This week's DVD releases

Loving ***

As straightforward "based on a true story" movies go, Loving is a strong account of the key factual events that led to the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision overturning anti-miscegenation laws. Effectively acted and occasionally moving, the film both benefits from and is undermined by writer/director Jeff Nichols’ no-frills approach to the circumstances leading up to the court case. Although it could be argued that Loving does little more than bring life to a Wikipedia entry, it does so with tact and craftsmanship, teaching a history lesson while offering a cautionary message for current and future generations.

Most movies set in the 1960s focus on the cultural and sexual revolution — hippies, drugs, rock & roll, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. For Loving, those things are far removed and of little consequence. Nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery, the South remains gripped by deep-rooted bigotries that disallow people of color to do many things, including intermarry with whites. Legal prohibitions have never been effective at stopping people from falling in love and that’s no different in the case of Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Jeter (Ruth Negga). When we first meet them, they have been together for some time — long enough to have conceived a child. Now, with this unborn baby on the way, they have to decide how to move forward.

Virginia does not allow interracial marriage so a wedding at home is impossible. To legitimatize their union, they travel to Washington D.C. where a justice of the peace is more than happy to name them man and wife. They return to their small town and resume their lives, staying with Mildred’s family while Richard, a builder, prepares to craft the house that will become their home. But the secrecy surrounding their marriage doesn’t last. Someone says something and the local sheriff (Marton Csokas) show up in the middle of the night to arrest the couple. Their lawyer arranges a plea bargain and the judge agrees to suspend their sentence if they leave Virginia immediately and stay away for the next 25 years (they can return separately but can’t both be in the Commonwealth at the same time). The sentence, which is difficult for Richard, proves intolerable for Mildred and it’s only a matter of time before they violate the terms of their probation and place their freedom in jeopardy.

Loving chooses to focus on the domestic aspects of the Lovings’ marriage. The legal part of the story, which might make for a fascinating movie in its own right, is of secondary concern. Nichols introduces the two ACLU lawyers, Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) and Phil Hirschkop (Jon Bass), but they never evolve into more than secondary characters and their arguments in front of the Supreme Court (with the Lovings not in attendance) are only briefly excerpted.

The screenplay’s shortcomings are largely the result of time pressures. Even with a two hour running time, Loving needs to cover a decade’s worth of events and this doesn’t allow for it to "breathe" the way it should to cross the threshold into greatness. The narrative is comprised of key vignettes that take place over the course of the 1957-1967 period. The characters are not well fleshed-out, although a strong performance by Edgerton and an even better one by Negga help to overcome that hurdle. Where Loving does a good job is in illustrating the prejudices that surround both the inter-racial marriage and the decision to fight the statue that prohibits it. (Some of the secondary characters are represented as stock, stereotypical "’60s-era Southern racists" but I’m perfectly willing to accept that this may be a valid choice considering the setting.)

As Richard, Edgerton inhabits the character of a taciturn, reclusive man whose forte isn’t verbal communication. Richard isn’t warm or easy to like but there’s no doubt that his devotion to Mildred is genuine. Edgerton makes him marginally sympathetic without resorting to the usual tropes. Richard isn’t galvanized by circumstances to become a "new man." He doesn’t suddenly exhibit hitherto hidden charisma nor does he become a great orator. He’s pretty much the same man at the end as in the beginning. On the other hand, Mildred blossoms, transforming from a shy girl to a strong, determined woman who embraces the media attention because of what it might mean for the case. Negga’s performance places Mildred at the film’s emotional center. Her acting radiates authenticity and her expressive face fills in gaps left by the dialogue. She’s the best thing about this good film.

Nichols’ understated approach deflects melodramatic pitfalls but it keeps us at arm’s length. Historical authenticity is obviously one of Nichols’ primary goals and there’s no question he achieves that. The movie reflects the period, right down to the vintage Corelle dishes that Mildred uses. Loving’s emotional impact is more erratic, however. There are times when Nichols has difficulty balancing the personal story of a family’s struggles with the bigger picture of history-changing events and this results in pacing issues. Loving is an important and interesting motion picture but it’s not always as involving as it might have been.

Trolls **

I’m shocked, if not exactly appalled, that it took Hollywood more than half a century to bring the trolls phenomenon to the screen. To be sure, the little ugly dolls with crazy long hair are featured in the Toy Story films. But the poor critters, who were introduced to the American market in the early 1960s, ain’t ever had a film of their own.

In comes DreamWorks Animation and its shiny new mass market product, the computer-animated 3D family musical adventure Trolls, a $120 million tentpole extravaganza featuring a nicely varied selection of pop, R&B, hip-hop, and folk songs produced by pop god Justin Timberlake, who sings quite a few himself. Timberlake does a rousing rendition of Can't Stop the Feeling! and has several memorable duets — with Anna Kendrick on True Colors and September and with Gwen Stefani on What U Workin' With? — while he and Stefani are joined by Ron Funches for a funny Hair Up. Other vocalists include Zooey Deschanel and Ariana Grande, and there’s even a fun, slightly spooky version of Paul Simon’s The Sounds of Silence sung by Kendrick.

As for the story, Timberlake and Kendrick lead the cast as a pair of young trolls named Branch and Poppy who team up to save Troll Village, despite having fundamentally opposite views of the world. Branch, who is given a wonderfully woebegone tone by Timberlake, is a prickly pessimist, a grouch who’d rather hunker down alone in his hovel than take part in Troll Village’s joy-stuffed daily routine. His lack of joy makes him an outsider, an outcast. See, most trolls are like Poppy, psychotically happy, boundlessly optimistic airheads who spend their every waking hour hugging, singing, laughing, and tripping the light fantastic under a really big groovy disco ball.

Trolls are small, defenseless beings who live in a secret corner of the forest. But when Poppy throws a particularly loud bash, their location is discovered by the Bergens, an ugly race of monsters whose only joy in life is the taste of raw troll, sushi-style. An evil Bergen chef (Christine Baranski) swoops up the revelers one by one into her fanny pack. Only Poppy and Branch escape. Convinced their fellow trolls will be kept alive until the Bergen royal family can prepare a public feast, they journey to the lion’s den with a daft rescue plan.

Despite the competent animation, the great tunes, and funny voice work by costars Russell Brand and John Cleese, Trolls is a lackluster entry. The story is clichéd and predictable. Overall, the film has no real magic. It doesn’t have the silly-yet-profound soul of DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda films, the heartbreaking artistry of animated masterpieces like Spirited Away and The Illusionist, or the madcap inventiveness of Disney's Frankenweenie and Zootopia.

