KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.
This Week:
Companion (2025, d. Drew Hancock- rental)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972, d. Ronald Neame - HollywoodSuite)
Juggernaut (1974, d. Richard Lester - Amazonprime)
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Toasty warned me that everything is a spoiler for Companion. The trailer, the synopsis, the bloody poster. Even saying there is a "spoiler" for Companion is a spoiler. It's kind of impossible to really have a big twist for an audience these days that doesn't give it all away. Audiences are too story-literate and too savvy, they're going to figure these things out pretty quick. You can't hang a film on a twist, you've got to have something more going on...and I think Companion never really set out to deceive the audience, well, not in the way you think. So if you don't want to know anything...stop reading now. Skip past this and head down to The Poseidon Adventure review.
Ready?
There are actually a few twists in Companion, only the first of which I will spoil, because it is the most obvious. We first meet Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) in the grocery store, she has a meet cute with Josh (Jack Quaid, Star Trek: Lower Decks) and Iris' voice over tells us how much it means to her to fall in love, and also reveals that she's going to kill him by the end of the film.
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| this is a spoiler |
We next see Iris waking up in the passenger seat of a self-driving car, Josh beside her, venturing down a long driveway to a modernist forest retreat, the home of Russian businessman Sergey (Rupert Friend). Josh's friend Kat (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever) is Sergey's mistress, and she has invited him, Iris, and their friend Eli (Harvey Guillén, Blue Beetle) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage, Fargo) for a weekend getaway. Iris is nervous. She doesn't think Josh's friends like her... specifically Kat.
The next morning Iris finds herself alone with Sergey at the lakeside and he propositions her. Next thing we see is Iris in the doorway of the house covered in blood, a knife in her hand, and Josh shuts her down. Yep, Iris is a robot. Technically a therapy bot ... that you can have sex with. But Iris is unaware that she's a robot until now and it explodes her world.
The twists and tuns here are pretty fun, and thinly allegorical. It's a film that villainizes toxic masculinity and white entitlement for entertainment purposes without really examining its root causes. It's not interested in where this mindset comes from, just that it's awful and needs to go away by violent means if necessary. It also isn't terribly interested in exploring whether the AI's of Companion are sentient or not, and what rights and or freedoms they should have. It's squarely on the side of Iris and she's who we're rooting for.
The movie tells us who Iris is from very early on. The way Thatcher walks as Iris is very mechanical, very deliberate. There are turns of phrase, like "it's just the way that you're wired", and Josh's pet name for Iris is "Beep-boop". When they exit the self-driving car, Josh is reminded to thank the car for the drive.
This isn't M3GAN, or the Terminator or Battlestar Galactica, even. It's a lighthearted romp that plays with the same suspense-horror tropes of "the final girl gets taken to a secluded location and bad things happen" that seems to be a legit subgenre at this point (recent in mind is Blink Twice), as well as the revenge of the abused or manipulated woman (see also Blink Twice). I was also reminded of Fresh, the way it tries to manipulate you into thinking it's a romance, with its opening meet-cute only to give way to its horror tropes There's no scares to be had. It's not a horror at all, but it is very entertaining, with some stupendous jump cuts that fill in gaps and provide some good gags, and Thatcher is really likeable and easy to root for.
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As the New Year's countdown begins, reports of an earthquake resulting in a tsunami that will, in short time, quite literally flips the ship...because it couldn't take on more ballast.
The captain will have no time for "I told you so" to the corporate overlord. The flip is sudden and violent. The majority of the ship's population was in the ballroom, and they're now Lionel Ritchie-ing it (he means they're now dancing on the ceiling, except, there's no more dancing). There's a battle of the wills as the "rebel Reverend" Scott (Gene Hackman) and the ship's purser plead to the survivors to follow them. The reverend wishes to move the people to the hull ("God wants brave souls, not quitters"), since it's upside down, that is where rescue will come, while the purser implores the people to stay put and wait for rescue.
In the end only a handful of people follow the reverend. There's the NYC police detective (Ernest Borgnine) and his new bride, a former sex worker (Stella Stevens). There's the elderly married couple on their first vacation since retiring (Shelly Winters and Jack Albertson). There's the teenager and her boat obsessed younger brother (Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea). There's the Scottish waiter (Roddy McDowall), the hippie folk singer (Carol Lynley), and the lifelong confirmed bachelor (Red Buttons). They make their perilous journey, and not everyone is going to survive.
The Poseidon Adventure is an exceptionally well-made but also exceptionally formulaic film. At the time it probably felt pretty fresh, based of the novel of the same name by Paul Gallico, but the conceit of gathering an ensemble and forging through disaster has become so by-the-book that even one of the first ones still seems pretty derivative.
Constant contention between Hackman and Borgnine creates such manufactured and meaningless drama in the face of crises. The weird obsession teen Martin has with forty-something Hackman is illogical. Lynley's hysterical singer and helpless femme is perhaps my least favourite trope in all of cinema, and Button's is at least 30 years older than her and being a gentleman the whole time, but still he's making a move on her. And poor Winters is really, really not served well here for all her kindness. Plus, Hackman's self-description of himself as a rebel preacher is ..just...a ridiculous moment among many.
And yet, for all its cliches and corny flaws, The Poseidon Adventure remains a cracking adventure that spins its wheels appropriately for the first act, introducing all the players until the disaster hits and then gets moving and only stops to have those quick little motivational heart-to-hearts that these types of movies have to have to deepen the bond between characters.
It's not fine dining, and it's empty calories in the end, but enjoyable in the consumption.
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In this case, a ship, the Britannic, has sailed out to sea, when its owners receive a call from a man identifying themself as "Juggernaut" notifyies them that many barrels of explosives have been placed on board, timed to explode in 24 hours and booby-trapped in various ways. He demands a ransom, a modest sum of 500,000 pounds, in exchange for which he will give them the designs for deactivating the bombs. As a show of his skill he sets off two of them.
The story takes place between the ship and land. On the ship we meet many of the crew and passengers (including the captain, Omar Sharif, his mistress Shirley Knight, and the ship's social director played by an absolutely delightful Roy Kinnear, just trying to make lemonade out of lemons) and on land the investigative team from Scotland Yard plus the cruise owners (including Anthony Hopkins and Ian Holm) are dealing with the Juggernaut situation, as he keeps calling with further instructions and taunts.
In a surprisingly visual sequence, the navy air drop a bomb disposal unit into the ocean near the ship, led by Richard Harris. The deactivation sequences are tense, because it's clear the bomb maker is as good, if not better at making bombs than these men are at dismantling them.
It is a film that is two parts procedural and one part civilian drama, and different parts work better at different times. The first act is a little too unassuming, as it sets up the pieces it doesn't really do a great job of providing a hook to the people we're spending time with (there's a seasick mother and her two rambunctious kids who probably could have been largely cut ), and as much as I like the romantic intrigue between Sharif and Knight, it never really makes sense amidst the two more intense aspects of the film.
Even the hunt for Juggernaut is at times underwhelming, in no small part due to the modest direction of Richard Lester (Superman II) and the entire lack of a score. It's a very British film, a bit obsessed with procedure and bureaucracy, and not all that concerned with flash.
But the moment the parachuting sequence happens, Juggernaut announces itself as something much more than a Poseidon Adventure knock-off, and though it is a very deliberate film, it's star-studded cast ultimately delivers a pretty compelling, if subdued thriller.
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