Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness is such a brooding, portentous title for such a zippy goofball of a movie. Why Into Darkness? Probably because it sounds cool. The movie also sounds cool — the decibel level, as usual with these summer behemoths, is punishing — and looks cool. “Cool” has seldom been an adjective associated with Star Trek, at least among non-Trekkies; what franchise rebooters J.J. Abrams (director) and his writing cohorts Damon Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci have done is to make Gene Roddenberry’s gentle humanist daydream safe for consumers of more steak-and-potatoes fare like Fast and Furious. To that end, lots of things explode and there are many, many chases, many races against the clock. This is a movie in which an event that would climax a frailer movie — Spock (Zachary Quinto) setting off a cold-fusion device inside a volcano to quell its eruption — is just the throat-clearing opener, explaining why impetuous Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) is busted down to First Officer.

Kirk saved an entire planet, but he wasn’t supposed to — he broke the Prime Directive, observe but don’t mess with alien civilizations — so, for his troubles, he gets demoted and loses his ship, the Enterprise, to his mentor, Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood). That doesn’t stick, though, because soon a terrorist (Benedict Cumberbatch) has someone set off a bomb in London (it’s nice to see that London will still have trees in the 23rd century) and tries to kill all of the Starfleet’s captains. This is bad, so Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) authorizes Kirk to take off after the terrorist and terminate him with extreme prejudice. The terrorist turns out to be Khan, a name familiar from a thousand internet memes featuring William Shatner bellowing it.

This is not quite the Khan we remember from the original Star Trek episode “Space Seed” and its feature-length sequel The Wrath of Khan; this rebooted Star Trek follows an alternate timeline, which theoretically means the crew of the Enterprise should be free to have all new adventures and encounter fresh new threats, not face off once again with a reiteration of a villain they battled 31 years ago in a different timeline. Benedict Cumberbatch seems to know he can’t compete with Ricardo Montalban’s beloved and richly campy reading of Khan, so he doesn’t even try; besides, he doesn’t have the dialogue. (And this movie, chasing as it does the Vin Diesel crowd, wouldn’t dream of having a Melville-quoting Khan spitting venom at a Dickens-reading Kirk. This Kirk might only pick up a book if it were lying atop an issue of Playboy, but it’s amusing that he’s still listening to the Beastie Boys.)

A Star Trek film lives or dies on the chemistry of the crew, and on that level the new movie sort of works. I like how actors such as Simon Pegg and Karl Urban seem to have enough reverence for James Doohan and DeForest Kelley to mimic the late actors’ mannerisms, but also enough of their own wit to make the characters their own. The characters are fun to spend time with. But the script deals in so many pointless twists and so much parking-lot logic (i.e., the kind of plot holes that make you go “Wait a minute” on your way to your car, and perhaps sooner) that there never seem to be any serious stakes. The movie hits the ground running and never stops; it gets winded with the frantic efforts to keep hustling us over all the plot speed bumps. Also, the movie ends with a glaring cheat that essentially means nobody in the Star Trek universe has to die any more. At least Spock stayed dead for a while, back in the ’80s when death still mattered in movies.

Fairly early on, I figured out how dumb Star Trek Into Darkness was going to be, so I just relaxed into the dumbness. It’s a top-notch light show (I saw it in 2D, so can’t comment on how effective the post-converted 3D is), scored with excitable flourish by Michael Giacchino. After a while I laughed at myself for watching a movie that climaxed, more or less, with a chase on foot between Khan and a really pissed-off Spock. This, I remind you, is a movie that begins with Spock stopping a volcano from erupting, and eventually winds up with the same mechanics — minus the hopping from airship to airship — that you see at the end of every fifth-rate cop show. The poor movie. It just wears itself right out. You almost want to offer it some iced tea and sit it under a tree for a spell.

Iron Man 3

Can you name a third film in a franchise that was better than the previous two films? You’d probably have to go deep — A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, perhaps? — but Iron Man 3, despite my misgivings as someone who yawned through Tony Stark’s first two adventures, turns out to be deft summer entertainment, cheerfully amoral (I’ll get to that) and lightly coated with terrific little bits of comedic business. The difference here, it’s clear, is director/cowriter Shane Black, whose scripts for Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout still hold up as winking macho fantasies. Black doesn’t take much seriously unless it involves a hero trying to rescue or avenge his loved one. Everything else is fair game, all in fun, the clatter and concussion of action tropes as syncopated as the dialogue.

Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is up against some heavy hitters this time: exploding, supercharged assassins — juiced up with some form of nanotech called Extremis — who do the bidding of a shadowy, preening terrorist known as the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). The Mandarin, probably the most durable of the rather forgettable rogues’ gallery in Marvel’s Iron Man comics, is sort of tossed aside in this movie, in a wittily cynical fashion that almost reads as subversion. Black doesn’t take mustache-twirling supervillains seriously either. Mostly, the movie is a matter of Stark up against amputee war vets whose exposure to the putatively healing Extremis has made them aggressive and vicious. Someone in a bad mood might find Iron Man 3 unforgivably callous and thoughtless, especially after the events in Boston, where we saw real terrorism, real explosions, real amputees.

But the combination of Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr., which worked a treat in 2005’s little-seen but well-loved Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, wants only to put you in a good mood — especially if you were there for the ’80s and ’90s action bonanzas from which Black emerged. Right down to its holiday setting — every scene is sprinkled with festive (and patriotic) Christmas lights — Iron Man 3 is a slick late-’80s throwback, with a bad guy (Guy Pearce) whose mullet and glib smile recall Val Kilmer’s Chris Knight in Real Genius, except this real genius is bent on domination via manipulating the terrorist market. (Kilmer, of course, was also Downey’s co-star in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.) Black expands his boys’ club a bit, though — one of the more fearsome Extremis brutes is a woman (Stephanie Szostak), and even the unfortunately named Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Stark’s loved one, gets to administer some beatdowns. Iron Woman!

If the thought of William Sadler and Miguel Ferrer — two character-actor favorites of the action era this movie fondly references — as President and Vice-President puts a spring in your step, welcome to Iron Man 3. (I wish Black had time to throw in Michael Ironside or Tom Atkins, just for me.) The rapport between Stark and fellow armor-wearer James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) likewise calls back to Riggs and Murtaugh. The action, framed by legendary cinematographer John Toll, is clear and crisp and satisfying, harking back to the days when directors felt it was important for us to see what was happening to whom, and where. (I’d advise skipping the 3D on this one — it works just fine in plain old 2D, and the colors most likely pop better.)

Downey is as blithely smug as he usually is in these hefty franchise events, but with Stark suffering Post-Avengers Stress Disorder, Downey has something new and likable to play: the current reality of gods and monsters has tweaked Stark’s head a little — he’s no longer the biggest kid on the block, and he’s a bit more humble. Technology, too, smacks him down to size, and at the end, after a symbolic fireworks show casting off tech support he no longer needs, we feel that Stark has grown up, left his toys behind. While we wait for the loud climax we have diversions in the form of witty banter between Stark and various admirers (including a fatherless kid who’s around just long enough not to wear out his welcome), and Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley making meals of their sinister dialogue, and Rebecca Hall, looking like an odd amalgam of Liv Tyler and Scarlett Johansson (Betty Ross! Black Widow!), as a botanist and former Stark one-night stand. The theme of the movie seems to be that the past — whether a woman scorned or a nerd snubbed at a New Year’s Eve party — will come back to bite you, and that extends to ghastly experiments on war veterans and destructive technology that can be used against its maker. For all its snark and lighter-than-air pyrotechnics and aesthetic, the movie has a bit more going on under the hood — or helmet — than it’ll get credit for.

Olympus Has Fallen

Every week, according to legend, Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller participates in a special Movie Night with like-minded freaks and friends. Movie Night has many rules, one of them being that if the title of a movie is spoken in the movie, everyone must applaud. I reflected on that ritual about half an hour into Olympus Has Fallen, when a Secret Service agent (Cole Hauser) intones into his wrist microphone — you guessed it — “Olympus has fallen.” Nobody at my semi-packed screening applauded; Penn and his posse must’ve been otherwise engaged. Nobody applauded at anything else, either, even at the many cheesily patriotic moments such as the one in which the bloodied Secretary of Defense (poor Melissa Leo) defiantly recites the Pledge of Allegiance while being dragged off by terrorists.

A moronic synthesis of Die Hard and Red Dawn, Olympus Has Fallen (applause) pits One Lone Man — ex-Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) — against North Korean terrorists. North Korea certainly does seem to be the accepted Big Bad of recent action cinema; last fall’s Red Dawn remake — which, like Olympus Has Fallen (applause), was distributed by FilmDistrict — famously changed its Chinese invaders to North Koreans. The movie’s politics are goofy in the manner of the hundreds of ’80s action flicks just like this one; in any event, the terrorists act independently of their country, and their ringleader (Rick Yune) is driven more by revenge than by ideology.

Director Antoine Fuqua has made eight features, of which I have seen four; is that enough evidence for me to declare him an unexciting and impersonal action director with a little style? Fuqua stages the initial assault on the White House with some bloody snap and vigor, but after that it’s a lot of footage of Gerard Butler skulking around dark hallways and neutralizing terrorists, crosscut with scenes at the Pentagon where people, including Morgan Freeman and Angela Bassett, scowl and fret. The President (Aaron Eckhart) is being held hostage in his bunker along with most of his top officials, and he must be rescued before the terrorists gain full access to the three-part code that will blow up all of our nukes in their silos. The President’s son is also hiding in the White House somewhere, and Banning must find him. Fortunately that goal is knocked out of the way relatively early, or else we’d be thinking “Who cares about a kid? Olympus has fallen!” (Applause.)

