Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

We’re over an hour into Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes before we hear a human voice. That’s not to say we hear no voices; the apes here, “many generations” after the events in 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, have become, for them, downright chatty (though they mostly speak haltingly still, with occasional flutters of sign language). The human is Mae (Freya Allan), who is smarter than the average feral human at this stage in the Apes timeline. She throws in with some idealistic chimps in opposition to Proximus Caesar (voice of Kevin Durand), head of a more violent ape clan, who wants to get into a vault that contains lots of technology. Still, the movie privileges ape voices over the few speaking humans’.

I was a major fan of the preceding three Apes films, which, with the help of Andy Serkis as Caesar, shook out as unusually insightful Hollywood blockbusters. They felt as though they mattered and had something to say — they had substance. Kingdom isn’t nearly as sharp or as full of surprising details, but it engaged me anyway. If this franchise is to go on without Caesar, telling stories about his legacy and how it is used and misused isn’t a bad way to go. Our hero here is Noa (voice of Owen Teague), member of an eagle-training clan headed by his father. Proximus and his army invade Noa’s village, kidnapping the able-bodied of his clan so they can work to open the vault. Noa, Mae and an especially bright orangutan, Raka (voice of Peter Macon), ride off to free the eagle clan and otherwise discourage Proximus’ plans.

Caesar and Serkis are missed, but the story here is sturdy enough that we get on board. It has a lot of good will from the previous films going for it, and manages to hold onto some of it. The problem is, I’m not sure how many flavors of story can be told in this universe; how many times can they reiterate the monkey-Spartacus plot? The special effects, as always, are magical — a chimp named Anaya at one point signs “Anaya is scared” and shows the most abject facial expression of misery I’ve ever seen. The work on all the apes is top-flight, enabling them to convey any emotion and all its nuances. When apes from the peaceful eagle clan are reunited with clanmates they thought dead, they respond with unfiltered joy that’s like a shot of oxygen. The apes mostly haven’t learned to be circumspect with their feelings — that’s a human thing (“echoes,” the apes call us) — though the shrewder, and more aggressive, of the primates can dissemble.

Kingdom is more interesting when alluding to details and threads that it just lets go. William H. Macy turns up as a sketchy history teacher who’s been tutoring Proximus, and I wanted to sit in on one of those classes. A short tale about what exactly a human would teach an ape about the time before, when (as acknowledged here) humans dominated and kept apes in chains, would be a good one to tell in an Apes TV episode or comic book. This teacher implores Mae to forget about the good old days and get used to the new way of things, indicating that the humans have developed opportunistic people who’ll try their luck with the apes rather than sleeping under trees. If another trilogy is planned, maybe they’ll get into the concept of human “donkeys” (the term derisively used in War for those apes who worked with the human militia).

This 56-year-old franchise seemed to run out of gas in the ‘70s, and Tim Burton’s attempt in 2001 read more like his riff on the Apes themes than a serious bid to relaunch. But the reboot series starting in 2011 found fresh and intriguing things to explore, and Andy Serkis’ virtuoso complexity as the hero seemed to lift everyone else’s game (it is, I feel, his crowning achievement in mocap acting). If we can’t have his Caesar (though in a franchise that in its second film blew up the earth and then circled back to 1970s America in its third, never say never again) and the franchise can’t just be left alone now, I suppose an Apes going concern is fine. Thoughtful writers can pursue issues in the Apes ‘verse that make comparable franchises look like pabulum, and special effects have sharpened to the degree that the world of the apes can be shaped and demolished in ways that aren’t limited by the physical world. But if they’re just going to retell the story of good and bad apes and humans fighting each other again and again, why bother? 

The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling is an affable presence. He’s hard to dislike, but in recent years he seems to have dialed down any urgency or passion in his acting (except for his big “I’m Just Ken” number in Barbie and on the Oscars). He just wants to keep himself amused, and that’s what he does in The Fall Guy. We don’t necessarily want anything more from him in this role; there’s no need for him to revisit the early drama of The Believer or Half Nelson. This is meant to be a big-budget based-on-TV wedge of cheese that gets the job done and keeps us feeling secure that it’s going to stay steadfastly vanilla and mainstream. It’s the sort of glitzy, unchallenging blockbuster that used to open on Memorial Day in the late ‘80s or early ’90s, and might have made more money then.

