Would You Rather

Ah, it’s always good to see Jeffrey Combs, especially in a film of some quality. The busy actor, best known for his iconic work as Dr. Herbert West in three Re-Animator movies, is diabolically front and center in the indie thriller Would You Rather. Combs plays Shepard Lambrick, a decadent moneybags who invites financially strapped folks to a dinner party and then obliges them to join in a competition. The winner gets his or her money problems sorted out. The losers … well, when candidate Iris (Brittany Snow) asks Lambrick what happens if you don’t win, his reply is simply “You don’t win.” Of course, it’s a tad more complicated than that.

The game and the movie’s title take off from the popular children’s thought experiment, wherein the choice is usually “Would you rather do this unpleasant (or gross) thing, or that unpleasant (or gross) thing?” Here, though, the players at the elegant dinner table are surrounded by bulky armed guards (in tuxedos, though; this is a classy environment, after all), and “elimination” from the game means elimination from breathing. Iris is there because she desperately needs money for her brother’s bone-marrow transplant; others in the game have similar hard-luck stories, including a recovering alcoholic (John Heard), an Iraq war vet (Charlie Hofheimer), and a gambler (Robb Wells).

Early on, Lambrick offers the alcoholic, who’s been dry for sixteen hard years, $50,000 if he finishes a snifter of brandy. Lambrick also waves $10,000 at vegetarian Iris and coaxes her to eat steak. He’s just warming up; the real plates on the menu include electrocution, stabbing, whipping, drowning, and self-mutilation. To his credit, director David Guy Levy doesn’t rub our faces in gore — most of the harsh stuff goes down off-camera. This isn’t a blood-soaked charnel-house mind-game like the Saw flicks; it leans more towards psychological violence. Most of it unfolds around the dinner table, in the fine tradition of “bottle episodes” on TV or low-budget filmmaking.

Would You Rather is a minor compelling entry in the subgenre of puppetmaster thought-experiment thrillers (another recent one was Compliance, based on a true story), and the actors have all been coached to keep their voices down; there’s little irritating hysteria, just ordinary people trying to stay in the game. Except for Iris, we don’t learn much about why the contestants have wound up in desperate straits, though there are teasing hints here and there. We root for Iris by default because we know what’s at stake for her, and Snow does a fair job of not squandering our inherent sympathy for Iris; she makes Iris a decent person, not insufferably so.

But if you’ve read this to the end it’s because I didn’t bury the lede: Jeffrey Combs is pretty much the reason to see this (or just about any) film. Combs knows how to be overtly creepy, but he’s done that in so many roles he no longer needs to make a big show of it. His Shepard Lambrick is quietly reasonable within the insane context Lambrick has created. Lambrick has more money than he knows what to do with, and he enjoys spending it by putting people to the test. Combs brings out Lambrick’s one-percenter vibe by making it seem that his little game is simply undiluted capitalism: If you’re better than anyone else at doing terrible things, you get the grand prize. Combs presides over this financial morality play with spirit and wit, a dry sense of self-amusement. He deserves to be far better known and appreciated outside of horror-fan circles.

Looper

A word to the wise: Don’t think too much about the time-travel element of Looper. For that matter, don’t think too much about the plot, which kind of amounts to the same thing. Looper’s being sold as a slam-bang sci-fi actioner, but that’s not the story that writer-director Rian Johnson is interested in. It’s a bit like 12 Monkeys stood on its head: In both, Bruce Willis travels back in time to stop something bad from happening. But 12 Monkeys wasn’t only about how the past affects the future and how the future can change the past, and neither is Looper. It’s more of a melancholy drama about people having touching faith in the notion that changing one small thing can change everything for the better, even if it means killing innocent people. The movie is morally murky, to put it lightly, and that’s a bit refreshing; we’re made to think about why we want the protagonists to achieve their goals — because they’re at the center of the movie?

There are two protagonists, who are the same person at different stages of his life. Younger Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) kills people for the mob; his victims are sent back in time from thirty years in his future, and he kills them and disposes of their bodies (the body disposal isn’t as easy in the future, where everyone is “tagged”). Assassins like Joe are known as “loopers,” and sometimes the future mob sends a thirty-years-older version of the looper himself, so that he has to kill his future self (“closing the loop”). This is what happens, apparently, when Joe finds himself pointing his blunderbuss at older Joe (Bruce Willis), who escapes and takes off on a mission to make his (and younger Joe’s) life better.

