For the week of July 30th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is offering 4K remasters of two bombastic action-thrillers: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and its sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation. If you're unfamiliar with either of the two (and let's be honest: neither G.I. Joe picture set the pop-culture world on fire), it's probably best that you know you're getting a mixed bag. On a technical level, The Rise of Cobra is easily the superior of the two. Director Stephen Sommers is old hat at this kind of splashy studio fare (he made Deep Rising for Disney and the '99 Mummy for Universal, and both of these are well worth your time), and he stages at least three globetrotting action sequences that make great use of the widescreen frame and his elastic sense of timing and physics: in particular, the pursuit through Paris (and the subsequent destruction of the Eiffel Tower) is probably worth the price of admission. What isn't, however? The awful script and most of the acting. It took at least four writers (Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett, with uncredited contributions from G.I. Joe comic-writer Larry Hama) to structure this screenplay, and the best they could do never rises above trite melodrama - you can't imagine this movie's target audience caring about the soap-opera-ready nonsense between former lovers-turned-mortal enemies Duke (a visibly unhappy Channing Tatum) and Baroness (Sienna Miller, who's much better when the movie just lets her be evil). And while Joseph Gordon-Levitt is having a blast as Cobra Commander, folks like Tatum, Rachel Nichols, Marlon Wayans, and Christopher Eccleston (playing a villain almost as boring as his Thor: The Dark World Big Bad) barely make any impression beyond bad ones. By comparison, G.I. Joe: Retaliation reverses the equation. After The Rise of Cobra underperformed, Paramount cut the budget (from $175 million to $155 million) and hired Jon Chu to replace Sommers. It shows - outside of a thrilling cliffwall swordfight, Chu has little facility for scale and composition (the whole movie was shot in Louisiana for tax purposes and looks it). But the character work is so much more engaging this time around that you're willing to roll with the cut-rate pyrotechnics. Other than the dull-as-drywall D.J. Cotrona, we get nice little turns from the likes of Adrianne Palicki, Ray Stevenson, and Walton Goggins, although the best casting choice Retaliation made was essentially replacing Tatum with Dwayne Johnson. The Rock's charisma alone has powered movies far worse than this, and he gallivants through the film like he's making Die Hard. Speaking of which: Retaliation gets a rare self-aware, non-pissy turn out of Bruce Willis (as G.I. Joe himself), and for that alone, I owe.
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's offbeat dramedy Tully, which might be 2018's most frustrating film. For its first eighty minutes, I thought I was watching one of the year's best pictures. Director Jason Reitman is smart enough to stay outta the way when it comes to Diablo Cody's script, which hews far closer to Young Adult than it does to Juno. There's little forced affect or whimsy here, just a fine-grained and often very funny look at the perils of motherhood. In particular, the first third played like the comedy version of Repulsion, given how Reitman/Cody turn all the attendant details of child-rearing into a free-floating malaise that's just as tense as it is hilarious. And my god, Charlize Theron! I'm one of those folks who finds her work in Monster to be gently overrated. It's the Darkest Hour Syndrome: Theron is great there, but the weight-gain and all the prosthetics would do 90% of the work for anyone in the part. She's much more revelatory here (or in Young Adult) - Theron manages to dial down her star-wattage and present herself as ordinary, of all things. I'm still struggling to reconcile the steely asskicker from the one-take fight scene in Atomic Blonde with the defeated suburbanite here who's too exhausted to care when her young children blithely ask her "what's wrong with [her] body." And then, midway through the third act, Reitman and Cody drop a Big Twist. You read that right. A mumblecore-esque character study ends on a reveal that Reitman stages with the "Gotcha" abandon of an M. Night Shyamalan movie. If it sounds like those two tones would be incompatible, you would be correct, and it almost torpedoed my appreciation for everything that preceded it. It does not help that you've seen this twist before, or that it cheapens some of the more pressing emotional concerns pulsing through the film (most of which involve Ron Livingston as Theron's on-screen husband, who should be the second most important character but gets relegated to a side-part). Whatever the case, this narrative decision is so misguided that you wish Cody and Reitman had spent a little more time figuring out how to make the title character (Mackenzie Davis' night nanny, and whatever my probably with the script are, they don't apply to Davis, who's splendid) significant without resorting to such a jarring fakeout. I can't ignore the greatness of the first two-thirds, but oof, is that ending a whiff.
