Tarantino at his most indulgent in Hateful 8

You’ve never seen a western like Hateful Eight, which is neither praise nor pan. 

Before we begin there, though, take yourself back to Inglourious Basterds. It had Hitler, Churchill, Nazis, the French resistance, a vile Jew-hunting SS officer, wise-talking GIs, machine guns, bombs, interrogations … everything one could hope for in a World War II movie. Pulp Fiction, a crime movie, had robberies, murders, drug deals, drug overdoses, fixed boxing fights, kidnapping, torture. Kill Bill, a revenge thriller in two parts, had kung-fu, animation, gunfights, swordfights, assassinations. I bring all this up because director Quentin Tarantino really packs everything he can into his movies, and he also boils his genres down to their most basic parts and then he exemplifies those parts with his subversive brand of glee.

Hateful Eight, though, is a western with few of the characteristics that define a western, least of all the adventurous spirit of the West. No saloon brawls, no high-noon shootouts, no horse chases or cattle rustlers, and not even a train heist or bank robbery. None of this is really out of the ordinary for Tarantino, who seems to thrive on taking what we expect and giving us something completely different. But Hateful Eight is not only a letdown as a western, it’s a tremendously indulgent film for the brash director, who likely didn’t hear the word “no” very often when he was pitching it as a three-hour, single-location stage play with overture and intermission and enough mindless dialogue to undo all the goodwill he’s earned from a career of mindless dialogue. 

The film opens on a stagecoach as it travels through a blizzard in Colorado. Inside the cabin are bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), John’s latest bounty that he intends to take to a town called Red Rock where she will hang for her crimes. Slowly, amid the snow and wind, the stagecoach begins assembling the cast: there’s the feisty stagecoach driver (James Parks), a former union officer Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and soon-to-be sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Early scenes take place in the stagecoach as three of the men and Domergue talk about bounties, bushwhackers and a letter from President Abraham Lincoln. This tedious dialogue is neither boring nor interesting, but it fills the cabin of the stagecoach for north of 20 minutes. And the landscapes are glorious, with scenic views of snow-capped peaks and of the tiny stagecoach framed against nature’s grandeur. This is why Tarantino filmed in 70mm, and it’s beautiful —a beauty that fades away as the film moves indoors permanently.

With a blizzard bearing down, the stagecoach stops at Minnie’s Haberdashery, where the film will spend the rest of its running time, and where our travelers take refuge inside with Mexican Bob (Demián Bichir), a proper English gentleman (Tim Roth), a weary cow-puncher (Michael Madsen), and Confederate general (Bruce Dern). What happens next would best be described by saying “the plot of Clue.” Men are killed, some coffee is poisoned, and Daisy Domergue cackles with delight as John Ruth questions who is and isn’t who they say they are.

Hateful Eight wasted so much of my time, that I will not to do the same here: the movie is simply far too long. A skilled editor could have his or her way with this and come out 45 minutes lighter, and the movie would gallop like cowboy’s quarter horse. Here, though, it’s so bloated and top-heavy it can never build momentum. Dialogue just keeps rolling out of everyone’s mouth, and so little of it is noteworthy or memorable that it all blends into a monotonous dribble of cowboy talk and frontier banter. Jackson has a great monologue about torturing a confederate soldier — he repeatedly says the word “dingus” which gets some decent laughs during a darker chapter about Union revenge — but these scenes are few and far between. 

With so much dialogue, you’d think the characters would have more — you know — character, but they never elevate out of Tarantino’s muck of words. Russell’s bounty hunter has an interesting look and particularly evocative dialect of country words, but he seems lost amid the exposition and mood that are telegraphed within pages of dialogue. Jackson and Goggins do what they can, even as the film ratchets tension around their plight that can only end one way. As characters trade conversations inside the store, amid the shaking of the blizzard and a broken door that needs to be hammered shut, none of it really leads anywhere. By the time the intermission starts, the film is nearly at the two-hour mark and you slowly start to realize that a better movie would have you walking to your car at this point. But Hateful Eight toils onward.

Post-intermission scenes do greatly improve, largely because key sequences from earlier are revisited in Tarantino’s out-of-order style of chapter organization. And while the first two-thirds are largely bloodless, the last third pours the guts, blood and mayhem on thick as all parties turn on one another. Snickering through much of it is Daisy Domergue, who might be the sole salvation in this twisted whodunit. Leigh seems delighted to play the demented little demoness. Russell has some great lines, and his thick porkchop sideburns do justice to his unapologetic ruggedness. Jackson is Jackson, which is way of saying he’s excellent, but I found the 75-plus uses of the N word thrown at his character excessive and entirely unnecessary — Tarantino believes we should take the power from the word, which is admirable but altogether impossible in this context.

I admire Tarantino’s vision, but Hateful Eight simply doesn’t work. Slap any other name on this film and every cowpoke on the range will tell you it’s too long, too wordy and too meandering. But Tarantino’s name is on it, so it’s brilliant — I’m sorry, but no thanks. He’s showing off here, and for once in his career, it’s not really working like it once did.

Pineapple depress: stoner spy comedy flops

American Ultra is an ugly and soulless action-comedy with almost no comedy and enough action to render the plot gimmick of the point-blank headshot completely meaningless. It does do one thing right: it ends at a brisk, although still-too-long, 90 minutes.

