Madame Web

Fun-loving people on the internet would like you to believe that Madame Web is so bad it’s good. It’s not. It is so bad it’s depressing. It shows every symptom of a thing that was made but not cared about, dropped onto our desks the way a failing student passes in an exam they didn’t study for, wincing. It contains the most atrocious ADR (post-production dialogue dubbing) I’ve ever seen in a released studio film. To be so bad it’s good, it would need to be fun in some way — campy, weird, wild, a guilty pleasure. Madame Web is a guilty displeasure. The hour and fifty-six minutes we kill watching this can be better spent watching a better movie of the same length (say, Full Metal Jacket), reading, doing one’s taxes…

Madame Web is about a paramedic, Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), who receives semi-psychic powers, which are sometimey and not under her control. The scenes having to do with Cassie’s visions are confusing to say the very least, since they barge into the narrative with no preparation or context; they’re also edited as incoherently as every other action scene is here. The gist of the story is that Cassie, whose dead mom was trying to find a special spider in Peru, must protect three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) who are in danger from the movie’s big bad (Tahar Rahim), who has his own future visions in which he sees the girls, in superhero costumes, killing him. Thus does the movie spoil its own ending about twenty minutes in. 

Enjoy that glimpse of the girls in their Spider-Woman costumes — for that is their destiny, to be Spider-Women, as this film is Spider-Man-adjacent — in that early vision and right at the end, because that’s all you get in this supposed superhero movie. Most of it is a matter of Cassie and the girls running from the big bad, except for when Cassie pointlessly goes to Peru to find out her mom, who died while giving birth to her, was looking for that special spider so she could cure the disease she knew Cassie would be born with. The sequence seems about as useless as the scenes having to do with Ben Parker (Adam Scott), a fellow paramedic, and his pregnant sister Mary (Emma Roberts), who will give birth, the movie hints, to Peter Parker, aka the Spider-Man most of us know.

This movie isn’t really for a viewer who has never seen a Spider-Man film before, but neither is it for those who have seen every Spider-Man film (or even one). The screen is loaded with actors visibly wishing they were anywhere else, most certainly including the dull-affect Dakota Johnson, who narrowly loses the “Calgon, take me away” contest to Zosia Mamet as the big bad’s hacker. (Bored-looking Mamet sits at her monitor watching for the girls and delivering pearls like “I think I got them.”) The saddest/funniest aspect of the whole ordeal, though, is that it seems convinced it’s the first of many adventures with this quartet — the three superpowered girls commanded/protected by Cassie. There will be no such sequels. We will never see these characters again. There will be no great future stories with Madame Web, or Cassie Webb, or Jack Webb for that matter.

So the ending is one of those “The end? Nay — the beginning!” conclusions meant to make us thirst for more, when what we’re craving at that point is simple fresh air, or something stronger. Madame Web was directed by S.J. Clarkson, who also gets official screenwriting blame along with three others, and I suppose we’ve reached the point where women can make superhero movies as empty and unsatisfying as men can. Clarkson has been a prolific TV director, and I hope this film, whose problems are probably most accurately pinned on an insecure studio’s meddling, doesn’t squash her career. Tahar Rahim, too, is a better actor than this movie, which destroys his performance with that poor dubbing, would indicate. Nobody comes out of Madame Web looking good except maybe Kerry Bishé, who, as Cassie’s ill-starred mother, at least gets in and out fast. Everyone else has to pull on hip-waders and slosh through this sewage until the finish. 

Eileen

When a movie makes you sort of sigh and say “At least it’s short,” that movie might be in trouble. Eileen is not my idea of a great time, but I can understand why others might dig it. It’s bleak and grungy, full of wet New England snow turned gray by car exhaust; the movie feels irritable, with anger governing many scenes. It left me in a ghastly mood — I felt poked and prodded by the plot turns that play with deep, dark emotions for no very good reason. Whatever happens in the film seems devoid of meaning and grace. It has a kind of integrity, though, and I can imagine mopey young viewers falling under its spell. 

