Monday at the Movies - October 31, 2016

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” Today’s Halloween, so we’ve got a very scary feature on tap for you.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) – For a film released back in March, there’s something suitable about me finally getting around to it in October. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a quiet creepy success, perfect for an after-midnight movie with all the lights out. Like its titular predecessor from 2008, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a bit of a mystery box, about whose plot the less said, the better. There’s a fine twist, though – where the original Cloverfield left no question about its monster movie affinity, 10 Cloverfield Lane invites us to wonder along with our protagonist Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) whether her captor (John Goodman) is telling the truth that the world has been unlivably ravaged by forces unknown. Director Dan Trachtenberg plays up the claustrophobic aspect of the bunker prison, which might actually be Michelle’s salvation. Winstead is suitable as the damsel in quasi-distress, an unsurprisingly competent hand at the panicked till. But it’s Goodman’s show through and through. I’m a big fan of movies like this, which give master craftsmen a chance to play a role that is truly terrifying, and Goodman plays it perfectly. At turns, he’s the true monster of the film, a horrifying abductor whose mouth-breathing portends a kind of supernatural terror; in other moments, though, he’s surprisingly sensitive and paternalistic, suggesting he might not be all bad – misguided, perhaps, but well-intentioned. Of course, the film never cops out and does address its central questions, and sooner than you’d expect, too, leading to a final act that is divinely unpredictable. With the recent news that there’s more to come from the Cloverfield brand, 10 Cloverfield Lane doesn’t need to take me captive.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

Back in 2012, I really enjoyed Jack Reacher as a surprising find amid the end-of-year fare that December. It didn’t do much in the department of the new, but it excelled in the field of competency and cleverness. Four years later, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back takes a clear and safe path down the middle of the middling road, erring on the side of generic without ever living up to its own promise.

Journeyman Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) roams the country looking to right wrongs, but when he arrives in Washington, D.C., to liaise with Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), he discovers that the major has been imprisoned for espionage. Suspecting that a game is afoot, Reacher strikes out on his own to pursue the truth about Major Turner and about the young girl (Danika Yarosh) who may be his daughter.

Four years ago, it seemed fairly obvious that Jack Reacher was the launching point for a new film franchise – although it seemed very much of a piece with Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible work, Jack Reacher was something of a scrappy American James Bond rather than the polished and unflappable Ethan Hunt. Equally good in a fight or a moment of deduction, there was much to like about Jack Reacher, even if the character wasn’t particularly distinctive in and of himself. But, as they say, he could have been a contender.

Instead, the sequel features Jack Reacher in a very generic plot, a half-hearted thriller in the espionage mystery subgenre, which doesn’t have much in common with the original film, nor does the protagonist actually drive the plot. Indeed, the film might better have been titled Jack Reacher: Ladies Night Out, because the three women – Smulders, Yarosh, and Madalyn Horcher, who plays a sergeant who assists Reacher – end up doing most of the heavy lifting as far as investigation and deduction go. (In fact, I suspect one might enjoy the film more if we think, as I tried to do, of Smulders as playing Maria Hill in a SHIELD-themed spinoff of The Winter Soldier. Henry Jackman’s score here certainly reminds one of such.)

When he’s in action mode, Jack Reacher is compelling enough, but it’s tough to hang a whole film on running/jumping/punching (just ask Pacific Rim), especially when it’s pretty much all that Reacher does of consequence in the film. And it’s a particular shame in this film when there’s an opening scene that introduces the character in pitch-perfect fashion – it’s the opener you’ve seen in trailers for months now, and it establishes the character in fairly succinct order. He’s a ferocious brawler with a sly sense of humor and a head for meticulous planning. Now that’s a character in charge of his own film, and a character who ought to enjoy a long and prosperous franchise.

We certainly get the former, plenty of action shots in which Tom Cruise punches someone so hard he leaves a bloodstain on the wall behind him. As action setpieces go, Never Go Back is probably worth going back, but it lacks the deductive ingenuity that made Jack Reacher such a surprise. Much of those investigative elements are given to other characters, leading one to wonder what Jack Reacher’s actually doing in this movie. Here, Reacher is reduced to following orders (something the character isn’t, I presume, known for doing) and roughing up ruffians who pursue him.

What he doesn’t do is command the screen in the way that he did four years ago. If we’re going to disregard the subtitle’s advice and come back for more in a third outing, let’s not give Reacher a sidekick or a love interest or even a commanding officer. Just turn him loose and let him do his thing. And let’s be smart about it, though “smart” is seldom the operating word in a sequel.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some bloody images, language and thematic elements.” Directed by Edward Zwick. Written by Richard Wenk, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz. Based on the novel by Lee Child. Starring Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, and Danika Yarosh.

