Various events have conspired to keep my movie watching to a minimum these past few weeks. Most notably, four of my favorite TV shows have all come back on the air, cutting my movie time way down. (For the record, those shows are Legion, The Expanse, Westworld, and Archer. So there.) Anyway, here are a handful of flicks I did manage to watch during the end of April and start of May…
The Bank Job (r) – About halfway through this Jason Statham heist flick, I became convinced that I’d seen it before. Situations and characters seemed very familiar, I was anticipating story beats long before they occured. Even after watching the whole thing, though, I’m still not sure. Is this just such a typical heist flick that it bleeds into all the others? Have I seen so many similar Jason Statham movies that it is now impossible to differentiate between them any more at all? Am I just confusing it with The Italian Job, another Jason Statham Euro-heist flick with the word ‘job’ in the title? Hmm. Well, I will say that The Bank Job is a pretty average, not particularly memorable flick, so I’m quite sure I could have seen this before and completely forgotten about it. The film claims to be based on a true story, with Statham as the leader of a group of criminals who manage to break into a major London bank. They make off with millions — as well as incriminating photos of Princess Margaret that someone’s been stashing in their safe deposit box. A rogue’s gallery of spies and ne’er-do-wells then proceeds to try and track down Statham and get possession of the pics. It’s all enjoyable enough while you’re watching it, and Statham turns in one of his more grounded performances as the lead heister. If you like heist flicks and/or Jason Statham, The Bank Job is certainly worth checking out. Just don’t be surprised if you forget everything about it within a few months.
Mystery Street – Caught this one as part of Turner Classic’s film noir series, but it’s much more of a police procedural than a true noir flick. A young and exceedingly dapper Ricardo Montalban stars as a police detective tasked with solving the mystery of a skeleton discovered buried on a lonely stretch of Long Island beach. With the help of the Harvard University forensics lab, he uses DNA evidence to track down the nefarious killer. The forensic science stuff was all very new and exciting at the time, and the flick often plays like a prototype for a CSI: Miami episode. I found the flick to be shockingly risque for 1950, with a plot about a single woman who’s killed for trying to blackmail her married lover into paying for an abortion. There’s also a shot of a man’s huge forearm tattoo of a fully nude island woman — I don’t have any idea how that shot made it past the censors, I’ve never seen anything like it in other movies of the time. Montalban is the best thing about the movie, exuding charisma and star power in a rare lead role for a 1950’s Latino actor. I liked that the only person who comments negatively on his race is the villain of the piece. Overall, Mystery Street is a decent enough police procedural from a time before that term even existed. It’s mainly interesting for Montalban’s performance and the dangerously scandalous backstory.
The Blues Brothers (r) – Inspired by my article on favorite car chases, I watched this classic for the first time in many years. I accidentally got the “extended edition,” which I didn’t even know existed, so that was a happy accident. Of course, not much of the extra footage adds a lot to the proceedings. Most of the musical numbers get slightly longer, especially John Lee Hooker’s street blues performance. There’s a scene of Elwood quitting his day job that adds nothing, an extra gas station explosion, and various little segments that you would never notice if you hadn’t seen the flick a million times. Anyway, with or without the extra bits, The Blues Brothers remains the best car-crash-soul-musical-comedy ever made. Belushi and Ackroyd deadpan their way through some truly ridiculous scenes, whether dusting themselves off after another Carrie Fisher rocket attack or tossing Cheez Whiz to a flophouse crony. The whole thing is really just an excuse to showcase performances by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and other soul music greats — and to smash up a lot of things. The flick rolls along at its own leisurely pace as the guys reunite their band and collect enemies, from country bands to Illinois nazis. Clearly, the guys also wanted to destroy as many police cars as humanly possible, and the climatic chase enables them to execute that plan on a grand scale. Look, what can I really say about The Blue Brothers? If you haven’t seen it yet, I’m not sure what you’ve been waiting for. They’re on a mission from God, after all.
War for the Planet of the Apes – I was expecting to really like this movie. I loved the previous two installments in the recent franchise reboot, which managed to truly get you to identify with the apes and their super-intelligent leader Caesar (played by CGI maestro Andy Serkis, of course). War got plenty of glowing reviews when it came out, too, so I was fully anticipating a pretty good time. Um, not so much. War for the Planet of the Apes ends up asking the question: If you make a dumb, cliche-ridden war movie that stars CGI apes instead of humans, is it still a dumb, cliche-ridden war movie? My answer is a big yes. This is simply not a good flick. For some reason, the filmmakers decided that they were going to make the Apocalypse Now of ape movies — they even show a big “Ape-ocalypse Now” graffiti tag not once but twice. Sadly, they never stopped to ask whether this was something that the world actually needed. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that people going to see a Planet of the Apes movie are necessarilly hoping for a moody Vietnam War allegory. I’m thinking they just want to see some big ape/human battle scenes. I would also like to point out that this flick is much more P.O.W. Escape for the Planet of the Apes than War. There are a couple of battles, but most of the movie involves Caesar and his small band of henchmen wandering around the jungle looking for the man who killed the lead ape’s family. Woody Harrelson plays this war-crazed zealot as a cross between Col. Kurtz and… Woody Harrelson, I guess. They even pull a chapter from the old Aliens playbook, having the apes befriend a lost, mute human girl who they then drag through a series of adventures. It’s as if the filmmakers didn’t trust that audiences would be on the apes’ side, so they stuck a cute blonde girl in there to guarantee some human rooting interest. So lame. Even lamer is the “majestic” musical score, a series of swelling, schmaltzy, overdone crescendoes that would be more appropriate to Schindler’s List than a movie about warring apes. And here’s something you never find yourself saying during a good movie: “Wow, what a conveniently timed avalanche!” Cornball, cheesy, and (most unforgivably) boring, War for the Planet of the Apes is the most disppointing flick I’ve seen in some time.
The Hitman’s Bodyguard – This Samuel L. Jackson/Ryan Reynolds vehicle seems to be some focus group’s answer to the question: What if John Wick was played for laughs? Jackson stars as a Wick-ian super assassin, on a prison furlough so that he can testify against a Belarussian dictator in the International Criminal Court. When everything goes south and his Interpol detail gets murdered, it’s up to former ace bodyguard Reynolds to get Jackson safely from London to The Hague. Violent hi-jinx ensue. The flick is okay, pretty much delivering what you expect — lots of gun fights, some decent chase scenes, and plenty of “wacky” banter between Jackson and Reynolds. Jackson seems to be having a great time throughout, chewing the scenery and tossing off semi-lame jokes with a broad grin on his face. Reynolds coasts through the flick on pure charm, delivering the same exact tongue-in-cheek performance as in Deadpool, minus the good writing. He seems to have settled into a comfortable groove as the wry, world-weary action hero, and it’s kind of a shame he doesn’t have much to work with here. The movie hits all its marks, including the now-requisite “one-take” action scene, this time with Reynolds fighting off a gang of European baddies in and around a small eatery. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking or original here, just a couple of well-traveled action stars doing what they do. If you can’t see every plot “twist” coming from a mile away, you haven’t seen too many movies. That said, there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours. War for the Planet of the Apes, for example!
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