The main problem with Eileen (based on the debut novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, who wrote the script with husband Luke Goebel) is that it has the tone of film noir without the mitigating pleasures — the cold, cruel brilliance, the cynical patter, the style. The dialogue in this movie tends towards the incoherently emotional. Everyone is weak and doesn’t think things through. The titular Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), 23, still lives with her drunken father (Shea Wigham), a retired cop sinking into the wastes of his own self-loathing. For work, she clerks in a boys’ prison, a grim and punitive place housing rude and terrible inmates, except for one kid whose reason for being there is more than meets the eye.

Eileen soon meets Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), a Harvard grad settling into her new job at Eileen’s prison as a psychologist. Rebecca seems an oasis of sophistication in this unnamed town in Massachusetts (the film was mostly shot in New Jersey). Everyone else is ignorant and brays in overdone accents. Set in the mid-‘60s, Eileen maroons two smart women in a time when Rebecca’s new boss says “She may be easy on the eyes, but I assure you, she’s very smart.” Eileen is something of a deranged fantasist, daydreaming about blowing her own head off or her dad’s. So it’s never quite clear whether Eileen is imagining the sapphic sparks between her and Rebecca, or whether it’s legit, or manipulated by one or the other.

Thomasin McKenzie is saddled with the worst Massachusetts accent since Julianne Moore on 30 Rock, but when she’s allowed to be quiet she scores. She and Anne Hathaway get a hushed, intimate rapport going, whispering fondly to each other. They had my permission to leave the dreary film behind and go find fulfillment in warmer climes, perhaps in a film by Greta Gerwig. God knows there’s nowhere for them to go in this film. A little over an hour in, the plot takes a pivot that struck me as flatly unbelievable, to say nothing of stupid. The movie throws away whatever McKenzie and Hathaway had built together, and we realize we’re watching a collection of self-sabotaging dimwits. Sigh. At least it’s short.

Who knows, Eileen might appeal to glum teenage nihilists. There isn’t much poetry in it, though, visual or verbal. Even when I myself was a glum teenage nihilist we had risk-taking stuff like River’s Edge, which at least was about something other than that life sucks and we’re all trying to escape it. (It also debunked that point of view, while Eileen dines out on it.) Eileen is directed (by Lady Macbeth’s William Oldroyd) as a string of blandly composed scenes heightened by abrupt gory shocks. The movie is unpleasant bordering on unsavory. It draws us closer with vague lesbian vibes and then squanders our attention on plot-centered drama that feels (despite a difficult monologue honorably delivered by Marin Ireland) pulpy and something you’d expect to find in a Lifetime movie. Eventually the film and Eileen have nowhere to go, and that’s exactly where they go.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

It was Cleolinda Jones, that consistently amusing and insightful pop-culture blogger, who pointed out a simple fact: “People in Dracula don’t know they’re in Dracula.” What this means is, not only do the characters not know that someone named Dracula is bad news, they aren’t aware of all the vampire tropes we’ve seen a thousand times, so we have to watch them get wised up, sometimes impatiently. Which brings us to The Last Voyage of the Demeter, where the characters don’t know they’re in one chapter of Dracula. Most of them aren’t even named in the book.

The movie is based on a section of Bram Stoker’s novel dealing with the trip Dracula makes by ship to London. The short passage is creepy and allusive, told in terse semi-sentences by the captain, powered by our imaginations reading between the lines. The film, directed by Norwegian horror journeyman André Øvredal (Trollhunter), turns the story into what Øvredal has described as “Alien on a ship in 1897.” Like a lot of critics, I appreciate what they were going for — a moody old-school monster mash — but the result is aggressively boring. 

The characters are standard-issue placeholders defined by a couple of Screenwriting 101 habits or beliefs, not filled out by personality or action (though David Dastmalchian is commanding as usual as the saturnine first mate). The hero is Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a doctor with experience in astronomy and general ship’s duties. He winds up on the ship after saving the life of the captain’s grandson. There is also a woman, Anna (Aisling Franciosi), who stows away on the ship and drops a lot of infodumps about a creature her people call Dracula. He’s the one, she says, who’s been slinking around the ship, warming up by killing all the animals on board and then picking off crew members one by one every night.

