For the week of November 4th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is presenting the first big Fast & Furious spinoff: Hobbs & Shaw. This buddy picture, which pairs Dwayne Johnson's badass government agent with Jason Statham's equally badass redeemed outlaw (the "Hobbs and Shaw" of the title, respectively) as they take on a megalomaniac super-soldier (Idris Elba, who's having a ball) with delusions of grandeur, got a somewhat chilly reception this summer. For the first time since the last Fast & Furious picture (2017's The Fate of the Furious), I have to ask: what, exactly, do you expect of this franchise? These are big, loud, excessively stupid movies, and Hobbs and Shaw is literally bigger, louder, and dumber in ways that couldn't be more on brand for the series (The Rock tows a helicopter with his bare hands and also he and Jason Statham blow up a not-unsubstantial chunk of the Ukraine). Yet I'm reading all these reviews that somehow brand it the least (or second-least, depending on your affinity for 2 Fast 2 Furious) of the series. It's not. Not even close. Matter of fact, I'd say that if you enjoyed the other Fasts, then you're almost guaranteed a good time with this one. Is it as transcendentally silly as Fast Five or Furious 7? No, but it doesn't take itself seriously in the slightest, and it trades out Vin Diesel's maudlin family sermonizing for increasingly hostile (and funny) quips that Statham and The Rock sling at each other about the other person's size / sexual prowess / overall intelligence. It's like a PG-13Tango & Cash. I'd even rank this one above about half the Fasts for its relative lightness of spirit (it's still a half hour too long but a full half hour shorter than The Fate of the Furious), its awesome Big Bad, and its largely thrilling stunt choreography. The last forty minutes go too hard on CGI chaos (that Ukraine sequence could be a PS4 cutscene), but credit to director David Leitch for privileging spatial coherence and crunchy dynamics in the fight choreography. I've mostly hated Leitch's other studio features (Atomic Blonde is gorgeous trash and Deadpool 2 is just trash); this is the best film of his that doesn't have John Wick in the title. And big props for giving The Queen's Vanessa Kirby such an action showcase as Shaw's frighteningly capable black-ops sister. She's gorgeous; she demolishes bad guys in hand-to-hand and automatic-weapon combat; and she's got the deadpan comic affect of Ricky Gervais. I think she might be the perfect woman? I ask again, Fast & Furious fans: what more do you want?
In his Hobbs & Shaw review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is a B-movie wrapped in A-level construction, a generic tale of heroes and villainy, big action, and huge stakes which, of course, all whittles down to massive set pieces with tons of explosions. The movie is absurdly large, with some of the most daring, dynamic, and delightful stunts seen in this franchise, or any other. But there's no mystery, no doubt, no fear, no dramatic draw. The action is absurdly improbable, with each visual staged only to outdo the last, and the story is merely a facilitator to move on to the next spectacle. But because the movie doesn't take itself at all seriously it more or less works."
The most interesting thing about André Øvredal's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark adaptation, which Lionsgate is releasing this week, is its structure. You might expect that the film, which takes inspiration from Alvin Schwartz's three horror-fiction volumes of the same name, would adopt an anthology format: all the better to retell any number of the books' short stories. Instead, the film takes six tales - "Harold," "The Big Toe," "The Red Spot," "The Pale Lady," "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker," and "The Haunted House" - and repurposes them as individual sequences inside one linear narrative. It's 1968, and on the eve Richard Nixon's election, six teenagers (Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Austin Zajur, Natalie Ganzhorn, and Austin Abrams) encounter a vengeful spirit (Kathleen Pollard) who begins writing their fates as ghoulish short stories inside a cursed journal. Schwartz's fiction represents what our protagonists fear the most, and by all accounts, producer Guillermo Del Toro came up with this narrative hook; it feels so much of a piece with the terrors in his directorial ventures. Del Toro sees horror as a means to interrogate all those the insecurities and anxieties that destroy us from the inside out. Schwartz's writing, then, becomes a metaphor for the rot at our core. It's a nice touch. Like the frequent cutaways to Nixon on television, Schwartz's shivery prose and Stephen Gammell's horrifying illustrations are emblematic of some shared cultural nightmare. And at its best, the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark film strikes this beat of morbid nihilism that I found bracing, especially for a PG-13 chiller. It isn't that the film is terribly violent (although the capper to the "Harold" set piece is visceral in a way I wasn't expecting). Rather, it acknowledges that sometimes the world is cruel and unfair, and all we can do is come to terms with that reality. However, as sobering as the film's social agenda is - and as muscular as Øvredal's direction is (he also made the great Autopsy of Jane Doe) - it doesn't quite stick the landing. See, Del Toro also asserts his auteurist influence in a manner that is way too familiar for the Devil's Backbone and Crimson Peak director. If you've seen those, you know that Del Toro has a deep and abiding sympathy for the monstrous, and he applies the same light touch to the main villain. But here, all the scare sequences are so intense that we can't broach the tonal shift into tragic victim territory. That's the big difference between movies and short stories, I guess. Movies feel the need to comfort, whereas Schwartz can leave us in the disquieting unknown.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the stories from Sarah's book which come magically to life are culled from Schwartz's original works, of course, and my hunch is those who grew up with the Schwartz tome may be less inclined to view how they're shoehorned into the overall tale this film is attempting to tell than will more casual viewers (of which I am most likely one). The 'scary stories' basically 'reach out and touch' a number of kids, with some of Stella's 'crew' falling victim, and Stella herself obviously a target. There's a somewhat inconsistent emphasis that the kids are being visited by their own nightmares, in what seems derivative and frankly unnecessary. Stella and Ramon end up being the focal 'detectives' trying to figure out the mysteries of Sarah's past, which in turn might help to elucidate what's going on with her frightening book, but there are arguably a few too many subplots stuffed into the proceedings, including Stella's troubled history at home and a really silly plot development concerning Ramon that ties in once again to the whole 1968 Vietnam Era underpinning."
