Rob Me Blind

Year: 2016

Director: Fede Alvarez

Cast: Stephen Lang, Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

2016 hasn’t been, like, the worst movie year ever. I dug Deadpool. And The Nice Guys was great. There has been some good stuff around the fringes, but the actual summer season has been devastatingly barren. And now here we are in the final days of August, the last weekend that could conceivably be called “Summer.” Kids are returning to school and Hollywood is closing up shop until the holidays, rolling down the shutters with the Jason Statham sequel Mechanic: Resurrection and the R-rated horror feature Don’t Breathe from the director of 2013’s Evil Dead. It doesn’t take a genius to guess which one I went to see.

And it doesn’t take a statistician to properly predict that I was at least minorly disappointed by it.

Don’t Breathe takes place in modern horror’s favorite decrepit haunting ground: Detroit. Rocky (Jane Levy) wants to ditch her alcoholic mother and escape to California with her little sister and/or daughter Diddy (Emma Bercovici). I assumed they were sisters, but a heated ride-home conversation opened me up to a world of possibilities. Rocky and her friends Money (Daniel Zovatto of It Follows) and Alex (Dylan Minnette of Goosebumps) are small-time thieves, but they decide to do one big robbery to fund their travels.

The target? A blind veteran (Stephen Lang), who supposedly received a huge settlement after his daughter was killed in a car accident. As you might imagine, things don’t go exactly according to plan, and the trio finds themselves trapped in the house with the vicious man prowling around, using his heightened senses to track them.

Yeah, the blind guy these teens are robbing is the VILLAIN.

I was very curious to see what Fede Alvarez could do with an original horror property. His Evil Dead remake is one of the better examples of the form, converting Raimi’s DIY aesthetic into a slicker but no less gonzo gore epic. Don’t Breathe provided Alvarez with two equally important challenges: 1) To prove that he is a capable filmmaker using his own unique directorial toolbox, and 2) to bring that same sense of breathless, hyperbolic gore and horror to a film that isn’t supernatural and only has a cast of three fleshpiles to choose from.

Alvarez achieves the former with far more confidence than the latter. While he doesn’t introduce too many techniques that aren't cribbed from the Sam Raimi playbook, that’s still a rich and varied resource that he co-opts well. He gets his crane shot jollies out early on, soaring high over the Detroit streets to contrast with the tight claustrophobia of the later scenes. Then his camera is all powerful sinew, slithering behind and around his characters, showing us everything they see and especially highlighting what they don’t, spinning around its prey in a glorious celebration of its own tension. It’s not a stunningly beautiful film, but it uses the camera and jagged slashes of light to ramp up the atmosphere considerably.

Detroit’s general terrifyingness also helps a bunch.

That second challenge is where Alvarez stumbles. Not only does Don’t Breathe shy away from Grand Guignol extravagance, it seems to actively abstain from using the tools that it has set up for itself. In a fabulous early single shot sequence, the film sets up all kinds of dominos (a hidden gun, a fully loaded tool shelf, etc.) that almost entirely slip its mind. Stephen Lang punches a character in the face when there is a hacksaw behind him in that very shot. Why even have it there at all if you’re not going to make bloody use of it?

I do appreciate the film’s willingness to use Dylan Minnette as a cinematic punching bag. But the only time Don’t Breathe goes as over the top as it could (and should) have, harnessing that frenetic, gooey, Evil Dead energy, is in a deeply uncomfortable, shoehorned-in rape sequence. And therein lies the biggest flaw of the whole piece. 

Inflicting bodily harm on women can achieve gross-out horror fun when it’s played the right way. You’re Next put Sharni Vinson through the winger, compounding her badassery with every injury she sustains. And Sam Raimi’s own Drag Me to Hell placed Alison Lohman in the Bruce Campbell role, using her as a slapstick crash test dummy. It can work. It’s all about proper tone management. What happens to Jane Levy in certain sequences of Don’t Breathe fails miserably to capture that. It’s ugly brutalization, as simple as that.

