Bigger Than Ever: A Review of John Wick 4

 directed by Chad Stahelski

written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch

The action saga that kicked off in 2014 when a retired hitman avenged his the killing of his dog and the theft of his car by murdering an entire Russian crime family has returned with easily its biggest installment yet. 

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still on the run, having been marked for death by the High Table of assassins over two films ago, but this time he's decided to take the fight to the High Table with the intent of killing them all, with the help of his allies, the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), Winston (Ian McShane) the manager of the New York Continental Hotel, and Charon (the late  Lance Reddick), the concierge of the Continental.  The High Table isn't messing around, though; they've tasked a powerful new player, the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgaard) to oversee Wick's elimination. Gramont is a canny player, and to get the job done he Caine (Donnie Yen), an old ally of Wick who also happens to owe the High Table big.  Of course, he also summons a huge army of lethal killers with guns and body armor to the do job, too. No place is safe now, not even the Continental hotel in Japan which is run by Wick's old friend Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama).  Another wildcard in the mix it the mysterious, nameless tracker (Shamier Anderson) a freelance bounty hunter who seeks to drive the bounty for Wick up as high as it can go before killing him.  In short, it all appears to be coming to a head.

Full disclosure: I didn't like John Wick 3: Parabellum, because in my opinion the fight sequences got repetitive after a while. There was every danger of that happening here, especially given the film's nearly three-hour running time, but I persisted because I have followed this franchise pretty faithfully since I saw the first one on DVD years ago.  

I'm happy to report however, that with the exception of the film's first big battle in the Japanese branch of the hotel Continental, which featured a lot of the jiu-jitsu-and-headshot choreography that had been a staple of the first three films, this film really takes its fight sequences to a whole new level, managing to devote generous screen time to every single one of the high=profile action stars it has added to the John Wick family, whether it's Donnie Yen, Hiroyuki Sanada or Scott Adkins who puts on a fat suit, and gold-plated dentures to play German hitman Killa.  Yen features most prominently here and nearly steals the show from Reeves with his killer moves and quippy humor, but make no mistake, this is still John Wick's movie, and Reeves is absolutely firing on all cylinders here to bring us the most extreme stunts we could possibly get without Jackie Chan or Tom Cruise showing up. Heck, I'd say Reeves is on par with them after this film.   

Director Chad Stahelski seriously switches things up here, and not just in terms of fight choreography and blocking. The guy has an extraordinary eye for beauty, which he effectively juxtaposes against the extreme violence, and with the story taking John and his pursuers all over the world, from Morocco to Japan to Germany and finally to France, he has ample opportunity to give the audience some real money shots, and boy, oh boy does he deliver. This bodes extremely well for the adaptation of the wildly popular video game Ghost of Tsushima that Stahelski is currently slated to direct. 

Do I have any problems with this movie? Well, as I said, it is rather long, though the time taken to set up the action is pretty well-spent. I had issues with the first major battle sequence, but just about everything after that played out excellently. 

At at a time when it's hard to find movies that feel fresh and exciting in view of the endless onslaught of franchises, it's refreshing that at least one of them manages to get it right. 

8.5/10

10 Thoughts on the Oscars

 So another year of Academy Awards has come and gone (a week ago, as of writing), and at the very outset I'd like to state that in my humble opinion, all of the winners deserved what they got. I found it to be a very satisfying ceremony with heartfelt speeches and lots of feel-good moments, and, just as notably, none of the moments of eye-roll inducing stupidity that left a stain on ceremonies of the last few years like the 2017 "envelope mix-up" or the idiocy of having the Best Leading Actor Oscar announced last in 2021.  

I think everything I have to say about the 2023 Oscars can be distilled in ten points:

1.  I'm just glad to have watched it live for the first time in ages. As early as 2019, there was some strange issue with the channels available to me on cable and for whatever reason a live broadcast just wasn't in the cards. That was a shame because that was Marvel Studios' banner year, with the first Black Panther movie garnering six Oscar nominations, including the history-making Best Picture nomination. From 2020 to 2022, I no longer had cable television so I had to content myself with live updates on websites. It was nice to finally be able to watch the ceremony in real time again. Thank you, Disney+

2.   I LOVE that this was the year of the "has-beens." After the 2022 Oscars, in which Best Leading Actor winner Will Smith showed himself to be the embodiment of privilege by publicly assaulting Oscar host Chris Rock, it was such a welcome change to see actors whom time and circumstance have humbled reaping rewards that they richly deserved. I haven't seen Darren Aronofsky's The Whale, but I have read all about Brendan Fraser's journey in making it, and as a fan of Brendan Fraser all the way back to his Mummy days I was really delighted to see him pick up the Oscar for Best Leading Actor. I was even happier for Ke Huy Quan whom I had only ever seen as a child actor in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, who had been away from acting for much longer than Fraser ever had. His comeback, even without the Oscar, would have been the feel-good story of the year, but now it's simply perfection, and he couldn't have had a better vehicle than the sensational film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (which I HAVE seen...and loved). Speaking of which... 

