30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night #2: NEFARIOUS (2023)

I should have pegged Nefarious as a Christian film before I started watching, but it pulled a fast one on me. I was expecting a regular ol' nasty demonic thriller like Sinister and Insidious and Malignant and other vicious adjectives, and it wasn't until the halfway point that I realized it had other aspirations. I like to consider myself smart enough to know a trojan horse when I see one, but the Devil is a wily one, as they say.

It's a shame that Nefarious doesn't know what a deft job it did at reeling me, a pro-choice liberal Catholic, into its procession, because that doesn't seem to be what it's trying to do. Rather, it seems squarely aimed at its own choir. It's one of those alternate versions of popular entertainment that's repurposed for the evangelical set: there's Christian rock, Christian pop music, Christian theme parks, and now there's a Christian horror movie. Sinister for Jesus Camp.

Except, well, Sinister itself should probably play pretty well at Jesus Camp: it was at heart a moral fable about ignoring one's family for fortune, and even cast a former Republican Senator--Fred Dalton Thompson--as the moral authority. A lot of mainstream horror movies tend to portray Christianity generally positively, from the questionable exploits of the benevolently portrayed Warrens in the Conjuring series to the admirable clergy in the Exorcist films. Nefarious doesn't realize that it actually doesn't need to stray far from the norm to make its point. So it's a shame when it stakes its claim firmly in its own yard and doesn't seek to go anywhere else. 

Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) arrives at an Oklahoma state prison to deliver the final psychological analysis of a prisoner about to be executed, Edgar Wayne Brady (Sean Patrick Flanery). Mr. Wayne Brady (Whose Line fans laugh there) claims to be inhabited by an ancient demon who used him as a vessel to commit the murders. Nefarious, the closest approximation of the name of the demon inhabiting Edgar, boasts to James that he wants Edgar to be executed so he can return to Hell. James, an atheist skeptic, is confident he'll be able to see through the supposed demon's facade, but his confidence soon falls apart when the demon begins to tell him things no one else knows.

Nefarious doesn't take long to get under James's skin, and that's because writer-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon (adapting a novel by right-wing media personality Steve Deace) make James into such a soft-headed bozo that he caves to the demon's will immediately. James is the evangelical bubble's version of an atheist secularist, with a self-assured cockiness that crumbles upon the first challenge. He's a human "Share this and make a liberal cry" meme.

The movie's best moments are the early ones between James and Nefarious in which the demon establishes his pomposity. It's here that Flanery really shines in one of his best performances, playing Nefarious as a properly dismissive and arrogant eternal being who's disgusted to be in the room with inferior humans. The writing shows some cleverness too, and Flanery and Belfi have a fun rapport in their early exchanges as Nefarious explains the origins of the human world through a fallen angel's eyes. Tom Ohmer, recognizable as the cop who tells Detective Crashmore that he "do[es]n't care who gets in [his] way" in I Think You Should Leave, has some fun as a tough-as-nails warden.

But around the end of the first act the directors lose their confidence in the audience and start catering to the lowest common denominator within the evangelical bubble. James turns from a formidable opponent to the easiest mark in the world, and all Nefarious need do is provoke him in the slightest for him to break down, as the filmmakers assume all atheists would. It's a common fantasy among the truly isolated faithful that nonbelievers need only to be confronted with something they're unfamiliar with in order to be convinced. Lots of their literature revolves around "told you so" rapture porn and "you can't explain that" question-begging: check the Left Behind series or Kirk Cameron's banana video for more examples. 