I can’t say this spy ditty does much else right. All the things that make spy movies so endearing — spy gadgets, international travel, criminal intrigue, nefarious plots — never make an appearance here. Instead we get two grungy lovebirds in their podunk town as they get high and shoot people in the head, which caters to its two apparent demographics: ’90s-era stoners and John Wick fans. More on both those points later.

Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) works at a convenience store that apparently stays open as a form of charity to Mike and his sad existence. The store gets about three customers a day, which allows lots of time for Mike to roll joints at the register and pilfer from the chip aisle. When a government agent comes in and says what is essentially “abracadabra,” Mike’s repressed past as a covert superspy comes racing back to him so he can defend himself from laughably awful assassins who can’t plant a bomb on Mike’s Buick in the dead of night without being spotted.

After committing what he thinks is cold-blooded murder, Mike calls his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) who arrives to survey the damage her wimp of a boyfriend has unleashed on two super agents. Once she arrives, the local police department shows up and it sets off a violent night of gunplay, explosions, cleaver hackings and government infiltration. 

Mike and Phoebe, as screwed up as they are, are kinda sweet together. Eisenberg and Stewart, forever defined by Facebook and Twilight — and reuniting after the fantastic Adventureland —  are unsympathetic protagonists in almost everything they’re in, yet here they somehow seem just right for each other, even as American Ultra photographs them without even a vague hint of glamour. Stewart is a trailer-park princess with gritty hair and cheap makeup, and Eisenberg spends so much of the movie with his face drenched in tears, blood, sweat and snot that a product placement from Kleenex would have been appropriate and appreciated. I often wondered if Eisenberg’s long shaggy hair was only meant to hide the face of the stunt performer during the action scenes, including in bridge shootouts, a grocery store massacre and a rumble in some kind of porn dungeon bathed in banks of blacklights. There’s also a scene of Mike ricocheting a bullet off a frying pan, which is a neat trick that the film puts in the trailer in case you wanted to watch something else this weekend.

Ultra is filled with an array of smaller characters played by actors who have nothing to do and nowhere to go. Connie Britton (TV’s Nashville) has a phone glued to her ear; Tony Hale (HBO’s Veep) is on the other end of those calls with dead jokes and meaningless subplots. The great Walton Goggins spends much of the film wheezing maniacally as one of the hitmen tasked with eliminating Mike. Bill Pullman shows up to prove to the world he’s still acting, and that’s pretty much it. John


Leguizamo has one sad line (“Wanna drop some acid and go to the titty bar?”) and then he’s removed from the movie as if he received a call, turned to the film and said, “Go on without me.” All these side characters are trumped by the still-infantile Topher Grace, here playing a government stooge with an ax to grind … apparently against us. His loud sequences have about three times more dialogue than is needed, all of which Grace chews on like it’s bubblegum made from a pair of yoga pants.

Going back to an earlier point, Nima Nourizadah’s juvenile film is largely geared to two subsets of viewers: people who still watch Half Baked on a weekly basis, and people are have fetishized bullets entering and exiting heads. With regards to the first point, the stoner comedy is a dead genre. With marijuana legal in more and more places, weed culture is quickly being diluted by regular users. Gone are the days of “rolling a fatty” under a Bob Marley banner while Snoop Dogg or Cypress Hill bang out of a boombox. Pot and its many forms are used by grandmas with glaucoma, kids with seizures, and lots of healthy people, too, including lawyers, dentists, blue-collar types, soccer moms, and yes, even undercover spies. Stoners like Mike certainly still exist — and Mike has made the famous Sleep lyrics his daily mantra: Drop out of life with bong in hand / Follow the smoke toward the riff-filled land — but they look like lost relics from a different time and place. 

As for the other point, the violence is just a stale copycat of so many other gunplay movies out today, including John Wick which turned the headshot into a celestial communion to the Church of the Second Amendment. That film has its fans, and it’s getting a sequel, but let me ask a serious question: how many is too many headshots? American Ultra doesn’t give it a dignified examination, and instead it just apes Wick’s action with less stylization and less irony. 

Skip American Ultra. It’s a dismal film pretending to be a slightly less dismal film.

This Mission Impossible franchise is out of gas

Maybe you haven’t heard yet, but Tom Cruise did a big stunt for the new Mission: Impossible movie. Remind me to send you a link to the trailer. And the post-stunt interview. And the behind-the-scenes featurette. And all the articles. And blog posts. And pictures. And poster. Actually, if you’re willing to not ask about Scientology in any way, I think we can get Cruise himself to re-enact the stunt in your driveway.

The acrobatic performance, with Cruise’s spymaster Ethan Hunt clinging to the side of big transport plane as it taxis and takes off, was billed as a major piece of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. Turns out, it was just a marketing stunt. The scene, dropped into the first five minutes of the movie and left largely untethered to the rest of the plot, might be the most overhyped thing since Amazon’s disastrously unrewarding Prime Day. 