3.   It was so nice to have a horse in the race again. The last time I could really and wholeheartedly say that was in 2013 when I was rooting for Argo to win (which it did). I mean, I've enjoyed films like Parasite, 1917, BlackkKlansman and, Black Panther among other Oscar Best Picture winners and hopefuls, but Argo was a good, old-fashioned thriller which, for all of its foibles, had loads of charm and told its story very well.  Even though Everything, Everywhere All at Once is a completely different kind of film from Argo, I loved it just the same for almost the same reason: it told its story masterfully, in a way that both charmed me and connected with me. I also cheered for the Telugu language, global sensation RRR when its Oscar-nominated song, "Naatu Naatu" took home the gold.  It feels really good to have an actual emotional connection to the movies that win. That said...

4.  Here's a statistic I find unsettling: the widely despised 2016 DC superhero film Suicide Squad has more Oscars than the 2023 Best Picture nominees Elvis, Tar, The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelmans, and Triangle of Sadness COMBINED.   I'd argue that this was an inevitable consequence of expanding the field of Best Picture nominees from 5 pictures back in 2009. Between them, Everything, Everywhere All at Once  and All Quiet on the Western Front, won 11 Oscars, so there was barely anything else left to win.  A whopping 50% of the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar went home empty-handed.  I know that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, but I still can't help but feel for the people who poured their heart and soul into those movies.  

5. I loved seeing all the fresh faces. I loved that among so many of the major nominations, from directing to about all of the acting nominations, there were many first time nominees, or people who had rarely been nominated before. About the only familiar face among the nominees was two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, who ultimately lost to Michelle Yeoh.  This is the kind of freshness that, in my humble opinion, will help keep the Oscars relevant in the years to come so long may it continue. On that point...

6.  Diversity is not the poison pill that narrow-minded people insist that it is.  One would be hard-pressed, for example to find anyone who was unhappy when "Naatu Naatu" won the Oscar for Best Original Song. "Diversity" meant that for the first time in 95 years, a song from an Indian movie could win an Oscar, because it forced Academy voters to step out of their comfort zones and look at other movies. It also meant that performances like Michelle Yeoh's and Ke Huy Quan's performances in what is effectively a "genre film" like EEAAO, which would have had Oscar voters turning their noses up not that long ago, could win big.  

7.  No high-and-mighty speeches from winners is a really good thing. There's not much more to add, lest I become guilty of making a speech myself. 

8. Hollywood's love affair with itself was tempered this year. Steven Spielberg's film, The Fabelmans was an early favorite and it kind of fit the mold of films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Artist and Argo which basically celebrated Hollywood and won one award or another. The shut-out of The Fabelmans from even a single award, to me at least, says that Hollywood is ready to stop fellating itself, at least for now.  

9.  As highlighted by Guillermo del Toro in his acceptance speech for Pinocchio, animation remains in a ghetto just outside "cinema" and that's just wrong. 

Finally...

10.  Though All Quiet on the Western Front would have been a deserving Best Picture winner, I am very grateful that the Oscar for Best Picture went to a movie that spent several months exclusively in movie theaters. Everything, Everywhere All at Once has once again proved that the best place to appreciate cinema is still in movie theaters.

John Wick Meets Mr. Incredible: A Review of Nobody

 directed by Ilya Naishuller

written by Derek Kolstad

This is a movie we never got in theaters here in the Philippines; at the time of its global release, March 2021, we were still under strict lockdown. I'm grateful, then, that nearly two years after it came out in theaters, we finally got it on Netflix. 

Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) is living the American dream; he has a nice house in suburbia, he's married to a successful realtor (Connie Nielsen) with whom he has two lovely children (Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath), and he has a stable (if boring) job as a bookkeeper in his father-in-law's factory. One night, his home is broken into by two desperate burglars, whom Hutch actually lets go, but when he discovers his daughter's toy missing, something inside him is set off and a part of him that he has long kept hidden comes exploding to the surface. He tracks the burglars down, but when he learns their true circumstances, he knows he cannot take his revenge on them.  On the bus ride home, a Russian mobster and his mates hop on the bus and start harassing people, and all hell breaks loose, in more ways than one.  To help him out of the mess he finds himself in, Hutch may need help from his brother Harry (RZA) and his dad David (Christopher Lloyd).

