For the week of August 28th, Arrow Films is giving a feature-laden release to one of the great contemporary action movies: John Frankenheimer's 1998 thriller Ronin. The plot seems culled from Robert Ludlum's leftovers: a shadowy criminal operation (personified by Jonathan Pryce and Natascha McElhone) contracts a group of mercenaries (Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgård, Skipp Sudduth, and - in a scene-stealing extended cameo - Sean Bean) to retrieve...something from rival terrorists in the French Riviera, but the violent response they face and their own shifting loyalties cause the mercenaries to question the task at hand. I'm being coy here for a number of reasons. For one, figuring out what kind of movie Ronin is represents one of its greatest pleasures. First it's a spy thriller, then it shifts into conspiracy-thriller mode before blossoming into a full-fledged action epic, albeit one that detours into the chase AND buddy picture (as for who our buddy pairing is, I won't say, except for the fact that their chemistry is so good I wonder why they haven't appeared in at least five hard-boiled thrillers together) realms as it's simultaneously becoming a political thriller and a noir mystery. It's a wonder that Ronin hangs together at all, except then you realize that Frankenheimer also helmed the similarly disjointed-brilliant The Manchurian Candidate (as singular a noir-comedy-satire-thriller-romance-surrealist epic as I've ever seen), and you realize how vital his hand was in shaping and balancing Ronin's unique tones. Almost as important as Frankenheimer is screenwriter Richard Weisz, and if you've never heard of him, that's because he doesn't exist. Weisz is the pseudonym of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Mamet (he adopted the name after some unpleasantries involving script arbitration - depending on whom you believe - Frankenheimer or co-writer J.D. Zeik - Mamet either completely reconfigured the screenplay or added almost nothing of value. Such is Hollywood, I suppose), and his terse approach to character and behavior permeates the finished film. People don't sit around dumping backstories on each other here - rather, Mamet reveals who they are through action, whether it's Bean's hilariously inappropriate response to a violent gunfight or De Niro's taciturn self-surgery on a near-fatal wound (the film's highpoint), and when his characters do speak, it's in that signature blend of Mamet-speak that turns mundane expressions into veiled threats or transforms repetition and profanity into something approaching poetry. I think of Ronin, and I'm just as likely to light on De Niro wielding a description of a boathouse as a weapon or the way the invocation of "She would not be coming back" between two characters grows into a tragic reflection of the mercenary lifestyle as I am the plot twists or violent confrontations. I'm reminded of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, which performed a similar trick: if you already know a genre's basic tricks, then sometimes it can be more fun distilling them down to the barest essentials and letting the viewer deconstruct the content from there. Now, Frankenheimer was far more of a cinematic populist than Melville, and he doesn't ever let Ronin become an Army of Shadows-esque arthouse venture; as anyone who has seen The Train or French Connection II can attest, Frankenheimer loves staging and choreographing action too much, and Ronin might be his magnum opus in that regard, from the numerous bruising shootouts to two all-timer car chases, one of which recreates Princess Diana's doomed paparazzi escape (Frankenheimer placed De Niro and Reno in the stunt cars, and it shows - De Niro looks legitimately terrified throughout this chase). But Mamet's gift for dialogue and his distain for conventions means the action lands harder. We feel like we're watching intelligent adults puzzle their ways through brutal situations, whereas too many action movies scale themselves for children. A treat for adult action fans.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that he "ha[d] a few more qualms about Ronin's wending structure and perhaps too convoluted political intrigue than Mart[in Liebman] evidently did, hence my slightly lower score for the overall film. But even with those qualms, there's no denying the visceral impact of Frankenheimer's work here, especially with regard to some spectacular set pieces which are dramatically staged and expertly filmed. Performances by the large international cast are also top notch, and a sense of increasing doom pervades this enterprise in a very realistic way, despite the obvious florid touches of the screenplay. Arrow's restoration has rescued this commendable effort from the less than optimal previous Blu-ray release, and is itself commendable."