But the scene, and its function as an innocuous jump-start to Rogue Nation, is revealing because it highlights a dangerous lean this franchise is making toward the James Bond franchise — all that’s missing from Cruise’s plane scene are those blaring horns and a silhouette firing a pistol into screen. One of Ethan Hunt’s endearing charms is that he clearly wasn’t James Bond. This, and so much more in Rogue Nation, feels like an abandonment of the franchise.

What irks me most about this lovably goofy spy caper is that it’s a cliché factory. Most action movies are, but this one hams it up under the guise of “serious espionage thriller,” as if it’s immune to sniper assassins blithely waltzing past security guards at the opera, or rubber masks that can flawlessly render wearers into anyone else in the film, or the umpteenth “impenetrable computer behind an impenetrable vault within an impenetrable fortress” gag. We get it already with the spy stuff! It's also interesting how everything is hackable, until the plot requires it to be unhackable. 

Rogue Nation begins in the bureaucracy of Washington, D.C. The director of the CIA (Alec Baldwin at his most Jack Donaghy) is lobbying congress to let the CIA absorb Hunt’s IMF branch — they’re no longer needed, he says. Hunt, meanwhile, is convinced that a group known as SPECTRE … oops, I mean the Syndicate, is plotting terrorist attacks around the world. The CIA, an organization that took us to war in Iraq on faulty intelligence, now suddenly balks at bombing, spying and eavesdropping on the Syndicate. The easier solution, inexplicably, is to disavow Hunt and make him the fugitive. 

Off Hunt goes around the world, or at least to places that helped finance the film, in his race to track down a nefarious villain he has only seen through a smoky window. Along the way he meets Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a British spy who is so entangled in the Syndicate that she has some kind of exclusive tenure. Every mission she’s on is bungled by her or Hunt, yet the Syndicate keeps welcoming her back with open arms for no other reason than the plot demands it. 

The middle part of the film takes place in Morocco, where Hunt and Faust — and the remnants of IMF, including characters played by Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg — must break into an unbreakable place. These mid-movie heists are classic Mission: Impossible stunts, and this one is suitably silly inside a flooded liquid-cooled vault cylinder. Nevermind that no one — ever — has had this many redundant and needless security features, and within a nuclear power plant of all places. Of course, it’s not hackable from the outside, so Hunt has to go in and swap out a lo-fi cartridge inside the vault’s hi-fi wheel of death. It’s all preposterously dopey, but it’s hard not to smile at it all.

What follows are rote passages involving motorcycles, bad guys firing blindly around our heroes and a CGI car crash that might be the automobile version of that terrible CGI plane crash at the end of Air Force One. Seriously, this crash must have been uploaded into the film from a floppy disk — it looks old and outdated. 

But Rogue Nation does have some light-hearted laughs, though, including a scene in which Hunt and one of the opera snipers silently fight on the overhead background lights during a performance. The lights lower and raise, like platforms in a video game. The sniper has a flute-rifle and it’s gloriously stupid and charming all at once. It’s also fun to watch Pegg and Renner spar with Cruise, who is always a good sport. There are more jokes this time around. There’s also more product placement, including an unforgivable Halo 5 scene that should be shot into space and what amounts to about 30 minutes of BMW commercials. 

With James Bond tackling SPECTRE later this year, and that whole 007 franchise growing increasingly more serious in tone and structure, Mission: Impossible should try another approach entirely. We saw a shift in the franchise before, particularly from Part 2 to Part 3, and again moving into Part 4, Ghost Protocol, which found the right breakdown of fun/serious. Rogue Nation feels like a step back for a franchise that was slowly starting to figure it all out.

When the heroes become the villains

“We don’t want to be doing this,” the man in the mask says as he looks at the camera crew documenting him. “If we could we would have normal jobs, like you guys.” And then he and other men in masks, assault rifles slung around their necks, start making meth in the Mexican desert. 

Cartel Land is an unnerving documentary about the way the drug trade, in particular the Mexican drug cartels, are ripping apart worlds north and south of the border. On the north side, we are shown America’s self-appointed border protectors, an armed militia of conspiracy nuts and soldier of fortune types who watch Sean Hannity while they clean their guns, sharpen their knives and mumble about conspiracies in their soup. They keep saying they’re not racist, but then say what can only be interpreted as racist opinions.

The meat of this film takes place south of the border, where a tall gray-haired doctor named José Manuel Mireles has had enough of the cartels and their wanton cruelty, including one particularly awful massacre in which 13 men, women, children and babies are killed after a lime grower refused to pay cartel protection money. Mireles jumps into action in the southern state of Michoacan, where the Knights Templar Cartel has reigned over the people. Enough is enough, he says. He tours through villages and gives a heartfelt plea: join us to rise up against the cartel so we can take back our towns. And people join him. 

Cartel Land depicts the uprising with a patriotic zeal, with convoys of armed young men bouncing through the Mexican streets, manning checkpoints at the village edges, and raiding cartel members’ homes. Some of the men are skilled fighters, and look the part with body armor, advanced weaponry and communications equipment. One man wears a holster that holds a nickel-plated revolver with a pearl handgrip — it’s the Wild West. Other fighters are just kids, their tiny hands comically out of place on oversized pistols and AK-47s. 

