Damon & Greengrass Are Back, But The BOURNE Formula Has Grown Stale

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

JASON BOURNE

(Dir. Paul Greengrass, 2016)

Since the previous BOURNE entry, THE BOURNE LEGACY, was such a bust, it was initially good news to hear that Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass were returning to the series.

One would figure that they must have a killer story that would want to make them come back for more, right?

Surely director Greengrass, co-scripting with the film’s editor Christopher Rouse, who won the Best Editing Oscar for THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, came up with some new-fangled premise that would make us forget the misguided attempt to replace Damon with Jeremy Renner and get the franchise back on track, right?

Sadly, but no, for JASON BOURNE is a by-the-numbers, standard sequel bore that only succeeds in showing that Damon has gotten back in shape, and has completely shed the “dad bod” image that tabloids got a lot of mileage out of a few years back.

We get this upfront as we re-meet Jason Bourne as he engages in some shirtless street fighting for cash in rural Greece. Meanwhile, Bourne’s analyst contact Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles reprising her role from the original trilogy), in hiding in Reykjavik, Iceland, hacks into the CIA’s black ops file and finds info about evildoing afoot in the relaunching of the Treadstone program that birthed Bourne, and how his father was mixed up in all of it.

Nicky’s hacking is detected by the CIA’s Cyber Ops division head Heather Lee, played by Alicia Vikander (EX MACHINA, THE DANISH GIRL), and Tommy Lee Jones as CIA Director Robert Dewey – both new characters to the series.

So the chase is on –Nicky travels to Greece to meet with Bourne which results in a chase through Syntagma Square in Athens involving Bourne and Nicky motorcycling through the fiery riot of political protesters as Vincent Cassel as a sniper only indentified as “The Asset” targets them from a rooftop above.

Mixed up in all this spy stuff is a Mark Zuckerberg-esque social media mogul named Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) who’s doing shady surveillance business with the CIA through his Facebook-like platform, Deep Dream. This subplot doesn't make much of a timely statement or have much impact, but Ahmed is good in it.

Between Bourne bouncing from Greece to London to the big climax in Las Vegas, he has flashbacks to his father Richard Webb’s (Gregg Henry) assassination, each time learning a little bit more until he figures out who killed him.

The film is well paced, but the plot just isn’t very interesting. All the kinetic energy that is the series’ trademark is there, but it’s in service of a routine series of action set pieces. Cassel makes for a boring antagonist, Vikander’s American accent doesn’t wear well on her, Stiles gets shafted early on, and Damon, now graying at the temples, is again such a serious slab of intensity that not once does he smile.

Only Jones appears to be having any fun with this material – I think he owns the movie’s only humorous moment – but not enough for the movie to be much fun.

All the things that were so cool about the BOURNE movies - the shaky-cam, quick-cutting drive, the tech savviness - have been done to death in so many high-octane thrillers in the fourteen years since THE BOURNE IDENTITY that it feels old hat here. They really should’ve called it THE BOURNE REDUNDANCY like so many folks, including Damon, have joked.

JASON BOURNE is already a huge hit (it’s currently #1 at the box office), so there will be likely more BOURNE on the horizon. Here’s hoping that next time, Damon and Greengrass and Co. will be more inspired.

While the first three films are essential genre exercises, this and THE BOURNE LEGACY come off like artificial extensions of the BOURNE brand. The formula has grown stale, but it maybe die-hard fans will still find it consumable. Since I’m not that big of a fan, I was just bored for the most part by this round of BOURNE.

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THE FAMILY: Besson's Really Redundant De Niro Mob Comedy

Opening today at a theater near you:

THE FAMILY (Dir. Luc Besson, 2013)

Seeing Luc Besson’s new mob comedy THE FAMILY makes me wonder if Robert De Niro will be remembered by future generations for his roles that poked fun at his image as a scary Mafioso type, more than the classic roles in which he actually portrayed a scary Mafioso type.

Here De Niro plays a former New York mob boss, living in France with his wife (Michelle Pfeifer) and teenage offspring (John D'Leo and Glee’s Dianna Agron) under the witness relocation program.

The set-up obviously recalls the end of GOODFELLAS, in which Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill complains about getting egg noodles with ketchup when he orders spaghetti with marinara sauce after being relocated to the suburbs for snitching on his former buddies.