What rankles is the fact that DreamWorks could have made a perfectly magical fable had they simply told the story of how the troll dolls were invented. The unisex toy, which has sold millions if not billions of units, was the brainchild of Thomas Dam, a Danish fisherman and woodcutter from a small town, who had fallen on such hard times in 1959 that he didn’t have money to buy a Christmas present for his beloved daughter Lila. As the story goes (it’s a factual tale with a bit of myth mixed in), Dam came up with the concept of the Good Luck Troll, as he called it, using ideas from folklore and his own imagination. He hand- carved the doll from wood, hoping the ugly little creature would bring Lila joy and luck. It sure did: Soon, other kids the fishing town of Gjøl wanted one, and orders came flooding in. Dam eventually founded a factory and began mass-producing the troll using vinyl and eventually plastic.

I’m not sure if anyone at DreamWorks bothered to read this wonderful little origin story. It’s a tale about real-world magic, about love and hope in the face of despair, about children’s relationships with their parents, about fishing, woodcarving. Man, it’s all there, a treasure trove of narrative ideas worthy of Hans Christian Andersen. But no, we get disco tunes, disco balls, troll-eating villains, and a Mission: Impossible rescue. Shame on you, DreamWorks!

American Pastoral *½

One poorly thought-through action can have a devastating ripple effect. So learns Mary Levov, the 16-year-old domestic terrorist in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral, and so, I fear, has Ewan McGregor, who decided an adaption of this rich, layered and elusive text would be good material for his directorial debut.

McGregor directs himself as Seymour "The Swede" Levov, the golden boy of 1940s Weequahic, the Jewish section of Newark, N.J. A living, breathing example of excellence and assimilation, Swede was the sports titan and pillar of local industry who attained legendary status with his peers when he married Dawn, a non-Jewish former Miss New Jersey. Taking over his father’s glove factory in downtown Newark, Swede earns enough to buy a piece of American paradise — a small farm just a short drive from the city. Here Dawn can raise cows and their daughter Mary can frolic in sun-dappled meadows. As Woody Allen once joked "had I been born in Poland or Berlin I’d be a lampshade right now," but everything seems to have gone the right way for Swede.

But if American Pastoral is about anything it’s about how perception is just guess work. What we think we know is likely wrong, and no amount of examination, extrapolation or investigation is going to get at the actual truth. So who knows why young Mary, whose pre-teen years are marred by stuttering and perhaps some confused sexual feelings toward her father, became a raging, angry left-wing radical. Sure, it was the 1960s and those Jefferson Airplane records and copies of Rampart’s got a lot of kids’ blood boiling, but not everyone blew up the local post office and killed a man.

The bulk of the film dwells on Swede and Dawn dealing with the after effect of their daughter’s actions and subsequent disappearance in the hard left underground. The closest thing to exciting film-making comes once Swede is approached by a young woman (Valorie Curry) who knows of Mary’s whereabouts and shakes him down for some cash. These tawdry scenes are quite effective as they give McGregor something active to do to show his frustration, guilt and grief. The rest of the movie consists mostly of people just talking.

That won’t be too surprising to readers of the book, as part of its strength is how it plays with time and reliability. Those unfamiliar with the source material or how Roth can dwell on one concept for paragraphs at a time with some of the greatest prose in the English language may find themselves making the "get on with it gesture" on their couches. When we do meet up with Mary again in her third act persona, Dakota Fanning, who is quite strong as the angry bleeding-heart teen, is quite out of her depths masquerading as a ghostly spiritual being.

What we have on our hands is a dud, but there are a few grace notes that save it from being an unmitigated disaster. (As far as terrible idea Roth adaptations, Ernest Lehman’s Portnoy’s Complaint’s position is secure.) Swede’s glove factory ends up being at the epicentre of the Newark race riots and while McGregor’s reliance on newsreel footage is cheesy (and sets up similar shots of the Moon landing, Woodstock and another use of Buffalo Springfield’s For What Its Worth on the soundtrack, so help us all) it does touch on how well-meaning liberals react in the face of potential revolution. Swede proudly boasts his factory employs "80 percent Negros," but yanks his daughter back in fear when she tries to give a black power salute to a group of men who may or may not be forming an angry mob.

The best moment in the entire film is when Swede proudly shows how a glove is made, from dark leather shipped from Africa, turning a white girl’s hand a similar shade to one of his devoted black workers, who then tests it out by making a fist. There are signifiers flying all over the place and McGregor is wise enough to let them stay in the background. The unfortunate thing is that it’s the foreground that’s so dull. Jennifer Connolly acts her guts out in a monologue sequence that is airless and uninspired. And as the movie drones on the most engaging thing is trying to figure out just what is up with McGregor’s accent. American excellence may be an unattainable dream, but sometimes the facade will appear real to outsiders. This production is not such a case.

Other Releases This Week
Little Sister *** A slight, sweetly cynical indie drama about family and belonging and the ways we cope with life’s disappointments.
The Alchemist Cookbook *** So compelling is writer-director Joel Potrykus’s unnerving scenario — with its largely ambiguous tone of horror dramatically offset at times by explicit frights — that a viewer isn’t necessarily bothered by a lack of basic story information about who, what, where, when and why.
The Eagle Huntress *** A stunning location and a winning character are cannily deployed to create a likeable film in which viewers will need little persuasion to cheer the triumph of the underdog.
Burn Country **½ There’s plenty of intelligence and atmosphere in play here. But the prevailing tone is of pressure applied and nothing released, a genre exercise that plays as educational rather than exhilarating.
Antibirth ** Although often narratively cryptic and stylistically uneven, this could serve to establish director Danny Perez’s reputation in low-budget horror.
Frank & Lola ** Despite being played by two charismatic and more than capable actors (Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots), the title characters never click in the way they need to. They’re too cool and vague for the volcanic story they enact.
Almost Christmas ** The film’s energy can be relentless, but the feelings are real, and they’re wrapped in a dysfunctional-family package that’s so venerable and endearing as to seem a little bit new.
Desierto ** What should have been a solid B-movie thriller with a premise torn from today’s headlines is instead as arid and desolate as the land between Mexico and the United States in which it is set.
The Take *½ Imitating the Bourne capers rather than establishing an identity of its own, this is a strictly by-the-numbers political thriller that fails to capitalize on Idris Elba’s formidable screen presence.
Nerdland *½ With a scuzzy style to match its sleazeball vision of spotlight desperation and depravity, this Tinseltown satire — led by the voice work of Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt — revels in the foulness of 21st-century pop culture, albeit to a degree that’s ultimately both exhausting and redundant.
The 9^th Life of Louis Drax *½ This is a intriguing but uneven thriller that doesn’t fully establish the tone and style that would be needed for a viewer to accept its supernatural plot.
Life on the Line ½* Underappreciated occupations deserve better than this cliché-clogged, utterly predictable film, a terrible move about the workers who keep the electrical grid functioning.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal

Nailed It

About the only good thing to come out of the Trump administration so far is the incredible amount of fodder it has provided for comedians and satirists. Both Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer and Kate McKinnon as Betsy DeVoss are absolutely brilliant in this bit.

