davidmvining

With the death of Moustapha Akkad at the hands of terrorists in Jordan, Dimension was able to give more control to the Weinsteins who brought in Rob Zombie to direct a remake. Makes sense, I guess. Having made a couple of well-received horror films that were nothing like the Halloween franchise, but having an obvious affinity for the material and film in general, Zombie wasn't the worst choice. He's at least trying to make an interesting series of decisions, even if I think the core of it is somewhat wrong-headed.

The thing about Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) that no one who makes these movies wants to admit is that he's not actually a character. He's a symbol of evil and fear, and there's nothing else to him. And yet, people (including John Carpenter, admittedly drunk while writing II) kept trying to give him motivation. It was always terribly done and kind of poorly thought out, making the dilution of this symbol all the worse. Well, Zombie heads straight into that by spending the first thirty minutes of his remake in Myers' childhood (Daeg Faerch). You see, he came from the worst white trash you can imagine. His mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) was a stripper. His dad is gone, replaced by mom's boyfriend Ronnie (William Forsythe), who doesn't work and screams at her and her infant child all day. Michael's older sister Judith (Hanna Hall) dumps him on Halloween night to have sex with her boyfriend instead. He's also bullied at school, a situation he himself fixes by beating the bully to death with a stick in the woods. It all culminates in Michael killing Ronnie, Judith's boyfriend, and Judith herself that Halloween night, preserving his little sister for when his mother comes home to find the situation.

Demythologization is a drag, man. That being said, Zombie isn't really trying to find an excuse for Michael or even to establish much sympathy. Before we really see much of this, we get the implication that he kills his own pets for no reason along with pictures he's taken of dead cats. He's a psychopath from the beginning which...calls into question the entire portrait of his childhood we just saw. Is it necessary? Or is it just a way for Zombie to find a role for his wife in a movie again?

Anyway, Michael gets locked up in a sanitarium under the watchful eye of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) who tries to help in the first year until Michael randomly stabs a nurse with a fork. He gives up, we skip ahead fifteen years, and we get our remake.

Suddenly, we're focusing on Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) going through the same motions as she had in the original except with a thin Zombie-skin over everything (she wears a sweater with skulls, something original Laurie would never have done). Her friends Annie (Danielle Harris) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) have boyfriends, problems with boys, and appointments to babysit. Michael escapes from the sanitarium, heading straight towards Haddonfield to find Laurie because Zombie has included the sister subplot from the beginning here.

And that's where we have Myer's motivation. Myers shouldn't have motivation. The scary thing about him in the first one was the unexplained nature of his stalking and violence. He was just there doing evil things for no reason, not because he wanted to remake his family with his long-lost sister whom he knew was Laurie...somehow (deleted scene, I assume).

And, it's fine. The remake part is just kind of fine. It's that grungy 00's horror remake vibe shared with the Friday the 13th remake that I've never found appealing. Zombie films far too closely in normal situations, and horror sequences end up feeling cut to almost nonsense while the emphasis is on action rather than tension. He's best when he's making these small moments that ape Carpenter, like the few long shots down the roads of Haddonfield that see Michael in the background while the girls walk in the foreground.

So, it's an unnecessary remake that doesn't stand terribly well on its own. I mean...disconnected from everything that came before (not the worst thing in the world), Halloween is fine as a horror film. It's not terribly engaging or scary or even titillating. However, it's got an interesting, if completely unnecessary and kind of annoying, look at the childhood of a serial killer and the horror moments, while not my cup of tea, function well enough with loud noises and screams to keep things moving. It's ugly, mean, and not much fun, which isn't that far off from most slashers, but it's so much dirtier in the process. Maybe Zombie took the material too seriously.

Halloween fully becomes Friday the 13th, complete with idiotic, sex-craved teenagers doing stupid things while staying in a place they could easily escape from. Le sigh. It's not the worst this franchise has gotten, the dumb lore of The Curse of Michael Myers has to be the low point, but this isn't good. This is Moustapha Akkad discarding, again, the potential of tension in favor of tired slasher cliches, all while getting the director of II, Rick Rosenthal, to just embrace the direction fully without any sense of wit or fun.

In a pointless prologue, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is in a mental hospital that gets invaded by Michael Myers where he finally accomplishes his goal of murdering his sister. For all that this has to do with the rest of the film, it's way overlong, not to mention that it's marked by really stupid characters while Myers fully embraces being magical and able to appear anywhere at anytime again.

With that out of the way, we're introduced to our actual characters led by Sara (Bianca Kajlich), a college student at Haddonfield College who, with her two friends Jen (Katee Sackhoff) and Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas), get selected to take part in Deathentertainment's exploration of Myers' house on live-Internet feed by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes). Sara also has an Internet friend, Myles (Ryan Merriman), whom she's never met, but he's fallen in love with her.

So, the setup is that we're going to get six teenagers into the house for more than half the film as they steadily get picked off by Michael while everyone figures out reasons to just stick around instead of leaving.

Despite the fact that the basic premise is kind of stupid, the execution is mostly just kind of boring, and the characters are generally thin and unlikeable, there are actually some interesting little pieces here and there. There's an all but explicit reference to Peeping Tom when Myers uses a tripod to kill someone. There's this balance between the kids finding easy answers to Michael's past and all of it being nonsense within the film and there being no answer. I mean...that's sort of interesting. It could have been the focus of the film.

Instead, we get teenagers, in effectively a haunted house, tearing off each other's clothes in a dank, dirty basement, while they know they're being filmed, and trying to bone. This is pure, dumb, Friday the 13th territory, and a serious departure from the re-embrace of tension based on character that Halloween H20 had sort of managed decently well enough.

Also, he whole thing about Myles getting everyone at a part obsessed with the show and then using some internet messaging to guide Sara through the house when things get dire is just silly. It's this late-90s skin to just using a phone that feels awkward and dumb as it plays out.

The kills are...fine, I guess. They don't inspire great visceral reactions like the detailed deaths in H20, but they're decent enough. They're just happening to people the film has made no effort to care about. They're really just meat for the knife. The lamest is probably the girl just getting put on a spike in an underground hallway. The best is probably the beheading. It's...fine. Doesn't have much impact, but it's sort of fun.

So, it's dumb. It tries to enter over-the-top territory in its finale with everything on fire and someone dead coming back to say a one-liner, but it's kind of a dumb one-liner and I hadn't care about anything since I first saw Laurie in that mental hospital. It's mostly just drudgery as we watch an unrealistic and kind of stupid series of events driven by stupid characters who should be doing anything that they're doing. However, there are a couple of interesting touches along the way. It's not a miserable as some of the others in this franchise, but it's not anywhere close to good.

Bringing in the talent who built the Friday the 13th franchise, Steve Miner, to direct the seventh installment of the Halloween franchise, a reboot of the franchise ignoring III through The Curse of Michael Myers, Moustapha Akkad found a way to make the best entry in the franchise since the beginning. I mean, it's not quite good, but it's practically there. It replicates the kind of tension that dominated the first film and hasn't been touched since, has some very solid kills, and even an emotional core. The uncredited rewrites by Kevin Williamson probably helped the film, but it could have used another real pass to tighten somethings up, give some meat on the film's bones, and find something for our cast to do in the final act.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) faked her death shortly after the events of II and went into hiding, ending up as the head mistress of a tony boarding school in Summer Glen, California as Keri Tate. She has a son, John (Josh Hartnett), who is seventeen, her age when Michael Myers first showed up, who is grating against the tight bounds she imposes upon her. There's a big annual trip to Yosemite coming up that John wants to go on, but his friends Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd), Sarah (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe), and his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams), all get themselves exempted from the trip so they can hang out together alone (with minimal supervision) for a few days over Halloween weekend. However, they're not destined to have a quiet time alone because Myers has reappeared, first killing Nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) in Haddonfield before finding Laurie's file which, apparently, contained information on where she was living.

What's interesting about this in contrast to the rest of the franchise since the first is that aside from the opening bit of terror, including a small part by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, there's no kill for pretty much for the first hour. The film is much more concerned with Laurie's dealing with PTSD twenty years after the event that shaped her life. It's not the deepest stuff, showing her being a high-functioning alcoholic as she tries to open up to her secret lover, the guidance counselor Will (Adam Arkin), while the teens do 90s teenager things as they set up for their secret night of food and sex, of which we end up seeing very little. These aren't great character moments, but they're solid enough to establish them as more than just meat for a slasher's knife. They feel a bit arch, but real enough.

And the advantage of actually giving us time with them as we can see the threat growing closer without anyone knowing about it is that they feel significantly less stupid when the killing starts. They have no reason for thinking that they're anything but safe even while we know that they're not. They're not having information withheld about someone who's been hacked to death a room over because the movie needs to happen. This also refocuses the tension around the kind of delivery that Carpenter (who was attached to direct this for a time before his sense of justice demanded he be paid $10 million for the job) had delivered in the first film. It's not about the strict thrills through, it's about building up the sense of suspense over an hour until the killing starts.

And while the killing isn't great in number, it's the most visceral killing in the franchise. The stabs hurt, the sound effects are gruesome, and there's one moment with a dumb waiter and a leg that just made me squirm.

So, the first hour or so was pretty okay with its character-focused efforts at building an actual story. The third act is where all the fireworks reside, and I ended up feeling something like a rollercoaster of emotion about it. The beginning of it was just outright great. This is where the meat hits the knife first and foremost, where the kills are gruesome and impactful, and where things feel like they're spinning out of control. And then...it just keeps going. The focus goes from the kids to Laurie, and the ending just kind of drags out as this cat and mouse chase develops between Laurie and Michael that often doesn't make the most sense, like the extended bit with Laurie under some folding tables that Michael (magically) gets on top of. It feels designed to extend the sequence as long as possible without addressing some real concerns about how...the whole thing is kind of stupid and Michael should just jump down and end it all.

I'm also of two minds regarding the finale to the finale where Laurie takes the knowledge that Michael always gets up again one last time and tries to do something about it. Knowingly leaning into that feels like a Williamson addition (it may not be, it's just a guess), but it goes on for too long, extending this coda of violence just too long, almost like the film wasn't long enough and they needed to get it over 80 minutes somehow.

So, if the film had better focus in its finale, I think I would have considered this good overall. Instead, the finale just kind of drags out beyond its effectiveness and becomes a drag. The opening hour was pretty decent, the start of the finale was great, and I was ready to really come away from this something of a fan. However, Miner and Akkad just didn't know when to quit, and we end up with still the second best entry in the franchise so far. I mean...it's a low bar, but it did clear it.

I often advocate for franchises stuck in a rut to go weird, and then when one actually does, I tend to reject it. Why? Well, I'm a bad person, but aside from that, the weirdness tends to be kind of terribly done. Think Jason Goes to Hell where all of the previous rules were tossed out in favor of disconnected weirdness that didn't make sense. Well, this is that for the Halloween franchise, a film so disconnected from how it had begun, so consumed with creating lore to explain what should never have been explained, and so unsure of how to fill all the bits of screentime in between lore with anything interesting that it just never works. I wonder if they'll reset everything after this.

I'm going to be honest, the opening ten minutes or so of this just outright confused me. I wasn't sure if things were jumping backwards and forwards in time. Having Michael continue to wear the Shatner mask is honestly not a help. It doesn't make sense. Anyway, Jamie (J. C. Brandy) has been captured by a cult who also captured Michael at the end of The Revenge of Michael Myers. Six years later, she gives birth to a baby and escapes with the help of a nurse. At the same time, Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan), a relative of Laurie's, lives in the Myers home (oh, lord) with her parents and son Danny (Devin Gardner). Across the street lives Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), who had been babysat by Laurie in the first film. He's obsessed with finding Michael again, and he watches the Myers house all the time. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) has retired, but his old colleague Dr. Wynn (Mitch Ryan), stops by to offer him a job at the hospital he used to work at and where Michael had been kept. Also, Tommy finds Jamie's baby at a bus stop. Also, Haddonfield is trying to make is legal to celebrate Halloween again, an effort headed by Kara's friend Beth (Mariah O'Brien).