Gosling drives this contraption smoothly, but the movie pays a price for his noncommittal vibe. For one thing, it rubs off on Emily Blunt, who plays a cinematographer turned director, Jody Moreno, who’s supposed to be and feel a bit in over her head. As her debut, she’s helming a megabudget sci-fi thing involving cowboys and aliens, she’s working with a highly unreliable star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and she’s still sore over her breakup with Colt Seavers (Gosling), a master stuntman who usually doubles for that star. Emotionally, though, she reads as null, her complaints pulled from a screenwriting checklist. The script pushes Jody and Colt back together, and their rapport is all glib banter and “funny” scenes like the one where she requires him to be set aflame and flung into a rock over and over. Nothing of importance seems to have been lost, or be rekindled, between them.

Colt has been offline for about a year following a stunt mishap wherein he broke his back (one reason it isn’t all that funny when he keeps getting launched into that rock and his back takes the brunt of the hit). A lot of that time in the wilderness, we gather, is down to Colt’s feelings of shame about the injury and inability to face Jody, who was there when it happened. But we don’t feel this any more than we feel Jody’s anger at Colt for his ghosting her for a year. There’s a similar dynamic in Grosse Pointe Blank between John Cusack and Minnie Driver, but hangdog Cusack hooked us into his grief over the relationship and for the younger version of himself capable of simple love, and Driver sure as hell made us feel her rage and her revived feelings for him and her rage about that. Maybe director David Leitch and credited writer Drew Pearce should’ve given that film a look.

The stunts, when they come, are crunchy and elaborate. Leitch is a former stuntman and stunt coordinator himself, and knows the life. But The Fall Guy is no Hooper, much less The Stunt Man. There’s a bit of standard Hollywood japery about tough-talking but sissy movie stars, and Hannah Waddington steals the movie without much effort as a Diet Coke-addicted producer who covers her anxiety with rictus grins meant to be reassuring. That this producer essentially turns into an empty noisemaker in scenes that could be lifted out of her own cheese epics is the sort of depressing meta comedy the film passes off as satire. But there’s a purity to the stunts, realized practically whenever possible, that lifts the movie somewhat. The fight choreography seems more on-point than the many chases, which never quite impress us because they feel like, well, stunts. 

Colt has a cracking, wild-ass moment when he swings from skid to skid on a helicopter in chaotic flight, like a kid swinging from bar to bar on a jungle gym. But otherwise the stunts announce themselves too lazily, sometimes with characters batting the same banter back and forth in mid-air that they do on the ground. If the people onscreen don’t take their situations or love lives or anything else very seriously, why should we? The Fall Guy was never going to be high drama, nor should it be, but even a fizzy action-comedy should have some stakes. What does it mean, really, that the movie Jody has been thirsting to make for years, and the one for which Colt and many other stunt performers risk their lives, looks like a big stupid Comic-Con Hall H hype bomb? Are her dreams being ridiculed, or is the movie saying that so much of her time spent on Hollywood sets has cheapened her dreams? A goofball amusement like The Fall Guy shouldn’t leave us asking ourselves disheartening questions like this.

Civil War

Like a lot of flashpoints for cultural controversy, Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t much to get angry or enthused about. It’s not a bad movie; it just isn’t what a lot of viewers will be wanting and expecting. Civil War is about a second such conflict in America, and some of its sounds and visuals have the spooky-surreal punch of the invasion sequences in John Milius’ Red Dawn. Garland, like Milius, wants the American audience to feel what it’s like to live under a hostile military presence. But he also wants to fashion a bouquet to war correspondents — our heroes are a quartet of combat photographers/writers, and they only get in the thick of things every reel or so. Meanwhile, the narrative takes no sides, which seems meant to placate the red and the blue by presenting a purple story that has already annoyed both sides.

Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura) are seasoned war journos, joined by aging writer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and neophyte shutterbug Jessie (Cailie Spaeny), who looks about 12. The American president (Nick Offerman) has somehow gotten himself a third term and done other dictatorial things. This has resulted (I guess?) in the country splitting up into factions — loyalist states (Florida, Colorado), neutral spaces, and a secessionist movement called the Western Forces based in a comically unlikely détente between Texas and California (Gavin and Greg, together at last!) 