This week's DVD releases

Elle ***½

Perhaps only Paul Verhoeven would open a film mid-rape — the violent attack observed by an unimpressed green-eyed cat — and then follow up with a scene where Michèle, the rape victim, face puffy from the beating, picks up a phone and orders takeout, asking questions about the "holiday roll." She's not blasé about what happened. She's freaked out. She stuffs the dress she was wearing in the trash. She takes a bath, blood from her genital area staining the bubbles above. She does not call the police. Instead, she orders food. It's hard to picture this woman shedding a tear. Ever. The opening sequence of Elle is just the start of the demented and exhilarating experience that is this movie. Elle is a high-wire act without a net.

Based on the novel by Philippe Djian, adapted for the screen by David Birke (and then translated into French by Harold Manning),Elle is a maniacal and confident hybrid of various genres. It's a rape-revenge-ensemble-comedy-thriller-stalker mashup, if you can even picture that. But the film (with a couple of sick and twisted adjustments) is mostly reminiscent of the "women's pictures" of the 1930s and 40s, starring the shoulder-pad boss-bitches of Hollywood’s Golden Age, dominant dames like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, whose characters were put through wringers involving snake-in-the-grass boyfriends/husbands, ungrateful children, career treachery. You can picture Stanwyck stuffing her dress in the trash, lighting a cigarette and then ordering takeout after being raped in the middle of her living room. You can't imagine any of those women, or Isabelle Huppert, who plays Michèle, going to a support group or therapy. They'll gut it out on their own.

The film is crowded with characters. Michèle has a lot going on: a slacker son (Jonas Bloquet) who has an abusive pregnant girlfriend, an ex-husband (Charles Berling) now dating a young yoga teacher, a bored sex fling with a married man, an elderly Botox-ed mother (Judith Magre) carrying on an affair with a gigolo, a pressing project at work (she co-owns a video game company), a handsome married neighbor (Laurent Lafitte) whom she stares at longingly from across the street, and a complex backstory not revealed until far into the film. This woman has too much to DO to fall apart after the rape. But then she starts getting creepy texts from the unknown rapist: he knows where she is, what she's wearing. It could be anyone. Every man she knows is a suspect. She buys pepper spray (and, on impulse, a small axe) to protect herself. She says at one point, "Nut jobs I can handle. My specialty." You believe her. Maybe somewhere she always expected something like this, that horror would reach out its tentacles to find her again.

Verhoeven unbalances the existing tension of the "whodunit" aspect of Elle by giving us some pretty obvious clues early on who probably did it. Verhoeven does not "bury the lede" because he's interested in things other than the plot cranking itself out to a "satisfying" conclusion. He’s interested in the psychology and behavior of this particular woman. His camera follows her everywhere, like a stalker, like a lover. As in life, whether we want to admit it or not, those lines are often blurred. Every interaction, not just sexual and political, contains small jostles for power, position, dominance. Who's the "top"? Who's the "bottom" in any given moment? There are competing objectives in every conversation, each side maneuvering to get what they want. Jostling for power comes in many different forms, playing out in romantic relationship, office dynamics, even in a conversation with a group of friends where you have something to say and everyone is too busy talking to give you "the floor." Elle is a dissertation on power dynamics.

Verhoeven's approach is, unsurprisingly, extremely provocative. Michèle is a woman in her early 50s, and her sexuality surges around inside her, seeking expression. It leads her into some pretty dark stuff. In real life, sex doesn't progress in a checklist of approved behaviors happening in the proper order. Sometimes people are drawn to danger, to risk. Rape fantasies are so common as to be mundane. The current view is that consent in sex is a cut-and-dry thing. Either you consent, or you don't. There is no doubt that the rape in Elle is horrifying. Verhoeven does not eroticize it. The rapist wipes the blood from Michele's vagina off of his hip bone as he gets up off of her. But later in the film, when Michèle does consent to sex, enthusiastically, watch how her lover is unnerved by a woman who wants it, who doesn't have to be talked into it. He's almost turned off by her sexual urgency. And that, ultimately, is the most cutting observation in Elle, and Verhoeven's aim is accurate and deadly. Men not knowing what to do with a woman who wants sex and knows how she wants it, men needing to be the "top," always, threatened by a woman taking the "top" role (not in sexual positions, but in attitude) … well. These issues have been with us from the beginning of time, and won't be solved overnight. But Elle is one of the smartest films about consent I've ever seen.

Huppert does not make even an unconscious bid for our sympathy. She never has, throughout her lengthy career and it is one of the things that distinguishes her from other actresses. Even very talented actresses want to make sure that we "understand" why the character does what she does. Huppert doesn't care. She's completely beyond those concerns. It's why she's so thrilling to watch and why she is in such rare company (Anna Magnani, Liv Ullmann, Gena Rowlands, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford — it's a short list). There's always some element of mystery left intact in Huppert's work. Huppert can be frighteningly blank (The Piano Teacher, La Cérémonie), she can be human and flawed (Amour, and the upcoming Things to Come). In Elle she gets to be funny, and it's such a joy to watch! It's effortless for her. She's funny in her line-readings ("Bimbos with big tits never worried me, but the girl who's read The Second Sex will chew you up …"), in her gestures and expressions. You cannot take your eyes off of her. Neither can Verhoeven. In a Q&A following the public screening at the New York Film Festival, Verhoeven reportedly described Huppert (also in attendance) as "unique in the world." She is.

Watching Elle feels like climbing Everest without an oxygen tank. The air is dizzyingly clear up there. And dangerous, too.