THE FAMILY’s wiseguy fish-out-of-water premise also recalls the 1990 Herbert Ross-helmed Steve Martin/Rick Moranis comedy MY BLUE HEAVEN (incidentally written by the late great Nora Ephron who was married to GOODFELLAS screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi).

But those reference points are over 20 years old now, so after countless spoofs of modern mafia movies, as well as six seasons of HBO’s dark comic drama The Sopranos, every trope THE FAMILY trots out has been done to death. Adapted by Tonino Benacquista from his 2010 novel “Badfellas” (that’s right), THE FAMILY has a few funny lines and a couple of decent gags, but the overly familiar structure (along with the high volume of convenient convolutions in the storyline) can't help but highlight how redundant it is.

De Niro spends the movie either trying to write his memoirs - an activity frowned on by Tommy Lee Jones as a CIA agent assigned to protect the undercover family – or trying to get somebody to do something about the brown water coming out of his house’s taps. De Niro’s worn-out character trait is that he speaks softly but will do violent damage to any non-relative who says something offensive to him. One scene has him dragging a fertilizer plant CEO behind his car for suggesting he switch to bottled water.

Pfeifer, also no stranger to this territory (see Jonathan Demme’s 1988 mob comedy MARRIED TO THE MOB), along with D’Leo and Agron, handle matters in the same abrasive manner. Pfeifer blows up a grocery store for snide remarks made at her expense by the clerks, D’Leo arranges for a brutal beating of his high school bully, and Agron makes like KICK ASS’s Hit-Girl when she takes a tennis racket to the head of a fellow student who puts the moves on her.

Trouble is that the film is so boringly broad that these scenarios have no ambition over getting cheap laughs from indiscriminate audiences. It also tries to go where it really shouldn’t when De Niro is invited to a local film club for a screening of the 1958 Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin movie SOME COME RUNNING, but there’s a mix-up and GOODFELLAS is shown instead. Besson’s film hasn’t earned that attempt at a meta moment, especially as it only aims for the funny from Jones’ grumpy cat reaction to De Niro yet again being unable to control.

After the effort De Niro put into his Oscar nominated role in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, it's disheartening to see him once again walk through a role. The man seriously doesn't seem to care about being the center of another self-referential mafia-themed farce - the ANALYSE THIS/THAT films should've been where he drew the line.

TV spots for the THE FAMILY highlight that Martin Scorsese was involved as one of the executive producers, even blaring an early ‘70s Rolling Stones track on top of clips (no Stones music appears in the movie) to shade the proceedings with his presence. This is an un-wiseguy move as it just calls into attention how much this film misses the mark.

Scorsese hasn’t directed De Niro since 1995’s CASINO, but a future collaboration – THE IRISHMAN based on the Charles Brandt book “I Heard You Paint Houses” - is reportedly in the works. Here’s hoping that will come together soon, because after the mess Besson has made here stumbling blindly around Marty’s territory, a clean-up crew is sorely needed.

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LINCOLN: The Film Babble Blog Review

LINCOLN (Dir. Steven Spielberg, 2012)

At the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s LINCOLN, based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 bestseller “Team of Rivals,” we meet the friendly, soft spoken Abraham Lincoln, played by Daniel Day Lewis in another Oscar caliber performance, as he’s conversing with soldiers, both black and white, in the Army of the Potomac’s camp.

When more than one of the infantryman starts reciting the Gettysburg Address with gusto to our 16th President,  I was thinking ‘what, is this written by Aaron Sorkin?’

I knew that it wasn’t - LINCOLN’s screenplay was penned by playwright Tom Kushner, best known for ANGELS IN AMERICA and Spielberg’s MUNICH - but the scene’s simultaneous attempt at gravitas and heartstring-tugging so reminded me of Sorkin’s style that the comparison was hard to shake. However, in this case, that’s not a bad thing.

Spielberg’s modest epic isn’t a life-spanning biopic; it concerns the pivotal last leg of Lincoln’s life, from January 1865 to his death several months later, in which he tirelessly fought to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and end the Civil War.