This is an overstuffed film.

And at its core, well, there's no core. What is supposed to be the point is this mystery around the Man in Black, a mysterious figure who first appeared in the fifth entry, and what he's doing with this cult focused on Jamie's baby and Michael Myers. The problem is that it's a mystery without much of an answer, no real sense of tension, and it all feels so disconnected from generally everything. What we get instead is Michael lumbering around (seriously...it made sense that he could get away with it in the first, even the second, entry, but anyone walking around with a Shatner mask in Haddonfield would be drawing attention) to kill people.

But, because we can't just have Michael killing people randomly, he needs purpose, so we get Loomis and Tommy explaining how Michael sees anyone who lives in his house as his family in need of killing. Which...whatever. It's an excuse, at least. And then the kills are kind of dull and unmemorable.

And it's all buoyed by details of the lore that are just kind of stupid, like Myers suddenly having a symbol that he burns into hay bails when he kills someone, something he's never done before. Is this...learned behavior over the past few years? I dunno. The movie doesn't know. The movie doesn't care.

So, it's all meant to build up to a big confrontation at the cult's center of operations with the surprise reveal of who The Man in Black is, a reveal that's honestly halfway decent not because of execution but because they did actually put in some effort for it to make sense. However, it's all lore-based nonsense that doesn't gel with much that came before and is kind of stupid. Tommy, at one point, says that the stars align on some Halloween nights to make a specific constellation, which isn't how stars work over a short period of time of a few years. Planets could do that, but not stars.

Anyway, this is a tired franchise reaching for anything to justify its continuation. Actors are committed, especially Pleasance in his final take as Loomis before his death, but it's all commitment to nonsense. The tension doesn't work. The kills aren't great. The stuff around them is nonsensical.

Take a break, Michael. You need a rest.

Hey, remember how Halloween 4 ended with an interesting moment where a little girl was going to become the next Michael Myers? Well, that's too far for Moustapha Akkad, it seems, so everything gets pulled back because having a little girl become a slasher villain was a bit too much. Which is, to be fair, understandable if you're going to refuse any sort of significant time jump, looking forward only a year so that your little girl actress was going to be the main character of the next film. What do you do then? Continue to ape the Friday the 13th franchise, poorly, it seems. Not that the Friday movies were masterpieces.

So, it's been a year since Michael Myers fell down a...well? In a cemetery after being shot dozens of times by the police of Haddonfield. He recovers at the hand of some forested bum whom he murders a year later because...Michael Myers, I guess. Anyway, Jamie (Danielle Harris) has become a mute after the events of the previous film, staying at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic and overseen by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) and visited frequently by her foster (well, they now say step) sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell). Everyone's hoping that Jamie will get over her night terrors and start speaking soon, including Rachel's friend Tina (Wendy Kaplan).

Now, this is where the weird combination of Halloween lore, Friday the 13th mimicry, and some kind of innate desire to maintain the original film's sense of dread come clashing together in a horrible car crash of inanity. Michael sets out from his hideaway in the forest, heading straight for Rachel's house. Why? Well, the subtitle of the film (which doesn't actually appear in the film) says that this is Michael's revenge. But he's also got this thing from the previous film where he needs to kill his family members (it's in both II and 4, for their own, separate reasons). He then spends the next very large bulk of the film pursuing Tina and her friends out of town, to a party at a farmhouse, even though none of these people were involved in the events of the previous film. So, he wants revenge on people who weren't there, ignores the little girl who is his sister before getting super focused on her in the finale, and goes out of his way to murder people he's never seen before. He's more Jason than whatever Michael is supposed to be at this point, and I don't think anyone knew.

So, the point of the slasher genre is creative and fun kills, and these are surprisingly tame. Stabs with scissors, an impalement with a pitchfork, and a swing of a scythe are pretty much it, and they're mostly off-screen. Also, there are these long stretches in between the kills that aren't built on tension but on following stupid characters for stupid reasons while Michael doesn't act like Michael.

This is a franchise in desperate need of an identity. What started as something sort of original quickly fell behind the trends of the slasher genre and never caught up. There's something more pure about how Friday the 13th and its mostly terrible sequels approach the material, having fewer pretensions about anything and never feeling like they are actively working against what came before, a trait that these Halloween sequels largely cannot match.

So, the finale ends at the Myers home, still abandoned and condemned decades after the original Myers murder of his sister, a dilapidated house in the middle of tony suburbia, and it's built entirely on Loomis using Jamie as bait because he's suddenly deeply invested in getting her after ignoring her for...the rest of the film. It also requires Loomis deciding that backup against Michael Myers is completely unnecessary for some reason, even though Loomis, every time he meets a cop, tells them that they're not taking Michael seriously enough.

This is a script written by someone either kind of stupid or just at a loss for how to accomplish all of the competing ideas that the producers and studio are throwing in his direction.

If there's one good thing in the film, it's probably that the director, Dominique Othenin-Girard, provides a nice, naturalistic feel to the female relationships in the beginning mostly, it seems, by just letting Kaplan, in particular, be herself.

I mean, this isn't the worst thing in the world. The kills have some very modest value. Kaplan is actually fun to watch, and most of the film hinges on her. It looks decent (TV movie from the 90s quality, to be honest). But, it makes no sense, it mostly just kind of dull, and further descends into this quagmire of dueling interests and influences. This is a franchise that has completely gone off the rails.

Just in case you had the misapprehension that the owners of the Halloween franchise would make the terrible mistake of not slavishly following the rules of slashers that had come to dominate the horror world in the 80s, we assure you that Michael Myers is definitely back. It's in the title. We swear. Mostly just putting on those slasher duds more comfortably than John Carpenter tried to do through his writing on II, 4 works better because it doesn't try to strike this balance between Carpenter tension and blood and guts exploitative nonsense.

Michael Myers somehow survived the massive explosion at the end of II, and so did Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance). When Michael is transferred from his current holding, hearing that he has a living niece, he suddenly overcomes the extreme atrophy of his muscles to become a walking killing machine once more. The point of these kind of films is the creative destruction of cannon fodder at the hands of a killing machine while a sympathetic lead manages to survive, all while trying to leave open some venue for the killing machine to come back in a sequel. They're not deep efforts, and the excuses of getting Myers from tied to a bed for ten years to putting on the Shatner mask (or one pretty close, I guess) doesn't matter that much.

The sympathetic character at the center is split between Myers' niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris), and her foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell). Ellie has a nascent relationship with a boy at school, Brady (Sasha Jenson), and she has to navigate taking care of her little foster sister with her promised date on Halloween. Being a slasher, we need teenagers worthy of brutal murder, so Brady decides to cheat on Rachel with Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont), the daughter of the sheriff, Ben (Beau Starr). So, we have our sympathetic character and some meat for the grinder.

And the movie largely goes through the motions of the slasher genre at this point. Myers shows up. No one will listen to the guy who knows what's going on because he sounds like a crazy person. Any help is too late. Meat must be sacrificed to the slasher.

The film does try some interesting things throughout, though, making it slightly, ever so slightly, more than a typical slasher. The central element is around Jamie who is consumed by visions of Michael in his Shatner mask, even though she's purportedly never seen him in real life. There are implications that she will continue his evil streak either through some familial line or perhaps something more ethereal and metaphysical. I mean, it gets forgotten for very long stretches, but it is there. There's also an effort by some good-ole-boys in Haddonfield banding together to go out and hunt for Myers, especially after Myers destroys the sheriff's office. They end up a lynch mob who accidentally kill an innocent (innocents who are running around town after curfew while pretending to be Myers, that is), which ends up going nowhere. It's the opening of a start of an idea, but it gets dropped in favor of some slasher action.

And the slasher action isn't terrible. The whole point is to kill people in interesting ways, and there are some decent kills, like using a double-barreled shotgun as an impaling device, and the tension is decent. This ain't high art, but it functions decently enough.

With the moving on of Carpenter, the creative control as director was handed over to Dwight H. Little. The classical compositions that Carpenter himself lensed with Dean Cundey as DP are gone, as well as the 2.35:1 ratio, replaced by the taller 1.85:1 ratio and a more standard look. However, that's not to say that it's generally ugly. It's got that late-80s, flat look generally, but there are moments, especially in the third act, that look really good, like a sequence in the elementary school and the sudden appearance of mist on the road. It's not a bad looking film. It doesn't look as good as something like Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, but it's pretty consistently decent and gets looking pretty good by the end.

So...it's not good. It doesn't do enough interesting with what it has, forgetting most of it for long stretches, while its slasher thrillers are kind of basic. It's not drudgery like II, but it doesn't have nearly the right kind of entertainment to make it genuinely fun.

It's very Meh.

John Carpenter's last involvement with the Halloween franchise where he handed off direct creative reins to Tommy Lee Wallace, a friend since film school who had been working on his films since Dark Star. Replicating the Carpenter look, this errant, black sheep entry in the franchise ends up feeling most like Prince of Darkness, just not as well written but just about as creepy. It's Carpenter-like without Carpenter's stronger sense of narrative (though, he did write Halloween II...).

Halloween is approaching, and all the kids want a Silver Shamrock mask, one of three (a goblin, a pumpkin, and a witch), their annoying commercials plastering the airwaves, counting down to the holiday, and promising a big giveaway that night. Meanwhile, Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry) gets dragged into a hospital and seen by Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) before being murdered by a mysterious man in a suit who then kills himself in a ball of fire in the parking lot. Harry's daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), shows up to identify the body and is also determined to figure out what happened to her father.

I think the largest issue with this film's script is the first third setting everything up. When we get past it, when the investigation combining Dr. Challis and Ellie leaves the sleepy California town for...another sleepy California town where Silver Shamrock is based, everything that came before seems so unnecessary. There are literal plot mechanics there to set things up, the murder of Harry and Ellie's determination to figure out what happened along with the mystery of why they can't pull human body parts from the wreckage in the parking lot, but once the pair reach the little town of Santa Mira, it feels like the film is finally beginning, even though the first half hour wasn't exactly absent any events. The reasons for Dr. Challis and Ellie being in the town end up feeling so unimportant to them actually being there because they're pretty much totally forgotten in favor of the central mystery of what's going on at the Silver Shamrock plant.

Silver Shamrock is run by Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy), a kindly old Irish man with a perpetual smile who is happy to give the biggest seller of Silver Shamrock masks, Buddy (Ralph Strait), and his family a tour of the facilities (not worth the price of admission, if you ask me). But there's a secret door and this mystery of what these little tags on the masks are for, a tag that accidentally kills another woman there to purchase more masks for her store.

How this mystery gets handled ends up feeling like the second major issue with the script. It's too opaque for too long, dealing out too few details about the nature of the masks, their overall purpose, and their effect, saving it all for the final act of the film. So, what we essentially have is a normal looking factory in the middle of nowhere run by someone who seems nice but obviously is hiding something and a vague sense of threat around everything. Wallace ends up hanging a whole lot on that vague sense of threat and dread, using every cinematic tool he'd learned from Carpenter to ramp things up without actually revealing anything, stretching the feeling really thin. I think the comparison to Prince of Darkness becomes kind of obvious at this point.

The third act is where the film is both at its best and worst. The reveal of the actual threat and purpose of everything, including a stolen section of Stonehenge, is really quite fun and ramps up the strange sense of terror that the film had been hinting at for most of its running time. However, the mechanics of how Dr. Challis goes from prisoner to beating everyone make just this side of no sense and heavily require everyone being kind of stupid to let it happen. Stil, the ending where all may have been for naught is a fun moment.

So, is this some hidden masterpiece only maligned because it doesn't have Michael Myers (all that much)? Not really. Does it have its own charms within the horror genre? For sure. Is it good? I wouldn't go that far, but it's far from worthless.