As I wrote in the title, this movie, written by John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad, essentially takes the premise of the Keanu Reeves-led film about an assassin who comes out of retirement because some Russian mobster kills the dog his late wife gave him and tweaks it a bit to make the assassin a bored suburban dad yearning for the days when he was kicking ass and taking names. Kolstad basically turns John Wick into Bob Parr aka Mr. Incredible, only instead of superhuman strength he has an assassin's consummate skill. Instead of a Russian killing a puppy, the film has a Russian thug and his gang harass a bus full of passengers.  Instead of John Wick coming reluctantly out of retirement to right a wrong, Hutch basically yearns to beat the crap out of people (who deserve it) and basically jumps on the first pretext to do so.  

The action is realized with the brutality and effective choreography of a John Wick movie, and it's all the more effective because of how convincingly Odenkirk plays the mild-mannered facade that Hutch has adopted to hide the killer lurking underneath.  There's a real sense of contrast here.  There's also some judiciously-used humor, and anyone sick of the quip-laden Marvel movies can relax; there aren't that many of them here. Still, for all of these trapping the movie can't quite shake the fact that it's a John Wick facsimile at heart. 

Fortunately, Odenkirk's performance is honestly what keeps this movie from feeling like an inferior John Wick clone, but the similarities really are a bit too glaring to ignore. Would I see another one? Maybe.

6.5/10

Chop-Sockey Caper: A Review of Bullet Train

 directed by David Leitch

written by Zak Olkewicz (based on Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka)

Ever since John Wick launched a new subgenre of action film nearly ten years ago, namely hyper-violent action flicks which are way too violent for children but which are too over-the-top to be taken seriously by adults, there have been quite a few of them which have tried to recapture the John Wick "magic," many of which have conspicuously failed, because they tried to repeat the formula with very little variation: a nearly superhuman killer comes out of retirement/hiding for one reason or another to kick some serious ass.

Bullet Train, which came out in the middle of last year and hit Netflix last December, is a notable exception which I thought to finally review after watching Nobody last night, another hyper-violent movie that only just came out on Netflix (and which I'm reviewing next). Bullet Train, directed by David Leitch, who actually co-directed the first John Wick movie, combines two genres, the hyper-violent action movie and the caper film, to surprisingly good effect.

In this film, hired killer Ladybug (Brad Pitt) has a very simple assignment from his boss Maria Beetle (Sandra Bullock), hop on board the famous shinkansen or the bullet train (hence the title) grab a certain briefcase and get off again.  Unfortunately, his actual mission is nowhere near as simple as he hopes it will be as a wide assortment of killers with different agendas, many of which conflict with his own, all happen to be on the same train at the same time he is, such as brothers Lemon and Tangerine (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Tayloy-Johnson), the Wolf (Bad Bunny), the Hornet (Zazie Beetz) the Prince (Joey King), and the worst of them all: the White Death (Michael Shannon).

It's been written that this film is evocative of the Guy Ritchie caper films of the late 90s and early 00s, and to be honest I quite agree. More than just the quippy humor, which pervades throughout the film, mostly courtesy of the banter between Lemon and Tangerine, this film is set apart by its interweaving narratives, with just about all of the characters' fates intertwined.  Sure there's plenty of violence along the way, but the fact that there's an underlying story and that the characters have motivations other than just laying waste to legions of cardboard cutout henchmen keeps the narrative properly engaging. As unlikely as this sounds, it was fun to listen to some of the dialogue of this movie. 

Also, the fact that Brad Pitt's highly-skilled killer isn't on a mission to kill everyone but on a simple snatch-and-grab errand that goes horribly awry makes him more sympathetic as a character. They couldn't well kill his dog at the beginning of the movie so at least this movie makes him quite distinct from the OTHER guy kicking ass well into his 50s.  It's also really funny to watch how almost everyone else's plans in the movie unravel as the titular bullet train hurtles on. 

It's not high art, of course.  It's sometimes a little too silly for its own good, and there are some tropes here and there. The storytelling isn't transcendent like it is in, say, Everything, Everywhere All at Once,  which actually managed to deliver a discourse on existentialism wrapped up in a martial arts movie, but Leitch and crew deserve credit for trying something a little different.

