Movie Review

  • Tomb Raider (2018)

    Tomb Raider (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) In rebooting the Tomb Raider film franchise, the 2018 version of the film sets itself against two perhaps overwhelming references—not only the series of adventure videogames that made such a splash over the past two decades, but also the Angelina Jolie double-feature that, for many and for all of their faults, defined the way it should be approached on-screen. But everything reboots, even videogame heroines, and so the recent Tomb Raider games have featured a younger, untested heroine, and that’s the approach also taken with the 2018 film featuring Alicia Vikander. The result is not especially impressive. Petite Vikander isn’t much of a presence even as the not-yet-formidable Croft, and director Roar Uthaugturnins merely manages to deliver serviceable sequences along the way to yet another dull origin story. (Seriously, the decision to “re-introduce” Lara Croft is dumbfounding: here we have one of the few videogame household names, and you’re going to waste everyone’s time reintroducing a beginner’s version of her? Why bother?) Much of the film is boring digital mayhem, not shot with any wit or expertise—the lone exception being a sequence featuring an old aircraft fuselage and a cliffside waterfall. It’s all not quite terrible, but it’s definitely laborious—there’s a sense that this is the film we have to struggle through so that they can be bothered to make a real Lara Croft movie. The film chuckles to itself as it ends with a reveal of Croft dual-wielding guns, but it’s only the final nail in the exasperation felt by the movie not delivering what it should. I’m solidly whelmed by the perfunctory adventure movie that is this wholly useless Tomb Raider. Now let’s hurry up to the inevitable sequel to see whether they’ll manage to make something out of this redundant throat clearing.

  • The Mechanic (1972)

    The Mechanic (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) It’s a tale as old as Hollywood: The remake comes out and everybody bemoans that it’s not the original. When the Jason Statham-headlined The Mechanic remake came out in 2011, I made a mental note to check the original. It took me a while, but I finally got it done years later as one French-Canadian channel had itself a nice little Charles Bronson marathon. Having seen the result, I don’t think I wasted all of these years not knowing. The Mechanic is very obviously a product of the early 1970s, with a whiff of drug-fuelled existentialism making a fairly simple action thriller get weirder than it should have been. It follows and deconstructs the lifestyle of a renowned assassin as he goes through his contracts and slowly seduces a younger man into his own way of seeing things. By necessity, our protagonist (played by Bronson) is an absolute loner—paying for call girls and quietly appreciating the expensive entertainment that his job pays for. His life gets more complicated when he’s asked to take on a younger partner, and both men’s styles clash. It’s not headed to a happy ending, but then again neither does the film have a happy middle or a happy beginning. Typically dark, grimy and off-putting for a film of its era, The Mechanic seems content to offer a counter-programming alternative to the better-known action movies of the era. Any hint of a homosexual relationship between the two lead characters is not accidental: the original script reportedly had it explicitly detailed and we can only regret the adulteration of that choice—it would have made the movie quite a bit more interesting than the one that made it to screen. In the end, what we have is a dourer Bronson vehicle that fails to impress except, perhaps, for its accidental period patina. Even though the remake wasn’t particularly remarkable, it still feels like an improvement over the original.

  • No Way Out (1987)

    No Way Out (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) I saw the very end of No Way Out two decades ago, and you would be forgiven for thinking that remembering only the final revelatory scene of a thriller would have been a problem in seeing it again. But there’s a lot more to a movie that its narrative conclusion, and I was remarkably pleased to find out that it’s a solid thriller from start to finish, and that what could have been a twist is half-telegraphed much earlier in the film—and that much of the film’s dramatic tension works equally well knowing about it. As a man investigating himself, Kevin Costner gets a great occasion to play off his stoic persona, and director Roger Donaldson cranks up the tension through a few remarkable scenes. The labyrinthine complexities of 1980s official Washington, D.C. can be fascinating at times, including the limited computing capabilities that fuel one of the film’s best sequences set deep within the Pentagon. There’s even a dash of (much parodied) eroticism to make things even spicier, as if Soviet spying, underhanded government secrets, plotting between organizations and a ticking-clock plot weren’t enough. It doesn’t really matter if the plotting is outlandish, or if the characters are well beyond unbelievable—sometimes, a thriller works because it’s ludicrous and this is one such case. I had a surprisingly good time watching No Way Out, and it still works largely because it doesn’t even attempt to be realistic.