It's no fun to watch the movie pander for the rest of its running time. It's clear that it speaks a language that only the devout will respond to. If you guessed that the movie wheels in the old favorite enemies by having Nefarious confront James's history of both (1) assisted suicide, and (2) abortion for a one-two punch, a shiny red apple for you. Amid a U.S. political climate where about 70% seem to be in favor of abortion rights in at least some capacity, this movie still speaks of it as if it were a secret shame, with James's cries of "It was her choice" serving only as a weasely shirking of masculine and fatherly responsibility. (The woman in question, of course, never appears and her voice isn't heard but for a too-late outgoing voicemail message. The decision-making, of course, lies entirely with men.) And his assisting of his mother's suicide during a terminal illness is written off as a ploy to quickly gain an inheritance; I certainly pray to my own God that none of the filmmakers are faced with such a situation only to have this assumption made of them.

It at least manages a modicum of consistency by coming out against the death penalty as well, but by the end it's beyond recovery. The ending is a debacle of a literal deus ex machina, the worst "God did it" resolution with no real catharsis or confrontation. And what's more, it subjects us to an unbearably long epilogue in which James explains the aftermath on a talk show hosted by Glenn Beck (!), followed by a final ending that doesn't so much "twist" as it does writhe.

The movie really had me in its first act, and were the filmmakers interested in reeling in nonbelievers, it might have worked. They could conceivably have gotten some non-Christians to watch a good solid horror movie with a Christian message. But no movie that features Glenn Beck as its version of a mainstream talk show host is interested in reaching a mainstream audience at all.

And it's a shame: Flanery is really good in it.

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night #1: THE BOOGEYMAN (2023)

The Boogeyman is a pretty good movie based on one of the scariest short stories ever written, and the thing that distinguishes the story is sadly largely left out of the movie. What’s left is some tried-and-true monster-in-the-closet madness, which, because the director Rob Savage is very deft at this sort of thing, is very exciting and fun to watch. Those who’ve never read Stephen King’s short story won’t know any better, but probably won’t see it as anything better than the myriad other Boogeyman or Boogeyman-adjacent movies that we admittedly love for what they are.

It’s a spooky fun good time and that’s enough, though I’d still like to see the real heart of King’s story adapted into a movie someday. The trouble is it doesn’t expand well to feature length, mainly because the main character of the story is an unreliable narrator and a selfish, rotten person. Lester Billings, who tells much of the story and is here played with a wan complexion of pure terror by David Dastmalchian, is the father of three children who have all suddenly died, one at a time, all after professing to have seen a “boogeyman” in their closet. The movie features Lester as an ancillary character who walks into the office of therapist Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina), who’s recently lost his wife. The grief in the Harper household naturally attracts the title monster to Will and his daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair). 

And so The Boogeyman is an allegory for grief and loss, as a violent monster fills the space where Will, Sadie, and Sawyer are reluctant to confront their emotions. Fine—a lot of horror movies mine this ground, and Savage along with screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods do it well—though King’s story treads an uneasier path that would have been more rewarding to see on screen. 

The arc of King’s story runs more like The Shining. It deals not with grief but with resentment, less with feelings that are uncomfortable to discuss and more with desires that are impossible to discuss. Lester Billings, like Jack Torrance, is a bad person trying minimally to be good, and failing. Just as the Overlook Hotel is a reflection of Jack’s violent tendencies and his alcohol dependency, the Boogeyman is a manifestation of Lester’s reluctant fatherhood and bitterness toward his wife for favoring the children over him. 

That’s hard to expand to a full movie, though Savage, whose first two features Host and Dashcam are both brilliant in their own regard, probably would have been up to the task. Woods and Beck are the proper writing team too: they were done dirty by John Krasinski in his diluting of A Quiet Place, and their debut feature Haunt is delightfully nasty. The movie works best when it’s taunting us with apparitions in corners and hazy figures in the dark. The main image the movie takes from the story—a cracked-open closet door—is used effectively. 

And so even if The Boogeyman ditches the more appealing aspects of the source material, it’s still superficially fun to watch. The performances are all very good, notably Thatcher, who plays the teenage Juliette Lewis on Yellowjackets and anchors the thrills here quite well. I can’t gripe that the movie is merely an effectively presented monster story. We need those too. 

