KWIF: 28 Years Later (+5)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. One brand new movie and a lotta real old shit. Yes, stuff from the 90's is now real old.

This Week:

28 Years Later (2025, d. Danny Boyle - in theatre)
Earthquake (1974, d. Mark Robson - HollywoodSuite)
The Swimmer (1968, d. Frank Perry - HollywoodSuite)
Look Who's Talking (1989, d. Amy Heckerling - HollywoodSuite)
Sudden Death (1995, d. Peter Hyams - HollyWoodSuite)

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28 Weeks Later was my inauguration into the post-apocalyptic trope of "the worst thing about the end of the world are the other survivors". Ever since that film, any time I'm watching anything po-ap I've come to expect the worst out of the people we haven't met yet, the others alluded to off in the distance. It is, frankly, my least favourite part of po-ap, but also probably the most honest.  Zombies, aliens, natural disasters, giant/tiny monsters we can survive...but each other? We're showing ourselves Right.Now. we really can't do it, we can't learn a goddamn thing about peace and harmony and coexistence as long as there are people who want more than what others have and are willing to go to any extents to have it. But I digress.

So imagine my surprise when the spectre off in the distance is not what they are believed to be, and in the darkest of spaces we find humanity, and humanity not just caring about life, but caring about death. 

In 28 Years Later, the UK is closed off from the world and the survivors are left to the infected, and the infected are left to the survivors. Our protagonists Isla (Jodie Comer), Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) live in a busy, close-knit village on an island connected to mainland Scotland by a causeway. Tide goes out, one way in, one way out, tide comes in. Jamie is taking 12-year-old Spike to the mainland for his first hunt, a right of passage among the villagers. Isla suffers from an unknown malady and is only sporadically aware of the here and now. There is no medication and no doctors to aide her. So after a very tense hunt full of close calls, when Spike hears of a doctor, even one gone mad, out on the mainland, he takes Isla out by himself to get her care.

I'm skipping over plenty, but that's the glory of discovery in a film like this, where our protagonists (and the filmmakers, and us, the audience) have gotten to a certain comfort level with the setting, surroundings and threats... it's the unexpected, and scripter Garland and director Boyle have much up their sleeve in this regards.

This includes hints at the nature of the infected, survivor subcultures on the mainland, the status quo of the outside world, and a bookend that... well... let's just say there'll be a lot of discussion around it until the sequel comes.

I had no expectations when it came to 28 Years Later, so they were neither met, nor dashed. Boyle both impresses and frustrates with his choices in direction and editing, but more the former than the latter. His shots of wilderness (with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle) are incredible, but his zombie frenzies, full of quick cuts and abstraction, are the weakest part of the film, and the style pulls me out more than enhances the chaos and scariness. 

Garland's script takes a turn that pleased me greatly, as I worried Jodie Comer's whole role was to be the frail, discombobulated matriarch whose whole purpose and contribution to the story is to motivate young Spike into rash action. I mean, it's a bigger role than just that, but doesn't exactly serve a nobler purpose (in a turn in Garland's script that displeased me only minorly).

But, that ending is bound to baffle, or even infuriate some, especially if you didn't know there's more on the way. Even if you did... I mean... I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it, which, after nearly 2 hours of stone-faced severity in muted, grainy colours, to have this blast of pizzazz and vibrancy...it's jarring. It hearkens to British subcultures, nodding to the droogs of A Clockwork Orange and the Inglorious Basterds, and promises something quite different in the picture to come.

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The disaster movies were the superhero movies of the 70's. All spectacle, where big stars would grab their paycheque to entertain the masses with an eventful show of calamity and destruction. There are the ones with the lasting legacy, like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and Airport, and then there were the rest.

I don't think I had heard of Earthquake before this year (if I had, it definitely didn't stick in memory), the Charlton Heston-led production which attempts the same ensemble cast put though their paces through not dissimilar story beats in the aftermath of calamity. In this case, if it weren't evident, there's an earthquake in Los Angeles.

Of course, the first act is all about setting up our cast of characters whose personal drama don't really matter at all once the shit goes down. It's all just kind of about survival. Ol' Chuck plays an ex-football star with a trope-addled wife (Ava Gardner) one could only call "queen of the harpies". There's a young woman (Geneviève Bujold) with a pre-teen kid who Chuck likes to visit. The film plays it off as altruistic, Chuck helping the widow of a colleague, but his wife thinks he's having an affair.  

There's a good cop having a bad day (George Kennedy), the seismologists who, in Jaws-like fashion, warn the mayor of the earthquake, but refuses to sound the alarm, and there's a motorcycle stuntman (Richard Roundtree) and his team who are also here because Evel Knievel (only took me 3 tries to spell it correctly) was hot at the time. There's also a few other odds and sods, including a creepy grocery store manager and Lorne Greene playing Chuck's father-in-law (only 8 years older than him in Last Crusade fashion).

The earthquake kicks off the second act with a whole lotta miniatures, and Star Trek-caliber flopping about as the camera shakes and tilts and applies an in-camera distorting effect to make it look like buildings are wobbling. It's delightfully corny, but the titular earthquake is not the threat of the film... it's all the crumbling infrastructure, downed power lines, and, of course, the human component afterwards that are the real threat.

Earthquake is not a great movie, it's most definitely a product of its time, but it is tremendously entertaining. I loved all the creative effects and model work and set pieces and matte paintings. I also really appreciated how the filmmakers here really tried to think logically about what the threats would be in a post-earthquake scenario, and how normal people, not superheroes by any stretch, could work through their treacherous situations. In keeping with the formulae, not everyone comes out unscathed.  If only there were any real weight behind it all. The characters are so basic and average, you almost forget most of them are movie stars.

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When we first meet the titular Swimmer, Ned, he's running through the woods in his swim trunks... it's a 55 year old Burt Lancaster looking better than I ever did at my absolute fittest. He breaks through the clearing an dives into a pool. It's not Ned's pool, but he is also not an unwelcome guest, although he has missed the party by 8 hours or so. The hungover men love him, the hungover women love him even more, and Ned ably flirts with them all. He's far from home, but obsessed with pools and swimming and reckons he can "swim" home, backyard hopping from pool to pool.

As Ned progresses through his journey, hitting on anything with breasts along the way, it becomes clearer and clearer that Ned isn't right in the head. He's having some kind of existential crisis mixed with a nervous breakdown peppered with a psychotic episode.

The closer Ned gets to home, the more the real Ned comes to light. He's not that life of the party to those who had really gotten to know him, he's not the wonderful father he purports to be, and as a lothario he's left them wanting, but not wanting more Ned. He's a cad, a deadbeat, and probably broke.

The journey of The Swimmer is one of character discovery for the audience, the teasing out of information that paint the picture of the man, but leading to no decisive clarity as to what triggered Ned's break, and leaving dangling the question of "how did he get here?" (both in the physical and metaphorical sense).

It's at times a riveting journey, but also at times a tedious one. The film could easily shave 25 minutes of montages and kaleidescopic lollygagging and not be the lesser for it (it's s film padding out a short story and it shows). I have to imagine that Matt Weiner, creator of Mad Men is a huge fan of this film, as Ned's journey seems to have made the map that Don Draper would follow.

I never knew where The Swimmer was going. It opens with such jovial frivolity, that it seemed like it was just to be a simple lark of a movie, a real late-stage Rat Pack-style hangout film with good looking people in swim trunks having whatever kind of conversations people in the 1960's had. Instead it doglegs pretty sharply into uncomfortable and darker terrain that had me saying "nope!" out loud, only for the film to be fully aware of its impropriety. It is a fascinating film, one I knew nothing about as it played immediately after Earthquake (it self sort of a random find one evening) and so happy to have had the chance to watch it.  It's stuck in my mind more than almost any other film I've seen this year so far.

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My favourite film podcast, Blank Check, has been covering the films of Amy Heckerling the past two months. As is typical with me and Blank Check, I want to follow along, but if the films aren't readily available on the streaming services I have (or in my DVD binders), then I tend to fall off the "follow along" train pretty quickly. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is streaming nowhere at the moment, nor is Johnny Dangerously  (while National Lampoon's Euorpean Vacation seems to have just popped up on Crave, weeks after "the two friends" have ripped the movie a new one so I think I safely pass that one up)  Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too popped up on the cable package Hollywood Suite last weekend, and I couldn't set the PVR to record any faster.