The main problem is that there’s no intrinsic interest in or mystery to any of this, since we know how it ends, although the writers extrapolate as much as they can. It’s a long wait between killings, and the killings are never very impressive or even distinct from each other. Someone is foolishly alone on the ship after dark, and Dracula rushes forth from the shadows, and the blood-draining commences. Dracula is played by Javier Botet, a creature actor in the mold of Doug Jones, and he’s covered in latex that makes him look like a man-sized bat monster. So the movie envisions Dracula solely as an almost-wordless beast who might as well be the xenomorph from Alien. Ultimately he’s just a slasher. We know that Dracula has a human form so as to travel among humans, but we don’t see one here; apparently he just needs to put on a hat and suck in his bat wings and he can pass as a regular human tourist in all that London fog.

All the ideas that might have made The Last Voyage of the Demeter fresh or intriguing or even witty are muscled aside in favor of tediously shot kill scenes, which we might overlook if the entire structure of the thing didn’t point to them as the gory crescendos, and if there were anything else of note going on. I’d say it was a waste of a good premise, but what about this story, as told here, needed to be told? (The best treatment of the events aboard the Demeter remains chapter 7 of Stoker’s novel.) If Dracula is ultimately a slasher here, then this is ultimately a slasher movie despite its trappings and literary pedigree. As such, it is fatally uninteresting.

Renfield

Of the things we might expect from a Dracula movie, particularly one starring Nicolas Cage as the legendary bloodsucker, the top of that list would probably not be a crime comedy. But that’s what Renfield shapes up as. There are a few decent ideas in Renfield, but they’re left to die of starvation while the plot gives us scene after scene in which gangsters have shootouts with cops or are bloodily dispatched by Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), the immortal familiar of Count Dracula. Renfield is an unassuming-looking British dude until he eats bugs, at which point he turns into Super Renfield and the movie turns into super crap.

After about a century of doing Dracula’s dark bidding, Renfield has sort of a mid-unlife crisis; he feels he’s in a codependent relationship with the vampire. So he attends a support group of such people, and he thinks that by feeding some of his fellow sufferers’ toxic S.O.s to Dracula he can do good and do bad at the same time. But one of those toxic boyfriends turns out to be mixed up in crime, and Renfield’s plan to kidnap him is foiled by a hit man from the Lobo crime family. This, not very long into an 87-minute movie less six minutes of end credits, is where the movie goes badly wrong and never recovers. I’m never unhappy to see Awkwafina, and she’s fine here — none of the cast is the problem, really — but she’s playing Cop Trope #7189, the cop’s cop daughter still sore about his murder by the Lobos, with a side order of tension with her FBI sister. All of this is awful and takes valuable time away from Renfield and Dracula.

A whole dark-comic movie could have been made about the relationship between the familiar and his master, but that’s not what Renfield is truly about. Cops and criminals are brought into it to ensure bang-bang and fight scenes and lots and lots of gore. (Between this and Evil Dead Rise, I’m just gonna say the MPAA doesn’t even care about blood any more. Have as much of it as you want in your movie, you’ll still get an R rating and be able to get a wide theatrical release.) But the idea of Renfield helping his codependent fellows by sending their tormentors to Dracula is lost, and Dracula himself barely makes any sense. Cage is game to give a mint-condition camp performance, but the material just gives him Dracula’s resentment of Renfield to work with. That isn’t enough to make him interesting, or even plausible as a powerful force in Renfield’s life. So Dracula wanders into the sphere of the Lobo family, and a movie that died half an hour ago now lets its corpse fall into a vat of rancid shit.

Speaking of powerful forces, Shohreh Aghdashloo turns up as the matriarch of the Lobo crime clan. The role and dialogue are insults to her, but she still rallies and comes up with a menacing growl to top any vampire’s. When her mob boss and Dracula meet, she purrs “Enchantée,” and he kisses her hand, lingers over her scent (he seems to be sniffing the metaphorical blood on her hand), and says, as genuinely as only Nicolas Cage can say it, “The pleasure is all mine.” That short exchange, showing what great actors can do without explosions of gore, contains the sum total of the Renfield I wanted, something that speaks of dark unslakable desire and ghastly alliances. It’s what it should always have been about, instead of Renfield’s redemption arc and Awkwafina honking insults at people. And a movie this incurious about what the vampire master/human slave dynamic might really be like suffers in every imaginable way in comparison with the fraught relationship between vampire Nandor and familiar Guillermo on FX’s What We Do in the Shadows. Any vampire comedy now has that show to compete with. Renfield ain’t got game. 

