Wyatt Russell – Christian Sauvé

Overlord (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-12-072023-03-19 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.

Movie Review

Table 19 (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-12-112018-02-01 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2017) It’s bad form for a reviewer to suggest that a film doesn’t live up to a wholly imagined alternative, but watching the first half of Table 19, I was struck at how the film seemed to work as a single-setting story. As various strangers gather around Table 19 of a lavish wedding’s reception, they gradually come to reveal their secrets and figure out the link between them. They all have backstories, quirks, aspirations and unfinished business—could all of this be resolved around a single table? For a while, Table 19 almost gets it as a stylistic exercise, as characters join or leave the table and their backstories are exposed. Then the film seems to lose interest in a potentially intriguing premise, and the action dissolves in far more conventional scenery-hopping. The second half of the film is far more conventional than the first, and even the combined charm and comedy of actors such as Anna Kendrick, Craig Robinson, Lisa Kudrow, June Squibb, Stephen Merchant and Wyatt Russell can’t quite rescue the film from dull mediocrity. Table 19 sadly leaves table 19 behind, going elsewhere in order to deliver a rather happy conclusion. It doesn’t help that some of the characters are too irritating to live—Merchant’s character, in particular, is annoying beyond belief and sabotages much of the film’s otherwise intriguing first half. Reviewers shouldn’t tell filmmakers how to make their movies, but this being said—I’s like to see a version of Table 19 in which the camera remains within a ten-meter radius of the titular table. Make it like a theatre piece, and the film may keep some of the intensity that it promised in its first half.