I can't remember how many times I saw Look Who's Talking, but it seemed like a lot. I was pretty into Rebecca from Cheers at that time -- hot messy women were my thing as an adolescent -- but even so, this Kirstie Alley-starring vehicle about a woman who has a baby as a result of an affair with a married man was such a quintessential 1980's "chick flick", I really shouldn't have cared. But for that baby to have an inner monologue voiced by Bruce Willis, suddenly this "chick flick" was the comedy sensation of the decade, drawing in people from pretty much every age group.  I mean, can you believe the things Baby Mikey is thinking?

Honestly, it was a revolutionary concept at the time, one which very quickly got beaten into the ground with subsequent sequels, TV spin-offs, and other shows and movies and commercials pilfering the gimmick.

The reality is Look Who's Talking is a sort of charming film about a woman, Molly Jensen, becoming a single mother and struggling real hard at it, trying to date and find a dad for her baby (the wrong way to date), while she strikes up a weird alliance with a hairy taxi driver (John Travolta) who agrees to babysit for her so that he can use her address to set up his grandpa in a local care home. There's definite chemistry between them, but she doesn't see him as being a good baby daddy, even though he's awesome with kids. *Shrug*.

The fact that baby Mikey has his inner monologue said aloud it Willis' playfully wry cadence kind of gets in the way and undercuts the journey Molly is on by more than half. At least a third of Willis' interjections were jarring in their insertion and, since we've all long gotten over talking babies, not contributing anything of real merit to the plot or story.

It is a strangely personal films for Heckerling, who found herself pregnant as a result of an affair, and George Segal's character reflects Heckerling's frustration with her real-life baby daddy, and doesn't paint a very kind picture.

It really is a hard film to hate. It's bright and filmic with two leads who are the opposite of unappealing, but whatever it was about its gimmick that made it such a phenomenon in 1989 has mostly worn off.  My apathy towards this one has left me with zero desire to watch Look Who's Talking Too.

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Director Peter Hyams has not gotten a series on Blank Check, where they review directors' filmographies one film at a time, nor will he likely ever. He is a journeyman director, one who had a stable career for over 30 years, and he quietly made some of the sleepiest of sleeper cult hits during that time. Three of his films have been covered on the Quentin Tarantno/Roger Avery podcast Video Archives (Bustin', Narrow Margin and The Relic) all with largely favourable critiques, and they haven't even touched 2010, Outland, Capricorn One, Timecop or Sudden Death.

It's almost too easy to look at the cover of any 90's Jean-Claude Van Damme flick and snicker, at least just a little, but Sudden Death is probably the least JCVD-esque vehicle of all JCVD films. In what can only be called "Die Hard in a hockey arena", JCVD is playing a fire marshal at Pittsburgh's Civic Arena, and he's scored seats to the Penguins' Game 7 Stanley Cup final against the Chicago Blackhawks bringing his pre-teen son and younger daughter. In attendance at the game is the vice-president so security it high.  But not high enough.

A large, well prepared team of mercenaries have descended on the stadium and successfully taken the vice president hostage, murdering plenty along the way. A deeply complicated money transfer scheme is their aim, based on seized off-books reserves the US government has access to, and their leader, Joshua Foss (Powers Booth), will stop at nothing to coerce the VP into getting it for him, including blowing up the arena.

The surprising thing is that there's really only one lengthy choreographed fight sequences (between JCVD and a stuntwoman in the Penguins' mascot costume) that shows off JCVD's usual fighting prowess. In this, his fire Marshall isn't an ex-marine, or has a black belt in tae-kwon doe, he's just a scrappy person with a few power moves, but he still gets his ass beat up quite a bit.  Most of what JCVD is asked to do is look stressed and panicked as he tries to disarm bombs and figure out how to rescue his kids, all while a big-time hockey game goes on inside, and the Secret Service attempt to reign in control on the outside. Is it the best use of JCVD's talents (and butt)? No, but he serves it just fine.

It's all second-tier Die Hard stuff, but it's still really damn enjoyable. Booth may not have the same gravitas as Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons, but you want a big bad on a budget the man can deliver.. He's absolutely vicious, and the death toll he and his team are responsible for is ridiculous. They really don't care (they even pull the trigger on a child at one point!).

Hyams and crew use the Civic Arena to its fullest. The arena sports a moon roof feature where a wedge of the roof retracts to reveal the night sky and fireworks.  It also is wide enough to, infamously, drop a helicopter into. There's such an energy added to the movie by having a hockey game going on in the middle of it, with the big roar of the crowd and the excitement of the goals being scored. It's a film taking its threat and its scenario seriously while also remembering to have fun with it (at one point JCVD needs to go out on the ice disguised as the Penguins' goalie, to which he keeps repeating "oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit" as the play starts streaking towards him).  

I delighted in this movie. Hyams is such an ultra-competent director, he keeps the suspense suspenseful, the action actiony, and paired with JCVD manages to keep the protagonist of the film the underdog throughout.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Fountain of Youth

2025, Guy Ritchie (Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) -- download

Guy Ritchie is trying to setup a franchise. The aforementioned Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre was most definitely a setup for one, but it hasn't happened... yet. This is almost certainly also trying to do so, and even had some closing dialogue to cement the idea of more treasures, more forbidden knowledge, more chases.

Funny, despite opening with the statement you thought "the aforementioned movie" was going to be a setup for a franchise, you never actually say that in the write-up of the aforementioned movie.

This movie is right down my alley, an alley I am always surprised is mine -- treasure hunting movies. I would guess it started with Richard Chamberlain's King Solomon's Mines but I imagine there were formative movies and TV shows before that. If I was to settle on the epitome of this type of movie, for me, it would be (and again, surprising me) Nicolas Cage's National Treasure (I should do a rewatch post for both) because they are silly, light, comedic and full of puzzles to solve and treasure to ultimately lose. Its still my greatest annoyance with all treasure hunting movies --- that much if not all of the treasure has to be lost at the end of the movie.

Luke Purdue (John Krasinski, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) probably identifies as an archaeologist, but he presents as an art thief. The movie opens with him stealing a painting from some Bad Guys in Thailand, leading to a very fun car-scooter chase, and then a classic fight on a train. On the train, Luke meets foil Esme (Eiza González, Baby Driver) who also wants the painting but is not with the Bad Guys that Luke eventually escapes from.

The hot opening was fun, light and caper-ific. Krasinski embodies a 20s serial adventurer, ala Indiana Jones, but with a more lighter, comedic approach, and the suits he wears smack of anachronism. When I saw the trailer the first time, for a moment I thought the movie might be period.

Anywayz, Luke makes it to London, steals another painting out from under the nose of his museum curator sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman, Vox Lux). There is lots of contentious banter and references to their father's legacy. It gets Charlotte fired, of course, but Luke introduces her to his team of Mission Impossible style misfits and their backer, a dying billionaire (Domhnall Gleason, Frank of Ireland) who wants Luke's help in finding the fabled Fountain of Youth, something that Luke and Charlotte's father had spent his life searching for.

It is at this point, he finds himself stalled and bored of his usual abridged "recaps". But even if there isn't a proper recap, there will be spoilers hereafter.

Treasure Hunt Capers have formulas to follow. There have to be a handful of clues that must be deciphered, and that usually involves finding some hidden pieces upon which the clues are placed. In period treasure hunts, those hidden pieces are just waiting to be found in tombs, but in current period movies, the treasures are usually already found, but in the hands of someone who won't give them up easily. Purdue and his crew end up being more thieves than treasure hunters. His sister isn't fond of that. They "recover" a painting from the sunken Lusitania, they "recover" some information from a heretical bible in Austria. There are casualties, there is destruction. I can see why she isn't fond of her brother's tactics.

Oh, and chase scenes. Lots of chase scenes. Fun chase scenes, and a whole lot more fun than a tuk tuk race.