*** out of ****

THE WHALE (2022)

The Whale is a no good, very bad movie with a collection of very good, admirable performances in service of an unworthy screenplay. The film doesn't appear bad until we've had a chance to think about it: its director, Darren Aronofsky, is no fool with this sort of emotionally wrenching drama, having delivered such truly raw tragedies as Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler. It's the sort of movie that's very good at tricking you into thinking it's profound, with its cathartic confrontational dialogue and its carefully crafted authentic performances. But make no mistake: it's as empty as its main character's chicken buckets and pizza boxes.

It garnered an Academy Award for Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a college professor who's housebound with extreme obesity, barely able to move without assistance. The win is not undeserved. Fraser's performance is a marvelous, genuine display of despair and submission. Some have questioned the ethics of whether Fraser, who appears comfortably overweight but not dangerously obese, should have donned a fat suit to appear larger than he is. That isn't quite as troubling as the fact that the character he's playing is a phony concoction to force the audience into pity.

When his friend Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who also happens to be the sister of his recently deceased boyfriend--and don't worry, all of this backstory is explained in full detail in long exchanges of dialogue--tells him that he's in congestive heart failure and will die if he doesn't seek medical help, Charlie instead contacts his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) to try to make things right before he goes. She resents him, of course, as he left her and her mom (Samantha Morton) when he came out of the closet. But he offers to ghost-write a few essays for her to make sure she graduates high school, in exchange for her company and for the inheritance he's about to leave her. 

It's only because of the honesty in the two actors' approaches that this arrangement is believable at all. Ellie is a cipher who's a boomer's idea of what a zoomer behaves like (TV programming in the background reveals that the film takes place amid the 2016 election, a setting which adds absolutely squat to the story). She takes odd pictures for her Facebook page (strike one right there), and gives little hints of a sense of humor beneath a tough exterior, sure to project to everyone around her that beneath every traumatized youth is a Gal Friday just begging to be let loose. Compare Ellie to Stephanie, the daughter of Randy "The Ram" Robinson in The Wrestler, another estranged kid whose strained relationship with her father is believable and relatable at every step. Aronofsky has proven that he knows how to do this sort of thing; it's unthinkable that he'd struggle so much here.

The other main character who pops in and out at convenient times is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young door-to-door evangelist from a nearby church who happens to knock on Charlie's door at a crucial moment. Thomas, like all of the others who Charlie interacts with, has a journey that seems cathartic but is only contrived: the plot twists surrounding his character are unrealistic even by this movie's standards, and his final revelation to Charlie negates a lot of what the movie seems to have been using him to say all along. His whole arc might have just been removed and the movie would have been no worse.

Sometimes a good melodrama can strain credibility and still work wonders. Look at Dark Victory, or Now, Voyager. Maybe if this movie were in black & white and starred Bette Davis I could take it more seriously. I'm not familiar with the source material, a play by Samuel D. Hunter, but it's not surprising that The Whale originated as a stage play. It takes place entirely in one location: Matthew Libatique's cinematography, complete with the choice to frame the film tightly in a 4:3 ratio, does a good job at enhancing Charlie's locked-in environment. But Hunter, also the screenwriter, fails to adapt his play in any significant way for film. Characters speak as if they're beholden to Aristotle's three unities, loading themselves with exposition and emotional heft, to speak out loud what Aronofsky might otherwise have depended on, say, film techniques to reveal. Every scene has at least one character baring at least one monumental revelation. This may be the first film constructed entirely out of audition monologues.

The conclusion comes with a moral lesson--Hunter works in a perfunctory theme about being honest and writing your heart or something like that--but it barely reads amid the machinations and emotional manipulation. Those unfamiliar with Aronofsky's work might find the last act somewhat effective. I found it infuriating. It ends with one of those sudden magical-realist transitions where a character's tragedy is ironically transformed into a victory. Aronofsky is very good at this, in a way that many directors aren't. But it's the same trick he pulled in Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain, and Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Slapping it onto this maudlin wreck is little respite.

