Sully (2016)

Clint Eastwood’s directed fourteen films since he turned 70 in 2000, and while he may be better known to audiences as no-nonsense detective “Dirty” Harry Callahan or the grimly determined Man With No Name, he’s cultivating a reputation as a no-nonsense director, as well. Sully is one such exemplar of a tight and effective film with little patience for gaudy thrills or big-budget exploits; instead, the film wisely centers on a confident performance and its director’s admiration for the human dimension of heroism.

Sully is the true story of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberg (played by Tom Hanks), who became an international celebrity after successfully landing U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January 2009. The film explores the snap decisions made by the captain and the subsequent investigation following the water landing. From behind a tremendous mustache, Aaron Eckhart co-stars as Sully’s stalwart first officer Jeff Skiles.

At a little more than ninety minutes, Sully is an impressively tight biopic with an effective grasp on the emotions it wants its audience to have. Even though we know the true story and despite the film’s opening moments confirming the safe landing of US 1549, Eastwood manages a compelling amount of tension in the flashback sequences of the events in the cockpit. In a way, Sully reminds me of the more successful parts of Flight, in which Denzel Washington found himself the captain of a similarly troubled flight.

Of course, Flight succeeded on the shoulders of Denzel’s performance, and Sully lives up to the legend in Tom Hanks’s restrained, subtle turn as Sully. Hanks puts his everyman charm to good use in Sully, allowing us to see more easily the toll that such immediate celebrity takes on an average, good-natured human being. Hanks doesn’t have to tell us he’s shaken or weary or confident in his command decisions; he can do it all with a frown or a turn of his head or the certainty in his voice.

But Sully doesn’t verge as hagiographic as we might expect, reaffirming the decisions made by the captain but without overblowing his legend. Instead, Eastwood spends a surprising amount of time on the heroics of those around Sully – Skiles, the flight deck crew, the police, fire, and ferry workers who got the passengers out of the water. “It only took 24 minutes,” the film reminds us, for New York’s finest to rally together. And for a film that plays the numbers game, so often reminding us that Sully’s entire flight lasted 208 seconds, Eastwood is equally (if not more) invested in the way that US 1549 was an occasion for wider heroism.

As much of a piece with Flight as it is with Eastwood’s last, American Sniper, Sully is a portrait of Eastwood’s vision of heroism – patriotic, part of a community, willing and able to make hard decisions and to live with them. It’s a concise portrait from two master craftsmen, both affective and effective, and it shows that whatever directorial touch he’s got, Eastwood hasn’t lost it.

Sully is rated PG-13 for “some peril and brief strong language.” Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Todd Komarinicki. Based on the book Highest Duty by Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow. Starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, and Laura Linney.

Non-Stop (2014)

Mark Kermode, a British film critic with whom I find myself agreeing more often than not, said of Taken, “It is the kind of movie that used to be the second-bill on a kind of junky double-bill at a drive-in and now somehow has managed to make it to the big screen with a big name.”  Indeed, that big name, Liam Neeson, has made a career of elevating otherwise B-movie action films.  Why Kermode doesn’t chalk up to Neeson the victories of Taken and its children is anyone’s guess, because it’s the clearest reason for Non-Stop to exist, let alone to succeed.

Neeson stars as federal air marshal Bill Marks (a name you won’t forget because of the way it’s growled throughout) on a red-eye transatlantic flight.  Midway over the ocean, Marks receives a series of texts from a terrorist who promises to kill a passenger every twenty minutes – and, we soon learn, frame Marks in the process.  But we know it’s not all as easy as that, and Neeson does not disappoint in his resilience, very nearly hijacking the flight in an attempt to clear his name.

Let’s establish one thing straightaway – Non-Stop is not Taken.  It’s a far cry from Pierre Morel’s masterful action film, which still manages to thrill after all these years.  In fact, I might be more generous toward Non-Stop precisely because its star makes some of the script’s sins forgivable, or at least bearable.  Neeson is as always a stalwart and reliable action star, gravelly and determined.  He communicates both desperation and dedication in equal parts, allowing us to feel the urgency without fully doubting his abilities.

Bill Marks may share a set of initials with Taken’s Bryan Mills, but he lacks that critical “set of skills” with which the latter might have quickly resolved the crisis.  Instead, the script saddles him with textbook substance abuse and past family trauma, but it’s to Neeson’s credit that he pulls off these rather generic gestures toward characterization and pulls in a convincing portrait of a troubled man pushed to his limits.

Where Non-Stop misses the bar set by Taken is largely everywhere else in its filmmaking.  At 110 minutes, the film feels longer than it needed to be, in part because Bill Marks is air-marshaling aboard a flight chock overfull of narrative detours.  One even suspects that Julianne Moore was cast because of her hair color as a literal personified red herring.  The problem is that the film’s reliance on the classic locked-room formula means that Bill’s initial hunches are necessarily wrong; this puts the audience in the position of being fully aware of the misdirections at work, and the film never really tries to counteract our sense of those sleights of hand.  Consequently, the film feels in a bit of a holding pattern while the intuitive audience members look for the real clues behind the foreground.  Neeson’s performance is compelling, very much enough to hold your attention, but on reflection it’s very much a B-movie superstructure.

