Forgettable Films of 2018

Alicia Vikander in Tomb Raider. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

For the last few years I've done a best of list to cap off a given year, along with a special spot dedicated to the worst movie. As 2018 ends, I wanted to try something a little different and instead give some final attention to movies that won't garner a lot of attention in 2019 and beyond. These are movies that don't stand out this year, films you'll skip over while browsing through Netflix, HBO GO, or Amazon Prime. Some are big budget flops that won't deliver a sequel, some are good movies that just can't find an audience, and others are missed opportunities.

Before we pour one out for the forgotten flicks of 2018, here's a short list of some of the best and worst 2018 had to offer.

Highlights: Thoroughbreds, Black Panther, Tully, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, First Man

Lowlights: Death Wish, Fifty Shades Freed, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Uncle Drew

Kyrie Irving in Uncle Drew. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

What is it? A continuation of Kyrie Irving's Pepsi Max commercials starring the eponymous old baller.

Is it good? Nope.

Is any of it memorable? Watching Irving dribble is always a treat. Chris Webber was clearly having a good time, and Tiffany Haddish is always fun. There's not much more to say about this movie otherwise; Irving isn't much of an actor, and the plot is uninspired.

The Sisters Brothers

Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly in The Sisters Brothers. Image courtesy Annapurna Pictures.

What is it? A neo-Western about greed, friendship, and dedication to family.

Is it good? Very much so.

Is any of it memorable? The opening scene is efficient, brutal, and sets the tone for the rest of the movie. John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix show great camaraderie as the titular siblings, and the film continually defies genre expectations. It's a really, really good Western, which sort of dooms it to be ignored.

Life of the Party

Melissa McCarthy in Life of the Party. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

What is it? A modern take on Back to School starring Melissa McCarthy.

Is it good? Not at all.

Is any of it memorable? Maya Rudolph earns a few laughs for being herself. Gillian Jacobs and Heidi Gardner play characters who belong to a way more interesting movie than this. McCarthy's talents are wasted in this movie, which is particularly strange given she and her husband, Ben Falcone, wrote it.

Skyscraper

Dwayne Johnson in Skyscraper. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

What is it? Dwayne Johnson's take on Die Hard.

Is it good? Unfortunately no.

Is any of it memorable? Just Johnson's performance. This is all the more disappointing considering even his lesser movies offer some redeeming value.

I Feel Pretty

Amy Schumer in I Feel Pretty. Image courtesy STX Films.

What is it? A send up of body swap movies starring Amy Schumer.

Is it good? It's pretty bad.

Is any of it memorable? Aidy Bryant and Busy Philips get a lot from underwritten roles. The premise is clever, with potential for both high comedy and pointed social criticism. It doesn't deliver though due to a mix of poor directing, an unclear premise, and precious few jokes for Schumer.

Tomb Raider

Alicia Vikander in Tomb Raider. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

What is it? A reboot of the Tomb Raider series, with Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft.

Is it good? It's fine.

Is any of it memorable? A couple of the fight sequences are solid. Vikander shows promise as an action heroine. The idea behind watching Croft grow into her eventual role as an iconic adventurer is interesting. With a better script (one that adhered more closely to the video game) and stronger direction this could have been a pretty spectacular action flick.

Tomb Raider fails Lara Croft

Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

There is something at least moderately superb about the reboot to the Tomb Raider series. The fundamental idea for what the movie is capable of being is at least on screen long enough to draw the interest of viewers, before they are swept away by pablum ripped off from far better movies. It eventually devolves into mildly competent action flick, a movie with nothing interesting to see and little to say about the capabilities of its protagonist. Tomb Raider neither overwhelms nor underwhelms; it’s pretty placid for an action movie.

The good stuff occurs in spurts in acts one and two, when Tomb Raider centers the story on its neophyte adventurer Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander). It's an origin story, but one in which the character's inexperience feels appropriate because the movie portrays her as someone clearly over her head. Her first moments on screen come in the midst of her losing a fight handily, which is followed by yet another loss in a bicycle chase through the streets of London. The set up is there to show a woman evolving into a hero, brave enough to put herself into difficult situations but not savvy or strong enough to pull off a victory. It's interesting to see a character take their lumps in the early going, plow through the difficulties as they level up and improve their strength, stamina, and experience. The culmination comes in act two, where Lara brutally murders a man for the first time. It's a moment of surprise and agony for Lara, the fact that she killed a person and the realization that she's capable of doing such a terrible thing in the first place, and Vikander sells the moment quite well. It’s brutal and effective, an abbreviated window into an action movie.

For some reason though the movie largely abandons that story. Tomb Raider's undercuts Lara's growth by taking a lot of the action and courage out of her hands. She's protected by the male characters around her, whether its her new friend Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) or by her father Richard (Dominic West). Instead of letting Lara fight for herself, the men are always on hand to save her. The change from letting Lara get beaten down to protecting her is abrupt and damaging, undermining one of her defining character traits. If the movie is going to put her in a dangerous situations, it needs to allow her to get out of it on her own accord and not rely on someone else to do it for her. Even Richard's presence in Tomb Raider hurts Lara as a character. Richard serves as a narrative crutch, a figure to both get Lara to go on the adventure and to protect her from making difficult choices. He's not that interesting of a character, or at least allowed to be that interesting of a character aside from some random discussions about hallucinations. Richard only exists because the filmmakers couldn't come up with a better way for Lara to improve, and because tossing in daddy issues is a really easy way to build a character.