Queen of Katwe ***

Director Mira Nair reportedly introduced her thoroughly crowd-pleasing Queen of Katwe at the Toronto International Film Festival by quoting the slogan of a film school she had founded in Uganda, where she lives: "If we don’t tell our own stories, no one will." That sense of ownership and authorship permeates Queen of Katwe, elevating it above your average feel-good biopic and allowing its message to feel not only inspirational but genuine. The story of Phiona Mutesi is a fascinating one on its own, but what could have just been an extended 30 For 30 feels lived-in, compassionate and truthful. It helps greatly to have not only Nair’s clear love for her country guiding every decision but also the amazing depth of David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong’o to ground it from most of its sentimental clichés. Some of the dialogue in the final act feels a little false and manipulative, but those scenes stand out because it’s been so believable up to that point.

The nuanced, subtle newcomer Madina Nalwanga plays 10-year-old Phiona Mutesi, a young lady who lives in the slum of Katwe in Kampala, Uganda. She has almost no possessions, can’t read and sells maize in the street to try to scrape together change for her family, which includes two brothers, a sister, and her headstrong mother Harriet (Nyong’o). Phiona and her oldest brother Brian (Martin Kabanza) cross paths with a local sports ministry head named Robert Katende (Oyelowo). Recognizing that the slum kids he’s working with aren’t going to compete at football, he decides to teach them something he mastered at a young age, the art of chess. It’s a game that equalizes issues of class, education and income. It can be played by anyone in the world, and Katende soon realizes that this young girl from Katwe has a special gift, especially when she starts beating him.

It’s to be expected that the education segments of Queen of Katwe include a number of nods to how the game reflects Phiona’s life, but the execution doesn't feel heavy-handed. Nair is confident enough in her characters and the story she’s telling to avoid the pitfalls of repetitive lessons. So we get the idea that Phiona likes the act of "Queening" because a pawn makes it all the way across the board, against all odds, and becomes a Queen. We don’t hear it 15 times like we would in a lesser film. When Katende explains the idea of finding a "safe space" whenever your opponent is on the offensive, it’s easy to translate that to Phiona’s real life but the movie doesn’t hammer it in. This subtle touch is undermined a bit in the final act as issues of Phiona’s success and class conflicts start to tear the family apart in a way that feels manipulative and melodramatic, but Nair recovers by the end.

Two of the reasons she manages to get the film back from the edge of treacle are right there in Oyelowo and Nyong’o. The Selma star is as charismatic as ever, capturing the kindness of a man who saw a potential escape for a young lady and did whatever he could to make it happen. Oyelowo’s work here is subtle but so consistent. He never looks like he’s working the message of the film more than the character he’s playing. Opposite him, Nyong’o is phenomenal. She has an incredible ability to convey backstory. We believe Harriet isn’t merely a sounding board for our heroine or an emotional plot device. She feels real because of the intense passion that Nyong’o brings to her. And it’s in the subtle things, like a glance that conveys fear about her family’s future or the different tone she takes with each of her children. One also shouldn’t miss how good Nalwanga is here, giving a fluid and physical performance.

Of course, much of the credit should go back to Nair and her technical team, who capture the streets of Uganda in a way we haven’t really seen before, certainly not in a Disney film (Nair has joked that it was the first Disney film set in Africa that doesn’t have a single animal in it). From the way Nair and her designer use costumes to convey economic status to how the great cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave) fluidly captures a corner of the world that makes it feel specific, Queen of Katwe is a team effort. With the combined efforts of Nalwanga, Nair, Nyong’o, Oyelowo, Bobbitt and many more, Queen of Katwe makes it clear that we can’t successfully tell "our stories" alone. To make them resonate, we need people this talented working together for a common goal. It seems unlikely that Phiona Mutesi ever imagined her life would one day be the subject of a Disney film. But she certainly learned that life is full of surprises. When it comes to movie surprises, Queen of Katwe is a truly pleasant one.


Jack Reacher: Never Go Back *½

If there had been any doubt, the tepid Jack Reacher: Never Go Back firmly establishes the adaptations of Lee Child's books about a wrong-righting former military police commander as Tom Cruise's B-unit action film series at Paramount, compared with his ongoing luxury-brand Mission: Impossible franchise.

By-the-numbers plotting, seen-it-all-before action moves, banal locations and a largely anonymous cast alongside the star give this a low-rent feel.

Based on the 18th of Child's 20 Reacher best-sellers, the film serves up nothing that hasn't been seen in countless action films before, and it's striking how little effort appears to have been made to give it any distinction: The villains are military guys gone rogue, the female lead is basically fighting the same fight Rosalind Russell did to be recognized for her equal worth among men in His Girl Friday more than 75 years ago, the hand-to-hand combat won't make anyone's highlight reel and even the star looks a bit pale and out of training compared with the shape he invariably gets himself into for the far more elaborate and fun Mission outings.

The film also marks quite a step down, in both ambition and accomplishment, from Cruise and director Edward Zwick's previous collaboration on The Last Samurai 16 years ago. It's even a notable drop-off from the first Reacher feature, which brandished some decent mystery-thriller elements, a very good and realistic car chase, Rosamund Pike in the female lead, juicy supporting turns by Robert Duvall and Werner Herzog and fine Caleb Deschanel cinematography.

This one, by contrast, has little to write home about. For a guy who's been out of the military for a while, Reacher (no one calls him Jack) still can't manage to stay away from soldiers and their institutions. Unfortunately, most of them are up to no good, as he finds out when he pops into Washington to check out the woman who now has his old job, Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders). Unfortunately, their potential date will have to wait, as she's just been arrested for espionage, although this gives him an excuse to prove how slick he is by rescuing her from the high-tech prison where she's held.

This puts him at odds with a Blackwater-like security firm that seems to be running the show and is both willing and anxious to rub out anyone who's on to its big-time weapons and drug dealing. Narratively, the film is almost entirely nuts and bolts, with Reacher and Susan literally on the run most of the time from a coolly efficient assassin (Patrick Heusinger) simply called The Hunter who, in one-on-one combat, can give Reacher a pretty hard time.

The one real twist in the strictly mechanical script by Richard Wenk (the very recent The Magnificent Seven), Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (the latter two now a very long way from Thirtysomething days) is the presence of a teenager, Samantha (Danika Yarosh), who may or may not be Reacher's daughter from a relationship 16 years earlier. Left largely to her own devices by her mother, Samantha (unlike the novel) ends up accompanying the pair to New Orleans, where the trio scenically arrive just as the Halloween parade is about to swing into action.

We just see snippets of the locals celebrating as only these locals can, however, as Reacher and The Hunter have it out on the rooftops of the French Quarter while the revelers party on obliviously below. As ever, Reacher is most into hand-to-hand combat, as is The Hunter, resulting in some pretty intense bone-crushing snaps, jabs and well-placed slugs. But there's nothing that hasn't been seen innumerable times before, and in neither style nor substance do Zwick and his writers bring anything new to the genre table here.