The film is, however, at its best when it surrenders to what might be considered the “dumb fun” action of the third reel, when the story takes on a ticking plot twist and a spiraling set of revelations.  Non-Stop does suffer from exposition-heavy villain monologuing, but it counterbalances with flashy fistfights and even a bit of high-altitude/high-stakes gunplay.  Ultimately, then, Non-Stop succeeds or fails based on how highly you value the screen presence of Liam Neeson.  For this filmgoer, it’s a fun enough diversion though not a close contender for greatness.

Non-Stop is rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of action and violence, some language, sensuality and drug references.”  There are a few deaths on the plane as the terrorist makes good on the every-twenty-minutes threat.  A younger passenger is seen flirting with two older men, and IMDb reports two F-words (only one of which I recall).

While The Cinema King enjoys spring break, it’s the perfect opportunity for multiple reviews.  So come back on Thursday for my take on Mr. Peabody & Sherman!

Flight (2012)

No question about it, Denzel Washington is one of the finest actors around, one of that rare remarkable breed of performers whose work is always worth the price of admission, no matter the vehicle.  Fortunately for Flight, Denzel is on board; it’s difficult to imagine this film being as compelling with a less gifted actor in the pilot’s seat.

In Flight, Denzel stars as Captain William “Whip” Whittaker, a star airline pilot with a major substance abuse whose life is thrust into the eye of the media after miraculously saving a plane from mechanical failure.  On his road to recovery, Whip strikes up a bond with fellow addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly), while his lawyer (Don Cheadle) and union rep (Bruce Greenwood) try to save him from prison.

Flight could have been disastrous.  The marketing touts this film as an intense thriller about finding the truth behind a mysterious crash-landing, but what you actually get are two very depressing hours in which Denzel drinks and refuses help from everyone close to him.  This should not be a pleasant moviegoing experience.  But, like Whip, Denzel manages to save the movie from catastrophe by being so good at what he does.

Denzel plays drunk better than anyone in recent memory, recalling the Oscar-winning performance by Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart but with more fearless sophistication.  The key, he says, is that intoxicated people pretend they’re not drunk, and Whip’s continual rejection of his problem coupled with his insistence that he’s “good” give us a subtle depiction of a man who’s almost always toeing the precarious line between sobriety and jeopardy.  The film is so very nearly exclusively Denzel’s that I’m wondering if we’re looking at another Oscar nod for the man, who commands the film in ways very similar to Daniel Day-Lewis’s highly engaging work in Lincoln.

Indeed, you could strip away much of what else works in Flight and still have a central performance successful enough to carry a film on its own.  Cheadle and Greenwood are solid in supporting roles that require their patience with Whip’s frustrating regressions, but their characters never really pay off in the way that John Goodman’s cocaine dealer does; equal parts Walter Sobchak and The Dude, Goodman struts to the sounds of “Sympathy for the Devil” in two key scenes that advance the plot but introduce tricky moral choices that might leave the audience wondering just what’s being sanctioned.  This is to say nothing of the curious and nameless cancer patient played by James Badge Dale (you know him as Jack Bauer’s partner from Season 3), who’s introduced as a man potentially with all the answers, but the film never revisits him, neither physically nor thematically; it’s a shame, because the character is charming and memorable, and he says some particularly pointed themes on which the film ought to follow up.

Disappointingly, the biggest supporting role – one that’s almost set up as a featured co-lead – is Reilly’s turn as Nicole.  Introduced in an opening that pairs her personal rock-bottom with Whip’s midair emergency, Nicole never quite accomplishes anything other than serving as a kind of billboard for Alcoholics Anonymous.  She’s set up as a voice of reason, an exit for Whip from his disastrous lifestyle, and some of the scenes where she’s unable to save Whip are heartbreaking.  But the film’s investment in her dissipates when she exits the film without casting an eye back; at the film’s end, Whip’s hollow reunion with his estranged son might have rang truer had the film made peace instead with Whip’s unresolved relationship with Nicole (something the film only alludes to in photographs, a blatant storytelling cheat).

But where director Robert Zemeckis wisely allows the film to be Denzel’s, the disproportionate balancing act he plays with the supporting cast doesn’t carry over to his competency in the film’s crucial airplane scene, which is as viscerally terrifying as recent aerial trauma films like United 93 or even some of the less schmaltzy scenes of the Final Destination franchise.  As much as I deplore the shaky cam technique, Zemeckis makes it work here, helping us to forget that we’re watching a soundstage filmed upside down.  If there’s a complaint to be had about this scene, as successful as it is, it’s that I never quite felt in danger with Denzel at the helm.  Forget what the trailers gave away; I’d let Denzel pilot my airplane, substance abuse or not.

Ultimately, Flight is a movie that by all accounts shouldn’t work as well as it does.  There are several filmmaking missteps, including the fact that the movie never quite lives up to its highly compelling opening act.  But this is as much a Denzel Washington vehicle as anything else, and in this respect Flight earns high marks for allowing a star performer to wield his craft with as much dignity and dexterity as he possesses.

Flight is rated R “for drug and alcohol abuse, language, sexuality/nudity and an intense action sequence.”  As mentioned above, Denzel drinks, smokes, and ingests cocaine several times in the film, almost always to excess.  The film begins with Denzel in and out of bed with a fully nude stewardess, but after that the film is mostly chaste; the old buttocks/hospital gown gag is trotted out once more but is played for a weak laugh.  And most viewers will probably find the midair catastrophe distressing, as is its somewhat bloody and wrecked aftermath.