Being a Ritchie movie, there needs to be a multitude of players. Interpol is chasing Luke, the Bad Guys from the Hot Open are chasing Luke, anti-treasure hunters (an organization of mysterious protectors of the Fountain of Youth) are chasing the entire group and, eventually, after reveals and betrayals, the billionaire backer has his mercenary goons. Much conflict, so many players.

To be fair, I had the fun I expected. It is not a good movie by any objective standards but Krasinski is charming, as expected, and I loved his suits. Portman is one note (frustrated), Gleeson is gleeful, until he is menacing, and González is sexy, intimidating and mysterious, and did I mention sexy? I expect her to be playing henchmen roles for a good long time, but at least in this one, her role had good intentions. The rest of the characters are cardboard stand-ins without enough good lines to be remembered. 

Like Raiders of the Lost Ark the treasure here is not a tangible thing, but the promise of immortality and ... other stuff. The Fountain of Youth is expanded from a pool of water that gives you, well, youth, into The Power of God (!!!) Of course, they are vague about what this power is but that's alright, they drop the pyramids on his head. The End. And no, no gold in their pockets. Not that this movie was about collecting actual "treasure", but it still always annoys me that treasure hunters always come away sans treasure.

...

I have been thinking about the way I watch movies, of late, a lot. The comparison of "popcorn movie" is often used, usually in connection with burping at the end, and its gone. But there is the "enjoy it while I am doing it" aspect, as in I really like eating buttered cinema popcorn while I am up to half way thru the bag, but afterwards, not so much. I can recall enjoying this movie, a lot, while I watched it, but I can not elucidate on that enjoyment. Is it timing? Is it too long ago in my brain? Do I need a rewatch? Maybe I need to start doing what I have been tempted to do with my viewing of Anora, which I am about half way thru, after about 5 sittings, getting in bits & bobs in mornings and during WFH Lunch. Should I start the post with my growing impressions? I have a lot going in my head as I watch that movie, but I also really enjoy the "movie done, put in a stub" aspect for this blog. Objectives Accomplished, I guess. But should I start writing BEFORE the end, because helz knows I am not going to write it, right after, when things are more or less fresh.

Anywayz, enjoyed the movie, but not a lot of nice things to say about it, which annoys me.

KWIF: Pee-Pee Peeping

 KWIF= Kent's Week in Film. Three "films" that start with "P" completely on accident.

This Week:
Predator: Killer of Killers (2025, d. Dan Trachtenberg - Disney+)
Pee-Wee As Himself (2025, d. Matt Wolf - HBO)
Presence (2025, d. Steven Soderbergh - AmazonPrime)

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The classic Arnold Schwartzenegger-starring Predator from 1987 was quite a successful film, as a group of mercenaries square off against a high-tech alien Predator in the jungle. It's Danny Glover-starring 1990 sequel, taking place in a sweaty, crime-addled futuristic L.A. was less successful but even more popular among the sci-fi nerds for teasing the culture of the Predators. But it was the various Dark Horse Comics mini-series in the 1990s that showed what could really be done with the Predator....

Put him at a disadvantage in a cold-weather climate. Have the Predator hunting during the first World War.  Let the Predators square off against Aliens. Or Batman. Or Tarzan. Or another Predator!

The core idea behind the Predator (their species is the Yautja...first used in the novel Aliens vs. Predator: Prey from 1994) is that they hunt those most deserving of being hunted; other hunters. Earth is so rife with skilled hunters and killers that it's a favourite hunting ground of the Yautja, but not their only one (as witnessed in 2010's Predators). The key to a good Predator story is to not focus on the Yautja much at all, and offer little to no explanation. Shane Black's 2018 travesty The Predator and the awful Aliens vs. Predator movies explained too much, tried to probe the creatures too much. So Dan Trachtenberg's back-to-basics Predator film Prey (pitting a Yautja against a Comanche warrior) came out in 2022, it paved the laneway for what future Predator stories should be... the Predator in other cultures, in other times.

The most obvious go-to would be Predator vs. Vikings, Predator vs. Samurai, Predator vs Kung Fu warrior, Predator vs Zulu warrior, etc.  So it came as a slight disappointment when the trailer Predator:Badlands dropped and it most definitely wasn't the back-to-basics follow-up to Prey I was anticipating from Trachtenberg.  What I didn't know was that the true follow-up to Prey would be Predator:Killer of Killers, stealth dropped on Hulu (in the US, Disney+ globally) last week.

At first blush, it appears to be an animated anthology film consisting of three stories: Predator vs. Vikings, Predator vs a ninja, Predator vs. WWII aerial ace, you know, the type of stories I was actually hoping would each get the full-feature, live-action treatment, not burned off in an animated tie-in. It's a movie that simultaneously offers a little more than what the typical anthology film does, but at the same time offers each conceit less than what it could have.

Set in 841 AD, "The Shield" finds a viking warrior, Ursa, leading her clan - and her son - on an assault against a foe she has been hunting for a long time.  The enemy was responsible for the death of her father a lifetime ago, but it seems revenge has been fuelling her the whole time. As she confronts the man she has hated her whole life, her son makes the killing blow, and makes him the target of the Yautja that has been observing them in action. The Predator here is a hulking beast, literally Hulk-sized, with a unique pulse emanating weapon on his right arm where his hand should be. Ursa, the Viking queen, meanwhile, fights using two shields with razor-sharp edges.  There is some wild violence and some impressive action beats in all this that allowed me to get over my disappointment of there not being more to it than there is. I feel like the emotional resonance that the story wants wasn't allowed enough time to build, both for the big confrontation the Ursa wants, and for the people she loses along the way.  I like that, like Prey, the Predator is still a more technologically advanced creature, but that technology is more primitive, clunkier than what we would see in the 20th century.

"The Sword" is set in Japan in 1609, but starts further back with two brothers, thick as thieves, who learn and train and grow up together, are forced to face each other by their disciplinarian father to see who is strongest and fiercest enough to be his heir. Kenji refuses to fight his brother, while Kiyoshi is reluctant but the disappointment of his father is too much to bear. He attacks Kenji and Kenji flees. Year later, Kiyoshi holds his father's title, and Kenji, now a ninja, sneaks into his city to get his revenge...except Kenji, for as stealthy as he is, cannot elude the Yautja observing him from behind his invisible cloak. This story, largely wordless, was everything I was wanting, except for not being live-action and feature length. It actually manages to hit the emotional resonance that "The Shield" could not, with the silence putting more emphasis of the visuals and direction, and the music providing so much of the emotional cues. As a short, it's absolutely lovely and poetic, but I still can't help want more out of it.

The end of each of "The Shield" and "The Sword" find our protagonists victorious against their alien opponent, and there's the briefest of glimpses of them in the same confined space that looks like the hold of a spacecraft. The film is teasing that there's more to Ursa and Kenji's stories than what we just saw. And then we're introduced to John Torres.

"The Bullet" is set in 1942, and finds Torres as a second-stringer aboard an aircraft carrier during World War II. Torres wants to fly, but hasn't been given the chance. When his squadron leaves to engage the enemy, Torres and his mechanic buddy discover something incredibly foreign, alien even, that's an even greater threat in the skies. He takes off in a junker plane to alert his crew to return to ship, only to have the Pred Baron start picking them off. Clearly we know Torres is successful in defeating this alien ace, but of the three stories, it's the most implausible. Torres is not, like Ursa or Kenji, so skilled, and his equipment is so outclassed it should barely be flying. Voiced by Rick Gonzalez (Arrow) Torres is a motormouth to the point of being too much, especially coming off of the quiet of "The Sword". Torres winds up verbalizing his inner monologue, which makes it feel much more cartoony than the previous for-adult-audiences entries felt.

It all culminates with a fourth act in a Yautja gladiatorial Colosseum, which I was not expecting at all. If anything I was anticipating that our three victors would wind up in the hunting forest planet from Predators. I very much enjoyed that it was something new, and there was no explaining it. We know what a gladiator arena looks like, and we know how they work, just not Predator-style, so it was full of discovery as new elements are introduced. 

