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

Death Wish misses the point

Bruce Willis and Ronnie Gene Blevins in Death Wish. Image courtesy MGM.

On the most basic, surface level view, Eli Roth’s remake Death Wish is fine. It’s sometimes a little campy, shot in a style that is neither appealing nor unappealing. The thrills are there, the blood is copious, and the deaths are grotesque in the Roth style. For what it is, Death Wish isn’t particularly interesting or groundbreaking. But it isn’t a catastrophe, and nothing about the surface levels screams incompetence. It exists to earn Bruce Willis some more money and revitalize his persona as an action star, and it does that to a degree. Looking at the movie as a basic piece of cinema obscures the grotesqueness Roth and writer Joe Carnahan created on screen. The message they have is an utter mess, either completely missing or gleefully ignoring the points of the 1974 Charles Bronson flick and the original novel about the inhumanity that comes from a quest for revenge. Their Death Wish isn’t even interesting enough to qualify as morally reprehensible; rather, it’s morally stupid.

Death Wish has little interest in holding Willis’ Paul Kersey to the fire for blasting people around Chicago. Roth and Carnahan justify it as a quest for revenge against the men who hurt his daughter (Camila Morrone) and murdered his wife (Elisabeth Shue). The expectation is to root for Kersey as he straight murders criminals and puts innocent people at risk as he gallivants around Chicago hunting people for sport. And this is a sport for Kersey, an after-work or weekend activity to engage in between saving people’s lives as a surgeon because it’s somehow the “right” thing to do. That he disobeys the most basic sense of law and order is not a factor for the filmmakers; they want viewers to cheer wildly for their “hero” as a savior for the people of Chicago (or at least the white people). Kersey should not be depicted as a hero; at best he could be viewed as complex, although neither Willis’ performance nor the script make Kersey appear overly complicated.

Death Wish should be a gritty movie. It needs to make people squirm from the violence on screen and the implications of revenge, showing how a man who seeks revenge becomes the monster he seeks to slay. It needs to make people second guess their thoughts about heroism and just be incredibly brutal. The original nails that aesthetic, due in large part to the 1970s-era New York City setting and Bronson’s cold demeanor. Bronson veers so close to crossing the line between good and evil he is often comparable to a slasher horror villain like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, an unrelenting machine designed to kill for the sake of killing. That Death Wish is often uncomfortable to watch because of how little regard Kersey has for life.

Roth and Carnahan go the other way with their interpretation. It’s too shiny and polished for a movie about moral decrepitude, too willing to wrap things up in a nice tidy bow and make the decisions for the audience. Their decision to make Kersey’s pursuit about justice for his family instead of vengeance against societal evils washes the characters hands of the mayhem he has brought to the city of Chicago. Even the way Roth frames the murders Kersey commits removes the discomfort from the whole scenario. Roth is outlandish in his deaths, showing as much blood and mush and guts as possible, transforming an act of brutality into a cartoonish farce. It can work in the right setting, for movies in which the fun comes from silly violence, but it doesn’t work when the point is to be ugly and cruel and to question the lead character’s motivations. 

 

None of that would be a real issue if Roth and Carnahan hadn’t sought that out in the first place. They litter the movie with faux debates over the righteousness of Kersey’s actions, only to vindicate him with a bloody finale designed to, again, make him heroic and justified. Simply put, Roth and Carnahan aren’t smart enough as filmmakers to even begin to have this debate, nowhere near evolved enough to understand what they’re even discussing in the first place. Death Wish would have been a fine popcorn flick had Roth and Carnahan with nothing under its veneer. But they are far away from their element here, and it results in an abysmal, heartless movie.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 107 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Folks with fond memories of the original or people interested in the works of Eli Roth.

Take the whole family?: Nope.

Theater or Netflix?: Just wait for it to stream.

What is up with Eli Roth?: Roth is just not very good at nuance or complexity. There are some major issues with his depiction of race in Death Wish, and he had a similar issue with homophobia in Hostel. He’s solid when he sticks to being weird but simple with Cabin Fever and his great trailer in Grindhouse.

Watch this instead?: The 1974 Death Wish isn't great, but it has the grittiness and an epic stoic performance from Charles Bronson to make it at least somewhat interesting. The later sequels are fascinating if only because of how utterly bonkers they become.