Many gears missing in The House with a Clock in Its Walls

Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, and Jack Black in The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Among the many things amiss about The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a simple purpose. It aims to fit into a few genres, but never quite manages to find the one worth filming. Concepts of horror sneak in, but never become realized in the ways they should be. It wants to have a message, to say something powerful about the good and evil and the human soul, but the message is garbled and difficult to interpret. The House with a Clock in Its Walls is fine when its a light kids' flick, but it falters as soon as it tries to grapple complexity. That's not too surprising given the limitations of director Eli Roth, who has shown repeatedly he is incapable of handling complex material with a deft touch. Give the man a cabin and some teens to bump off gruesomely and he'll deliver a decent popcorn flick; give him the end of the world to think about and he'll miss why that matters.

Then again, The House with a Clock in Its Walls should be right in his wheelhouse, a movie with supernatural elements that doesn't require Roth to attempt to delve into complicated issues like vigilantism. The premise is simple enough, centering on 10-year-old orphan/oft irksome Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) moving in with his kooky uncle Jonathan (Jack Black). Jonathan, who spends much of his time meeting with his purple-obsessed neighbor Florence (Cate Blanchett), has a habit of keeping secrets, which are tied to the bumps in the night at the eerie house. As he struggles to adapt to his new life, Lewis also copes with the his parents' deaths and the dissolution of his friendship with cool jock Tarby Corrigan (Sunny Suljic, who looks disturbingly like Ted Cruz), along with a malevolent force coming his way.

It's with these basic areas where Roth sort of excels The House with a Clock in Its Walls. He shows a playful side with the house of magic, creating a less active version of Pee-wee's Playhouse that shows how inviting the place can be despite the inherent weirdness. He deploys the overqualified Blanchett and Black to add a smidgen of gravitas and heaps of kid-friendly humor, respectively, and he tosses in a pretty nifty magic trick that brings Lewis and Jonathan together. If The House with a Clock in Its Walls didn't stray too far from the basic story, it would be fine at least.

Writer Eric Kripke's adaptation of the eponymous book goes much, much deeper than that. It tosses in Kyle MacLachlan as the evil wizard Isaac Izard, who loses his soul to World War II. It adds in his wife Selena (Renée Elise Goldsberry), an apparently wicked witch willing to end the world for her love. Florence is also granted a sad backstory, one that is stated in passing but used as a primary character motivation. Jonathan is given a half-baked plot about his fears of parenting, which falls flat because the movie never invests in it. Lewis has an attachment to a Magic 8-Ball that is stated but never returned to until the final act. All of these should flesh out the characters, add some grounding to the fluff to make the characters matter to the audience. But they all fail, due in part to poor, inefficient storytelling on Kripke's part. A lot of the blame too belongs to Roth, who reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of emotional complexity. That a lot of the driving forces for characters are referenced in passing reflects minimal care from the filmmakers for the world they've built. Frankly, it is tremendously boring to watch a movie in which the stakes are so poorly established.

Strangely, the weakest element of the film aside from the lack of depth is a general absence of terror. Roth cut his teeth as a horror director, and he should be more than qualified to build tension despite his unaccustomed PG rating. Scares do not require an R rating to work as long as the person steering the movie knows how to invoke fear. Yet The House with a Clock in Its Walls doesn't evoke shivers or goosebumps. Instead the horror is outlandish and quite often silly, with Roth never bothering to set up the proper ambiance for what is largely a haunted house movie. The least Roth, and by extension The House with a Clock in Its Walls, can do is give the audience a scare or two in a movie that dedicates itself to the wonders of the supernatural.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 104 minutes

Genre: Fantasy

tl;dr

What Worked: Cate Blanchett, Jack Black

What Fell Short: Directing, script, ambiance, Lewis Barnavelt

What To Watch Instead: Coraline, ParaNorman, Halloweentown

Predator sequel can't keep up with its ambitions

Olivia Munn and Jacob Tremblay in The Predator. Image courtesy Fox.

At the very least, The Predator has ambition. For a third sequel to a horror sci-fi franchise, not including the Alien vs. Predator series, director and co-writer Shane Black wants to evolve the franchise beyond its simple base. What started as a hunt in the jungle – one featuring Black himself as a combatant 30-plus years ago – has become a global threat with unexpected heroes and stronger villains. But there's so much to The Predator, so many stories Black and fellow writer Fred Dekker want to tell, they can't corral possibly tell everything. A lot happens in the course of the film, but most of it feels incomplete.

Following the evens of Predator and Predator 2, and skipping right over Predators, The Predator is technically a misnomer. There are, in fact, two Predators in this movie. One is theoretically (albeit not in practice) a good guy, while the other is an 11-foot beast with new abilities gained from stealing DNA from some of the hunted. The big Predator is on the hunt for the “good” Predator, and encounters expert sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) and his savant son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) during the pursuit. Alongside a mentally unbalanced squad of soldiers (Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, and Augusto Aguilera) and biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn), the McKenna family must evade the expert hunter, as well as a mysterious government agent (Sterling K. Brown) with ill intentions.

So what's really new this time around? The Predator has the larger Predator, one with far better weaponry and even a couple of hounds to unleash upon his prey. There are a plethora of in jokes, from references mocking the first two films to a couple of scenes deconstructing how the name Predator does not actually match those aliens do. The point is for Black and Dekker to show they're in on how campy the series has become, and the dialog is good enough to just barely pull it off. But, mostly, there's the battle among Predators, with the alien creatures warring against one another. Which, as a concept, is pretty interesting. Bumping the stakes from small hunting expeditions to global annihilation makes a lot of sense for this franchise, while adding urgency to a formula that has started to become stale in recent years. It also shows Black and Dekker want to do something more with their sequel, to put their stamp on this movie and to deviate away from the past 28 years of Predator flicks. Interesting is good, especially for a franchise with sci-fi roots and such a horrifying and dangerous threat.