7.5/10

Effortlessly Toeing the Line Between Grimness and Hilarity: A Review of The Banshees of Inisherin

 written and directed by 

Martin McDonagh

One of the stronger contenders for Oscar glory this year is the off-the-wall tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin, directed by British-Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh, who reteams with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, the gentlemen with whom he made his feature film directorial debut, In Bruges.  

Set in Ireland (or in a fictional island of the coast of Ireland) in 1923, during dying days of the Irish Civil War, The Banshees of Inisherin is the story of two lifelong friends and drinking buddies, Padraic (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) whose friendship takes an abrupt turn for the unexpected when Colm, a folk musician who plays the violin, suddenly decides he does not want to be friends with Padraic anymore, much to the latter's befuddlement as well as the confusion of the tiny village, including the bartender Jonjo (Pat Shortt) and Padraic's sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon). Eventually Colm explains that he wants to spend the rest of his life writing music for which he will be remembered rather than wasting his time idly chatting with a dullard like Padraic.  Heartbroken, Padraic at first tries to cope by hanging out with the town idiot, a boy Dominic (Barry Keoghan) who is constantly abused by his father , who also happens to be the local policeman (Gary Lydon), but it just isn't the same.  Padraic tries to force the issue with Colm, who then makes a chilling threat: if Padraic won't leave him alone, he will cut a finger off his violin playing hand every time Padraic talks to him.  Will he make good on this threat?

This movie with its strange mix of deadpan humor and downright grisliness makes a lot more sense when one has seen In Bruges, which featured two hitmen, also played by Farrell and Gleeson, who are lying low in the idyllic Belgian town of Bruges following an assignment gone wrong.  I enjoyed the strange mix of quips and occasional slapstick that permeated the film, so much so that when it came to its violent denouement, I really wasn't all that bothered by it. It was a film that featured hitmen, after all.

The Banshees of Inisherin has a very similar sensibility to In Bruges and its strength lies in its dialogue penned by McDonagh who was a playwright years before he started making movies. There's not a whole lot of broad humor here, but I found myself laughing time and again in spite of myself.  It's also genuinely interesting how it tackles concepts that people didn't really understand back then. Colm, for example, is grappling with what appears to be a deep depression, which his priest (David Pearse) refers to as "despair." This does put a lot of Colm's actions in the film into their proper context.  

It also helps that the actors have such great chemistry. Gleeson and Farrell, even when they're feuding onscreen, make a compelling comic duo, as do Farrell and Condon as siblings.  Keoghan, playing an awkward teen at the ripe old age of 30, whose Dominic has a crush on Siobhan effectively projects a figure that is both comic and tragic at the same time.  

If I had any nitpick about this film it would be with its occasionally anachronistic dialogue. I'd be happy to be corrected, but I feel relatively certain that expressions like "mental" and "judgy" were not in popular use a hundred years ago.   It doesn't really take anything away from the story but it is occasionally distracting. 

This film achieves the absurdist approach that Noah Baumbach tried a bit to convey with White Noise. Even when the characters are acting at their strangest, the whole thing seems believable because McDonagh has given them believable dialogue and not text that feels like it's being read out of a book. 

It is well worth the time to watch this  film.

9.5/10 

  

When Not Everyone Bites Your Awards Bait: A Review of White Noise

directed by Noah Baumbach

written by Noah Baumbach, based on the novel by Don DeLillo

Following his acclaimed, multiple Academy-Award-nominated divorce drama Marriage Story, writer-director Noah Baumbach brings his audiences a new film, the quirky comedy drama White Noise starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle. 

Driver plays college professor Jack Gladney whose life in a small town of Blacksmith, Ohio consists mainly of raising his mixed family of four kids together with his fourth wife Babette, played by Greta Gerwig, and promoting his very specific field of historical study, "Hitler studies" and bonding with his fellow professors, including Murray Siskind (Cheadle) who also wishes to promote an esoteric field of study he has dubbed "Elvis studies."   Everyone's lives are momentarily thrown into chaos when a train transporting toxic chemicals collides with a trailer truck and releases black pillar of smoke into the air, prompting a wave of mass hysteria and a subsequent exodus from the town.  Things are never quite the same after that as Jack is confronted with his near-crippling fear of death and learns that Babette is addicted to a mysterious drug that no one has ever heard of, a mystery he endeavors to solve. 