All of the futuristic stuff is window dressing — especially since the “now” scenes, younger Joe’s scenes, are set in 2044, though I’m not sure why. There is another major character, Sara (Emily Blunt), who lives on a farm and looks after a little boy whose continued survival and stable upbringing are important for a lot of reasons. The plotting gets a little “wait a minute.” But the centerpiece of Looper finds younger and older Joe sitting across from each other in younger Joe’s favorite diner, and that scene — quiet, skillfully acted, bringing out Gordon-Levitt’s itchy impatience and Willis’ wounded soulfulness — is really the whole movie, the reason, I think, that Rian Johnson (as well as Gordon-Levitt, reuniting with Johnson after the superb Brick) wanted to make the film.

Neither younger Joe nor older Joe is entirely good or bad; they have heavy shadings of gray. Each is responsible for the deaths of innocents; younger Joe never asks what his victims did to be sent to him for execution, and we never find out. But the movie successfully expands on an intriguing concept introduced earlier in the film, when a hapless looper (Paul Dano) is expected to kill his older self and can’t do it. The difference between the two Joes is something like the difference between Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Eastwood’s Will Munny in Unforgiven. Younger Joe is cold, nihilistic, drugging himself away from awareness of what he does for a living; older Joe has passed through the flames and, improbably, in later life, found love. There’s real weight in older Joe’s passionate defense of the life he’s managed to build; younger Joe’s dismissal of that life seems inhumanly offensive to us.

There’s a lot of other window dressing, or “world-building” if you will, and some of it adds texture and some doesn’t. Jeff Daniels is amusing as Abe, a guy from the future who runs the looper organization. Younger Joe tells Abe about his plan to retire eventually and move to France; “Move to China,” Abe insists, “I’m a guy from the future — trust me, move to China.” Abe is interesting, and an idiotic looper (Noah Segan) who puts too much trust in his long-barreled “gat” affords some comic relief. Other stuff wasn’t terribly clear to me: If, in the future, you can’t hide the body of someone you’ve killed, why can’t you just kill someone and ship the corpse back in time, instead of shipping a living victim and running the risk that he escapes or the looper chokes?¹ But like I said (and like Abe says), don’t dwell too much on the window dressing. Look through the window and into the diner; that’s where the real movie is.

¹According to Rian Johnson, this is because people have trackers implanted in them, and if they die, the authorities immediately know. The movie doesn’t bend over backwards to clarify this, though. 

Premium Rush

Premium Rush moves like New York City — fast and hard, with nary a backward glance. The movie is about Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a NYC bike messenger tasked to deliver an envelope. This envelope contains something very much desired by Detective Monday (Michael Shannon), a corrupt cop who wants to intercept it before it reaches its destination. Wilee is probably named after the luckless cartoon character, but he’s more like the Road Runner, with the cop as the coyote. Most of the city cops in the film, including a bike cop Wilee consistently stymies, are annoyances or obstacles. It’s an eerie coincidence that Premium Rush opened on the same day that New York City police, trying to take down a gunman, ended up wounding nine bystanders. New York’s finest, indeed.

Apart from its unintended ironies, Premium Rush is a fat-free thriller with breathtaking high-speed bike chases — we’re told the footage is unfaked — through busy Manhattan streets. Professional stunt drivers can almost do flashy, bone-crunching car chases in their sleep, but what must really require nerve-racking attention are the many scenes here in which cars are always braking within inches of hitting a bicyclist. There’s a lot of subtle yet thrilling car choreography here, reminding us that sometimes it’s more exciting when you see two or three near-simultaneous accidents narrowly averted.

Wilee is a great bicyclist, eschewing gears and even brakes; he relies on his legs and his instincts, and we see the latter at work at several points when Wilee has to make a split-second decision which way to go, and his imagination plays out various scenarios (if you go this way, you hit someone’s stroller; if you go that way, you’re gonna fly over someone’s hood). It’s as if Wilee’s got a rapid-fire GPS in his head that steers him to safety — in most cases. The director of Premium Rush is David Koepp, who’s primarily a screenwriter but has made a few interesting films, chiefly his directorial debut The Trigger Effect. Here, Koepp just takes us for a ride, no subtext required or desired. It’s a trim piece of work, maybe his best, because it isn’t bogged down and it knows how to sketch characters on the fly. In the minimalist-thriller race, I’ll take this over the pretentious Drive in a New York minute.