At least there could have been a threat of danger, as the peril is reduced markedly by some CGI Predator action. The original Predator has some excellent elements of horror movie because the eponymous alien exist on the same plane as the humans. They are large and strong, big enough threats to physically intimidate one of Earth's largest combatants. The Predator shifts between a real-life character in costume and CGI, with the latter scenes looking pretty cheap. Once the Predator is no longer flesh, the fear it evokes is gone. Bad CGI, like the version in this movie, sucks the audience right out of the tension the filmmakers try to breed.

The rub with ambition is it needs to have some direction to go with it. The Predator floats because Black and Dekker have so many ideas for this movie they can't keep track of everything. Narratives abound, from Quinn and Rory, to the soldiers, to the Predators, to Bracket, to the future battle for the planet. The focus shifts wantonly, because Black can't manage to track all the stories he and Dekker lobbed into this movie, and the result are a combination of plot holes and unfulfilled stories for the characters. Nobody receives adequate time because the movie gives itself less than two hours to tell 10 stories, and the result is a mass of confusion for an audience tasked with keeping up with so much.

The funny thing is, The Predator is still the best Predator sequel. Even with the mess of a story, Black is a competent enough filmmaker to give the audience some quality gore and decent jokes. The action is shot pretty well, and the kills become fairly unique thanks to the new Predator's advanced weaponry and Black's penchant for ingenuity. Then again, being the best Predator sequel is a backhanded compliment given how bad the rest of the franchise is; none of them could ever match the magic of the original. Ambition won't necessarily carry a movie to greatness, but it does put The Predator above its sister sequels.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 107 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Ambition, in jokes, Sterling K. Brown

What Sucked: Abandoned subplots, special effects

Watch Instead: Predator, The Nice Guys

Garner on her own in sloppy Peppermint

Jennifer Garner in Peppermint. Image courtesy STX.

Sympathy for the dull absurdity that is Peppermint belongs solely to Jennifer Garner. Garner gives all she can to a poorly written character, inhabiting the protagonist with verve and tenderness. She reveals the depths of a woman with little left to care about in this world, who is broken by society and becomes convinced of the righteousness of her actions. Garner is the only thing Peppermint has going for it, because what exists around her is dreadful.

Peppermint is designed to be Garner's Taken, even importing the latter movie's director Pierre Morel to helm this one. Not that Garner needed a Taken, as she has 100-plus episodes of Alias to support her action-star credit, but she dives right into the role of working mom turned vigilante Riley North. Following the gang-related murder of her husband (Jeff Hephner) and daughter (Cailey Fleming) and the lack of justice that followed, Riley goes on the run for five years before returning to Los Angeles to exact revenge upon drug lord Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). She's pursued by a pair of detectives (John Gallagher Jr. and John Ortiz) and an FBI agent (Annie Ilonzeh) as she creates chaos on Garcia's drug operations and easily murders the men who denied her justice. One by one she disposes of Garcia's men, evading traps and fighting against a comically corrupt system.

When these revenge movies work, they often succeed because of simple, direct plots and an interesting lead who can carry mediocre material. Peppermint at least gets the casting right with Garner, but it utterly fails on delivering the former. The film's plot leaps from point to point, opening in a dramatic moment, then bouncing five years back in the past for the rest of the first act, and finally leaping ahead of the moments that lead off the movie. It is as jarring as it sounds, and Peppermint isn't out to disorient audiences, so this casual time shifting is more sloppy than clever. And there is so much backstory the movie tries to squeeze in Morel and screenwriter Chad St. John struggle to separate the necessary pieces against the unnecessary bits. There are character motivations that seem to have been lost in either script revisions or editing, plot details revealed at awkward moments, and narrative lapses that never become resolved. The movie is at least coherent, but it's clunky and ill-fitting of the genre.

One of the recent problems that have plagued revenge flicks, including the god-awful Death Wish reboot from earlier this year, is a push to insert social media into the equation. In a poor attempt to replicate the real-life experience, despite existing in what is otherwise a fantastical world, Peppermint uses social media as the platform as its method of debating Riley's moral compass. Aside from looking fake, the push to have the public evaluate the character's morality is lazy storytelling. Audiences are denied the right to make their own decisions about whether a person who kills people for revenge is a hero or a menace. Peppermint clearly sides with the former and declares Riley in the right for her actions, which removes a lot of the moral complications from the character. And it's not as if she needs vindication for her actions; if she were written with more complexity, she wouldn't care if what she did was right or wrong. To slay monsters, you have to become one, and a character like Riley should embrace that.

Peppermint frustrates because there is a legitimately interesting movie existing on the periphery of the inanity. The movie casually tosses out Riley North's backstory, eliding over five years of combat training, fighting, and clearing out all the crime around the digs in Skid Row (naming is an issue with this film). There's a portrait of her as a saint, honoring her efforts in cleaning up the streets. Yet the movie never shows any of Riley's transformation from working mom to bloodthirsty murder machine. It's fair to respect storytelling efficiency, but alluding to the epic, international adventures of a heartbroken woman is just a waste of a good narrative. And the simple mention of such an extreme change to a character opens far more questions than the movie is comfortable answering. Then again, the odds are strongly against filmmakers behind Peppermint being competent enough to do better than this.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: R

Run time: 102 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Jennifer Garner

What Sucked: Everything else

Watch Instead: Alias, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Taken