For the week of May 6th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part to Blu-ray. Maybe it's time we left The LEGO Movie well alone. Phil Lord and Chris Miller's 2014 animated comedy is kind of a miracle - it should just be a toy commercial, and it sort of is, but it's also subversive and hilarious and richly dense with action and visual puns. But nothing else that's sprung from the LEGO Movie universe comes close to approximating the original's lunatic spirit. At best, we might get LEGO Batman, which is funny but slight, and at worst we have LEGO Ninjago, which isn't much of anything. So it goes with The LEGO Movie 2, which certainly falls more on the "fine" side of the spectrum while doing almost nothing to distinguish itself. If its predecessor was a ruthlessly focused examination/deconstruction of the Hero's Journey, this "Second Part" wants to lampoon the tendency that sequels have to go darker. Suffice to say, when the father (Will Ferrell, making only a brief vocal cameo here) from the first film let his daughter (now played by The Florida Project's Brooklynn Prince) share his Legos with his son (Jadon Sand), all hell breaks loose, with the girl's sickly-sweet creations destroying Bricksburg and turning it into a post-apocalyptic wasteland out of Mad Max: Fury Road. This sort of doom and gloom suits Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks, who should be the lead of these movies) more than it does the ever-optimistic dolt Emmet (Chris Pratt, who's so delightful riffing on both his Andy Dwyer and Star Lord personas here), although their emotional conflict takes a back seat to the intergalactic threat (Tiffany Haddish) that kidnaps Wyldstyle, Benny (Charlie Day), Unikitty (Alison Brie), MetalBeard (Nick Offerman), and Batman (the great Will Arnett) for seemingly nefarious purposes. The question, then, becomes: what will be more effective in saving his friends? If Emmet stays sweet, or if he grows up and gets sad? (No points for guessing the right answer). In theory, I like this thematic setup, except it feels so much messier than it should. And unfortunately, I blame Lord and Miller - it's their first creative misfire, in a lot of ways. From what I can tell, they were never going to direct (that duty goes to Trolls' Mike Mitchell), but they did write a draft of the script about eighteen months after the success of The LEGO Movie. I remember Lord and Miller talking about how they wanted to give Wyldstyle more agency in the sequel, and the film feints at this idea (Stephanie Beatriz's henchperson launches into a monologue about how Wyldstyle is much cooler/more capable than Emmet) before sidelining Banks for long stretches. At times, it parodies DC's "grimdark" inclinations; at times, it's a family comedy about blending interests. This being a LEGO Movie, it throws out so many jokes and sight gags that the experience still satisfies. Ben Schwartz has a bit as a Banana Person that can't stop slipping on itself that is funnier than anything I've seen all year. The deep bench of cameos still works, too. Best of the old bunch: Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill's passive-aggressive Superman/Green Lantern pairing. Best of the new bunch: (tie) Noel Fielding's haughty glittery vampire and Bruce Willis as the Lego version of himself (he's more engaged and loose in ten seconds than in the entirety of Glass 4K). Yet I couldn't ignore how the machinery supporting all this stuff clanks into place. I know Warner likes money. Still, you gotta take a page from Pixar and try not to go into production with a script that doesn't work. I expect more from Lord and Miller than a sentient joke machine.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film is at its best in its opening act, playing in the literal sandbox of a decayed world with strong, obvious vibes of Mad Max propelling the look and feel. The film folds in a number of nice touches that hearken back to the original - such as a scene featuring Mrs. Scratchen-Post herding her post-apocalyptic cats (including one named 'Scarfield') - that re-establish the world, as broken and upside down as it may be, and pit the ever-optimistic Emmet, who is still jiving to 'Everything Is Awesome,' against the dead and depressed environment around him. But as the film transitions to its second act, with several of the characters taken against their will and Emmet joining forces with the mysterious Rex to get them back, the film becomes a collection of moments rather than a neatly assembled cohesive story, scenes stitched together with narrative connection but dragged out in an effort to cram as much 'stuff' into the movie as possible. It's a delicate balance the first movie nailed. It flowed from one set piece to the next (Bricksburg, the Old West, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and so on) with panache and purpose, finding the film's beating heart and reinforcing its purpose with the surprise reveal. There is no such luxury for this film to fall back on. The truth of the world is established, and try as this film might to once again capture the human spirit in the real-world scenes, it cannot."
