Ana de Armas

Knives Out (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Amazon Streaming, December 2020) What a complete delight. The murder mystery is an enduring form of cinema – you can watch some 1930s classics with equal delight today, but the subgenre has not always been as popular over the years. But with Knives Out, we’ve got a brand new great one, with all the classic tropes: a gothic setting, a large cast of suspects, a savvy detective, snappy dialogue and a final round-up of suspects leading tot the climax. It’s everything we want from such a film, and even a bit more with some light interweaving of socially conscious themes. Writer-director Rian Johnson knocks one out of the park here – bringing the promise of greatness he’s had since Brick, but weaving in everything he’s learned about directing since then. Johnson has always been clever, but until now, he had struggled to transform this cleverness into audience-pleasing filmmaking. Here the film is subversive and experimental with plot structures, but remains playful and entertaining until the end. Daniel Craig anchors the cast as great new detective Benoit Leblanc, with a hypnotizing southern accent and a demeanour that fits with the rest of the ensemble cast without getting drowned in it. Ana de Armas also has a good turn – she’s been an interesting presence for a few years, but this specific role asks more of her and she delivers. Knives Out is all quite wonderful and fun – while I’m not one to encourage imitation, when it comes to murder mysteries, I’m willing to make an exception: Go wild and start a trend, Hollywood.

Overdrive (2017)

Overdrive (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, October 2020) I’m a very good audience for car-centric action movies, and since we only get a Fast and the Furious instalment every other year, I have to bid my time with something in the meantime. Something, in this case, is Overdrive, and it’s not much of a stretch to call it a Fast and Furious derivative: Written by the screenwriters who have worked on the series (albeit on 2 Fast 2 Furious, easily the worst of the bunch), this film takes us to Marseilles, where a team of half-brothers specialize in stealing expensive cars for rich people. The plot gets underway when they are caught in the cross-fire between two very rich men: Agreeing to steal cars from one to the other, their scheme quickly becomes more complex with moves and counter-moves that all pay off in the last third of the film. Scott Eastwood stars in the film (making extra funnier the constant references to his character’s father), along with the always-attractive Ana de Armas and Freddie Thorp in a role meant for comic relief. Still, the stars here are the cars to be stolen, and the various action sequences that pepper the narrative. Ably directed by Antonio Negret from a production put together by notables such as Pierre Morel (of Taken fame), this is a lower-budgeted but still entertaining attempt at showing fast cars zipping by. The climactic sequence is set on the twisty roads near Marseille and includes some good moments along the way. Still, it’s not much compared to the best examples of the genre: Overdrive struggles with middling actors, bland dialogue, extremely familiar narrative engines and a tendency to fall in love with the cars it managed to bring on set. But if you’re looking for a decent-enough car thriller, this is better than many other examples: it’s entertaining enough to be worth a quiet unassuming look.

Knock Knock (2015)

Knock Knock (2015)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2018) There are stories that men tell each other in order to keep themselves in line. Don’t crush on crazy; don’t crawl inside the bottle; don’t run with criminals; don’t stray outside your marriage; don’t neglect your kids. Elementary life lessons, but worth repeating, often with maximal effect, in order to feel better about an ordinary life. When those morals are handled through genre methods, they become high-impact morality tales. Think Fatal Attraction. And if you give the story to a horror director like Eli Roth … well, you end up with something like Knock Knock, in which a good husband/dad finds himself powerless to resist the advances of two women when they show up at his doorstep when his wife and kids are away. What follows is a pair of steamy sex scenes. But what follows what follows is a merciless takedown of the man’s life using video and social media. The moral of the story here is clear enough: Destroy Facebook. Japes aside, does it work? Well, yes and no. Famously stoic Keanu Reeves is a curious choice as a good husband/dad, given that his innate reserve doesn’t really help him reach the emotional extremes required by the script. On the other hand, Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo are good picks as the ruthless temptresses—fortunately enough, since much of the Knock Knock’s credibility (or what passes for it given that it’s a quick-and-dirty exploitation film) depends on them—de Armas is particularly good, which explains why her career has taken off since then. Otherwise, though, the film does feel as if it doesn’t have enough depth to sustain its straightforward warning. It ends limply, in perhaps the tritest possible way. As a horror-erotic take on the home invasion genre, it sits uncomfortably between two very different genre—I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one (or fifteen) XXX-rated parodies focusing on the eroticism, and we’ve already seen an entire pure-horror home invasion subgenre come and go and come again. For Roth, who straddles the line between mainstream and extreme filmmaker, this is curiously tepid stuff—he’s obviously daring enough to feature two very explicit sex scenes, but the rest of the picture goes nowhere. As a result, Knock Knock doesn’t unnerve as much as it annoys, and that’s a fatal flaw in the kind of moral lesson it almost tries to be.

Exposed (2016)

Exposed (2016)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Video on Demand, April 2016) What if you called for a police thriller and a psychological drama showed up? That was my first reaction after seeing the underwhelming Exposed, but after reading up on the film it turns out that the reverse is a pretty good explanation for what actually happened. Originally conceived as “Daughter of God”, a psychological drama with a minor police subplot, Exposed was radically restructured to put emphasis on the police subplot, leaving the rest of the film sticking out incongruously. (The director even took his name off the results.) It shows almost from the first few minutes, which presents what turns out to be a not-particularly objective sequence before the rules of the film have been set. The rest of the film feels a few frames away from a horror film, but turn out to have a rational explanation as long as your definition of “rational” includes hallucinations, twisted psyches and a gritty detour to the lower rungs of what humans are capable of doing to each other. It shouldn’t be surprising if the result ends up being a mess, and not a particularly likable one. The editing drags on, cuts weirdly and doesn’t do itself any favours with a deliberately off-putting mindscape even as viewers are conditioned to expect a straightforward police thriller. It really doesn’t help that Exposed ends abruptly, without tackling any of the consequences of what’s coming to the characters after the movie ends. A few good things do remain in the wreckage: a clean-cut Keanu Reeves isn’t a bad thing to watch (although his character doesn’t get any payoff from the cut-short ending). This is the first time I’ve seen Mira Sorvino show up in a movie in a long time, and the years have been kind to her, enabling her to play a minor role with far more gravitas than she would have been able to do a decade ago. But it’s Ana de Armas who shines in the lead role, doing well with a difficult character. Otherwise, the film just feels odd, and not in a deliberate way. The shift from police investigation to psychological horror could have worked with more forethought (I’m thinking about The Tall Man as an example) but here the film shows clear signs of production improvisation and it doesn’t take a tour through the film’s troubled production history to see the results of such tinkering on-screen.