But again, the performances from Fraser, Sink, and Chau, even Simpkins as the movie's least believable character, and Morton as another function of the plot, always threaten to elevate it. It's the sort of Oscar movie that might have appeared as a trailer in Tropic Thunder, between Simple Jack and Satan's Alley. It might have lost the award to Home for Thanksgiving.  

* 1/2 out of ****

SKINAMARINK (2022)

I fear that not enough people in the Year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty Three will allow themselves to experience Skinamarink in the appropriate way. There's a reason it's set in 1995 and not in the present day. Technology offers us an escape, and Skinamarink is designed to offer no escape. The director, Kyle Edward Ball, arrived at the premise when he polled Redditors on what their worst nightmares were, and found that many people responded with the same or a similar dream from when they were kids.

The dream: I wake up in the middle of the night to find that my parents are gone, and there's something in the house. I don't know what, but I know it's something bad. Ball personifies this primal fear in two children, four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and six-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), who wake up to find that their parents are missing, and that the windows and doors on their house have disappeared. They respond the way a kid their age would. They travel the lengths of the house calling for Mom and Dad: Jamie McRae's masterful cinematography makes the normal house (Ball's parents' house, which he grew up in) seem positively expansive and labyrinthine, the way it would seem to a very young child. They watch an endless loop of cartoons and play with Legos. They call 911 (the phones are out, of course). And then something makes itself known.

For 100 minutes, the film sits on the waking verge of a nightmare. It occupies the moment when we're aware we're dreaming, but that awareness doesn't make the danger any less real. The surroundings are hazy but familiar. The cartoon images and sounds that pump constantly from the TV--assembled from various public domain sources, including Ub Iwerks's impressive and mildly terrifying "Balloon Land"--provide a kind of anchor into childhood reality, until a key moment at which whatever the presence is begins to manipulate them. Voices echo in the dark hallways. There are subtitles to help us decipher what's being whispered. Sometimes they don't seem to match the sounds.

What sets in after the first act--and yes, like a lot of David Lynch's work, Skinamarink does have a plot that can be analyzed and divided into very traditional acts, despite the outward appearance of being a fluid dream sequence--is the crushing sense of abandonment that's often felt in a nightmare. That a previously felt sense of security is suddenly gone without explanation. I do not use hyperbole when I say that one scene in which Kaylee journeys upstairs to her parents' bedroom might be the most tragic and devastating moment I've ever seen in a horror movie. Not because of any shocking imagery or manipulation of the child's presence for cheap sympathy, but because of what's implied in the dialogue, and what emerges from the darkness as her eyes adjust, and what she is left with in the end. It's the moment the greatness of the movie settled in.

The tension ratchets but rarely releases. Even the jump scares--and there are a few--don't provide the relief that usually comes with such moments. After the jolt, we're still in the nightmare. In directing the child actors, Ball shows a surprising sensitivity. We rarely ever see their faces, which works to several advantages: it provides a sense of removal from reality, and it allows Ball to distance the child actors from the terror in the movie. The horror is created in the editing and cinematography, never really explicitly on screen. The two children are directed to deliver the dialogue innocently and straightforwardly, mostly on ADR, and I have to assume phonetically, similar to the child voice actors in Peanuts specials. This prevents us from being yanked out of the nightmare by any fear for the actors' safety.

It's this intricate work that makes Skinamarink into more than the terror roadshow event that it's gotten the reputation for being. I expect it will be very divisive. Many will hate it. Others will shut themselves off from it. It's an extraordinarily immersive film made by a filmmaker who is in tune not only with nightmares but with film language. Like Lynch, Ball knows how to use traditional film to tell a nontraditional story. His fascination with nightmares may have given birth to Skinamarink as a concept, but it's his deftness as a director and editor that has made it a great film, and has allowed him to deliver--and again, I use no hyperbole--a shot late in the film that is the scariest thing I have ever seen in a movie.

