Tanks for nothing

Repeat after me: “War is hell.” Now keep repeating that for over two hours and by the time you’re finished you might have some idea as to the cumulative insights gathered in David Ayer’s turgid World War II tank drama. It opens with U.S. tank commander Sergeant Collier (Brad Pitt) stabbing a man in the eyeball, which, I suppose, is some kind of clever performance of the title of Ayer’s preceding directorial effort, End of Watch. But I had to review Fury, so I kept on watching, as bodies were crushed to pulp under tank tread, as men on fire blew their brains out, as prisoners of war were repeatedly executed, as women are humiliated and surrender their bodies to invading soldiers because they know they have no choice. (I’ll let you decide how that differs from sexual assault.) Mayhem without energy, these dour scenes don’t even have the crassness to be perverse. What it has instead and in droves is this appalling, pretentious mixture of misanthropy and sentimentality, with endless peanut-brained justifications for superfluous raping and killing. There’s a scene in which a newbie (Logan Lerman), already traumatized by having to clean to clean up the bloody interior of the tank and discovering a sizable chunk of someone’s face, is escorted by Collier into a room littered with Nazis who suicided in anticipation of the Allies’ arrival. As though speaking on our behalf, the newbie asks, “Why are you showing me this?” And Collier, as though speaking on Ayers’ behalf, answers, “Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.” This is the zenith of what passes for wisdom in Fury.

If Ayer’s aim is to remind us of the infernal horrors of what many consider a just war (something that, for the record, countless, infinitely superior films have accomplished before this), I suppose he’s succeeded, but he deflates whatever value such a statement may possess by simultaneously constructing scenarios in which his characters are made to seem heroic, striking heroic poses, saying heroic things to the strains of heroic music. Which is to say, Fury is a dunderheaded apologia for war crimes, a morally inept work of grotesque nonsense exploiting historical suffering for the sake of pulpy so-called entertainment.

Fury is a fairly appropriate title (American Tank might have served just as well), but Ayer’s definition of fury has much overlap with stupidity or blunt nihilism. Collier proudly declares that he once promised to keep his crew alive, yet the film ends with an act of utterly gratuitous violence, a quasi-Wild Bunch climax that’s sure to get everyone butchered for absolutely no good reason. It’s April 1945, the war is nearly over, a mechanical failure stalls Collier’s tank at a country crossroads somewhere in Germany, hundreds of Nazis are spotted coming their way. Outnumbered and outgunned by a colossal margin, Collier’s crew of five could easily hide out in the woods, but instead choose to hold their ground for no apparent reason other than to keep killing and keep getting killed, to get that body-count as high as possible even when the war’s outcome is all but secured. 

That Ayer has managed to make a film even stupider than End of Watch is some kind of achievement. That he manages to exacerbate that stupidity with snatches of scoring from The Omen is almost, but not quite, impressive. Misguided in the extreme and weirdly boring, there is no genuine audacity here, and certainly no nobility. Of interest to tank enthusiasts and Shia LaBeouf completists only.

                        

Disciplinarian vigilante gets baggy injustice

The first fifth or so of The Equalizer is an exhaustive introduction to a mysterious protagonist. Bob (Denzel Washington) is a middle-aged widower who works at a Boston big box building supply store. Though he volunteers to coach a co-worker through a weight-loss regimen, Bob has no close friends. No one knows much about him or his past, though Bob claims to have once been one of Gladys Knight’s Pips. Bob seems like a square, lives like a monk, and, while his public persona seems laid back, he takes an almost autistic approach to discipline, timing everything he does with a stopwatch, scrubbing his sneakers daily, and carefully wrapping his own teabag in a pristine napkin before going to the local diner where he spends his sleepless nights reading Hemingway, Cervantes and Ellison or exchanging friendly banter with a young sex worker (Chloë Grace Moretz) who, one quickly surmises, is in a lot of trouble. It’s trouble that animates the hidden Bob, the Bob we came to see, the Bob who takes out a quintet of very scary Russian heavies in half a minute with a corkscrew and a paperweight and whatever else is at hand.

