A MAN CALLED OTTO: A Grumpy Old Hanks In The Maybe-See Feel-Okay Film Of The Season

Now playing at a bunch of multi-plexes in my neck of the woods:

A MAN CALLED OTTO (Dir. Marc Forster, 2022)

Ah, Tom Hanks. America’s Dad. The modern day Jimmy Stewart. You know the deal - he’s the double Oscar-winning everyman of cinema that’s been on the pop culture radar for four decades, who I’ve never met anyone who disliked. His stock hasn’t even fallen in the last year with his badly reviewed, very odd, and frankly off role as Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrman’s ELVIS, or his instantly forgettable performance as Gepetto in Robert Zemeckis’ PINOCCHIO the last year (I even considered a post entitled “Has Covid Thrown Tom Hanks off his game”), because the goodwill embedded in his rich legacy can’t easily be erased with a few missteps.

So here is Hanks in a classic, meaning frankly standard, grumpy old man role (somebody even calls him a grumpy old bastard in the first five minutes) as widowed Pittsburgh resident, Otto Anderson, in this remake of Hannes Holm’s 2015 Swedish comedy drama, A MAN CALLED OVE. Just like Rolf Lassgård in the original, we meet Otto in a box store having issues with staff, but he’s buying rope, not the flowers that Ove grumbled about the discount price of when buying for his wife’s grave.

The rope Otto is purchasing is to hang himself, which brings us this story’s central premise – a man’s suicide attempts keep getting aborted by life re-affirming interruptions. These distractions from Otto’s rush to join his spouse in the afterlife come in the form of a new family that has moved in to his small, contained suburban housing community. The out-going, bubbly, and pregnant Marisol (Mariana Treviño), and her friendly doofus husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and their two kids ( Christiana Montoy, and Alessandra Perez) have moved into a unit across from Otto’s home, and they immediately are in need of his help with home repairs.

The community surrounding Otto, and his new neighbors includes the kindly Anita (Juanita Jennings), and her dementia-suffering husband Reuben (Peter Lawson Jones), who a younger Otto (played in flashbacks by Hanks’ 27-year old son, Truman) had a long-running Ford vs. Chevy rivalry over automobile purchases (it was Saab vs. Volvo in the Swedish version); the overly chipper Jimmy (Cameron Britton), and transgender delivery boy Malcolm (Mack Bayda), who was a former student of Otto’s wife, Sonya (Rachel Keller). That last cast member may sound like a woke addition, and it pretty much is as David Magee’s adapted screenplay changes the character from just being gay in OVE).

As for those aforementioned flashbacks, they are emotionally summoned when Otto is closest to death, whether it be by rope, his Chevy’s exhaust, getting hit by a train, or with a rifle, and they dive deep into sometimes icky, but still earnestly poignant enough, sentiment especially when Otto and Sonya’s first meeting is enhanced to be even more of a meet cute than in the original with Truman Hank’s Otto getting on a commuter train heading the opposite direction that he was going to return a book that the young lady dropped on the platform (He just happens to wakes up on in the train compartment with her there in OVE).

Then there are the strands of Mike Birbiglia (SLEEPWALK WITH ME) as an adversarial dickhead real estate agent (from a evil company actually called Dye & Merica), and another concession to today’s internet fame culture with a social media journalist played by Kelly Lamor Wilson, who aims to make Otto an online hero. Yeah, this stuff is pretty forced, dopey, and sitcom-ish, but somehow felt like it had just as much right to be there as the more fleshed-out character elements.

While Marc Forster’s (FINDING NEVERLAND, QUANTUM OF SOLACE) direction is stylishly unspectacular, there is a decent amount of real charm, and warm sensibility (especially in Hanks’ moments with the scene-stealing Treviño) in this light opus about the ornery Otto, but it’s still fairly insubstantial Hanks fare in the league of the other A-lister’s little-remembered throwaways like THE TERMINAL, HOLOGRAM, any of those DA VINCI CODE non epics (which even Hanks now calls “hooey”), or especially LARRY CROWNE. Still, A MAN CALLED OTTO is a fine, fluffy watch – a maybe-see, feel-okay view if I must say - that didn’t make me cringe too hard, and that fans of Hanks will most likely enjoy.

Holm’s OVE original, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is a better movie, but only by a small measure as it’s a pretty cornball affair itself. They are interesting to compare as many scenes are close to shot-by-shot recreations, and there’s only a handful of story deviations. It’s telling that OTTO most resonates when it stays faithful to its source material. Consider it the equivalent of an English language cover song by a big name star that’ll just be background music in most people’s lives.

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WORLD WAR Z: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening tonight at a multiplex near you:

WORLD WAR Z (Dir. Marc Forster, 2013)

These aren’t the slow “walkers” like on AMC's hit show The Walking Dead, these zombies run at intense speeds, jump long distances, and swarm into a tangled mangled mess of flailing limbs coming at you in 3D in this adaptation of the bestselling 2006 novel by Max Brooks (son of Mel).

