Great cast can't prop up portentous Just Mercy

Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx in Just Mercy. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

One of the worst things a film can try to be is powerful. Films can convey a lot of weight and impact on the viewer through acting, writing, and message because the filmmakers driving it have something of import to say. But a powerful film should be naturally so, delivering messages of great import through the craft. For films like Just Mercy, the attempt at gravitas comes across as trying too hard and results in a film that is more didactic than memorable.

Like most films of its ilk, Just Mercy is based on the true story of Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan), an idealistic Harvard attorney who dedicates his life to helping prisoners in need. Assisted by the tenacious Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), Stevenson picks up the case of inmate Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), who is on death row solely due to the testimony of erratic witness Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson). Stevenson spends years fighting against a corrupt system spearheaded by a spineless DA (Rafe Spall) to save McMillian from state-instituted death.

Just Mercy never lives up to the sum of its parts. The talent is there and Jordan, Fox, Larson, and Nelson all do good work in their respective roles. Stevenson's story is almost too perfect to craft a fine courtroom drama reminiscent of The Verdict. Yet the film doesn't dive into the material with nuance or an eye for dissecting the depth of the issues that cause a Walter McMillian to be put on death row with little evidence. Just Mercy thrives above the surface, giving the audience something to feel good about without challenging preconceived notions. Everything about the film is too easy and too direct; the line between evil men and the good folks contains no room for grey. The audience isn't granted room to consider the roots of the racism that drives the villains or the virtue of its central character, and without that room for ambiguity the film lacks the teeth it needs.

The actual horror about what happened to McMillian happens in the procedures director Destin Daniel Cretton and his co-writer Andrew Lanham don't choose to explore. Institutional racism is dangerous because it his hidden within minutiae constituting the law. Racists are terrible people worthy of condemnation, but they get away with their racism because the law both protects and supports their view. Just Mercy focuses on the individuals with barely a glance at the system that enables them. Viewers should be bothered by this topic because of its subtlety and how easily it pervades society. Saying racism is bad like Just Mercy does is an easy win; pushing into a person's biases is far more challenging and much more rewarding if done well.

Films like Just Mercy can at least be watchable with the premise and the cast it has in tow and can be more so with good writing. Cretton and Lanham miss heavily on the writing though, in particular when it comes to their central characters. Despite the talent on hand, none of the performers are provided a character to play. Each person is a collection of speeches designed to make the audience either nod in agreement or hiss in anger, sort of like a wrestling match about racism. Building the film around multiple speeches provides the important veneer of power Cretton and Lanham strive for, but at the expense of legitimate character growth and storytelling. Nobody really grows or changes in the film; they start off with an important speech and end with a similar important speech with the journey in between not actually mattering. Stevenson in particular is granted little change; he starts the film as idealistic and angelic and ends the film in the same state. His main flaw is youth, which he overcomes by getting older. I can guess the reason for this view of Stevenson is due to the real-life Stevenson serving as a producer and writing the source material, which explains why a biographical film leans heavily toward the hagiography. (That Just Mercy gives him the cinematic equivalent of a halo in the third act is a little much). It's difficult to succeed with an overly perfect lead character, which is apropos for a film like Just Mercy that tries far too hard and falls short because of it.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 136 minutes

Genre: Drama

tl;dr

What Worked: Cast

What Fell Short: Characterization, Dialog, Depth

What To Watch Instead: The Verdict, Fruitvale Station

Free Fire hits more than it misses

Brie Larson in Free Fire. Image courtesy A24.

The central joke behind Free Fire is very clever. It’s a comedy of errors, a group of hard gangsters pushed to the boiling point only to reveal how terrible they are at actually being gangsters. And, for a while there, the joke sticks and the very dark punchline earns the guffaws writer/director Ben Wheatley and co-writer Amy Jump seek. That is until the end of the second act when the joke grows stale and the plot is dragged forward to reach the 90 minute mark for a movie with a 60 minute plot. Screams of agony are only funny for so long.