  • The 15:17 to Paris (2018)

    The 15:17 to Paris (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) As a director, Clint Eastwood is well-known for a quick and efficient shooting style: He goes fast, doesn’t overthink the details and is often satisfied with one or two takes. This works well when dealing with good actors (including Eastwood himself), but the limits of his approach clearly show when dealing with non-professional actors such as in The 15:17 to Paris. It must have been a good idea at the time: Since the point was to make a movie about the three American who thwarted a terrorist attack on a European train in 2015, and the three young heroes of the story were still very much alive and willing, why not cast them in their own roles? As it turns out, there is a reason why we have professional actors, and the limits of their experience in portraying themselves quickly become apparent throughout the course of the film. Not that this is the biggest issue. The 15:17 to Paris, having to fill 90 minutes out of a relatively short incident involving a trio of wholesome young Americans, has to fill its running time somehow, and it’s not going to do that by, say, exploring the perspective of the terrorist. No, The 15:17 to Paris prefers to pad its running time with an awkward denunciation of secularism and then a travelogue as it follows our intrepid heroes throughout the sightseeing trip that precedes the dramatic events at the end of the movie. That’s right: Eastwood “directing” three young guys as they backpack through Europe, and a wasted Judy Greer as a mother who puts school officials in their place. The best part of the film, fortunately, comes at the end, when it’s time to deliver what audiences have come to see: a few tense minutes facing a terrorist and saving a victim. That final act of The 15:17 to Paris is much better … but it’s too bad we have to struggle through the hour that comes before. Eastwood gets terribly sloppy here, and it severely harms the point of the film.

  • Spielberg (2017)

    Spielberg (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) There’s a plethora of documentaries about famous directors these days, and it seemed strange not to have one about Steven Spielberg’s career. Spielberg’s two-and-a-half-hour running time certainly reflects the amount of material available for discussion: Not only does Spielberg have a forty-year career at this point, there is also a fascinating dramatic arc to a filmography in which, as he himself will admit, he grew up and matured behind the camera as audiences were watching. Spielberg went from pure pop entertainment to some of the most acclaimed dramatic movies in recent Hollywood history, and this progression does end up forming much of the native backbone to this HBO documentary. Numerous interviews with well-chosen subject help flesh out commentary from Spielberg himself. This being an authorized biography, do expect a sympathetic overview of his wok—while some reviewers ding a few obvious items in the Spielberg filmography, much of it reflects the consensus opinion with a few illustrative details. Not every Spielberg film gets equal treatment—there’s deservedly a lot to say about Schindler’s List, and almost no mention of Always. Alas, the film is already a reflection of its time—the material coming from the end of 2016, it talks about Lincoln but not about the Ready Player One/The Post early-2018 one-two punch echoing Spielberg’s 1993 annus mirabilis. Still, there are a few revelations here for casual Spielberg fans—I knew the broad outlines of what led to the character-defining divorce of his parents, for instance, but did not know that they had reconciled in the past few years. Because of carefully chosen details such as those, Spielberg remains an entertaining and well-structured overview of a big and important career.

  • Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

    Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I gave it a shot. I was not expecting anything special from a Direct-to-Digital sequel to the shark-thriller classic Deep Blue Sea, but I gave it a shot. I was not rewarded by the attempt. Despite a kernel of a good idea—boosting shark intelligence in order to understand how to boost human intelligence as a protection against strong AI—, this is the wrong film for a sustained exploration of smart ideas. Far too often, Deep Blue Sea 2 is content with the lowest common denominator of DTD filmmaking: terrible acting, rote premise, even duller execution. It quickly grows undistinguished, then wearying, then exasperating. You could probably have fun trying to predict the average amount of time until an entire watching party switches their allegiances from the dumb humans to the smarter sharks. I won’t make this review any longer than required to act as a warning: even if you’re expecting something anywhere near the level of the original film … you will be disappointed.