Although it begins on the battlefield, only briefly do we see combat (there’s nothing that compares to the SAVING PRIVATE RYAN’s lengthy opening Normandy invasion sequence), because the film is more interested in the back room deals, with the suspense coming from how close the vote over the 13th Amendment was in the House of Representatives.

Of course, we all know how it’s going to turn out, but that doesn’t harm the feeling of being a fly on the wall for some of the most crucial conversations in America’s storied past.

A cast of recognizable faces help bring history alive, including Tommy Lee Jones (once a scene stealer always a scene stealer, especially as he has the most humorous moments here) as Republican Congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens, Sally Field as First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Field’s one-on-ones with Day-Lewis are wonderful - two Academy Award winners reminding us what won them those awards in the first place), the always welcome Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a brief part as Honest Abe’s son Robert Todd Lincoln, and - thank the Heavens he’s still with us - Hal Holbrook, who once played Lincoln himself in a 1976 television project, as the wise, and very old political figure Francis Preston Blair.

Every other face seems to be somebody you may know too - James Spader, David Strathairn, Bruce McGill, Gulliver McGrath (last seen in DARK SHADOWS and HUGO), Jared Harris, Jackie Earle Haley, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Hawkes are all on hand.

Day-Lewis’s and Spielberg don’t offer us a larger than life Lincoln, they give us a humble man passionately driven to change the fate of human dignity (as he puts it), and it’s a portrayal to believe in. It’s made the more powerful because Spielberg refrains from CGI (an era-appropriate Washington D.C. could’ve been created with lavish special effects), and keeps his cameras (or more accurately cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s cameras) tight on these grand men (or in the case of Lee Pace’s character Democratic Congressman Fernando Wood, not-so-grand).

Spielberg’s long-time composer John Williams (this is their 26th film together) provides a suitably grandiose score, that gets cheesy at times, but overall effectively enhances the narrative turns, even if I’m having trouble remembering it right now.

For most of its almost 3 hour running time (of course, it’s long!) LINCOLN has the thrust of the best entertainment about political matters from the 1939 classic MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON to the acclaimed NBC drama The West Wing (Sorkin again!), but a few sections drag, and there were times that I thought it might’ve been better as HBO mini-series.

But that probably would’ve denied us the excellent work of Day-Lewis and other A-list cast members though.

There will be many folks that will be turned off by the notion of a long talky history lesson, but with the sheer strength of Day-Lewis’ incredible acting, and Spielberg’s subtle construction (and minimum of his trademark corny sentiment), LINCOLN ought to win over many more folks with the patience to take in what’s being said, how things were changed, and why, to this day, its title subject is considered to be the greatest American President of all time.

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Streep and Jones rekindle romance in HOPE SPRINGS

Opening today in Raleigh and the Triangle area:

HOPE SPRINGS (David Frankel, 2012)

A frumpy Meryl Streep and a grumpy Tommy Lee Jones, as a long-timed married couple whose marriage has lost its spark, are both excellent in this film that really shouldn’t be mistaken for a oldster rom com.

At first, it can seem simple-minded, both drama and comedy-wise, to see Streep failing to get any action from her coldly set-in-his-ways husband Jones, who sleeps in a separate room, completely oblivious to his wife’s advances.

However, more and more, as it follows Streep through the motions of her passion-less existence, Vanessa Taylor’s screenplay has a good brain on its shoulders about these being real relatable people, and not caricatures armed with one-liners.

So to save their marriage, Streep signs her and Jones up for a week of couples’ therapy with a famous sex therapist (Steve Carrell) in the town of the title in Maine. Jones is resistant to leave their home in Omaha, but catches up with Streep at the last minute on the plane. “I hope you’re happy now” he says, and, like in a few other instances in the film, I swear Streep gives the camera a knowing look.

Because, you know, it’s Steve Carrell, I kept thinking he was going to steer the movie into different comic territory, but he plays the role completely straight. Carrell’s soft-spoken character is vague with no back story, yet figures in nicely with the very spare cast.

Elizabeth Shue has what amounts to a cameo as a bartender that chats up Streep when the couple spends a day apart, in a scene that tells us ‘hey, everybody has the same problems.’ For Streep’s benefit Shue asks for a show of her patrons’ hands: “Who in here is not having sex?” Of course, everybody’s hands go up.