I...do not understand why fans of the franchise like this one so much. Everything I read says, "Sure, it's not as good as the original, but it's still so much fun!" And yet, I find it immensely boring. Just straight up dull from beginning to end. It's weird because John Carpenter and Debra Hill wrote it while the director, Rick Rosenthal, was trying to go for the same kind of restrained tension that Carpenter maintained in the first one. However, the script is a complete mess (something Carpenter himself famously maintains), and the placement of the action immediately after the first one ends while filling the running time with what amounts to cannon fodder creates this weird series of mundane setpieces that are never, you know, fun.

So, Michael Myers (Dick Warlock) has killed the teenagers but gotten away while Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) continues to run around with his gun, demanding help from the Haddonfield police. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets carted to the hospital where she was lay asleep for the next hour of screentime, and we have just this side of nothing to do until she decides to wake up. What we get instead are the employees of the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, all five of them it seem, mostly Jimmy (Lance Guest), a paramedic and ambulance driver, and Nurse Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop). Jimmy latches onto Laurie once she comes in, promising to take care of her as the head nurse, Mrs. Alves (Gloria Gifford), shoos him out of the room. Karen tries to shoo off Jimmy's partner, Budd (Leo Rossi), and his sexual advances.

Now, why do I think this movie is just built wrong? Well, it has to do with how much the audience knows about the situation. We actually start with the final moments of the first film (slightly re-edited), so we go in knowing that Michael Myers is dangerous and out there. However, he moves through town without anyone noticing him, and he never feels like a threat as he goes. The film has a specific reason for this (a stupid, specific reason), but watching him just bypass everyone, filmed in the same way that he would stalk the few people he came across in the first film, just doesn't feel right. It's not tense.

And that feeling extends throughout every major setpiece, helped in no small part by the fact that these characters are all just thin meat for Michael Myer's knife. The whole cast has gone from these realistic portrayals of older children to slasher meat in a single film. Budd is probably the worst of them, the perennially horny guy trying to sleep with the large breasted nurse, who has nothing else to his character and is only there to be killed in an inventive way by Michael Myers. I'm not opposed to the meat for the grinder approach to slashers, but that doesn't combine well with this attempt to replicate the slow-burn approach that Carpenter had done so well on the first film. Giving us thin characters who have to unknowingly get murdered...very slowly is just a bad combination.

And, the preponderance of these side characters throws me as well. Laurie really is supposed to be the main character. She's the focal point of the final act of the film, none of these others matter by that point. Most of them are dead, and Laurie has literally been asleep for most of the film, only to wake up to lost memories of her parents not being her parents and Michael Myers being her brother, a fact so secret that it was even kept from Dr. Loomis. I mean...this is stupid, and it's all John Carpenter's fault. Or the beer. Maybe it was the beer.

And the ending is the kind of exploitative trash you expect from an 80s slasher, not from a sequel to Halloween. On that level, it has the kind of explosive attitude one might expect, and I don't hold it against the film that it's not in alignment with the first. It's just that it kind of comes out of nowhere, is tied to nothing that came before it, and it's built on this completely unnecessary addition the lore that doesn't make any difference other than to explain why Myers showed up there.

I don't know if it was Carpenter's insistence on keeping the action to immediately afterwards or a mandate from the studio, but I think getting distance from the original would have helped give him the space creatively to come up with something more imaginative and workable than this. Set it the following year. Myers has been missing, hidden in the woods and eating animals to recover from the bullets. Laurie is trying to move on. Coincidence brings them together again. Done. Move on from there.

Anyway, the end result here is...not good. It's mostly boring as we watch cannon fodder plod towards death. The main character disappears for the first two-thirds. The final act has some exploitative fun to it, but it's too little, too late to save anything. Really, this movie is just kind of dull.

My wife and I have a running joke about this movie. We saw it when we were dating, and she came out of the theater playfully angry because the film's title was a misnomer. "Ah," I retorted after she had explained herself, "It's not the train that the title refers to, but to the friendship between the two leads. That was what was unstoppable." We replay the joke about once a year. It tickles me.

Anyway, pointless personal anecdote aside, revisiting Tony Scott's final film more than a decade after that dollar theater screening, I was surprised to discover Scott's purest film. The film that feels the most his with the fewest amount of competing interests and influences. I was also surprised to find, easily, my favorite Tony Scott film in the process. This is effectively B-movie stuff, the kinds of films that Roger Corman was producing under American International Pictures: gaining access to a thing that provided production value, and then building a script around it. This time, it's a speeding train, but it cost about a hundred million dollars and starred real movie stars. I think Tony Scott would have thrived under Corman.

So, through a series of bumbling accidents by Dewey (Ethan Suplee), a hostler at a railyard in rural Pennsylvania, a train with a few dozen cars, including a few with dangerous chemicals aboard, starts speeding down the main track towards Scranton, building speed until its moving at 70 miles per hour. This is a disaster waiting to happen. At the same time, rookie Will Colson (Chris Pine) is working for the first time with veteran Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) on their own little assignment further down the line. What's interesting about the script to me is that Will and Frank don't get involved in the impending disaster until the halfway point of the film. Until then, the film is split in two with the unfolding situation that's spiraling out of control played against the quieter, character-driven moments of Frank knowing more about railroading than Will while harboring secret animosity because of Will's place as, effectively, his replacement.

Now, this isn't a Bergman film when it comes to its character work. What this film actually is plays much more broadly with both men having their own little pasts that define them as individuals. Will is having trouble with his wife Darcy (Jessy Schram) over imagined infidelities. Frank forgot one of his two daughter's birthdays. It's not deep, but it does the job of humanizing and individualizing these two characters beyond "old man near retirement" and "rookie learning the ropes." It's also where the Tony Scott's ability with actors gets to shine the most through with both Washington and Pine playing well off of each other, Washington mostly playing off his charm while Pine does his own to try and make a career that's not just Captain Kirk.

So, the action element, since this is a Tony Scott film, is kind of the perfect balance between the ridiculous, over-the-top destruction that was his wont with the need to actually build tension over the course of a film. A lot of the credit for that has to go to the writer, Mark Bomback, who structures the film really well to accomplish the kind of B-movie charms with an A-list cast that Tony Scott obviously had yearned for ever since he'd first met Don Simpson in the early 80s. It's about efforts to try and stop the train, overseen by the Fuller Yard yardmaster Connie (Rosario Dawson) while she butts heads with the company VP Oscar (Kevin Dunn) on a series of conference calls. Each effort fails, leading to a close call with Frank and Will, when they decide that they're going to play by their own rules and take down that train on their own.

And that's all built on the brewing relationship between Will and Frank as they irritate each other and even grow to like each other. This is not deep stuff, but it's the kind of easy entertainment that was always in Tony Scott's blood.

And I loved it.

This is the first Tony Scott film I feel almost no resistance towards (the frightened wife and daughters back home and at...Hooters is a trope that could have been excised, but they don't take up much time in this fairly tight 95-minute long film). I didn't remember much about the film from my first viewing over a decade ago, so I was waiting for the third act stumbles that I had noted time and time again with Tony Scott films that I had started appreciating so well. However, they never manifested. It was just simple, B-movie storytelling told cleanly. And it works really well.

Props also need to be given to Scott for the filmmaking around the action scenes. It may seem redundant by this point, but Scott's style had degraded horribly through the 00s, especially with Domino, so seeing him cleanly film sustained action while finding new ways to keep things visually interesting was honestly refreshing. When the duo try to hook up to the speeding train the size of the Chrysler Building and it causes the rear car to break open slightly, sending grain in the air, it's just one of those things you do as a filmmaker to make another moment of peril just look different while providing another source of potential tension (we lose sight of Will because of the stuff for a moment).

So, I genuinely and greatly enjoyed this film. I think it was Tony Scott's best film. It's probably his least ambitious narratively, but that ends up being a positive attribute because he sticks the landing so well. I have no real complaints.

There's something off about this readaptation of the novel by John Godey. On the surface, it's a perfectly acceptable Tony Scott thriller with overactive camera work and good performances, but there's something missing in the writing by Brian Helgeland. Characters feel too thin, the thematic tissue connection them too underdeveloped, the push to make the main character too sympathetic. The thriller elements work decently enough, but all of the character stuff just feels thin and off.

The 1:23 car from Pelham station gets hijacked by Ryder (John Travolta) and placed in a strategic spot, safe from police snipers at the recommendation of former Metro employee Phil (Luis Guzman). Running the operational show for Metro is Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) who becomes the point man for the hostage negotiation. This is a setup for comparing personalities, situations, and backgrounds, and the movie does make some small effort at bringing the two together. However, I really think it's all undermined by how Helgeland, Scott, and Washington present Garber combined with Travolta's extreme performance as Ryder.

Garber was demoted on suspicion of taking a bribe on a trip to Japan to look at subway cars the MTA was looking to potentially purchase. He might or might not have done it, but he did it for the purest of pure reasons, and he has a wife (Aunjanue Ellis) he calls from time to time who just knows he's the most honest person in the world. This is in contrast to Ryder who's shooting people for money while flailing about and cursing like a sailor. Any sort of comparison of the two being beaten down by the system one is actively supporting through work and the other used to support before he went to jail. There's obviously supposed to be this effort to bring them together at a thematic level, to create this common cause level of thought between them, but they're drawn at such extremes that the intention gets lost in the flurry of John Travolta's extreme performance.

Where the film works is purely at the surface thriller level. I mean, it's not great at that. Scott is uncomfortable when things aren't going boom and has always shown a great impatience to get through quieter, tenser moments to rush towards action beats, like what defined the misses in The Fan. This is more accomplished than that previous thriller effort, but I wouldn't quite call it successful. I mean, he can't move to action beats for long stretches which largely works in his favor since the focus becomes the actors.

Now, I critique Travolta's performance as a piece of the puzzle that is the character-level of the storytelling, but that doesn't mean that it's bad. It's a bit outrageous and out there, but he does it fairly well. Washington doesn't have the most to do on his own, relegated to a nearly saintly role who has to stay in control all the time, but he can manage to make it compelling enough.

Of course, Scott can't limit his cinematic ambitions to quiet tension, even if it's never really quiet, to a whole film. He's got to start flipping cars at some point, and the race to get the money to the train is his opportunity. At orders from the mayor (James Gandolfini), the money has to be transported across town, in the middle of the day, with a police escort, and cars end up in crashes that make absolutely no sense but look kind of cool as they happen. Again, this movie doesn't really work on any deeper levels, but the surface is kind of fun.

Ryder has a secret motive regarding put options that requires such a huge swing in gold prices as to be laughable, but whatever. Movie. Booms. It's all fine.

Why I think I end up kind of cold on the film is because of that core contrast between the characters not working while the ending hinges on it so much. This emotional ending as two men who've been thrust into this situation have to make a life or death decision together, and I've never felt like Garber was anything other than an innocent bystander who just got pulled into it. The connection just didn't quite work, so it felt melodramatically empty in a weird way.

So, this is far from Scott's best work, but it functions well enough on some basic levels to be near his worst. I'm not the biggest fan of Helgeland as a writer, but he understands the basics well enough to deliver scripts that hit the basic points, and he was working from a good bit of source material anyway. So, this kind of feels like Scott fumbling. I feel like he did that a fair bit.

For the first two-thirds of this film from Tony Scott, I thought it was going to be his best film, and it wasn't even going to be very close. And then the final third just kind of became a typical action film, Tony Scott on auto-pilot. The writers, Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, insist that their script was tighter than what Scott actually filmed (undermining my idea that Scott never, ever wrote a thing on his movies), so I suspect that Scott just pushed the final act towards his own milieu, having worn out his patience on all this quiet, investigatory work that started things.