It helps that the Road Runner and the coyote are impeccably cast; Joseph Gordon-Levitt is accessible, smart, athletic, everything a young action hero needs to be, while Michael Shannon, born in Kentucky and raised there and in Chicago, almost single-handedly brings a ’70s New York flavor to the movie. (Detective Monday isn’t always eating a sloppy, garlicky sandwich, but spiritually he is.) There’s more New York irritability, desperation and unchecked pride in Shannon’s performance than in the entirety of the Taking of Pelham 123 remake from a few years ago. Shannon usually plays suffering saps in indie films (and is great at it), but here he’s clearly having a great time and shares it with us. The movie doesn’t stop there, surrounding Wilee with a crew of colorful support, including Dania Ramirez as Wilee’s ex-girlfriend and fellow bike messenger and Aasif Mandvi as his dispatcher. Everyone in the film has New York fever, and every damn time you see a cop he always interrupts himself to hassle someone over something small.

Premium Rush might be purer if we never knew what was in the envelope, but we find out it can lead to a little boy’s freedom. On one level that’s kind of a bummer — do it for the kid! — but on another level it adds some warmth and urgency to the chase. And the movie keeps going at a clip; the editors, Jill Savitt (who’s cut most of Koepp’s films) and Derek Ambrosi (making his feature debut), can take a well-earned bow. This is the kind of low-expectation late-summer film that can all too often fall under the radar but delivers more honestly and forcefully than most of its warm-weather predecessors. Watching Wilee and his cohorts bob and weave in and out of bleating traffic while Michael Shannon hilariously chews the scenery (minus one tooth) offers, if not pure cinema, at least pure entertainment.

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.

Savages

Savages, the new drug thriller directed by Oliver Stone, has been getting a bit of a bum rap. This hard-charging controversialist doesn’t always need to poke America’s soft spots; sometimes he just wants to have a good lowdown time, as he did in his freaky U-Turn fifteen years ago. Savages would make a fine double bill with U-Turn, up to the point where many viewers will bail — when Stone delivers a tragic ending, apparently along the lines of Don Winslow’s source novel, and then rescinds it. For me, though, the “happy ending” actually politicizes the movie more than a crime-does-not-pay finale would have. It also says a lot about the Hollywood system in which Stone is expected to work these days. If Universal nudged Stone’s hand here, are they aware they’ve given a happily-ever-after to drug dealers?

Those dealers are almost cartoonishly whitebread: Chon (Taylor Kitsch), a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who picked up some excellent seeds during his tours, and Ben (Aaron Johnson), a do-gooder with a minor in botany. They’re both in love with Ophelia (Blake Lively), or “O,” and the three of them run a highly prosperous weed business out of Laguna Beach and are happy as clams until a Mexican cartel wants in. Ben and Chon try to fake out the cartel and split for Indonesia, but the Mexicans kidnap O, and the plot thickens. The cartel’s scary enforcer is Lado (Benicio del Toro), who likes to strike terror with chainsaws and whips, but the true mastermind is Elena Sanchez (Salma Hayek), who wears her hair in cruel black bangs. Even Lado is afraid of her. You might be, too. Stone has seldom known what to do with the women in his largely masculine films, but he gets a vivid, iconic portrait of corrupt humanity out of Hayek. After this and Frida, isn’t it time to admit that Hayek is one of our great actresses?

The story has many branches, including a dirty DEA agent (John Travolta), a perhaps too sensitive Mexican tasked to watch over O, and mostly faceless war buddies of Chon’s who always seem ready to drop everything and sit around in the desert for him with sniper rifles. Travolta is probably never better here than when Chon has just stabbed him in the hand and he seems less physically wounded than affronted in his soft spot, his dignity. Everyone here, indeed, has a soft spot, as Ben points out in one of his more lucid moments. Travolta’s other soft spot is his wife, expiring of cancer at home; he avails himself of some of Ben and Chon’s weed to make his wife’s chemo more bearable. This leads to Travolta’s other fine moment, when Ben asks how his wife is doing and Travolta says simply, “She’s dying,” and we’re reminded of the vulnerable actor who moved us in Blow Out and Saturday Night Fever.