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is offering a 4K upgrade to the great war drama Black Hawk Down. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote of Ridley Scott and Alien, that "Scott would make good films again, that's for sure. But none of them approach what he accomplished here." While I stand by that statement, I do think this bruising re-enactment of the 1993 siege at Mogadishu comes awfully close. On a technical level, Black Hawk Down might be Scott's most impressive achievement. Working with the support of the U.S. military and super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott has crafted an immersive war film on par with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan - the scope of this thing is massive, as Scott uses his $100-million budget to create an almost three-dimensional sense of chaos. He and his longtime editor Pietro Scalia cut between five or six different Ranger-and-Delta-Force groupings (including Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner, Jason Isaacs, Ewan McGregor, Ewan Bremner, and Ron Eldard), and the Somali attacks against them in 360 degrees: from pitched gun battles in the streets to rocket launcher assaults off the top of buildings to frenzied Humvee races through the city. Somehow, we're always sure of where/when we are, thanks to Sławomir Idziak's crisp widescreen photography and Scott's masterstroke to intercut the ground war with overhead satellite footage of Mogadishu. As viscerally overwhelming as the film often is, we maintain this fascinating objective distance, almost as though we're sharing the console with Sam Shepard's General Garrison: we can process the carnage yet are unable to stop it. The common refrain over the years is that this approach distances us from the human performers. I disagree, and not just for Scott's stated reason that Black Hawk Down is about all soldiers rather than individual ones. For one, his eye for casting is so distinctive. Note that list above. Recall that the film also features appearances from the likes of Hugh Dancy, Tom Hardy, Ty Burrell, Ioan Gruffudd, Jeremy Piven, Brian Van Holt, Orlando Bloom, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. These people pop visually; we're connected to their faces even if we don't remember their character names. More importantly, Scott never lets us forget the human cost of war. The most wrenching scene in the film isn't one of the (many) percussive fire fights. No, it's the protracted, agonizing impromptu surgery wherein Hartnett and Dancy try to clamp a severed artery on a grievously wounded soldier (Charlie Hofheimer). You process this scene in painfully human details: the slip of metal on flesh, the sudden spray of blood, Hofheimer's pallid, wheezing visage. The whole movie works like this. It's a hell of an experience.
If Black Hawk Down functions as a steely-eyed, terse recounting of men under pressure, then Ron Howard's Backdraft - which is also getting a 4K pressing - operates on the opposite end of the spectrum. The film is a full-on soap opera, shamelessly indulging each and every melodramatic impulse of the Gregory Widen script. Howard and Widen sold the film as a rough-and-tumble look at Chicago firefighters, but Backdraft is so much more (or less, depending on your facility for manipulation) than that. It's a story of fathers and sons, and the way brothers Bull and Brian McCaffrey (Kurt Russell and William Baldwin, sharing top billing for the last time in film history) have grown up in their wake of their own father's fire-related death. It's a relationship saga, too, whether we're talking about the interpersonal dynamics between the firefighter squad (including Scott Glenn, Jason Gedrick, and Jack McGee) or the various romantic entanglements our heroes run into along the way - Bull is trying to reconcile with his ex-wife (Rebecca De Mornay), and Brian is having an affair with a spirited political aide (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Widen also has half a mind to cover the shady side of Chicago politics - the film's secondary villain is J.T. Walsh's corrupt alderman - but considering the film's fire effects inspired a long-running Universal Studios stunt show, you can imagine how much attention the political graft angle gets (answer: not bloody much). And at times, Backdraft morphs into a weird serial-killer whodunnit, of all things, as Brian and Robert De Niro's arson investigator track a mysterious firebug killing prominent Chicago figures; we even get an appearance from a deranged convict (Donald Sutherland) assisting the investigation simply because Silence of the Lambs made such a smash three months earlier. As the kids say, it's a bit extra, but it's also a lot of fun. I miss the days of big-budget, adult blockbusters. In something like Backdraft, you tolerate the soapy mush because the action scenes are so great, with the final blaze particularly intense.