Halloween Ends

We certainly can’t say that Halloween Ends, the last of the new trilogy supposedly putting paid to the struggle between superslasher Michael Myers and survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), does the same old same old. It diverges so wildly from what most fans might expect of a Halloween film that I’d like to give it points on that basis alone. This leg of the franchise has taken the story deadly seriously, layering on subtext after subtext, which is fine if the text itself engages and entertains. But Halloween Ends, like its 2021 predecessor Halloween Kills, comes across more annoying and depressing than scary. 

A nerdy kid named Cunningham with an overbearing, forbidding mother runs across an avatar of evil and loses his moral bearings. John Carpenter made that movie in 1983, from a book by Stephen King, Christine. Well, it also describes the key conflict here. David Gordon Green, who has directed all three of these Halloween movies, and wrote this one with three other guys, has possibly placed this as an Easter egg for the fans. Okay, neato. But the kid here, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), barely makes sense as a human being. Notoriety has followed him from an incident in which he accidentally killed a kid he was babysitting, and after he’s bullied and meets Michael in the sewers, Michael seems to recognize himself in the kid, and vice versa. 

Meanwhile, Corey also falls for Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), but if we’re supposed to root for him to reach out towards love and sanity and break from the “dark path” he’s trudging down, we don’t. We don’t like him and we don’t care. Green and his co-writers have made Halloween movies more fit for analysis than for seasonal scares. Everything in the movie only makes sense symbolically; taken literally, the plotting is stupid, depending, once again, on people doing the absolute dumbest things they can do. If Halloween Kills was “really” about the deranging power of fear, this one says that evil never dies, it just changes faces under the mask.

The kills are as brutal as ever, accompanied by stylized sounds of squelching, spattering, and slicing. The dirty secret of the slasher subgenre is that its structure allows us to enjoy the murder and mutilation; they’re the crescendos in a musical piece. To his credit, Green wants to do something different, uglifying the deaths. But without the fun or suspense or even the morbid curiosity that makes us want to look at the blood and brains on the floor, where’s the entertainment? I wound up not being sure what Green and his cohorts wanted to accomplish with this trilogy. Here, there’s more boring stuff about how violent tragedy can deform a whole community; we learn that some folks in Haddonfield, Illinois, the sleepy death town where all of this unfolds, blame Laurie for the new Michael murders. This is an example of how the script wants to Say Something Important — in this case, about victim-blaming, I guess? — but completely fumbles it as a plausible thing that happens in the story.

Rohan Campbell has been coached to play the faux-Michael as a sullen, misunderstood kid who kept reminding me unhelpfully of the irritating Caleb Landry Jones. There’s not much of a shift between Corey when he’s “normal” and Corey when he’s gone off the deep end. As for Jamie Lee Curtis, who has been riding a media blitz surrounding her last dance with Michael Myers, she gets a Big Moment near the end but otherwise can’t do a lot with Laurie as (inconsistently) written. I can read Curtis’ loyalty to this diminishing-returns trilogy — she’s said she owes her career to Laurie Strode and is grateful to the franchise’s fans for the life she’s had — far more easily than I can read anyone’s motivations in the film. I will always be fond of Curtis, but the Laurie in these films is beyond my understanding. Green’s 2018 Halloween famously proceeded from the 1978 original and disregarded any of the sequels. By and large, I would like to disregard Green’s sequels, too. His first effort was solid, and he should have stopped there and resisted the temptation to Say Something Important.

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.

Behemoth

Peter Szewczyk (credited here as Sefchik) is a digital-effects artist who has worked on a few Star Wars films and Avatar. So in his feature directing debut Behemoth, we know the monsters and other effects will be first-rate. Unfortunately, everything else in this underpopulated mash-up of paranoid corporate thriller and trippy supernatural horror is second-rate at best. Joshua (Josh Eisenberg) is a father driven around the bend by grief and guilt over his ailing little daughter, whose disease may have been caused by the chemical company he used to work for. Along with a couple of friends, Joshua kidnaps a higher-up at the company (Paul Statman) and keeps him at a motel, hoping to force a confession: what poisoned his daughter?