Paramount Home Media Distribution offers no such fare with its release of the disappointing Baywatch reboot. Sometimes I resent Phil Lord and Chris Miller's sleeper hit 21 Jump Street (and its slightly less inspired sequel 22 Jump Street); it is so unexpectedly charming and funny and smart that it gives remakes/reboots a good name, and it emboldens the people behind a film like Baywatch. Hell, it probably makes more sense to fashion a jokey parody/sequel out of Baywatch than it does the original 21 Jump Street. I've met my fair share of unironic Jump Street acolytes (Tom Hanson POWER), but Baywatch offers little to those who aren't in it for the girls in bikinis OR who aren't stuck in a car-dealership waiting room. And to its credit, you can imagine a version of the Baywatch movie that uses the rough formula of the series (a muscle-bound lifeguard - Dwayne Johnson replacing David Hasselhoff - and his team of scantily-clad subordinates fighting beach crimes, here represented by Priyanka Chopra's glamorous drug kingpin) to simultaneously lampoon the jiggling, rote clichés behind it all. However, the finished film squanders most of its opportunities, and for the most fundamental reason possible: it's just not funny. This is another one of those comedies (like the equally dispiriting CHiPS reboot) where the cast and crew go right up to the edge of a joke and then don't deliver, like the fact they're making a Baywatch movie alone is reason enough for chuckles. Director Seth Gordon has seemingly allowed only Zac Efron (as Johnson's idiot new partner) and Jon Bass (as the team's chubbiest, nerdiest teammate) to deliver anything resembling jokes, and of the two, only Efron gets any laughs. Bass's whole shtick exists on the assumption that a) fat people are always funny, especially when seen in contrast with beautiful skinny people and that b) there is nothing more gutbusting than watching him suffer grievous physical harm, especially in his genital region. As such, after a while Baywatch just starts looking like a slightly better produced episode of the TV show - you wonder if, had they known that would be the case, female leads Alexandra Daddario, Kelly Rohrbach, and Ilfenesh Hadera would have been cool with playing glorified eye candy. And the frustrating thing is, the raw elements are promising. I can think of no better lead for this kind of smirking reboot than Johnson - while I'm less keen on the movie as a whole, Johnson delivers one of 2016's great comic performances in Central Intelligence - and Efron has time and time again proved himself as a stealth weirdo of the highest order; the guy stole both Neighbors movies from the likes of Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Hannibal Buress, and Ike Barenholtz. You give these two a screenplay that's on the level of 21 Jump Street (or better yet, 2007's perpetually underrated Hot Fuzz, which still remains the gold standard for this kind of cop-movie farce), and you're looking at a comedy classic. Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's credited draft (many more people tried to punch up this one), however, is not that script. Baywatch isn't the worst film of the year, but it might be the most forgettable. For people like Johnson and Efron, there's no worse fate, I think.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the story involves a murder, a mystery the lifeguards will likely solve, a nefarious plot the lifeguards will assuredly foil, all the while learning to tolerate - even love - one another and their various idiosyncrasies. And yada, yada, yada. It's all just noise, the cinematic equivalent of cheap glue that holds the movie together, that gives it a purpose to market the title and introduce a new generation of muscle and breasts. Indeed, the plot is as empty, predictable, and pointless as they come. There's no tension, little dramatic flow, and only a concern to get to the next stale action scene or unnecessary gag...Characters are otherwise serviceable-to-good. There's little depth, but they're performed enthusiastically, a borderline miracle given a script that's bereft of creativity or purpose."