And it’s not like the rest of the film is unimpeachable enough that it can survive this flaw. Rocky’s backstory is marred by emotionally manipulative twaddle, desperately attempting to force feed us empathy for these three unlikeable characters, the cheapness of which is exposed by a dreadful child actress. And Don’t Breathe indulges in that eye-poppingly frustrating rope of beginning in medias res with a clip from the third act, essentially spoiling its own ending and planting a niggling seed of impatience as you wait for the movie to catch up with itself.

Whatever happened to unpredictability?

See? The second I let myself get a smidgen excited about anything this year, it’s just another disappointment ready to rear its ugly head. Don’t Breathe is one of the better disappointments of the year because it’s still a taut, stylish thriller a heart, but it’s one more uneven tile in this summer’s fresco of misery. Before we go, I would like to highlight Lang’s performance, which is viscerally chilling, using a gravelly vocality that cuts like a buzz saw. He stands out in a cast of decent but unproven young actors, and he helps goose the engine of the film when its pacing sputters. So there’s that. I don’t think I’ve felt this down about a 7/10 film before, but 2016’ll do that to ya.

TL;DR: Don't Breathe is a tense thriller without a certain spark to push it over the edge.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1006

Popcorn Kernels: Aw, Screw It

Hello, hello, hello, faithful readers! Normally I do my best to bestow full length reviews on current films, but I am so damn close to clearing my backlog that I can’t resist knocking out some of the less important, less current selections from last year with another slate of mini reviews. There’s got to be a statute of limitations on this kind of thing, right?

In the Heart of the Sea

Year: 2015
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

In the story that inspired Moby Dick, the captain and first mate of a whaling ship pursue a massive white whale that destroys the vessel, leaving the crew stranded.

As helpfully pointed out by Hunter Allen (of Kinemalogue) in the comments on my Muppet Treasure Island review, I’m a hard sell on ship movies. So right off the bat, I was disinclined to adore Ron Howard’s massively ill-advised seafaring epic In the Heart of the Sea.

But you know what I dislike even more than schooners? Movies that use the lazy framing device of an author coaxing a story out of somebody for the express purpose of reminding people that hey, they read this book in middle school, isn’t that neat? This technique can be used well, but here it’s just an excuse to slice the film’s pacing into ribbons in order to bridge plot gaps by using the “storyteller” to handily provide us with an airdrop of exposition and convenient analysis. There is literally zero reason why the Chris Hemsworth storyline couldn’t have stood alone, and the film takes on a lot of water thanks to this decision.

You know what I dislike even more than flimsy framing devices? The fact that Chris Hemsworth can apparently only get roles if they take place either centuries ago or in ultramodern yet inexplicably Medieval cultures. The man has talent, but he’s constantly shunted into stuffy roles with awful hair that clamp down on his range like an iron vise and surround him with such illustrious (read: pale) performers as… That guy from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And maybe wait until his Marvel contract is finished before you strand him on a desert island. With his scraggly beard and perfectly waxed chest, he looks more like a hipster barista than a marooned sailor.

But you know what I dislike even more than Hemsworth’s Buff, Waxed, and Stranded photo shoot? The whale! The CGI technicians do not commit to making this khaki monstrosity seem huge or white or menacing in any way, shape, or form. I’m all for cinematic realism, but would anybody be mad if the whale was a couple yards longer and bone white? If I had to hazard a guess, marine biologists are not in the primary demographic for this flick. Plus, it really doesn’t do anything impeccably beastly other than trawling around after our heroes like it’s Jaws: The Revenge and providing really obvious metaphors to conclude Our Hemsworth’s character arc.

If you don’t particularly mind any of these things, we are not on the same page and you can feel free to check out In the Heart of the Sea. But even putting those gripes aside, it’s still only a blandly functional adventure picture populated with stock characters and depicting oddly brutal animal violence. So have fun with that.

Rating: 5/10

Goosebumps

Year: 2015
Director: Rob Letterman
Cast: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

A teen boy moves in next door to R. L. Stine. He befriends the author’s teen daughter, then must team up with the two of them when he accidentally unleashes Stine’s creations upon the town.