My only exposure to Noah Baumbach has been limited strictly to his work with Wes Anderson, with whom he wrote or co-wrote scripts, and so far the script that has left the biggest impression on me was his work on the Roald Dahl adaptation The Fantastic Mr. Fox, from which, oddly enough, Baumbach borrows some elements, including a snarky pubescent son and a bizarre dance at a grocery store.

Baumbach's quirky, sometimes surreal dialogue felt at home in that charming stop-motion cartoon which featured A-list actors like George Clooney and Meryl Streep but to my mind, it doesn't quite work in this 80s-set fable and, more often than not, feels a tad pretentious. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig have terrible onscreen chemistry; as the viewer I never got a sense that these characters really meant anything to one another other than when the script told me they did. If anything, Driver has stronger chemistry with his colleague Siskind, who is one of the few bright spots on the film. 

Driver himself fortunately, manages to carry the film to its ungainly conclusion. Transformed from his ultra-cut Kylo Ren physique, either through prosthetics or some good old-fashioned goofing off, he convincingly wears his character's middle age like a comfortable suit, even when spouting out some of Baumbach's clunkier, stilted dialogue.   Gerwig is far less convincing as Babette; she's supposed to be wrestling with a mid-life crisis but her performance just doesn't sell it. She just feels like a Hollywood type pretending to have a mid-life crisis.  The way I see it she's a lot better behind the camera than in front of it. 

On the whole Netflix really does deserve kudos for championing films that would otherwise languish in movie theaters. That's how I felt when they released the German-language masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front.  I don't quite feel that way about this film. 

 

6/10

Awards Season Ramblings, Part III: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

 directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

written by del Toro, Patrick McHale and Matthew Robbins

Thank God for public domain.  Why, you ask?

At a time when Disney mangled yet another of its beloved animated properties, Pinocchio, with an ill-advised live-action remake, Netflix and Guillermo del Toro reminded us that this classic tale about yearning and heartbreak, based on a story by Carlo Collodi, can be charming and expertly-crafted.  Their chosen medium for presenting the story was stop-motion animation, which had a nice rough and tumble feel to it. 

The story is familiar enough; an old wood carver makes a wooden puppet to be his son, and a magical fairy brings the puppet to life. Hijinks ensue. True to del Toro's style of storytelling, though, the story (which is already dark enough in its original form) has a very particularly dark twists. Here, Gepetto (David Bradley) loses his son Carlo (Gregory Mann) during the Great War when Italian bombers returning from a mission unload their excess bombs on what they mistakenly think is the middle of nowhere.  In a drunken rage, he later chops down the tree under which his son is buried and carves Pinocchio (also Mann).  The tree also happens to be the residence of a talking cricket (Ewan McGregor).  As in the original, the Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) gives Pinocchio life as a gesture of compassion to Gepetto, and as before hijinks ensue. This time, instead of being recruited by a talking fox, Pinocchio is approached by a sleazy circus Ringmaster named Count Volpe (Christophz Waltz). Like in previous versions he ignores the cricket's attempts to be his conscience and runs into serious trouble. Interestingly enough, though the trouble he runs into here actually involves Mussolini's fascist government...I kid you not.  

In an age where everything is computer-generated, it was really refreshing to see a film rendered in something as old-fashioned and quaint as stop motion animation, and infused, as well, with a decidedly different sensibility from what we've seen before. Infusing Gepetto's backstory with tragedy was interesting enough, but setting the story in the years between the First and Second World Wars was both a stroke of genius and madness, the kind of audacious move that only del Toro could have pulled off.  Another interesting twist to this story is how Pinocchio cannot die, and despite suffering mortal injuries throughout the movie he finds himself in the afterlife with Death (Swinton again) and her black undertaker bunnies, only to be promptly sent back to the land of the living. It really is such wonderfully quirky storytelling. 

Del Toro has enlisted a truly formidable voice cast, with Harry Potter alum David Bradley as Gepetto and Obi Wan Kenobi himself, Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket (not Jiminy, mind you).  Two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz chews the scenery as the villainous Volpe, while regular Del Toro collaborator Ron Perlman also shines as the evil Podesta, a fascist official whose son Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard) also bullies Pinocchio. Tilda Swinton enchants in a double role as the Wood Sprite who brings Pinocchio to life and as her sister, Death itself. Casting legendary voice actor Tom Kenny as Benito Mussolini was another brilliant call from Del Toro and his casting director.  The eponymous wooden boy himself is played by newcomer Gregory Mann, who comes across as earnest and sincere in his performance. 

  It's a real charmer, this movie. For people sick of the CGI glut in the marketplace, this is bound to be a welcome balm. It certainly was for me. 

9/10