That last detail is your loudest indication that Civil War isn’t meant to be a statement about our current polarized situation (and a surprising amount of reviewers really, really wanted it to be). It extrapolates a reality that could happen here into a story about the truth-tellers, the press who (theoretically, anyway) seek to capture what’s happening and report on it. Garland’s defense of the media against charges of “fake news” and “enemy of the people” is about the closest he gets to condemning a certain former president who, to these eyes, has very little in common with the president Offerman plays (for one thing, Offerman doesn’t have the material — he’s in it so little one could comfortably hold one’s breath throughout his scenes).

Every so often there’s stuff for Lee and Jessie to photograph, and Garland sticks to the stuttery realism of modern war cinema, the clatter and muffled bass of combat, people abruptly felled as though connected to the sky by an invisible thread that’s been snipped. It was done with more panache and feral virtuosity in Children of Men, but Garland’s attempt to honor the chaos of real warfare is noble. The comparison is apt, because despite what many of its overexcited boosters claimed, Children of Men plopped us in medias res in a grim meathook future and then had nothing much to say about it other than how much it would suck. Civil War is the same. Garland pays a price for his noncommittal approach: his world-building suffers to the point of being nonexistent or at least irrelevant.

If Civil War were a better movie it might spawn a franchise, like the odious The Purge, telling a variety of stories set in the dystopia it creates. Garland’s America has me wanting to know more about it than what we’re given piecemeal. What started the war, what politics were involved, how do some towns apparently choose to opt out of the conflict altogether? Meanwhile, Garland’s narrative is old and full of familiar tropes; the protagonists meet their predicted fates at the predicted times, and Jesse Plemons turns up on the road — this is in essence a glorified road-trip movie, with our heroes beating feet to D.C. to secure an interview with the president — to be creepy and militaristically sadistic in the manner of heavies in a hundred B-movies. Which Civil War basically is, though a well-acted one, and precisely calibrated in the combat sequences. But people need to chill about it. It is what it is, not what we want it to be.

Sorcerer

When William Friedkin died on August 7, the press of course referred to him in terms of his hits: “the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist.” Friedkin was also the director of 1977’s Sorcerer, a movie he might have preferred to be remembered by. Of all his films, it was his favorite, “the only film I’ve made,” he said in 2017, “that I can still watch.” It ended up being one of his biggest flops, having gone way over budget at great physical risk to the cast and crew; the making of Sorcerer was often as nerve-wracking and nightmarish as the movie itself is. 

Based on the premise of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear, which also inspired H.G. Clouzot’s 1953 classic of the same name, the film comes close to being a pure-cinema riff on the frustrations of machines and nature and how they are aligned against the will of man. Four men hiding out in a Colombian village are selected for what looks to be a suicide mission: using a couple of broken-down trucks, they must convey old boxes of dynamite, which has leaked highly unstable nitroglycerine liquid, over two hundred and eighteen miles of bumpy, treacherous jungle roads — and the most rickety-looking suspension bridge you’ve ever seen — so that a burning oil well can be blown up, dispersing the fires. The men are Scanlon (Roy Scheider), an American wheelman for thieves, on the run from a mob boss; Kassem (Amidou), a terrorist who targeted an Israeli bank; Victor (Bruno Cremer), a stockbroker who fled jail time for tax fraud; and Nilo (Francisco Rabal), an icy hit-man.

Friedkin and writer Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) introduce these men in pre-plot vignettes to establish what they seek to escape. They are offered a large sum of money by the American oil company to perform this mission. In either film version, I think we’re meant to take the story as a metaphor for how capitalism grinds everyone down, though Friedkin tends to let subtext take care of itself; he gets much more juice out of the central challenges, which pit truck against nature and sometimes against itself. Humans create machines to master nature, but here the machines are jerry-rigged and half-dead, and the jungle is robust, throwing many obstacles in the protagonists’ path. (There are no heroes here.)