  • Unsane (2018)

    Unsane (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) The really nice thing about writer/director Steven Soderbergh announcing and then renouncing his retirement from moviemaking is the growing conviction that he’s now doing movies for the fun of it—that as a formal experimenter, he’s now free to take on projects because they sound cool, or because they push the envelope of what he wants to do. For instance, shooting a movie using an iPhone. In that context, Unsane is far more interesting than if you’d see it completely cold: At the surface, it feels amateurish, off-setting, simplistic, even far-fetched. In-context, however, it’s a Research and Development effort in greatly simplifying filmmaking—moving fast and using cheap equipment, but informing it with a strong filmmaking artistic intention. Soderbergh isn’t the first filmmaker to shoot a studio-level feature using a cell phone—that would be Sean Baker’s Tangerine—but Unsane is meant to be a relatively accessible thriller for multiplex distribution rather than an arthouse favourite. I can’t say that the experiment is completely successful—the paranoia is cranked up beyond believability, and the nature of the iPhone cameras means that the image does look quite a bit different from what we’re used to—the field of depth alone is a bit disorienting. As a very technical director with considerable cinematography experience, Soderbergh is obviously aware of those issues: the film is mean to make audiences uneasy with a form that follows function. The warped off-kilter perspective reflects the warped worldview of the lead character as she is trapped in an asylum, convinced that she’s being hounded by an obsessive stalker. Unsane doesn’t have a complicated story, but it’s well told thanks to Soderbergh verve behind the camera—or in this case, the phone.

  • Shaft (1971)

    Shaft (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) My expectations may have been a bit too high for the original Shaft. The film, in the popular imagination, has become a bit of a Blaxploitation landmark, buoyed by its famous title song and Richard Roundtree’s untouchable status as an icon. Shaft remains one of the best-known Blaxploitation film, which acted as a precursor to modern black-driven American cinema. That’s a lot of weight to put on what is, after all, simply a crime thriller. The reality on the ground, or rather on a scene-by-scene viewing basis, is not quite as glamorous: While Shaft benefits greatly from Roundtree’s performance, its Oscar-nominated title tune (naïve, but still potent) and first-mover advantage in defining blaxploitation, it does feel tepid and dated—there’s definitely some coolness to it, but it doesn’t measure up as favourably as it once did as an urban thriller. Of course, what we see now after decades of imitators is not the same thing as the 1971 audiences saw, some for the first time: a black hero stylishly navigating a complex urban landscape between cops and organized crime. While I enjoyed it, I was clearly expecting more, probably conditioned by endless flashy imitators refining the lessons learned by the original Shaft.

  • Les affamés [Ravenous] (2017)

    Les affamés [Ravenous] (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) Now here’s a fun curiosity— Les affamés is a French-Canadian zombie film, featuring some well-known local actors fighting the undead menace in rural Québec. It speaks to the democratization of genre elements that even that kind of project can be viable away from Hollywood. (Or maybe not that all surprising, given that the only thing you really need for a zombie movie is a farmhouse and red syrup.) Still, it is quite a thing to see grande-dame of Québec actresses Micheline Lanctôt cock a shotgun before going undead-hunting. Writer/director Robin Aubert makes the most out of the limited budget given to French-Canadian productions, setting his stories in forests, farm fields and isolated houses. Most of the elements of zombie movies are used in a straightforward fashion, although Aubert can’t resist adding an eerie element of zombie intelligence and proto-civilization by having them create towers out of ordinary objects. But never mind the quirks—the film delivers on the usual zombie-chomping action, what with lead actor Marc-André Grondin trying to hold everything together even in the face of an ongoing apocalypse. The result feels a bit odd by zombie-movie standards: a bit too pretentious at times (as in “yeah, we’re trying to do something more ambitious than the usual zombie movie”) even though its chief appeal—at least for me, as a French-Canadian viewer—is in setting familiar zombie tropes in very familiar settings with characters speaking a familiar patois. Les affamés offers two lasting visuals, but if I had to choose, I’d rather sacrifice the tower of chairs so that I could have more veteran Québec actors shooting zombies in the face.

  • Realive aka Proyecto Lázaro (2016)

    Realive aka Proyecto Lázaro (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Speaking as a long-time written science fiction fan, a really nice thing about the 2010s has been the expansion, globalization and democratization of filmed SF, as more filmmakers around the world are using a common understanding of the genre, cheap digital effects and accessible production means to create small-scale visions that go where Hollywood wouldn’t. With writer/director Mateo Gil’s Realive, this means a Spanish/Belgian production tackling universal ideas with a European slant, not necessarily settling for the same answers that what we’d see from other sources. The SF theme is familiar—a terminally ill man, choosing to be cryogenically preserved in the hope of a later cure. But of course, things aren’t so simple—being revived decades later leads to profound side effects, and there’s no guarantee that a man out of time would be able to cope with a future where he has to relearn everything. And that’s not mentioning the big question lurking behind it all: revival isn’t cheap, someone financed our protagonist’s return to life—and they expect a return on their investment. Going back and forth between a contemporary and a future timeline, Realive opposes the present and the future, as well as the choices the protagonist must make in leaving loved ones behind. The future, mostly taking place in a medical clinic, is cold and antiseptic: Yet revival is messy, complicated, prone to setbacks and uncomfortable choices. Our protagonist is not always of admirable fortitude, and the film does have an ironic surprise for him at the end. Tom Hughes is not bad in the lead, with Charlotte Le Bon providing some emotional support, and the eye-catching Oona Chaplin as the most vivid character in the film. While there isn’t much here that seasoned Science Fiction fans won’t have seen in other (usually written) forms, it’s good to see filmed SF rise to the level of maturity of prose SF and keep a stinger in reserve. While Realive is perhaps a bit too downbeat to please large audiences, it’s a mature kind of SF film, and one that should exist alongside happier, more superficial fare.