A prologue of sorts tells us why Banning is no longer a Secret Service agent: one snowy night, the President’s vehicle went halfway off a bridge, and Banning wasn’t able to save the First Lady (Ashley Judd) before the First Car plunged into the icy drink. What we take from this is not “What a sad backstory” but “I guess Ashley Judd gotta eat.” The movie is in other respects a halfway house for actors who used to have better careers, like Bassett, Radha Mitchell, Dylan McDermott, and Robert Forster. Olympus Has Fallen (applause) isn’t much of an actor’s showcase anyway, though Aaron Eckhart gets to add another Big No moment to his highlight reel. Butler does what he can, but Banning lacks the Jersey street wit of John McClane, not to mention McClane’s vulnerability. If we’re supposed to feel any apprehension on Banning’s behalf, we don’t, because he’s presented from the word go as the best and toughest Secret Service agent ever.

Every so often, competing films on the same theme go into production independently of each other and then race to see which will hit theaters first (last year brought Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, for instance). This is one of two White-House-under-siege films you will see (or wait for Netflix to see) this year, the other being June’s White House Down. Will there be a character in that film who will dramatically speak the line “White House down,” prompting Penn Jillette and his cronies to redden their palms? Maybe you can go see it and let me know — I’ll probably opt for the Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy that weekend, having essentially seen White House Down already.

Django Unchained

Like most of his other films, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained feels like a summing-up, a resuscitation of forgotten subgenres, another thick volume of The Portable Quentin Tarantino — which, given the writer-director’s penchant for lengthy movies, isn’t quite portable. But that’s okay: the time always flies, and Tarantino gives us a lot of movie for our money. Django Unchained is another historical revenge epic on the order of Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds, in which the insulted and injured get bloody satisfaction; in this case, the wronged party is Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave passing through antebellum Texas. Django encounters a bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), and the two men become partners, Django assisting Schultz on various jobs until Schultz decides to help Django rescue his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from a Mississippi plantation.

Previous Tarantino revengeploitation (Kill Bill, etc.) was set in made-up, stylized worlds, but this movie and Basterds unfold against real-life backdrops of cruelty (and deep collective shame), so Django Unchained has sparked considerable controversy. Some African-Americans take issue with a white filmmaker’s using slavery (not to mention “the n-word”) so freely in service of a popcorn movie. Others find it empowering, as their ancestors also found blaxploitation cathartic in the ’70s. I’ll just say that the movie is structured as a spaghetti-western Niebelungen, in which the dragons this Siegfried must slay are slave owners and all the hillbillies and Uncle Toms who enable them. Django’s journey brings him to Candyland, an elaborate plantation run by the noxiously self-satisfied Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Hanging on his master Calvin’s every casually racist word like Gollum is house negro Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who can tell straight away that Django and Schultz aren’t really there to buy “the right nigger” for mandingo fighting.

Trying to catch Broomhilda in a lie, Stephen asks her why he’s scaring her. “Because you’re scary,” she replies, and indeed he is; Jackson atones for many easy Samuel L. Jackson Auto-Pilot performances with a creepy, cobra-like menace. Tarantino has always been an actor’s director, evident here from so many people willing to drop in for tiny roles; at times the movie is an anthology of character actors from exploitation or TV. Foxx’s Django is iconic and stoic except where his beloved Broomhilda is concerned, while Waltz’s Schultz, familiar with violence up to a point, is gradually sickened by seeing firsthand the ruthless machinery of the slave economy. DiCaprio doesn’t overdo Candie’s sadism; in fact, in order to be sadistic you have to have some awareness that what you’re doing is wrong, and Candie, born into his position, sees nothing evil in it. It’s the water he’s always swum in. Someone like Stephen, who should see the evil but overlooks it out of expedience, is far more treacherous.

Starting with Kill Bill, Tarantino became a born-again action director, and the many shoot-outs here are staged with over-the-top gusto, with blood spurting and misting and puddling. When we’re supposed to enjoy the brutality, we do; when we’re not (say, when Candie unleashes dogs on an escaped slave), we don’t. Tarantino’s use of violence here seems fair and organic: If you profit from human misery, your death will be a joke to energize the audience. Tarantino’s great theme, hooking into his preoccupation with revenge sagas over the last decade, has always been “Actions have consequences.” When this is applied to America’s guilty past, Django Unchained comes to feel like an act of radicalism, which connects it to Tarantino’s obvious influences here, the sardonically political spaghetti westerns of Sergio Corbucci (The Great Silence and the original Django).

