Review: The Mummy (2017)

* *
Director: Alex Kurtzman
Starring: Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe

I'll give The Mummy this much: it takes stones to start your movie by announcing it as the inaugural entry in the "Dark Universe" when previous attempts to launch the series have already been released and failed (and then disavowed as if they were never meant to be anything of the kind in the first place). As for the rest? Meh. Marketed (in North America, at least) as a "darker" take on the Mummy story that would veer towards horror, it's actually aiming to be an Indiana Jones-style adventure yarn with frequent shots of humor, and if that's what you want to watch, well, you may as well just watch the Brendan Fraser version of The Mummy, which does everything that this one is trying to do (except kick off a shared universe) but much better.

Review: The Nice Guys (2016)

* * *
Director: Shane Black
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe

There are moments in The Nice Guys where you watch Ryan Gosling's performance and think, "Is this about to go too far?" The performance is so broadly comedic that it threatens at times to cross the line from being genuinely funny to trying too hard to be funny to actually be funny. Fortunately director (and co-writer) Shane Black is always able to keep him on the right side of that line, reeling him back in whenever it seems like he's about to drift away. The performance is ridiculous, but it's ridiculous in exactly the right way and in what is ultimately a very funny and very good comedy/noir/buddy movie mashup.

Review: Noah (2014)

* * 1/2
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Ray Winstone

Whatever else you can say about Darren Aronofsky, you can never accuse him of lacking in ambition. Whether he's telling an intimate, small-scale story about addicts hitting rock bottom and then finding new depths to sink to, or a science fiction epic spanning multiple time frames, he thinks big and follows his vision through to the end. Although he didn't seem like the most likely of contemporary directors to make a Biblical epic, after seeing Noah it's now apparent that Aronofsky was, in certain respects, the perfect director to tackle the story of Noah's ark. In other respects the story seems to have gotten away from him, with somewhat generic action/epic elements overwhelming the more unique and compelling elements of the film. My impression of the film was pretty evenly mixed - parts of it I found glorious, other parts I found considerably less so. It is at once a visionary work and a bloated miss.

Review: Les Miserables (2012)

* * 1/2
Director: Tom Hooper
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne, Amanda Seyfried

Les Miserables is going to make a lot of money. It's going to get nominated for a bunch of Oscars including, I'm certain, Best Picture. It's going to be loved by a lot of people. There's a lot of good news for Les Miserables. The bad news is that it's actually not a very good film. It has its moments, it is sometimes entertaining, sometimes even moving, but its flaws are so prominent and so distracting that the elements of value are almost buried beneath them.

The Best Picture Countdown #73: Gladiator (2000)

Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix

In certain circles Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is considered a masterpiece. A poll in 2002 named it the sixth greatest movie of all time. Sixth! Which put it three spots ahead of Schindler’s List and four ahead of Goodfellas. I. Don’t. Get. It. I don’t think that it’s a bad movie, mind you, I just don't think it's anything more than average. It's like Ben-Hur's morose cousin, a dour exercise in big speeches, big battles, and big personalities.

Gladiator tells the story of Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe), a Roman General turned slave turned gladiator. As a General he was a favourite of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), who had planned to hand over leadership to him. Before being able to carry this out, however, the Emperor is murdered by his son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who then orders the execution of Maximus in order to consolidate his power. Maximus escapes but his wife and son are murdered and soon after he falls into the hands of slave traders who take him to North Africa. After being bought by Proximo (Oliver Reed), Maximus begins his career as a gladiator, which will eventually take him back to Rome.

During a tournament at the Roman Colosseum Maximus reveals his identity and his plans to avenge his family to Commodus, who is forced to spare his life only because Maximus is a crowd favourite. Meanwhile, Maximus learns that he still has the support of the army and enters into a conspiracy with Commodus’ sister, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), to remove the Emperor from power. The plot comes to light, however, and Maximus is captured before he can rejoin the army. In the climactic scene Commodus and Maximus face off in the arena, where the score is finally settled but the triumph is bittersweet.

The screenplay was written by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson (apparently with fairly extensive rewrites at the behest of Crowe) and suffers somewhat from having too many cooks stirring the pot. That being said, the plot is serviceable enough for an historical action movie where the main draw is going to be the spectacle of the action set pieces. Scott is a skilled director of action and Gladiator delivers that in spades with plenty of blood saturated deaths to cap those scenes off. The film obviously owes a debt to the sword and sandal epics of old Hollywood, films like Ben-Hur, Spartacus and The Fall of the Roman Empire (a film that shares more than a few plot similarities with Gladiator), but Scott also renders an homage to Leni Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will in the way that he presents Commodus. I don’t particularly care for the film, but I can’t deny that Scott puts a lot into it and that he brings a high level of craft to the way that he guides the whole production.

