Hell or High Water - Movie Review

Starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Burningham, Kevin Rankin, Marin Ireland and Dale Dickey.
Written by Taylor Sheridan.
Directed by David Mackenzie.

★★★★

The Wolf of Wall Street. The Big Short. 99 Homes. All inspired by true events, and those events would bleed into Hell or High Water, where rural north Texas feels the weight of poverty and greed.

The movie is about two pairs of men, and both could have their own film, and I'd be happy following either one. It's a credit to the filmmakers that there is no scene wasted.

One one side, there are the cops. Jeff Bridges is the crusty old marshal who's about to retire, and Gil Burningham (Twilight) is his Native-American partner who puts up with all of his race jokes. When a couple small banks are robbed, this is their chance at cracking one last big case.

On the other side are the robbers. Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers in dire straits. Their mother has just died and the bank is about to foreclose on her ranch unless they come up with the cash to pay off her reverse mortgage and back taxes by the end of the week.

This isn't a glossy production. This movie feels lived in. The mud caked on their cars feels earned. The small parts and extras look like real people. And the four main characters are all outstanding. I would argue this is Chris Pine's best performance to date.

Suicide Squad Stays #1 at Box Office

For the weekend of August 12-14, 2016, Suicide Squad easily held on to the top spot. After breaking the August opening-weekend box-office record, its 67% drop was to be expected. Its worldwide gross is now past $465 million, and this is before opening in lucrative countries like China, India, Germany and Japan. (For comparison, China alone was responsible for $190 million of Captain America: Civil War's $1.15 billion).

Sausage Party's tracking grew the closer it came, and when the overwhelmingly positive reviews came in, its success was assured. It also only had a $19 million production budget, which just makes me wonder why it took $105 million to make Ice Age 5.

Pete's Dragon opened to okay business, but it'll need good word-of-mouth and strong overseas performance to make a profit, and Disney could use some better news after Alice Through the Looking Glass and The BFG flopped. (Don't weep for them just yet. They also had Zootopia, The Jungle Book, CA:CW, and Finding Dory).

Florence Foster Jenkins joins Ricki & the Flash as an example that late summer Meryl Streep is no longer as bankable as she'd been in years past (with titles like Mamma Mia!, Julie & Julia and Hope Springs).

On fewer screens, Anthropoid wasn't able to garner much interest. It may look like a sci-fi title, but it's about the two men who carried out the assassination of SS Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. It stars Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) and Jamie Dornan (Battlestar Galactica).

Hell or High Water came out of nowhere for the highest per-screen average of over $18,000 on 32 screens for a $592,000 total. It's a modern-day Western starring Jeff Bridges as a sheriff on the trail of two bank robbers (Chris Pine, Ben Foster). Expect it to expand in the next week or so.

Opens August 19
KUBO & THE TWO STRINGS with the voices of Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey.
WAR DOGS with Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Bradley Cooper, Ana de Armas and Shaun Toub.
BEN-HUR with Jack Huston, Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell and Ayelet Zurer.

Lone Survivor - Movie Review

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana, Alexander Ludwig, Yousuf Azami, Ali Suliman and Jerry Ferrara.  Directed by Peter Berg.

★★★½

The advertising keeps quoting Bill Simmons calling it the best war movie since Saving Private Ryan. Simmons is a sports guy, so it just shows how insignificant movie critics have become, at least to the marketing department. I'd say it's just a notch below Kathryn Bigelow's efforts, but it's worthy to compare to Black Hawk Down.

It's based on Marcus Luttrell's best-seller about the failed Operation Red Wings that resulted in the deaths of 19 servicemen. It's a tribute to those men, and it finds a way to be pro-soldier without being pro-war. It's angering to see how hard it is to become a SEAL, and how weird the rules of engagement are in Afghanistan, and how so many more lives would have been saved if they just had better equipment.

The soldiers' bodies take quite a bit of abuse, and from what I've read, they were pretty accurate about it. The comraderie of the four soldiers (Wahlberg, Kitsch, Hirsch, Foster) is engaging, and when the bad stuff starts happening, we still hope somehow they'll escape their fate. Kitsch has shown he might have a future in movies after all.

Contraband - Movie Review

★★★

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Ben Foster, Giovanni Ribisi, Lukas Haas, Caleb Landry Jones, JK Simmons, Diego Luna and David O'Hara.
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur.

Mark Wahlberg is cool. He just is. He can do your art-house flicks (I Heart Huckabees), your comedies (The Other Guys), your Best Pictures (The Departed), and then he's an action star. His action movies serve as a reminder that Jason Statham could do better.

Wahlberg in action mode isn't much different than Eastwood in the 1980's or Bruce Willis in the 1990's. When I watch movies like this, I always have John Malkovich in True West come to mind. "It's not a film, it's a moo-vie."

Here he's Chris Farraday, former smuggler gone legit, with his wife Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and two kids. When Kate's little brother Andy has a job go bad (throwing some drugs in the ocean when customs boards), he's threatened with his life unless he pays the amount the score was expected to bring - $700,000.

Chris tries to appeal to his boss, a little psycho named Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi, in Bruckheimer villain mode), but Briggs wants the full amount and threatens to kill Chris and Kate and their kids as well unless he gets his money. So Chris comes out of retirement for one last job - smuggling counterfeit money from Panama.

The movies goes back and forth from hard-hitting action drama to light-hearted heist flick. Of course Chris's best-laid plans fall apart in Panama. If it all went smooth we'd have a dull 60-minute movie.

This is based on the 2008 Icelandic film Reykjavik-Rotterdam. The producer and star of that movie, Baltasar Kormakur, serves as director here, and he has a sleekness to his style. Reminded me of the Scott brothers at times.

(P.S. My wife's biggest complaint? Wahlberg never takes his shirt all the way off.)