A car explodes on a ferry in New Orleans, killing over five-hundred people, and ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) starts investigating, quickly going off on a tangent because of a body meant to be one of the victims but found an hour before the explosion in the wrong direction of the tides. This is Claire (Paula Patton), a pretty young girl who lives in the city, missed her meeting with her father, and tried to sell a car the night before. Figuring her connection out and presenting it to the task force led by FBI agent Jack (Bruce Greenwood) and run by FBI special agent Paul (Val Kilmer).

All of this is told is surprisingly restrained style, especially after the stylistic bombast of Domino, feeling more like a high-budget CSI episode rather than a Tony Scott film, and this allows Scott the time and space to focus on his actors. I mean, this is a procedural with an eventual scifi skin, so there's not a whole lot of space for them to go. This isn't a deep drama, but it is a place where people like Washington can professionally do his job with few frills. Doug walks into the scene, does his work, and Washington sells it well.

The interesting scifi skin is that Paul heads a unit that's using an Einstein Rosen Bridge to look four days and six hours in the past. There's some thin covering of the actual reasons when the team talks to Doug, a narrative decision that feels thin since, watching a movie and not assuming this is the real world like Doug, the audience figures it out real fast. I'll admit to being amused by seeing the same description of wormholes delivered by Dr. Alexander Denny (Adam Goldberg) as in both Event Horizon and Interstellar, though.

So, the investigation continues with Doug following clues through the screen while questioning the limits of what the team is telling him that he's watching. It's a neat whodunit with this extra layer on top, and Doug falls in love with Claire. I mean, I get why the film does it. It's standard movie trope that cop will fall in love with woman being threatened, but there's this extra creepy element that the movie does touch on in amusing fashion where they're watching a woman without her knowing in her own home, without her consent and after she's already dead.

The stakes get escalated with a nifty chase as Doug has to follow the terrorist who planted the bomb in the past while driving in the present. It's a rather inventive way to make a chase, and it fits Scott's stylistic wheelhouse quite well.

I wouldn't say that the film falls apart after this, though, but it just becomes...more normal. It becomes Scott pursuing his action inclinations as Doug makes a dangerous trip and has to face down the villain in a new circumstance. The ideas of time travel, that, admittedly, never felt like much more than hand-wavey nonsense used to establish a new way to tell a police procedural, largely just get forgotten. This ain't Looper. Instead, it's Tony Scott casting aside all concern for science-fiction mechanics in favor of guns, car chases, and a romance that never quite works.

So, the first two thirds may not be perfect, but it's actually really solid and quite well done. It's Scott taking the criticisms he faced on his previous film and actually trying to course correct while doing it quite well. I mean, it was never groundbreaking, really just a combination of police procedural and temporal mechanics that seemed to make sense, anchored by a solid performance from Washington and a good supporting cast. When Jim Caviezel comes in later, he gives what is the most interesting performance as well, but he also marks the stylistic changing point, moving from temporal police procedural to action movie.

And that's not to imply that the action movie stuff of the final third is bad. It's perfectly fine. Scott pulling back on his excesses works well. It's actually pretty clear what's happening, and things move clearly, all built on the characters established in the better first two-thirds.

So, what seemed like it could have been Scott's best work ends up being pretty good. Near the top, but there are others where things come together slightly better. Still, it's pretty good stuff.

This is Tony Scott's entry into the BMW web series, Beat the Devil, across an entire 2 hours of film. I found it a headache in 8-minute form. I find it just as much a headache at feature length. Bearing the obvious marks of a screenplay straining for any reason to exist, Domino is an overlong drag through stylistic excess with nothing at its core. If there is an attempt at something being the film's center, it's undone by the film's flippant attitude towards audience involvement as well. This is something of a crash and burn scenario for Tony Scott.

Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), the daughter of Laurence Harvey, star of The Manchurian Candidate, leaves her prim life of boarding schools, modeling, and a life in the Beverly Hills to become a bounty hunter. Why? Well, because she likes danger. Also, there's something about a coin flip and fate that comes back a few times but doesn't make a whole lot of sense. She is supposedly the core of this film. It's named after her. She's in most of the scenes. We even get a quick little cameo from the real Domino Harvey during the credits. Does she have an arc? Does she drive the plot? Does she do anything a protagonist does except be cast by the biggest star at the time?

Nope. She's pretty much an empty vessel through which plot runs...sometimes. What is the plot? Well, it actually revolves around Lateesha (Mo'Nique), one of the three mistresses to Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo), a bail bondsman who hires Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez) as bounty hunters (who also hire Domino pretty much exclusively because she's hot). Lateesha has the main subplot in the film as America's youngest grandmother who goes on Jerry Springer to advocate for increased racial categorization in government, and has a grandchild who is suffering from an illness that will require a $300,000 surgery. At the end of their ropes, Claremont (who is implied to be Lateesha's baby-daddy which means he was having sex with a minor) decides to use his armored car service to perform an inside job on $10 million being sent from a casino in Vegas that's secretly controlled by the Cigliutti crime family, headed by Anthony (Stanley Kamel). Domino is involved in none of this.

Where Domino is involved is in the attempt to cleanup the aftermath of the planned heist. Claremont sends Ed and his three lackeys, including Alf (Riz Abbasi), their driver, to pick up the four framed suspects without their knowledge that these aren't the real suspects. Where Domino has some involvement in all of this is that she figures out that the four aren't the real suspects...far too late to matter. Things devolve with miscommunications, the FBI controlling some information, and we get a Mexican standoff in Vegas where just about everyone dies...which is quickly followed up by Domino challenging the audience to not believe any of it because she doesn't care.

And ultimately, that just kind of irritated me. This was obviously not real. If I were to look it up, I would assume that roughly 5% of the movie was real, and only mostly in the broadest of broad strokes that Domino Harvey became a bounty hunter, that she chased people down, and that she had a reality TV show for some limited amount of time. Though, looking it up, even the reality TV bit seems made up. So, it's deeply fake, it never feels close to real (helped none at all by Scott's stylistic excesses), and the movie has this attitude that becomes explicit through voiceover about how it all could be, but screw you if you don't believe it. It's...weird.

So, the script is just...wrong. It doesn't actually have Domino as its protagonist despite her supposedly being the main character, and the plot itself is so fractured, devolving into so many different little subplots that there's precious little to latch onto for the audience to go from beginning to end. And then you throw Scott's embrace of visual chaos.

Scott knows how to make movies. He can get actors to emote well and appropriately. He can film a scene so that it's obvious what's actually going on. He just simply chooses not to here. Instead of just allowing scenes to play out, he cuts at such intensity within scenes and between them that it's honestly just kind of hard to figure out what's basically going on within any given moment. And, the flashes are almost headache inducing. When these techniques are used sparingly, like in moments of high emotion more along the lines of the first half of Man on Fire, then they can have purpose and even some level of effect. When it's constant and nonstop, it's deadening. Everything is told at this heightened level, and when the script is a mess underneath, it all just collapses under its own weight.

This is something of a disaster from Tony Scott. An artist who simply didn't understand the limits of his own ability, his own deficiencies, and who pushed as hard as he could in an experimental direction without a stronger hand to help improve him where possible. I had been thinking that his career had improved a good bit when he started producing his own films, but this makes me wonder if, producing through Scott Free with his brother, Ridley was a guiding hand on some of these films. It seems obvious that there's some guiding hand missing here that was evident for several years before.

This is the most sedate, focused, and emotionally resonant film that Tony Scott probably ever made. It's also got those same hallmarks that have held back most of Scott's other better efforts: namely some issues in the backend of the script that he shot without, seeming, much question. It kind of descends into revenge porn while leaving its emotional resonance behind until it tries to grasp at it in the final moments once more. It's a disconnect that takes what should have been Scott elevating material above pulpiness into just luxuriating in it.

John Creasy (Denzel Washington) is a drunk who has extensive experience in counter-insurgency tactics through his sixteen year military career. Brought to Mexico by his friend Rayburn (Christopher Walken), he takes on the job of bodyguard for Pita (Dakota Fanning), the daughter of a Mexican business man, Ramos (Marc Anthony), and his wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell), making it clear that they're getting a discount bodyguard because of his alcoholism. The first third of the film is really dedicated to Creasy as a character, especially the burgeoning father-daughter-like relationship between him and the young Pita. It's a surprisingly well-done series of scenes as she tries to get close, he pushes back, he decides he can help her win her swim meet by getting her used to the sound of a gun (foreshadowing) to start the race better. Real time is spent on this. It's not one scene and done, it's a solid 40 minutes or so, and it's where the film establishes all of its goodwill.

And that hinges a lot on its actors. Through all of my ups and downs with Scott, I've consistently noted that he's a quality actor's director, getting good performances from his movie star casts over the previous twenty years, and matching him up with Denzel Washington, one of the best of the Hollywood movie stars from an acting perspective, was always a good sign. Washington really brings that pathos and charisma to Creasy, forming the underlying necessary emotional resonance through his growth as a character within the context of his relationship with Pita to make it all work.

The film's second act is really dedicated to the inevitable kidnapping of Pita by a band of powerful men called La Hermandad, mostly made up of corrupt policemen in Mexico, starting with Creasy getting shot. One of the interesting things about this script is its embrace of the complexity of living and navigating a corrupt judicial and legal system where everyone is against you, giving it that depth of corruption and tactile feel that grounds it well in a single time and place. This is offset by the seemingly necessary inclusion of the good reporter, Mariana (Rachel Ticotin), almost always an addition that feels off (massively corrupt and powerful organizations not getting control of media outlets? That's just nonsense). At best, she's a plot device to get Creasy information that he might otherwise not be able to get...except that they established Rayburn already who could have done it. Whatever.

So, the exchange goes bad (why ends up a complicated mess that the film explains poorly, but that's not for a while), and Pita dies, leaving Creasy alone as the one who can deliver the justice necessary in a corrupt system. And, this is where the film kind of disconnects for me. I think it's the absence of a ticking clock mechanism. There's nothing that Creasy is moving against in terms of what could be limiting him. Not only does he become something like a ghost and unkillable movie thing rather than a broken man trying to find redemption through terrible violence, the stakes seem somehow depressed because he's just kind of taking his time going from one target to the next. I feel like there should have been something he was moving against, like the guy behind it all, The Voice, has decided that he's made enough money and is going to disappear. So, Creasy needs to move faster to get to him before he's completely out of reach, sort of thing.

And that lack of a contrast to the violence ends up just feeling like Scott is reveling in the violence. Sure, there's some thin fun to be had with Creasy cutting the fingers off and torturing those who had a part in the kidnapping, but without something else driving him forward, it ends up feeling kind of empty. The point isn't to get anything, but to wallow in the torture. This is where the movie's first act becomes a real asset because, despite having almost completely disconnected from it, that backing is still present, giving a patina of emotional cover to what's going on.

And then the film has its final ten minutes that is supposed to reestablish that connection, and I found it to be more manipulation than fulfilment. I didn't buy into it, essentially, which prevented me from really investing in the pathos that the finale held in store. It may just be a me thing. I dunno.

However, I don't want to undermine what is actually quite a good script by Brian Helgeland. The use of the gun in the swimming competition and its recall during the kidnapping, the use of scripture as an element of Creasy's character journey, and the core relationship between Creasy and Pita are all based in the script. That's solid stuff, and it makes me wonder whether the disconnect I feel in the back half of the film comes from the script or from Scott's influence in the edit.

So, I think the overall package is quite good. It might be Scott's best film. However, I just feel like something is missing in the back half that would give Creasy's actions more immediacy. Also, Scott's visual flare continues to become a headache in increasing intensity, flashing needlessly in sections but, thankfully, not all the time.

I wanted to like this more than I did. I really did want to. However, the combination of its odd structure, overabundance of unnecessary exposition, and stretching beyond thin of its conceit to justify its flashbacks just held be back. There were good ideas here. There's quality production design, its stars are quite good in their roles, and it looks quite good (when Tony Scott can calm himself down, of course), but ultimately it's just hobbled by a deeply troubled script that really needed another few passes. However, Tony Scott was not the man to demand rewrites of problematic scripts.

