For the week of June 11th, Warner and MGM Home Entertainment are bringing the video-game adaptation Tomb Raider to Blu-ray. I tire of movies that kill you with adequacy. To wit: almost all of Tomb Raider's individual pieces are adequate. Director Roar Uthaug can stage/shoot a competent action sequence. The script (by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons) consists of equal parts the 2013 Tomb Raider game (where a very green Lara Croft gets stranded on an island fighting some very nasty people and a supernatural menace) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Lara dives into this adventure searching for her long-lost father), both of which are pretty good in their own right. The movie gets extra points for casting folks like Kristin Scott Thomas (as Lara's legal guardian), Dominic West (as her father), and Walton Goggins (as the Big Bad), and while none of them do near their best work here, their presence classes up any joint. From the Tom Holkenborg score through the George Richmond cinematography, everything in the film is fine, and that's the problem. At no point does Tomb Raider either impress or repel us; it just coasts along on a tide of impersonal functionality and leaves almost no impression whatsoever. As I write this review, I'm less than a day away from my first viewing, and I'm struggling to remember basic plot details. I seem to recall some late-act business wherein Goggins' henchmen turn into mindless rage zombies - did that happen, or am I remembering 28 Days Later instead? I know Lara shipwrecks on the island (the previews kept playing that shot of her vaulting from a boat into the ocean) with Into the Badlands badass Daniel Wu, except he just disappears from the movie? That can't be right - why would they waste him so egregiously? - but all I can recall are a few shots of him running through the jungle and then maybe leading an insurrection against Goggins' people that goes nowhere. This Tomb Raider seems designed on a molecular level to resist even a basic level of distinction, and that's a shame. For one, I have to imagine Warner and MGM didn't intend to reboot Tomb Raider with a movie people would forget fifteen minutes later. But most importantly, Alicia Vikander is totally committed as Lara. It isn't just her physical transformation (she's like 180% muscle and 0% body fat in this movie). She wants to sell the reality of Lara as a scared, tentative young woman (this Lara yelps when hurt, and in the film's best moment, she struggles to process her very first kill) who learns how to be an icon. Pity the movie doesn't care about Lara as much as Vikander does.
In an effort to roll out 4K Blu-rays for most of their backcatalog, Paramount Home Media Distribution is offering new Blu-rays for both Forrest Gump and Terminator Genisys. It's become very trendy of late to dogpile on Forrest Gump (it didn't deserve to win so many Oscars; it's an unrealistic boomer fantasy; it cheapens the struggles of the cognitively challenged - take your pick), but I...kinda like it? Do I think it's better than fellow "Class of '94" peers The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show, Ed Wood, Natural Born Killers, Interview with the Vampire, or Pulp Fiction? Absolutely not, but it is very good, and hardly the sociocultural travesty that so many critics brand it. Director Robert Zemeckis has never been more in command of his technical gifts - one of the few epics that earns its widescreen scope, Forrest Gump merges Old Hollywood storytelling with still-impressive New Hollywood digital effects - and he has a perfect scene-partner in Tom Hanks, who brings so much unforced decency to the part that we're more willing to ignore the more problematic aspects of the character (or the film's callous handling of Robin Wright's Jenny). You know what really makes Forrest Gump look good, though? Watch it back-to-back with Terminator Genisys. I'm not sure Genisys is the worst of the Terminator franchise (we do live in a post-Terminator Salvation world, after all), but it might be the least essential. In theory, I like that Genisys wants to be the Back to the Future II of the series. We open as Kyle Reese (a profoundly uncharismatic Jai Courtney) is just about to travel back to 1984, but then a mysterious new assailant (Matt Smith, playing a villain intended to take center-stage in a follow-up that will never happen) messes with the space-time continuum, and Reese finds himself navigating an alternate version of the first Terminator, complete with a battle-ready Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke, likable but miscast) and a family-friendly version of the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his least inspired go-round for this franchise). Some of the new 1984 scenes are cool, and I loved Lee Byung-hun's T-1000, but then the movie starts time-hopping, and I stopped caring. These movies are supposed to be fun, so why does everyone seem so dour? I don't blame Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier's script (it's appropriately poppy, and it includes what could have been a great reveal about Jason Clarke's John Connor had the previews not bungled the surprise), but rather Alan Taylor's direction. Based on this and Thor: The Dark World, Taylor has absolutely zero facility for this kind of expansive blockbuster: his post-Game of Thrones movies feel like homework, and not in a good way.
Of Forrest Gump, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is one of the great American classics that's unique in its sum total excellence of tone, depth, and characterization. It's brilliantly acted, of course. Its story of simple humanity is timeless, and the message on the importance of seeing the bigger picture and embracing life rather than sweating the details remains as relevant today as ever. Paramount's UHD is disappointing, to say the least. Picture quality frustratingly fluctuates quite a bit, practically sparing at its best but often suffering under the burdens of noise reduction, crush, and poorly realized Dolby Vision colors." Then he called Terminator Genisys "a serviceable big-budget spectacle with plenty of strictly recreated nods to previous entires in the franchise, but it's also lacking that spark that made the original two, and to a lesser extent the third and fourth films, superior. Nevertheless, there are some highlights and the film plays well as more of an homage to the series than it does a necessary entry into it. Paramount's UHD is excellent. The 2160p/Dolby Vision transfer is a highlight, the Atmos sound is exceptional, and the studio has included several new extras that were not included on the core Blu-ray release from 2015."