All the fighting throughout the film is brutal and bloody and quite impressively choreographed. It's clean and clear what is happening in the action, although sometimes it's moving so quickly (Tractenberg using a lot of follow-from-behind or follow-in-front of the action oners) that taking in all the violent mayhem is sometimes a bit too much to process. I like how the Predator designs were all quite well thought through and how even though our protagonists were technologically outmatched, they still were smart enough to figure out how to use the Predators' technologies against themselves.

I had an absolute blast with this movie. In the end, the three opening acts come together with purpose for a rousing fourth act that, despite some pretty hand-waivy improbabilities, makes it all comes together, not just within but also outside of this film. The victories Dutch, Harrigan, and Naru all had...well, those probably weren't the end of their stories either.  Also, it should be said that at no point did Killer of Killers ever feel like it existed solely as an introduction to the forthcoming Badlands. It will be interesting to see if they do connect in any way, but even still, this feels as stand-alone as every other Predator story, which is amazing.

[Series Minded: Predator edition]

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When I was a young lad, I thought Pee-Wee Herman was real. Like, maybe he didn't always look like that, in that suit, with the hair slicked back, but to me I had no awareness there was anyone underneath. Pee-Wee was a character actor like, say Ernest or Hulk Hogan or Mr. T, who only seemed to star as himself in movies and TV shows about himself as the character.  I didn't know Paul Ruebens from a hole in the ground until he was arrested at a porn theatre in 1991, and suddenly the magic was dispelled.  I mean, I was 15 at the time, and I knew Santa wasn't real, but this was the first true realization that Pee-Wee was a character played by someone not named Pee-Wee Herman.

We lost Paul Ruebens to cancer in the summer of 2023. He was 70 years old. In the year prior to his death, he agreed to participate in a documentary about himself, shedding off the layers upon layers of privacy he'd long, long held and opening himself up to examination and scrutiny in a way that seemed to frighten him previously.

We learn about Ruebens' early days, his family, his dalliances with theatre and art school in his teens, and we learn about his coming out story, which led to his re-closeting story once he started achieving success. He had a true love-at-first-sight relationship post-College, and he had formed a true bond with this man, as they shacked up and got a cat, Ruebens found himself content.  But that contentedness presented a crossroads: either live the life of love, or live the life of ambition. He chose the latter, broke his lover's heart and his own, and set out for L.A. where he joined up with the Groundlings comedy troupe. From there characters, including Pee-Wee were built, but there was something about Pee-Wee that demanded more attention, both from Ruebens and the audience.

Ruebens was committed as a performer. He invested himself in whatever it was he was doing. He knew how to steal scenes with looks and physicality more than words (but as we see in the documentary, he does have a razor-sharp comedy mind to accompany the sly-little-devil twinkle in his eye). As Pee-Wee became a bigger and bigger thing from stage to screen to Saturday morning subversive idol to children and college kids, Ruebens sheltered himself to the point that he barely existed outside of the character he played. His ambitions got the better of him, relationships with friends and colleagues fractured, and then the arrest.

A children's show host being arrested for something indecent coming out of America's puritanical 80's (where sex was evil, but violence and greed were good for all) was the death knell for Pee-Wee and Ruebens spiralled. 

The first half of this two-part documentary (each part 100 minutes long) follows Rueben's life through all these elements, with friends and ex-colleagues all talking about how amazing it was to be part of it all but also speaking truth to who Ruebens was at the time, as Ruebens himself struggles on camera to fully lay it out and cede control of his narrative to his director.

The second half is all about the fall of Pee-Wee Herman, and then his revival, and his third act, and all the messiness in between. The first half is a real rise-to-fame story, but without revealing in the triumph, since there were sacrifices along the way that have manifested as, if not regrets, then at least remorse. The second half is very much a rollercoaster, as Ruebens tries to find his footing as Paul Ruebens and it's full of ebbs and flows that must have been really tumultuous and stressful to live through, particularly the very public reaction and hurtful things said about him. Rueben's relationship with his sexuality is an integral part to the story, and probably a lot of what Ruebens wanted to get off his chest about in the documentary. 

There's a lot of great things about this documentary, first and foremost is Ruebens himself. Even at 68/69 years old, secretly dealing with cancer, he looked fantastic and vital with a precociousness about him that was so alluring to watch. His combative nature with director Matt Wolf is the B-story to the documentary, where clearly Wolf was constantly having to fend off Rueben's stabs at taking control of the project.  Rueben's jabs at the director start out quite playful and take on a bit more menace the closer they get to the more troublesome years. 

The talking heads are all fascinating, most coming from such a place of love, but a few coming from a point of pain, of regret or remorse around their falling out with Reubens (and there were a few). The sheer volume of personal films and tapes that Ruebens had around his life makes this documentary sing with not just the narrative but visual proof of that narrative, and transporting the audience into the past.  

There have been a slew of documentaries about celebrities of the 70's, 80's and 90's of late, most of them produced by the celebrities (or their family/estate) leading to pretty whitewashed looks at their lives, celebrating more their glories than their humanity. This is very much the opposite, really getting in touch with the person who hid behind a character for so long that he had a hard time finding his way out again. It should be a compelling watch if you ever had any affinity for Ruebens at all. 

--- 

I wrote a bit about Steven Soderbergh's prolific output in my Black Bag review (Toasty just published his, we agree!), so I won't rehash it here, except to say that the man put out two films in the first quarter of this year. That's insane. Even more insane is that Black Bag was a critical hit but fared poorly at the box office while Presence was pretty much ignored by everyone, but its low budget meant that it would up being a modest success.

Where Black Bag was a real adult sexy thriller starring big stars, Presence is an experiment in filmmaking with a story.  While the story's unfolding nature of discovery does lead the audience through the proceedings rather well, it's unable to escape the techniques Soderbergh employs that are simultaneously distracting and effective.

The whole film takes place inside a gorgeously refurbished 19th century home which had Lady Kent and I both salivating. It's a dream home, to be sure. The film opens with the Payne family looking at the property, and then moving in. Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is the driving force of the family, clearly successful, but there are hints that her success hasn't always been above board. She is obsessed with the wellbeing of her superstar swimmer son,  Tyler (Eddie Maday) while all but ignoring the well-being of her daughter, Chloe (Callina Lang), much to husband Chris's (Chris Sullivan) constant displeasure. Chloe has recently lost two friends two overdoses, and she's spinning out. Chris does what he can to engage, but it seems like Rebekah and Tyler just ride her and push her too hard. Tyler introduces her to his new friend Ryan, and soon Ryan and Chloe are hooking up. He seems like a good guy, and lets Chloe take the lead in their relationship, but there's also an air of menace about him. He's up to something, and it's not what you think, but the film wants you to think it.

The entire production is told from a sort of floating first-person perspective, which, it's slowly revealed, is the "Presence" of the title. Yes, it is a ghost story. It's not a horror movie, but just a drama in which a ghost is our eyes into the play. At times the spirit, who Chloe believes is her dead friend, seems to be  trying to interfere in what's happening, mostly unsuccessfully, but events that elicit a particularly strong emotion from the spirit allow it to interact with its environment.

It's a bit of a trifle of a film. It exists solely for Soderbergh to play with this first-person perspective storytelling, which doesn't have a lot of true success stories in the film world outside of Nickel Boys which earned an Oscar nomination at this year's Academy Award.  But presence is more in the "just trying something here" vein of Hardcore Henry or Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void and is about as successful as either of them. When the whole story is in service of a stylistic experiment, there's a layer that gets in the way of the audience engaging with the story fully.  

As well, the third act climax felt...very Hollywood. This took a family drama with a hint of supernatural intensity and turned it into a studio movie with a legit villain. I didn't really expect too much from Presence and it doesn't ask much either. It's fine for what it is. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Ballad of Wallis Island

2025, James Griffiths (Cuban Fury) -- download

British "feel good" movies are a staple in our household, but I was left not sure if I wanted to consider this being about feeling good. Sure, it ends on a melancholy smile, but much of the movie is about feeling uncomfortable, and that is most often not my bag.

I can imagine that is going to be (a version of) the opening paragraph for pretty much every British Feel Good Movie we write about.