Savages goes like a speedboat — its two hours and eleven minutes streak by. Stone shows a strong taste for brutality here; this is possibly his most splattery film since Natural Born Killers, and the presence of freshly chainsawed heads, skulls perforated in close-up, and the hard-to-watch fate of a man accused of being a DEA rat speaks volumes about how tolerant the MPAA is of violence these days. There’s also a good deal of sex (though no nudity from Blake Lively, much to her fans’ chagrin, no doubt) and, of course, near-constant drug use. Savages muscles its way into the heart of the hermetic superhero summer, sweating and cursing and bleeding and smoking and fucking. In its way, it’s a throwback to ’70s cinema, where nobody was all good or all bad, before George Lucas’ black-and-white chessboard design mapped itself over American entertainment.

This is by no means Oliver Stone’s best work — neither was U-Turn. But it’s his best work in well over a decade. He has a story here and he sticks to it, jazzing it up visually every so often, though never calling attention to his technique. He seems to be done with the Cuisinart style, as well as the Indian mystics who used to pop up in every Stone movie of the ’90s. If he has a muse this time, it’s Buddhist: Ben is a follower of the Dalai Lama’s teachings (up to a point), and O is referred to as a lotus. The comic tragedy of the movie is that nobody practices non-attachment, when they really should. Stone, a self-described Buddhist himself, makes movies that would horrify a monk but, in their rough fashion, stand as fairly memorable illustrations of the Four Noble Truths. Stone’s movies are full of what Buddhists call hungry ghosts, craving sensation and wealth, trying haplessly to fill a void in themselves. That double ending starts to make sense: it’s Stone saying “This is what could happen. And this is also what could happen. You have a choice.” The ghosts stop feeding and become people.

The Raven

For many years now, Sylvester Stallone has talked about directing a film about Edgar Allan Poe. He wouldn’t star in it — last I heard, Robert Downey Jr. was the favorite — but a lot of onlookers have doubted heavily that the man who directed Stayin’ Alive could do justice to a complex figure like Poe. Well, The Raven has obligingly come along to make anything Stallone could come up with look austere and intellectual. The movie puts our embattled author — lord help his poor soul — at the center of a murder mystery wherein the killings mimic his stories. Even Stallone wouldn’t have had the hubris to have Poe riding a horse while firing a gun into the Baltimore fog, but this film does.

If you’re a Poe fan, you might enjoy such details as a reference to Poe’s ill-fated wife, the princely sum he was paid for his famous poem “The Raven” (nine dollars), and an explanation of why he said “Reynolds” on his deathbed; you might also enjoy seeing Poe’s nemesis Rufus Griswold, the critic who in real life lived to defame Poe after the latter’s death at age 40, unwillingly re-enacting “The Pit and the Pendulum.” But if you’re savvy enough to spot all these things, The Raven won’t be nearly enough to keep you awake. For one thing, serious Poe fans have read any number of Poe-as-detective stories and novels, and William Hjortsberg’s 1995 fiction Nevermore also concerned a murderer patterning his crimes after Poe’s work, though it was Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, not Poe, on the killer’s trail. Now that would’ve made a much cooler film.

The Raven is coarse and stupid, pitched to the jocks in the audience despite all the chat about literature, with anachronistic profanities and turns of phrase, as when someone refers to himself as Poe’s “biggest fan.” The killer is disappointed that the drunk and disorderly Poe (John Cusack) has stopped writing tales of the grotesque and arabesque in favor of poetry and lit-crit, so he has kidnapped Poe’s sweetheart Emily (Alice Eve) and threatens to kill her unless Poe writes new stories about this ongoing case — in effect, becoming the killer’s collaborator. This premise sounds promising, but the execution is dullsville; it sorely needed a gothic sensibility like Tim Burton’s, but what it got was non-entity James McTeigue, who previously distinguished himself with V for Vendetta and Ninja Assassin. McTeigue has no apparent feeling for 19th-century America; a lot of it looks like cheap backlot or green-screen. This movie needs madness and delirium swirling around in it like fog, but all it has is fog.