Of Tully, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "isn't a story about raising a baby. It's instead about rebuilding a mother. Certainly the movie does a wonderful job of depicting not only the stress of new motherhood but also the emotional baggage that comes with it, compounded by raising two other children, one of whom is a handful, to say the least. But the film is not just a collection of scenes of 3AM feedings and a burned-out and overtired mommy struggling to get through her day. Those are the springboards for the larger story, and while they're familiar refrains to anyone who has experienced the joys, and burdens and sacrifices, of raising a child, the film's primary focus evolves over its runtime. Tully's second half is a tonal departure and sometimes seemingly a mismatch for the first, transitioning from a tale of a tired mama to the story of a burgeoning friendship between two very different individuals, different in terms of age, energy level, body image, and confidence. Tully is everything [Theron's] Marlo is not, or at least everything Marlo perhaps once was: young, spunky, spirited, athletic, blessed with a toned body and endless energy. But she's also not everything she appears to be. Tully's second half may not appear to be a natural extension of its first half, but it's actually a more complimentary and revealing continuation than anything else the film might have depicted, including just staying the course and leading Marlo to a generic and predictable state of motherly bliss and balanced living. The film has a remarkable twist to reveal that may not be novel but that does play as a genuine, natural extension of Marlo's life as it is."
You always want to judge film adaptations on their own merits, but after finishing Alexandros Avranas' turgid, unsatisfying procedural Dark Crimes, I wholeheartedly endorse skipping the movie and b-lining to the source material. David Grann's 2008 New Yorker article "True Crime: A Postmodern Murder Mystery" is a wonder, and you can read it in a fraction of the time it would take to watch Dark Crimes. In the piece, Grann details the curious case of Krystian Bala, a young Polish writer whose novel Amok made him the prime suspect in a brutal murder, except that Law & Order-ready twist won't prepare you for how strange things got. See, Bala was a philosopher and intellectual, so to better decode Bala's text for clues, Detective Jacek Wroblewski became an amateur student of postmodern literary theory, using the insights of people like Foucault alongside more traditional forensics and profiling strategies. By the end of the article, Grann has left us with far more questions than answers, not least of which is that age-old chestnut: should we hold art responsible for influencing life? That push-pull between art and reality is fascinating, and I can see someone like David Fincher or Spike Jonze running with that tension and exploiting it. Not so with this Dark Crimes movie. I mentioned Law & Order, and that's what this film feels like - a hyper-austere, hyper-graphic episode, sure, but narratively as formulaic as anything Dick Wolf could conjure. Don't get me wrong: there's a time and place for Law & Order, but not when we lose almost everything that makes Grann's article so singular. Gone is the Kafkaesque nightmare and postmodern approach to morality and criminality, and in its place? Yet another antisocial, haunted cop (Jim Carrey, committing admirably to a movie that doesn't deserve him - we've got another Number 23 on our hands, people) so obsessed with apprehending a sneeringly menacing author (a terrible Marton Csokas - he'd be less bothersome if he had a literal mustache to twirl) that he puts his own fraying sanity on the line. What meta traces remain are pretentious and obvious (Csokas has a press conference where he comes off like the evilest grad student imaginable; in discussing Csokas' lurid fiction, one character decries them as "too perverse"), although I prefer them to the subplot screenwriter Jeremy Brock cooked up about a shadowy sex dungeon that feels like it exists solely so Avranas could parade around a cavalcade of naked young women. I'll give Law & Order this: even at its most salacious, it didn't make me want to take a shower like Dark Crimes did.