Yes, bits like that make this come off like a big screen sitcom at times, and the film does get goofy with too much oral sex humor (there’s a movie theater scene that should’ve been deleted), but the writing is truthful about aging relationships, and there’s a undeniable warmth throughout.

Enough to make one ignore the safe choices on the soundtrack (Annie Lennox, Van Morrison, Lenny Kravitz, Al Green, etc.), and the Nancy Meyers-ish trappings, and take in a couple of ace actors in a small simple story about a couple of 60-year olds rekindling their romance.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, there’s plenty of CGI-ed spectacle with cartoon characters out there this summer that probably will.

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MEN IN BLACK III: Meh

MEN IN BLACK III (Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld, 2012)

Despite a few good ideas - Josh Brolin cast as a young Tommy Lee Jones; a cameo by SNL’s Bill Hader as Andy Warhol – the third installment of the MEN IN BLACK series is exactly what I expected. Every joke and plot point of this series of CGI-saturated set-pieces is mechanically in place in this standard-issue sequel right off the formulaic franchise assembly-line.

It’s been 10 years since MiBII (and 15 years since MiB), and not much has changed.

Will Smith and partner Jones are still up to their top-secret agency’s alien neutral zone policing, only Rip Torn doesn’t return to play their boss Agent Z. Instead they’ve got Emma Thompson, severly underwritten as Agent O, who figures out that there’s been a fracture in the time-space continuum because Smith came to work craving chocolate milk (that’s right). This is after Smith wakes up in a world in which Jones has been dead for 40 years.

You see, when the evil intergalactic criminal Boris the Animal (Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement) escaped from a Lunar prision (the film’s big opening scene), he traveled back in time to 1969 (via a time-jump device obtained in a pawn shop) and killed Jones, so Smith has got to go back to the past and save his gruff partner. Then they can save the world from, I dunno, alien jellyfish descending on the planet?

This is where Brolin comes in with a pitch-perfect impersonation of Jones. This central gimmick works well initially (Brolin does Jones so much better than he did Dubya), and helps carry the film from half-chuckle to half-chuckle.

Jones really made out well in this outting - he only has to appear in the beginning and end of the film, but still gets his name above the title while a young hot actor embodies his persona for the rest of the picture.

There are a lot of possibilities for larger-than-life laughs here, such as retro aliens a la late ‘60s sci-fi (think Star Trek and Lost in Space), Clement’s bickering with his younger dumber double, andMichael Stuhlberg (A SERIOUS MAN, Boardwalk Empire) as a quirky visionary alien, but as big as the spectacle gets (and with its Cape Canaveral climax it gets pretty big), the attempts at creating actual comedy are few and futile.

It feels as if the film is so slickly streamlined that any notion of inventive wit would only get in the way. A throwaway one-liner spoutin’ Smith kickin’ extraterrestrial ass is always a surefire summer movie-going audience pleasing scenario, so why mess with success?

Basically, MiBIII isn’t a great movie, but it’s a sturdy franchise entry.

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CAPTAIN AMERICA: The Film Babble Blog Review

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (Dir. Joe Johnston, 2011)

Although I am not a comic book guy, I have more and more been developing an admiration for how Marvel has been expanding their movie universe.

Now Captain America joins Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk, in this surprisingly solid summer super hero movie that just might be the best of the bunch so far.

Much like the recent X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, this is an origin story crossed with an alternate history scenario, and also like that film, it largely works.

Here our hero played by Chris Evans, who we first meet convincingly CGI-ed as a scrawny runt constantly rejected by the military, gets genetically modified into a tall muscular super soldier for action in World War II by a German scientist (Stanley Tucci).

The villain, the intense Hugo Weaving as a Nazi official with a sinister secret, is planning on destroying the United States with his HYDRA terrorist organization ("Hail, HYDRA!"), and, of course, it's up to Captain America with the help of love interest Hayley Atwell, best friend Sebastian Stan, and the always reliably gruff Tommy Lee Jones as a stern army Colonel to stop the looming wave of world domination.

Weaving, especially after being revealed as Red Skull (not sure I want to try to explain that), appears to be having a blast with his scenery-chewing-and-spitting out prowess, and his treatment of Toby Jones as a beleagured Nazi chemist/lackey is terrifically savage stuff.

