For the week of January 8th, Warner and New Line Home Entertainment are bringing the horror hit It to Blu-ray. You got to give it to this flick: in a time of PG-13, kid-tested-mother-approved studio fare, this ghoulish little shocker about a shape-shifting monster (personified by Bill Skarsgård's terrifying clown, Pennywise) hunting and eating children proved to be one of 2017's biggest box-office draws. To anyone who's ever been a kid, this attraction shouldn't come as any big surprise. Kids like being scared, and you better believe that when Stephen King was first writing the novel version of It, he was only riffing on bloody tropes the Brothers Grimm established about two hundred prior. I certainly dug the book for that same repulsion-attraction fear factor, and it's that obsession with King's handling of terror that complicates my reaction to the movie. If I'm trying to be objective and am assessing It on its own merits, like, whether or not it achieves what it sets out to do, then sure, It works, and sometimes quite a bit more than that. Director Andy Muschietti roots the scares so aggressively on the Jump Scare side of the Fear Spectrum that his film often functions more like a carnival funhouse than an actual, y'know, movie, but I can say this: Muschietti does build an attractive funhouse. He's also smart enough to embolden his young stars, who manage to turn It into, essentially, The Goonies with a flesh-eating, interdimensional clown. In particular, Sophia Lillis is going to be a huge star. Mark my words, but seventy years from now, when the Academy Awards are screening Lillis' Lifetime Achievement Reel, the Oscar editors are going to foreground that tremendous moment where her Bev is trying to process the dawning realization that her abusive father can't see all of the gore staining her bathroom after a violent Pennywise attack. And yet, I've been living with Stephen King's original novel in my head for seventeen years and for all its faults, the book version of It permanently shaped my conception of genre horror: its history, its highs, its lows. Viewed from that cruelly nostalgic perspective, of course It the movie can't compete. None of the other criticism I might proffer - that Derry never feels like a living entity, that Muschietti turns Bev into a damsel-in-distress while overly truncating Mike and Stan's characters, that original director Cary Fukunaga might have made a Great Movie as opposed to just a great horror movie - matters, given that my original sin is Bias. So there's that. Maybe one more thing: if Fukunaga couldn't direct this, James Wan should have. That man could make a perfect populist It, even if it would never be My It.
I'm far less ambivalent about the revenge potboiler The Foreigner, which arrives courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment. For its first hour or so, I was convinced I was watching an unjustly neglected sleeper. Director Martin Campbell (of GoldenEye and Casino Royale fame) economically draws us into the world of Quan (Jackie Chan), a Vietnamese restaurateur who loses his daughter in a London terrorist bombing. I don't think I've ever seen Chan so emotionally open on camera, so we're all the more receptive when Campbell steers the movie into Taken territory and has Chan hunt those responsible for the attack. Anyone familiar with Campbell's Bond entries (as well as his underrated eco-thriller Edge of Darkness) knows Campbell has a crunchy, spatially sure sense of action choreography, and he puts Chan through a series of bruising showdowns (an escape from a boarding house; a woodland knife fight; a claustrophically close-combat gun battle) that are just as notable for showcasing Chan's legendary physical gifts as they are for their genuine kinetic mayhem. Campbell emphasizes those moments when his combatants get winded or screw up, all of which enhance the unpredictability of their bouts. Furthermore, The Foreigner has just enough political resonance to keep things interesting. Quan quickly learns that the terrorists belong to a splinter cell of the IRA, a discovery that puts him on the path of Pierce Brosnan's Irish Deputy Minister Liam Hennessy. Loosely based on Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, Hennessy makes for the kind of nuanced rotter than Brosnan plays so well - he sure as hell didn't orchestrate the bombing, but to offer too much support for or against the bombers could implode his political career, and Brosnan makes palpable Hennessy's unease at being beholden to all the wrong people. As action-movie setups go, this is rich territory, and I was astounded when Quan infiltrated Hennessy's isolated forest compound at the halfway mark: this sort of development usually occurs at the finale, and it left me excited about where The Foreigner might go in the back end. Sadly, the answer is, nowhere, and slowly. Quan's revenge grows repetitive - he sets off a few bombs himself; Hennessy sends some men into the woods to stop him; and after Quan defeats them, he hounds Hennessy for the names of the terrorists. Rinse, repeat. And it's no better on Brosnan's end! As good as he is, he's saddled with a whole lot of melodrama (he cheats on his wife, who's also cheating on him with Hennessy's young nephew, who the wife wants to put into power, Lady Macbeth-style) and a third-act twist that renders his character much less ambiguous. Campbell is such a consummate genre craftsperson that he keeps The Foreigner watchable even as it flails, but you wish he could have wrapped things up more effectively.
