For the week of July 2nd, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the period thriller Beirut to Blu-ray. I wasn't surprised to learn that screenwriter Tony Gilroy first wrote Beirut almost thirty years ago. Not because it feels like a late-'80s/early-'90s period piece (Gilroy roots the action in 1982), but rather because it plays like a test run for ideas Gilroy would tackle later on in his career. His hero, alcoholic crisis mediator Mason Skiles (a terrific Jon Hamm) tasked with brokering a complex hostage negotiation in Lebanon, is another one of Gilroy's noble failures: squint a little, and you could be looking at the morally distraught title character in Michael Clayton, or Russell Crowe's shambling journalist from State of Play. Hell, when Skiles really gets cooking linguistically, we could be looking at the non-rom-com version of Clive Owen from Gilroy's underrated Duplicity, and the whole film unfolds in the kind of ethical and physical mindfield that made Gilroy's Bourne screenplays so bracing (like those, the ultimate Big Bad is playing for the Good Guys). But at this point in his career, Gilroy hadn't succeeded in getting the formula right. He clearly loves his broken hero; too bad he doesn't offer the same nuance to Rosamund Pike's female lead, a CIA operative who dryly refers to herself as "a skirt used to drive tourists around" and then spends the rest of the film doing just that. Too much of the plot hinges on contrivances you could drive a tank through (in no way will the identity of the main terrorist surprise you, so loudly does Gilroy telegraph the move in the first act), and Skiles's motivations for falling into drink and disarray were clichés at the turn of the twentieth century - he's another wounded heart, lovesick over his wife's murder. However, warmed-over Tony Gilroy is still better than no Tony Gilroy at all. As imperfect as it may be, I still enjoyed Beirut a good deal. There's a great irony in that the films that made Gilroy rich (the first four Bournes) privilege physical action to a degree atypical in most of his other projects. Gilroy loves legalese and the verbal tête-à-tête (remember: he's the same guy who wrote The Devil's Advocate, where Al Pacino's literal devil uses language to seduce Keanu Reeves's callow lawyer over to the dark side), and long stretches of the film allow Gilroy this passion. His facility for hushed argument and acid repartee are on full display here, whether it's Dean Norris baiting Hamm with about a half dozen redefinitions of the word "reality" or Hamm's virtuoso haggling session with an equally savvy PLO representative. And while I still think Beirut handles its delicate subject - Israeli-Palestinian relations - too glibly at times, I guess I should be grateful I'm getting any substance at all. Mid-tier adult programmers are an endangered species, and we should support them whenever we can.
Martin Liebman wrote that "the film certainly tries rather hard to build an intense, sometimes frenzied character and political drama but only feels as if the constant shaky handheld camerawork is trying to draw attention to kinetic energy and masking the essential shortcomings inherent to the straightforward narrative rather than complimenting or enhancing it. The picture moves from one essential plot contrivance to the next, with predictable turns and character arcs largely going as predicted once the players are introduced and the core story is set in motion, as Skiles returns to Beirut a decade after losing his wife. Intrigue is mild, action is relatively brief and not memorably staged, and everything in between feels churned out from a movie mill. Controversial or not, Beirut does do a decent job of depicting the world in which it takes place, at least insofar as it supports the building narrative and houses the characters that maneuver about in it. Political intrigue is a constant hover over the on-the-ground goings-on as Skiles, fighting tragic loss and attempting to negotiate for his friend's life while dodging bombs and bullets and attempting to sober up, finds himself neck-deep in social unrest and political tugs-of-war, all the while fending off his own demons. His character is the film's brightest beacon, even as he's a rather dark figure and generically constructed at that. Hamm gives it a solid effort, playing both extremes at various points during the movie but usually soldering through all of those components that shape the character as the movie's central driving force. Hamm finds the gravity of the moment in each scene and constructs the character within the movie's larger parameters and the dark and evolving narrative stakes with as much depth as he can muster for a role that is otherwise made of stock components."