The legendary (or if it isn’t, it deserves to be) bridge sequence, in which first one truck and then the other seems to exhale stoically and try its luck over the splintered boards and unlikely ropes of that bridge, can still get us to lean forward in our seats and wince audibly, even though we know that nobody died filming it, and the bridge itself was part of hydraulically assisted movie magic. Friedkin, a master of tension, can make us forget all that. Then there’s the fallen-tree sequence, which inspires a Treasure of Sierra Madre-like gust of sardonic laughter from the hit-man, before the terrorist — who has experience with bombs — figures out a way to clear the path. The physical realism is oppressive, reeking of a sense of futility. The men, feeling every inch of the slow 218-mile drive, strain against the elements to attain freedom, which isn’t guaranteed.

I don’t want to get into a contest between Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear. Both are masterful in their distinct ways, and the Clouzot classic has won (and earned) a spot among the Criterion-anointed canon, while Sorcerer, this surly and downbeat thing that could serve as a comment on Vietnam, got chased out of theaters in 1977 by the post-Vietnam bag of candy nobody knew they’d been waiting for, Star Wars. The writing was scrawled in blood on the wall: Friedkin’s taste for antiheroes or flawed heroes, which had stood him in good stead in his previous two hits, was now as much a thing of the past as Clouzot. Disagreeable main characters eventually found a home on HBO and elsewhere on the dial; they were, by and large, no longer welcome in theaters, though Friedkin kept trying. But he could never quite get behind the heroic code or perfect people doing perfect things. Right up to the end he asked, with his usual impatient tenor, “What the fuck is wrong with us? Why do we do this shit?” and to try to answer the former, he made movies exploring the latter. Sorcerer was maybe the clearest example of his mission, of his question. Give it a shot. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

You can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe had it, but you can make a new one. The revved-up, perfectly acceptable Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny seems to mistrust nostalgia while trading heavily on it. Characters keep wanting to turn back the clock, and the movie figuratively and digitally turns it back, giving us a 1944-era Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) on one of his prologue adventures. The lengthy preamble this time has Indy and associate Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) trying to keep Archimedes’ dial, which is thought to have time-travel capabilities, out of the hands of the Nazis, represented by goose-stepping physicist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen).

It’s something of an Indiana Jones tradition for Indy to become embroiled in the hunt for an artifact that a father figure is or was obsessed with. But Indy is too old to have any father figures left (if fan consensus is to be believed, he was born in 1899; the main narrative of Dial of Destiny unfolds in 1969, making him 70), so the plot introduces Basil’s daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who is also Indy’s goddaughter, and who takes up her father’s absorption in the Dial. Helena is a bit of a mercenary, threatening to become what Indy’s long-ago nemesis Belloq was, or what Indy himself could have become. The movie very lightly tweaks Indy’s shadowy rep as a “grave robber” whose refrain “It belongs in a museum” carries the silent subtext “preferably one that pays well for it.” 

Dial of Destiny gives Indy a certain sad gravitas, and Ford seems grateful for it, willing to take his legacy characters — Han Solo, Rick Deckard, and now Indy — down a road of loss and pain. That doesn’t mean Ford’s performance is a downer; his Indy retains his mordant wit, particularly when he has the cool cucumber Mikkelsen or the vibrant, cheerfully corrupt Waller-Bridge to bounce his grumpiness off of. As the younger Indy his voice isn’t quite where it needs to be, but visually, with the help of AI, he suggests the Indy we remember. Some of us wouldn’t mind revisiting the years of Ford’s and Indy’s prime, and the movie satisfies that desire at the beginning but spends the rest of its time thinking about how it might not be such a good idea if you could do it. Voller, for example, wants to go back thirty years so he can make sure Nazi Germany wins this time. 

Steven Spielberg isn’t in the driver’s seat this time; the wheel has been handed to James Mangold, who contributes a sharp and energetic entry that still feels unsettlingly like a really good fan film. There’s not much here that’s overtly disappointing; it just never hits the giddy heights of the Spielberg films — yes, even the unfairly slimed Crystal Skull. Say what you will about the infamous nuke-the-fridge scene, but it was out there, and Spielberg went for it. Mangold doesn’t quite dare anything that the fans will hate, though the plot (which he cowrote) lands in an unusual place that very explicitly reiterates the movie’s theme about not getting stuck in the past. Mangold can be a terrific director, and his handling of the many chase scenes is crisp and smooth. But, again, nothing all that funny, the way Spielberg’s great action has little curlicues of slapstick. 

