Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow is literally Groundhog Day with space aliens; more accurately, it’s Groundhog Day meets Aliens, right down to the inclusion of Bill Paxton and a kickass female lead in a robotic suit.  It’s a fine popcorn film, engaging without any real dead spots and bankable in the best Tom Cruise tradition.

Cruise stars as Major Bill Cage, a military spokesman who is shanghaied into service on the front lines of a conflict between humanity and the invading “Mimic” aliens.  His first day of combat goes disastrously, but his newfound ability to “reset the day” and travel back in time brings him to legendary soldier Rita Vrtaski (Emily Blunt), who trains him to become a better fighter and take advantage of his time traveling powers to end the war.

Regardless of what one makes of Tom Cruise personally, the man is one of Hollywood’s more reliable action heroes.  His recent work has been consistently entertaining, due in large part to his charismatic on-screen personality.  Here that quintessential Cruise persona gets inverted a bit; when we first meet Cage, he is essentially a deserter, more at home selling a war than fighting it.  Cruise plays these early scenes very well, and he does a comparably good job with Cage’s transformation into a battle-hardened soldier.

In some ways, though, he’s still playing a version of Tom Cruise.  Don’t get me wrong – I very much like that character (he was plenty of fun in the underrated Jack Reacher), but it’s not really news.  What Edge of Tomorrow does give us that we haven’t seen a dozen times before is the commanding performance of Emily Blunt as the “Angel of Verdun.”  It’s a performance that does recall Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, especially with the mechanical exoskeleton iconography.  It’s not, however, a metaphor for her own resilience as was the case in Aliens; instead, Blunt humanizes Rita and saves her from the worst fate of all – the stereotypical romantic subplot.  And honestly, thank God – where Groundhog Day relegated Andie MacDowell (also playing a Rita – coincidence?) to the object of Bill Murray’s desire, Edge of Tomorrow flips that and gives us a hard-as-nails woman who is uninterested in Cruise’s amorous affection for her.  It helps that she’s incredibly immersed in the role, which could make its own successful feature in and of itself.

The film is surprisingly funny, which will definitely bring up those Groundhog Day vibes, and it’s to director Doug Liman’s credit that the film never feels uneven in that regard.  What holds it back from being a truly great film and restricts it to the province of popcorn blockbuster is that a lot of the film does feel somewhat undercooked.  We have two very compelling protagonists, but the villains are a bit underdeveloped; aside from a neat and original look, they’re really only there to fill the antagonist quota.  We don’t know what they want or why they’re on earth, which wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that the film reminds us a few times that these questions are lingering.

Similarly, the members of J Squad (the military troop into which Cruise is drafted) aren’t very well crafted, functioning mostly as bodies when in combat and comic relief when not.  There’s value in comedy in the midst of a war film – see above for the unexpected humor in the film – but there are a few jokes that don’t feel earned and especially a few deaths in the supporting cast that never quite resonate because a) you’ve seen them die plenty of times before in rejected timelines, and b) you have to remind yourself, “Okay, they said he died, but which one was he again?”

All of this is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is a bad film.  It’s at worst serviceable and at best a fun and entertaining flick that does enough things right to justify its own existence.  If I had to do it over again, I would.

Edge of Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and brief suggestive material.”  There are a lot of military combat sequences between armored humans and tentacled alien monsters, though they’re closer to the frenetic shaky-cam of video games than the brutal gore of Saving Private Ryan.  We see one bare bottom, Tom Cruise gets a rather funny three-quarters of an F-bomb, and a suggestive pick-up line (more of a shrug, really) is quickly and mercifully defused.

Check back on Thursday when The Cinema King assesses The Fault in Our Stars!

2 Guns (2013)

It’s hard to say just which of the many guns – both literal and colloquial – are referenced in the title of 2 Guns, but there should be no doubt that Denzel Washington accounts for at least one of them (and if only one, then at least a double-barreled one).  Indeed, without Denzel, I can safely say that 2 Guns would lose a lot of its fun and thereby expose its own flaws.

Posing as small-time crooks with big league connections, DEA Agent Bobby “Beans” Trench (Denzel Washington) and NCIS Agent Michael Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) pull off a surprisingly solid bank robbery and boost $40 million more than they were expecting.  But the two quickly learn that not only have they double-crossed each other by working for rival federal agencies but that they’ve also been double-crossed themselves by their own superiors.  Worse yet, the drug lord they thought they were robbing (Edward James Olmos) and the money’s true owner (Bill Paxton) are both gunning for our heroes.