The Accountant (2016)

The Accountant was something of a surprise to me. The trailers looked intriguing, but I had little sense of the plot and knew only that it carried a very strong cast attached to the project. There’s no accounting for taste, but there’s much about The Accountant that should compound your interest.

Put another way, if we’ve just been through the McConaissance, which saw Matthew McConaughey score big in a slew of major projects, does this mean we’re well and truly in the age of the Benaissance? Has Ben Affleck well and truly (and finally) redeemed himself after Gigli and Jersey Girl? Has the Dark Knight returned?

Ben Affleck stars as the eponymous accountant, Christian Wolff, whose unassuming demeanor conceals his dangerous work as a bookkeeper for the most dangerous illegal operations, cooking the books for drug lords, terrorists, and enemy states. While two Treasury agents (J.K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson) pursue the mysterious accountant, Wolff is hired to investigate the books of a robotic prosthetic company after a low-level employee (Anna Kendrick) reports a revenue leak to her boss (John Lithgow).

Perhaps the key to enjoying The Accountant is not quite knowing what to expect, and the delight of it is that there’s a little bit of everything in this movie. We’ve got espionage, both corporate and political, organized crime and disorganized shootouts, nascent friendships and deep family connections. You might even think of The Accountant as a superhero origin story, showing how Wolff goes from a troubled boy on the autism spectrum to one of the world’s most capable – and surprisingly dangerous – financial analysts. Indeed, we might think of Christian Wolff as an autistic Jason Bourne, with a mathsy dose of Batman sprinkled in for good measure.

(Sidebar, and without going into too much spoilery detail, am I the only one who feels that J.K. Simmons was very much on a trial run for Commissioner Gordon here? I wouldn’t be surprised to see a little bit of this characterization carry over, and I think the hat would be a good fit too.)

I’ve had high praise for Ben Affleck over the last decade or so; he’s evolved into a fine director, and I stand by my statement from back in February that he’s “an excellent choice” for Batman, on whose capable shoulders DC seems to be resting their cinematic franchise. As Wolff, in a portrayal where it might have been easy to phone it in, Affleck does more than one might expect with monotone deadpans and escalating senses of panic brought on by moments where he’s unable to finish a task (his dominant trait, I’d say, is his single-minded devotion to completion). I’ve seen this movie touted as a thriller, and while I wouldn’t go quite that far – it seems to defy categorization in a way that I found refreshing (while others wanted more focus in genre) – I would say that there are thrills to be had when we see Wolff encounter a situation we know is going to trigger him, and we feel that same building tension within ourselves, as when a cleaning crew begins to erase his dry-erase marker work. Credit to Affleck for crafting a character whose reactions are consistent and easy to understand and to anticipate, and credit to director Gavin O’Connor for giving room for Affleck’s performance to shine.

Although there are other wonderful performers in the film – one senses, for example, that Anna Kendrick’s character could have been a downright sidekick in another version of this film, or that Jon Bernthal’s shadowy hitman could dominate a movie all his own – it is first and foremost Affleck’s show, and he handles it with grace. Points for creativity (hat-tip to writer Bill Dubuque for an original and fulfilling script) and points for the wow factor of surprise, but the bottom line is that it’s Affleck’s balance sheet and the rest of the cast are just numbers that add up to one heck of a film.

The Accountant is rated R for “strong violence and language throughout.” Directed by Gavin O’Connor. Written by Bill Dubuque. Starring Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, and John Lithgow.

The Girl on the Train (2016)

It’s impossible not to compare The Girl on the Train to 2014’s Gone Girl (or, in the world of the not-cinematic, to compare the two source novels by Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn, respectively). Both are wildly successful novels by women novelists, texts about missing and presumed murdered women, told by unreliable narrators with the spotlight of suspicion cast on nearly every character. They’re page-turners, and they’re both told with a competence that one might not expect from a narrative which might otherwise be fare for a Lifetime Original Movie.

In any other context, Tate Taylor’s adaptation of The Girl on the Train would be a runaway hit. And perhaps it is unfair to compare The Girl on the Train to Gone Girl, but it is to my eyes unavoidable and Tate Taylor isn’t David Fincher, and so Train becomes a distant second. It doesn’t do anything wrong aside from not being Gone Girl, which – when the comparison is so strongly invited – ends up a bit of a dark shadow.

Emily Blunt stars as the eponymous girl, Rachel Watson, an unreliable narrator if ever we’ve seen one. Amid a fog of mass transportation, substance abuse, and her own internal brokenness, Rachel thinks she observes the key piece of evidence in the disappearance of Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett). Complicating matters, though, Megan lives a few doors down from Rachel’s ex-husband and his new wife (Justin Theroux and Rebecca Ferguson), who suspect that Rachel’s escalating derangement poses a danger to their family and to Megan’s.