Still, I can think of many worse directors for the job, so why berate Mangold for being himself? Dial of Destiny does accomplish something for the general franchise beyond itself — it may make Crystal Skull more palatable to its detractors, since it no longer bears the weight of being the last Indy film. Dial carries that weight rather well, because the story, as opposed to the forward-propelled plot, acknowledges the appeal as well as the problems of nostalgia. Some may find the post-climactic between-scenes shift from past to present a bit abrupt, but we didn’t need to see how Indy and Marion got back to the States in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s touching, though, how both this film and its predecessor work to satisfy our desire to leave Indy exactly the way we want to leave him and remember him. Dial sticks the landing. Now, please, let there be no more. Indy wants to retire. Let him. 

Top Gun: Maverick

Continuing Oscar catch-up: Nostalgia can exert a powerful magnetic pull. The first Top Gun, from 1986, never won my heart, but Top Gun: Maverick felt like coming home, in a weird way. There’s no reason in the world it should have worked, but it does. Maverick was put together by a bunch of craftspeople — not necessarily artists — who are very good at what they do, and who know what works, damn them. Two and a half cheers, then, for an entertainment that delivers on its promise (and never even thinks to pretend to be more). It tickled the same part of my brain that lights up whenever the radio plays ‘80s songs. 

I don’t know why we care about Maverick (Tom Cruise) and his arc from rule-bucking perpetual captain to teacher and leader of an elite squadron of pilots. But we do. I don’t know why we care about Rooster (Miles Teller), one of those elite flyboys, whose father (Anthony Edwards in the original movie) flew with Maverick and died, and who is sore at Maverick for holding back his career. But we do. I don’t even know why we care about the mission, which involves dropping bombs on some secret uranium plant in some country somewhere — North Korea? Canada? who knows? — and then skedaddling at dangerous speed before the deadly counter-attack. But we do. It’s the architecture of the thing as much as the plot details. It’s built to please — all quadrants. That’s what it does. That’s all it does.

Cruise has been a star now for forty years. Gravitas has gathered around his jowls and the thickening of his nose, but he sounds pretty much the same — the pitch is the same, anyway, though the words don’t come gusting out in an impatient rush any more. This older Maverick thinks a little before he talks. The mantra in the movie is “Don’t think, just do,” which seems at odds with the shrewd businessman Cruise seems to have become. (His own “do, don’t overthink” period was from 1989 to 2004, let’s say.) What Cruise has to sell here, though, is his image as a doer — the crazy cat who does his own stunts, climbs up skyscrapers, jumps out of planes and chats with us on the way down. What he does is old-school movie-star acting, which is fine for Top Gun, and he knows just how much self-deprecating comedy he can allow at Maverick’s expense without damaging his credibility as a leader of soldiers. And he has aged into someone who at least looks like he could instruct and command. That’s not something we could have guessed from the first Top Gun, where his hot-shot callowness was sort of the point.

Of the neo-Blackhawks on Maverick’s team, only Rooster and another guy, the arrogant, toothy Hangman (Glen Powell), really register. The ranks are more diverse — there’s a woman, some pilots of color — but it’s still essentially a triangle of white guys, aping the Maverick-Goose-Iceman dynamic in the first one. Speaking of Iceman, Val Kilmer is back, and his quiet presence gives his scene some substance. Iceman also brings some homely reality to this franchise, a sense of mortal threat that comes not from enemy fire or malfunctioning jets but from one’s own mutinous body. It’s not a narrative beat you’d expect to encounter in most blockbusters of this stripe. But the scene is played so honestly and with such direct access to sorrow and humor that it transcends its surroundings. The dialogue isn’t telling us much — Iceman tells Maverick to go get ‘em, basically — but it’s still a three-minute great drama, supported by a lot of aerial zooming and shooting and whizzing. Whatever it takes. 

Lou

It’s tempting to say that the idea of Allison Janney as an action hero would be tough for any movie to live up to, but Lou tries very hard. Lou (Janney) is a scowling loner who lives off the coast of Seattle with her loyal dawg. (The dog survives; the movie never really puts that in doubt.) She acts as a grouchy landlady to Hannah (Jurnee Smollett) and her little daughter Vee (Ridley Bateman), who live nearby. Problem: Hannah’s ex-husband Philip (Logan Marshall-Green), a psycho who used to be with the Special Forces, kidnaps Vee, spiriting her across the rainy, perilous island towards a symbolic structure, with Lou and Hannah in hot pursuit. 

