Jovan Adepo

  • Overlord (2018)

    Overlord (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) While Nazi Zombies are a staple in videogames and low-budget movies, Overlord is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that a Hollywood studio movie has tackled the topic with a substantial budget. Fittingly enough, it’s not meant to be a prestige picture—from the first few historically inaccurate moments, Overlord is clearly meant to be a pure B-movie, exploiting common tropes to deliver a thrill-ride. It succeeds mildly. Director Julius Avery’s setup is mechanistic and laborious, as our heroes are stranded deep behind enemy lines without enough resources to complete their mission and face unexpectedly formidable odds. The characters are whittled down to their essential numbers, the Nazi villains are proven to be irremediable, and then—as anticipated—we’re dropped in the middle of a Nazi scientific experiment to resurrect the dead. Overlord certainly isn’t designed to be surprising—you can predict almost to the second how one character gets abruptly killed and how another one gets heroically wounded, and that’s not mentioning the pedestrian dialogue. Still, much of the point of the film is showing us Castle Wolfenstein: The Movie, and that includes speed runs through familiar levels. Special effects are used wisely (including two lengthy tracking shots at the high points of the action sequences), Jovan Adepo and Wyatt Russell share protagonist duties, and Pilou Asbaek is just detestable enough as the Nazi-in-charge. The result isn’t particularly distinguished, though—somehow, I expected more fun, more mayhem and more zombies. Just-good-enough B-movies remain B-movies forever.

  • Fences (2016)

    Fences (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, August 2018) It’s always interesting to see what actors with strong screen personas choose to take on when they direct a movie. Here we have Denzel Washington, of the old-school stoic tough-love tradition, picking the historical drama play Fences as his inspiration for his third outing as director. As we may guess, it’s a strong actor-driven project exploring themes of black experiences in urban America, facing prejudice and individual failings along the way. Washington himself gets to play a hard-headed patriarch—but certainly not a perfect one. Actors such as Viola Davis and Jovan Adepo have good roles here, with family conflict building up as a dramatic force throughout the film. While Fences is not particularly strong on sheer cinematic qualities, the acting is, as one expects, very good—with many of the players, including Washington and Davis, reprising award-winning performances from a 2010 theatrical revival. It’s not a spectacular nor overly memorable film, but it’s solid, thematically successful and a wonderful capture of a play, a time and place and a certain hard-fought working-class attitude. It certainly does much to bolster Washington’s credentials as a surprisingly effective voice for a certain segment of the African-American community, not only by what he chooses to play, but also what to bring to the screens.