Written by Richard Wenk (The Mechanic, The Expendables 2), The Equalizer, inspired by the eponymous 1980s television series about a former CIA operative, reunites Washington with his Training Day director Antoine Fuqua. Fuqua knows we came to see Bob kick ass but wants us to wait for it, approaching The Equalizer as equal parts character study and exploitive vigilante actioner. My problem with this approach is that there’s only so much character to study and the action sequences are even more belaboured than the quiet ones. Fuqua chooses, for example, to gives us an awkward prelude to Bob’s first act of violence that’s a bit like Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Googlemap street scan in Premium Rush, shooting the camera into Washington’s eyeball before showing his analysis of his adversaries, the room and its contents. Fuqua shoots actions from four angles when one would suffice. He lingers over things when swiftness seems called for.

It needn’t be thus. One elegantly edited sequence elides an act of violence altogether, moving from a scene in which Bob witnesses a robbery and memorizes the perpetrator’s licence plate, to a scene in which he calmly borrows a sledgehammer from the store’s supply, to one in which a cashier discovers that one of the stolen items has inexplicably reappeared to one in which Bob calmly cleans and replaces the sledgehammer to its original place. This sequence is a fine example of narrative economy very much in keeping with the central character’s sensibility. It also drew great laughs from the audience with whom I watched the film. We understood exactly what transpired and took perverse satisfaction in the compact way it was implied. This sequence is, unfortunately, an exception in The Equalizer, a 132-minute film that ends four times but could have been a sleek, say, 93 minutes and ended at its peak of inevitable vengeance.

What irony. Washington is well cast as Bob, and Bob, though his murderous, pre-emptive ethics are exceedingly dubious, appeals to us because he’s obsessed with making everything clean, mean, efficient, no bullshit. I would much rather have seen his cut of the movie.

                    

The expensive explosives that failed to blow up

The protracted prelude to Sorcerer (1977), William Friedkin’s remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), which itself was an adaptation of George Arnaud’s 1950 same-named novel, whisks us on a world tour of criminal activity, starting in Veracruz, Mexico, before making stops in Jerusalem, Paris, and New Jersey. What Friedkin’s film takes great pains and many minutes to show us is something the Clouzot efficiently and effectively dealt with in a handful of lines: we’re about to be told a story of sundry scumbags who wind up in an unnamed but fairly miserable-looking Latin American purgatory and take a gig transporting extremely sensitive nitroglycerin across 320 kilometres of shoddy jungle and mountain road; Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green want to know just what kind of scumbags we’re dealing with, so they frontload Sorcerer with backstory that reveals our quartet to consist of a hitman (Francisco Rabal), a terrorist (Amidou), an embezzling investment banker (Bruno Cremer), and the driver (Roy Scheider) for a gang who rob a church. In every case something goes amiss that forces the characters to flee and hide where their pursuers will hopefully never look for them.

To be sure, these backstories function more as colour than as essential narrative materials, but maybe Friedkin and Green just figured that knowing how people got into a mess will make the mess itself more interesting. That’s certainly the tack that Friedkin and everyone else involved in the restoration and re-release of Sorcerer are taking in trying to get audiences to engage with this cursed production. I don’t think that any amount of New Hollywood mythmaking is going to make Sorcerer into the lost masterpiece it’s being touted as, but the context is fascinating: Friedkin was coming off of the massive success of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), and considered Sorcerer a personal project destined to cement his status as a genuine auteur, but his misadventures in the wilds of a developing country, his running way over budget, and the film’s misfortune to open the same year as a little space opera called Star Wars doomed its prospects. Sorcerer is in a sense, Friedkin’s Apocalypse Now (1979) or Heaven’s Gate (1980), though, really, it isn’t nearly as ambitious or artistically successful as either of those legendary films made by his peers. It’s a confused movie with fumbling existential visions and half-hearted political statements. Having said that, it’s also extremely watchable, captivatingly seedy, mesmerizing in its use of locations, and features an excellent Tangerine Dream score. It has some spectacular and expertly executed suspense set-pieces and a handful of wonderful, almost throwaway details that indeed speak to something that could be deemed almost singularly Friedkinian.