Charles Heath (Tim Key, Wicked Little Letters) is an eccentric young man living pretty much alone on an island off the coast of Wales. No, its not entirely empty, but its still glaringly remote. And much to the surprise of "past glory" folk singer Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden, Plebs) whom Heath has invited to the island to play a concert. A concert is too generous a word; he wants McGwyer is play for him, alone. He tosses 500k Herb's way to convince the incredulous man. 

And then Herb's ex, and ex music partner, arrives. You see, they were a folk music phenom sometime in the early 2000s and Charles was a super-fan. Then he won the lottery, twice, and after having spent the first fortune on traveling, he spent the second fortune to hide away here on Wallis Island. McGwyer Mortimer were his and his wife Marie's shared love, though you get the idea it was more her than him. Then she died, and he now consoles himself with everything McGwyer Mortimer. Except, the band broke up, contentiously. Herb, whose real name is Chris Pinner, is desperately trying to (re)create a career, while Nell (Carey Mulligan, Drive) is now a hippy in Portland, yes Oregon. She was told they were both coming, Herb was not.

The movie is a triad of discomfort. There is the locale, the remote rustic island, where there has to be other people, but we really only ever see Charles one neighbour, Amanda, who runs the island's "general store", and that is being generous. They are all staying in Charles run down country house, and even if they wanted to get off the island, they would have to wait for single boat that comes this way, on its own time schedule. Then there is the relationship between Herb and Nell. She has obviously moved on, bringing her tentatively friendly American husband along with her, but Herb is lost in the past, and still very much in love with Nell. And finally, there is Charles himself, who is painfully, terribly awkward both from being a man who lives alone on a lonely island, but also, he's quite the nerd. He's endearing in his own way, but...

I was fine with the movie, but for one thing -- the music. I am a fan of the last couple of decades of nouveaux pop folk music, much of it British, but the music in this movie, all written and played by Tom Basden, who is not a musician but a comedian, seems to reflect a nostalgia for 70s 80s folk instead of what it is now. It was less Damien Rice / Lisa Hannigan or Angus & Julia Stone (yes, they are Australian) and more Joanie Mitchell. But then again, maybe that's me, being on the peripheral and I never did see the original short this is based on. But, the music did not click for me, and that was supposed to be kind of the point.

But the cast is charming, and the filming is luscious and terribly isolated, which I am a fine of, so yes, some Feels Good. Its one of those movies where I am very much more fond of the pitch, than the execution.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Black Bag

2025,  Steven Soderbergh Contagion) -- download

Wait, was that it? What? No, did she didn't she constant cat & mouse game between the two main characters? No cute quippy scene as they shoot at each other with silenced pistols? Just a quick conclusion to the story punctuated by a metric ton of tight dialogue? OK, wow.

In the movie the use of the term "black bag" is a reference to work-related stuff they cannot talk about, even with each other. In the British spy business, you might be married, but that doesn't mean you can just blab on about everything at work. "Why are you going to Zurich?" - black bag, "What did you and Steiglitz talk about?" - black bag. Its the opposite of Rebecca and Ted's (Ted Lasso) ultimate honesty term "Oklahoma". 

And yet, despite this requirement, power couple George (Michael Fassbender, Assassin's Creed) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett, Borderlands) are utterly dedicated to each other. Buuuut, as the movie opens, we are not so sure, as George has been tasked with finding out who betrayed the agency, who disappeared with the thumbdrive of secrets called Severus. Maybe its his wife? And if it is, what will George value more, his marriage or his loyalty to the agency?

George begins his investigation with a dinner, inviting his closest work friends. Two couples, two agents and their partners, also agency staff. Its a tense "party" as they play one of George's games, one his wife knows is more about interrogation than party fun, and the attendees catch on pretty quickly, but also fall into his trap, revealing hereto unknown secrets about each other, and ending with George's close friend Freddie (Tom Burke, The Musketeers) getting his hand pinned to the table with a steak knife by the girlfriend he is cheating on. George does not like liars.

Do we learn anything? Who knows, I surely didn't know. I am sure George learned some things. That same evening, the connection that alerted George to an internal leak dies of a heart attack. And soon after, George finds a movie ticket in his wife's waste basket, to a movie she claims to have not seen. Yes, George suspects his wife, we can see that, and he proceeds down this path of inquiry, at first by breaking into her office, followed by conning Freddie's GF, yes the one who put a hole in George's dining room table, into using her surveillance satellite access to spy on his wife. We are learning... something.

And from there, my memory serves me a chess game happening. Pawns are moved around, as are the more valuable pieces. A lot is going on, but subtly. And surprisingly, before I knew it, the game was over. This was never going to be a movie with high action scenes, with Bond-ian chase scenes or Atomic Blonde hallway fights. Its all resolved in offices and rooms in the Soderbergh style; OMG does he love his particular architecture and set decorating. Those rooms themselves are almost distinct characters, from George and Kathryn's flat, to the bars they visit to the style of offices used for the agents. There is nothing better than a seasoned director who knows exactly what his internal vision should look like. I cannot wait to watch his take on a "haunted house" with Presence -- and yet, wait I do continue to do.

I also very much like how when we think we are being directed down a path of George investigating Kathryn, we learn he is just filling in blanks. He knows very well he is being played, being misdirected into believing she is the villain, and he just plays along to see where it is supposed to lead him. Once he reaches a point, he reveals what is going on, to her, and together they end the plot, via a fatal second dinner party. We should have seen their dedication via Kathryn's required psychology session with Dr. Vaughn, another of the original dinner party attendees -- she is unflappable. And George's dedication to Kathryn is not to be tested or trifled with.

Kent's view; we agree.

Of note, I should return to and grab the entire season of  "The Agency", the Fassbender led CIA thriller drama, that came on the heels of his assassin movie "The Killer". No, not that "The Killer".

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Flow

2024, Gints Zilbalodis (Away) -- download

Kent flowed.

OK, its about time I wrote about something that was not only in my bin for a while, one of the Should Be Watching, but also because it was entirely worth waiting for. This was not only everything everyone said it was (Best Animated Feature) but it was beautiful to watch, beautiful to listen to, and one long Cat Video. Also, its PoAp.

Some planet after some event. Maybe its Earth maybe its a Ghibli world, but that doesn't matter. We have a world without humans but the remnants of humanity, the refuse left to grow over, leaving lots of room, and peace for the surviving animals. A little black cat (OK, the director says it was "dark gray" but I am partial to black cats, so he was black for me), for one, who lives in a house once owned by an artist, where he sleeps on a made bed that is only easily reached by the lithe little jumps a cat can reach. That is, until the waters come.

The movie begins with a tense encounter between the cat and a pack of dogs, not a feral looking scary bunch, but a pack of once-pets, but still cat/dog, so conflict. Until they are all swept away by a flash flood. The cat does find refuge, briefly, back at his home, the lovely artist's shack surrounded by cat sculptures, but the waters continue to rise quickly until the cat finds himself perched high upon a stone cat. When that  too is under water, he is picked up by a capybara in a sail boat. 

Yup. Too cute.

Thus begins a "road trip" movie, a journey towards... well, we never really know what, but in a world overwhelmed by water, I imagine they were looking for dry land, and a time when the waters aren't rising.

There are no humans in this movie, so there is no dialogue as these are not "cartoon animals", but there is no lack of communication, albeit fantastical in nature. The cat is constantly mewing and meowing, in the manner we are accustomed to, which is in turn for our benefit, as cats sans humans don't often make those noises. But the other animals he encounters interact with him in very definable manners. The capybara is helpful and looking for companionship. The secretarybird that joins them is domineering, stoic and their navigator... he seems to know where he is going. The meercat lemur is frenetic, a covetous collector of human things. And the golden retriever is a typical big, goofy pal who didn't share in his pack's desire to chase a cat in terror. They are all gathered together on the boat on their way... somewhere.

This movie is just so beautiful to look at. Obviously inspired by the films of Miyazaki, everything is bright and beautiful and mystical. Their journey is punctuated by the constant slow rise of the waters, now deep enough that whale-creatures join them on their journey, at least one finding itself bonding with the cat. This is not our Earth and in the distance, just over the horizon, the massive monoliths that the secretarybird guides them to are ominous, magical.

