For the week of November 13th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the spy thriller Atomic Blonde to Blu-ray. Never have I been more excited to see an action movie: the early trailers for Atomic Blonde are a thing of beauty, firmly positioning the great Charlize Theron back in ass-kicker territory (after her great Mad Max: Fury Road performance) as an MI5 operative trying to untangle a Soviet conspiracy just before the fall of the Berlin wall, and all while engaging in the kinetic, dynamic fight choreography that director David Leitch helped perfect making the first John Wick. However, if nothing else, Atomic Blonde indicates that Leitch is nothing without his Wick co-director Chad Stahelski. On his own, Leitch can't elevate Atomic Blonde beyond what's ultimately a stylish-but-turgid mess. For reasons I don't think I'll ever understand, Leitch and his screenwriter Kurt Johnstad fracture their film's chronology, beginning with Theron's official debrief after the main plot and then flashing back and forth for the rest of the film. If Atomic Blonde had any of the thematic or narrative complexity of, say, Tomas Alfredson's great Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy remake, this choice would make more sense, but we don't come to Atomic Blonde for deep resonance. We just want to watch Theron unleash hell on unsuspecting thugs, and every time we jump around in time or struggle with how the deep bench of character actors (including Sofia Boutella, Eddie Marsan, John Goodman, It's Bill Skarsgård, and a genuinely obnoxious James McAvoy, giving the worst performance of his career) fits into the larger conspiracy, Atomic Blonde loses a little bit more of its precious narrative momentum. It doesn't help that Leitch backloads most of the best action setpieces, or that he has absolutely zero facility for scoring on-screen action to pop needle drops (not only does he bungle the use of Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," but he seems to have forgotten that Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing owns the song until time immemorial). Certainly, Atomic Blonde isn't wholly without merit. Leitch and DP Jonathan Sela coat the film in neon colors and graphic camera placement, thus guaranteeing that Atomic Blonde remains an aesthetic delight, and occasionally they'll reach the giddy action heights you'd find in John Wick. Everyone talks about the nine-minute apartment-complex fight that Leitch presents as one unbroken take, and it is great, but the inveterate movie geek in me prefers the brawl that consumes Theron as Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker plays behind her. Yet these moments belie what a chore it is to get through much of Atomic Blonde, or how irritating it is that the film ends where it probably should have started. Look, I'm glad this female-centric, R-rated action movie killed at the box-office, but when that inevitable sequel rolls around? Leitch and Co. would do well to make it more...what's the word? Oh yeah: fun.
Martin Liebman noted that "the film's plot - despite existing in the narratively rich, politically dense, and harrowingly dangerous world of divided Germany in the time of the Berlin Wall, Reagan, Gorbachev, and mutually assured destruction - is about as wafer-thin as they come, reliant on crude spy game maneuverings centered around a 'list' that could extended the length of the cold war by as much as four decades. None of that really matters. The basic plot is little more than a propellant to move the film from one action scene to the next, to absorb the audience not in dramatic details and the political quagmires on the ground level of the Cold War but rather indulge in the sultry curves and high-octane music that truly shape the film. The movie is brimming with an infectious 80s flair and flavor. It's completely absorbed in its culture, from lighting to music, with the latter in particular its lifeblood as songs from George Michael and After the Fire blare atop the film's expertly choreographed fight scenes. Atomic Blonde nails the approach of style over substance, and while the central plot might still leave some audiences wanting more, there's no mistaking the film's credentials as a top-flight entertainer that knows its way around its timeframe, its sex, its sounds, and its violence."