Other than showing off the first Django (Franco Nero) in a cameo, Tarantino’s Django shares no particular plot overlap with Corbucci’s, any more than his Inglourious Basterds cribbed its narrative from Enzo Castellari’s. The soundtrack is gratifyingly eclectic and defiantly anachronistic; Ennio Morricone and Jerry Goldsmith consort uneasily with Rick Ross and Jim Croce, and somehow it all works. As always, Tarantino is like a kid playing you his favorite albums and movie clips, but as he’s gotten older, with this and Basterds, he seems to have concluded that all his passion and enthusiasm should be put to use for grindhouse-history lessons — that is, history as seen through the filter of grindhouse, not the history of grindhouse, though it’s that too. The movie takes its time and stretches its legs and lets people reveal character through monologues. It also knows when to blow people sky-high for a laugh and when to step back in revulsion when other people who don’t deserve it are butchered. The tension between the two forms of violence may be the key to the movie’s controversy, but it also makes Django Unchained the season’s most vital filmmaking, bringing all of cinema’s manipulative possibilities to bear on a cracking good tale.

Skyfall

If nothing else, Skyfall is the prettiest James Bond film in years. In the Shanghai sequences, master cinematographer Roger Deakins bathes the screen in the soothing blue of neon and the perky yellow of lantern lights. Elsewhere, Deakins brings out lush and painterly browns, reds, and oranges. The movie is certainly a lot easier to look at than its drab predecessor, Quantum of Solace, and considerably easier to sit through, too. Skyfall isn’t quite a throwback to the absurd thrills of the 007 films of old, but it does inject some fun back into the franchise. What you need in this series, it turns out, is a diabolical mastermind with apparently limitless resources. Bond needs to stop him. The rest almost takes care of itself.

The mastermind here is Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a former MI6 agent who wants revenge on MI6 leader M (Judi Dench). Silva warms up by stealing a list of agents in deep cover and threatening to out them. Bond, in the formidable form of Daniel Craig, swings into action — though painfully, since he almost died (and for months is officially presumed dead) and spends half the movie wincing over a bum shoulder. This is Craig’s third 007 outing, and probably his best; he seems more comfortable in Bond’s skin here, and he gets to play a productive mix of emotions. Since this year marks the series’ 50th anniversary, it looks back a lot (much is made of “the old ways” being better than “the new ways,” and Bond’s very relevance is questioned by the government), and so does Bond.

For its 50th birthday, the franchise has been gifted with its first-ever Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road). Though not an action director, Mendes at least lets you see what’s going on, unlike Quantum of Solace non-action-director Marc Forster. The movie has breathing room, too; as far as I can determine, Skyfall has the second-longest 007 running time (Casino Royale has it beat by a minute), yet the pace is smooth and assured, mainly because the plot doesn’t get bogged down in pointless twists. Getting away from his usual theme of masculine disillusion seems to have done Mendes a world of good (though the betrayed Silva character allows him to sneak it in a side door). We can feel Mendes enjoying the far-flung locations, the set-ups and grandeur that only 007 money can buy. For the first time, I got the sense that a name director had attached himself to the franchise out of love for Bond, not for an easy paycheck.

This is all to say that I, generally indifferent to Bond films, had a decent time at this one. Bardem brings back something we haven’t seen in the series in far too long, an interestingly depraved villain who seems to love his work. I don’t know whether Silva’s flirtatious advances towards Bond indicate anything other than simply tweaking his macho and legendarily hetero adversary, but it’s amusing to watch. Bond himself gets two bedmates here, one of whom has no dialogue and one of whom does, but may as well not have any — all she does is vamp, talk about how much Silva scares her, and fail to smoke a cigarette convincingly. Aside from M and a new field agent (Naomie Harris) who assists Bond, the 007 franchise remains a boys’ club, and a white boys’ club, at that. Is there any reason the next 007 can’t be a black man — or woman?

Well, you go to war with the Bond you have. In a way, Skyfall returns Bond to his roots — the title refers to the estate where Bond grew up and where the climax unfolds, and though Bond is unsentimental about the place, the movie brings in Albert Finney as the estate’s gamekeeper, a role originally intended for Sean Connery. I wish the filmmakers had enticed Connery out of retirement, as Skyfall would be a far superior swan song to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but Finney’s presence feels right here anyway — it seems like he always should’ve been part of this series in some capacity. He might’ve made a wittier Q than Ben Whishaw, who doesn’t get to do much with what he’s given here, but any Finney is better than none. And for those who feel that any Bond is better than none — i.e., those who convinced themselves that Quantum of Solace was any good just because it was there — Skyfall should be a pleasant surprise.