They say the journey is more important than the destination, and in the end this applies to the movie succinctly. They do reach the monoliths, there is a beautiful, mysterious interaction but then the waters recede, disappearing, pulling back, as if  they were not even there. Where does the water go? Why is the land not saturated and destroyed after being underwater for so long? What about the whales? What's next for our cat and his friends? No answers but your own headcanon. And it doesn't matter, doesn't diminish from an absolutely lovely movie.

Also, I would love to see some lemurs wearing pots as hats.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Exterritorial

2025,  Christian Zübert (Bad Banks) -- Netflix

Are the Americans the Bad Guys? Right now, if you refer to the exposed parts of American culture by way of The News and Social Media, they are very much indeed. The rhetoric I expose myself to, and that is the salient point, shows me a non-stop barrage of anger and lunacy and the erosion of any progressive moves made over the last... 50 years? I am sure if was, like so many must be, only exposed to another line of rhetoric, I would see the current actions as America clawing back its own identity from those who would change it -- they are getting their country back from the woke, the immigrants, the foreigners, the non-Xians, the sexually Other-ed. But like them, I only really pay attention to what solidifies my world viewpoint, one grown by our adjacency, our shared cultures, our own unified medias, our shared pop cultures.

Kent just wrote about the Bourne movies, where the security forces (CIA+) are most definitely setup as the Bad Guys. They manipulate, they alter, they kill, they interfere all for their own own idealized belief systems under a mask of patriotism. But these are stories told by Americans, to Americans, embraced by Americans. I wonder how the landscape of such movies will change over the next few years, as narratives like Bourne are shouted down or just entirely misunderstood.

This movie is a German movie set inside an American Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. Sara Wulf (Jeanne Goursaud, The Magic Flute), ex-soldier, and her son, are going there to be processed for emigration to the US. She has a job offer. Josh (Rickson Guy da Silva), her son, is impatient and... well, a kid, so she drops him in a playroom while she waits her turn. When she returns he is nowhere to be found, and the seemingly helpful consulate staff start by assisting her, but end up accusing her of being... well, nuts. They show her footage of her arrival, and there is no boy with her. At this point, Sara's PTSD and training kicks in. She releases herself from confinement, and begins to investigate on her own. Someone is hiding her son from her, and doing their best to manipulate the situation. There is a conspiracy at play.

The consulate staff is depicted as helpful, but we the viewers know something is going on, that there is a conspiracy, with maybe a slight hint of unreliable narrator. Initially I suspected this movie might be a depiction of an America the world can no longer trust. The staff are represented by a not-American, but a German security head named Erik Kynch (Dougray Scott, Mission: Impossible II).  He is supported by the hulking American soldier, Sergeant Donovan. In non-North American movies, US forces are always depicted as an integrated force: men, women, black, white. Donovan is black, and he could represent that integrated force, or he could also be a European hint of xenophobia. Yeah, I see ulterior motives and cultural narratives around every corner. Again, I don't know much about the German people beyond what I see in pop culture and the news, but I do know the film industry relatively well, and know that every casting choice says something.

In the end, the movie was less than I thought it would be (hoped it would be?) as no, America is not the Bad Guy. Yes, there are things going on, but the American people (the rest of the staff in the consulate) are as much a pawn of the conspiracy at play as Sara and Josh are. Its a capable action-thriller and Goursaud is really wrapped in the character. The fight scenes are a bit clumsy, seeking to remind one of Leitch-Hargrave styles, but were just unfortunately filmed too slow, literally letting you see the choreography at play. But in the end it was a satisfying middling movie, that didn't have me wondering (again) why I even watched it.

But I still do wish the movie had eaten the whole cake and had American as the Bad Guy. I need my dose of confirmation bias.

Series Minded: Bourne and Bourne and Bourne Again

[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop. The funny thing is, almost every "Series Minded" I've done has had at least one follow-up movie since I wrote them, so expect another Bourne movie soon.] 

The Bourne Identity - 2002, d. Doug Liman - netflix
The Bourne Supremacy - 2004, d. Paul Greengrass - netflix
The Bourne Ultimatum - 2007, d. Paul Greengrass - netflix
The Bourne Legacy - 2012, d. Tony Gilroy - netflix
Jason Bourne - 2016, d. Paul Greengrass - amazonprime

After compulsively gorging on season two of Andor [review pending] like a perfectly cooked steak that was only slightly oversalted, I was kind of jonesing for more of the Tony ("I made Andor") Gilroy dramatic intrigue. I had no prior awareness that he had co-written the screenplay for the Bourne trilogy, but it immediately piqued my interest about this franchise I had all but dismissed from my life 20 years ago. I think it was time for a re-watch (and in some cases a first watch) of the trilogy.  I mean why watch that ill-fated Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off that...what? Tony ("I made Andor") Gilroy wrote and directed The Bourne Legacy? Ok, well, I guess I'm all in then.

So yes, I had seen and enjoyed damn well enough The Bourne Identity back at the turn of the millennium enough to buy it on DVD and give it a permanent home in my collection. Doug Liman directed a brilliantly paced, taut action-suspense story about an amnesiac assassin who grew a conscience and the poor, unsuspecting German woman who gets swept up in the madness as killer Jason Bourne targets his former black ops handlers who are operating waaaay off book.

Of all the Bourne movies (now that I've seen them all) The Bourne Identity is still the best. It is a satisfying and complete story in and of itself, with a happy, romantic ending for our leads who are so well matched in this film. Damon, at the time, was such an unlikely choice for a super-assassin, he was not on anyone's mind as an action star. Having come out of Good Will Hunting, Rounders and The Talented Mr. Ripley in the preceding years, his success in high profile and award winning dramas saw him going the prestigious actorly route.  Even third-wheeling it in Oceans 11, nobody suspected he could be an action hero. It was only after Bourne that he achieved super-star wattage, suddenly he was the guy who could do everything.

I'm sure at the time I thought Damon was out of his element as an action star, and the success of The Bourne Identity was thanks to Doug Liman's exciting and assured action direction, but Damon plays both hyper-competent and out-of-his-element very, very well. Franka Potente as Marie, even more out of her element, was the perfect tag-along-come-romantic interest for this amazing mash up of Euro-thriller and American-action. Potente sells falling for the wounded dog so very well, even though she should just run. The various looks in her eyes that say "I should leave, but I can't help but stay" give this film another level that none of the subsequent features have.  Potente sells that this movie is as much about her being kept safe from all this as it is about Jason Bourne finding out whatever it is he needs to find out and stop whatever he needs to stop.

We get an excellent supporting cast with Chris Cooper and Brian Cox as the CIA ringmasters, super-assassin Clive Owen, Lost's Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbage as the target Bourne failed to clear before his amnesia, and Julia Styles in a small role as station agent Nicky Parsons.

There are some flat out brutal fights with excellent choreography, the chase sequences are maybe just a notch below the top-tier of cinematic chase sequences, but they're very well shot and so energetic. And the sequence at the farmhouse where Bourne matches wits with The Professor is the most memorable sequence in the whole series (for me at least). It's a crisp, vibrant, great looking movie that satisfies from start to finish.

The franchise deviates almost entirely from the Robert Ludlum novel series with the sequel to The Bourne Identitly, but I have no practical experience with LudIum's work, so that was of no influence on my reaction to it.  That said, The Bourne Supremacy is where I "noped" out of the franchise back in 2004. It was an even bigger success commercially than its predecessor, but I found Paul Greengrass' frenetic quick-cut editing and loose handheld camera work disorienting. It was considered kind of a revolutionary style at the time, something people hadn't seen before, and it was undeniable that it did make the fights feel more visceral. The problem was the success of this film spawned countless imitators who had neither the control nor forethought for what they were shooting (they thought it was all about the editing) and the mid-2000s to the early 2010s are littered with TV shows and movies that are virtually unwatchable as a result.

The second film in the series opens with Bourne and Marie living in India. It's clear they've been continually on the run since the last movie ended, destroying the peaceful resolution we thought the characters had earned. Jason is haunted by his past, but Marie is there every step of the way, helping him work through the traumatic flashbacks and comforting him in his guilt. It's clear that she's is so in on this relationship and doesn't regret a thing being on the run with him.  What Jason doesn't know is that someone has framed him for a professional assassination of a prized informant.  New CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), and her section chief Ward Abbot (Brian Cox), put everything they have into finding and eliminating Bourne, killing Marie in the process.