This crime is all over the news, so it’s odd that the cops don’t bother to question Joshua’s wife Amy (Whitney Nielsen), who’s staying in a hospital room with their daughter. Instead, every time we hear from Amy, she lays a guilt trip on Joshua for not being there for his daughter. Meanwhile, Joshua’s friends give new meaning to the word “inept,” and an assassin from the company is closing in. There are also numerous hellish visions involving what seems to be a possessed goat, as well as sundry other beasties and Natural Born Killers-style strobe-cuts flashing gore-soaked demons and butchers. 

That last element seems to be where Szewczyk’s heart is. As I noted about Wishmaster, the directorial debut of practical-effects maestro Robert Kurtzman, such craftspeople who graduate to the director’s chair often focus on their specialty to the exclusion of all else. Behemoth gasses on a lot about the evils of corporations poisoning the land and our children, which is a valid topic for a movie if overdone, but then Szewczyk festoons it with monsters and grotesques. Is this corporation literally run by devils and ghouls? Szewczyk and his co-writer Derrick Ligas don’t really connect the theme and the plot, and frankly there’s not enough plot to power a feature-length film. The denouement further makes Behemoth feel like an extended (and bad) Twilight Zone episode.

At times, Behemoth wants us to think all the grody stuff is just in Joshua’s head. That suspicion intensifies when Joshua pops some of his friend’s MDA instead of painkillers (oh yeah, Joshua spends most of the movie contending with a bullet wound in his hip, despite which he manages to stand up and not bleed out) and hallucinates all kinds of gnarly phantasms — or are they hallucinations? There’s a story buried in there somewhere, but a lot more of it needed to be dug out of the soil. As it is, Szewczyk unearthed whatever bits would justify playing in his digital-monster sandbox but only got crumbs of anything that would have made the story meaningful, resonant. 

Some might be willing to go along with it just for the horned boogeymen, but a more concerning problem with Behemoth is that Peter Szewczyk is good at what he usually does, but simply isn’t cut out to direct. His actors listlessly chew the scenery when they’re not tossing off dead-zone line readings, and he has no sense of pace, so the movie feels much longer than it is. We’re often not sure what’s important and what isn’t (does the same actor play a newscaster and a motel manager? why? are they involved in the action or just a daydream?), and Szewczyk doesn’t seem to know, either. The narrative just grinds on unpleasantly but artlessly — except for those computer-generated nasties. They deserve to be in a better film, one that doesn’t rely so heavily on them to work, and then doesn’t work anyway. 

Werewolves Within

Something about Werewolves Within doesn’t sit right with me. It’s a horror-comedy, which often means that people and even dogs die and you’re not asked to care much, but even so, this is a glib and breezy affair. We may find ourselves asking why we care if the characters live, either. The script, by memoirist Mishna Wolff, based on a video game, hands the actors lumpy mouthfuls of dialogue that they mostly turn into sentences that sound like real people might say them.

The cast is likable and game; the lead, Sam Richardson, is a large and huggable bundle of neuroses and kindnesses. But most of the rest of the characters are annoying, stereotypes, or both. Wolff and director Josh Ruben betray a snide contempt for flyover country, although a well-to-do gay couple also take some abuse (more for being rich than for being gay; I suppose we must be thankful for small favors). After a longer-than-necessary set-up, Werewolves Within settles into a one-location whodunit, in which evidence mounts that a large animal is savaging men, dogs, and generators in the tiny mountain town of Beaverfield.

There’s already drama in the town over a guy who wants to run a pipeline through the area, waving big paychecks. Some refuse the money; some can’t afford to. The script largely separates anti-pipeliners and pro-pipeliners into elites and Trumpsters. Werewolves Within keeps flirting with the notion of a divided-America metaphor in the whodunit mode; Knives Out did it a lot better, or at least was more enjoyable. Rian Johnson believed in his characters more purely than I believe Ruben and Wolff do, and Johnson’s cast was having a ball with the things they got to say and do. This cast seems to be working against the script. Not to mention that big, gaping traumas both emotional and physical seem far too easily gotten over (lose a husband, lose a hand, keep on truckin’). And if I never again see the gag where someone talks in the middle of the road, oblivious to the large vehicle that’s about to flatten them, I’ll feel no pain.