The Man with the Iron Fists

Am I the only one who remembers Kung Faux? It used to run on IFC, though I’ve no idea if the show is still in production. Anyway, they’d take old martial-arts flicks and dub them with wise-ass dialogue, kind of a hip-hop version of What’s Up, Tiger Lily? It wasn’t the first time I was aware of the large African-American fandom devoted to chop-socky movies, but it sure was the funniest. RZA, the hip-hop legend who leads the Wu-Tang Clan, is a serious student of martial-arts epics, particularly the Shaw Brothers productions, the same films that kept Quentin Tarantino company on so many afternoons. Now RZA has co-written and directed (and Tarantino “presents”) The Man with the Iron Fists, an homage to thousands of hours of poorly-dubbed Asian action. He gets some blaxploitation in there, too — Pam Grier is even in it, briefly. This is almost the missing third chapter of Grindhouse, only without the fake splices.

Probably my recounting the plot would make us both stupider. It has to do with the Lion Clan and some bad Lions who kill their leader, and the good Lion who wants revenge, and some gold the bad Lions want, and there’s a brothel called the Pink Blossom run by Lucy Liu, and a beefy dude who can turn his flesh into brass, and a British soldier named Jack Knife (Russell Crowe) who ambles into the middle of all this and avails himself of whatever the Pink Blossom has to offer. There’s also a blacksmith (RZA himself), a freed slave (the movie is set in the 19th century) who found himself in this village and makes weapons for bad guys so he can make enough money to get his girlfriend (Jamie Chung) off the Pink Blossom’s payroll.

We don’t go to these things for the acting, but some of the performers — especially Rick Yune as the vengeful Lion — deliver their lines in an inert manner that seems to pay tribute to the terrible dubbing of old martial-arts films. Others fare better, like Byron Mann as the wicked Silver Lion, who looks and sometimes acts like Dave Chappelle playing Prince. Crowe and Liu have fun, and RZA salts the supporting cast with venerable old-timers like Gordon Liu (no relation) and Chen Kuan-tai. I also enjoyed “the Geminis,” who escort the gold and who have joining swords that form the yin-yang symbol. The movie is undeniably colorful and action-packed, and gorier than a slaughterhouse floor. But something’s missing.

I don’t doubt RZA’s commitment to the genre, and he acquits himself smoothly enough as director — we always get a good look at what’s happening in the fight scenes, which is always a plus. But Man with the Iron Fists leaves me feeling the same way Grindhouse did, and Hot Fuzz too. I know that RZA wanted to do his martial-arts film, and he’s done it, and now he should move on; people with the talent to pay tribute to other people’s movies should really focus on making original movies. What’s missing, I think, is passion — not passion for old movies, which this film and Grindhouse have in abundance, but passion in general. For all its bloodletting and crazy action, the movie never really cuts loose. RZA never risks the excesses that sometimes made old chop-socky funny, and that Kung Faux lampooned so effectively. It feels like the work of a very serious student, not a master.

Still, I’m curious what else RZA might have in his quiver. He has a good feel for narratives of injustice, to the point where he almost masochistically gives his own character three movies’ worth of heartache before he finally gets to become the hero of the title. The film is dynamically scored, of course (by RZA and Howard Drossin). In the tiny subgenre of debuts by musicians-turned-directors, The Man with the Iron Fists ranks with Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses — which was, maybe not coincidentally, another act of worship towards grindhouse cinema. If RZA has a Devil’s Rejects in him as his second film, and if he can avoid remaking a classic, he stands a good chance of being a filmmaker to watch.

Cloud Atlas

If the massive, vaultingly ambitious Cloud Atlas could be whittled down to one old-Hollywood concern, it might be this: At the end of the picture, do the guy and the girl get together? This is a tricky proposition in this case, because there are six guys and six girls, in six different times and places, all of whom, we are led to surmise, are the same guy and girl in different stages, and sometimes they don’t even meet each other for so much as a how-do-you-do. Cloud Atlas, based on a widely cherished cult novel by David Mitchell, spans centuries and the globe without breaking its stride, intercutting between each of its sextet of tales and arriving, finally, at its big takeaway: Love is good. Freedom is good. Truth is good. The opposites of those things are bad, and the pursuits of those things are the only constant in an ever-changing, ever-hostile world.