If you’d told me twenty years ago that someday John Cusack would play Edgar Allan Poe, I’d have advised you to cut back on the nepenthe. But here he is, and he isn’t the problem with The Raven. He plays Poe as an arrogant elitist who knows how much he’s wasting his gifts and his life. He’s constantly broke and near-constantly drunk, though we see that he drinks to kill his pain. Cusack puts across the more objectionable bits of Poe’s personality, but as an actor he can’t help projecting decency and affability, so we perceive a tension between the mask Poe wears publicly and the wounded person underneath. Despite the dumb script he has to enact, Cusack seems to feel honored to play Poe, even in a lukewarm pastiche like this, and he commits himself.

If you like Cusack and Poe, my advice is to rent The Raven someday and tune everything else out. That includes the non-actress Alice Eve, who couldn’t convey gravity if you dropped her off a cliff, and the unimaginative score by Lucas Vidal, and the dull Heath Ledger clone Luke Evans as an inspector on the case, and the way one sequence evokes the terror of “The Masque of the Red Death” only to climax with some dude on horseback with a note. “The inventive or original mind,” wrote Poe in a glowing review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, “as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter.” The Raven displays neither.

The Grey

A certain segment of the audience will want The Grey to be about Liam Neeson punching wolves in the throat for two hours. They’re not wrong — that would be a lovely, absurd film — but the actual movie is more of a bleak tone poem about modern man versus nature. Neeson plays, once again, a man with a very particular set of skills: he’s a sniper who picks off wolves so that they don’t maul the guys on an oil-drilling job in Alaska. Depressed one evening, he sticks the barrel of his rifle in his mouth, then seems to think better of it when he hears a wolf howl. That comes to be a familiar sound, because when Neeson’s plane goes down en route to Anchorage, the wolves are a near-constant presence, circling Neeson and the handful of other crash survivors, waiting.

Visually, The Grey is harsh and drab, aside from a few coruscating shots of a freezing river against a backdrop of white mountains. But even that image squashes the men down to size. They don’t belong here; the wolves do. There’s no human civilization in sight; Neeson wearily advises the other men not to pin their hopes on being rescued — “Unless you want to freeze to death. That will come for you.” Director Joe Carnahan and his cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi emphasize the sharp cold and grinding discomfort of the journey. More often than not, the men are imperiled not by hungry wolves but by their own terrible luck bashing up against the remorseless physics of outdoor survival.

At times, the movie could just as well be acted out on a stage, as the men talk about their lives and their loved ones. This is the soul of The Grey, an existentialist thriller in which Liam Neeson faces down the void of God. He commands God, in less polite language: Never mind faith — earn it. Do something; show yourself. The answer is silence. Thus a Bergmanesque despair creeps around the edges of what’s being marketed as a survival action flick. One of the men becomes weighed down by the meaningless sadness of what awaits him if, by dazzling fortune, he should actually happen to survive and return to what passes for his normal life. The Grey is a hard slog and a bummer. I can’t say I was sorry it was over. But it also has the stark purity of an icicle; it earns my respect if not my love.

The dialogue is a bit overexplicit here and there, and the action (especially a bit where the men cross a divide between a cliff and a tree) feels somewhat makeshift. Ultimately, The Grey shakes out as more of a spiritual drama, the spirit simply being the will — or lack thereof — to live in the face of vast futility. The wolves might as well be bears, or cancer, or faulty car brakes. They’re not the villains; the wild is their home, and the plane crash has delivered them some unexpected dinners. Take the wolves out of the equation and you still have an environment that tests human endurance at every turn. Narratively, The Grey is a little amorphous, with an ambiguous ending (a post-credits bit doesn’t clarify matters). It leaves us with some not entirely happy thoughts about humans and our role in the universe; the silence of the movie’s God echoes like a dark bell.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

The Mission Impossible film series has crossed the fifteen-year mark, and Tom Cruise is pushing fifty, but neither shows much strain in the new entry, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. I’m tempted to say that this movie is what the franchise should have been all along: light-hearted, preposterous, and, most importantly, easy to follow. Here, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is after a man who wants to start a nuclear war between America and Russia. Oh, that old thing again. But the goal is refreshingly clear: stop this guy before he blows up everything. There are no double crosses, no tormented plotting. There’s the bad guy — go get him. I appreciate that.