The one element that puts a smidgen of snap in the proceedings is something resembling a rivalry between Reacher and Susan in which the latter introduces the gender issue. Unfortunately, neither the screenwriters nor the actors know quite where they want to take this little skirmish of the sexes (not very far, obviously), nor do they have the flair to handle it in a witty fashion, which leaves the matter just sitting out there on a limb.

For an actor who usually seems all-in no matter what he's doing, Cruise comes off as somewhat less engaged than usual here, just going through the motions compared to, certainly, his last Mission: Impossible outing. Committed most noticeably to the physical side of her performance, Smulders can't or won't offer up the humor that might have struck some sparks with her co-star, while Yarosh, sidelined through much of the New Orleans interlude, doesn't have much real to work with as the fraught would-be daughter.

Undistinguished visually, this marks a return to the old days, when sequels were almost always markedly inferior to originals that spawned them.


This week’s other new releases:
Masterminds *½ Sometime it’s an absurdist comedy. Sometimes it’s a dark comedy. Sometimes it’s out-and-out killing-people drama (almost, but not quite). It’s often funny, but it never quite hangs together as a coherent movie.
Boo! A Madea Halloween * At 103 minutes, this film has way too much dead weight. Scenes are repeated over and over, and some of the acting would not cut it in a school play. But in the rare moments when Tyler Perry’s movie is firing on all cylinders, it displays a cleverness that hints at, with more time and a few more iterations of the script, this might have been a good movie.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal

A reasonable plea

 

This man is dangerous, Olbermann argues, not strictly because he lies to the American people, but because he lies to himself.

This week's DVD releases

The Handmaiden ***½

Chan-wook Park’s The Handmaiden is deliciously perverse, delightfully twisty, and unapologetically erotic. Delivered with a dash of black humor and a fair amount of bare flesh, Park (using Sarah Walters’ novel Fingersmith as a template) delves into Hitchcockian territory and delivers a story that would have had the Master of Suspense roaring his approval. Unfettered by concerns about an MPAA rating, Park doesn’t hold back when it comes to the sex scenes. The Handmaiden may not be high art but it’s tremendous entertainment. For those who enjoy this kind of material, there’s nothing better out there and one can make a compelling argument that this is the best work of Park’s career (yes, even better than Oldboy, although certainly not weirder).

The Handmaiden is divided into three parts. The first two are mirror images of one another, presenting the same story from different perspectives. The third unites the first two and drives the narrative forward to its conclusion. Although Park isn’t the first director to employ this approach, the device works exceptionally well in this case since the viewer will not have the same interpretation of the scenario after Part 2 that he or she has after Part 1.

The movie focuses on Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim), a lonely Japanese heiress living in 1930s Japan-controlled Korea. A con man who goes by the name of "Count" Fujiwara (Jung-woo Ha) has designs on her fortune and, to that end, he employs a Korean pickpocket, Sook-Hee (Tae-Ri Kim) to pose as Hideko’s handmaiden. Sook-Hee’s mission: convince Hideko to reject her current suitor (and uncle), the sadistic Kouzuki (Jin-woong Cho), and instead marry Fujiwara. However, during the course of her assignment, Sook-Hee develops feelings for Hideko, which she believes are mutual, and becomes jealous when Fujiwara attempts to take possession of his "prize."

The Handmaiden is loosely adapted from Welsh writer Sarah Walters’ 2002 novel, Fingersmith, with the location and time period shifted. Although the underlying premise and structure resemble those of the novel, Park adds numerous flourishes to the production and one of the film’s most notable twists is new to the screenplay. Additionally, the character of Uncle Kouzuki is filtered through Park’s worldview. Kouzuki is as twisted a monster as has appeared in any of Park’s productions, and that’s saying something.

Many of Park’s films, regardless of how violent and degrading the content might seem, have an underlying current of dark humor and The Handmaiden is no different. There are some very funny moments, including one literal instance of gallows humor. The lesbian sex scenes, hot and explicit as they may be, are important to italicize the deepening relationship between the two main characters. The central sex scene is presented twice (once in Part 1 and once in Part 2) with key differences that are crucial to understanding the importance of this moment to both characters and the overall narrative.

The casting couldn’t be better. Korean A-list actress Min-hee Kim presents Lady Hideko as a multi-layered character who is far more than the timid, high-bred heiress she initially seems to be. Tae-Ri Kim makes Sook-Hee spunky and energetic but imbues her with the unfortunate anchor of a conscience. Jung-woo Ha’s Count Fujiwara oozes charisma and shallowness. And Jin-woong Cho creates the most diabolical of human monsters.

I don’t think I’ve ever compared Park to Hitchcock. His previous efforts (including Oldboy, the "Vengeance Duology", and his only English-language movie, Stoker) are closer in tone and intent to Tarantino or Burton. There’s a lot about The Handmaiden that fits with his oeuvre but this is a more ambitious and, in many ways, compelling endeavor. Its twists and turns are better plotted and its weirdness seems in keeping with the story rather than a garish appendage. The Handmaiden is one of the best neo-Hitchcockian mystery/thrillers to have emerged from any country in any language during the last few years, if not longer.


The Light Between Oceans **½

Great drama requires trust. The director has to trust his actors to convey the complexity of the human experience without smothering their performances in manipulative filmmaking devices. He also has to trust the viewer to bring their own interpretations and emotions to the story, meeting the characters halfway along the spectrum of the human experience. Derek Cianfrance can’t find this trust in The Light Between Oceans, an adaptation of M.L. Stedman’s novel. It's a film with greatness within that’s been lost due to varying degrees of distrust; ridiculously tight close-ups in soft focus feel like they’re pushing you to cry instead of allowing emotion to come organically. Narrative beats and themes are hit repeatedly, just to make sure you don’t miss an opportunity to feel something. Buried beneath this melodrama — but shining through nearly enough to justify a look — one can see the film that could have been, as anchored by great performances and emotional truth. It’s just lost in the fog.

Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender, giving a very measured, confident performance) is a World War I veteran battling Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder before his condition really had a name. In some of the film’s best scenes, we learn that Tom has been burdened by the randomness of life and death. Why did he live but his fellow soldiers die? One almost gets the sense that Tom doesn’t think he "deserves" to have made it home, and that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in solitude, refusing to take the creature comforts that other young men lost forever when they went to war.