But, again, for a while there everything works pretty well thanks to the simplicity of the concept. Stick a bunch of gangsters played by reliable character actors (Cillian Murphy, Sam Riley, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Michael Smiley, Babou Ceesay and Noah Taylor) along with an A-list starlet (Brie Larson) in a room, allow tempers to boil over during an awkward gun deal, and watch as the situation goes out of control. The joke of it comes after the tension devolves into violence, and its revealed that every single person in that room is a terrible shot. In lieu of actually killing the other guys, they keep hitting calves and ankles and shoulders and feet, places that don't prevent others from shooting back but limit movements to agonizing shuffles and crawls. (The mouths rarely stop screaming, bellowing, cursing or some combination of the three.) That every character in Free Fire has what appears to be infinite ammo results in a video game reality mixed with the darkest undertones of a slapstick comedy routine.

Wheatley and Jump get a lot of mileage out of that concept by first earning the sloppy violence with effective tension building. They set up the scenario well enough that any one thing could trigger a bloodbath, whether it’s the lack of trust between the gun sellers and buyers; personality conflicts among Copley, Murphy, Hammer and Smiley; the isolated location offering little escape; or the abundance of John Denver music. Pragmatic business reasons would be a little too logical for Free Fire; Wheatley and Jump prefer to set things up with a mix of fate and machismo completely unrelated to the deal. It makes sense given the context and nature of the situation; it's far easier to compromise on business than it is on ego and blind loyalty to idiots.

Free Fire works long enough to offer a generally favorable rating. It is often hilarious watching this group of tough guys launch invectives and vomit bullets at one another, their jokes and mocks interspersed with the aforementioned screams. The cast sells the hell out of it, reveling in both the physical pain and the pain of their insults. Hammer in particular appears to have the most fun as a very dry fellow who cares little about the people around him; his loyalty is based solely on money, making him a moderately independent agent who shoots one side while insulting the other. But there's a built-in limit to the premise. At some point the bullets have to start hitting their targets and people have to die to advance the plot forward. Free Fire's humor drops as its accuracy increases, the stakes becoming a little too real. Wheatley and Jump try to make up for it by heightening the violence to make the situation more ridiculous, but it comes across as more mean spirited than the violently silly tone the film has for its first half. Free Fire stops being fun as it evolves into a traditional crime film with the unhappy endings for all involved. It's not an unfair fate for the players involved, but it isn't an overly interesting one either.

The pragmatic but unimaginative ending is one of the signs that Wheatley and Jump didn't quite have a full grasp on their project. They needed a more interesting direction for the film to take after the violence loses its humorous punch, but what they have is more over the top lunacy than interesting. Ultimately there isn't really enough going on to make 90 minutes work easily, so the movie ends more on a whimper than a bang. There remains a lot to like about Free Fire, but it still leaves viewers feeling a little unsatisfied.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 90 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Shoot 'em up fans and people down for some real dark comedy.

Take the whole family?: Nope.

Theater or Netflix?: It's fun for a night at home, but not worth a trip out to the cinema.

How Boston is this film?: Not as much as one would suspect. Despite being set in the city, there is a surprising dearth of proper Boston accents or even the city's personalities. The two supposed local boys are both played by British actors, and they lack the unfounded bravado hinted at in a proper Boston accent.

Watch this as well?: Reservoir Dogs remains the pinnacle movie about gangsters stuck in a garage waiting for fate to play out. Also something worth at least an interesting glance are the Clive Owen vehicle Shoot 'Em Up and one of the more underappreciated films from 2016, The Nice Guys.