The star-spangled man with a plan (as Jones calls Evans) is as engaging as he is unshakable in fight scene afer fight scene. Evans mostly acts with a stoical demeanor, but its not without humor.

There's a satisfying use of circular dialogue throughout in which key lines are effectively repeated, and Evans holds his own with the exceedingly capable cast.

Director Johnston handles with film's aesthetics, at times metallic; at times grimy, beautifully, with all the gravitas that GREEN LANTERN was so sorely missing, and he sets a sturdy tone that takes itself just seriously enough.

There were some pacing problems here and there, and Alan Silvestri's generic action movie score was a bit intrusive, but since CAPTAIN AMERICA is such a smart and ginormously entertaining mainstream Marvel movie, I feel like a heel complaining.

As for the Marvel Universe aspect, you can always expect cameos from franchise characters such as Iron Man's dad Howard Stark (this time played by Dominic Cooper), and Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury (that can't be a SPOILER! right? I mean, he's in all of these films).

You can also expect the traditional Stan Lee cameo, and more importantly, the after-the-credits scene which here doubles as a teaser trailer for next summer's THE AVENGERS which, as you probably know, assembles several of their super hero strands into one big ass Marvel movie event package.

Here's hoping that will be as solid and super as this is.

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NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN Enters The Classic Coen Bros. Canon - Just Don't Call It A Comeback

Cormac McCarthy: MILLER'S CROSSING is in that category. I don't want to embarrass you, but that's just a very, very fine movie.

Joel Coen: Eh, it's just a damn rip-off.

- Time Magazine Oct. 18th, 2007 (A Conversation Between Author Cormac McCarthy And The Coen Brothers) It has been a while since Joel and Ethan Coen unleashed a movie that really made an impact. Their last offerings - THE LADYKILLERS (2004), INTOLERABLE CRUELTY (2003), and a personal favorite of mine - THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (2001) all had their fair share of merits and moments but you'd have to reach back to O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU (2000) to cite any serious seismic blip on the pop culture radar. Even during this supposed down-time they never had a critically lambasted failure or did anything resembling "jumping the shark" so the held belief was they would check in with another masterpiece someday in the future. Well the day has now come with the instant classic that is: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Dirs. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, 2007) A more faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel could not be imagined. There are a few transitional dialogue and setting embellishments but the bulk of this film is directly, word for word, from the brilliant book. In the vast plains of Rio Grande, Texas in 1980, Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss - a poor Vietnam vet who one day when out hunting antelopes comes across a slew of dead bodies, a large surplus of heroin, and a satchel containing over 2 million dollars. He takes the satchel and returns to his wife (Kelly Macdonald) at his trailer park home but wakes in the middle of the night with what he himself recognizes as a "dumber than Hell" compulsion to return to the crime scene. Soon to be on his trail is what can only be described as a completely evil man - Chigurh (Javier Bardem). With an odd Prince Valiant-style haircut and a never ceasing confidence, Chigurh uses a cattle gun to kill just about anyone who gets in his way throughout the film (usually through the forehead) and it also comes in handy to blow out door locks. "What is this guy supposed to be, the ultimate bad-ass?" - Moss even asks Carson Wells (a smooth Woody Harrelson) - yet another man on the trail of the money. As Sherriff Bell and a sort of narrator in his grizzled though still whimsical monologues Tommy Lee Jones tries to make sense of these new violent times. He never appears surprised by each new bloody development - he takes it all in with a jaded shrugging sigh. Though many of the stylistic devices have been used and reused by the Coen Brothers before (the roadside murders, the seedy hotels, etc.) amidst the shoot-outs, chases and scary darkness there are waves of fresh subtleties that they hadn't explored before. The quirky everyday folk that reside in little general stores out in the middle of nowhere might have provoked ridicule before in such Coen classics as RAISING ARIZONA, FARGO, and O BROTHER but this time out I found the audience around me were tittering around - almost afraid to laugh at these people. Like Chigurh - who one character refers to as a man "without a sense of humor" seems to know all too well is that their fates, whether by his hands or by natural destiny, aren't that funny. More later...