On his last day of employment at he CIA, Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) is called into a meeting of a taskforce with the subject being a former protégé of his, Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt). Bishop led an unsanctioned mission into a Chinese prison to rescue someone, got caught, and is now at the center of an international incident between the Chinese and American governments on the eve of George HW Bush's visit to China. This task force, most notably populated by Deputy Director of Operations Harker (Stephen Dillane) is being cagey with Muir about why they need his information, information that should be in files but which Muir hides with the help of his secretary Gladys (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). This leads to the necessity of Muir telling the story of his recruitment, training, and eventual falling out with Bishop.

The oddness of the film's structure is that it's actually four acts. Four act structures are far from impossible to pull off, but they're not the common currency of Hollywood blockbusters. The first act is, effectively, the tale of how Muir and Bishop met in Vietnam. The way this should probably work is a main focus on establishing the relationship between the two men, setting a groundwork that the rest of the film will build on in order to create a sense of emotional attachment and, eventually, pathos by the end. However, the main focus is on the mission in Vietnam that brought them together: Muir, working in the CIA, needing a sniper to assassinate a Laotian general and recruiting Bishop to do it. This being a Scott film, there's more emphasis on the action set piece of the sniper shot (of course Scott turned a sniper shot into an action sequence instead of something quiet and tense) than on the two men.

The second act deals with Muir recruiting Bishop for the CIA several years later while Bishop is stationed in Germany, teaching him the tradecraft, most notably using him in a feint of an operation to out a spy in the American embassy. The business of the feint ends up the focus, again, however, this ends up the best integrated element of the first three acts because the actions and fallout are all feeding what central idea the film has: that spycraft is deadening to the soul, that it requires the cutting off of human emotion, and the treating of other people as no more than disposable elements of a plot. It's the John le Carre view of espionage through a Tony Scott lens.

The third act was where I just kind of lost all interest. We're about halfway through this film, and the details of the plot within the third act become the focus. Mostly, it's about the attachment Bishop develops with an aid worker, Elizabeth (Catherine McCormack), in Beirut while Bishop is there to establish the footing for the assassination of a Hezbollah general who should show up at some point to receive a physical from his cousin, Dr. Ahmed (Amidou) whom Elizabeth works for. Introducing Elizabeth here isn't the problem, it's the weight of the plot's complexity, all of which is being introduced more than halfway through the film. There's even a voiceover exposition dump at about the two-thirds mark of the whole movie. Seriously, the complexity of the overlapping plots of Bishop's efforts to get Dr. Ahmed to apply a slow-acting poison to his stethoscope against the over-eager actions of the local militia are just unnecessary. Heck, Bishop is already distancing himself from Muir at the end of the German episode, so we don't need a big action spectacle to get him over the point where he leaves Bishop, not that they ever felt that close anyway.

And then we have to talk about the flashback structure. The whole conceit is that the taskforce is working against time, eagerly bringing in Muir to tell them what he knows because Bishop only has 24 hours before the Chinese will execute him (it's a weird ticking clock scenario that never feels like more than supposition, but whatever), but the taskforce is looking for reasons to...not save Bishop. This literally makes no sense. If that's what they want, let Muir go, never let him in the room, escort him out of the building since it's his last day, and let the Chinese process work. Why go through this reminiscing? Most of what he ends up revealing, like the identity of the person Bishop was trying to save from the prison, they know already. It's a conceit that honestly doesn't make sense.

However, for all my complaining, the movie isn't a complete drag. I have constant issues with its narrative from a wholistic perspective, but Redford, Pitt, and Dillane are all quite good. The movement of things within each act is decently well done, the best being the German episode (the Beirut episode being just frustration on stilts mostly because of its placement in the overall narrative), and Scott knows how to film well. However, his stylistic excesses, which he mostly keeps in check for the majority of the film's running time, are getting headache inducing. The jumps to black and white stills to show the status of the ticking clock are mostly annoying and feel like they're there for the lowest common denominator, but his embrace of digital color timing, especially to give Vietnam a different look, are interesting. It's much better than the headache that is his short film "Beat the Devil" for BMW, though.

So, it feels like Scott trying to, again, elevate his own material, but he couldn't judge scripts or improve them, and his stylistic excesses were beginning to work against him. He still has qualities to recommend his work, but this script is simply too filled with issues that need to be worked out on the page before pre-production ever got close to beginning.

This might be the most perfect alignment of a script and Tony Scott's filming style yet in his career. The script itself isn't perfect, but the action-thriller elements present mesh very well with Tony Scott's hyperactive visual stylings (where Tony Scott ends and Michael Bay begins at this point in the 90s feels like an academic question to a certain degree) work quite well together. A story of surveillance, corruption, and the proper role of governmental powers balanced between different needs of the people, it never takes the ideas themselves more seriously than as elements in a plot, but one that has a surprisingly cogent sense of escalating tension.

An assistant director in the NSA, Reynolds (Jon Voight), is pushing Congressmen for a bill to get passed that would increase the agency's powers. When NY Representative Hammersley (Jason Robards), head of the key committee, remains resistant, Reynolds has him murdered. This gets accidentally recorded by a hidden camera designed to monitor ducks operated by Daniel (Jason Lee). He makes a copy, runs into an old buddy from Georgetown Law, Robert Dean (Will Smith), drops the device with the footage into his bag unsuspectingly, gets killed in traffic during a chase, and no one knows where the tape is.

The one interesting thing about the film's take on the surveillance state is something that the film never actually makes comment on, which is not necessarily a bad thing (it just makes me wonder if anyone involved noticed the irony): Reynolds sets up an operation to delve into the life of an American citizen to protect his own malfeasance and criminal activity. It's an abuse of power from the start, and no one within the organization questions it. His lackeys just go along with it without question. No one wonders if destroying an American citizen's life by bringing up a previous affair with another woman, Rachel (Lisa Bonet), something his wife, Carla (Regina King), already knew about but frays their relationship, inventing things about setting up shell companies for known gangsters, and getting him fired is within the proper scope of their work defending America from foreign threats. The film needs to understand this irony at some level, perhaps it's a bit more obvious in the script and a lot of it got shaved out through filming and the edit. I dunno.

Anyway, what really works in this film is the escalating sense of tension and stakes through the opening hour and a half or so as Reynolds sets his team onto Dean. Because this is a Tony Scott film, there are chases dotted throughout, and while excessive in style (Scott's visuals are beginning to enter a bit overdone by the late 90s), they feel justified narratively enough so that they don't completely stick out. Reynolds' men chasing down Dean as he tries to meet a secret contact, Brill (Gene Hackman), tracking him as he sheds six trackers as he goes, even jumping out of a hotel window, it all works with Scott's hyperactive style and within the narrative as well. And the stakes keep escalating even to the point of a side character dying at nefarious hands. It's not a host of explosions and gunfire. It's running and jumping with the threat of gunfire, not buildings blowing up (though, one does, but only after a while).

The paranoid aspect obviously recalls Hackman's previous role as Harry Caul in Coppola's The Conversation. This is where the film feels the most timely, even more than twenty years after its release, which is an unusual positive quality for a film after a couple of decades. Timely movies rarely age that well, but since the whole issue of privacy within the modern world has simply gotten worse, this techno-thriller balances this line between quaint (hardly any mention of the internet, most spying happening through phone records) but also ahead of its time (Brill's talk of recorded phone calls). It's interesting how it manages to maintain that balance.

Where I don't love the film is in its final half-hour when Scott and his writer David Marconi give us the kind of underdog wins ending that mass audiences want. The problem I have is that we have moved from something that feels grounded in its own stylized way into something that feels like fantasy, giving us the unrealistic ending. It also hinges on Dean coming back to the mobster he's involved with in his day job as a labor lawyer, Pintero (Tom Sizemore), and setting up a situation where both sides think they want what the other has, no one speaks clearly enough about the issue at hand to clear it up in order for the situation to play out, and then Mexican standoff because 90s.

I do appreciate how all the effort early to establish Pintero does actually pay off in some way, and it's well filmed and functions well enough as thriller mechanics, but this goes into the pile of films by Tony Scott where there could be an interesting exploration of a theme through dramatics that gets undercut by the ending because action.

So, it's actually pretty solid as an action-thriller. It's pretty well-written. Tony Scott's increasingly frenetic visual stylings fit well with the material. It almost has something on its mind. It's not great cinema, but it's probably Tony Scott's best movie up to this point.

I'm not entirely sure if this would be a good film from the same script directed by someone else, but I think I can say for sure that Tony Scott was exactly the wrong director to bring this script to screen. The script has its own problems, for sure, but Scott was never a guy for building tension over extended periods of screentime, and that's exactly what this script needed. It's essentially The King of Comedy in the sports world, made all the more obvious by the casting of Robert de Niro in a very similar role as to what he had in Scorsese's film, and that requires a quieter, more subtle touch than Scott's aggressive edging towards cool action cinema. Essentially, so much of this film, while perhaps questionably written at best, is filmed wrong.

Gil (de Niro) is a knife salesman, the son of the firm's founder who has since passed, and on a downslope. He's divorced with a son, Richie (Andrew Ferchland), while his ex-wife, Ellen (Patti D'Arbanville), barely tolerates his existence. The only thing that really seems to give him joy is Giants baseball and the prospect of a winning season behind the newly acquired Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes) on a $40 million contract from the Braves. Representing the skeptical side of things is the radio host Jewel Stern (Ellen Barkin). Now, the opening half hour or so is probably the film's strongest. It's when Scott has the least excuse for stylistic flourishes because the opening is about introducing characters and situations, not clashing them against each other.

It's here where we get a sense of Gil as a man barely clinging to sanity, how he could become attached to a superstar baseball player he's never met (getting to exchange a few words on the phone over the radio show has an effect), and how Rayburn has his own doubts about being worth the money. It's not a great opening, the film honestly just taking on too much, in particular Rayburn's son Sean (Brandon Hammond) who really is no more than a plot device for the final act, the low point being Rayburn visiting a dying child in a hospital and promising a home run (the film is not absent its baseball cliches).

Where the script has some interesting things is that both Gil and Rayburn enter their own independent spirals. Gil gets fired, leaves Richie at the opening day game so he can go across town in the middle of it for a sales call, greatly angering his ex-wife in the process and having a restraining order placed on him. Rayburn gets injured during a flyball catch, colliding with the left fielder Primo (Benicio del Toro) who wears Rayburn's lucky number 11 and won't give it up, leading to Rayburn entering a batting slump. The problem is the edit is pretty much pure chaos, and it seems like a good part of this section was created in the edit, especially a sequence with Gil at Candlestick Park that obviously includes footage from three games (the pitcher wears St. Louis reds, the catcher wears Colorado purples, and Gil's footage seems to come from at least two games based on his stubble).

Where Scott fails is in the fact that he's not a tension-focused filmmaker. He's an action filmmaker, so he doesn't know how to hold quiet moments and extend them out as threats become palpable. He speeds through those to get to people swinging at each other in any way possible. So, the descent of Gil into madness is gleaned over with greater focus on him showing up to a hotel where the team is staying to confront Primo about giving up the number 11 to Rayburn to stop his skid. The actual moment of Gil showing up in a sauna feels abbreviated and gets cut short, only to come back to it a moment later to show how it resolved in action-terms. It's just not uncomfortable enough, tense enough, or shocking enough to actually work like it should, like Scorsese could make happen with Jerry Lewis just standing up from a chair.

Where I think the film just simply falls apart is in its final act with Gil finding a way to get close to Rayburn and that kid of his becomes the plot device that he was always meant to be. It all feels fake and wrong and amped up without the necessarily built tension from the beginning to really sell the threat. On top of all of this, Scott seems to have absolutely no feel for the game of baseball, and any footage from a game feels like an effort to make the game an action scene. Baseball is a game of tension, one where players and the spectators wait expectantly for something to happen at predictable intervals. It's not an action movie, and it's weird that Daniel Stern made a better baseball movie in Rookie of the Year than Tony Scott did here, but Stern actually likes baseball. I'm pretty sure that Scott didn't.