Far better a thriller is Taylor Sheridan's Wind River, which Lionsgate is releasing this week. While the film marks Sheridan's directorial debut, he's already skilled at assaying Wind River's unique brand of American noir; Sheridan wrote the screenplays for Hell or High Water and Sicario, both of which examine this country's fringe communities (poor Texas farmers in Hell or High Water; the border cities from where Sicario views the War on Drugs) for insights regarding abuses of power and endemic corruption. With Wind River, Sheridan takes us to a Native American reservation in rural Wyoming, one that's already suffering the indignities of poverty and drug abuse even before a young woman (Kelsey Asbille) turns up dead. Technically, the cold killed her, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent (Jeremy Renner) who found her body suspects foul play, so he forges an uneasy alliance with an FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) and begins investigating the circumstances leading to her death. What they find is, admittedly, less compelling than the build-up to it - Sheridan is still a better writer than a director, and he resolves the mystery in such a perfunctory fashion (despite a decently intense shootout and a great little performance from Jon Bernthal) that I wish he had a Denis Villeneuve or a David Mackenzie to help him restructure the third act. Yet the investigation itself is so rich that you barely register the ending's deflation. Sheridan spent many of his early years on the reservation, and he has such a clear, specific vision, making time for daily indignities as well as moments of genuine humanity: as the father of the dead girl, Gil Birmingham gives a performance that could have netted him an Academy Award nomination if he'd had maybe one more scene. And he gets a big lift from Renner and Olsen. The two have great chemistry in the Marvel movies, and they generate an entirely different - but no less wonderful - rapport here. Sheridan sets up a familiar dynamic (he's the experienced lawman; she's the green Fed) only to puncture it. Olsen is so good at watching Renner's character and then subtly reflecting his best traits - his confidence, his stillness - and Renner lets his territorial irritation with this newbie turn into genuine admiration, and quicker than we might expect. They're so good at playing this platonic relationship that we're happy just to spend time with them (and we more readily overlook the fact that Renner's character really should be played by someone of Native American descent). A solid, engaging piece of work.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film's "'procedural' elements proceed apace in Wind River, especially once a second corpse is found, but what really propels this film is the characters and relationships. There's a bit of a pat feeling to the predictable denouement involving Cory's sadness, a family tragedy that plays into his desire to bring Natalie's killer or killers to justice, but even with some kind of rote plot formulations, Wind River regularly offers some very forceful emotional content on a whole variety of levels, not the least of which stems from various indignities suffered by assorted Native Americans. All of this said, the 'mystery' at the core of Wind River is never that compelling, and it's potentially ruined one way or the other by a somewhat baffling structural artifice that reveals what led to Natalie's fate right before what is ostensibly the 'real' climax of the film. It's an at least partially understandable artifice, but it's almost willfully disruptive, and (for me, anyway) robbed the closing moments of the film of some power. It also presages a completely ludicrous showdown that defies logic (would any potential bad guys really attempt to take out a bevy of local and federal police officers just to protect themselves? - how would that work, anyway?). Perhaps notably, then, these potential misfires are only short speed bumps in what is an often emotionally devastating portrait of loss both personal and communal."
From the Criterion Collection comes Le Samouraï, which remains one of the most important neo-noirs ever made. Director Jean-Pierre Melville's setup is simplicity itself; we follow ice-cold Parisian assassin Jef Costello (Alain Delon, in his most iconic role) as he executes his contracts. That's about it, except that anyone familiar with Melville's Le Cercle Rouge or Army of Shadows knows how much Melville enjoys establishing simple templates so that he can deconstruct them. So it goes with Le Samouraï - Melville strips down his characters until they resemble mythic archetypes, with Jeff adopting a Zen detachment in terms of how he kills people and avoids betrayal. Nothing fazes him, yet you can't look away; Delon has never been more charismatic (few performers can turn striking a series of poses into a full character), and Melville abstracts the world around him until the film as a whole resembles some great pop-art installation. How fascinating, too, to consider Le Samouraï's position within a greater genre framework. As the title suggests, Jef has more in common with a samurai warrior than an unstable noir gunsel - his stillness reminds me of Toshiro Mifune from Yojimbo - although you can trace the ways that Melville distends and heightens the moments just before and after the actual violence back to Sergio Leone's languid Spaghetti Westerns. Yet Le Samouraï feels so singular in its intentions that you'd never charge it with being derivative. Instead, it plays like the Rosetta Stone behind the work of folks like Michael Mann and Walter Hill, both of whom bring the same alienated reserve to their own stories of hyper-disciplined criminal operators. If Le Samouraï isn't Melville's best film (that would be Army of Shadows or Léon Morin, Priest), then it's certainly his most important. Essential viewing.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "instead of focusing on the action or evolving nature of various straightforward relationships as traditional gangster films typically do, Melville completely drains the glamour and makes them look casual. So all of the clichéd dramatic buildups and climaxes instantly become pointless and the film acquires a brand new identity...There is something else that separates Le Samouraï from other gangster films as well. There is a very interesting western vibe that runs through it, though because Costello operates in a large European city with overcrowded streets and chic jazz clubs it almost seems odd to acknowledge its existence. But pay close attention to the manner in which Costello goes about his business and you will quickly discover plenty of similarities with how various great gunslingers are profiled in the classic American westerns. At times Costello even faces off his opponents as if he is challenging them to an old-fashioned duel. (The prolific Hong Kong director and producer Johnnie To, a great admirer of Le Samouraï, has actually incorporated this particular aspect of Melville's film in many of his popular high-octane action thrillers). Melville parts ways with Costello in perhaps the only way that makes perfect sense. In fact, the finale pretty much legitimizes the 'cool' because it is yet another form of rejection of the conventional rules that traditional gangster films follow. It is bold but casual, unexpected but unforgettable. Melville does not just abruptly clean up the mess and dispatch Costello into the night, he correctly preserves his integrity, and with it that of the entire film."