A story like this typically requires a little bit scenery chewing but the tone throughout the film is so dark that it generally leaves little room for that larger than life style of acting. Even lines that are cheesy on the face of it – such as “At my signal, unleash hell” or “What we do in life echoes in eternity” – are delivered with such gravitas that it’s the stuff of pure drama rather than the hyper-drama of the huge, old school epics. The actor who comes closest to that style of acting, skirting right up that line but never crossing it, is Phoenix who, as the villain, has an inherently flashy role. Phoenix received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor while Crowe won in the leading category; both deliver strong performances but I don’t truly believe that Crowe was rewarded for his performance here so much as for his work in 1999’s The Insider.

Gladiator has a lot of strong individual elements but there’s just something about it that doesn’t work for me as a whole. To me it’s like a beautifully wrapped package that you open up only to discover that there’s nothing inside. It’s just so hollow, despite the best efforts of everyone involved in front of and behind the camera. To reiterate, I don’t think it’s a bad movie; I just don’t think it’s anything particularly special.

Review: American Gangster

This is a good movie that could have been two great movies. As it is, the film is so packed with all the stories that director Ridley Scott wanted to tell, that it’s difficult at times to fully engage with it. And to top it off, it just sort of… ends, as if Scott came to the final scene and said, “Well, I guess that’s it.” And even at the end, it’s still trying to tell you more story.

There are two main storylines that run parallel to each other, that of rising gangster Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), and that of an honest cop, Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), out to stop the drug trade. There’s also a smaller sub-story (which feeds into both of the main ones), which follows a gang of crooked cops led by a Special Officer named Trupo (Josh Brolin). The film stretches itself thin by trying to follow all these plots, so that we’re barely comfortable with one set of characters before we’re thrust in with another, and we’re left feeling like we didn’t really get to know any of them more than superficially.

That’s the downside of the film, but there’s a lot of good in it, and a lot which makes it worth seeing. Washington gives a fantastically layered performance as a man who is good and kind to his mother and his wife, and capable of the most brutal violence when it comes to others. He’s a man who wants to be seen as a provider to his community when he hands out turkeys at Thanksgiving, but fails to see how he’s also destroying that community by sending drugs out into it. To him, the bad things are just a part of business, and that’s the meat of the story, the thing that gets lost somewhat at the end when the film turns its focus to police corruption.

The film begins in 1968 with Frank’s boss lamenting the evolution of mom-and-pop stores into chain stores which cut out the suppliers by buying directly from the source. When he dies and leaves Frank to pick up the pieces of the enterprise, Frank tailors it to fit the changing market place. Frank, too, will cut out the suppliers and make his fortune and gain his power by buying directly from the source. He goes to Bangkok where his cousin is stationed and they make an arrangement to buy pure heroin and ship it back to the United States in the coffins of dead soldiers. Frank sells his product for half of what other dealers are charging, and soon he’s got a monopoly on the market. He’s a capitalist in the fullest sense of the word. If it weren’t for the fact that his product was heroin, he’d be considered just another businessman (and a very good one, at that), rather than a gangster.

The thing that keeps him going for so long is the fact that he does look like just another businessman. He dresses in nice suits and looks respectable and advises his brother not to dress flashy because “it’s like saying, ‘Arrest me.’” The most dangerous people in this film are the people like Frank and the high level police officers: criminals who are hiding in plain sight. When Frank fails to take his own advice by donning a flashy fur coat (a gift from his wife), it leads to his downfall. People notice him in this coat – the good cop who wants to stop the drug trade by getting the major dealer, and the bad cop who is suddenly made aware that there’s someone out there who hasn’t been paying him off. Frank announces himself to the world, and then has to face consequences from all sides.

What’s good about this film is very, very good, but it simply tries to be about too much. It’s about the rise and fall of a gangster, and it’s about an honest cop trying to deal with crime on the outside and the corruption that surrounds him while also trying to fight a custody battle with his ex-wife, and it’s about social issues (there are a lot of shots of people shooting heroin and open sores and overdoses, and there is also a lot of talk of heroin and opium addicted soldiers in Vietnam), and it’s about race (part of the reason Frank is able to lay low for so long is that no one believes that a black man could gain that much power, and everyone just assumes that he’s working for someone even more powerful). There’s just so much in it that the film doesn’t explore any of it as effectively as it otherwise might have.