While Scheider’s gang is storming the backroom of the Jersey church—and senselessly killing a priest while doing so—we get cutaways to the (presumably shotgun) wedding between completely incidental characters transpiring in the chapel—and a close-up of the bride’s black eye! Later a cop will open a bottle of Coke with an automatic. Later still we watch our antiheroes trying to cross a collapsing bridge and blow-up a tree. All of this, and, of course, the pleasures of watching Scheider, make Sorcerer very much worth rescuing from obscurity. The new print premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and has since been making the rounds in the major centres. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray.  

                      

Head in the cloud

One of the things that irked me about Spike Jonze’s Her was its failure to consider any number of consequences generated by its eerily close-to-reality science fiction premise. By contrast, Transcendence, which shares a key narrative element with Her—its protagonist’s beloved is an omnipresent immaterial being who exists solely via the supernatural realm known as the Internet—bends over backward to consider all sorts of grandiose consequences of living in a world where such love is possible. The problem is that consider is all Transcendence does. The film, written by Jack Paglen, checks off a lot of big ideas that we should probably all be thinking about, but is ultimately just as soft-headed as Her, while bearing little of that film’s distinctions. Her sacrificed coherence in favour of some resonant knowingness about the nature of love and possession. Transcendence sacrifices coherence for the veneer of intellectual and/or spiritual heft—and for a nonsensical third act full of big-ass explosions and sundry special effects.

The portentously named Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Deep), a genius in the realm of artificial intelligence, gets shot by radical anti-AI activists. At first it seems he’s going to be okay, but then a doctor with an astonishingly poor bedside manner informs him that the bullet was laced with isotopes and he’s going to die from radiation poisoning in a matter of weeks. A devastatingly brief window of time, but just enough time for Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), Will’s partner in love and science, to encode Will’s memories, ideas, emotions—in short, his consciousness—and upload the whole package into PINN, or Physically Independent Neural Network, the Casters’ revolutionary AI program. So Will’s flesh perishes, but his mind, or some facsimile, lives on in the cloud. He’s everywhere, all the time, and, it seems, all-powerful. He makes a bunch of money fast, and sets up Evelyn with an entire desert town, and, apparently, all its inhabitants, to continue their research, which, needless to say, has the capacity to take over the world!

Evelyn is our Dr. Frankenstein, her hubris driven equally by grief and scientific vision, her fundamental innocence underlined by the fact that she wears Keds with every outfit. Will is her disembodied monster, HAL 9000 with a handsome synthetic visage, a novel spin on the abusive, controlling spouse, Big Brother as bad husband. There are other characters to complicate and crowd Transcendence: a soundly sceptical neurobiologist pal (Paul Bettany) who conspicuously wears a cross around his neck, a wise old former colleague (Morgan Freeman), and a fed (Cillian Murphy) who keeps a watchful eye on the Casters’ mad science, which could one day prove useful to the Department of Defence.

The first hour is very intriguing, if poorly paced—so many scenes are a few lines too long, and there’s a great deal of padding—but then the script devolves into ungovernable plottiness. First-time director Wally Pfister, already famous as Christopher Nolan’s regular cinematographer, opts to emphasize spectacle, whether it be clouds of infectious nano-dirt reaching up out of the earth or a diamond-like drop of dew sliding off a sunflower in slow-motion, the former being an empty conceit designed solely to look freaky and thrilling, the latter being an empty stab at profundity.  