So, it's an overwrought thriller that's short on thrills, absent of tension, and filmed like an action movie. The script underneath it all has its own issues, but Tony Scott was not the man to work through them. He just exacerbated the situation by filming it wrong.

That's not to say that the film is completely worthless. De Niro and Snipes give fine performances. It looks good (Scott's penchant for filming in rain is well-used here). The action beats, while inappropriate for the story overall, are decent. However, it's really just a series of small pieces that don't contribute well to the whole which has been mismanaged rather fully by the man in charge.

Going into this run of Tony Scott films, I wanted Crimson Tide to be my favorite. I don't really know why beyond a certain affection for submarine movies in general. I'd seen it once before, remembered little about it, but felt like it could be the Tony Scott film that I got the most out of. Well, I did enjoy the film. It's slick and fun and tense, but it's also kind of inherently silly in a way that undermines it at key points all while it's pretty obvious that Don Simpson was looking at this as a way to legitimize himself after he'd been knocked back with the less than stellar box office returns of Days of Thunder. It's a weighty thriller unmade at its highest ambitions by the fact that it just doesn't quite feel real. Still, fun as it plays out.

Russia is going through turmoil as a separatist leader is leading an insurgency against the sitting federal government, rekindling the hot potential of war with the United States from the Cold War. In the middle of this is the US submarine, the Alabama, captained by Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman), an old seadog who has actually seen combat. Into his family of a crew he invites a new Executive Officer, Lt. Commander Hunter (Denzel Washington), after his previous XO is sidelined with appendicitis. It's obvious from the start that the two will butt heads, Ramsey dismissively noting Hunter's year at Harvard, a divide that becomes apparent in an early conversation on ship about the use of nuclear weapons in WWII.

You see, this conversation is kind of ground zero for why I can't actually take this film seriously. There's a talk about how there is a debate about the use of nuclear weapons to end WWII, but the talk is razor-thin and never actually goes into the pros or cons of the use in that specific case. It's just sitting there as this gauzy cautionary tale, with no specifics, about how the use of nuclear weapons can be world-ending. It's like it was written by someone who knows that there is a debate about the use of nuclear weapons but can't remember what either side actually says. In a film that's nominally about the use of nuclear weapons and the moral weight that such a decision carries, it's an odd way to try and ground your tale with a moral foundation.

But, it's obvious that Scott and his writer, Michael Schiffer, are mostly just interested in the situation as a great way to set up the pressure cooker that is dozens of men trapped in a metal tube in the middle of the ocean with death pressing up against the hull in every direction. Patrolling waters near the Eastern edges of Russia, namely a point near the Chinese and North Korean borders where a dispute over Russian nuclear silos is heating up, the Alabama, gets into conflict with a Russian sub that leaves its radio broken having received on message telling it to launch its ICBMs at the silos while a second message had been cut off in the middle of transmission that could say anything.

So, this is the source of the conflict. New XO and established Captain get into a head butting match about whether to follow the first order or to try and reestablish contact with their command to see what the second order is. On the surface, this is a great source of tension that drives everything, and what might be the film's saving grace is Tony Scott's slick, propulsive style that keeps things moving with new events (two sub attacks) along with the quality performances from everyone involved, most notably our two leads. However, it's ultimately kind of silly, especially considering the ticking clock, which takes what would be this great conflict of personalities like Run Silent, Run Deep, and instead leaves it as a facile piece of drama. I don't mind the facile drama on display. It's fun, but it's still facile.

You see, the problem is how the ticking clock works out. They have sixty minutes until the Russian separatists supposedly launch, but they're launch capable more than twenty minutes before that. Even if there is this conflict between the orders, why does Ramsey act like there's no way to wait a few minutes while the radio is being fixed until the last possible moment? It's obvious, from Hackman's performance, that he takes the idea of launching nuclear weapons as to be something of great weight and responsibility, but his actions are so gung-ho on the other hand. It's a contrast that the film doesn't seem to understand is there, especially late in the film when Ramsey does exactly that, making all of the dramatics of the previous forty minutes or so feel pointless.

However, as I said, those dramatics are fun. They're just thin. Ramsey desperately wants to follow the first order, so when Hunter declines, he tries to have Hunter removed. Hunter uses that as an excuse to remove Ramsey from his command. There's the second appearance of the enemy sub, torpedoes exchanged, pressure on the hull, a mutiny to the supposed mutiny as the officers split their loyalties. It really is helped by the fact that it's all cut so fast together while the actors give it their all (Scott really was good at getting performances from his actors).

And yet, I just wanted more. I wanted these professional sailors to act more professional, to find the tension through adults facing a terrible situation in the limits of their own experience. However, the film trends more towards irrational shouting from people who don't really feel like they belong in command at all. I mean, when Ramsey points a gun at Lieutenant Ince's (Viggo Mortenson) head, it's just too far, you know?

So, it's fun, but its one foot in realism betrays the rest of the film which isn't terribly realistic. I have a real soft-spot for submarine movies, pressure cookers for drama, and this does deliver that all on the backs of two high quality actors while the director speeds through everything in his own high-octane style. It's a good time at the movies, but it's just no The Hunt for Red October.

This feels like a very unpolished Quentin Tarantino script, which I'm pretty sure it is. Part of an epic writing effort by Tarantino and Roger Avery while they were still working in that video store, the first half became Natural Born Killers while the second became True Romance. It has these hallmarks of a rambling script, a series of ideas sort of connected to each other but without the kind of attention to story cohesiveness that Tarantino would bring to his own directed projects. Bought by the Weinstein Brothers who hired Tony Scott to direct, it's a stylish, quasi-Tarantino jaunt through pop-culture references, gangsterism, Hollywood satire, stylish violence, and, yes, romance. Its pastiche qualities impede my enjoyment a bit, but it's still a fun ride while it lasts.

Clarence (Christian Slater) is a loner, working at a comic book store who loves asking women out to Sonny Chiba triple features on dates. Alone while in such a triple feature, Alabama (Patricia Arquette), runs into him, gets him to invite her to pie afterwards, and they go back to his place where they discover that they have very quickly fallen in love. She is, of course, a call girl sent by his boss to lighten his mood on his birthday, but that doesn't diminish his love for her or her pixy-dream-girl status as the perfect girl for him. This opening half hour or so is the best of the film, focused on our two characters as they get to know each other, selling the titular romance despite Alabama's general unreality (too pretty, too well endowed, too innocent despite her profession, and too ready to fall into Clarence's preferred cinematic tastes).

What follows is really a kind of staccato series of events, connected only by the fact that Clarence and Alabama are in the middle of them. That's enough for a Tony Scott film, but characters having great scenes, like Drexl (Gary Oldman), Alabama's pimp and his faceoff with Clarence or Vincenzo (Christopher Walken) having a faceoff with Clarence's dad, Clifford (Dennis Hopper), to just simply disappear from the film completely is indicative of something of a fractured storytelling mechanic. It would be like Hans Landa never appearing again in Inglourious Basterds after his first scene. The plot device keeping it all whole, though, is the suitcase full of cocaine that Clarence accidentally takes from Drexl's pad.

And Clarence and Alabama going to LA to shack up with his actor wannabe friend, Dick (Michael Rapaport), to try and use his contacts (what few he has) to sell the large stash is entertaining. It just doesn't really seem connected to what came before all that strongly. Yes, it has the plot mechanics and characters to do it, but this doesn't feel like a flowing story but more like a series of episodes of television. I think that's why I don't embrace the film as much as many others. There's a disconnect from one major segment to the next that feels like something that should have been smoothed over in a rewrite.

That being said, those individual pieces are a fun combination of Tarantino characters and dialogue along with Tony Scott's style. Scott is a solid actor's director, and he gets good performances out of everyone, relying heavily, of course, on that quality dialogue from Tarantino. Scott's style is out of synch with Tarantino's, Scott preferring the action over the buildup (yes, Kill Bill Volume 1 exists, but so does Kill Bill Volume 2). He does the action well, even changing a scene to happen at an amusement park so he can film a roller coaster. He also brought in the Joel Silver comparison because of his bad experience on The Last Boy Scout with Saul Rubinek playing Lee Donowitz approximately like Silver behaved (providing the only real bite to the satirical side of the Hollywood view).

The actual movement of the plot never feels like its fated or inevitable, more randomly getting there, making it feel episodic in ways that singular stories shouldn't be. The Italian mobsters, for instance, largely fall out of the film for a large chunk only to suddenly show up at the finale, mixing up in the sting operation for the cocaine local police have set up. This is where having Walken come back might have helped tie everything together, especially with such a violent end for Clarence's father that gets completely forgotten by the film since Clarence simply never finds out what happened.

The heart of the film is that relationship between Clarence and Alabama, though, and once you get past the manic-pixy-dream-girl aspect of Alabama's character, it's actually a rather sweet, if somewhat twisted romance between the two. He's willing to go to any pulpy end to protect her, from confronting drug dealers to selling half a million dollars' worth of cocaine to a Hollywood producer while BSing his way through every meeting. The way that Alabama falls all over him while Clarence portrays cool is just endearing. There are obvious, heavy parallels to Terrence Malick's Badlands, the least of which could not be the use of Orff's tune by Hans Zimmer, rescored slightly as "You're So Cool", but it's been twisted in a way where the guy who kills is cool and justified, taking a poetic tragedy of Americana and making it into pop culture infused celebration of movie tropes.

I don't mind that, but it's just kind of interesting to note.

That being said, it's pretty good. It's an entertainment first and foremost, and it does it well. Tony Scott again works from a solid script, this time with far less tampering by his producers and stars, and he has the room and appropriate space to make his visual stylings fit reasonably well (I think this script as is might have worked better with Tarantino's focus on buildup rather than payoff, but that's just me). There's a sweet core, some solid action, and a lot of fun dialogue along the way. It's quality entertainment from Scott.

I don't want to say that Tony Scott directing a script by Shane Black is a match made in heaven, but it did lead to Tony Scott's best film since the start of his career directing feature films. The younger Scott is obviously someone who didn't have much in the way of an eye for the building blocks of a good screenplay, and he was sometimes just a pawn for the erratic cinematic ambitions of Don Simpson. However, combining with Black's solid approach to narrative, sarcastic wit in his dialogue, and deep appreciation of noir tropes meshes really well with Scott's slick stylings to make an entertaining neo-noir action spectacle in the lines of Lethal Weapon and Scott's later directorial work like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. This, of course, is an oversimplification since the script reportedly got butchered on set by both Joel Silver and Bruce Willis, but enough comes through that shows that Black and Scott were good together.

Something is rotten in the state of American football, and it's evident in an opening, rain-drenched sequence that shows a player for the LA Stallions so desperate to win the game after a threatening call from a gangster that he pulls a gun out while running down field, shoots those in his way, and kills himself. This ends up being more of a sidepiece of the action and never the focus of the ensuing mystery, which is honestly kind of an odd way to start a film: flashy but mostly disconnected.

Anyway, the actual story centers on private investigator Joe (Willis) getting the job to watch and protect the exotic dancer Cory (Halle Berry) who happens to be the girlfriend of former LA Stallions quarterback, Jimmy (Damon Waynes), kicked out of the league for gambling. When Cory is shot and murdered leaving work, Joe and Jimmy end up working together to figure out what's going on.

The core of this film is really that antagonistic friendship between the two main characters as they spout Shane Black insults back and forth at each other. Around them is built this noirish mystery where the end result is going to be a greedy figure out to increase his own wealth on the backs of those with less power. The central idea at that being the pursuit of legalized gambling (oh, how times have changed) for professional sports. The path that Joe and Jimmy have to take to figure that out goes from Cory's trashed apartment through the toughs run by Sheldon Marcone (Noble Willingham), the local crime boss, and touching on Joe's own past as a Secret Service agent who had saved the president's life as well as confronted a senator for abusing a woman, which got him kicked off the Service. This is countered with Jimmy's own past dealing with a dead wife and child, the physical demands of his job, and the spiral of drug addiction.