The movie didn’t thrill me, exactly, but it’s absorbing. Half the film devotes itself to the ludicrously convoluted schemes Ethan and his IMF team — including ass-kicking Paula Patton, returning Simon Pegg, and shadowy Jeremy Renner — hatch in order to gain access to highly secure places. My favorite, used early on in Moscow, is a screen that covers a hallway and projects what a security guard is supposed to be seeing, while Cruise and Pegg hide behind it and move it forward a few feet every minute or so. Not only that, some sort of tracking is used to move the image on the screen so that it looks natural to the security guard wherever he’s standing or sitting. It would have been easier, I suspect, simply to take the guard out with technology no more sophisticated than a blow dart. But it wouldn’t have been as cool.

Coolness, indeed, is the film’s main weapon. This is the live-action directing debut of Brad Bird, an animator best known for his work on The Simpsons and his acclaimed animated features The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Bird approaches Ghost Protocol as a live-action cartoon, yet one with an appealing sense of physics. Ethan Hunt gets bashed around quite a bit, landing in the hospital not once but twice. When he’s prone and exhausted near the end, we believe it. Cruise is in fine shape, but he’s aging out of his pretty-boy looks — the nose is starting to look gnarled and bulbous, approaching Owen Wilson levels. And so when he gets chewed up, while his teammates mostly kick back on the sidelines (although Patton gets a nicely feral fight scene and Renner gets a high-stress mid-air scene that almost parodies Ethan’s dangling in the first film), he becomes more human and likable, somehow. Cruise isn’t quite so cocky here. Ethan throws himself into impossible situations because there’s no other way; he doesn’t just assume he’s going to master the situation.

The movie’s most sung and storied sequence by far places Ethan on the side of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world. Cruise, we are assured, is really up there, though suspended by wires that were later digitally removed. The scene could easily have been faked, but Bird’s camera, moving around Cruise’s body and staring down the face of the monolith, catches images that simply wouldn’t occur to anyone to fake. It’s the centerpiece of the film but doesn’t take up too much time; it’s economical and governed by the story’s needs, like everything else in the movie. As for the rest of it, it’s a smoothly rhythmed piece of work, moving at a pace sufficient to bypass inconvenient questions. Ethan is on the side of the building so he can access the place’s server so that the team can fake a meeting and swap a fake nuclear code for a real one using special contact lenses and a fake hand, when in a more boring film they might’ve just killed the thugs and taken the code. It’s the theater of subterfuge.

Contagion

Before Contagion is anything else, it’s a master class in filmmaking — shooting, editing, making a movie move. On the surface, it’s a disaster film of the sort we’ve seen before — a viral-epidemic thriller — but you could conceivably not care about anything that happens in the movie and still find yourself jazzed by its rhythms, its ambiance of high intelligence. In just over 100 minutes it takes us from the first, mystifying contact with a deadly virus to a satisfying resolution, spanning the better part of a year. And here, the scariest thing isn’t the virus itself, but the widespread reaction to it. People panic; they loot and commit murder. Contagion argues for the importance of cooler heads prevailing, but it acknowledges that cool heads are in short supply in America.

Conspiracy theorists will likely hate Contagion, because it tells us that government agencies have our best interests at heart, and it puts any dissent into the mouth of a rather sleazy blogger (Jude Law) who, it seems, may be stirring up skepticism for his own gain. Let’s allow that government people are as corruptible and flawed as anyone else, that bureaucracies often obstruct, and that complex systems dealing with large populations don’t and can’t have the personal touch we so often demand in times of crisis. By and large, the people in Contagion trying to deal with the outbreak do the best they can, sometimes throwing their own bodies into the breach, their own health on the line. They may be motivated as much because their professional asses are at stake as because they care for their fellow man. It’s a comforting narrative, ultimately, because it reminds us that even those who are protected, whose families are protected, are in human contact with those who are vulnerable. The unstressed irony of the movie is that this same contact is what is killing people.

Contagion was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who studs the movie with stars (Matt Damon as a grieving widower, Kate Winslet as an epidemic investigator, Laurence Fishburne as at doctor at the CDC, Marion Cotillard as a doctor with the World Health Organization) but gives none of them any big moments. The story skips from continent to continent, but Soderbergh always keeps us comfortably oriented. It’s a highly compact and factual movie: no shot calls attention to itself (Soderbergh photographed it himself), the editing (by Stephen Mirrione) moves at a healthy jog, not a frantic sprint. Contagion goes fast but takes its time when the audience needs to understand something. I was so absorbed that I forgot entirely about an entire character and her storyline, although this narrative thread, with Marion Cotillard kidnapped and held in a Hong Kong village until a vaccine is found, feels a bit out of step with the rest of the film.

