For the week of April 13th, Twentieth Century Studios is bringing the horror-thriller Underwater to Blu-ray. I feel a special responsibility to champion the mid-range genre feature; the humble $40-to-$90-million programmer has become an endangered species in a cinematic landscape that favors either the $300-million studio blockbuster or the microbudget indie effort. So it gives me no pleasure to report that the $50-million Underwater does little to strengthen the viability of this dying breed. The best thing about the film is its setup: we open near the bottom of the Marianas Trench, just minutes before an earthquake fractures the ocean floor and cripples the deep-core drilling operation Kepler 822. The surviving crew (including Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Mamoudou Athie, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., and T.J. Miller, whose cancelled status is, I'm betting, a part of the reason Underwater got delayed more than two years) have to traverse miles of murky sea floor while evading catastrophic facility damage and constant depth pressures (for a PG-13 movie, Underwater sports an impressively disgusting human implosion)...and that's before they realize they're being hunted by a race of carnivorous sea monsters. As with From Dusk Till Dawn or the underrated 10 Cloverfield Lane, I get a thrill every time a movie hops from one genre to another. However, that shift alone marks the full extent anyone put into blending together these two genres. You may note that Underwater sports screenwriting credits for Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad, and from what I gather, one writer penned an adventure story, the other wrote an underwater Alien, and then director William Eubank jerry-rigged the two different scripts together. You can feel the haphazard construction at play - the finished film all-but-jettisons the (more compelling) disaster-movie elements as people start getting eaten until we're basically left with Stewart doing her best Ellen Ripley impersonation and squaring off against Underwater's equivalent of the Alien Queen (which looks like a mix between a Lovecraftian beast and a certain The Little Mermaid character). To be fair, Stewart's blend of steely competence and tremulous courage holds you in thrall long after Underwater basically stops being its own movie and starts hosting whole-scale homages to other, better pictures. I mentioned Alien, but this picture also wouldn't exist without The Abyss' seabound claustrophobia or Sunshine's creeping nihilism. I get that we have to treasure these more modest thrillers whenever we can get them, but in the case of Underwater, I have but one request: do better.
Here's a suggestion: jump genres and check out Ron Shelton's sparkling romantic-comedy Tin Cup, which hits Blu-ray courtesy of Warner Archive. It's a mid-range adult entertainment produced during the genre's heyday (1996), and at a time when the film's star desperately needed to reassert his low-key, easygoing charms. Just the year prior, Kevin Costner would appear in Universal's massive actioner Waterworld and experience the greatest commercial and critical drubbing of his career (even though Waterworld is actually quite good). So he tucked his tail between his legs and reteamed with Ron Shelton in the hopes of recapturing some of that Bull Durham magic the two men conjured back in 1988. They mostly succeeded. Tin Cup is a shaggier, less polished affair than that baseball classic, but it's also such an easy sit, and a potent reminder of how charismatic Costner could be when he wasn't trying so hard to be a Great Filmmaker. As Roy McAvoy, Costner hits a groove that's halfway between his Silverado rapscallion and his endearingly shambling The Upside of Anger drunk: this former golf pro is having much more fun getting wasted, hanging out with his best friend (a very funny Cheech Marin), and basically pissing away whatever delusions of grandeur he might have had in a previous life. When Roy is finally spurred to action, it isn't because he wants to reclaim his wasted glory - no, he falls for sardonic psychologist Molly Griswold (Rene Russo) and is enraged to learn she's dating his longtime rival David Simms (a wonderfully smarmy Don Johnson), so Roy figures he'll enter the U.S. Open, beat Simms like a drum, and then win Molly's heart. It's that mix of horniness and petulance that bespeaks the Ron Shelton touch. Shelton has since lost his edge (see Hollywood Homicide or Play It to the Bone if you don't believe me), but in films like this, Bull Durham, or White Men Can't Jump, he proved such a canny scribe of a very particular varietal of self-destructive man: the guy's who's smarter than he looks but less talented than he thinks. Roy is a classic Shelton hustler, and he helps turn Tin Cup into a stealth snobs-vs.-slobs comedy as his pitched insouciance goes toe-to-toe against Simms's casual arrogance. Tin Cup offers little in the way of surprises, yet I doubt you'll care. Its relaxed ease is contagious.
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that "on the right lazy weekend afternoon, Tin Cup can still hit that sweet spot and, for those who saw and enjoyed this one back in the day, I'd imagine it carries a good amount of nostalgic value. The film really does have a refreshingly quaint and charming core, along with likable lead performances by Costner, Rene Russo, and Cheech Marin. All that is just enough to glue everything else together, with the added bonus that no, you don't actually have to be a lifelong fan of golf to follow along and enjoy. I'd still say that Warner Archive Collection's long-overdue Blu-ray will play better for established fans, though Tin Cup is still accessible enough to be a halfway decent blind buy: armed with one of the studio's consistently great remasters, this film sparkles like new and looks waay better than the old DVD."