This was a choice the film in 2004 made, the term "fridging" - or to kill off a female character as motivation for the male character - had already well entered the zeitgeist. Greengrass' stylistic choices as well as this narrative choice were the exact elements that contributed to my early souring on the franchise.

The rest of the film has Gilroy's fingerprints all over it, as it does get fairly twisty as it builds a mesh of lies and intrigue, sewing discord inside the CIA as Bourne starts forcing people to examine his past.  It is a fairly engaging thriller by and large, but whatever victory Jason gets at the end feels empty without Marie to share it with.  It would have been far more satisfying if he had left her behind to "take care of business" and then return to her in the end. I mean, we all know that assassins and superspies can have no rest and no home and happiness is fleeting, but it really sucks when the best part of the series is destroyed in the first act of the sequel.

Karl Urban is fantastic as a Terminator-like killing machine, the yin to Bourne's yang in this one.  He is the Russian assassin that frames Bourne to begin with, and then is tasked with taking him out before he makes too much noise. I think of everyone Bourne goes up against in the series, it's only Urban who seems like he's the superior warrior.

The Bourne "Trilogy" ends with The Bourne Ultimatum, which once again features Greengrass' hyperactive camera and editing style. It's never easy on the eyes and it's a pretty ugly adjustment getting used to it each time. Those knock-offs and rip-offs that popped up in the years before and after don't make it look that much better by comparison, even though it's clearly Greengrass' thing.

The third film, in a bit of a twist, starts somewhere late in the timeline before The Bourne Supremacy ends. I can't imagine if someone were watching Ultimatum in the theatre that they would have cottoned onto this time play unless they were huge fans of the series or had just watched the previous films prior to the screening. 

The film opens with a journalist (Paddy Considine), operating from Intel from a secret informant within the CIA, writing articles about the history of Jason Bourne. Jason, having just escaped a precarious manhunt in Russia (following his encounter with Karl Urban), is only now reading these stories. It's the factual inaccuracies around Marie's death that particularly set him off and it seems like he wants to meet with this reporter to clarify a few things...but really, he wants to know where he's getting his intel. Jason has more questions, based of some new memory flashes that are returning.  

The film finds Pam Landry picking up that something hinky is going on in the CIA and she's trying to suss out what it is  Her director (Scott Glenn) has basically set her up to take the fall if the whole takedown of Bourne doesn't go as planned and their ultra-secret operations are blown. They're after the same thing Bourne is, the source of the leak, only Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) is hellbent on making sure things stay quiet.

The cat and mouse sequence with Bourne and the reporter trapped in the train station with the hounds closing in is thrilling, just a tremendously tense sequence of trying to evade detection, and elude being captured or killed. Bourne can do it in his sleep, but whenever he has someone to watch out for who isn't as versed, it's always ten times more suspenseful.

What the Bourne franchise does well with from start to finish is convey how much of a surveillance state we live in, how difficult it is to hide and to protect your whereabouts should you want to. If Big Brother really wants to find you, to follow you, they can and with each subsequent movie, it seems easier and easier for them. 

It's also a series that, in a low-key, but obvious manner, paints the security forces of the United States as particularly villainous organizations, playing with lives in such a callous manner with "patriotism" and "security" and "saving American lives" always being the rationale for egregiously heinous acts of terrorism and espionage.  I won't go so far as to say they're anti-American, but they're not very pro either.  The film's CIA adversaries always try to present the end justifies the means, but Bourne (and the filmmakers by proxy) are clearly saying they don't.

After two smaller appearances in the prior films Styles' Nicky Parsons gets a bigger play here, and the film reveals a very juicy nugget that Nicky and Jason were an item before his amnesia. He never recovers that part of his memory unfortunately, and after a pretty good sequence of eluding their watchers, Jason sends Nicky off, telling her that it gets easier, living on the run.

Again, the romance sub-plot of the first movie was its strongest character and storytelling element, and that seemed just baited on the hook here, but the storytellers didn't bite, and all the possible chemistry and fireworks that could be fizzle out as Nicky boards a bus.

The third act takes place in New York and it's another hearty mix of cat-and-mouse and action as Jason toys with the Agency, while still very desperate to resolve the mystery behind his most recent flashbacks. The flashbacks are the most unsatisfying part of the film, and the third-act culmination in revealing that, despite the glimpse he remembers telling him otherwise, he did volunteer to be Jason Bourne, super-assassin, and in the end he has to live with that. But also, he enabled Pam Landy to expose not just the Treadstone project he was borne out of but also other shady operations that followed.

It ends where it started, with Jason in the water, being reborn, the poetic symmetry of the franchise left there.

Until Tony Gilroy, freed of any obligations to past directors and stars, is given the task to relaunch the franchise with Jeremy Renner as the star. (The decision to replace "aging" Matt Damon with an actor barely one year younger than him to reboot the franchise is a strange one). The opening act of the film takes place during the third act of Ultimatum, and finds Edward Norton trying to suss out the damage that Bourne could cause, and ensure it's contained, and that there's no blow back. There's all sorts of secret black-ops operations out there and if they're all going to be revealed then they all need to be shut down.

Oblivious to this all is Renner's Aaron Cross, part of the "Outcome" project which found its subjects taking mentally and physically enhancing drugs to make them smarter, faster, stronger. While Bourne is exposing the CIA's black ops in New York, Cross is in the snowy north, getting chased by wolves on a sort of muti-day survival/obstacle course. He finds his home base where he meets another "Outcomer" in Oscar Issac, and they don't bond at all despite Cross' efforts. And then they are drone strikes as part of Norton's renditioning of the black op programs.

Rachel Weisz's Dr. Marta Shearing was part of the medical and research team that was testing and metering the "Outcome" subjects, and she winds up being the sole survivor of a mass shooting in the lab, again part of the cleanup process. When assassins are sent to her home days later to kill her, it's Cross who saves her.

Norton's team get frantic about Shearing going missing and only become more rattled to find out that Cross is also still alive. It all leads to a showdown in Manila, that, once over, finds Shearing and Cross disappearing.

With Legacy it's clear that Gilroys Tony and Dan were tasked with not just writing one film but setting up a bigger story. In the wake of Marvel's big successes, the idea of world-building and not resolving the major plot points in the first film was all the rage in the 2010s, and this film is a victim of that era. I really did enjoy the first act of the film which weaves the events of the prior film into the narrative of our new characters, and even provides some deeper background on those prior characters. It's the Gilroys in total world building mode, as pretty much perfected in Andor, but somewhat sloppier here. I really ate it up though. It's fun to get into it after three character-centric films.

Renner is charming enough and has a sense of humour that Jason Bourne does not, that gives a little levity that was particularly absent from the trilogy. Unfortunately with all that groundwork to lay, it doesn't get to its central story until about the halfway point. The action, the intrigue, it's all pretty good, but we don't really get too connected to these characters until the second half, and the film runs out of runway to make their journey a meaningful one. It doesn't crash and burn at the end of the tarmac, but it doesn't take off either.  The ending is really, really abrupt.

Gilroy's directing hearkens back to Liman's first entry, only maybe even more livelier, brighter. He abandon's the graininess and quick-edits of Greengrass, and crafts some really, really solid fight sequences. Even still, my favourite moments are those between Renner and Issacs, and I'm sad it had to come to an end. What a buddy movie that could have made for.

It's clear whatever was planned here was abandoned. Gilroy was seeding in the background that the dark secrets of the CIA that Pam Landry had exposed last film managed to get buried again and Pam got scapegoated once more by powerful white males who painted her as a poor confused woman.  It's infuriating and I would have loved to see how Gilroy planned to play that all out.

All told, Legacy wasn't the cynical joke I thought it was going to be, but it's a frustrating half-a-story that isn't much satisfying at all, despite some tasty elements. Legacy had to die in order to give way to the Gilroy-less return of Jason Bourne in... Jason Bourne.