Through diligent patrolling, cartel raids and tight security, Mireles’ paramilitary defense force succeeds in driving out Knights Templar members. When the Mexican government gets wind of armed groups maintaining order, it sends the army to confront Mireles and his group. Soldiers disarm the ragtag defenders, but the townspeople hit the streets in protest of the army, who they say are in cahoots with the cartels. The crowd grows so big and so angry, the army returns the guns and drives away. “What happens here is in your hands,” a top-ranking soldier tells Mireles.

These events are exciting and moving, but Matthew Heineman’s film doesn’t let you off the hook that easily, though. It portrays these events with a hint of malice, with just a slight suggestion that something more diabolical might be at work here. In one scene, we see the good doctor tell another man to question, and likely torture, a known drug member. “Get everything you can out of him and put him in the ground,” Mireles says in the shadows of a roadside checkpoint. Later scenes seem to hint that the raids aren’t linked to cartel members, but to people the defense force wants to rob. After one raid, armed men ransack the house and leave with electronics and stacks of clothing still on hangers.

The turning point came for me during a daytime raid that nabbed a man that supposedly fired on the town’s police force. As the man is being hauled away, his family pleads with the men in tears to let him go. His daughter threatens to kill herself. It seems unlikely that the man would fire on anyone with his family in the car, right? But then he also has a big luxurious car, designer clothes, what might be a gang tattoo that has been disfigured, and one man notices his skin is too smooth for hard labor? Maybe he is a cartel lieutenant. So much is unknown, but the man is hauled away to a detention center where the screams of men can be heard piercing through the concrete hallways. 

Cartel Land is essentially a Batman story. It’s about vigilantes, their origins and their undoings. Remember that line from The Dark Knight: “Die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It’s the only possible outcome here for Mireles and his defense force, which eventually becomes exactly what it was created to fight, a cartel. 

Heineman captures all this beautifully, with shots that seem almost too good to be true — guns hanging out car windows, an apparition-like shape emerging from smoke produced during a meth cook and numerous gunfights in Mexican villages. I think the film could be a little more focused, especially with the mostly unnecessary segments north of the border. It has a twist ending that feels a little manipulative, but is still bonkers in how it changes everything we just witnessed. 

This is a fascinating and polished documentary that reveals how complicated the war on drugs has been, is now and forever will be.

Book of Genisys sets back Terminator franchise

Cheering for the villain is only called for in extreme cases, but here, with the woefully spelled Terminator Genisys, all I can say is: Go Skynet!

Yes, Skynet — the sentient robot army that becomes self aware, nukes mankind and then enslaves the survivors in futuristic death camps — deserves your cheers and untethered adoration if only because it’s the second best way to protest the existence of this clunky hunk of sequel. The best way is to not see it at all, but Terminator fans have taken abuse before (see Terminator 3) and they’ll do it again here.

Terminator Genisys is a big dumb movie. From its big dumb title all the way down — it’s dumb at a cellular level. It’s so stupid that one movie couldn’t contain all it’s idiocy, so it had to reach back into its own filmography to fondle with the earlier movies in an inebriated stupor. It plays this up like an endearing tribute or homage, but it feels more like aggravated assault.

We begin with Kyle Reese, who you’ll recall is the future soldier sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor, mother of the leader of the human rebellion, in 1984’s The Terminator. After infiltrating a Terminator time travel base in 2029, Reese is sent back a handful of decades to what should be James Cameron’s first movie, but instead he finds an alternate timeline that now is a convergence of both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, including another blank-faced liquid metal T-1000. In the future, somewhere between “almost defeated” and “defeated” Skynet realizes that the humans had out-Back to the Future’d them, so they just start sending Terminators everywhere, or everywhen, which is how Genisys acknowledges its cinema roots and also exploits them. 

The movie stars Jai Courtney, who opens the whole damn picture with the most unnecessary and heavy-handed exposition-filled narration — it makes Harrison Ford’s theatrical Blade Runner voiceover sound downright peppy. He plays Reese, rebel leader John Connor’s right-hand man, and also his younger father, which only makes sense in the Terminator universe. Sarah Connor, John’s soon-to-be mother (stay with me!), is played by Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clark, a feisty little robot killer with a gun taller than she is by at least a foot. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only returning actor, and here he plays several Terminators, including one fresh out of the Skynet bubble wrap (it’s a naked stunt double with a CGI Arnold mask). The main Terminator, called Pops, is showing his age, a point that is explained away by saying that Terminators age, which seems to go against canon, but whatever. 

These three go tearing through 1984, and then time-travel to 2017, where Skynet is ready to launch Genisys, a computer system that gadget-hungry modern-dayers paw over in gleeful anticipation. I wasn’t really sure what the product does, and I’m assuming it’s some kind of Siri-like appointment scheduler — Genisys: “Today is your salon appointment. And tomorrow nuclear armageddon.” The subtext here is that Skynet is a lot like Apple, another company with a legion of devoted fans and enough hardware to link the world (nukes and all) in web of disharmony. But the joke falls dreadfully flat. 