**** out of ****

Kyle Edward Ball's short film "Heck," which is the basis for Skinamarink, is available on Youtube. I would recommend watching Skinamarink first and checking out "Heck" afterward.

WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR (2021)

One of my favorite anecdotes about film comes from Roger Ebert, from a review he wrote of the passable but forgettable Linda Blair vehicle Hell Night from 1981:

It was that legendary Chicago film exhibitor Oscar Brotman who gave me one of my most useful lessons in the art of film-watching. "In ninety-nine films out of a hundred," Brotman told me, "if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen." This rule, he said, had saved him countless hours over the years because he had walked out of movies after the first uneventful reel. 

I seem to remember arguing with him. There are some films, I said, in which nothing happens in the first reel because the director is trying to set up a universe of ennui and uneventfulness. Take a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's L’Avventura, for example. 

"It closed in a week," Brotman said. 

"But, Oscar, it was voted one of the top ten greatest films of all time!" 

"They must have all seen it in the first week."

Ennui, isolation and distance are difficult to portray in any movie, but they're particularly challenging for a horror movie. In a horror movie you have to sympathize with someone, or otherwise you're not scared when they are. The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa does this very well, in films like Pulse, in which ghosts invade the internet and destroy humanity by breaking friends apart and spreading isolation like a virus, but I'm having a hard time thinking of another filmmaker who's been able to capture the fear of loneliness so effectively, except for Jane Schoenbrun, whose debut feature We're All Going to the World's Fair is a quietly wrenching chronicle of emptiness. Emptiness of life, emotion, character, entertainment, culture. There's a treacherously thin line between a movie about vapidity and a vapid movie, which is what makes World's Fair all the more impressive. Its ability to thread this needle is thanks in no small part to Anna Cobb, the lead performer who's on screen alone for most of the film and is going to be a star.

Movies like this always risk closing in the first week. World's Fair will be discussed forever when anyone asks what 2020s American culture was like. It is not a flattering portrayal. Early scenes establish a suburban corporate graveyard marked by the husks of once-dominant Toys-R-Us-es and K-Marts. The town is in upstate New York but it might as well be in a post-nuclear wasteland. During the opening credits young Casey (Cobb) wanders like the Road Warrior. No school is mentioned: maybe it's summer, or maybe it just doesn't matter anymore. We get glimpses and hear distant voices of parents in the background, but they never really enter the picture. Casey goes home to her attic room, where she opens her Youtube channel. She announces that she's "taking the World's Fair Challenge."

We learn from glimpses of other Youtubers' clips that the World's Fair Challenge is the "scariest game of all time," based on an innocuous-looking arcade game (hints of "Five Nights at Freddy's"). Someone takes the challenge by performing a "Candyman"-like ritual in front of their computer screen. Various Youtubers report differing results: one believes his insides have been turned into a Tetris game, another turns to plastic, another's arm breaks out in an odd pattern of sores (in what turns out to be a very funny scene). We follow Casey as she documents what happens to her after she takes the challenge. At first the seeming effects are maddeningly normal and expected. Then, a stranger known only as JLB contacts her. The message: "You're in trouble."

Schoenbrun's storytelling method is fluid and inconstant but intricately balanced. Some scenes take place entirely within the screen, Unfriended-style, complete with clips of seemingly unrelated videos from other users as well scenes from TV shows and movies related to the Challenge, revealing it for the cultural phenomenon it is. But it often extends outside of the screen to give us a view of who Casey is outside of her online performance. We also meet JLB, who's revealed to be a significantly older man (played by Michael J. Rogers, from Beyond the Black Rainbow) living in what appears to be a mansion. He, like Casey, is always alone. Is he an orchestrator of Casey's fate in some way? A predator? A hero? Someone who's lonely like she is, seeking a friend? Schoenbrun allows for him to be all and none of those things.

