Free Fire - Movie Review

Starring Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, Sharlto Copley, Jack Reynor, Sam Riley, Noah Taylor, Babou Ceesay, Michael Smiley and Patrick Bergin.
Written by Amy Jump & Ben Wheatley.
Directed by Ben Wheatley.

★★½

This is a fun little gangster flick, probably more worthy to be watched on Netflix or Amazon Prime when it shows up in a few months.

The plot is very simple. In the 1970's, some IRA members are meeting some arms dealers in an abandoned warehouse to buy some guns. Room full of antsy people with guns and money? Eventually someone's trigger-happy finger sets things in motion.

Picture the Mexican standoff in Reservoir Dogs. Now picture there's about ten of them, and it's in a much bigger warehouse with more places to hide and take cover. And you have 45 minutes of movie to go. Now this does lead to a lot of scenes of shot people crawling on their elbows to get from this place of cover to that, but the dialogue and exchanges remain funny.

Wheatley said he was aiming to write a standoff movie realistically, and I can see that. In real life, these guys would miss most of their shots, and most of the ones that hit wouldn't be fatal.

The Birth of a Nation - Movie Review

Starring Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, Penelope Ann Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, Aunjanue Ellis, Colman Domingo, Mark Boone Jr., Gabrielle Union and Roger Guenveur Smith.
Written by Nate Parker & Jean McGianni Celestin.
Directed by Nate Parker.

★★★

It's 12 Years A Slave meets Braveheart. Now I loved 12 Years a Slave, and I loved Braveheart, but I'm not so sure they should meet.

This is a biopic of Nat Turner, the leader of a slave rebellion in 1831 and resulted in the deaths of about about 65 whites and 200 blacks. We meet Nat as a young slave boy. The white matriarch takes a liking to him and teaches him to read from the Bible. When the patriarch dies, his wishes are that Nat return to the cotton fields.

But Nat gets really good with the Bible and preaches to the other slaves on Sunday. When his current master Sam Turner (Armie Hammer) gets into debt, he's given a profitable idea from the local preacher (Mark Boone Jr.). Other slave-owners would pay him to have Nat preach to their slaves. You know, preach from the verses that justify slavery.

The movie is full of brutality and cruelty. There's more than one rape and many of the expected whippings and torture of slaves. Nat sees that while his own situation is bad, the surrounding plantations are far worse. He starts reading the verses in the Bible that justify fighting injustice, slave revolts, and killing oppressors.

This is all from Nate Parker. He is the writer, director, and star. There are many close-ups putting his face squarely in the middle of the frame. It has a level of admirable messiness from an undisciplined auteur. We see the beauty of the cotton fields at dawn, juxtaposed with blood on the ground where a slave was beaten or killed.

The movie is about how the Bible was misused to justify slavery, or it's about how blind the institution made whites to the inhumanity of the arrangement, or it's about what Black Lives Matter looked like 180 years ago. Or it could be other things. There's a complex relationship between Nat and Sam, but in their final scene together, I wasn't sure what emotions they were experiencing. Just an example where the movie could have benefitted from more polish.

My comparison to Braveheart is if you stretched out the indignities the English inflicted on the Scottish, and then condensed the last two hours into 30 minutes. It also takes many liberties with what the actual historical record shows. (For example, Sam died in 1823, but he's alive during the 1831 rebellion here.)

Overall I liked it. It packs a punch. It has its flaws, but I'd rather a movie had too much to say than nothing to say.

The Lone Ranger - Movie Review

Starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, William Fichtner, Ruth Wilson, James Badge Dale, Barry Pepper and Helena Bonham Carter.
Directed by Gore Verbinski.

★★½

The Lone Ranger is one of those characters who's just about extinct.  I'm 40, and I barely remember him.  I mean, I know there was him and Tonto, and I'm pretty sure I saw an episode of the TV show before. I remember the Filmation cartoon from 1980 that rotated with Tarzan and Zorro.  I remember the William Tell Overture and "Heigh-ho, Silver!"  I remembered enough to know that the guy from this movie was not the Lone Ranger.

John Reid was a character who stood for justice in the Wild West.  He also abhorred killing and tried to take 'em alive whenever possible.  Maybe it today's age that seems too square or corny, whatever the word is, but rather than embrace the earnestness like in Captain America, they turn him into a sissy-man joke.  This Reid is a naive, foppish lawyer who even stand carrying a gun in a gun fight.  He's a dweeb who must be propped up by Tonto (Depp), a Comanche who has his own weird problems.

Remember Without a Clue? It was a comedic spin on Sherlock Holmes where Holmes (Michael Caine) was the face but Dr. Watson (Ben Kingsley) was the real brains behind the operation.  I wondered if this movie realized it was going the same route here. This is like a Tarzan movie that starts with him afraid of heights. (Even the poster tries to scoot him out of the picture.)

Aside from that glaring, gaping problem, for the most part I had fun at this movie.  And looking back, it was actually faithful to the source material in many other ways.  I watched the premiere episode and was delighted to see that the set-up was the same, with the group of rangers pursuing the outlaw Butch Cavendish through a canyon when they get ambushed and killed, thanks to a traitor named Collins.  The movie was even filmed in the exact same canyon as the TV show.

Reid now travels with the mask in pursuit of Cavendish. Tonto wants Cavendish caught too, for he believes him to be a wendigo, a devil who must be killed.  Meanwhile, the railroad's being built and you just know the head of the railroad company is going to wind up being the main villain that Cavendish happens to work for.  Progress, claims the movie, is evil.

Now this movie suffers the same excess problems as the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.  It goes for 2 1/2 hours, and it could easily trimmed ten minutes here, ten minutes there.  Helena Bonham Carter's part could have been cut completely, but she is here because her soul is bound to Depp's, and it provides the opportunity for the men to visit a whorehouse.  All Westerns these days must eventually visit a whorehouse while looking for the bad guy, just like how today's detective movies always have to visit a strip-club to crack the case.

There is a moment of movie magic, when things are looking dire, when the Lone Ranger arrives to save the day and ignite our climax.  The William Tell Overture kicks in, and I got fuzzies.  We're over two hours in, and finally "The Lone Ranger" has arrived!  The final 20-minute chase scene using two trains on parallel tracks was as thrilling as any action scene in any movie the past couple summers.

Gore Verbinski, who won an Oscar for Rango, his animated Western, knows how to stage scenes and execute them.

This movie isn't as bad as some critics have been suggesting. I can't honestly call it good, but I was entertained, and I'd rather see The Lone Ranger 2 over Pirates of the Caribbean 5.