The film is largely a series of despondent chase sequences, each more mindless than the one that preceded it, including one that begins with a liquid Terminator materializing out of nowhere, and another that ends with a crashed helicopter arriving at the intended destination faster than a non-crashed helicopter. A school bus chase on the Golden Gate Bridge has both a school bus and a bridge of golden gates and yet has a climax so utterly boring that it has to end with the COPS theme song to jazz it up. The chases go nowhere and accomplish nothing, and they only serve as interludes to bigger set pieces in spark factories and generic server warehouses. Recall the build-up in the earlier films: Terminators doing their detective work, hunting for leads, killing other Sarah Connors, waving photos of John around at the mall dressed as a cop … all that nuance and prelude to action is gone. It’s traded in for lines like, “Oh no, he’s behind us,” and “faster, faster” and then 22 minutes of vehicular destruction. But how did the Terminator get there? Where did he come from? Where are you driving? What is even happening? I couldn’t hear an answer in the noise.

Say what you will about James Cameron and his well-documented eccentricities, but he was, and still is, a visual storyteller of the highest caliber. He knew how to edit his films, how to pace action, how to use film’s complex grammar to create visual coherence, and he knew how to make grand science fiction masterpieces out of very simple ideas. Genisys is not simple, and I’m not just talking about the time travel. It’s a sloppy mess all over, with plot holes, dead ends, choppy editing, characters of little significance, dialogue that is recited (never spoken), and it tinkers with the franchise in such a major way that it feels malignant and terminal. There is no coming back from what this film sets in motion.

Cameron’s T1 and T2 are action juggernauts, and nothing was going to touch them, so I’m not faulting Genisys for failing to top those classics. But it’s just as sloppy as Terminator 3, if not more so, and that says a lot because that movie was all over the place. And people like to dump on Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation, but despite their obvious faults both films made noteworthy deviations in Terminator lore: T3 showed us that the robot apocalypse was unavoidable, no matter how many Arnolds came back, and Salvation ditched the time travel elements completely to just focus on John Connor and what made him so important to the resistance. Genisys does its damndest to undo the whole franchise by reaching way back to fumble around with the very origins of what Cameron created. It’s so unfortunately ill-conceived it feels blasphemous. And if the franchise keeps degrading at this rate, we’re two movies away from late-night Terminator infomercial. 

Now, to be fair, Cameron has come out in support of this movie, which seems odd, but I will take him at his word. Fans, though, don’t owe Genisys any lip service and I think they’ll see through the film’s wanton disregard for what made the franchise great to begin with — impressive visual storytelling and its straightforward science fiction plot, both of which are muddied here. Director Alan Taylor, so good with everything he directs on HBO, should stick to television, where plot and characters aren’t steamrolled into the landscape. He was dealt a hard blow when the marketing team revealed the plot twist (spoiler alert, sorta) that John Connor (Jason Clarke) had turned into a Terminator. But problems began long before that. They began when the film decided the rest of the franchise was fair game and then — and this is my key argument — didn’t even attempt to make a film that could match the power of the first two. 

The last time I saw a franchise fall this hard it involved crystal skulls and Shia LaBeouf Tarzan swinging with monkeys. Franchises should stop while they’re ahead.

And, hail Skynet.

Family Ties: Uncle Pablo & The Canadian Surfer

Nick Brady: Paradise Lost does not have the ring of Escobar: Paradise Lost, but then again Nick Brady does not have the charisma of Pablo Escobar. 

But Nick Brady serves a purpose in movies like Andrea Di Stefano’s Escobar. He’s our everyman. Our stranger in a strange land. Our innocent guide into the foreign and deadly world of the most notorious cocaine kingpin the world has ever seen. He’s also a foreigner to Colombia, the people and the movie’s plot.

Nick (Josh Hutcherson) is a Canadian surfer who ends up Colombia in 1983. He falls in love with Maria (Claudia Traisac), a confident young woman who points to a billboard with a picture of a menacing face and says that’s her uncle. Uncle Pablo seems nice enough, and he’s some kind of politician. When Nick and Maria attend a lavish party, Nick asks how Uncle Pablo made his fortunes. Maria doesn’t miss a beat, and her smile never fades: “Cocaine.” 

What transpires next is mostly predictable, but altogether fascinating. Nick is so smitten by Maria that he barely notices himself sinking deeper into Pablo’s clutches of money and extravagance. The hacienda where the Escobar keeps his family is paradise: pools, elephants and other exotics animals, life-size fiberglass statues of dinosaurs in the pastures. At one point we see Pablo dusting his prize keepsake: the car that Bonnie and Clyde were killed in. 

The real draw here is Pablo Escobar, played with psychotic finesse by Benecio del Toro. He’s a lovable kind of kingpin. Oafish, domineering, dispensing sage advice in ways that disarm his intimidating 1,000-yard stare. He’s made even more terrifying as he struts around with his wireless briefcase phone, Cosby sweaters and, hilariously, a green corduroy Boston Celtics cap. If you admired Steven Soderbergh’s Che and the great lengths del Toro went to craft that complex character than you will likely be disappointed that this film doesn’t quite reach that level of storytelling. His Pablo is marvelous to watch, but he doesn’t have much arc. He begins the film as Uncle Pablo, and then one day, on the eve of a prison term, he decides to kill everyone, including two infants—two infants too many for this kind of movie. There is no nuance in his monstrosity. And the fact the he would spend so much time doting on and then ultimately trying to kill Nick, seems laughably pointless. A country full of Colombians and we spend the whole movie with the lone gringo. 

