For the week of May 11th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) to Blu-ray. If nothing else, I can say this: compared to the enervating, ugly Suicide Squad, this Harley Quinn-centric spinoff/sequel plays like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But despite a few good action sequences and some terrific performances, Birds of Prey still isn't all that compelling. In theory, we should be locked into the unlikely partnership between Joker ex/part-time crook/full-time Bugs Bunny proxy Quinn (Margot Robbie, once again laboring mightily to serve a film that does not deserve her) and the titular group of exceptional women (Ella Jay Basco's Cassandra Cain, Jurnee Smollett-Bell's Black Canary, Rosie Perez's Renee Montoya, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Huntress) as they face off against the loathsome Black Mask (Ewan McGregor, and more on him in a sec). And in those moments when we get to watch the team at play (the climactic funhouse brawl, or the taco breakfast our heroines share after giving the bad guys what for), Birds of Prey feels like the prankish, dirty-minded cousin to DC/Warner's wonderfully cheeky Shazam. Director Cathy Yan and DP Matty Libatique create this camp aesthetic that's part disco ball, part Vertigo Black Label, with fourth-wall-shattering narration and animation interludes and a wonderful digression on how to make the perfect egg sandwich. But those energies clash with a script (by Bumblebee scribe Christina Hodson) that's overly focused on Suicide Squad damage control. Didn't like Jared Leto's Juggalo Joker? Fine - he's gone (although not, as the trailers suggested, blown up in a chemical-factory explosion). Wish it wasn't PG-13? Well, have I got news for you! Birds of Prey is a hard R, with graphic gunshot violence and peeled faces and dismemberment by explosion. Speaking of violence: the choppy, visually murky action was a particular Suicide Squad low light, but Birds of Prey has a number of terrific escalating brawls - Warner brought in John Wick's Chad Stahelski to punch up the fight sequences, and you can feel his touch in the long takes and wide masters that showcase the action. And if you were skeeved out by the manner in which Suicide Squad leered at Robbie, Birds of Prey not only desexualizes Quinn and the other female leads but also foregrounds a feminist message of empowerment: the only way they'll stay alive is by banding together against Black Mask's men's-rights wannabe (not for nothing, but the film's ugliest scene finds him forcing a random woman to strip under threat of death). All that's well and good, except these elements never cohere into anything meaningful. The film gives off the impression that it's been focus-grouped into existence. It doesn't have any strong political agenda outside of some glib "Girl Power" messaging; it's narratively inert to a degree that even Suicide Squad isn't (in trying to set up all the new characters and intrigues and details, the first act swells to easily half of the film, drowning viewers in a morass of exposition and flashbacks and introductions); and outside of Smollett-Bell's vulnerable Black Canary and McGregor's giddy psychopath, it doesn't do anything interesting with the personalities at its disposal. The Ewan McGregor of it all is subtly troubling; he gives the film's standout performance, turning Black Mask into a vain, easily wounded maniac with too much money and absolutely zero sense of decorum, and yet it seems a bit indelicate that a man should dominate the proceedings in this ostensibly female-forward text. Still, he's having fun, and his energy was contagious. Would that the rest of the movie followed suit.
You'll find no such complaints from me about Criterion's new pressing of John Sturges' 1963 classic The Great Escape. In dramatizing how a group of Allied POWs orchestrated a massive prison break from the Nazis' Stalag Luft III, the film fictionalizes history to an extent that is only slightly more realistic than Birds of Prey. Sturges presents life both inside and outside the POW camp with the "Gee, shucks!" spirit of a boy's adventure story. You will find no brutal mistreatment of prisoners here. Everyone is well fed and looks fabulous (all those sweet leather bomber jackets!), with the worst punishments seemingly limited to thirty-day shifts in solitary confinement. And once our heroes actually escape (spoilers for a movie with "The Great Escape" in its title), their exploits alternate between the bucolic (James Coburn lazily bike-riding out of enemy territory) and the exciting (the still-phenomenal motorcycle chase between Steve McQueen and a host of Nazi soldiers). But Sturges' command of tone is so precise that we never begrudge the fantasy. Face it: we know war is hell, and certainly the generation alive in '63 was more acutely aware of the devastation left in the wake of WWII. As such, it's nice sometimes to get the version that owes less to Saving Private Ryan than it does to Indiana Jones. And that's what Sturges is peddling: an experience where everyone is a winner regardless if they survive the movie or not (this has one of the great all-star casts, beginning with McQueen and Coburn and running through James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasance, David McCallum, and Charles Freakin' Bronson), where one of the greatest existential threats the world has ever seen is reduced down to a group of sniveling, largely ineffectual functionaries. And Sturges does all of this so patiently. The Great Escape runs a full three hours, but it uses its runtime strategically. The first hour plays almost like Ocean's Eleven as the POWs meet each other and test the weak points in the camps - it's a sprightly, often very funny lark. And the second hour is a prison-escape movie that builds to an absolutely ingenious tunnel sequence. Watching these men dig around in the dark and wheel themselves underground on makeshift rail lines is equal parts tense and thrilling. By the time we're following the cast as they're scattered across Europe and trying to survive, we could be watching a proto-Fugitive or something. The Great Escape is fluff, but it's great fluff. It earns its allowances from reality.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "the star power on display is hugely impressive. Some of the greatest American and British actors of the era come together and quickly begin working as a team rather than a group of individuals trying to outdo each other. Unfortunately, this might be the biggest compliment one can give the film. Indeed, its tone and attitude are so seriously mismanaged that sizeable portions of it look like they are coming from a period comedy about a motley crew of goofy outcasts and wise guys, not a serious war film about real soldiers who are risking their lives in a dangerous mission. Even more unbelievable are the people running the prison camp, with Robert Graf's character, Werner, going to such extremes to convince he is legitimately clueless about the real intentions of the people that he is supposed to keep an eye on that it is hard to believe no one felt the need to step up and trim his scenes a bit. The final third of the film is where the most exciting material is, though it does very little, if anything at all, to restore its credibility as a legit war drama. There are a few nicely shot sequences from the underground tunnel and of course here is the iconic footage with McQueen riding the bike. But again, this is the type of flashy material that looks right in a period Hollywood action film, which is not what this film was meant to be."