Well. Yes. It would take a preternaturally grumpy viewer to object too strongly to this life-medicine, though, because it’s administered so skillfully and passionately, with a complete disregard for the cynics in the balcony. I think the tipping point in Cloud Atlas determining whether you will love it or hoot at it is a top-hatted imaginary demon with greenish skin, exhorting a character to do vile things in the name of self-preservation. I grew to look forward to that fellow, and I sighed a little and became restless when the movie flicked over to the futuristic “Neo-Seoul” segments, which feel the most like a dystopian fantasia by the Wachowski siblings (of The Matrix). Sure enough, they directed those segments, as well as another futuristic story and one set in the 19th century, while Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) handled the ’30s, the ’70s, and 2012. Which shows, I guess, that Andy and Lana Wachowski are uncomfortable with present day, present reality, and Tykwer can work quite well without spaceships and laser blasts.

Taken all in one two-hour-and-52-minute lump, Cloud Atlas is never boring; I checked the time at one point, saw that we had about an hour to go, and settled back, relaxed and happy to get more. As pure cinema — a term I overuse, but can’t avoid when discussing this thing — the movie is a vast banquet table stretching to the vanishing point, though we’re never allowed to linger over any one tasty dish before it’s removed and replaced with an entirely dissimilar platter. Mitchell’s novel was structured symmetrically, or palindromically (it’s a word now), the first story leading into and appearing in the next, and so on, and then the narrative doubled back on itself. The movie shuffles the deck — the effect is simultaneity, not continuity. Each reality the film shows us — a notary on a ship, a rent boy working as an amanuensis to a composer, a journalist uncovering shenanigans at a nuclear power plant, a publisher trapped in a nursing home, a clone seeking freedom in futuristic Korea, a post-apocalyptic tribesman in Hawaii — unfolds, for us, at the same “movie time,” in apparently different dimensions.

The fun part, despite clucking from the politically correct, is watching the same actors — Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant — appearing as different characters of sometimes different races. Hanks gets to be heroic (or at least morally conflicted) in some segments and diabolical in others; my favorite of his incarnations was “Dermot Hoggins,” a pugnacious Irish writer who chucks his least favorite literary critic off a roof. Hanks and Halle Berry appear to be destined for love — the “guy and the girl” who get together at the end of the picture — though in a couple of the stories they make no more than a nodding acquaintance, perhaps because in those realities Hanks isn’t worthy of love yet. Karma seems to be one of the many ideas bubbling to the surface here. In his six identities, Hanks starts out rotten, becomes merely sleazy, then conflicted, then violent, then an inadvertent motivator of freedom fighters, and then, after many visitations from Hugo Weaving as the aforementioned top-hat demon, finally a hero deserving of Halle Berry’s hand.

Again, most of this is shuffled together so smoothly that it never confuses and nearly always engages. As photographed by Frank Griebe and John Toll, it’s a gift for the eyes, and though Cloud Atlas is perhaps not the intellectual/emotional one-two punch it seems to want to be, it’s nonetheless made for endless replaying on Blu-ray and at midnight screenings (the few still extant). In isolated bits it feels major; other bits force us to agree to go along with them (the makeup department kept very busy here, and sometimes it’s like playing spot-the-actor in something like The List of Adrian Messenger). The cast and the filmmakers are committed at the highest level, and good old Hugo Weaving gets to chew scenery as a variety of evildoers, including a forbidding nurse (yes, a female nurse). Given that this is the first major film co-directed by a transgendered woman (Lana Wachowski), it ends its gay love story less cheerily than some will like, while others will shrug and blame it on the repressive time period. The Magical Negro trope pops up in a couple of the segments, too, which may, for all I know, reflect as much on the book as on the filmmakers. Cloud Atlas is too earnest and overarching to be perfect in any way — the literal-minded will gather dozens of flaws to cackle over. But in such a timid time for entertainment in general and movies in particular, I have to respect the beauty of the attempt. It isn’t a masterpiece but it sure has masterful pieces.

Resident Evil: Retribution

It’s a good thing Resident Evil: Retribution recaps the previous four movies at the beginning, because I didn’t remember a goddamn thing about any of them. And a couple years from now, when Resident Evil: Tintinnabulation (or whatever they end up calling it) comes out, I won’t remember a goddamn thing about this one. Not that it matters much; as long as they’re blathering and exploding directly in front of your face, these movies are cheesy fun, if you allow them to be what they are, which is to say, stylized action-apocalypse nonsense with a formidable heroine. With this film, Milla Jovovich beats Sigourney Weaver’s record by one and Kate Beckinsale’s by two — she now boasts the longest-running major franchise anchored by a woman. Scattered golf claps for this, I guess.

Jovovich is her usual surly self as Alice, who must escape from an underwater base used for simulations. She also gets to be maternally protective towards a deaf little girl (Aryana Engineer) who may be a clone of Alice’s daughter in an alternate reality. At one point, the little girl is captured by an enormous creature that deposits her in an egg-like pod. I’d like to give writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s paying homage to Aliens instead of outright ripping it off, though the distinction is so often subtle.