The plot runs over with red herrings; we figure pretty much anybody could be the culprit. When one of the more annoying and inconsistent characters comes forward and seems to admit to everything, and another character snarks that it would be a disappointment if this person turned out to be the werewolf — well, that also applies to the actual culprit. About halfway through I felt the familiar chill in my belly telling me that I didn’t honestly care who the werewolf was and that I was wasting my time. The tone is just too offensively light; it plays like the pilot of a CW show that only lasts one season. Towards the finish, people keep lurching forward and seeming to reveal themselves. It’s all amiably meaningless.

There are any number of ways Werewolves Within could’ve been about something, could’ve worked its paranoia into a statement on mistrustful America. But it’s too hip for that, too ready to score points off of ignorant small-towners who just want to open a craft shop (okay) but are willing to murder for it (wait, what?). Maybe it shouldn’t have bothered with its shallow stabs at relevance — the little attempts at commentary (rural types love their guns and beer) make it always seem on the verge of satire.

Character work at the script level might’ve helped. Michaela Watkins is a force of nature, and it’s sad to watch her playing yet another braying yahoo. Milana Vayntrub might emerge with some new fans, even though the movie betrays her. Sam Richardson comes off best — unsurprising, as he’s one of the producers — but he deserves better, too. One minute his character is bleeding badly from a gut wound; not much later, he’s flinging heavy axes at a nemesis. It’d be cool if even horror-comedies about werewolves could at least acknowledge reality, how things like bodies and blood and grief work.

Possessor

Surprises abound on the movie beat. If a filmmaker’s debut feature doesn’t do it for you, a second chance might be in order, and I thought Brandon Cronenberg, who bowed with the tedious and unpleasant Antivirus eight years ago, was still serious and sincere enough to merit further scrutiny. Cronenberg’s new one, Possessor, sadly confirms my earlier response. Cronenberg, whose father is the legendary director David, is certainly no dummy, and he doesn’t go for cheap thrills, or indeed any thrills. His work sure is gory, though, and the violence is crueler than it needs to be while not really engaging our emotions — just our gag reflex. People are always slipping and sliding on bloody floors, the soles of their sneakers squeaking around in puddles of gore. You can’t say Cronenberg romanticizes murder or death at all. It’s presented as a sticky, soul-scorching and repulsive experience.

Does this mean that Cronenberg has earned a third visit from me? I’m afraid not. Possessor is bleak and cold, out of touch with ordinary feeling. Like the recent She Dies Tomorrow, the film takes off from a premise of fantasy but isn’t moved to explore the premise’s nuts and bolts, preferring to study the humans involved and create a mood. The problem is that there are no humans in Possessor, and the mood is dreary and depressing. Andrea Riseborough appears as Tasya Vos, a futuristic assassin who jacks into another person’s consciousness and rides their body around, eventually committing murder. Tasya’s main problem is that the host bodies of this neural hijacking are supposed to blow their own brains out after the job is done, and Tasya can’t bring herself to do it. The first time she does it in the movie, she engineers a suicide-by-cop. Her second assignment that we see doesn’t go quite as smoothly.

“Andrea Riseborough is worth watching in anything” is a sentence I can no longer use after Possessor. It’s not her fault; after a certain point, she enters the consciousness of a corporate lackey (Christopher Abbott), and the wounded, numb-spirited Riseborough vanishes into the glowering Abbott, who never manages to suggest being puppeted by Riseborough or even by a woman. (You’d think a filmmaker with Cronenberg’s lineage would have more fun with the concept of a female assassin who finds herself with male equipment and using it on a woman. No fun to be had here.) Riseborough-as-Abbott commits double murder, again with far more sadistic relish than seems necessary given the no-nonsense demands of an assassin; then she loses control over the body, and the body heads for Riseborough’s family’s house. But Cronenberg’s morose, dead-affect treatment of all this aborts any pleasure we might take in the twisty plot.