To that end, Tom signs up to take a job that not many would want, manning an extremely remote lighthouse in Australia, at a spot in which one can see two oceans from its top. The last lighthouse keeper was fired when he told someone that he allowed his wife to signal a passing ship. The break in protocol was a small problem — the fact that his wife had been dead a few years was a much bigger one. And yet this not-at-all-coveted job changes Tom’s life when he meets the daughter of his new boss, a headstrong and beautiful young lady named Isabel (Alicia Vikander). Before long, Isabel and Tom are married, planning to start a family on Janus Island. Isabel gets pregnant, but loses the baby in a heartbreaking scene in which Tom is in the lighthouse and she can’t get to him. She gets pregnant again. Tragedy strikes again.

While Isabel and Tom are mourning the loss of their second child, a miracle happens. A rowboat washes ashore, carrying a dead body and a baby. No one on the mainland knows that Isabel lost the second baby. They could just take this new child as their own and no one would know any differently. At first, the plan seems to work perfectly as Isabel, Tom, and their new daughter Lucy find happiness, but a visit to the mainland forces an encounter between Tom and a mysterious woman (Rachel Weisz) that changes everything.

Derek Cianfrance has undeniable skill with actors, drawing masterful performances out of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine and his large ensemble in the highly underrated The Place Beyond the Pines. That skill is evident here mostly in Fassbender’s largely internal turn. His take on Tom is often stoic, haunted by the ghosts of World War I in a way that makes him quiet, sometimes uncertain. Vikander often goes in the other direction, offering the more extreme emotions that Tom keeps hidden, but she’s rarely given the room to breathe life into the performance. And I mean that almost literally. Cianfrance and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw put us right in her face in extreme close-up, thinking that this will help force a viewer’s response. It’s distracting more than effective, as is the soft focus and overcooked score by Alexandre Desplat. When Arkapaw and Cianfrance let their characters breathe, or even when they admire the gorgeous landscape, the film feels more effective and less manipulative.

Ultimately, it comes back to trust. Don’t force us to feel, trust that we will do so. This is a film that I kept wanting to emotionally connect with and give myself over to the human power of its tragedy, but it kept pushing me away. With the undeniable, unwavering skill of the trio of actors at the film's center, we would have followed them through this heartbreaking tale without the signposts that tell us what to feel along the way.


Inferno *½

One of the biggest mysteries about the Robert Langdon movies is why they don’t work. Dan Brown has a large, built-in fan base. There’s no lack of talent in the productions. The director is Oscar winner Ron Howard (who was near the zenith of his career when he made The Da Vinci Code) and the lead actor is household name Tom Hanks. Yet these movies have never succeeded. The Da Vinci Code was adequate but forgettable. Angels & Demons was godawful. Inferno is somewhere in between — watchable but by no means worth the effort to make a special effort to rent or stream it.

Inferno starts with the hero, symbologist Langdon (Hanks), awakening in a Florence hospital with a head wound. He has no memory of how he got it. The attending physician, Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), informs him that he was grazed by a bullet and the short-term amnesia he is suffering will pass. Soon, however, an assassin (Ana Ularu) has invaded the hospital and is gunning for Langdon. He and Sienna escape using staircases and a back door and, as the symbologist recovers both his memories and his powers of deduction, he begins a quest to determine who is trying to kill him, and why. It is connected to a lethal virus that the late nutcase billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) intended to spread. Following Zobrist’s death, the virus remains "out there", waiting to be activated by an unknown disciple. Meanwhile, a consortium hired to assist Zobrist has become disturbed by his activities. After watching a video elucidating The Plan, the consortium’s Provost (Irrfan Khan) decides to join forces with the World Health Organization to stop the madness. But there are traitors aplenty, making Langdon’s task all the more difficult and dangerous.

The movie can be neatly divided into three sections. In the first, lasting about 30 minutes, we have no idea what’s going on as director Howard attempts to replicate Langdon’s fragmented state of mind. The movie feels disjointed and there are repeated apocalyptic visions inspired by Dante. Unfortunately, this isn’t a good way to provide viewers with a gateway into a motion picture world (especially those unfamiliar with the character from his previous outings). The first act is confusing and Langdon’s infirmity distances him from us.

The second section, which comprises the film’s middle hour, has Langdon, supported by his attractive doctor-turned-assistant, in investigative mode as he hopscotches across Italy. To the extent that Inferno works, it’s because of this segment. Langdon’s dogged pursuit of clues (which generally lead to other clues rather than a solution) is engaging and there are a couple of action sequences inserted to keep things from becoming too exposition-heavy. Unfortunately, the screenplay suffers from compression issues — too many pages being condensed into too little running time. The pacing is poor and plot holes result from cuts to the material.

The third section is an anticlimactic disaster. Not only does it not follow the book (which had a smarter, albeit less cinematic, resolution) but it devolves into generic James Bond-inspired action. Langdon is no 007 and the logistics of the finale make little or no sense. The same can be said of the motivations and actions of some of the characters. To the extent that Inferno‘s first 3/4 can be called "entertaining", the climax is a letdown of catastrophic proportions.

The acting is a tick above adequate. Hanks, as was the case the other two times he played this character, is collecting a paycheck. Jones isn’t given much of an opportunity to do more than walk in his shadow. (Attempts to give her a backstory — scenes that don’t happen until well past the halfway point — are perfunctory.) Foster has little screen time. (We can be thankful for this because he moved on to make the superlative Hell or High Water.) The best work is turned in by the nearly mute Ana Ularu (whose fierce expression speaks volumes) and Khan, whose character is intriguing enough to deserve more screen time.

The problem with adapting a narrative as complex as the one spun by Brown in Inferno is that it requires considerable massaging to pummel it into screen-ready shape. In this case, most of the choices made by Howard and script writer David Koepp seem to be the wrong ones. They diminish the story’s intelligence and plausibility, transforming it into a cut-rate Bond/Sherlock Holmes hybrid … and that probably sounds more interesting than it is. Inferno is a disappointment — perhaps not to the degree that Angels & Demons was but enough to sadden fans of Brown’s books and confuse and distance those who haven’t been exposed to the author’s prose.