In any event, Alice and the little girl and the rescue team that’s come to help them must get the fuck out of Dodge in two hours, before explosives go off. A lot of creatures, zombies, and agents working for the evil Umbrella Corporation get in their way. The agents include Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory, awful as ever), who’s being controlled by Umbrella’s “Red Queen” computer, and Rain (Michelle Rodriguez), who’s been cloned into two different characters, a merciless assassin and a kinder, gentler woman who seems to know Alice from the alternate reality where she had a daughter. The movie also throws in two characters familiar from the videogames, Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) and Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb). All of these complications seem pointless, because these movies are just delivery systems for action set pieces, some of which are slickly entertaining.

At the climax, the superpowered Rain (who’s injected herself with some sort of parasite) takes on two large men hand to hand, breaking their bones while we get to see it in X-ray-vision, and Alice faces off against Jill. The fighting isn’t bad. It never is, in these movies. And as I’ve said before, there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes than watching Milla Jovovich punch and kick and shoot and spin upside down and generally laugh at the laws of physics, though she doesn’t laugh much in these films. It’s a funny thing about Jovovich as Alice: she gives the character just enough personality, but not enough to break the somber apocalyptic mood; she knows her function is to kick ass and look cool doing it, but isn’t afraid to look dorky taking heavy hits in slow motion. Audiences seem to like her, or at least accept her, as an action heroine in a way they won’t accept almost any other woman. At the same time, Alice is seldom if ever sexualized — she gives off more of a look-but-don’t-touch vibe. I could’ve done without the maternal stuff, which was old even when James Cameron did it 26 years ago, but Jovovich is possibly the affectless action heroine we deserve.

The Bourne Legacy

Though it’s not a terribly memorable or distinguished film, I’m rooting for The Bourne Legacy to do well for one reason: Jeremy Renner. In movies since 1995, Renner first got on my radar with 2002’s Dahmer, in which he turned in a strangely affecting performance as the Milwaukee Cannibal. It took him a few more years, but Renner finally grabbed another lead — and an Oscar nomination — with 2009’s The Hurt Locker. After a couple of support gigs in blockbusters (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and The Avengers), is Renner ready for his close-up? I certainly hope so. Renner has a quiet alertness, a sense of serenity, and a general air of mystery; he gets us to lean forward a bit to access him. He’s physically convincing in action scenes, emotionally persuasive elsewhere. Unless America is really that stuck on Matt Damon in the Bourne franchise, I see no reason that Renner’s work here shouldn’t make him a star.

The movie he’s in needs him badly but just barely deserves him. Directed by Tony Gilroy, who had a hand in the other Bourne screenplays, The Bourne Legacy follows Renner as another super-agent, Aaron Cross, who is marked for death along with several other agents when Jason Bourne (in The Bourne Ultimatum) blows the whistle on the CIA. Cross goes on the run, scooping up scientist Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), who narrowly escaped assassination herself. Cross takes green and blue “chems” to keep his physical and mental abilities at peak efficiency; he’s almost out of chems, and he thinks Dr. Shearing can get him more.

The first half hour or so is intriguing, with Cross hiking and climbing in Alaska and not speaking until well into the movie. After a while, though, The Bourne Legacy turns into an extended chase sequence; Cross and Dr. Shearing make a beeline for Manila, where the chems are, while various CIA goons, headed by an increasingly frantic Edward Norton, try to track them down. I don’t know that I buy Norton as a retired Air Force general turned CIA black-op supervisor — he just seems too young — but he brings clarity and urgency to his role, never letting us catch him playing evil. He’s a guy trying to keep a lid on a boiling-over pot.

The action is comfortably small-scaled and tastefully staged, though the climactic motorcycle chase drones on for so long it becomes an irritant — past a certain point I just wanted Cross’s stoic pursuer to drive off a cliff, or suddenly convert to pacifism and give up, or anything that would make it stop. Gilroy, who also directed Michael Clayton and Duplicity, is better with mood and performance than with action; as if to compensate for not having a big special-effects moment, he lets the set pieces overstay their welcome. The style is a lot calmer than that of Paul Greengrass, who directed the two previous Bourne films with a jittery camera that evoked immediacy but also provoked headaches. Gilroy’s action has more solidity — it’s better centered — but it lumbers a bit.