From Warner Home Entertainment comes the DCU Animated adventure Batman and Harley Quinn, and it, too, is fairly forgettable. It isn't terrible - never does it sink to the lows of the terrible Batman: The Killing Joke - but it also has little of the scope of DCU Animated highlights like Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox or Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. No, what Batman and Harley Quinn has to offer is sheer, unadulterated nostalgia. Fans of the great Batman: The Animated Series rightly love Harley Quinn who, as voiced by Arleen Sorkin, turned what could have been a stock sidekick (the Joker's demented Girl Friday) into the heart of the show: a funny, broken misfit who trusted the absolute wrong person with her affection and keeps paying for it. What, then, could be better than a feature-length picture uniting the Dark Knight (The Animated Series' iconic Kevin Conroy), Nightwing (Loren Lester), and Quinn as they took on Poison Ivy (Paget Brewster) and the evil Plant Master (Kevin Michael Richardson)? The fault, however, lies in DC (specifically director Sam Liu and writer Bruce Timm) and its reliance on the affinity for those characters and nothing else. Batman and Harley Quinn kinda shuffles along, so content in putting these characters onscreen that it does little to advance their narratives in any meaningful way. While the film tries to provoke an interesting connection between Ivy and Quinn (an oh-so-edgy-except-not one), their history doesn't matter. Joker brings out Quinn's depths, and he's nowhere to be found. And in a sense, neither is Quinn. I don't understand why DC brought over Conroy but not Sorkin, replacing her with The Big Bang Theory's Melissa Rauch, who does a serviceable job and nothing more. Sorkin brought madness and insight in equal measures, neither of which Batman and Harley Quinn is all that interested in.
Finally, Kino Lorber is offering a Blu-ray upgrade to director John Huston's crime comedy Prizzi's Honor. As a Huston acolyte (films like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, and Fat City represent the high-water marks for what cinema can do), I'm loath to admit that time has not been kind to Prizzi's Honor. I get why audiences responded so rapturously to the film in 1985; filmmakers are supposed to become more reflective and autumnal in their moods as they age, yet for his penultimate film, the then-seventy-nine-year-old Huston made, of all things, a slapstick-y mob farce. To his credit, Prizzi's Honor feels like the work of a much younger person. Huston gleefully indulges the film's various violent and carnal appetites, to the degree that you can practically hear the then-ailing director cackling with delight over how the sexual chemistry between two mob assassins (Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner) complicates their personal and professional relationships. I applaud that spirit, and at its best, the film thrums with the same offbeat energy that Huston brought to something like, say, his loopy 1953 caper Beat the Devil: William Hickey looks like he stepped out of an Edward Gorey cartoon as the cadaverous Don Corrado, and Anjelica Huston (in an Academy Award-winning turn) steals the movie as Nicholson's deceptively cunning ex-wife. But those moments are few and far between, and for all of Huston's clear delight in wanting to break bad, he struggles with the movie's farcical atmosphere. Prizzi's Honor slogs along at over two hours - a tighter edit would have worked wonders - and when Huston isn't using sex and violence to goose his audience, he's over-relying on Mafioso stereotypes that, even in 1985, were well past their sell-by date. Nicholson suffers the worst in this regard. It's bad enough that he's tamped down his natural energy and wit to play such a leaden moron, but he adopts a distracting accent and odd lip prosthetic to approximate the character's Italian background, I guess. Turner is a little better, but she's given this performance before - it's just a less complex version of her Body Heat villainess. I hate that Prizzi's Honor doesn't work as well for me as it does for others, but it's John Huston, after all. You have to hold him to a higher standard.
Brian Orndorf wrote that "on its own, the film is mostly just fine, never remarkable, coasting on the abilities of its tremendously talented ensemble, which is teeming with character actors and toplined by then-titans, Kathleen Turner and Jack Nicholson. The Huston touch is there with cultural details and bluntness, but the feature falls a little flat when it gets caught up in plot mechanics...Huston doesn't aim to mimic The Godfather, but there's a defined concentration on the positioning of the Prizzis and their dirty business, with much of the movie devoted to characters in rooms trying to figure out a solution to rapidly mounting troubles Charley's uncovered. For the more mafia-minded, the feature will likely scratch that criminal itch, detailing family business that goes back generations (the picture opens with Charley's birth) and is currently threatened with extinction as Don Prizzi searches for a replacement. There are few knots to untangle, but the onslaught of last names can be a bit numbing, with the production leaning hard on cat's cradle-style relationships and secretive motivations, and Huston loves the Italian atmosphere of it all, supporting the mood with opera selections on the soundtrack and he keeps the cast well fed with pasta dishes. A lesser helmer would crank it all into a cartoon zone, but Huston stops just short of absurdity, sustaining sobriety to Charley's journey of mind-bending revelations."