That is the peril of these types of movies, these pictures about famous people and their sidekicks, assistants or secretaries: the film can’t sustain itself on the Nick Brady’s of the world, and there’s never enough time to develop the Pablos. It happened in The Last King of Scotland, in which a doctor found himself in the inner circle of Idi Amin, and in The Devil’s Double, in which a body double is roped into Uday Hussein’s twisted universe, and it happens here in Escobar. Hutcherson does what he can, and del Toro hits it out of the park, but they don’t have much to work with because their characters are on different trajectories. 

Di Stefano does do a commendable job holding these trajectories as best he can, and the film has a unique look and feel to it, although I found the drifting focus and handheld shots to be frequently annoying. He structures the movie out of sequence, and it works really well, especially since the flashbacks and flash forwards don’t tip off the plot points any more than they should. The first half of the film is largely a romance and psychological drama, but it quickly becomes a terrifying narco-thriller as Nick is sent on a mission to bury Pablo’s treasure. It’s a jarring acceleration, and doesn’t altogether work, but the scenes are well executed and appropriately nailbiting.

I did find it very hard to believe, though, that Pablo Escobar would ask his niece’s Canadian surfer boyfriend to drive his loot up into the mountains and then have to commit murder to hide it all. And Nick, apparently out of inexhaustible fear, goes along with it to a point. Let me repeat an earlier sentence here: A country full of Colombians and we spend the whole movie with the lone gringo. 

Listen, I’m fond of what this movie does, and what it attempts to do, with Pablo Escobar, who might be one of the greatest villains of the late 20th century. But Paradise Lost doesn’t go far enough. Pablo needs to run, as fast as he can, away from Nick until he finds himself in his own movie.

"They're dinosaurs — they're wow enough."

Jurassic World desperately craves 1993, when CGI was in its infancy, the internet was not in wide use, and when dinosaurs could inspire awe and wonder from all who gazed upon them. Just picture the film as a Scooby Doo villain, an old crotchety man shaking his fist: “If it weren’t for those meddling kids and their Tweeter and their Facepages, then this park would be the greatest park ever.”

I’m not one to miss the 1990s, but Jurassic World makes me yearn for those halcyon years, before we became cynical and jaded, before we started turning our back on the Mona Lisa to take selfies with selfie sticks, before we started thumbing our nose at the marvelous. That’s the attitude of Jurassic World, in which a theme park with living, breathing, chomping dinosaurs is struggling to pay its bills because “no one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore.” Times are so tough that they have bio-engineer the Indominus Rex, whose DNA is a chunky stew of other creatures’ chromosomes. Kids these days, the film laments, they just want their phones, their Snapchat, and a hoodie to retreat into. One character has to be reminded to put his smartphone down to see a Titanic-sized sea monster gobble a great white the way a child crunches on goldfish crackers.

This is Jurassic World’s most fundamental failure: it wants us to believe that a theme park with dinosaurs would get old. Lions, tigers and elephants have existed longer than man has, yet we still line up to gaze at them at zoos, so what makes Jurassic World thinks we’d be bored with cloned dinosaurs? It’s an idiotic concept that produces no fruit, just leafless limbs that end in broken stumps, and it’s a premise that the entirety of the film is grown around. More on that later.

Jurassic World has many failings, but it is, first and foremost, a rip-roaring dino-adventure. If you watched the first three films and thought “not enough dinosaurs” then this fourth entry in the franchise has you covered in every combination imaginable: I-Rex on raptor, mosasaurus on I-Rex, pterodactyl on human, human on raptor, T-Rex on human, T-Rex on I-Rex … so many variations that it sounds like an erotic personals section in a paleolithic newspaper. The scenes are long and action-packed, and they give heroic treatment to dinosaurs that were only glimpsed at in previous films. The velociraptors, so often the villains in the other pictures, are essentially good-guy sidekicks here. Think of them as trained orcas at SeaWorld, another disaster park with deadly man-eating attractions. 

The raptors are trained by Owen (Chris Pratt), who was with them when they hatched and who now oversees their development as park stars. They may know tricks, but they’re still deadly predators as we see in an early scene involving a rookie taking a spill into their pen. (My question here is why didn’t Owen use the raptor flute from the third movie, but then I remembered that even a raptor flute is too ridiculous for this movie.) Owen has to fight back a corporate stooge who wants to militarize the raptors into some kind of living battle-drones. I wish I could tell you this character was played by Paul Reiser from Aliens, but I cannot — he is played by Vincent D’Onofrio who actually has the line, “These things would have been great in Tora Bora.” At the conclusion of this line the sound of 400 collective eye-rolls was loud enough to fill the theater in 3D sound.

Owen flirts occasionally with park director Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is busy negotiating deals around the park, including a Verizon Wireless sponsorship —”what’s next, the Pepsisaurus?” a computer tech asks. (Yes, says Pepsi.) Claire is hosting her nephews, Zach and Gray, who are taking some time for themselves so their parents can divorce, because what you want in a dinosaur movie is lots and lots of family drama. 