                      

Arm's length

The title is confusing, right? It reads like Captain America is the Winter Soldier. But he isn’t. The Winter Soldier is some guy with grunge hair and something like one of those masks they put on digs who bite people. A nasty piece of work, he’s a killing machine: insistent, determined, affectless, walking doom. Anton Chigurh with a super-powerful metal arm. I don’t think he blinks. He and Captain America face off several times in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which obviously should have been called Captain America Versus The Winter Soldier. Anyway, it’s long. 136 minutes long.

It’s also, for at least half of the movie, action-packed and fairly engaging. Not unlike Captain Phillips, Captain America takes on pirates. Samuel L. Jackson tells a story about his elevator operator grandfather that I quite liked. Scarlett Johansson jumps around and kills people while wearing really tight pants. There are deftly staged chase scenes with many crashes and explosions. Then we get to this turning point that’s entirely dependent on a dopey conspiracy theory that suggests the evil Hydra organization is somehow behind every act of malfeasance over the last 60 years, and are days away from launching an evil scheme to kill millions of hapless citizens for nothing other than the possibility of their future crimes. A Minority Report kind of thing, but on an apocalyptic scale. Big themes: free will versus pre-determination, the perils of a world in which algorhythms are taken as the word of God, and so on. But even within the comic-myth-logic of the movie, things start getting way too silly and excessive.

In the previous instalment we learned how Steve Rogers became Captain America during World War II. He got injected with a special serum that made him really muscular and sped up his metabolism—this is before those sports doping scandals—and kicked Nazi ass. Then he got frozen and woke up in 2011, but they really don’t explore the Rip Van Winkle thing anywhere near enough. Captain America’s the opposite of Batman in that he’s very earnest and un-cynical, but like Batman he’s more souped-up-man than superman. Which is what makes parts of Captain America: The Winter Solider so annoying. Captain America seems invincible, and invincible is boring. Dude leaps out of airplanes without a parachute, seriously? Winter Soldier seems invincible too. Everyone seems invincible, except Robert Redford, because—spoiler alert!—he’s an evil psycho Nazi prick. I suppose they want to “give you your money’s worth.” It gets wearisome. 

              

Speed limits

In accordance with the title, I’ll make this quick: Need For Speed, based on the beloved video game of the same name, is a lot of fun whenever it kicks into high gear. Unfortunately, Need For Speed is an astonishing 130 minutes long, and every time it gets out of the car the thing just slows to a crawl, offering us way to much time to contemplate how unbelievably dumb it is.

Tobey (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) runs a garage in the upstate New York backwater of Mt. Kisco, where he and his buddies soup up cars and go racing in the streets. Tobey’s old rival, affluent asshole Dino (Dominic Cooper), comes back to town after having stolen Tobey’s girl and vamoosed to Manhattan. Dino pays poor Tobey and the buddies big money to work on a fancy Mustang, but these fellows just can’t get along. One thing leads to another, and during an impromptu race on the freeway one of the buddies gets blown up to death. Tobey winds up in jail while Dino gets off Scott-free, though everyone knows buddy’s death was Dino’s fault. Except it wasn’t entirely Dino’s fault. One of the appalling things about Need For Speed is the way it keeps making Tobey out to be the bad-ass hero and righter of injustices, when the guy repeatedly puts the lives of countless innocent strangers into harm’s way with his at times needless reckless driving and daredevil stunts. Our engagement depends on our sensing the tragedy of Tobey’s buddy’s death, but we don’t even know how many people were injured, maimed or killed during the multiple chases and crack-ups, most of which are caused by Tobey.

Anyway, the music is wildly overwrought, the movie over-long and the characterizations over the top. Dino is so bad, he only wears black! Paul’s performance is largely a matter of raspy delivery and hard stares. Imogen Poots shows up as a token love interest in misguided headscarves and a posh accent. Michael Keaton has a bit as a pirate jock radio variation on the DJ from Vanishing Point. As promised, the sequences in which Tobey’s behind the wheel—flying over Michigan off-ramps, refuelling without stopping, getting airlifted out of Utah—are truly thrilling, but everything else is a snooze. “This isn’t just about racing,” someone declares. They’re wrong.