But since there’s so much quick cut action, a lot of it in darkness, the zombies aren’t really coming at you, except in chaotic glimpses. Perhaps blame the fact that it’s a PG-13 production, but the zombies here are hard to get a good look at in early scenes set in a Philadelphia traffic jam captured by herky-jerky-cam, a shadowy stairwell in a New Jersey slum, and a dark rainy runway in Korea where they’re mainly seen as spastic silhouettes.

These are locations that Brad Pitt, as a retired United Nations investigator, encounters the blood-thirsty undead as he travels the earth trying to figure out how to stop the zombie apocalypse.

Pitt had managed to shuffle his wife (Mireille Enos) and daughters (Abigail Hargrove and Sterling Jerins) to safety aboard a U.S. Naval ship, but despite wanting to stay with his family he’s talked into saving the world by his former U.N. boss (Fana Mokoena) so he rolls up his sleeves to get the job done.

Pitt co-produced this big ass epic, touted as the most expensive zombie movie ever with its budget of $400 million, so it makes sense that it’s his character’s singular story. We follow him to Israel because they somehow were more prepared for the zombie outbreak, having quickly constructed enormous walls around their cities to protect themselves.

It’s too bad that Pitt doesn’t share with their officials that they should keep the noise down, something he previously learned in Korea, because their loud chanting, aided by misguided microphone use, draws the zombies to pile up in large numbers to scale the walls (this is one of the movie's big money shots). 

Anyway, Pitt, joined by Daniella Kertesz as a wounded Israeli soldier (Pitt had to chop her hand off because of a zombie bite), board a plane, which of course seems quiet and safe at first, but in the bathroom, you got it – a zombie!

The airplane’s fate here won’t make anybody forget the spectacular plane stunt work in last summer’s THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (or even the fall’s FLIGHT for that matter), but it’s still one of the film’s most gripping and exciting sequences.

However, when watching this and the rest of the movie I kept thinking that it really didn’t look like $400 million was up there on the screen. 

But I know that there were many re-writes and re-shootings (as this Vanity Fair piece details) in which Lost and PROMETHEUS writer Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard (CLOVERFIELD) were brought in to not just merely punch up Matthew Michael Carhan’s screenplay, they were recruited to create a new third act and ending and that's what added hugely to the film’s already bloated price tag.

That third act, largely taking place in fluorescent-lit labs at the World Health Organization in Wales, has Pitt testing a theory about a possible anti-zombie vaccine. 

The suspense has pretty much been drained from the movie at this point, and the lack of an emotional connection is pretty numbing too. 

Throughout the film, nobody seems to react to their former family, friends, or colleagues having turned irreversibly into these scary creatures, they just know immediately that they have to get the Hell away from them. When watching people they used to work with at the Wales institute on monitors now zombified, a random comment like “oh, jeez, that was Dr. Rosenthal – what a loss,” would be expected, but the screenwriters seem to be more concern with stating plot-points than at least fleshing out the humans to have at least a few more recognizable feelings than the zombies.

AMC’s flawed but enjoyable The Walking Dead may meander at times, but it compellingly regards this relatable factor with characters struggling with losing their love ones. 

Here a kid that sees his father become infected and change (it takes 10 seconds in this film) never shows anything but a survival instinct as he joins Pitt and family on a helicopter to safety. That kid’s thread is never followed up, like a lot of characters that are trotted out – hey, there’s Lost’s Matthew Fox for a second as a a U.S. Navy SEAL! Oh, nevermind. He’s gone.

The 3D conversion doesn’t do the movie any favors either. I can’t think of a single instance where the in-your-face format was effective. The film’s visual appeal is already dicey with its dull gray tones, the addition of the all too typical blockbuster gimmick of the day just detracts even more from the experience. 

It doesn't help either that Forster’s ham-fisted direction, formerly on display in the 007 dud QUANTUM OF SOLACE and 2011’s MACHINE GUN PREACHER, barely keeps the film afloat through the chaotic camerawork by cinematographer Ben Seresin (TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, UNSTOPPABLE). 

As this summer’s event movies go, WORLD WAR Z is not as all over the place as IRON MAN 3, STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS and MAN OF STEEL are, but its narrow focus on Pitt’s heroics doesn’t make it any more powerful, especially when the entire ordeal boils down to Pitt being able to walk down a hallway through a hoard of zombies without getting bitten. All the socio-policital commentary in the book has been discarded so that we can have the standard race-against-time to save the day scenario, but then that's what the audience wants, right?

Inevitably, after its best shots and moments have been Spoiled by its heavy promotion over the last several months, Forster’s film can’t help but feel anticlimactic. 

Folks who swarm in messy mobs just like the zombies to see it this weekend will most likely find that large chunks of it work as surface level entertainment, but overall its a mediocre and over-reaching opus that has nowhere near the gritty gravitas it’s going for.

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