Simon Kinberg

  • The 355 (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) My muted reaction to many gender-flipped movie projects isn’t so much about reactionary tendencies than disappointment at the laziness of many such flips. Or the weird celebration of ideas that were terrible when played by males in the first place. It really doesn’t help when such projects come with a breathless self-celebration of their progressive credentials, conveniently forgetting decades of prior examples. So, when writer-director Simon Kinberg’s the 355 comes complete with auto-congratulatory back-patting as a female version of espionage thrillers, it comes across as more than a little obnoxious… especially considering that the film itself is not particularly impressive. (Also, not to put too much of a fine point on it: Kinberg’s career as a writer-director is no shining beacon of excellence. His work as a producer is not all bad, though.)  There are a few decent ideas floating around the project – celebrating teamwork rather than hermetic individuality, spending some time thinking about the domestic challenges of being a working spy, Jessica Chastain in a role fully playing to her screen persona. There’s even, to be charitable, one good sequence set in a Moroccan city. The cast is also quite promising: Chastain is joined by such notables as Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o and Fan Binbing (whose English seems notably worse here than in previous films). But the rest of the 355 is not distinctive enough to be remarkable – tired tropes, indifferent characters, very familiar punching bags (are you surprised than most of the male characters are evil or victims? Mostly evil, though.), terrible dialogue and bland directing all combine to make this a deeply unimpressive genre entry. While the 355 is hardly unusual in going for a fantasy depiction of espionage – expect the characters to band together to save the world from an international criminal rather than being anything like a nuanced look at real espionage—it seems unwilling to go beyond the clichés. This is probably the third or fourth film I’ve seen in the past year where the MacGuffin is a magical high-tech device that can bring down planes, electrical devices and governments, and I’m tired of it. In manipulating the elements of espionage fiction, the 355 doesn’t do much more than the usual, and so makes a very poor case about how it’s different (let alone better) from so many other dull thrillers. The gender-flipping also becomes noticeably more insistent in its third act, calling further attention to its limitations. I want strong, competent female protagonists and I want to question the crudest assumptions of genre cinema, but a disappointing movie that loudly calls itself progressive only makes things worse for everyone.

  • Dark Phoenix (2019)

    Dark Phoenix (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) The problems with Dark Phoenix are numerous and significant, but most of them stem from one particularly boneheaded decision: Redo the comics’ Dark Phoenix arc, merely thirteen years after it was (badly) done in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. Sure, superhero films aren’t known for originality—but this is being insultingly blatant about it, especially since you have the same scribbler, Simon Kinberg, penning the second script. But then further missteps accumulate: the decision to put the dramatic weight of the film on Sophie Turner is baffling considering her limited range, the “X-Women” pandering misandry [2023: A problem specific to Kinberg, as further demonstrated by his work on The 355], the limp action scenes, the way characters act out of character, an irritating pair of lead performances from Turner and Jessica Chastain, the humdrum direction, the fuzzy writing… It’s a surprisingly incompetent film, especially given the large budget it has to play with. Kinberg specifically beclowns himself here—not only is it his second time at bat as screenwriter for that specific story, he also directs and produces meaning that he only has himself to blame for the limp result. It’s not that the film is completely dull, but whatever highlights it has (from the opening shuttle sequence to the train-set final mayhem) are largely bits of special effects rather than character moments in a series that usually succeeded because of strong actors and dramatic highlights. The production history of the film suggests that it could have been worse—after multiple false starts and extensive reshoots to redo the entire third act (i.e.: the train sequence), the film was a box-office bomb that cut short any thoughts of a new trilogy launched by this film. Considering the tangled corporate restructuring that came with Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox (which cut off planned plotlines all over the place), there’s a very good chance that this is the last of the Fox-lineage X-Men movies and if so, it’s a deeply unimpressive finish—all thanks to Kinberg, who (after writing the previous two instalments) turns out to be the final villain of the series.