We know Lou’s no pushover even before she angles into a shack inhabited by two of Philip’s armed associates and dispatches them ruthlessly, one with a broken and sharp soup can. For this scene and at least one other, Allison Janney was trained by martial artist and fight coordinator Daniel Bernhardt, who did likewise for Bob Odenkirk on Nobody. Those who liked Nobody for its transformation of someone not known for action into an ass-kicker will probably want to give Lou a day in court. It is, of course, the sort of story that only speaks in the broad vowels of pulp, but pulp isn’t illegal — why fight it? 

The script (by Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley) ties together a lot of psychological/thematic threads neatly and, I thought, gratifyingly. The reason for Philip’s psychosis, we eventually gather, opens him up for some sympathy. But he’s no less scary for that, and possibly scarier, because the illness we’ve diagnosed in him will not be readily cured, the rage perhaps never appeased. The narrative threads, on the other hand, knot together in ways that strain credulity. By the end, I was wondering if the kindly ol’ island sheriff (ol’ dependable Matt Craven, a “hey it’s that guy,” Canadian division) was somehow connected to the shenanigans as well. Heck, everyone else seems to be. But if you want starkly believable plots, you’d do well to avoid the “thriller” section at the video store.

Yes, I did say “video store,” which is a too-cute way of saying that Lou unfolds in late 1986, when Reagan is on the box denying any such thing as an exchange of weapons for hostages. An episode of Only Murders in the Building this past season posted a weirdly funny riff on the whole Iran-Contra Affair, too. Why this enduringly shameful chunk of recent American history is rearing its clean-cut Oliver North head now is a question I don’t feel qualified to answer. But it engages nicely with the backstories of some of the characters. It also takes the story out of the realm of cell phones, and when our heroes are trying to reach civilization and have to do it via sketchy walkie-talkies, we might sympathize with writers whose movies would be five minutes long if anyone had a working phone. Not that this rainy, windy island would be within service anyway.

Allison Janney is not the new Michelle Yeoh, or even the new Cynthia Rothrock, but the moves she’s added to her toolbox work for her character even in quiet, noncombative moments. When you’ve been trained to execute maneuvers that can kill someone, you carry your body differently. That was evident with Odenkirk, who trained for two years and definitely had the vibe of someone who could end you efficiently and then move on to the next aspiring corpse, and sometimes had it just sitting there. The key to the performance is the moment when Lou, posing as a frail ol’ gal named Martha who just wants to come in out of the rain, ever so slightly overdoes the frail-ol’-gal mannerisms. Janney is a great actor, but Lou, despite her other skills, is not, quite. (Or she may have been once, but living in isolation for so long has rusted those particular gears.) So Janney acts badly in character, and it’s as though Lou had such contempt for her stupid opponents that she doesn’t bother to make her “performance” realistic. These idiots deserved to die, and didn’t deserve Lou at her peak of imposture. Lou is low-nutrition thriller babble, but it’s often fun, and it has Allison Janney, for Pete’s sake.

Samaritan

Once upon a time, two superpowered brothers lived in rainy, poverty-stricken Granite City. Samaritan, the good one, fought for peace and justice. Nemesis, the bad one, was full of hatred — for the normal humans who’d called them freaks, and for his brother. One night, the brothers fought each other, and there was a big kaboom, and everyone thought they were both dead. But a little boy named Sam (Javon Walton) thinks Samaritan might still be alive, in the form of Joe Smith (Sylvester Stallone), a recluse who just so happens to live in the building next door.

Samaritan is a simple-minded superhero flick that offers no solution or reason for the grinding poverty it shows us. Someone on the news is literally cut off before she explains why unemployment and evictions are high. It’s just something that happens in the big city, where a lot of those, y’know, urban types dwell. To cover its ass, Samaritan gives us a blonde, Viking-looking gang leader, Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), who stokes working-class resentment (for his own ends, of course) and wants to follow in Nemesis’ footsteps. Still, a lot of those, y’know, urban types work for Cyrus — including little Sam, at first. But Joe stands tall and points the way that others should go — to redemption or to Hell, their choice.

