Tag Archives: D

PACIFIC RIM UPRISING

Grade: D

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, Guillermo del Toro follows up his well-deserved Oscar winner “The Shape of Water” by acting as one of the producers of this laughable sequel to his bloated 2013 “Power Rangers”-meets-“Transformers” ripoff, “Pacific Rim.” His direct responsibility is minimal: the script was written by others, and he handed over directorial duties to feature neophyte (and co-writer) Steven S. DeKnight, whose earlier claim to fame rests on his contributions to television, including various incarnations of the Starz “Spartacus” series. DeKnight’s efforts are workmanlike, but he’s no del Toro—or even a Michael Bay.

And del Toro still bears the burden of having conceived the nutty premise in the first place. Of course, it can be argued that the premise to “Water” is no less nutty, perhaps even more so. Presumably the secret is all in the telling. If so, it’s not told especially well in this case.

The time is a decade after the battle between the alternate-dimension kaijus, giant lizards unleashed from breaches in the ocean floor, and the two-pilot giant robots, the jaegers, that humans build to defeat them, with ultimate success. A rogue jaeger appears in Australia just as a decision is taken by the Pan Pacific Defense Force to replace the pilot-bearing jaegers with drones controlled by overseers back in a control room, and the old jaegers must be called back into action. Eventually the lizards reappear as well, and city-destroying action is once again on the menu. The locus of the big finale is none other than Mount Fuji, which is a kaiju target for reasons that are explained in typical meaningless gobbledygook.

Within that larger context the script focuses on Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of Stacker (played by Idris Elba in the previous film), one of the heroes in the first war (and an ex-pilot himself) who’s turned criminal. After a job gone wrong, he encounters a spunky orphan named Amara (Cailee Spaeny, irritatingly shrill) who’s rebuilt a jaeger she calls Scrapper, and after a skirmish with a larger robot the two of them are taken into custody by the authorities. To avoid jail he reluctantly joins the pilot force again, and she enthusiastically becomes a cadet.

The other cadets are a pretty colorless lot, but there is one other pilot of note: Nate (Scott Eastwood), Jake’s old partner, who urges him to recapture his old sense of duty. Naturally they will become comrades-in-jaeger again as the battle starts, while Amara, though at once point expelled for insubordination, will be recalled to service and ultimately prove central to victory.

But there is a serious issue about that rogue jaeger and the new breaches for the kaijus to come through. They suggest that there is a human traitor assisting the enemy. Who might it be? The imperious head of the Shao Corporation (Jing Tian), who’s implementing the drone program? Or her loud-mouth lackey Newt (Charlie Day), the right-hand man in its development? Certainly it couldn’t be Jake’s half-sister Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a stalwart of the defense force, or Jules (Adria Arjona), the pretty pilot both Jake and Nate look at longingly, or Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman), chief PPDF scientist and a genius at coming up with innovations just when they’re needed. Or could it? If you don’t care for any of those choices, there are plenty of other suspects—pilots, cadets, commanders, politicians and corporate types—lurking in the background to choose from.

As it is, the movie reveals the culprit pretty early on, and while there will be no spoilers here, rest assured it isn’t Jake, whose transition from antihero to pure hero Boyega limns with lots of bluster but surprisingly little charisma. It’s not really his fault, though: Jake is the sort of fellow who proclaims that he’s not going to give a stem-winding speech to his fellow pilots before the life-or-death battle, but then does just that, and then closes his spiel with the words “Let’s do this!”—an injunction that by now should be banished from every screenwriter’s lexicon.

At that Boyega is still miles ahead of Eastwood, the second syllable of whose surname is all too apt, or Day, whose animated ranting grows tiresome after only a few minutes, or Gorman, whose mugging would have been out of place in the days of the silents. Jing’s icily officious corporate mogul is only one of the picture’s efforts to appeal to the huge China market, which was instrumental in the financial success of the first movie and will obviously be crucial this time around as well.

On the technical side the most notable aspect of “Uprising” is the ear-blasting mix of Lorne Balfe’s score and the sound design. Dan Mindel’s cinematography is okay, but blighted by an avalanche of CGI that’s frequently murky and, even at its best, distinctly second-rate. Then there’s the frenetic tempo, courtesy of a trio of editors—Zach Staenberg, Dylan Highsmith and Josh Schaeffer. At least they bring the thing in under two hours.