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes a 4K pressing of the classic Jean-Claude Van Damme/Dolph Lundgren actioner Universal Soldier. If you were raised on a steady diet of 1980s action movies, as I was, then you know there's nothing more exciting than when two or more of the headlining brawlers would put aside their egos and pair up for one movie; for all intents and purposes, getting to watch Stallone fight Lundgren in Rocky IV, for example, was a whole generation's equivalent of watching Iron Man rib Captain America in the MCU. And I can think of no more satisfying an entertainment than Universal Soldier, which exploited everything exciting about both Van Damme and Lundgren inside one lean, deeply absurd package. We begin in the Vietnam War, as one does, after a My Lai-style massacre; Lundgren has snapped and butchered an entire village, and when the more principled Van Damme tries to stop him, the two men kill one another. We then jump forward to 1992 when both men have been cryogenically resurrected as "UniSols" (see if you can figure where the title comes from), nigh-unstoppable warriors that can be programmed and operated through the most intense combat situations. Just reading that synopsis bugs my eyes out - I still cannot believe this movie exists - but director Roland Emmerich gives it a widescreen sheen and a surprising bit of narrative propulsion, particularly once the reanimated Lundgren regains his taste for wanton slaughter and goes AWOL in America, leaving only Van Damme and a plucky reporter (the wonderful Ally Walker, who acts like she wandered in out of It Happened One Night) as our last line of defense. Anyone who's seen Independence Day knows that Emmerich loves mixing genres, and Universal Soldier offers one of his most interesting concoctions. Sure, we get enough meathead action to please any '80s kid, but the sci-fi angle keeps the film from feeling like a basic punchathon and lifts it into an even more surprising genre: the UniSols might have feelings and emotions, but they're essentially really complex zombies. Director John Hyams would push the undead idea even further in his two Universal Soldier sequels - 2009's Universal Soldier: Regeneration and 2012's Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, the latter of which is practically an exercise in Lynchian surrealism and dread), but Emmerich still mines it for an appealing nasty edge. To wit: the brutal finale, which lets Van Damme and Lundgren gorily hack away at each other with a number of farm-specific implements, most memorably a machine harvester. For a few minutes, we could be watching the biggest-budgeted Friday the 13th ever made. It's a real trip, this Universal Soldier.
I've read a lot of people compare The Kitchen unfavorably to Steve McQueen's Widows - both films focus on groups of women who break bad after their criminal husbands go to prison/get murdered - and I think doing so is a little unfair. For one, neither premise is terribly original; Widows is an adaptation of an '80 ITV miniseries, and The Kitchen is drawing inspiration from Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle's 2014 DC Comics series. But more importantly, The Kitchen would have to leave some kind of an impression to warrant any kind of comparison, good, bad, or indifferent. As I write this, it's less than twenty-four hours since I first watched The Kitchen, and I'm not convinced the movie exists. I'll say this: it has a reasonably competent opening act, which finds Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elizabeth Moss' frustrated housewives struggling in Hell's Kitchen (circa 1978) once their gangster husbands (Brian d'Arcy James, James Badge Dale, and Jeremy Bobb) get busted by the FBI. But then the men go to jail, and the film starts going through narrative as if edited at random. Long stretches pass with almost no dramatic weight or import, and this is a movie that covers quite a bit of ground, including (but not limited to) the leads trying to placate the local Mob kingpin (Bill Camp), force the neighbor's Hasidim community to invest in their protection services, forge an uneasy alliance with the local worker's union, and learn the ins and outs of body disposal, which arrives in the form of Domhnall Gleeson's unstable Vietnam veteran. And Moss learns she's got a taste for killing. And McCarthy wants to earn the respect of her disapproving father (Wayne Duvall). And Haddish wants to spread their criminal reach uptown. And there's an FBI mole somewhere, and some intrigue once the husbands get out of prisons...it's just that no one seems that invested in any of it. Not writer/director Andrea Berloff, whose house style starts at functional and only backslides over the course of the film. Berloff constantly frames her characters in the middle of the frame in the least thematically or viscerally engaging tableaus possible, an aesthetic that reaches its nadir in the third act, when she botches presenting the murder of a major character because everyone in the scene is stacked in the center. Certainly not her leads, all of whom act like they've been forced to give oral presentations. The Kitchen is so meh that even Moss, who's one of the nerviest and most unpredictable performers we've got, can't summon up any real excitement. If you want to compare The Kitchen to anything, it should be between doing nothing, and watching the movie. I recommend the former.
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that the film "falls apart within the tight boundaries of a 103-minute film. The plot becomes more and more needlessly convoluted as it chugs along, doubling down on half-finished details and dead-end detours instead of tightening up in the home stretch. The exact turning point is when their husbands are granted an early release: you can almost see the story fall apart within a 10-minute window, and it never fully recovers during its remaining lifespan. As such, a few Hail Mary plot twists ring completely hollow because they're not given near enough setup, and the whole production ends with such a flat thud that you're almost guaranteed to do a double-take."