It's surprisingly heavy stuff that the movie only touches on before moving in a new direction, never lingering on these dark facts for too long before the pair are back to quipping and getting punched in the face. That sense of self-effacing humor gets wrapped up in the solid, if underdeveloped, character stories and wound around the twisty-turny plot that recalls things like The Big Sleep. The sense of threat and danger that Joe and Jimmy get into is strong with good bad guy turns from actors like Taylor Negron as one of Marcone's henchmen, a suitcase of explosives getting confused and misplaced, and even a solid excuse to have a character ride a horse onto the field of an ongoing football game.

This is very much a star vehicle for Willis and Wayans, giving them space to be charming and charismatic in that grungy, ironic, 90s sort of way, and Tony Scott is able to keep his camera calm enough in between his action scenes to allow space for his actors to do just that. I still think that Ridley has the greater talent between the two directorial brothers, but, matched with a solid script (no matter the interference from Silver and Willis), Scott knows enough to just let things on the page happen on the screen.

This is solid, 90s fun from Scott and Black, buoyed by fun performances, a good balance between comedy, drama, and action, and a smartly written, noir-inspired script. It's fairly easily Scott's best film so far in his career.

I've seen this once before, but it's been a while. I couldn't say why I had this middling feeling about it, but the first half of the film had me questioning that middling feeling from before. This was fun stuff from Scott, Simpson, and Bruckheimer. It really did seem like this rather ideal distillation of their obsession with male-dominated relationships and things that go vroom. And then...the second half started where it was supposed to get serious, and it just never recovered. They didn't commit to fun, they had to suddenly decide on dramatic import all while having no idea how to get to it.

Cole (Tom Cruise) is a new driver for a new NASCAR driving team owned by Tim (Randy Quaid) and run by Harry (Robert Duvall). The relationship between Cole and Harry starts fraught because Harry doesn't believe in Cole, Cole won't listen to Harry's advice from years managing racing teams, and they're racing efforts become defined by a brewing rivalry with the reigning champ, Rowdy (Michael Rooker). Cole keeps melting his tires, crashing into everything, and blowing out engines, and it's going to take Harry's guiding hand to get him on track.

This is not groundbreaking stuff, but it is a grounding for what is to come. In particular, though, it seems like a playground for Duvall to have a blast in. Cruise is trying to give Cole all of the dramatic weight his somewhat limited range will give, but Duvall is just there to laugh, smirk, and half-seriously provide wisdom to the younger kid. Imagine if Paul Newman hadn't taken anything seriously in The Color of Money. That attitude is a real advantage for the film because it provides a good amount of the sense of fun in the first half. Duvall simply lightens the mood in every scene he's in, and he's in a lot.

The first half also has something of its own dramatic structure, centered around the rivalry between Cole and Rowdy. It escalates as Cole gets better at driving, listening to Harry along the way, until a huge crash that injures them both with president of NASCAR, Big John (Fred Thompson), demanding that they learn to get along, allowing for another budding bromance in the film. Unfortunately, while these scenes of Cole and Rowdy getting to like each other through their own bits of off-track racing, this is also where the film really begins to fall apart. I mean, I really liked the first half of the film. It's probably the best thing that Tony Scott has made up to this point.

But then they introduce Dr. Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman). I'm not saying that Kidman is bad, or anything, or that she and her future husband, Cruise, don't have chemistry. It's just that Lewicki, at best, provides us with the concerned girl on the side of the track as our hero does dangerous things. She doesn't add much beyond rote character beats. And, with the rivalry over and bromance born between Cole and Rowdy, there's now no dramatic tension or stakes for the second half of the film. Que the entrance of Russ (Cary Elwes), introduced in a brief scene as Cole's backup when he's injured and then given prominent status as his rival because Tim hires him to lead a second team. All of the energies at rivalry in the first are discarded to be immediately replaced by someone else with less motivation around it all.

And then, we just get other random bits of things that should be increasing dramatic stakes like Rowdy not healing as well as Cole, needing money but not being able to race, so Cole decides to race for him because he got fired by Tim. It's a hodgepodge of reasons, and the movie doesn't even really stick to them. The whole reason Cole decides to enter the finale race at Daytona is because Rowdy talks him into it, but Rowdy is never seen or heard from again once the race starts. Even at the end, Cole doesn't have a moment to make note of the friend he just did this for.

Another issue I have with the film is the racing scenes. Don't get me wrong. They're thrillingly filmed, it's just that there's so many of them while they all tend to look kind of the same. There's only so much variation you can throw at an audience of cars going in circles, especially when every single race shown has a crash in it. This is a contrast to Top Gun where the finale had actual explosions while everything up to it was just cool aircraft doing cool things. There was an escalation there that Days of Thunder can't do because it did too many crashes too early. The only real difference becomes what sponsor is on Cole's car.

So, the first half is actually quite fun, doesn't take itself too seriously, and is just generally a high-adrenaline good time at the movies. The second half is a hodgepodge of dramatic nonsense that never connects and the movie doesn't actually care about. This is a real mixed bag.

This film seems to have some mild positivity amongst Tony Scott fans, the idea that it may not be one of his best films but that it is one of his underappreciated ones. I simply cannot agree. It's kind of terrible, a mixture of narrative, styles, and concerns that clash horribly all while having no real grasp of how to tell a character-based story of vengeance. I was alternatively bored and frustrated from beginning to end, finding nothing to cling to as a viewer beyond some mild application of Tony Scott's visual style which was butting up against Kevin Costner's insipidly dull approach to storytelling.

Based on a novella by Jim Harrison, it tells the story of how a naval aviator, Jay (Costner), retires from the military and decides that his first stop is going to be the local Mexican kingpin, Tibey (Anthony Quinn). I've tried to look, but I'm not sure if the novella has a reason why Jay and Tibey are friends at all. The age gap between them is so large and their backgrounds so unexplained in the film that I just could not shake the question about why they knew each other at all, much less why they seemed to have this deep friendship. I reached a certain point where I was saying to myself, "Assume you missed a line of dialogue and it makes sense," and yet I still couldn't make it make sense. It was too implied while the action on display was too shallow.

The action involves them playing tennis and talking about guns and hunting trips. This is stuff that obviously has connections to Harrison's source novella, but there's this lackadaisical pacing that combines poorly with the opaqueness of the background that just makes everything feel...dull. This seems to be the big Costner influence. He had reportedly wanted Revenge to be his directorial debut, but he was talked out of it and left with a producer credit. I seriously, seriously doubt that he didn't exert himself creatively over his director, Scott, which ends up making the final product feel like a weird space in between Scott's visual hyperactivity and Costner's placidly paced looks at men in the West.

Anyway, the central dramatic fulcrum in the film is Tibey's wife Miryea (Madeleine Stowe), much younger than Tibey, a trophy wife, and one that Tibey will not give a child to since he does not want to ruin her figure. It's unclear if they're physical with each other or not (the way they touch on screen is almost fatherly rather than like lovers), but Miryea is obviously unfulfilled and quickly finds that Jay is not like the others in Tibey's orbit leading to the inevitable affair.

The affair itself might be the best part of the film. It's not great, or anything, and I could think of ways to make it more impactful. However, it is the tale of two lonely people finding each other, and it's decent. It just takes...kind of forever to manifest, all the while we're getting this thin look at the relationship between Jay and Tibey as well as Mexican politics (Tibey owns the local political machine which comes to exactly nothing in the end except to show that he's ruthless when wronged in one scene). It's a purely functional romance mostly hindered by the fact that everything around it is trying to undermine it by taking up time. The Mexican politics that don't matter. The bromance that never feels real (which completely undoes the sense of betrayal).

Well, the titular revenge does get taken because of obvious movements in the plot, and the second half of the film is all about Jay trying to get back to Miryea who is forced into hiding. It's here where things just feel...off structurally. We get introduced to Texas (James Gammon) who takes Jay under his wing for a few scenes before dying due to injuries from an off screen fight. It takes something like fifteen minutes and has virtually no impact on the plot (there's something about Jay driving Texas' trailer that makes him identifiable, which is a very thin reed). And then there's the introduction of Amador (Miguel Ferrera) and his cousin Ignacio (John Leguizamo) who are there to help Jay in his final steps.

This trio of characters really does feel like the kind of flavoring you throw into a written work, especially something shorter like a novella, but having them pop up so late and be so prominent for so long to such limited effect is...odd in a movie. Especially a movie that's supposed to be a thriller building up towards a climax.

And that climax feels like a wet squib because it entirely relies on this feeling of betrayal between best buddies whose relationship never felt more than thin and never made sense anyway. Really, I don't think this film works at all. The romance, to some limited degree, but nothing else.

I was beginning to be on the Tony Scott train as he grew in prominence through the 80s, but Revenge is a healthy step backwards. I lay a good amount of blame at the feet of Costner, a man who, when he's a filmmaker instead of just an actor, I have little affinity for, finding him plodding and dull more than anything else. It's obvious that this was his passion project and that he took as much control as he could during production. Scott apparently was very fond of the film, so I assume that he liked the working relationship with Costner. I don't think it led to a good final product, though.

Plodding is not a word one should associate with a thriller. At least it looks pretty good.

Gosh, I wish I liked this more than I do. I mean, it's technically accomplished, there are some nice performances, it looks good, but the story is just so wane, the stakes so completely absent for so much of the running time, and the romance so generically dull that it seriously limits my enjoyment of what the film does well. It's just one of those films where the technical side of things is so high that it really does just come down to a balance between that and everything else that is just kind of...boring.

Pete Mitchell, Maverick, (Tom Cruise) is a hotshot naval aviator flying F-14s with his radar intercept officer, Nick, Goose, getting sent to Top Gun, the naval school for elite aviators to teach them dogfighting. The one piece of screenwriting that I actually appreciate in this film is how the beginning, where we watch the best aviator on the aircraft carrier, Cougar (John Stockwell), get so spooked by an encounter with potential enemy MiGs that he just outright quits. This gets repeated later in the film with Maverick which is the one bit of screenwriting structure that feels like it has some real thought in it. Because, otherwise, this is just Pete up against Tom Kazansky, Iceman, (Val Kilmer) about who's the best pilot at Top Gun.

When I say that there are no real stakes here, I really mean it. There's little sense that what they're doing is actually dangerous to them personally because none of the pilots are self-reflective enough to realize that they're doing incredibly dangerous things that can end their lives for roughly the first hour and twenty minutes of the film. Aside from the opening with Cougar, it's just a bunch of hotheads arguing about who's the best of the best. If it weren't matched with some incredible aerial footage of these aircraft dodging around each other, expertly edited together, it'd be a slog of boring machismo without any stakes.

And then there's the romance. Pete meets the civilian contractor, Charlotte (Kelly McGillis), and the two have this will they won't they relationship that's just honestly never that interesting. It's rote, at best, all the while we know that they'll get together in the end, that Pete's recklessness will temper just enough so that Charlotte can love him...except we don't even need to get that far. They' fall in love by the halfway point. I suppose it's a small mercy that she isn't one of those, "I'm always worried about losing you every time you go up," movie wives, but they've replaced that trope with almost nothing instead. It's just a dull as dishwater romance that eats up minutes and minutes of screentime.

Things get amplified during one of the training exercises when something terrible happens to a character, shaking Maverick's confidence to the point that he thinks of quitting the whole thing. Finally, there are stakes. This honestly would have worked better if the sense of danger were more palpable through the whole preceding couple of acts instead of just relying heavily on how awesome it is to fly fighter jets (which, admittedly, seems pretty awesome). And then it really becomes, can Maverick get over the fact that he's not really responsible for a tragedy and fly again? It's kind of an odd moment.