First of all, Emily Blunt gives a commanding performance as Rachel. Fans of the book will not be disappointed by her interpretation of the character, which is compelling in its unflinching precision in depicting her battle with alcoholism, her dispiriting recidivism, and those moments where book-readers will recall wanting to shake the poor woman by the shoulders and implore her to come to her senses. Indeed, I almost wonder if Blunt will end up filling out a lot of Best Actress lists come December. Ferguson and especially Bennett do good work too, the latter displaying a range I wouldn’t have expected after last month’s Magnificent Seven outing; as Megan’s psychology is unveiled in the film, Bennett keeps strong pace with the character, such that a pivotal water drop in the film’s third act becomes intensely significant and vividly understandable.

As I said above, though, Tate Taylor isn’t David Fincher, and so Girl on the Train simmers with these strong performances rather than Fincher’s film, which positively crackles with its kinetic energy. Setting aside the similarities in plot, both films use voiceover narration (which I usually deplore), Train doing so less effectively than Gone Girl, but I would give points to Train for finding ways to communicate visually the unreliability of Rachel as a point-of-view character which the novel expressed in its narration. Even Danny Elfman seems to be doing his best Trent Reznor impression on score duty.

There are moments, then, when I don’t feel the comparison to Gone Girl is unfair, because it does seem at times that Taylor is aspiring in the direction of David Fincher. Points in favor of Taylor (and Hawkins) – the film passes the Bechdel Test with far more grace than Gone Girl ever did. It’s surprisingly loyal to the book and very successful as a page-to-screen adaptation, but what Girl on the Train doesn’t do is transcend the Lifetime ethos with the fluidity of Gone Girl, nor do I expect Train to remain as rewatchable as Gone Girl. The Girl on the Train is very good at what it does, but what it doesn’t do is end up as essential as Gone Girl.

The Girl on the Train is rated R for “violence, sexual content, language and nudity.” Directed by Tate Taylor. Written by Erin Cressida Wilson. Based on the novel by Paula Hawkins. Starring Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, and Luke Evans.

Deepwater Horizon (2016)

Hands up if you’ve seen a film where Mark Wahlberg plays a middle-class Average Joe who becomes an American hero after being thrust into extraordinary life-threatening circumstances. Hands up if it was based on a true story? Hands up if it was directed by Peter Berg? While statistically we’re only talking about one other movie – Lone Survivor – it sure feels like we’ve seen this one before.

Wahlberg stars as Mike Williams, an engineer aboard the doomed (and retrospectively ominously dubbed) oil rig Deepwater Horizon. Against the advice of supervisor “Mister Jimmy” (Kurt Russell), BP execs (led by a seedy John Malkovich) press on with the drilling operation, sparking catastrophe when the rig ignites.

Deepwater Horizon is competently told, frightening when it needs to be and rousingly admiring of its real-life heroes in the obligatory epilogue in which we see photos of the real-life casualties. That’s the thing about Deepwater Horizon, though; it’s entirely inoffensive because it plays very much by the numbers of how you’d expect this film to bear out. Deepwater Horizon never truly transcends the genre it inhabits.

As a piece of narrative fiction, Deepwater Horizon isn’t particularly thick. Its characters are largely indistinguishable, set apart largely by the fact that they’re played by different recognizable performers who lean heavily on their reputations or, in the case of Malkovich, an accent bordering on the ludicrous. These are largely seasoned veterans, quite comfortable in their cinematic personas. Wahlberg is in top “say hi to your mother for me” mode and looks suitably beleaguered by the harrowing disaster he endures. And Russell is finely stalwart as Mister Jimmy, commanding the respect of his employees in a way that never beggars credulity. But it’s not as though there are any surprises in this one as far as acting goes. Ditto for the story, which ends up being a vehicle for big explosions and opportunities for individual heroism (usually shot against a billowing American flag, which is astonishingly flame-retardant).

When it comes to the spectacle, though, Deepwater Horizon is sufficiently compelling and doesn’t disappoint. Indeed, it calls to mind an oceanic Alien, claustrophobic with no shortage of renegade scenery ready to pop out without a moment’s notice. As with character, the film is unfulfillingly thin on plot, but its special-effects sequences are engaging and amply terrifying, though I’m not sure they have the staying power that make the film strongly memorable.

Trailers before Deepwater Horizon reveal that Berg and Wahlberg are reuniting for Patriots Day, a film about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Whether this is the final installment of a thematic trilogy or the shape of things to come, there isn’t much to suggest that another film won’t be anything but more of the same. This “same” is fine enough, but it’s doubtful that the third time’s going to flip the script. If you’ve enjoyed it before, you’ll like it again, but unlike the depths which its protagonists plumb Deepwater Horizon proves to be a little shallower than filmgoers might appreciate.

Deepwater Horizon is rated PG-13 for “prolonged intense disaster sequences and related disturbing images, and brief strong language.” Directed by Peter Berg. Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand. Based on a true story. Starring Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, and John Malkovich.