Throwing parental problems at an action character has been done, just like the rest of Tomb Raider. As the movie goes on the similarities to the Indiana Jones series become more and more notable, to the point where certain plot points are ripped off blatantly. The action sequences exist, functional and largely uninteresting. The final twist is ultimately asinine, as is Lara's fight with the movie's villain Vogel (Walton Goggins) at the en. Although it is pretty nice to have Boyd Crowder around, Tomb Raider misses a great opportunity to build out a fascinating in concept villain. Perhaps without Richard the movie might have built Vogel into the villain it needs.

Calling Tomb Raider another indictment against adapting video games into movies is a little unfair. This movie was not done well, but the fault lies with the method and not the quality of the source material. After three movies (two campy adventures with Angelina Jolie and this one), there still remains a lot of potential with the Lara Croft character. She's still a great adventurer, smart and strong and very dangerous because of it. Tomb Raider shows the material is there for a good adaptation; it's the filmmakers who keep bringing it down.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

 

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 118 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away
 
Target audience: People who like video game adaptations and those who hope Alicia Vikander becomes the next big action star.

Take the whole family?: This is pretty violent and it has enough body horror toward the end to discomfort young kids.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay home.

Is Vikander an action star?: Maybe with better material. She sells the painful moments pretty well, although she does succumb to an epic case of Tom Cruise running and spends a decent amount of time shrieking. I'm not sold on her as an action star, but she's good enough to deserve a closer look.

Watch this instead?: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the basis for a lot of Tomb Raider's plot, so it makes sense to just go to the source.

Light Between Oceans cries its way through tedium

Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender think about crying in The Light Between Oceans. Image courtesy Disney.

While leaving the theater on Tuesday evening on the way to a train home I realized I couldn't actually remember the name of the movie I just watched. I had to look at my notes to come up with the title, The Light Between Oceans, which is so perfectly generic it flutters its way through the mind within an instant. It's a title that screams bland, offering no intrigue but wrapped in a heavy handed metaphor that clearly must mean something important. It doesn’t really mean all that much, nor does the film the title introduces to audiences. The actual film is equally unremarkable, concerning the travails of a lighthouse keeper and his wife somewhere in Australia (albeit filmed in New Zealand) in the 1920s. The Light Between Oceans flirts with mediocrity, falling a slight step below that mark.

Occasions arise when the film bobs into charming in the first act, when stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander reveling in their wedded bliss in a satisfactory sequence that, sadly, teases a more interesting film. (At least, more interesting than the one director Derek Cianfrance, who also wrote the adaptation from the novel, delivers.) Their bliss, coming after a short romance between Fassbender's lonely and guilt-driven lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne, and Vikander's local girl Isabel, is sweet and endearing, showing off the inherent decency of Fassbender's Tom and the liveliness of Vikander's Isabel. It's akin to the Julia Childs half of Julie & Julia, a portrait of a loving couple that captivates from the magnetism between Meryl Streep and the perpetually underrated Stanley Tucci. Vikander and Fassbender don't quite have that level of rapport, but they do make for a enviable couple for the film's moderately endearing first act. And at least the early parts of the relationship explain how a couple living alone at a lighthouse can handle the isolation; they have each other, and that's just about all they need for a spell.

The Light Between Oceans starts to sink in act two, once Vikander becomes obsessed with motherhood – representing a fairly notable reversal in her previously noted personality – and the couple's decision to claim a lost infant as their own. It's at this point when the water works begin to flow and Vikander and Fassbender ugly cry as often as possible. (They're joined later by Rachel Weisz as the child's real mother; she more than holds her own in this contest.) The tears come across as more phony than real, presented in a more cinematic scope than as an organic reaction to the situations the characters find themselves in. It’s staged weeping built for award shows and to show the photogenic stars in a vulnerable state of mind, although it does sometimes feel as if the characters are infected by a terminal case of snot face.

What Cianfrance wants is a presentation of inner turmoil, with the morally rigid Tom debating the rightness of their decision. Yet Cianfrance doesn't appear to know how to accomplish that goal in an interesting fashion (ugly crying excluded); he doesn't focus enough on Tom's inner turmoil, and his efforts to toss in montages akin to the early days falters because of how poorly Cianfrance addresses the proverbial elephant in the room. Not like he didn’t have time to deal with this issue considering how much the film begins to drag in the final two thirds, lollygagging through a long second act and an interminable third act brightened solely by the reminder that Bryan Brown is still alive. Whatever point Cianfrance wanted to bring up in The Light Between Oceans exists somewhere within the morass of his final two acts and involves guilt, sins and temptation on some level presented without passion or excitement.

The Light Between Oceans is something of a tease. It's a movie about a lighthouse keeper in an era when lighthouses were vital that incorporates little of the dangers or interests the position has. It presents child abduction in an utterly boring way. It offers an interesting debate of the definition of parenthood, only to skirt away from the issue to push the plot forward. It comes close, sometimes, to resembling interesting, only to step away and test the audience's patience in the process. There isn't much more to say about The Light Between Oceans except to remark upon its frustrating fugacity and shrug.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 132 minutes

Genre: Drama 
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People searching for ersatz prestige flicks.

Take the whole family?: Far too boring for kids to handle.

Theater or Netflix?: Just stay home and wait for it to come to you.

Academy Awards odds?: About time to break this thing out for the ramp up to Oscar season. I don't think this will do any real damage in the main categories, but the film does have some very solid costuming reflecting the era that might just justify a nomination.

Watch this instead?: It's tough to find a good film that matches The Light Between Oceans, so I'll go instead with A Simple Plan, Sam Raimi's terrific slow burn of a thriller about four people who quickly end up over their heads. It also does a better job of showing how guilt can become such an insidious little thing when it comes to illegal activities.