The other notable 4K release is an upgrade for Joe Wright's Academy Award-winning Darkest Hour. The best reason to watch Darkest Hour is the phenomenal makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji. You've seen Tsuji's labors before - he worked with Rick Baker on the Tim Roth ape from Planet of the Apes and the Edgar alien from Men in Black, and he was responsible for making Joseph Gordon-Levitt look more like Bruce Willis in Looper - but his Winston Churchill prosthetics for Darkest Hour might be one of his two or three most impressive screen creations (alongside his incredible Mason Verger makeup from Ridley Scott's Hannibal). As Tsuji explains it (in target="blank">an awesome Vulture profile that's more interesting than Darkest Hour), star Gary Oldman and Churchill look absolutely nothing like one another, so the whole process of merging them unfolded as one of trial-and-error: make the face rounder, lose the eyes; widen the eyes, lose Churchill's baby-faced pout. Looking at the end result, Tsuji's Churchill art has a fascinating sculptural density. Sadly, though, his work is the only exceptional thing about Darkest Hour. This is as staid and conventional a docudrama as I've seen, so much so that it hardly seems the product of the otherwise nervy Joe Wright. Wright has brought a florid style not unlike Ken Russell to films like Hanna and the underrated Anna Karenina, and I suspect the high-profile failures of both Anna and Pan scared him straight. How else to explain Darkest Hour's tedious, unobtrusive restraint? Occasionally, Wright will toss in a virtuosic flourish (a tracking shot through a bombed-out Allied camp; an affinity for overhead shots of WWII landscapes that, in one breathtaking instance, transition into a dead soldier's face), but for the most part, what he offers has the same visual polish as an HBO movie-of-the-week: a lot of shadowy rooms filled with white dudes arguing about war. DP Bruno Delbonnel gives the picture a velvety texture, but you'll find little that I'd call cinematic. I'm reminded of Lincoln, which is the ideal for this type of movie: historically resonant, yes, but visually interesting and wittily scripted. You'll find little wit on display here - Anthony McCarten's script operates as a functional procedural, with only the actors juicing the text. Kristin Scott Thomas does nice work as Winston Churchill's patient, flinty wife, as does the great Ben Mendelsohn as a dashing King George VI, although I could have done without the bland Lily James (playing Churchill's new secretary), and I'm nowhere as keen as Oldman as the rest of the world is. He's fine, but he adds nothing special to animate the character, especially if you compare him with John Lithgow's less flashy work in The Crown. Again, Tsuji's art brings the part to life, and not the other way around.
Also from Paramount comes reissues of two iconic Eddie Murphy/John Landis comedies: 1983's Trading Places and 1988's Coming to America. I use "iconic" because both films have the distinction of being popular without being very good, and I'm speaking as a diehard fan of both Murphy and Landis. In many ways, Trading Places is the most inexplicable hit of the two. The setup is straight out of Preston Sturges: take two very different men (Dan Aykroyd's vain day-trader and Murphy's excitable hustler), and then watch what happens when a pair of scheming billionaires (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, both of whom steal the movie) cause our leads to swap their respective positions in high and low society. The difference is, Sturges would have pulled off something sharper and funnier in under a hundred minutes, whereas Trading Places waddles along at a bloated two hours. Landis has always struggled with overlength, but at least stuff happens in Animal House and The Blues Brothers. Here, we get a whole lot of vaguely racist jokes at Murphy's expense, Aykroyd's unfunny mugging (he's so much better playing a weirdo than an authority figure), and some business with Paul Gleason and a gorilla that manages to combine gay-panic humor with rape jokes. And if anyone can explain to me what the hell is happening in the big stock market finale, I'll owe you a life debt. Murphy is great (he has a break-the-fourth-wall moment that slays me), but people forget that after his hilarious introduction (where he pretends to be an amputee war veteran), the movie mostly relegates him to the background. If nothing else, Coming to America does not make that same mistake: Murphy plays no fewer than four different people, and his character work here often bests his more expansive work in, say, The Nutty Professor. There's a specificity to his Coming to America personalities that slays me - much as we must credit Rick Baker's impressive makeup work, Murphy finds the soul buried beneath, whether he's playing a Teddy Pendergrass-like soul singer or an old Jewish (and white!) man. And were Coming to America just a series of sketches with Murphy undercover, I'd have no reservations about my love for it. Unfortunately, that Landis bloat kicks in again! As great as Murphy is, the movie around him is a tired, Cinderella-in reverse story about an African prince (Murphy) who ventures to Queens in search of a bride. Furthermore, by 1988, Murphy had pretty much reached the apex of his vanity, so he expects us to take the romance stuff seriously, even though his leading-man act is far less interesting than his oddball side characters. The Nutty Professor wouldn't make the same mistake.