Follow me on Twitter @EricMungenast

Kong smashes in Skull Island

Kong faces down helicopters in Kong: Skull Island. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

There are precious few complications to Kong: Skull Island. The movie sets itself up to be a good old fashioned monster movie featuring a giant ape smashing all the things and giant lizards eating people, and it delivers exactly all of that with even more creatures and a little emotional undercurrent to offer just a little something else beyond mindless smashing. But, really, it’s the smashing that matters most.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and his team of writers get right to the monster from the get-go, using the opening sequence to contrast Kong's enormity with the first wave of intruders to come to his island, American and Japanese fighter pilots who happen to be fighting to the death in 1944. It doesn't take too much longer than to jump the story to 1973 and establish the key players who keep the plot going and get them right back to that island located somewhere in the South Pacific so viewers can watch Kong demolish a fleet of helicopters and piss off Samuel L. Jackson's crazed colonel. What people want to see from a movie called Kong: Skull Island is Kong acting very ape on his home turf, and the gaps between the human interactions designed to push the plot forward and the wanton craziness with Kong are short and sweet.

Skull Island has a few themes it hits on with a decent amount of success. The Vietnam War backdrop serves as a tool to set up important plot machinations and acts a thematic parallel between the Americans invading Skull Island and the actions taken during the war. Along those lines is the Ahab in Apocalypse Now subplot involving Jackson's character losing his mind over the ape and, again, the war. It’s an interesting idea that works in no small part from Jackson’s consistent ferocity in the role and one memorable shot of Jackson staring down Kong through a wall of flames. It looks just as cool as it sounds.

The humans as a whole though are a little less important, especially in comparison to King Kong's emphasis on the romantic subplot between Kong and the respective female protagonist. Brie Larson's photographer Mason Weaver is as close as this film gets to a Fay Wray, Jessica Lange or Naomi Watts, but her relationship with Kong is less amorous and more protective of each other. But there’s just enough emotional justification for Skull Island to work on that level and the movie establishes character motivations efficiently before settling on the island. Larson's Mason and the young geologist played by Corey Hawkins are both drawn to the island by curiosity. Jackson is fueled by his remorse for the unsatisfactory end of the Vietnam War and the emptiness that comes from a man who lives to fight but has no more battles left. John Goodman's government official Bill Randa is motivated by desperation. Tom Hiddleston's tracker James Conrad is in it for the money. It’s not enough to forge fleshed out characters, but it is more than enough to care about which humans will or will not get eaten.

Skull Island never asks any of them to do more than solid work or be a menacing Samuel L. Jackson. It leaves the emotional heavy lifting to John C. Reilly as the slightly loony Hank Marlow, the American soldier who crashes to the island toward the end of World War II. It’s easy to feel for a man stuck on an island of death for almost three decades, only wanting to go to home to his wife and see his son for the first time, all the while losing bits of his mind. Reilly sells his character's humor as expected from his comedic background while hitting on the loneliness the character, making the final few silent moments with Marlow more rewarding than expected.

There’s just enough there to keep the moments between monster action interesting as the humans wait for Kong or some other creature to strike. The battles are the selling point, and Vogt-Roberts put a lot of time and effort into making them engaging, enthralling and surprisingly gory given the rating. Watching Kong rise from the trees is intense and astounding, a great figure rising from the depths to protect his home from unwanted invaders. The vibe these fights give off are rooted in the atavism of its main character, messy and violent and without too much complexity. Vogt-Roberts’ film promised a giant ape fighting humans and monsters alike, and Skull Island gave the world a very good version of what it promised.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 120 minutes

Genre: Action
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Loyal King Kong fans and people interested in what will happen to this monster franchise and several others in the very near future.

Take the whole family?: I really have no idea how this thing got a PG-13 rating. There is a lot more gore than expected for this rating, so make sure your kids can handle blood if you take them.

Theater or Netflix?: Big screen is cool if you do it matinee style.

Any other things worth noting?: One of the cool touches Jordan Vogt-Roberts uses are a few bait and switches where characters try to sacrifice themselves. Most films emphasize a blaze of glory for characters after a kiss-off line, but Vogt-Roberts turns that on its head and shows the more realistic result of their attempts at martyrdom in a land of enormous creatures.

Watch this as well?: Any of the three versions of King Kong is watchable on some level. The 1933 iteration remains the best, while Peter Jackson's remake is a step above the one starring Jessica Lange. Track down Godzilla circa 1954 – although not the one remade for American audiences – and the much more recent creature feature Monsters for some more monster mashing.