Other New Releases This Week
The Monster **½ In the end, this film does more by way of thrilling tension and heartfelt admissions than it does through any scares, but that doesn’t make it a bad horror film. Director Bryan Bertino reveals a gushy soft side, only to tear out his heart and hoist it for all to see.
The Vessel **½ A modest but not maudlin parable of hope about mustering the strength to vigorously plunge again into life’s uncertainties after a devastating loss.
I’m Not Ashamed * Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it’s awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.
USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage * This is a World War II "epic" that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the viewer with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal

My final 2017 Oscar nominations predictions

The Oscar nominations will be announced Tuesday morning so I figured this would be as good a time as any to look into my cracked crystal ball to forecast the results (listed alphabetically):

Picture
Arrival
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
La La Land
Lion
Manchester By the Sea
Moonlight

Director
Damen Chazelle, La La Land
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester By the Sea
Martin Scorsese, Silence
Denis Villeneuve, Arrival
(Possible: Denzel Washington, Fences)

Actress
Amy Adams, Arrival
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Emma Stone, La La Land
(Possible: Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins; Ruth Negga, Loving)

Actor
Casey Affleck, Manchester By the Sea
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington, Fences

Supporting Actress
Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester By the Sea

Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
Hugh Grant, Florence Foster Jenkins
Lucas Hedges, Manchester By the Sea
Dev Patel, Lion

Adapted Screenplay
Arrival
Fences
Lion
Moonlight
Nocturnal Animals
(Possible: Hidden Figures)

Original Screenplay
Hell or High Water
Jackie
La La Land
The Lobster
Manchester By the Sea

Cinematography
Arrival
Jackie
La La Land
Moonlight
Silence

Costume Design
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Florence Foster Jenkins
Jackie
La La Land
Silence

Film Editing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
Jackie
La La Land
Moonlight
(Possible: Manchester By the Sea, Silence)

Make-Up and Hairstyling
Deadpool
Florence Foster Jenkins
Star Trek Beyond

Production Design
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Jackie
The Jungle Book
La La Land
Silence
(Possible: Arrival)

Score
Jackie
La La Land
Lion
Moonlight
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Song
"Audition (The Fools Who Dream)," La La Land
"Can't Stop the Feeling," Trolls
"City of Stars," La La Land
"How Far I'll Go," Moana
"Runnin'," Hidden Figures
(Possible: "Try Everything," Zootopia)

Sound Editing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Silence
(Possible: The Jungle Book)

Sound Mixing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Silence
(Possible: The Jungle Book)

Visual Effects
Arrival
Doctor Strange
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
The Jungle Book
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Animated Feature
Finding Dory
Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
The Red Turtle
Zootopia

Documentary Feature
Cameraperson
The Eagle Huntress
I Am Not Your Negro
O.J.: Made in America
13th

Foreign Language Film
Land of Mine
A Man Called Ove
My Life As a Zucchini
The Salesman
Toni Erdmann

Animated Short
The Head Vanishes
Inner Workings
Pearl
Piper
Sous Tes Doights

Documentary Short
Extremis
Joe's Violin
The Mute's House
Watani: My Homeland
The White Helmets

Live Action Short
Nocturne in Black
The Rifle, the Jackal, the Wolf and the Boy
Sing Mindenki
Timecode
The Way of Tea

The 25 Best Films of 2016

The Oscar Nominations will be announced in a week so with that in mind I thought it was time to list my selections for the best films of last year:

1. Moonlight

2. Manchester By the Sea
3. La La Land
4. Paterson
5. Elle
6. Hell or High Water
7. Krisha
8. Love & Friendship
9. Little Men
10. The Handmaiden
11. Weiner
12. Kubo and the Two Strings
13. Everybody Wants Some
14. De Palma
15. The Witch
16. Don’t Think Twice
17. The Lobster
18. Embrace of the Serpent
19. 20^th Century Women
20. Silence
21. Arrival
22. Certain Women
23. Moana
24. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
25. A War

This week's DVD releases

The Girl on the Train *½

Paula Hawkins is on record as disliking comparisons of her sensationally successful 2015 best-seller The Girl on the Train to the previous "girl" crime fiction smash, Gone Girl. There's no doubt that Tate Taylor, the director of the film version of Hawkins' novel, will also object to having his work held up next to David Fincher's cinematic take on Gone Girl, as the juxtaposition will certainly not be to his benefit.

A morose, grim and intensely one-dimensional thriller about an alcoholic's struggle to make sense of a close-to-home murder as well as her own mind, this major release from Universal can count on a panting public to rent or steam this when it first becomes available tomorrow. But this train may hit a yellow commercial light sooner than expected down the line.

Distinguished only by a quite extraordinary musical score by Danny Elfman, working in an entirely uncharacteristic mode, and some adventurous camerawork from Director of Photography Charlotte Bruus Christensen, the film is very faithful to the book both structurally and in dramatic incident. The changes lie elsewhere: The setting has been shifted from greater London to the New York City suburbs, the milieu is much more upscale than in the book and the title character in the film is both more physically attractive and less ironic than on the page.

As the cinema is arguably the artistic medium most conducive to conveying sustained voyeurism, this particular story held a great deal of potential. The first mistake of cast-off ex-wife Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) is to continue to live in immediate proximity to her ex, Tom Watson (Justin Theroux), and his beautiful new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), especially now that they have a baby, something a jealous Rachel was unable to produce.

While drowning her sorrows with the bottle and having long since lost her job due to drunkenness, Rachel spies on and harasses Tom and Anna with persistent phone calls, unwanted visits and, unbeknownst to them, prying looks as Rachel passes by their house twice a day on the Metro North commuter line on her way to idle days in the city.

Along this river route also lies the house shared by ultra-macho Scott Hipwell (Luke Evans) and his gorgeous young mate Megan (Haley Bennett), who not only bears an acute resemblance to Anna but, at the outset, works as the nanny for Anna's child. Rachel likes to spy on her, too, and one day her prying eyes hit pay dirt when she spots Megan on an upstairs deck kissing a man who is decidedly not her husband.

In fact, it is the local ladies' favorite shrink, dreamy-looking Dr. Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez), a problematic character in that, a) he has some professional ethics issues he ought to sort out, b) he just sort of disappears from the narrative at a certain point and c) his name suggests Middle Eastern descent (explicitly so in the book) but the role is performed with a light Spanish accent. Once it was decided to cast Ramirez, an excellent actor, why not just change the character's name instead of inviting perplexity?

The sometimes formidable screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson has retained Hawkins' storytelling architecture, which involves shuffling three female first-person points of view as well as hopscotching among past and present time frames. Still, the central voice belongs to Rachel, who spends a good deal of her time trying to remember the details of an awful drunken night when something very bad happened.

The problem, however, is that Rachel just can't stay off the sauce. Taylor and his cinematographer move the camera around in any number of disorienting, unsteady, focus-changing ways to communicate the protagonist's instability. But the bottom line is that what we're looking at much of the time is a woman with bleary eyes, blotchy complexion and a demeanor of sour discontent who nonetheless remains movie-star pretty. In the book, Rachel says of herself, "I am no longer desirable, I'm off-putting in some way. It's not just that I've put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it's as if people can see the damage written all over me … ." Try as the actress might, all of Blunt's grimaces, slurred words and unbalanced walking don't really convince that she is Rachel; it feels like an act.