And the final act is actually, finally, a clearly defined dramatic situation where tensions are running high with some unnamed foreign power in the Indian Ocean, and there's going to be potential for violence during a rescue mission. Combine that with Maverick still trying to get over his mental blocks, and you've got the makings of a quality third act. It almost feels like an accident that it gets to that, to a third act that actually does kind of work, but there it is.

Also, the whole final moment with Iceman feels so unearned because the rivalry between the two was never that deep, just simplistic rivalry type stuff.

So...I'm mixed on the whole thing. The technical side of things is top notch. The third act works quite well while combining nicely with the prologue. However, everything in between is thin and dull, especially the romance. It's a rewrite away from giving the majority of the film stakes, diminishing the romance appropriately, and tying up the whole film with a stronger emotional throughline. Maybe a decades-later legacy sequel could do...all of those things?

Tony Scott emerges from his commercial period with his first feature film in over a decade, a vampire tale in two parts that's all style and almost no substance. I say almost no substance because there are a couple of small and interesting little twists on vampire lore going on here that do actually feed the overall film, but they're never explored in great detail and ultimately fall to the side in favor of blue-steel visuals of people inside with glasses while doves fly around. It's far from the worst thing in the world, but I really just get this sense that Scott was going for cool over anything else.

The first half of the film is centered around Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) and her fellow vampire and lover, John (David Bowie), our introduction to them being this weird sequence (weird mostly because of the sound design) where they pick up a pair of victims at a rave, take them back to their townhouse in New York, seduce them, and then feed. I really get this impression that there was this desire to elevate vampires by making them darker, sexier, and by never once saying the word vampire. Those always fail, in my mind, because, ultimately, you're just dealing with vampires while acting like you're being coy about it. The coyness falls flat, and you're just left with self-importance around something kind of silly. Importance comes from character, and characterization isn't that strong here.

The first half, though, is the more interesting of the two because it's where the characterization is strongest, that falling on the shoulders of John. The twist on vampire lore here is that Miriam is something like the original vampire, and whenever she turns someone else, they reach a point where they suddenly and rapidly age. Youth forever, until some time in the future when you will become a desiccated corpse, still living and housed in coffins in Miriam's attic as she can't bring herself to actually kill them because she loves them so much. Watching Bowie, the superstar known for his perpetual sense of youth, suddenly age, desperately clinging to it by visiting a doctor specializing in aging, Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), is fascinating. It's mostly a stylish exercise as Bowie gets in increasingly claustrophobic makeup over a short amount of time, but Bowie can actually provide the moments with some form of pathos as he realizes that nothing will change his fate. The problem narratively is that he seems to expect this researcher to have an answer to his problem as he decays within hours.

The second half is where the film kind of loses me a bit. The narrative elements, as simplistic as they had been, kind of just get dumber and more rote within vampire lore while Scott continues to amp up his stylistic flourishes. Essentially, Miriam needs a new familiar (or not since they turn vampire), and she immediately chooses Sarah. Why? I dunno. Because she just showed up at her door, is reasonably attractive, and Miriam is so needy that she'll just grab the next person who comes along? We don't get to know much about Miriam despite spending so much of the movie with her, she's mostly smoky, French stares at people, so it could be that. The movie provides nothing to actually substantiate it, though.

And the final act is this moody extended bit where Sarah's boyfriend, Tom (Cliff de Young), goes looking for her while Sarah deals with the fact that she's now a monster, but only in the most oblique of ways. And there's blood and dust and stuff that fills the screen in slow motion. I mean, if I cared about...anyone in this film the final bits of stylistic flexing from the young Tony Scott might mean something, but the movie has been nothing but stylistic flexing from him up to that point.

So, I like the variations on the vampire lore. They provide some interesting grounding for the film to go in a new direction with a focus on character. The movie mostly wastes that potential, though, with largely empty characters that need to be propped up entirely by the actors, only Bowie really being up for it, and we're left with a lot of steel-blue visuals of people inside with sunglasses at night. I suppose I should also give props to the moment that John kills the young girl that he and Miriam have been teaching the viola to for a year because it's a nice moment of desperation from him, but the mixing of vampire lore, while kind of interesting, is also incomplete. It's hard to know if he thinks that the act will reverse his plight or if he's just got that eponymous hunger in his final moments. I dunno.

I mean, I've seen far worse, but this is kind of a muddle to get through with nothing tangible to latch onto as an audience. It kind of reminds me of the later Underworld, throwing anything at the wall in terms of lore, upping style, and just kind of forgetting how stories get told.

Is it even done to talk about Tony Scott's first film? He made Loving Memory 13 years before The Hunger with BFI money (reportedly some Albert Finney money as well), it was shown at Cannes, and then the younger Scott didn't direct a film for more than a decade when he came out with fairly different material. At only 50 minutes in length, it's a curious mood piece and not much else, and I was mostly just kind of bored.

A young man (David Pugh) is riding his bicycle around the rural part of Northern York when he's accidentally hit by a car driven by Ambrose (Roy Evans) and his sister (Rosamund Greenwood). He's immediately killed in the impact, and Ambrose and his sister pack him up in the car and take him to their remote house.

The next forty minutes or so is Ambrose's sister talking sweetly and kindly to the corpse of the young man, cleaning him up, changing his clothes, and talking about James, a young man who may have been their son (honestly, it's not clear at all). It happens at the same time that Ambrose is out gathering wood using his mining truck (the mine never really has any importance other than some regional flavor, I think), and setting up some small explosions for his mine.

The only real material thing that happens across this half-hour is a breeding sense of unease as Ambrose's sister keeps talking in that nice, old lady from the North sort of way, steadily revealing their past in cryptic terms. Really, I'm not sure if James was their kid or their brother. Anyway, none of the detail that does get through is terribly interesting, and nothing of terrible interest actually happens. The only real positive it has for it is that steady progression of tone towards unease. It's a small win, but it's still a win.

Maybe if the young man were still alive but slowly dying it might have worked a bit better, but him already being dead places any actual tension purely on Ambrose and his sister potentially getting caught, which is never a thing in the film. There's no shot of neighbors wondering what's going on. There's no moment where a police officer comes by with information about a car matching their description having been involved in an accident. It's just this steady, quiet conversation between Ambrose's sister and a dead man where the dead man says nothing.

And, it's just not very much to latch onto. There's no great twist coming, even, to recast everything. It's really just kind of a quiet muddle with no real point and nothing to grip the audience beyond this light sense of steadily growing unease. That's not nothing, but it's also not a whole lot.

Maybe if it were more...stylish?

A Hollywood myth for decades, Orson Welles' final film was in legal limbo because of its funding mechanism (the brother-in-law to the deposed Shah of Iran), typical Welles family in-fighting (his daughter Beatrice and mistress Oja Kodar were regularly at odds regarding what to do with the different pieces of different projects that they had claim to, though Oja got most of it), and the fact that no one really knew what to do with the footage (even people like George Lucas couldn't make heads or tales of it). Peter Bogdanovich, a Welles acolyte and co-star in this production, tried for years to get the funding to finish it, but it wasn't until Netflix decided it wanted some real clout (it still hasn't won a Best Picture Oscar, though Apple has) that the funding came together, most notably through a handful of famous directors like Frank Darabont and Wes Anderson. Following notes and recollections of people like Bogdanovich, they came up with something that could have come close to a finished product that Welles would have signed off on, though it's impossible to tell.

The story is of the final day, mostly the party at night, of the life of the famous Hollywood director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston), information given in the opening voiceover by Bogdanovich so it's not much of a spoiler. Huston effectively just plays himself (I'm not sure he was capable of anything else, he plays himself in Chinatown), but he's got Orson Welles-like problems around funding of films, fighting with studio executives, and general bankruptcy (in Filming The Trial, Welles talks about how he never made any money making movies, he just lost money). The production of the film within the film (also titled The Other Side of the Wind) is in serious danger for two main reasons. The first is that Hannaford's male star, John Dale (Bob Random), has walked off the set. The second is that Hannaford's loyal friend, Billy (Norman Foster), has shown the first two reels in their current state to Max David (Geoffrey Land) who hates what he sees. He's not going to fund them anymore, and come Monday morning, the whole thing is going to be shut down.

However, it's not cleanly presented. Welles chose a discordant filming style probably in no small part because he knew that he was going to be filming it in pieces all over the place. The in-film context of that style is that Hannaford is surrounded by acolytes, chief among them being Brooks Otterlake (Bogdanovich), who are almost all documenting the day, along with some press, chief among them being Juliette Rich (Susan Strasberg). The verisimilitude of the filming doesn't really hold together in all moments, but it does provide the context for the jump from different film qualities and even colors.

What the film does is try to tell the story of the collapse of the production of the film within the film through the footage of the film while the party limps along, acolytes trying to tell Hannaford's story and dig into his past any more than they already can. Essentially, Hannaford has been left behind by the times, his new effort is an empty exercise in style, and his inner circle is trying to get Otterlake to front them a large amount of cash (there's talk of needing $40 million), something Otterlake conceivably could do because he's the son of a wealthy timber man in Canada. However, it's all doomed, as we know from the opening narration, and it will end in tragedy.

Removing the film from its meta context as a somewhat autobiographical film for Welles, it's a solidly built film about the final day of a once great man. A womanizing, masculine brute who's willing to hurt everyone around him which, ironically, creates fierce loyalty from those he hasn't hurt. Huston, playing himself, actually provides Hannaford a surprising amount of pathos as he reaches the point where he realizes there's no saving himself anymore, lashing out in a purely Huston way of shooting a series of mannequins done in John Dale's image.

The film is remarkably dense beyond that, though. There are a host of characters like Jack Simon (Gregory Sierra) who gets into a rhetorical conflict with Otterlake about how they're both imitators of Hannaford but in different ways (Otterlake is Harvard educated, but Simon is more obviously masculine). Hannaford tries to pick up a high school girl for a trip to Mexico. One of Hannaford's old friends (lovers?), Zarah (Lilli Palmer), is hosting the party while giving evasive answers to interview questions.

On top of that, the meta elements do provide interest. The biggest elements are around the two stars, Huston and Bogdanovich. The filming was so fractured that Huston had long stretches to go off and make complete movies (most notably The Man Who Would Be King, an expensive passion project) which obviously rankled Welles who was scraping together pennies to film for another day. The other is that Bogdanovich did go from nothing acolyte, living at Welles own house, to a respected filmmaker with the production and release of his breakthrough freshman feature, The Last Picture Show. Everyone was passing Welles by.

Stylistically, it should be noted that the footage of the film within the film is rather atypical to Welles, making the whole, "behind the times" narrative even more potent. Essentially, Welles rarely worked in color, and the colors of the film are so conscious and outlandish that it goes beyond the precision he used colors in something like The Immortal Story. It's also really sexually explicit with Oja being the star and being naked most of the time. Welles was never opposed to lustfully filming the women he was involved with (like Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai), but there was always a chasteness to the lustfulness. Here, Oja reaches down Dale's pants and has sex with him in a car while her boyfriend drives. There's an explicitness that Welles was obviously uncomfortable with (in Filming The Trial, he talks about how he'd be happy to never film an actor taking off their pants again, an interview done years after the filming of The Other Side of the Wind). It makes the whole effort feel like Welles consciously trying find a place in the New American Cinema after the fall of the studio system, chasing the kind of financial success that were defining the careers of people like Bogdanovich and Dennis Hopper (who has effectively a cameo in the final film).

It's unfortunate that Welles never got to finish this. I think the final product, overseen by others, is interesting and a mild success, but like Mr. Arkadin, it's impossible to call it Welles'. Who knows what direction he might have taken things with the 100 hours of footage? Still, it's a dense work with a surprisingly strong emotional core and enough to pick at from a Welles' biography perspective to keep a Welles scholar happy for days.