Because I am nothing if not a consummate academic, I am much more familiar with the Goosebumps books than the TV show. As such, I had absolutely no nostalgia for any visual R. L. Stine property and came to the Goosebumps film unclouded by expectation. This is the best way to approach it, though I feel that all but the grumpiest among us would be hard-pressed not to have a good time.

Goosebumps might be fashionably generic (new kid in town, single mom, struggling to find place amid wacky mayhem, it’s not exactly Proust), but it enacts those typical plot beats with an energy that at least makes them feel fresh. Dylan Minnette and Amy Ryan forge an excellent mother-son relationship, and the movie’s humor and heart branches out from there. This is primarily a comedy film of course, especially when Jillain Bell (as an eccentric aunt) or Timothy Simons and Amanda Lund (as two inept cops) are on the scene, but there actually is a decent amount of juice in the horror side of things.

The monsters are all rendered with a cartoonish CGI, which in a family film isn’t actually a liability (Mama, eat your heart out), but the effects spring into high gear when they get sucked back into the books from whence they came. Their bodies begin to unravel in a tornado of ink that’s both beautifully rendered and quite gruesome. It’s Goosebumps, so it won’t turn your stomach, but it’s just raw enough to remind you that kids movies can be scary too. Anybody who has seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory can attest to that.

Funny, scary, campy… Sounds like Goosebumps to me! The movie plays with a lot of classic monsters and scenarios, even conjuring up its own wicked twists. It might not be a perfect iteration of the Goosebumps mythos (sometimes the structure of a feature inhibits its ability to evoke some traditional Goosebumps storylines), but it captures the gleefully macabre atmosphere with no shortage of charm.

Oddly enough or perhaps no quite so unexpectedly, even taking into consideration the green teen talent, the weakest link is most obviously Jack Black. He hams it up like he works at a deli, and the taste of flop sweat curdles the tonal mixture a little bit. Goosebumps does exist in a heightened reality, so it makes a game attempt at assimilating his boisterous performance, but there are many moments that he tramples over by pulling faces and generally clowning around. It’s immensely frustrating, but this isn’t a movie about him. It’s about the young generation that loves Goosebumps, and for them the film is mostly a blast.

Rating: 7/10

We Are Your Friends

Year: 2015
Director: Max Joseph
Cast: Zac Efron, Wes Bentley, Emily Ratajkowski
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A young DJ meets an older producer, igniting a friendship that will lead to love, loss, success, failure, and eventually growing up.

We Are your Friends is not a lucky movie. If no for the box office cavalry of Jem and the Holograms, WAYF would have scored the lowest opening weekend of the entire year. Seeing how I’m obsessed with cinematic failure and Zac Efron is on my celebrity freebie list, I couldn’t rest giving the film a looksie. Boy, am I glad I did.

We Are Your Friends isn’t ever going to be unearthed as a true buried gem, but taken as the generic coming-of-age story in the modern world that it is, it couldn’t be better. It’s a mini prestige picture, hitting all the beats of larger, more successful films with just enough twists to keep it lively. My single favorite element is the editing, which a voids the temptation to turn the whole thing into an EDM music video, rather creating a slick visual rhythm that jumps off the screen with graphic and text overlaps. It’s an edgy, modern style that has certainly been seen before, most recently in The Big Short, but it’s an exciting cinematic presentation that works wonders for the film. These flashy technical moments unfortunately decrease as the movie foes on, but their presence gives WAYF a spark that never fades.

Also, honestly, the cast is pretty incredible. Wes Bentley is magnetic as a self-destructive mentor, Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal gets his Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wall Street moment in the sun, and Zac Efron turns in what is unequivocally the best performance of his career, one that’s tempered, at least slightly layered, and miles away form his standard dreamboat duties.

Please don’t leave this blog thinking We Are Your Friends is a life-changing motion picture, but aside from a bit of an unfocused narrative drive and a deeply generic plot structure, it really ain’t half bad. It’s messy, it’s foolhardy, occasionally deep, and plugged into some great beats; an imperfect love letter to modern youth that doesn’t talk down to them. I genuinely enjoyed this movie. That may or may not be a socially suicidal admission, but it’s the truth. Check it out!

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1468