  • Death Wish (2018)

    Death Wish (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Ho boy, do I have mixed feelings about this Death Wish remake. For one thing, I’ve been watching a lot of urban-decay movies of the early 1970s lately, including the original Charles Bronson film. For another, well, I’m Canadian—my nearest metropolitan area is in the midst of an unprecedented murder wave and yet our yearly total barely exceeds what the city of Chicago alone experiences over two weeks (although Chicago’s own wave of violence seems to be receding after a particularly bad 2016). Seeing Death Wish isn’t just like seeing a very American nightmare given form, but one that seems to be coming back from the past. You already know the story, or at least can grasp it in a few words: A peaceful man turns vigilante after a brutal attack leaves his wife dead and his daughter in a coma. The rest is pure predictable plot mechanics to complete the cycle of revenge, making sure our hero develops the skills, evades the cops, tracks down the responsible parties and executes them in a way that leaves him in the clear. The first step in such a by-the-number reactionary thriller is to clearly establish that its world is a far more dangerous place than ours—and the film does have to lie quite a bit in order to get there, reaching for racial stereotypes and vilifying its targets. Poachers attack a farm just to make a convenient point, statistics are grossly inflated, and a Greek chorus of radio and social media voices is there to half-heartedly make and dismiss objections. Meanwhile, Bruce Willis broods his way through a role very much in-line with much of his indifferent 21st-century screen persona. Director Eli Roth may want to make a social statement (although I doubt it—his horror-movie instincts come up whenever there’s even a faint chance to put gratuitous gore on-screen) but Death Wish is, far more than its predecessor, an NRA-approved exploitation picture designed to make fearful people feel comfortable in their twisted version of the world. It would be a pretty reprehensible picture if it wasn’t for one thing: It’s actually executed decently. Roth has the budget to go for clean impressive cinematography, feature good actors even in thankless roles (Dean Norris once more takes on a familiar persona, but he’s sufficiently good at it that emerges intact from the deplorable results), and flex his directorial skills honed on much nastier pictures. He doesn’t stray that far from his roots—plot-wise the film hinges on convenient coincidences and at least one ridiculous Rube-Goldberg contrivance. But Death Wish, for all of its considerable problems, does actually work at what it intends to be: a gun-powered revenge fantasy, slickly made and updated to the current era.

  • Melinda and Melinda (2004)

    Melinda and Melinda (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) In the grand scheme of writer/director Woody Allen’s career, Melinda and Melinda feels both like a partial return to form and a transitional film. Occurring right before Allen’s European phase, it takes place in his Manhattan playground and features the kind of high concept that he played with in the earlier segments of his career—specifically, what if the same initial situation led to two separate stories, one tragic and one comic. Radha Mitchell stars as the same protagonist in both stories, with a typically good cast surrounding her in both versions. There is no single Allen analogue to be found here, showing the way that most of his European movies would go. Unfortunately, the concept of having playwrights arguing over whether life is a comedy or a tragedy by telling competing stories is perhaps better than the actual result: the cohesion between the stories is disappointing, as are the echoes going back and forth between the two of them. It’s the kind of device that a younger filmmaker may have been able to exploit more daringly, because as it is Melinda and Melinda often feels like a comfortable and perfunctory return to the kind of gently upper-class Manhattanite comedy that Allen did throughout his career. We’re more or less in the same apartment blocks, going to art-house movies, discussing literature and philosophy in the same ways other Allen characters have done. This does not, in other words, do much to expand Allen’s repertoire but it can be a comfy return to form for his audience. The result is predictably middle-of-the-road, liable to please those who think it will please them. It’s a specific kind of film, the kind where even an inconclusive abrupt ending becomes a gag in itself. In other words, don’t care too deeply about it.