I realize it's a roundabout way of discussing Blockers (which also hits Blu-ray courtesy of Universal), but can we talk about how awesome John Cena is? After serving his time in serviceable action programmers (12 Rounds, anyone?) designed to make him the next Dwayne Johnson, Cena took a hard turn into character-actor absurdism. We've all benefitted from the shift. With about fifteen minutes at his disposal, Cena stole Trainwreck away from funny people like Amy Schumer and Bill Hader, and he's even better in Blockers as Geraldine Viswanathan's sensitive, absurdly supportive father. Whenever the Rock plays sweet, the joke always lives in the disconnect between his fearsome exterior and his meek interior (see also: Central Intelligence, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), but Cena is so un-self-conscious about his meekness that it's almost besides the point. What we're laughing at is Cena's specificity of performance: the way he bristles at untucking his flannel shirt from his khaki cargo-shorts because "this shirt is meant to be tucked in," or the obvious joy he feels when Viswanathan cannily argues that she was trying a cigarette so she'd know she wouldn't like smoking them. Hell, look at Blockers' big butt-chugging setpiece. You can tell Cena has worked out exactly how he'd be feeling in each step of the "drinking" process, from initial insertion to the last of the beer sliding out of him (as a result of a freak car accident, natch), so we're laughing more at Cena's careful modulation of inebriation than any of the actual jokes Brian and Jim Kehoe's script gives him. Shame the rest of Blockers never matches Cena's efforts. I want to like the movie more than I do, but it's simultaneously too much and not enough. Director Kay Cannon never quite figures out if the movie is a gender-flipped Superbad (on Prom Night, Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon, and Viswanathan's teenage besties make a pact to lose their respective virginities) or a farce about their overprotective parents (Cena, Leslie Mann, and Ike Barenholtz) trying to stop their kids from having sex at all costs, so Cannon MacGyvers both plots together to diminishing effect. We never spend enough concentrated time with either group to care about them, and the overreliance on formless improv turns much of the film into a feature-length version of one of those "Line-O-Rama" featurettes on a Judd Apatow movie (Barenholtz comes off worst in this regard - the film lets him riff too much, and we don't take it seriously when he reveals himself as the most self-aware of who his daughter is and what she really wants). Still, Blockers might be a shambles, but it's an inoffensive shambles, and Cena is great. I can't stress that last point enough.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film shares its focus between the daughters and the parents, but there's no mistaking where Blockers' character loyalties lie. It's named for the parents, after all, and while the film explores the girls' various wants and needs, reactions and responses to sex - the dream encounter, experimenting with various drugs, the courage to ask another girl out - the bulk of the humor, and the majority of the runtime, stems from the blockers' jaunts through the prom and the surrounding local area in the pursuit of preventing their girls from making their own decisions. The film's drama comes from the idea that the parents are at once both protecting and projecting on their girls. Through their would-be interference, they are reflecting on their own lives, are reliving their own mistakes, and are of the belief that their girls are incapable of making their own decisions and living their own lives, at least when it comes to sex. There's a scene in the middle of the movie in which John Cena's character's wife admonishes the blocking trio, and Lisa in particular, for this very idea. It's no surprise where the movie goes and how things resolve, but the filmmakers at least attempt to wrench in a bit of a dramatic core (read: social commentary) into an otherwise raunchy but vacuous movie watching experience."
Finally, Arrow Films is offering a stacked new edition of Wes Craven's notorious 1972 The Last House on the Left. At this point, we must acknowledge that Craven was a different filmmaker at this point in his career. You won't find the stylish populism of his A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream in this, which begins with the rape and murder of two young girls (Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham) and somehow only gets more depraved from there. The phrase "endurance test" comes to mind - even though Last House on the Left runs under ninety minutes, you kinda can't wait for it to end. And I suspect Craven wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Craven has spoken about how the media's brutal coverage of the Vietnam War infected his psyche, and in both Last House on the Left and his pulpier The Hills Have Eyes, he gives the various atrocities the vérité jitters you might have seen on an old Magnavox during the nightly news. Admittedly, this lack of polish makes for an uneven sit, and critics back in '72 (notably Roger Ebert, who emerged as the film's most prestigious champion) questioned Craven's choice to insert random hick comedy involving two bumbling cops (Marshall Anker and Martin Kove) circling the violence. Yet this very incongruity somehow enhances the film's raw power. We're watching Anker and Kove hee-haw their ways through narrative dead-ends, only to shock-cut into David Hess's terrifying psycho disemboweling a screaming victim, before transitioning into grindhouse mayhem once Peabody's parents (Cynthia Carr and Gaylord St. James) decide to mount their revenge. The proceedings have the instability of a nightmare. If The Last House on the Left isn't Craven's best film, it's easily his most frightening, and one of the 1970's most important horror pictures.