The horror in World's Fair comes from how easily we tend to be yoked into interesting stories and swindled by interesting frauds, and how our need for connection and involvement in isolating times draw us into conspiracies and cults. But we are never quite sure who is the victim and who is the predator. Maybe neither exists. Maybe, as comedian Bo Burnham posits, they're "performer and audience melded together" as "the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform... perform[ing] everything to each other, all the time, for no reason." 

Schoenbrun reveals an unsettlingly real world where this constant-performance expectation has replaced real culture. All that's left to do is mine old properties for new entertainment, to project a ludicrous mythos onto an arcade game that, we see in some clips, is painfully innocuous, primitive, and functional. At a time when most movies are repackaged versions of old IP--check the imbecilic Space Jam 2, or the umpteenth version of Batman and Spider-Man etc., or the new horror version of Winnie the Pooh that's coming soon thanks to the expired copyright--World's Fair explores the sadness in a culture that's been completely drained from all sides, has even run out of the fumes of past successes, and is now running on the fumes of past failures. To paraphrase Daniel Plainview, we're a milkshake that's been drunk up.

Many will be frustrated by World's Fair's reluctance to fit into a traditional demonic possession story. The final scenes very subtly and unexpectedly switch our sympathies. The last moments dangle catharsis and then snatch it away. There's no real end because the performance, not the resolution, is really what the characters crave. Without it, they have nothing. There have been lots of movies where the main character is possessed by a malevolent game. In this one the tragedy is that they're possessed before they play.

**** out of ****

Note: This movie contains extensive use of strobing effects. Those affected should proceed cautiously.

White Male Rage! White Male Rage! NOBODY (2021) and WRATH OF MAN (2021) in Catharsis vs. Damnation

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s about fed up with the Middle-aged Family Man With Tortured Past Whose Rage Gets Triggered By Traumatic Event movie that regained its popularity in 2008 when Liam Neeson rocketed from prestige actor to Action Star in Taken. At their worst, these movies can be a troubling appeal to fascist tendencies, like Charles Bronson gunning down multicolored street thugs in the Death Wish series. At their best they can be fun, but an interview with Neeson a few years ago revealed a real sinister force behind even a throwaway thriller like Taken: the actor’s revealing that his motivation for the Man on a Mission role he’s become synonymous with was an incident in which he almost committed a hate crime is hard to separate from the shoot-‘em-ups and chases in what’s supposed to be an escapist movie.

Regardless, this role has become a rite of passage for a lot of aging male actors: Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Keanu Reeves, and now Bob Odenkirk. Though it’s interesting to see a considerably non-buff performer like Odenkirk kick ass, his vehicle Nobody isn’t much different from its predecessors. 

It starts promisingly, introducing a hero entrenched in his averageness and not eager to leave it. Hutch (Odenkirk) has a good life as a regular old auto parts factory manager with a teenage son and a wife (Connie Nielsen) who’s a successful realtor. When their house is broken into one night, Hutch stops just short of going postal on the burglars. He instructs his family to stand back, lets the burglars take what they want, and calls the police. No one realizes that Hutch is a former special ops soldier who could, if he wanted to, take out an entire battalion singlehandedly. Like they do.

With this setup, Nobody could have been an interesting comment on the hypermasculine revenge drama rather than just another example of it. Director Ilya Naishuller makes it look like Hutch chickened out. Neighbors and co-workers all offer their thoughts on what they would’ve done if their house had been broken into. Hutch just smiles and nods. He knows what he was capable of doing, yet chose not to do. We learn later on that Hutch was being hypervigilant, not hesitant: he noticed the fear and desperation in the burglars’ voices, and that they had no bullets in their gun.