Stallone keeps his end of the bargain. He’s playing the ancient trope of the still-powerful old-timer drawn back into the fray against his better judgment, but he plays it simply and well. Joe just wants to be left alone in his apartment to tinker with things he finds on his trash-collecting route. Stallone makes us feel Joe’s weariness alongside his growing impulse to do for the city what he does for watches and toasters. One’s focus shifts immediately and gratefully to him whenever he’s around, and he even sells a flashback moment with him de-aged to look like, say, Nighthawks-era Sly. He’s the reason most people will bother with this and stick with it (though the other actors, particularly Dascha Polanco as Sam’s harried mom, aren’t bad).

It’s the nihilistically grungy backdrop, like Hobo with a Shotgun or RoboCop without the satire, that sticks in the craw. Granite City is full of misery, and full of mobs of people easily swayed to chant Nemesis’ name and then Samaritan’s. Such soil is fertile for the seeds of fascism, as is the soil of a lot of superhero power fantasies. I wouldn’t be — don’t want to be — going here if Samaritan were any fun, but largely it isn’t. The action is PG-13 brutal but dumb; half the shots we see bad guys take from Joe look like they’d be fatal. After too many macho things like this, in comics or in movies, I can see why old issues of Wonder Woman are so gratifying to me. My favorite version of Wonder Woman (there are many) is so powerful she can afford to be kind, even to her enemies. I’ve read stories where she says of that month’s baddie, “I know what in this person’s life turned them towards mistakes. I’m going to see that they get help.” 

But that sort of thing probably lies beyond a movie produced by as well as starring Sylvester Stallone, whose presence sometimes makes Samaritan seem like Cobra for teenagers (actually, Cobra was always for teenagers). There are honest, hard-working moms harassed by their landlords, and there are low scum who kill without a thought; there’s no middle ground, even though Joe’s whole arc rests on the possibility of redemption and the war, as Joe says, between good and bad in the same heart. I guess that depth of understanding only applies to white male heroes and the little boys who idolize them. There’s a female character who runs with Cyrus’ gang, having been “rescued” by him from living in a car at age eight. Joe kills her with a bomb. Apparently her crisis wasn’t as valid as Sam’s or Joe’s.

Day Shift

J.J. Perry is a martial artist, fight coordinator, and former stunt person/stunt supervisor. So it doesn’t surprise me that Perry’s first film as a director, Day Shift, is a zesty tribute to all those disciplines. Jamie Foxx’s Bud Jablonski, a vampire hunter posing as a pool cleaner in L.A., strides into one vampire nest after another, loaded for bear, and the vampires don’t take Bud’s invasions lying down. No, they come at him whirling and kicking and chopping, and Bud puts them down with various weapons and techniques, though just barely. Vampirism, it seems, confers lots of violent skills upon the vampire other than just biting, and Day Shift is there to showcase them all.

It’s a fast, furious Saturday-afternoon time-killer, but how is it aside from the mayhem? The script, by Tyler Tice and Shay Hatten, comes up with sly ideas like a vampire hunters’ union, whose codes and rules make it hard for a firecracker like Bud to make a living. So he’s been working on his own, making far less money, until he needs a quick infusion of cash to make sure his ex-wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) and daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax) don’t take off for Florida — he needs to cover the costs of Paige’s tuition and braces. As a plot motor, it’s a bit dusty — we’re to believe Bud has gone all this time keeping his real job a secret from his family — but we go along with it to get to the good parts.

The union stuff gives Bud an unwanted partner — Seth (Dave Franco), a union bean-counter assigned to observe Bud, who’s applying to get back into the union for more money, to make sure he follows all the rules. Bud doesn’t, of course, and the premise that Seth is Bud’s babysitter doesn’t last long. Seth exists solely as a wimpy foil for Bud’s go-for-broke, hammer-headed methods. Foxx and Franco make a mildly amusing team, though I would’ve liked to see more of Snoop Dogg, who has a few scenes and makes them count as Big John, a respected vamp-slayer. For that matter, I was ready for more of Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Heather, Bud’s mysterious neighbor. In some ways, the characters and worldbuilding in Day Shift seem to lay groundwork for further stories, like John Wick (co-writer Hatten worked on the third John Wick and is attached to the next two).