  • The Yards (2000)

    The Yards (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I take no real pleasure out of reporting that The Yards is much duller than I hoped for. Movie reviewers, contrarily to some perceptions, usually hope for the best—otherwise, why bother? At the same time, I’m favourably inclined to tales of protagonists fighting against corruption, stories where characters try to get themselves out of the criminal life, and semi-realistic dramas at an age where we’re saturated with superhero blockbusters. Then there’s the respectable real-life factor of the movie being based on events having involved writer/director James Gray’s father. But The Yards is not how to do it. Taking place in lower-class Queens, The Yards is about an ex-con stuck in-between small-time businessmen, institutionalized corruption, blue-collar labour and complex family drama. The result is not meant to feel good: Everything’s dark and dreary, characters get killed accidentally, lifelong friendships are destroyed and there’s little hope for the protagonist in the middle of those powerful corrupt forces. Boasting of a great cast but directed with little distinction, The Yards often doesn’t quite know what to do with its leads Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron, not to mention living legends such as James Caan, Ellen Burstyn and Faye Dunaway in supporting roles. The result is procedurally wearying, a description that can be applied surprisingly well to many of Gray’s later works. The Yards may have echoes of On the Waterfront somewhere in its working-class corruption DNA, but that’s not enough to make it feel alive.

  • Tommy Boy (1995)

    Tommy Boy (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) The formula behind Tommy Boy isn’t complicated—take an outrageous comedian with a funny physique (that would be the late Chris Farley) and cast him as a man-child chaos-maker, then pair him up with a somewhat more conventional comedian with an ability to freak out in amusing way (that would be David Spade) as the straight man, and send them off on a road trip. There’s a sub-genre with a list of movies a mile long all revolving around the same concept, and Tommy Boy doesn’t break any new ground in following tradition. The details are unimportant, what with two young men trying to save their auto part company from going under by going on an extended sales trip. There’s some mechanistic character development, perfidious antagonists, comedy legends in secondary roles (Dan Aykroyd!) and a car that gradually breaks down over the course of the trip. As is tradition with road movies, it also features both characters singing along to a song. Narrative cohesion isn’t a big concern of the script, as much of the details are of the episodic one-thing-after-another variety. In execution, however, Tommy Boy depends a great deal on the specific comedy of Farley and Spade (better yet; both of them together), a pop-heavy soundtrack and some outrageous visual gags. (If you’re a fan of cars gradually falling apart, this is a movie for you.) It’s not good, it’s not memorable, it’s not clever but it just may be enough for an undemanding viewing in-between more substantial fare. Just don’t get Tommy Boy confused with the other Farley/Spade movie.

  • Arthur (1981)

    Arthur (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) Here’s a useless bit of childhood memory: Back when I was a boy, there was a French-Canadian TV show hosted by René Homier-Roy that offered viewers a choice between two movies to watch—viewers could call in during the following week, and pick the movie they wanted to see. Homier-Roy (a legend in French-Canadian broadcasting) would often pit 1981’s Arthur against other picks, nudging viewers toward it … only to be disappointed when viewers inevitably picked the other film. I only mention this because this is the kind of childhood memory that sticks in mind and leads middle-aged men to finally sit down and see what the fuss was about. Alas, the childhood curiosity was better than the adult review: While I can see how Arthur may have appealed to certain audiences in 1981, it feels like a stultifying bore in 2018. I’ll admit that my overall lack of interest in Liza Minnelli may have something to do with it—given that she’s the film’s love interest and hence the goal to motivate everything else, a lack of interest there means severely limiting the film’s appeal. More successful is Dudley Moore’s portrayal of the title character—a wealthy heir seemingly content in drinking himself to a constant stupor, and indulging in a few eccentricities along the way. He’s slated to marry another heiress, but then comes Minnelli’s character—a lower-class young woman—to change his ways. Arthur is really a belated coming-of-age romantic comedy, as an adult character who never had a reason to grow up suddenly has to—notably through the death of a surrogate father. There’s a touch of sadness to Arthur that prevents it from being an all-out feel-good romantic comedy, something reinforced with the gritty backdrop of early-1980s New York City. It works, but I was not as charmed or as amused as I expected it to be—but perhaps I’m unfairly comparing it to the shallowed but funnier 2011 remake. Sorry, René: I too would still pick something other than Arthur if you offered me the choice.