I thought that writer Derek Kolstad, who also wrote the John Wick movies, would take a similar approach here and create a righteously rageful hero whose driving force is empathy rather than wrath. The scenes where the men around Hutch belittle him for refusing to stand his ground are the best in the movie because they ironically play on masculinity rather than trumpet it. While the average Liam Neeson film is about a man protecting his castle, Nobody is about Liam Neeson living among a bunch of guys who think they’re Liam Neeson. Only he knows who he is.

As inventive as the idea is, it doesn’t last long. When Hutch saves a young girl from a gang of loud abusive Russians on a bus, he attracts the ire of a Typical Russian Mobster and the movie plunges headlong into dullsville. There are a few well-choreographed fight scenes, but they all seem so familiar. If you’ve seen John Wick, you won’t be surprised. The only real highlight is an appearance by Christopher Lloyd as Hutch’s father, where… I’ll just say that I thought I knew, and I didn’t.

On the complete flip side of this premise, Guy Ritchie (of all directors) does not spin his revenge thriller Wrath of Man into a lighthearted bruiser, but rather drives his characters straight to hell and lets us dwell there with them. His movie is also about a Man on a Mission, but he doesn’t glorify it. Ritchie’s men are broken and unfixable. There is no redemption, only pain.

At the center is Jason Statham, who unlike Odenkirk is the exact person we expect to be on a revenge mission. Ritchie knows this. Early scenes show him behaving calmly, patiently, unobtrusively, when we know something is bubbling underneath.

Statham is H, who’s hired by an armored car company at which the employees have names like Bullet, Boy Sweat Dave, and Hollow Bob. Everyone there is hiding something for one reason or another. We see H go through the hiring process. He barely passes the test: we see him fire a few stray bullets and almost fenderbend the truck. But he seems to be doing it on purpose. Instinctively, Jason Statham doesn’t seem like someone who messes up. 

Our instincts are right. I won’t reveal what he’s up to, but H’s plan is a credible and fascinating one. Ritchie tells us the story in chapter format, starting with H's job interview, then changing points of view and revealing the surrounding events little by little. Characters played by the reliable and underappreciated Holt McCallany, as well as Josh Hartnett, Andy Garcia, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, and (oddest of all) Post Malone, factor into H's plot in ways I won't reveal. Once we know why H has embedded himself in with this crowd, the movie culminates in a heist sequence that's among the most exciting I've ever seen.

It’s anchored by Statham in a role that departs from his expected wiseguy character from the early Ritchie films and his smarmy antihero from Hobbs and Shaw. Since Ritchie and Statham started their careers together, maybe Ritchie is the only director who could have coaxed this performance from Statham, without ironic distance or smirking nihilism. He plays a hurt man, and he and Ritchie drag us into the hurt with him. The L.A. setting recalls Michael Mann’s work in its sun-drenched days, neon-drenched nights, and labyrinthine roadways and tunnels. 

Ritchie’s victory is in the tone. He refuses to lighten it or let us bask in H’s brutality. A lot of thrillers like this don’t treat violence with real weight. This one does.

Nobody: ** out of ****

Wrath of Man: *** 1/2 out of ****

I CARE A LOT (2020) and ME YOU MADNESS (2021): On Steely Blonde Sociopaths Both Real and Fictional

It's hard to make us care about the three female villains at the center of the two recent black comedies I Care A Lot and Me You Madness, the first two of which are the respective main characters, the third of which is Louise Linton, the writer-director-star of the latter, who happens to be the wife of thankfully-now-former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a onetime guest of Fort Knox who notoriously scoffed at critics who suggested that her photo op--next to a sheet of money that could have paid a full salary for a laid-off hospitality worker during the pandemic--was a tad out of touch. Linton was an actor before her foray into Marie Antoinettedom, and will no doubt be one again now, but by grace, will never write or direct again.