Aided by a heartbeat-elevating score by Cliff Martinez, Soderbergh keeps the tension up while avoiding any obvious turning of the screws. Contagion is more frightening for being rather matter-of-fact. It pits rationalism against randomness — the scientists trying to figure out the virus, which is mutating. It’s also realistic about how long it would take before order would be restored — people are dying everywhere, society is breaking down, and we’re repeatedly told what the timetable would be on finding a cure, developing it, testing it, getting it approved, mass-manufacturing it: weeks, months. Hurry up and wait, indeed. In the end, Contagion is not quite as credulous about government aid as it first appears: there is still and will always be fraud, corruption, preferential treatment. But there will also always be good people everywhere who step up and do what’s needed despite official regulations. We saw it on and directly after 9/11, and we’ve all seen it personally on a regular basis, people who don’t have to help you and might get in trouble for it but do anyway. For all the crap we deal with and can put each other through, Contagion ends up saying that maybe we’re worth saving after all.

Unknown

He is in Berlin for a biotech summit. He is involved in a car accident, whacks his head badly, and wakes up in a hospital four days later unsure of a lot of things. He knows his name is Martin Harris, he knows he is a doctor, and he knows his wife is around somewhere, because she came to Berlin with him, and now she is probably wondering where he is. He manages to find her. She doesn’t know who he is. There is a man next to her, claiming to be her husband, Martin Harris.

And this is about all I can tell you about the plot of Unknown, a twisty thriller in which Liam Neeson, as Martin Harris — perhaps the real Martin Harris, perhaps not — bulldozes all around Berlin looking for answers. He does not — sadly for those who fondly remember him in Taken — punch everyone in the throat. Martin Harris is not a fighter, or at least he doesn’t think he is. He finds it increasingly hard to grab onto exactly who he is. What he discovers, and how he discovers it, are the movie’s currency. This is a by-the-numbers thriller, in which nothing is what it seems, but nothing is what it seems in pretty much the way you’d expect, if that makes sense. It may make a halfway diverting rental in a few months.

I can tell you the little bits I enjoyed. They may not be worth your $6.50 to experience for yourself, but they were worth something to me. To start with Liam Neeson: he is a sadder actor now than he was in Taken, for obvious reasons. He seems to have new and unfortunate resources to draw upon to play a disoriented man standing in a hospital wondering why he no longer seems to have a wife. Our awareness of Neeson’s extratextual grief lends gravitas, possibly unearned by the script, to the emotional center of Unknown. I liked Neeson sitting quietly on a cheap bed next to Diane Kruger as a taxi driver who he thinks can help him. Neeson, or Martin Harris, is so visibly overwhelmed by confusion and sadness that Kruger’s heart goes out to him, even though it should probably stay put.

Late in the game there is a diamond in the rough of all the convolutions. Two master actors, Bruno Ganz as an ex-Stasi agent Martin Harris has contacted for help and Frank Langella as a scientific colleague of Martin Harris’, stand facing each other in an unpretentious little Berlin walk-up. They talk about cars; they don’t say much. All is said with glances, silent realizations. The two great actors play an ominous duet of regret. This is what I hope to find in thrillers like this: malevolent elegance tuned to perfection. It’s very brief, and soon we are back to car chases and a skulking assassin and a bomb that threatens the lives of thousands.

I don’t imagine myself seeing Unknown again, but I would like to revisit the first ten minutes or so, to see if it squares with what we learn at the end. Part of this experiment would involve monitoring Liam Neeson’s pre-accident performance for any “tells.” As for January Jones as his wife: many critics have taken her to task for her somnambulant work here, but in her defense, it’s hard to say in retrospect how such a role should, or even could, be played. She certainly doesn’t seem like Martin Harris’ wife, or anyone else’s. Maybe January Jones knew that Liam Neeson would be doing most of the heavy lifting: we don’t have to believe in her, we just have to believe that Liam Neeson believes in her. And he sells that. I suppose that’s enough.