As Zach and Gray set off into Jurassic World the film wonderfully establishes the setting as a working theme park, something way beyond what even Jurassic founder John Hammond could have hoped to achieve. There are canoe trips down brontosaurus-lined rivers, herbivore tours inside glass gyro-bubbles, an aviary with winged creatures, and many opportunities to watch carnivores gobble up their lunches in bloody clouds of pink mist. The mosasaurus exhibit is especially nifty: the bleachers begin topside at the lagoon with live feedings, and then they lower behind glass walls to get submerged views of the croc-like monster. An absolutely adorable petting zoo with pudgy little leaf eaters makes an appearance as well, and it is cuteness overload. 

People look like they’re having a lot of fun, but the evil “board” doesn’t like sagging attendance numbers, so they greenlight the I-Rex, which is smarter than any character in the film and has heat-vision like the Predator. And this is where Jurassic World loses its damned mind. The dinosaur itself is awesome, but its existence, its origins, its supernatural powers … it’s all a bit much. Of course it escapes, of course it goes on a killing rampage, and of course every human character suddenly decides it’s time to make the worst decisions of their lives. I want smarter characters in a movie about the genius of mankind. Instead I get Claire, who would rather watch dinosaurs regurgitate half-chewed guests then evacuate the park; Owen, who carries a John Wayne-style lever-action rifle when everyone else carries machine guns; the military guy who apparently has a contract from Weyland-Yutani; and Jurassic’s CEO, who fatefully admits in his first scene that he’s got two more days of flying to get his helicopter pilot's license. Yep, that helicopter is totally crashing. 

The characters in the original Jurassic Park were guilty of hubris and for “playing God,” but they were generally smart people taken down by a computer hacker with selfish motives. In Jurassic World, though, the gruesome deaths — including one entirely unnecessary devouring of Zach and Grey’s wedding-planning babysitter — are entirely linked to the complete and utter stupidity of the plot, its characters and director Colin Trevorrow, who jams so much garbage into his film that you have to wonder if he really wanted to make a movie about dinosaurs at all. 

The biggest failure, though, is that Jurassic World truly believes that dinosaurs alone aren’t enough, which is why it throws in a romance, family drama, battle-raptors, sulking teens, obsessive marketing mavens and that hulking bio-fabricated dinosaur. “We have to up the wow factor,” one characters says. 

“They’re dinosaurs — they’re wow enough,” responds Owen. Amen to that.

Westerns return to greatness with Slow West

A teenager stumbles into a cluster of trees as he walks his horse through clouds of acrid smoke. He comes into a clearing where he discovers the source, a smoldering Indian encampment. Burned teepees are scorched and ruined, their narrow bones still upright and revealing their triangular corpses. The scene is played in black and grays, with an immense feeling of dread that looms over the wayward boy lost in nature’s wrath. The sequence was likely shot on a soundstage, but it feels like a Caravaggio painting come to life in the West. 

I’ve never quite seen anything like this before, which further proves the resilience of Hollywood’s oldest genre, the western. 

Slow West is an intense burn of a cowboy picture. It comes together like an epic romance: a lovelorn teen, Jay Cavendish (The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee), journeys to America’s Western frontier to find his sweetheart, Rose. Rooted in romance and the Old West, the film is more an absurdist road adventure and surreal fantasy: In an early scene, Jay looks up over the frontier, aims his revolver at the stars and watches as they light up like a shooting gallery. This scene leads into the burning of the Indian village, which is so hauntingly beautiful that it seems plucked from another movie in another genre.

Jay quickly meets Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), a bounty hunter with a secret in his pocket: a wanted poster with Rose’s picture on it. Silas agrees to help Jay find Rose, even though his intentions are deadly and selfish. What transpires on their journey is a magnificent set of adventures, the likes of which have never before been seen in a western. You’ll know you’re very far away from John Wayne and Clint Eastwood when Jay meets a trio of Congolese singers on the road. Who are these men, and where did they come from? Slow West doesn’t elaborate, just presents images and shambles onward toward Rose’s doom. 

Much of the film can be broken up into episodes, including one where Jay and Silas are stalked by the film’s villain, a fellow bounty hunter. I kept thinking I knew where this scene would go, and Slow West goes far and wide to prove you can’t predict anything in this strange western universe. The confrontation, or lack thereof, ends when the creek they’re camped next to floods, washing their weapons away and leaving them with soaked clothes. They ride away in their longjohns with their clothing tied to clotheslines stretched between their horses.

Another episode takes place with a traveling preacher, who imparts one last piece of advice on a slip of paper that reads “West” with an arrow pointing. If only Jay had picked up the paper before the breeze, which forever scrambles the arrow’s intended direction. In another scene, Jay and Silas are caught up in a store robbery that goes wrong in every conceivable way. And then they step outside and it gets even worse. 

Slow West is written and directed by John Maclean, whose debut here as an innovative force is about as fine as debuts come. Maclean’s biggest film credit before this was in High Fidelity, in which his band at the time, the Beta Band, has a song featured in a key sequence. How he got here to Slow West, and why — and what took so long — are questions almost as fascinating as the film itself. Almost.