And what a sour note this third Bourne collaboration between Damon and Greengrass is. Just a purposeless, emotionless, cash grab of a film it is. Without the planning of Gilroy, left to Greengrass and some other scriptors, Jason Bourne feels like every other late-stage return to a character in the Rambo and Rocky vein.  The character is on hard times, fighting in illegal pit fighting matches in Greece for money. Is this where fans wanted to see Bourne wind up, hanging out in Fight Clubs for petty cash?  Meanwhile Nicky seems to be actively collaborating with hacker groups and WikiLeaks type associations, taking here CIA experience and dumping it in the public.  At least, that's what one would think if Nicky's latest hack wasn't so spectacularly ill-advised and goes so terribly awry.  I mean, she suspects that she doesn't have much leeway breaking into the CIA and stealing their files, but their cybersecurity head, Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) is better than Nicky and manages to trace her location as well as plant a tracing virus in the data download.

I was ready to think that Nicky was working with Jason because maybe their relationship from pre-amnesia had resumed, but nope. They haven't seen each other pretty much since Ultimatum a decade earlier. Their reunion is not warm, and seems unwelcome. Their meeting is in central Athens during the riots that were taking place while Greece's economy was tanking. The purpose for Nicky and Jason meeting is exhaustingly trite, but the cat-and-mouse/evading-detection/sporadic fights/chase sequences is a pretty impressive set piece set against the riots (however, the 2022 French film Athena does riots and action sooooo much better). And in the latest indignity to Nicky, she gets Marie'd in their attempt to escape. Honestly, I couldn't believe they did it again.

Nicky's whole purpose of meeting up with Bourne is because she discovered some documents linking Bourne's dad to Treadstone, and so the rest of the movie is Jason trying to uncover just what that connection means. It's treated like it's an unresolved plot thread from the previous movies, but it was never ever mentioned and it seems, ten years later, utterly irrelevant to Jason moving on with his life.

Of course Heather Lee, who is given the assignment to take Bourne down, thinks she can bring him back in the fold. Her boss, CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) just needs Bourne put down so that he doesn't interfere in CIA operations any further, so he's operating in the shadows from Lee, undermining her initiative. Dewey has an operative (Vincet Cassell) with a personal reason for wanting Bourne dead, so he's charged with taking him out. Meanwhile there's a whole subplot about a tech billionaire social media magnate (Riz Ahmed) that has some shady dealing with Dewey but now he's having reservations. The film in a very clunky, hamfisted manner brings these threads together and none of it feels at all necessary or relevant (or rather, it's trying way too hard to feel like it's saying something relevant when it's really saying nothing at all).

I really hate to say it, but Jason Bourne is a dumb movie. It truly lacks purpose and momentum. Greengrass still hangs on to his quick-cut editing and handheld-style camera work, but it's well past  innovative, and he seems like he's now just another knock-off of his former groundbreaking work. Also it's now shot on digital instead of film and it looks so much worse, like it was shot for Netflix instead of theatres (and that's exactly where I watched it, so... well done?). It looks muddy and dull, and feels the same. There's no energy to this picture, including in Damon's performance in which both Jason Bourne and the actor portraying him both seem tired. Styles, Jones, Vickander, Cassell, Ahmed... all of them seem in it for the paycheck, and are not giving anything more to this very middling script than what it asks for. 

The most interesting part of the film, as mentioned before, is just how O.P. (overpowered) the CIA has gotten, in this global watchdog reality, it becomes hard to believe anyone can traverse the world through normal means without being found, without obfuscating their physical identity as well as their travel documents There are some decent procedural sequences here (and others not so much).

Franchises and intellectual property never die, so this is not the last we will see of Jason Bourne. It's likely not the last we will see of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. I can bet that in within the next five years we will get an "Old Man Bourne" revival as Damon tries for one last cash grab while he's still physically able to punch and jump, but I can also most assuredly say we don't need it.

I also would hazard a guess that we will get some type of Bourne reboot as a TV series under the premise of "more closely following the Ludlum novels", and it fizzling out by season two once people realize that what they like most about the series was the intensity and intrigue Tony Gilroy brought to it, and not actually what came from the source.

Ranking: -> 1/3/2/4/5. The first film is great. The trilogy is largely solid. The franchise spinoff is an enjoyable enough failure and the revival is at best forgettable, at worst miserable. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Survive

2024,  Frédéric Jardin (Nuit blanche) -- Amazon

Or Survivre.

This low-budget (more accurately, economical budget; low has connotations) French apocalyptic survival (pun intended) movie strikes me as the pilot episode on a 90s scifi survival series, right down to the make-shit-up "science" of the situation and the "every other person is a Bad Guy" setups. Like those shows, it just rushes along on a wave of adrenalin and the screaming, without really trying to have a plot. Its almost big dumb fun, but not quite, as it takes itself far too seriously, considering how absolutely silly the whole premise is.

It starts with a family on a boat and wee bit of character development, just a wee bit. A French family, he is German, they live in Miami. The family vacation at sea is interrupted by weird storms and satellites falling from the sky and ears bleeding. When they wake up the next morning, the ocean is gone. They are in a desert in the middle of nowhere. Sucked through a rift in time and/or space? Nope, that would make "sense"; instead they are still off the coast of Miami but the oceans have been sucked away. 

By looking at his compass, Dad (Andreas Pietschmann, 1899) determines the poles have reversed after which the oceans went onto the land, leaving what they left behind as dry land. Wait, dry land? So, the water went... uphill? Dry land was not dry because the magnetic poles kept the water there, but because the continents had rose above the water. Furthermore, one night's departure of water would not leave a dry, gritty desert (filmed outside Morocco) but a muddy morass probably massively deep in many places. But no matter, oceans gone, boat stranded, what to do what to do.

They talk to people on the radio. The scientist who was in a deep sea diving rig explains to them what happened, in details only a scientist could and that he is in a vehicle that can hold three people. Also, the oceans will return. How he knows this, who knows or cares -- sense of urgency! Save our kids! And that tense setup is also interrupted by the arrival of a stranger with a dog. Men with dogs are to be trusted, right? Nope, stabby stabby, Dad is dead. Wait what?

The rest of the traumatized family (as if oceans going bye bye wasn't enough) run off into the desert, towards the man in the yellow submarine. Bad Man gives chase, sans dog, cuz Mom (Émilie Dequenne, Brotherhood of the Wolf) killed it. Poor dog, not his fault his owner was a dick. They find a plane that obviously crashed into the ocean years ago, and hide out the night. But not before the bad man catches up to them and Mom stabby stabby kills him. BUT the next morning, his body is picked over; what's been chewing at him?

Delirious with thirst, young teenage Son drinks from a puddle. "Don't do that !" yells Mom! And almost instantly he gets sick, but that's alright, cuz she has a first aid kid with a needle that makes things alright. Further on, they spy a crashed container ship in the distance. Should be LOTS of people on the thing, right? Full of sailors, right? Nope, just a couple of scavengers breaking into a cracked container of bottled water and food. Help a family out? Nope, they wave their guns around cuz in this new no-ocean world, nobody can be trusted. BUT the unknown threat from earlier, that picked over the Bad Man, is now chasing everyone -- CRABS ! Deep Sea Crabs! Not bothered by the lack of pressure, they are hungry and like to pinch pinch everyone to death. The family crawls on top of a container until the sated crabs depart. Now they have food, water and guns.

Eventually they make it to the yellow submarine, but only after leaving Mom behind in a trench. Yellow Submarine Guy says they only have hours until the ocean returns, BUT he's been bitten by crabs so that will make room for Mom. So, back to the trench to get Mom, and everyone gets in, and Submarine Guy dies, and the oceans return. Whoosh.

The next morning they are awash on a ruined beach, inland, oceans where they should be, but proper dry land has been wrecked. Cue the sequel.

If this had been a terrible 90s action survival TV show, I would have probably forgiven it because even That Guy of the 90s liked disaster and survival plots. And back then you forgave a lot but this is now and This Guy, despite having devolved into Terrible Action Movie Guy, has developed an identity of snarky complaining. While being decently shot and acted, where acting was required between the running and screaming, it just diverged from reality so far without giving even the littlest of shit, that it irked me. Pretending that all this lunacy could be caused by natural disaster just strained credulity to the point of breaking.