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes the 4K remaster of Guillermo Del Toro's delightful superhero adventure Hellboy II: The Golden Army. This sequel to the 2004 Hellboy got lost in the shuffle almost immediately following its 2008 release, and for the most unfortunate of reasons: it came out two months after Iron Man and a week before The Dark Knight. You couldn't ask for worse blockbuster timing than that. No way could Del Toro's idiosyncratic fantasy film hope to compete with The Two Most Influential Superhero Movies of The 21st Century. Yet this second Hellboy doesn't deserve such neglect. If its predecessor was a solid at-bat that suffered from some puzzling studio concessions, The Golden Army finds Del Toro mostly liberated to do his own thing. Gone is Rupert Evans' boring audience surrogate; now the misfits of the Bureau for Paranormal Research get to take center stage, with Ron Perlman's cigar-chewing, cat-loving, wisecrack-spewing title character the ringleader of this motley crew. Ostensibly, Hellboy is hunting a rogue Elf prince (Luke Goss) with a yen to destroy all humanity, although the broad narrative strokes here aren't that impressive. Del Toro is just presenting a PG-13-friendly riff on his Blade II setup, even going so far as to cast Goss as a similarly styled sympathetic heavy (no vagina dentata mouth, thankfully). But the visual invention is so audacious that the plot doesn't matter, whether Del Toro is staging a trip through a back-alley troll market (as grand-scale homage to the Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars), having Hellboy's battle against a giant plant monster end on a note of beautiful melancholy, or presenting the film's climactic Angel of Death (Doug Jones, obviously) as a perfect visual synthesis of the Pale Man and Pan from Pan's Labyrinth. Better still are the BPRD team dynamics. Selma Blair and Jeffrey Tambor do great, weird work as the group's human liaisons, and I love the buddy rapport between Hellboy and gill-man Abe Sapien (Jones again, obviously). Even Seth MacFarlane impresses as the team's new recruit, a hyper-proper German protoplasmic cloud (yep, you read that right) who doesn't take too kindly to Hellboy's freewheeling ways. The Golden Army ended on a fairly irresistible cliffhanger, and here's where I get really irritated. Even though the film netted a modest profit, Universal declined to finance a follow-up (we're now getting a Del Toro-and-Perlman-free reboot from Neil Marshall and David Harbour). Credit Hollywood's poor short-term memory in the wake of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, as well as the financial expectations those two features established where modest would always prove less desirable than massive. Still, Hellboy II: The Golden Army has retained so much of its charm. Here's hoping this reissue helps the film pick up some new admirers, especially in the wake of Neil Marshall's disastrous new reboot.
But the best movie of the week? That'd be Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, which arrives courtesy of Kino Video. Jarmusch remains one of the only filmmakers who's gotten better as he's gotten older, and this wry dramedy illustrates the maturity that's come to define the latter stages of his career. In the greatest performance he's ever given, Bill Murray stars as Don Johnston, an aging lothario who's just ended another relationship with another woman (Julie Delpy, in a very funny cameo), although perhaps "ended" is too strong a word. Despite his associations that his name carries (it's like the intersection in the Venn Diagram between "Don Juan" and "Don Johnson"), Don seems almost pathologically indifferent to the world around him. Somehow, he gathers a host of beautiful, passionate admirers (he's really good at making his indifference read as "mystery") and then sloughs them off as they grow tired of Don's studied apathy. Murray is maybe the only actor in the world who could sell you on Don's charisma - he uses his gifts for understatement and minimalism to convey charm, weariness, and even a certain erotic hunger, so we understand how he'd be able to beguile and then frustrate in equal measures. About the only healthy relationship Don has is with his Ethiopian neighbor Winston (the great Jeffrey Wright) and Winston's idiosyncratically lovely family, and the scenes with Don and Winston riffing play like outtakes from Stranger Than Paradise or Ghost Dog. But Jarmusch has done this kind of minimalist buddy comedy before. He wants Broken Flowers to deconstruct a man like Don, inscrutable as Don might seem, so Jarmusch devises a complication: Don receives an anonymous letter from a past fling letting him know he has a son. Grudgingly - almost glacially so - Don charts a course across America to meet his former lovers, and with each visit, Broken Flowers develops a different energy. The trip to Sharon Stone's sexpot feels almost farce-like, while Frances Conroy's conservative housewife turns the film into a comedy of manners. Tilda Swinton brings a bitterness that feels pulled from a rawer, more unpredictable place, but even it's got nothing on the quietly devastating visit to Don's ex Michelle. And somehow, almost imperceptibly, Jarmusch flays away more and more of Murray's defenses, until Murray seems emotionally open on camera in a way he's never been before or since. Ultimately, Broken Flowers represents a kind of movie that no one really makes anyone: the unobtrusive masterpiece. Except for Jarmusch, that is. He keeps churning them out even if no one's watching.