Bud frequently storms enclosed spaces, the better for he and his vampire prey to bounce off the walls. The vehicular stunt work is particularly well staged, composed, and edited. Sometimes when a master of another film vocation — say, special effects or cinematography — ascends to the director’s chair, they focus on their thing and forget most of the other things that go into making a movie. That isn’t the case here. J.J. Perry seems to respect the moth-eaten plot motor of Bud doing battle with monsters for the sake of his little girl, and the scenes that don’t involve stunts don’t seem rushed or half-assed. Day Shift feels like a movie made by a craftsperson who may have gotten tired of watching inept directors disrespect the arts of stuntwork and fight choreography by slicing it into a thousand unviewable pieces in the editing room. You can see what’s going on here, and that’s a relief.  

If Foxx wants a bubble-headed, action-oriented franchise, he’s got one here. As long as they bring all the folks back, especially Snoop, I’ll watch. But is L.A. — hell, the world — really so infested by vampires that an actual union of vampire killers is needed? It’s a funny idea, one that may get fleshed out in sequels, and a vamp bigwig called El Jefe (Dracula?) is mentioned but never seen. Sometimes vampires seem to outnumber humans here. The big bad here is Audrey (Karla Souza), who wants a world where humans worship vamps as gods. But has she really thought it through? If vampires feed on humans all the time, where will their worshipers come from? Or their meals? Zombies chow down on people with no thought for long-term consequences because, well, zombies aren’t big on thinking, but you’d think vampires would be more savvy. 

Prey

The well-loved Predator (1987) pitted Arnold Schwarzenegger and a cadre of tough guys against an ugly alien hunter with superior technology. After several sequels over the years, the franchise notes its 35th anniversary with Prey, an action-thriller set in 1719 among mostly a Comanche tribe as they attempt, more or less feebly, to contend with this merciless E.T. warrior. It takes Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman raised as a healer but yearning to be a hunter, and her loyal dog Sarii to defend the tribe against the Predator as well as some human predators (some French trappers).

Some have called Prey the best Predator film since the original. I may not be the best judge of that — Predator 2 (1990) eludes my memory, I fell asleep on Predators (2010), and I missed The Predator (2018) and the Alien Vs. Predator duology. But I’ll take their word for it. Sharply and succinctly directed by Dan Trachtenberg, from a meat-and-potatoes script by Patrick Aison, Prey establishes its conflict with no fuss, gives us a hero straining against the role 18th-century Comanche culture dictates for her, and doesn’t skimp on the action. It’s brisk old-school entertainment, and what it’s doing on Hulu and not on a big screen near you is beyond me.

Then again, Hulu offers the choice to view the film in a version dubbed in Comanche, which feels right. Not that there’s much chat anyway. The French trappers, mainly scum and Predator fodder, speak in French subtitled in French, so I guess it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. The one exception speaks Comanche to Naru and provides her with firepower other than her bow and her tomahawk. Why do I mention all this? I guess because the film’s setting (it was filmed in chilly Alberta, Canada) and polyglot nature reminded me of some of the better spaghetti westerns, especially those by Sergio Corbucci. 

I hasten to add Prey doesn’t share much besides aesthetics and a certain people-talking-past-each-other vibe with Corbucci. But I’m glad of any current movie that evokes him. I’m also glad to make a better acquaintance with Amber Midthunder, whom I might’ve seen in one TV show or another; here she takes the screen effortlessly and builds rapport with us immediately. Naru makes a fine no-frills heroine, though she’s made a bit too flawless. Other than the hunting training she works on by herself and doesn’t always come naturally to her, she doesn’t have a streak of impatience or something a young, energetic hero would have to unlearn. Of course, in such an action-centered movie this comes with the territory.

Naru takes some hits and losses, but her dog isn’t one of them, which is fine with me as a frequent visitor to the Does the Dog Die? website. Generally, Prey doesn’t want to bum us out too much. It’s a zippy Saturday-matinee creature feature. The apparent randomness of its setting (there is talk of setting further Predator movies in various other eras) allows for some subtext that isn’t stressed too much. What I admire most is that the film prizes Naru’s smarts above all else. Sure, she’s brave, loyal and independent, but she’s also a quick study, and she notices things about the Predator’s techniques that help keep her and others safe. She’s a great hero for this moment — not tough so much as resilient.