I understand how unfair it is to compare an artist to his parent. But David Cronenberg, no less serious or contemplative, also brings an astringent wit to his work, as well as deft pacing. David Cronenberg’s films are often hushed and eschew false, easy climaxes, but they move, and almost despite themselves they entertain. His violence, too, is never just gross or off-putting; he usually approaches it with the air of a bemused scientist. The difference between David and Brandon can clearly be seen in the way both men direct Jennifer Jason Leigh. In Cronenberg pere’s 1999 eXistenZ, Leigh had the lead as a videogame designer on the run from her fans’ fatwa, and Cronenberg provided a fun and funky adventure for her, giving her eye-candy support with Jude Law. Cronenberg fils casts Leigh as the scientist who runs this whole secret-agent deal, and here she has the same flat affect everyone else does. It could be anyone in the role. Leigh just sits around in a dark blue room and mumbles bitter mumbo-jumbo. What a waste of a still-vibrant actor! Cronenberg’s punishment should be one screening of Heart of Midnight — Leigh’s equivalent of Vampire’s Kiss — and going to bed without supper.

It could be that Brandon Cronenberg somehow can’t get interesting performances out of interesting actors because he’s not an actor’s director. In that case, he should stick to short films of ideas and avoid grasping at emotional straws that just aren’t there. The only things holding me to Possessor were its unsavory brutality and the dread of more and worse. Now and then Cronenberg tries to employ the language of film to evoke disorientation, but it comes off like a student director playing with film stock or exposure levels. And, as with Antivirus, the movie has a clever premise but offers no clue as to why it was made. We don’t feel any passion behind it, no suggestion why this story needed to be told now in this way. We feel no horror or sadness at the killings, just nausea and distaste for the killers. My only surprise at Possessor was that I managed to sit through all of it.

Force of Nature

Its critical reputation as a racist thriller is a little overstated, but Force of Nature is still ten pounds of ass in a five-pound bag. This is a movie whose handling of a major character’s death is so feeble — a twitching eyelid visible to the camera — we expect the supposed corpse to pop up later on, perhaps to save a loved one at the last minute. That’s about the only cliché we’re spared in a film wherein even the bad guy comments on the clichés. Filmed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Force of Nature unfolds during a hurricane, though it doesn’t actually need to; the hurricane really only explains why two cops show up at an apartment building to evacuate some recalcitrant tenants, only to be caught in the middle of an art heist by some armed and deadly robbers led by a guy calling himself John the Baptist.

I would like to welcome the Peruvian actor Stephanie Cayo to English-speaking films. She plays Jess, a cop trying to make a name on the San Juan force. Cayo looks all the better next to the essenceless Emile Hirsch as her cop partner, the burned-out, lackadaisical Cardillo. These two go to the apartment building and try to extricate an old German man and a retired, sickly cop, played by Mel Gibson, whose very presence in a film at this point would attract hostile skepticism no matter what the film is. Gibson is (or has been; he seems to have behaved in recent years, from what we’ve heard anyway) a terrible person, but he still has the spark of a true movie star, and so does Stephanie Cayo; their brief scenes together illustrate what this bland movie could have been.

Force of Nature would like to be the sort of invincible thriller, like Die Hard, whose every odd bit of business pays off later. I have to wonder if the screenwriter, Cory Miller, wrote this whole thing around a scene involving the bad guy, who dons a police uniform in order to get away, and something behind a multi-locked door in someone’s apartment. There’s a whole scene dealing with meat and a guy buying all of it at the supermarket, and a bit of planted information that you definitely don’t want to enter that locked room if you’re wearing a cop outfit, and so when John the Baptist forces Cardillo to swap clothes with him, all the pieces fall into place but seem stupid anyway — and then the movie cuts away before we can see the one hilariously brutal thing we’ve been spending half the idiotic film waiting to see.

Director Michael Polish started off in the late ‘90s as a Sundance-blessed indie director, but now he seems to make films just to cast his wife, Kate Bosworth — this is their fourth film together, and probably their worst. Bosworth plays Gibson’s daughter, who is also a doctor, and who can also hold her breath long enough to get her and a wounded man out of a submerged room. (We never see them find their way out; she turns up fine later, like almost everyone else, and fairly chipper despite what we’ve seen her go through.) Force of Nature’s mixed review of the thin blue line — cops may be mean and corrupt but still get the brutal job done — is accidentally poorly-timed at this cultural/political moment, but it’s no more consciously racist than a hundred action thrillers from the ‘80s. It’s meant, I think, to be a throwback to those films, and to an era where Mel Gibson was still on top, but it lacks the snap and pizzazz to close the deal. It may speak well of Michael Polish’s character that he tries to make a retro, obliviously racist thriller and fails. But the failure still reads to us as a wasted hour and a half.