Don't let the Saban Films tag at the start of the movie dissuade you. Vivarium (which arrives courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment) couldn't be further removed from Saban's default line of tax-shelter-ready productions. At its best, this intelligent and deeply creepy genre exercise taps into the same shivery allegorical power that made The Twilight Zone so arresting. And its sense of scope: most of Vivarium unfolds in Number Nine, a new prefab house in the Yonder development project just outside of London. Number Nine has all the major amenities. The yard is impeccably maintained. And the house's new inhabitants - elementary school teacher Gemma (the great Imogen Poots) and her boyfriend Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) - couldn't be nicer. Yet from the start, director Lorcan Finnegan keeps layering in one unsettling warning sign after another. Like the too-chipper real estate agent (Jonathan Aris) who is unnervingly still whenever he's not moving, and who has a tendency to mimic - with disturbing fidelity - the voices of anyone he meets. Or how none of the food in the house tastes like anything. Or that Gemma and Tom don't even agree to buy Number Nine; the realtor just disappears, and then our heroes can't seem to find a way out of Yonder. Even the title portends the worst (a "vivarium" is an enclosed space used to study plants and animals), and by the time something delivers Tom and Gemma a box filled with a newborn baby, thus ending the first act, the film has created a web of dislocation that's as intriguing as anything I've seen this year. Truth be told, nothing in the film matches the power of its first thirty minutes. Garret Shanley's script ultimately veers into bleak nihilism, and that's after a second act that can't quite give both leads enough to do. Poots delivers an incredible performance as a woman trying to eke out some semblance of normalcy from this increasingly abnormal nightmare, but Eisenberg spends much of the second hour literally digging a hole. Still, the ideas are so rich that you power through the film's less inspired turns. Vivarium's broad ideas about society and culture might share DNA with Blue Velvet or Bigger Than Life (it's all about the lie of the "normal" family), but it carves out space for itself with a bracing, shockingly critical perspective towards the millennial instinct to have kids without considering the repercussions of such a decision. In that regard, the film suggests that we're all trapped in the Twilight Zone.
Finally, Scream Factory is bringing a special edition of the cult horror-comedy Idle Hands to Blu-ray. In theory, this should probably be the best genre movie ever made, right? Idle Hands plays like a compendium of the best scenes from classic horror movies. The whole premise - a teenager (Devon Sawa) experiences a digital case of demonic possession when he loses control of his right hand to some evil entity - feels like director Rodman Flender and screenwriters Ron Milbauer & Terri Hughes Burton really wanted to stretch Evil Dead 2's iconic Ash's hand-tries-to-murder-him setpiece into a full-length feature. Furthermore, after his hand kills his two best friends (the very funny pairing of Seth Green and Eldon Henson), the two don't quite stay dead. But even as zombies, they're prone to getting high and dumb jokes, and we're more-than-a-little reminded of how Griffin Dunne's rotting corpse seemed to regard the afterlife as a major bummer in An American Werewolf in London. Even the character dynamics between our three leads recalls another great cult epic. In their lazy, stoned indifference to matters of good and evil, we could be watching another spin on The Dude from The Big Lebowski. Here's the thing, though: you can't just pilfer the best stuff from great movies and expect that the Transitive Property will make your movie great, too. Ultimately, Idle Hands has so little of its own identity that, at best, it's a slight diversion and nothing more. It doesn't help either than Flender's direction never settles on a consistent tone - there's a stretch near the beginning (when Sawa's parents meet an untimely fate), where you think he might be trying to scare you, but then he'll veer into comedy, alternating between stoner gags and splatstick gore. Something like Cabin in the Woods does an expert job of blending disparate genre and tonal beats; Idle Hands functions like a bloodier-than-average sitcom episode. It's not a bad movie, yet if given the choice between watching it or one of the films it imitates, I'll choose the latter every time.