There's a great story at the heart of Destin Daniel Cretton's docudrama Just Mercy, and it's that of Walter McMillian, a black logger and pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama (the home of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee and the inspiration for that most famous of American classics). In 1988, McMillian was convicted for the murder of Monroeville dry-cleaning clerk Ronda Morrison. By most accounts, his trial was a sham - a poisonous mix of incompetent police work and abject racism (his trial was relocated to a predominantly white area so as to remove any black jurors from selection, and his own lawyer told McMillian he thought McMillian was guilty) - but that didn't stop McMillian from receiving a death sentence. He spent six years on death row, and the beauty of Jamie Foxx's performance lies in how patiently Foxx reveals all the trauma that McMillian has internalized for the better part of a decade. McMillian has become his cell block's unofficial moral center for his fellow inmates (O'Shea Jackson Jr. and a heartbreaking Rob Morgan), serving as counselor, strategist, and yogi (in the film's best scene, he talks Morgan through a panic attack by having him breathe and imagine a clear blue sky peeking out above a field of pines), and this esprit de corps suits Foxx's natural gifts for bonhomie and easy confidence. But as McMillian begins to hope - for the first time in a long time - that his new attorney (Bryan Stevenson, who wrote the book Just Mercy is based on and is played by Michael B. Jordan) might have a shot of freeing him, Foxx lets all of McMillian's anguish start to bubble over. We mistake it at first for defiance; when a fellow prisoner gets led to the electric chair, McMillian leads the prisoners in a communal howl, banging their cups against prison bars and crying out for their friend. Except this isn't Escape from Alcatraz: McMillian is breaking down, and his pain knocks the movie off its axis. Late in Just Mercy after a particularly gutting setback, McMillian starts to cry, and Foxx begins these retching, awful sobs that seem to hurt him more than they do us. It's more than the movie can handle. Whenever Foxx isn't on screen, Just Mercy is dutiful, stolid. I respect Cretton's desire to win us over with facts and argument even as I wish his movie were a little more engaging (Jordan and his fellow MCU-er Brie Larson are a couple of charismatic blanks - there's really no there there). But then Foxx shows up, and Just Mercy gets closer to transcendent. Foxx reminds you to get outraged when Just Mercy is too timid to do so.
Randy Miller III wrote that the film "takes its time from start to finish, letting the main story unfold naturally without feeling too rushed or padded along the way. A number of smaller narratives are also introduced such as the slow but steady growth of Equal Justice Initiative, the emotional plight of [MacMillian]'s struggling family led by faithful wife Minnie (Karan Kendrick), and Bryan's other legal cases involving [MacMillian]'s fellow death row inmates Anthony Ray Hinton (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) and Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan). The latter is directly involved in one of Just Mercy's most chilling and emotionally devastating moments, one that drives the main narrative forward through the third act into a somewhat stunted but nonetheless emotionally effective climax. If there's one role-related area where Just Mercy could have improved, it would've been a more full-bodied examination of its central character -- but then again, it's based on Stevenson's own best-selling memoir, so one can expect the story and film to have a somewhat homogeneous tone. The production also occasionally suffers from 'made for TV' syndrome, compounded by a few clichés that are, to be fair, all but hard-wired into the majority of vintage and modern-day courtroom dramas alike."
I have always thought that Jimmy Stewart was a more nervy, contemporary performer than his reputation suggest, and Destry Rides Again (which hits Blu-ray via Criterion) offers a prime example of his off-center energy at play. From his introduction in this Western - nestled in the background of a stagecoach set - he's making choices we don't expect. Up to this point (about fifteen minutes into the movie), people have been talking about what an iron will Tom Destry has; former drunk-turned-Sheriff Dimsdale (Charles Winninger) has warned all the shiftless grifters and criminals of Bottleneck that if there's anyone who can clean up their town, it's Destry. So it comes as a shock, then, that Destry doesn't command the screen when we first see him. Heck, he doesn't even try - on the stagecoach trip that's bringing him to Bottleneck, director George Marshall cedes the frame to Jack Carson's belligerent cattleman, who complains and whines and gnashes the scenery. Destry, by comparison, sits almost in the background of the shot, side-eying Carson as the latter carries on, yet it's Stewart you end up remembering. You'd think you were watching Ryan Gosling or Brad Pitt; Stewart underplays all his sarcastic reaction shots, and he seems more content to fiddle with some performative business (Destry likes to whittle, you see) than to try and match Carson's force. And Stewart maintains this wry vibe throughout the film. It's the only thing that's worth watching - Destry Rides Again is pretty much Western Melodrama 101. It will not surprise you that Destry is a tougher sort than his amiable front suggests, or that he's able to best the villain (Brian Donlevy) and charm the Big Bad's moll (Marlene Dietrich). On the subject of Dietrich: she's fine and no more. For all the (deserved) fuss over her work in films like Morocco or The Scarlet Empress, it's a little dispiriting seeing her reduced down to such a stock type (the bad girl who's really good). Plus, given that her and Stewart carried on a torrid affair behind the scenes (she even got an abortion without telling Stewart - how's that for contemporary?), little of that romantic chemistry carries over into the film. But it almost doesn't matter when Stewart is on screen. His choices are so unique that the movie feels fresh even when it's not. Such is the power of the movie star.