A postscript to the movie threatens another sequel. The returns from China, of course, will be decisive in determining whether that’s just another fantasy.

CRIMINAL

Grade: D

Last year, in “Self/less,” Ryan Reynolds played a strapping young fellow whose body became host to the consciousness of a dying old man. The arrangement did not work out well. Now in “Criminal,” he’s a guy who’s killed, only to have his consciousness transferred to the brain of another fellow. The result, at least for the audience, is even worse this time around.

In the astronomically silly script, which one can even imagine Luc Besson turning down as ludicrous, Reynolds is Bill Pope, a CIA agent who, over the first fifteen minutes of screen time, we see stalked via ubiquitous cameras and his trusty, all-powerful laptop by a steely-eyed terrorist named Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Molla), who wants to blow up this corrupt world, and his chief lieutenant Elsa (Antje Traue). Pope’s ever-more-frustrated boss Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) desperately tries to save his man, but to no avail.

That’s a serious problem, since only Pope had access to a computer genius, code-named The Dutchman (Michael Pitt, who once seemed to have leading man potential, which has long since vanished). The Dutchman, who once worked for Heimdahl but came to think the guy crazy (one can understand his point), has somehow acquired control over all US nuclear weapons, and his erstwhile boss wants that information. To prevent him from getting it, Pope hid The Dutchman away and promised the guy cash for the flash drive—loot he was in process of delivering before things went south for him. Fortunately he was able to hide the cash before Elsa caught up with him.

But where are The Dutchman and that cache of money? That’s what Wells needs to find out, and since Pope is now dead, he calls in Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones, looking exhausted and unwell), a scientist who’s been working on a process to transfer one brain’s memories to another. Unfortunately, the host brain needs particular characteristics that few people possess, and the best candidate is an antisocial, brutal prison inmate named Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner), who suffered head trauma as a child. He’s enlisted in the experiment without his consent, and then, when it seems to fail, is sent back to jail, only to escape along the way.

As it turns out, however, the experiment did work, though slowly—Pope’s memories come to Jericho in fits and starts. He does remember enough, though, to take him to the home of Pope’s widow Jill (Gal Gadot) and his darling little daughter Emma (Lara Decaro). Contact with them is strained at first—Jericho’s a nasty sort, after all, with no compulsion about hurting people. After a time, however, Pope’s personality begins to affect its host, and Jericho, until now incapable of empathy, begins to feel emotions, and not just anger but sympathy and concern—even love, perhaps.

Of course, that nice quasi-domestic stuff can’t be allowed to interfere with the mayhem, and so Jericho is soon off in pursuit of that money and The Dutchman even as he’s pursued by both Wells and his team, and Heimdahl and his. Lots of fights, car crashes and gun battles follow, and inevitably Jill and Emma will become helpless pawns in the crossfire. But rest assured the world is not destroyed, though given the unlikely plot turns your capacity to suspend disbelief might very well be.

This is the second time lately that Costner has tried to go the tough-guy route, and though he works very diligently at it, the result is even less credible that it was in “3 Days to Kill” (Jericho’s first appearance in his prison cell is a doozy). Ryan, moreover, is curiously anonymous and Gadot completely wasted, while Jones looks like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Molla comes off more than a little absurd as a guy who can supposedly do anything with a mere touch of a keyboard, and Traue is even worse as a villainess who seems to have escaped from a Sean Connery-era James Bond movie. The worst of the lot, however, is Oldman, an actor who can be subtly brilliant in some roles and laughably terrible in others. Here, sporting a Bronx accent so thick you could cut it with a knife, he’s comically awful; it’s one of the worst performances he’s even given. Technically the picture is proficient enough, but director Ariel Vromen doesn’t generate the level of excitement he and his crew are clearing trying for, and cinematographer Dana Gonzales’ widescreen images sometimes look cloudy, with hand-held moments especially trying. The cautious editing by Danny Rafic and bland background score by Brian Tyler and Keith Power are no help.

As it reaches its absurd final confrontation the movie grows so foolish that in the future it might be used as a cinematic touchstone, as in: “It’s so bad, it’s ‘Criminal.’” Still, one can appreciate it for its unintentional hilarity.