I’ll say something I almost never say for a movie that I ultimately liked:  2 Guns is a little more complicated than it needs to be.  I know, I know; I’m almost always the guy who wants films to be more complex (cf. Pacific Rim).  But during the film there were moments where the intricate plot meanderings left me behind for a breath, even though the end results were a bit predictable.  Spoiler free translation:  I knew that certain characters would do things, but I wasn’t quite clear on why.  (It’s mostly a question of sequence, of when exactly in the past a few third-act revelations of past misdeeds actually occurred.  Again, without spoiling anything, when did people decide to do certain things?)

But the barest skeleton of the plot – double agents double-crossed – is enough on which to hang an otherwise engaging film, and 2 Guns is at its best when it shows Trench and Stigman putting their plans into action, in scenes that are as fun as they are explosive.  Director Baltasar Kormákur wisely keeps a sense of humor about the proceedings, allowing the elevated absurdity to come to life amid a series of incredibly charismatic performances.

As the villains of the piece, Olmos and Paxton are scenery-noshers in the highest degree, doing “comic book baddie” (yes, adapted from a graphic novel!) without the negative connotations of the term.  Olmos’s is the stronger of the two, in part because I’m already biased (loved him since Stand and Deliver) and also because I would have preferred something a little less showy than Paxton’s tough Texan turned up to eleven.  Peeking in as the handlers, Paula Patton and James Marsden do well enough, though the script doesn’t ask much from them; Marsden does, however, step far enough out of his squeaky-clean stereotype (literalized in both Hairspray and Enchanted) to impress.

But the film really and truly succeeds, even conceals some of its shortcomings that are visible more in retrospect than in the moment, by virtue of the exceptionally disarming performances of Wahlberg and especially Washington.  Wahlberg is still playing a strong mostly-wise guy (a la The Other Guys, minus the comedic broad strokes), though his greatest strength is in keeping pace with Washington, who’s made a career out of stealing movies through sheer power of ethos.  Washington remains fresh, fun, and fascinating, bringing new life to another version of the quintessential Denzel Washington character (that quick-talking guaranteeing charmer straddling the line of the law).

Look, I tried to write a review of this film but really all I wanted to do was write a love letter to Denzel Washington.  So I’ll close by saying that Denzel is, here as always, far and away worth the price of admission, elevating what might have been a C-grade film into at least a high B solely by his presence – which, unlike most actors with so-called “presence,” actually counts for a whole lot.

2 Guns is rated R for “violence throughout, language and brief nudity.”  There’s a lot of bloody gunplay and a generous amount of profanity which includes a good helping of F-bombs.  Additionally, we briefly see a topless woman early in the film (between this and Flight, is that a new rider in Denzel’s contract?).

Don’t change that dial, loyal readers, because Wednesday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month... and you all know what that means by now!

Monday at the Movies - August 27, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Two of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week we continue our long-promised look at the “Alien Quadrilogy.”

Aliens (1986) – Aliens changes up a lot of what worked in Alien, swapping director Ridley Scott for James Cameron and moving from claustrophobic horror to expanded action.  It’s a film that tries almost too hard to distance itself from the original, but although it’s so different from its predecessor Aliens succeeds on a number of levels.  Returning as Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver steps up her performance as Ripley suffers from PTSD after her encounter aboard the Nostromo; Weaver successfully evolves her character from fearful victim into proactive hero as she leads a military platoon against the Xenomorphs.  The rest of the cast is passable:  Lance Henriksen plays android Bishop, but he doesn’t do as much as Ian Holm in Alien, and Paul Reiser is surprisingly scummy as a company man whose only investment is in weaponizing the creature, while Bill Paxton plays an entertainingly campy soldier whose every line is a catchphrase (“Game over, man!  Game over!”).  And the action scenes are first-rate; much as it pains me to laud James Cameron, he does strong work filming the chaos of a full Xenomorph squadron’s assault.  But in this element perhaps rests the film’s greatest detriment; we see entirely too much of the Xenomorphs (indeed, we even have a name for them now).  There was something to be said about the original film’s refusal to let us see the creature fully, so an element of horror is lost when the creatures are seen in full lighting; worse, they’re not indestructible, which makes them mere cannon fodder at times.  But what Cameron sacrifices with the visible Xenomorphs, he reclaims with the Alien Queen, whose final sequence with Ripley and the iconic cargo loader is as exciting as anything the film offers.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, but stay tuned later this week for our no-spoilers-barred review of The Dark Knight Rises!