It’s written perfectly, with balance for the deceptively complex narrative and the intriguing characters; the performances are spot-on, with Smit-McPhee and Fassbender making an unlikely but likable pairing; and the visuals are poetic and serve the film’s larger theme that man is not nearly as cruel as nature. Consider these three shots: a tree that has fallen on a lumberjack, his axe-wielding skeleton splayed out beneath the trunk. Ants crawling on and in the barrel of a gun. And, in one of the final shots of the film, jump cuts to each and every person killed since the beginning of the movie.

Death comes for everyone, but in Slow West it lingers, and chokes, and it does not come quickly.

A fitting end to a Furious actor

A morbid sense of doom lingers over Furious 7, and it grows darker the longer Paul Walker’s character is spent living and breathing within the film.

Walker died in an unrelated accident in the middle of production, so it was widely known that the seventh Fast and Furious entry would have to tinker with its already completed story to write Walker out of the franchise. Careful CGI was used to blend old and new footage, and the actor’s brothers were on hand as stand-ins. But what were they up to? And how did the story change under these awful circumstances?

Overlooking the terrible tragedy that befell Walker (and a friend, who also perished), these screenwriting questions interest me greatly. Films are bubbles largely sheltered from the outside world. And Walker’s unfortunate death popped the bubble and allowed real life to flood into the film’s playfully dopey car adventures. I was curious how the franchise would handle it: how would it break the fourth wall and send Walker’s FBI gearhead off into the great beyond?

The answer is heartbreakingly appropriate. It comes where you least expect it, and it’s so fitting — solemn yet light-hearted, honest yet in-character, emotional yet also very functional — that the film ends and a public memorial for this beloved actor and character springs up in its place. 

Just looking at the movie, though, Furious 7 is not a high point for the franchise. The stunts are bigger and more brazen violations of the laws of physics, which is always goofy fun, but the tone is less tongue-in-cheek than that of the fifth or sixth movies, franchise highwater marks that abandoned all seriousness at the door. In the end, it’s just trying too hard to be cool, a characteristic that must be finessed out of a film, not bludgeoned in.

It begins sorta where the last one left off: Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) is out-of-his-skull angry that his criminally minded brother found himself in intensive care for being a capital-V villain. Shaw goes berserk and vows revenge on Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Conner (Walker) and their gang of hooligan racers, who are forever telling themselves “just one more job.”

The movie’s strangest development happens early, when it’s revealed that Shaw killed a driver named Han way back in the third film, Tokyo Drift in 2006. This plot point was the big reveal at the end of the last movie. So here we are in Part 7 at a funeral for a character who died just yesterday in the movie’s universe, but nine years ago for the audience. And then, at the cemetery, before the body is even in the ground, Toretto starts a car chase amid the headstones, which is a weird image for a movie starring a dead actor.

Shaw escapes many times, and Toretto chases him many times. It’s the mantra of the film, and the franchise to a certain extent. Eventually, a super-spy played by Kurt Russell — and literally named Mr. Nobody — turns up and offers to help Dom and his crew catch Shaw, but they first have to retrieve a hacker named Ramsey, who invented a surveillance program called God’s Eye. This is where the plot threatens to strangle this film. 

There’s a hilarious bit with Ramsey’s secret files, which she sent to a car mechanic in Abu Dhabi. So they jump on a plane, because they apparently don’t have cell phones to call him and the mechanic can’t be bothered to use the mail. But when they get to the Middle East, the mechanic sold the files, now in a thumb drive, to a royal prince, who installed the thumb drive in his billion-dollar car … in a vault … high up in a tower. This improbable revelation initiates an extended heist sequence in a trio of skyscrapers high above the desert floor. I enjoyed it, but the setup could have been much cleaner.

These are dumb movies, a point few people are going to argue with. They’re so dumb that an opening shot featuring the Tower Bridge and Big Ben must tell viewers this is “London.” And the product placement is shameless, including a scene in which Mr. Nobody gabs on forever about Belgian ale. Toretto passes and asks for a Corona. Mr. Nobody, like a magician, pulls a perspiring metal ice bucket full of Coronas from behind a desk, where they were presumably filming a beer commercial between Furious 7 takes.

Director James Wan stumbles from action scene to action scene, filling the interludes with closeups of bare female butts in thongs and factories that spew smoke and sparks around glistening supercars with immaculate paintjobs. He doesn’t seem to know how to pace the film’s brand of mindless action. It goes from cemetery chase to vehicular skydiving to cliff jumping to skyscraper heists to factory shootouts to drone attacks. Each action sequence is more ridiculous than the one before it, but with each new one the characters get a little more lost in the shuffle.

It’s a shame they’re mistreated, because the characters are actually likable, something it took many movies to achieve. Diesel is great, Michelle Rodriguez is less sassy and more interesting, and Dwayne Johnson, who serves no purpose, is there to cheer us all up. In one scene he flexes his muscles right out of an arm cast because why not? Even Walker, who was slowly becoming a more minor character in the franchise, has a great scene with a minivan at his kid’s school. 

Fans of the Fast and Furious series will feel right at home in all this. I rolled my eyes about as much as they rolled tires, but I would still take the worst Fast and Furious movie over the best Transformers movie any day of the week. The best reason to see Furious 7 is to see what they do with Walker and his character. It’s classy, and graceful, and appropriate. Bring tissues.