But the real problem is that she's a drag, as is virtually everyone else who populates this dire tale of serial misbehavior among would-be-but-not-really friends. The puzzle of how the various personal and narrative pieces will eventually fit together exerts a smidgen of interest, but the characters are so dour and lacking dimension as to invite no curiosity about them. The two main men, Tom and Scott, are humorless, ornery, sexually presumptuous and incapable of saying an interesting word about anything. The women aren't much better: The sullen Megan resembles a beautiful zombie, Anna can think or speak of little other than her baby and Rachel only with great difficulty emerges from her booze-soaked cocoon. Taylor's first feature was called Pretty Ugly People; that could equally serve as the title for this one.

All of this wouldn't matter quite so much if the central mystery had been more compelling. But the ever-present possibility of trick endings to the side, it isn't too difficult to come up with the most rational supposition as to who the baddie is, and the revelation, when it comes, isn't the least bit gasp-inducing. The other suspense rates as little more than curiosity, as to whether or not Rachel will ever pull herself together and pour the hooch down the drain instead of down her throat.

A few nice character performances lurk around the edges, including those by Allison Janney as an approachable cop; Laura Prepon, given too little screen time as Rachel's indulgent landlady; and especially Lisa Kudrow, who brings exceptional verve to a nothing role.

The lone creative element to command coercive interest here is Elfman's score, which employs sonic currents of tonal irregularities, pulsations and mood instigators rather than melodies, typical tension tropes or any of his trademark gambits from the Tim Burton collaborations. He almost makes the film seem good from time to time.


Keeping Up with the Joneses *

Greg Mottola has made some fine contributions to big-screen comedy — including sweet-and-salty teen flicks Adventureland and Superbad — but his new film, Keeping Up With the Joneses, is decidedly not one of them.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises. It’s been obvious for a while now, but bears repeating: At a time when we’re spoiled with satisfyingly funny small-screen options, laugh-challenged fare like Keeping Up With the Joneses just doesn’t cut it. Why shell out anything for this junk if you can tune into the latest season of Black-ish, check out new gems like HBO’s Insecure, FX’s Better Things and Amazon’s Fleabag, or just google Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump on SNL? Even by standards of low-IQ escapism, the film falls short. At least Masterminds, another recent goof-fest headlined by Keeping Up With the Joneses star Zach Galifianakis, gave the actor an epically awful pageboy hairdo to divert our attention from its disappointments.

Mottola’s movie wasn’t without potential. There's an appealing quaintness to its story of a married couple who become convinced their glamorous neighbors are spies. Unlike most studio comedies these days, Keeping Up With the Joneses isn’t brashly vulgar, nor does it try, aside from a lame Caitlyn Jenner joke, to be zeitgeisty. The problem is that it doesn’t really try at all. Imagine Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery plus I Love You, Man, multiplied by Mr. & Mrs. Smith, divided by TV series The Americans. Minus all the wit, spark and deftness.

Jeff and Karen Gaffney (Galifianakis and Isla Fisher) enjoy a life of comfortable if numbing suburban averageness in the Atlanta area. He’s a straight-arrow HR manager who cheerfully submits employees to asinine trust games and conflict resolution exercises. She’s a perky interior decorator suffering from a lack of inspiration. With their kids at camp for the summer, Jeff and Karen vow to spend some quality time together, but empty-nest syndrome starts to take hold.

That’s when distraction, and possibly danger, arrives in the genetically blessed forms of Tim and Natalie Jones (Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot), who move into the house next door. Tim, a travel writer, speaks multiple languages and has a head of hair made for shampoo commercials. His wife Natalie is a social media editor and food blogger with runway-ready legs and cheekbones for days. Jeff and Tim begin a tentative bromance — dorky Jeff seems flattered that the suave, casually macho Tim even acknowledges his existence — but Karen decides that "there’s something off" about the Joneses. When she finds Tim snooping around upstairs during a barbecue hosted by the Gaffneys, she sets out to do some snooping of her own.

Thuddingly obvious hijinks ensue as Karen, "incognito" in a hat and sunglasses, follows Natalie around town — an operation that concludes with the two women facing off in a lingerie store dressing room. (The movie’s use of lesbian "tension" to titillate and amuse, culminating in an especially depressing girl-on-girl kiss, feels dated and desperate.)

Mottola and LeSieur fumble the big set pieces, including a sequence that finds the Gaffneys breaking into the Jones residence to look for clues; the rhythm is off, the jokes don’t land, the gags are sluggish and unimaginative. You know things are dire when one of the most amusing bits consists of Jeff accidentally smashing Karen’s head into a wall. Even scenes that have a flicker of comic invention — as when, toward the end of the film, the Joneses start bickering at a diner, the sexy, unflappable twosome momentarily unraveled by the same neuroses that haunt normal couples — peter out before they get good.

Galifianakis, in what might be described as the Will Ferrell role, has a few giggle-worthy lines (sitting down at an underground Chinese eatery, he marvels, "Look at all these little ethnic condiments!"). But it's safe to say the actor is better at playing creepy man-children than regular squares. He and the always likeable Fisher pull faces and do pratfalls, throwing their considerable skill and timing at material that, apart from a throwaway touch or two (there's a good quip about crooked British teeth), is essentially irredeemable.

Hamm offers up a breezy variation on his tormented Mad Men protagonist Don Draper, and he's a pleasure — the only one who doesn't seem to be trying too hard. Gadot looks fittingly stunning and bad-ass, though on the basis of her work here, comedy may not be her strong suit.

The sparse supporting cast includes Veep's terrific Matt Walsh, an inadvertent reminder of how much more fun we could be having watching something else.


This Week’s Other New Releases
Zero Days *** Because the movie’s subjects who are best positioned to provide new information are also the least likely to talk, much of the movie is devoted to rehashing previously published reports, which director Alex Gibney does with both cogency and style.
Ouija: Origin of Evil **½ The movie takes a while to get going, and the demonic possession plot pretty much runs on rails. And yet there’s plenty to admire here: strong performances (E.T. legend Henry Thomas is a welcome sight as a kindly priest), top-notch jump-scares, and some unexpected lovely, almost Far From Heaven-ish autumnal photography.
The Whole Truth *½ Plays like an especially claustrophobic courtroom procedural, drably photographed and generically framed.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal