KWIF: The Fall Guy (+5)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (uh huh) Kent has a spotlight movie in which Kent writes a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else Kent watched that week (or maybe a month ago and forgot about) Kent does a quick little summary of my thoughts. Just not in third person.

This Week:
The Fall Guy (2024, d.  David Leitch - in theatre)
Millennium Actress (2001, d. Satoshi Kon - the shelf)
Witness (1985, d. Peter Wier - the binder)
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023, d. Guy Ritchie - AmazonPrime)
Clear and Present Danger (1994, d. Phillip Noyce - the binder)
Blackhat (2015, d. Michael Mann - the binder)

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I don't know if I can really write a longer, thinker piece about The Fall Guy because it doesn't seem like much thought was put into the film itself. 

I'm being rude. 

The Fall Guy was a film I actually had a good time with, largely based on the explosive and almost effortless chemistry between Emily Blunt (Gnomeo and Juliet) and Ryan Gosling (Young Hercules) -- two extremely attractive people that look even more attractive together. Do Eva Mendes and John Krasinski need to be worried? Or at least extremely jealous?

This film is director, and former stuntman, David Leitch's love letter to stuntmen and stunt crews, wrapped in an action rom-com. Leitch over the years has proven his action-directing chops with Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, and Bullet Train. Each of those films may not have the greatest of stories, but the action tends to be really fun. 

And the action is fun here. There's a great "tripping balls" fight in a nightclub, and a swing arm garbage truck chase/fight sequence through the streets of Sydney that strive to stand out. I think the problem with post-John Wick action-heavy films is the action is too heavy and so nothing really stands out, and the same goes here.

What's more, I found the fact that we were watching a lot of stunts from the perspective of a film crew, seeing all the cameras and cables and tracks required, which was necessary as part of the film's narrative, but it ruins the illusion and lessens the impact of the stunts (most stunts, really, should inspire at least a bit of awe, but we've seen and know too much now, and they've become a little commonplace, undervalued).  I do appreciate that Leitch lets everyone in on the action, with the welcomed, if under-utilized Stephanie Hsu and Winston Duke each getting a sequence of their own, and Blunt reminding us she's more than capable of throwing fists when needed.

As a crime/mystery story, the more it reveals itself, the dumber it gets. It's a real nonsense plot which requires an acceptable amount of suspension of disbelief to start with (the star is missing, Colt is asked to discreetly track him down only to find a dead body and have things go even more wrong for him from there. But there's no real world logic to how wrong it gets, and the more you pick at it, the more it bleeds. There's only so much belief I could suspend and this stretched it to its breaking point.

What eventually made my suspension of disbeleif snap, though, was the film-within-a-film. A sci-fi epic called "Metalstorm" that looked, at best, like a sequel to Battlefield Earth. It looked like a mid-budget remake of the Barry Bostwick 80's b-movie Megaforce. This film would have you believe it was the next Dune or Star Wars, and it just looks like trash. The Fall Guy is a pretty good looking film. It really needed "Metalstorm" to look incredible, or play into it being B-movie action trash, not say it was an A-tier movie, but look like B-tier trash.

As a romcom, this is aces. I was in for every sleepy and/or doe-eyed stare that Colt and Judy give each other. Their dialogue was charming, funny and seemingly effortless in its delivery, and that split-screen sequence was terribly cute. Gosling and Blunt, all day, every day.

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Watching Perfect Blue last week felt like a revelation, like there was a piece of cinematic language missing from my vocabulary all these years which I now understood. Millennium Actress couldn't compete with that type of lifting of the veil.

It also didn't help that I just wanted to sleep the entire time it was on. 

I didn't fall asleep, though, which is a testament to how engaged I was with it (I did fall asleep while writing this post).

Once again director Kon proves his mastery at the transition and edit. Where Perfect Blue was a Giallo-tinged suspense thriller, Millennium Actress is a romantic drama that, all at once, tells us a character's life story and steps us through seventy years of Japan's cinematic history through which we get a staggering sense of Japanese history.  Let me tell you that as a viewer having a very limited amount of knowledge of Japanese history -cinematic or otherwise- it does this film a disservice.

The story is of a studio executive and a young cameraman visiting a famous, but long-retired, reclusive actress to interview her after the demolition of the studio of which she was a big part of building. The exec, who you would expect to be forceful and entitled, is instead a gushing fanboy with nothing but the utmost respect and reverence for the actress.  He presents her with a key which the actress thought lost years ago, and the totem unlocks a lifetime of memories.

The actress recounts her birth, how she was discovered by a producer, her first film, but also her encounter as a teen in the 1930s with a young artistic rebel whom she helps escape by shielding from the law. She is instantly smitten by him, a soulful artist, and the key was a gift from him which she was made to promise to return to him, what became her life's mission.

Her real life blurs into her acting roles as she describes them. Like Perfect Blue the transitions between real life and her acting are seamless and, at times, difficult to discern.  Her roles, or at least the ones that matter to her in retelling her life, are the ones of a young romantic longing for an unseen man who she desperately wants to find. The roles step through the eras and genres of film, from samurai to geisha to Kaiju to sci-fi.  All the while as she recounts her blurred story of life and work, the producer and cameraman are present in the story, the producer injecting himself into roles in the films he clearly knows so well. It turns out, he was a young production assistant during her later films at the studio and was, once or twice, a part of her story.

It's a surprising film in how down to earth it is. It is a film that deceptively seems like it should have been live action, but to have the actress span the ages she does is almost impossible for a single performer, and to have the scale of adventurous productions in her repertoire would make for an expensive film.  Plus, I don't know that any live action director alive has a handle on seamless transitions like Kon.

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For four years I had an art teacher in high school who loved Peter Weir films, and would play them in class while we were toiling away on our sketches. I've seen Dead Poets Society, Green Card, and Fearless numerous times. Of the three, only the latter did I actually like.  If you look at the release dates of those films, you can tell which years I went to high school (accounting for the delay between theatrical and home video release). I don't know why, if he was such a fan, we never saw The Cars that Ate Paris, Gallipoli, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Mosquito Coast, or Witness.

I have just assumed all this time that I'm not a Peter Weir fan. And I'm not. But I've spent some time thinking I'm opposed to Peter Weir, and, after watching Witness for the first time, it turns out I'm not. 

Witness is a surprisingly patient movie from an era of filmmaking where its action movies were increasingly bombastic and its thrillers were full of sex, violence and cliches. This lacks almost any bombastic action, and there's no sex, an anti-violence message, and its cliches are tossed out the side of the horse-drawn buggy. 

It's got plenty of Amish. And I thought this story of a police man protecting a young Amish boy (Lucas Haas, Mars Attacks) who witnessed a murder would be full of crude, reductive stereotyping of the community instead places Harrison Ford (Working Girl) as Captain John Book within the community where he is largely respectful of its traditions, keen to help out, and even finds a bit of peace while he's there. 

He also starts falling for Rachael (Kelly McGillis, Stake Land) the boy's mother, but also keeps his hands to himself, respectfully remembering they are people of two very different worlds.  There is an intense attraction between the two of them that just builds until, following the climactic conflict between Book and the bad guys, deflates like a balloon. The scene of Rachael looking out her window to see Book chatting up his police pals by their cop cars, smoking a cigarette, it is just an incredible moment that reinforces the gulf that separates the two of them. The thread of attraction that seemed to grow inot a bridge made out of stone turns out to just be a wispy thin thread.

Along with the film's climax -- where Weir, instead of delivering that oh-so-American release of catharsis and shooting up the bad guy instead ends with an appeal to his humanity -- proves the director isn't interested in the most satisfying ending for the audience, but the one that feels most real.

This is a pretty great movie, held down by a drone of a score that might as well not have been there at all, and one of the most awkward impassioned kissing scenes I've seen.

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One of the dumbest titles in recent cinematic history, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre finds Guy Ritchie delivering a script with plenty of charming flourishes, and leading a cast where everyone seems game (even Jason Statham (The Beekeeper), well, at least for the first 20 minutes where he flirts with the idea of adopting a character before he falls back into default Statham mode). 

Josh Hartnett (Halloween H20) does that "proof I can be funny" supporting role mid-life crisis thing that modern actors have done since Tom Cruise appeared in Tropic Thunder. He's good, and handsome, and, yes, funny playing a pompous, pampered superstar actor (if we're comparing, he does a better job than Aaron Taylor Johnson in the same role in The Fall Guy).  Aubrey Plaza (Ingrid Goes West) sometimes feels like she's in the wrong movie, but I would watch that movie. Cary Elwes (Robin Hood: Men In Tights) gets some good cracks, and Hugh Grant (Wonka) genuinely seems to be enjoying himself. 

There is that odd take in the elevator with Hartnett where Grant breaks after barely delivering his line... which speaks to one of the larger problems of this film: it feels unrefined. There's a lack of care, and certainly a lack of flair to the overall production. It doesn't look great, it looks barely a cut above, say, Burn Notice or some other action TV series. This obviously wasn't a cheap movie, so why then does Ritchie's work on Netflix's The Gentlemen TV series look so much better? The editing here proves serviceable but we've been so locked into the idea that Ritchie movies are highly stylized, that this largely doesn't feel like a Ritchie movie. 

Ritchie already did his take on Bond with Man from U.N.C.L.E., while this feels like his riff on Mission Impossible if it were done by Asylum. It's certainly inessential to his repertoire.  I think the director just likes to work, he's found a mid-range groove and he's maybe going to coast there for the rest of his career.

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The third entry in the Jack Ryan "series" (and the second with Harrison Ford [Cowboys & Aliens] in the role) finds Ryan becoming embroiled in the "War on Drugs". The PotUS's friend is found murdered alongside his whole family, the culprits being the Cali Cartel. The President wants swift retribution, under the guise of the War on Drugs, and discreetly has his national security advisor run an off-the-books operation to take out the head of the cartel.

When Ryan's friend and mentor Admiral Greer (James Earle Jones, Conan The Barbarian) falls ill, Ryan takes his place as Deputy Director of Operations in the CIA. He is dispensed to Columbia to try and find other means to cutting off the supply chains to the US.  He petitions Congress for more funds, and Congress agrees so long as no military engagement is enacted. Little does he know he is set up to be the fall guy for it.  

The film is a pretty taut political thriller that falls apart only with a jingoistic third act that finds Ryan single handedly going to Columbia to bring back the soldiers left behind by the NSA.  It turns into a ridiculously out-of-place rescue-the-POWs action sequence that neuters the political intrigue that had been the film's raison d'etre up til that point. 

The finale of the film finds Ford's Ryan dressing down the President ("How dare you, sir!") by holding the most powerful position in the land to a standards of decency and responsibility that have absolutely been abandoned in the past decade. It's perhaps the most upsetting (and unintentional) note of the film.

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In the past dozen years of massive disastrous box office performances, Blackhat still stands out as one of the biggest bombs, recouping under 20 million of its 70 million dollar budget.  

It's not just that the film tanked at the box office, but it was both critically and socially derided at the time. That beautiful brick wall of a man, Chris Hemsworth, Thor himself, playing a nerdy master computer hacker. It was laughable in its very conception.

But a funny thing happened in the years since, the Michael Mann fans have managed to drown out the knee-jerk reactionaries and get the film into a "reclaimed" status. Certainly the podcasts and socials I feed into have been saying as such for a couple years now.

Having seen the film (then forgetting to log it) I have to say, bluntly, not bad. In fact, good. Not great, certainly flawed, but good.

My biggest gripe with the film is how Mann shot it.  It's a film that puts Mann in Steven Soderbergh mode, using a lot of different types of digital cameras and lenses and I found jumping between them quite distracting.

The film begins with a nuclear power station melting down. It was hacked and the cyberwarfare arm of the People's Liberation Army want to find the culprit. Captain Chen (Leehom Wang) of the division aligns with the FBI in the US, needing genius-level hacker (and his college roommate) Nick Hathaway freed from prison in order to sniff out whomever was capable of such an attack.  A subsequent attack on the stock market only exacerbates the need to find the culprit.  

It's a pretty taut globetrotting cyber-thriller all told. It takes some tense and scary turns as it leans into just how reliant we are upon technology, and just how vulnerable that technology is to malicious interference.

I can ignore the sketchy accent, and I can even buy into Hemsworth as a hacker, but how did Hathaway get so adept at knife fighting and shooting guns? There was a lot of nonsense in the film, questions raised and never answer, but I still just rolled with it and enjoyed the ride.

I had just watched Decision to Leave the night before watching this, so I was pumped for more Tang Wei and this did not disappoint in that regard. Loved the cast which also features Holt McCallany and Viola Davis.