None of this can be blamed on Renner, or Weisz either — she’s quite convincing in her post-traumatic scenes following the first of many attempts on Dr. Shearing’s life. The Bourne Legacy has an interesting if underused supporting cast, including Scott Glenn, Stacy Keach, Zeljko Ivanek, and various leftovers from previous films, like David Strathairn, Joan Allen, and Albert Finney (all of whom may only be represented by recycled footage — I’m not sure, since I haven’t watched any of the other films again since they first came out). A lot of acting firepower is in service of a side story, the story of what was happening during Bourne Ultimatum, which led me to think: Did Jason Bourne know he was dooming various other operatives when he outed Operation Blackbriar and the Treadstone Project? If so, did he care? I can imagine a fifth film in which a vengeful Aaron Cross goes looking for the guy who consigned him to a life on the run.

Total Recall (2012)

The most entertaining moment in Total Recall, the latest needless remake, is the screen logo of the film’s production company, Original Film. Ah, irony. We went down this am-I-really-me rabbit hole 22 years ago, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a futuristic construction worker who doesn’t remember his past as a secret agent. Crudely but vigorously directed by Paul Verhoeven, the movie had its goofball charms, including cartoonishly fun effects by Rob Bottin and a literally eye-popping trip to Mars. The new Total Recall doesn’t go to Mars, and there’s no cartoonish fun (aside from an obligatory rehash of the prior film’s three-breasted prostitute). It’s a grim actioner, full of deep-bass noise and flashing lights and gunfire and bloodless PG-13 violence.

Few would argue that Colin Farrell is not a better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger. But as Douglas Quaid, a bored worker who visits the memory-implant outfit Rekall to take a mental espionage vacation and finds himself embroiled in the real thing, Farrell doesn’t get to do anything he does best, which is to be quick and profane and sly and sexual. I don’t think he laughs once in the movie or even smiles much (except ruefully at the featureless drudge that is Quaid’s life); it’s a real waste of a vibrant performer. There’s no time for levity here anyway, hardly even time to breathe before the movie lumbers into its next endless and expensive action set-piece. There is a nice bit when Quaid, who earlier commented idly that he wished he’d learned to play piano, sits down at the ivories at his secret-agent apartment and starts tickling them expertly. It just leads to yet another info-dump (this is who you are and this is what you must do), but it’s a pleasant respite while it lasts.

Vaguely following the 1990 film’s blueprint, Total Recall tries to keep us guessing whether Quaid, in his past life, was an agent working for the repressive government or an agent who threw in with the resistance. Either way doesn’t seem like much of a party: if Quaid was a government man, he was working for Bryan Cranston (a long way from Breaking Bad, in his “I’d better do as many crappy movies as I can while the iron’s still hot” mode, last seen in Rock of Ages); if he was a rebel, he was reporting to Bill Nighy, doing his usual dour turn in his third film for director Len Wiseman (after two Underworld movies). I find, with some surprise, that I have somehow seen all four of Wiseman’s films (including Live Free or Die Hard), and I wonder if four films over a nine-year career is enough evidence to declare a director essentially worthless. Wiseman makes mildly pretty films, full of blues and grays and lens flares, but they’re the definition of bland. Certainly they never risk camp or bad taste, as Verhoeven triumphantly did.

As in the original, Quaid escapes from the government agent he thought was his wife (Kate Beckinsale) and joins up with a resistance fighter (Jessica Biel) he has tucked away in his subconscious. I had heard encouraging things about a take-no-prisoners fight between Beckinsale and Biel, but it takes place in an elevator and Wiseman, who’s hopeless when slow motion or big special effects aren’t involved, loses track of the action. The elevators themselves are interesting, whooshing vertically and horizontally, but they’re part of a massive yet impersonal production design whose best elements are cribbed shamelessly from Blade Runner. There’s even a shot where Quaid leans against his balcony and looks out on his ruined city, just like a similar shot with Harrison Ford in the 1982 classic, except this time the camera does a 180-degree spin, which wasn’t possible in 1982. The point seems not to be Quaid’s ruminations on his surroundings but rather “Look what we can do with computer effects now!”

Both versions of Total Recall are based loosely on a story by the late sci-fi mystic Philip K. Dick (as was Blade Runner). The man cooked up mind-twisting ideas that seem unfilmable without a lot of visual garlic sprinkled on. Every few years someone tries to put Philip Dick on the screen, but the paranoid questions at the heart of his work get smothered by state-of-the-art technology; even A Scanner Darkly was literally coated by rotoscope animation. At least the first Total Recall used its premise for absurdist jollies; it was a loopy chunk of Saturday-night escapism, and it looks better than it did in 1990, compared to the passionless, glum-faced adventures we get now. The new Total Recall seems fanatically dedicated to the chase scene, the shootout, the big bang, and forgets entirely about the who-am-I query at its core. Verhoeven sealed his movie with a certain ambiguity — was the whole movie just Schwarzenegger experiencing a false memory from Rekall? — but there’s no ambiguity here. I never thought I’d say that a Schwarzenegger flick was more provocative and subversive than a film made 22 years later, but here we are.