From the Criterion Collection comes John Ford's formally and thematically daring Young Mr. Lincoln. Anyone familiar with Ford's great Westerns knows how obsessed he was with analyzing American mythmaking - The Searchers is practically a graduate thesis on deconstructing the lie of the "Old West" - and with Young Mr. Lincoln, Ford takes on nothing less than the legend of Abraham Lincoln. We might expect a traditional biopic, or a record of Lincoln's time in office, or even a celebration of how he helped end slavery: any of these would befit as towering a figure as our sixteenth president. Except that's not what Ford does. What strikes you immediately about Young Mr. Lincoln is how small Honest Abe seems. He's not small of height - Henry Fonda cuts an appropriately imposing figure in terms of his stature - rather, Fonda and Ford's Lincoln is recessive, diffident even. He couldn't be further away from the presidency, and his soulmate Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore) practically has to push him into taking up law. No, in the early, idyllic moments of Young Mr. Lincoln, Lincoln is just a small-town Illinois kid, and Fonda emphasizes the character's unease with himself, the way his gangly body seems perpetually on the verge of folding itself out of existence. What shakes him up is Death, as is often the case in Ford's works. Ann dies, and that void compels Lincoln to try and find some kind of greater meaning in all this misery. It's here that Ford again feints away from our expectations. Already, he's given us an awkward Lincoln whose true love passes away well before Mary Todd ever shows up (Mary factors into the second half of the picture, but Ford casts her as little more than a consolation prize to his heartbroken Abe), and now, just as we think maybe he'll flash forward to Lincoln's campaign, he instead turns the film into a courtroom drama, of all things. And not even a big court case: some nobody dies in a random, ugly fight, and Lincoln finds himself defending the hapless brothers accused of the crime. The proceedings play out like a proto-Perry Mason episode, and the first time I saw Young Mr. Lincoln, I found this shift into formula unsatisfying. Sure, Ford's innate skill keeps the legalese fleet and surprisingly funny, but I wanted more from Abraham Lincoln. Essentially, I fell right into Ford's trap. He knows we expect so much of this man, and by giving us such a modest, low-stakes insight into his character, Ford is able to not just foreshadow the man Lincoln will become but also affirm the inherent value of all people. To him, Lincoln was an ordinary guy who just found his moment. The same, by extension, could happen to any one of us.
Finally, Well Go USA is offering the Irish neo-noir Bad Day for the Cut. I'll tell you this: director/co-writer Chris Baugh really wants to be Jeremy Saulnier. He's crafted something that plays, at least structurally, like Saulnier's masterful revenge drama Blue Ruin; Nigel O'Neill's taciturn farmer sets out to avenge his mother's death, with predictably bloody results. And the more Bad Day for the Cut approximates Blue Ruin's elliptical, menacing approach to action/character, the better it works. I loved the first act, which gives O'Neill's unassuming home life with his mother the texture of a Ken Loach drama - I could watch O'Neill fix cars and stare sadly into the Irish countryside forever - and Baugh manages to inject some wry comedy into the bleakest of situations, from O'Neill improvising a torture device out of a hot bean sauce pan to Susan Lynch's Big Bad chewing out an underling for getting too much of a kick from "slicing people's bellies" open. However, a) Baugh doesn't have Saulnier's terrifying facility for staging violence (seriously, Saulnier deserves recognition alongside Scorsese and Spielberg in terms of the visceral-horrifying jolt he gives on-screen carnage) nor b) Saulnier's gift for thematic and narrative plotting. It will not surprise you at all, Dear Reader, that O'Neill ends up furthering a cycle of bloodshed far past anything he imagined, except his blunders feel more like screenwriting contrivances than the brutally logical missteps plaguing Blue Ruin's unlikely avenger. How else to explain how the movie justifies and then exploits Józef Pawlowski and Anna Próchniak's struggling Polish innocents? And that's not even counting Lynch's big reveal as to why all of this is happening in the first place. The movie gives so much psychic weight to an explanation that isn't the least bit shocking or interesting. After a certain point, there's no sense to the proceedings - it's just a slab of noir miserablism. Now, Baugh is not untalented as a filmmaker, and I quite liked James Everett's churning music score, but ultimately, Bad Day for the Cut is both too lightweight and too grim to warrant more than a casual viewing.