Both comedies revolve around steely blonde girlbosses who do horrible things with glee, but only I Care A Lot is a gleeful experience to watch. There's a movie somewhere in Me You Madness, a self-aware American Psycho parody about a hedge fund manager/serial killer who unexpectedly finds love in her latest conquest, but Linton isn't the director to make it happen. It's not only that she stumbles as a filmmaker--although she does--but her proud identity as a real-life Cruella de Vil lends too much sobriety to what's supposed to be a bitterly funny satire.

Catherine Black (Linton) does stonks by day, and by night seduces and murders unsuspecting men in her sanitized Malibu dream house. But when she strikes up a rapport with her latest mark, Tyler (Ed Westwick), she grudgingly decides to spare him. And then he steals her car.

It's a decent idea for a comedy, and Linton and Westwick sometimes have an easy chemistry in their banter that's fun to watch, and would certainly be more fun were it not for the real-life sins of both actors threatening to creep in (Westwick has several credible sexual assault allegations against him). There are bright moments: I admit I enjoyed a back-and-forth in which Tyler holds a white sofa hostage with a glass of red wine, and an extended fight sequence which involves a curling iron, thankfully not in the way you expect.

But Linton's idea of black comedy has a pretty high floor. Perhaps her marriage into the Family Values administration makes her reluctant to go too far. I'm probably not spoiling much in revealing that Catherine has a penchant only for murdering bad people--what a cop-out!--and that her idea of "partying" involves a setting on her phone that makes her house play Taylor Dayne. At least Hannibal Lecter was into creepy stuff, like opera. The confounding ending is so maudlin that it feels like it was tacked on by Jerry Falwell (before the throuple scandal). I kept watching through the credits, thinking Linton was saving something snarky for the last minute. Nope: just a reminder that she, like a lot of the Trump ilk, is a conservative traditionalist wearing the temporary skin of a provocateur. Doesn't take much to bring her from knife-wielding badass to smiling handmaid.

 I Care A Lot, meanwhile, is the bizarro version of this story that I expected when I started Me You Madness: a thriller about a sociopath just as cruel as either Catherine or Louise, which doubles down on her cruelty and doesn't hedge. Writer-director J Blakeson takes a huge risk asking us to follow a main character based on audacity alone, because Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) isn't merely cruel; she's irredeemable. But the risk pays off because Blakeson's screenplay is clever and Pike's embodiment of the character is fascinating to see.

Because Blakeson doesn't try to make us like Marla, but rather entices us with her cleverness and brazenness, we remain with her all the way. Marla is a "state-appointed guardian" who, with the help of a corrupt doctor (Alicia Witt), gets herself assigned as conservator for well-to-do elderly women, commits them to a nursing home, and sells their assets for profit. Pike's portrayal of complete remorselessness, accented by the frequent casual power-puff on a vape pen, actually anchors the film: we want to see her comeuppance, and at the same time we want to see how far she'll get.

Marla eventually digs her claws into Jennifer (Dianne Wiest), an early-stage Alzheimer's sufferer who seems too good a mark to be true, because she is. I won't say why, but Marla soon finds herself the target of a mob boss (Peter Dinklage) who is as ruthless as she is.

Where I Care A Lot could have been an average potboiler and gotten away with being merely diverting, Blakeson's writing elevates it to art. Take the scene where Marla first discovers that the mob is after her. An average movie puts her immediately in the victim role, while this one instigates the plot with a scene between Marla and a mob lawyer (Chris Messina) that is one of the funniest I've seen in a thriller since North by Northwest. Messina, who is absolutely flawless at playing a sleazeball, offers to buy her out; her response, and his response to her response, are the confirmation of this movie's greatness.

The final climax and conclusion are disappointing only because the setup has been so gripping. We expect an explosion, and we only really get a spark, which is still fine. And Blakeson doesn't cop out like Linton does, in that he gives Marla the coda she's earned.

Me You Madness: * 1/2 out of ****

I Care A Lot: *** 1/2 out of **** 

I Care A Lot is available on Netflix. Me You Madness is available in hell's car wash discount bin.