Soviet sleeper agents who are b) involved in a deadly espionage exercise involving a brutal former KGB officer (the great character actor Richard Lynch). Director Richard Benjamin has made good films in the past, but he can't get much out of a Bo Goldman/John Hill script that grows increasingly anti-climatic as it goes along. That said, Phoenix and Poitier are terrific, and the whole movie is so logy and conflict-free that after a while, you kinda sink into it, which isn't a bad way to spend, say, a lazy Sunday afternoon. In theory, Punchline is much better. It's got a more nuanced human core - Sally Field plays a bored housewife who decides she wants to be a standup comic - and much more edge, given that Field quickly learns this world is less funny than she might have expected. That goes double for the movie: we've got a comedy where the jokes don't really work, either from Field or from Tom Hanks as her abrasive male counterpart. Yet the film maintains an odd integrity in its willingness to take comedy seriously, as it were. Writer/director David Seltzer foregrounds the desperation and insecurity at the heart of the standup world, with Hanks delivering a virtuoso turn as an unlikeable mess who uses his raw energy to overcome his personal shortcomings. And hey, unlike Judd Apatow's similarly minded Funny People, we don't have to endure a third act that goes all mushy and lasts approximately the same length as Dylan's Live at Budokan. Just because a film's an interesting failure doesn't make it any less interesting.