The Death Collector

I was hoping that last week’s The Punisher: One Last Kill would give me the opportunity to pay tribute to the holiday here in the US this weekend.  But since it was a major disappointment, I found myself reaching for a movie that I’d seen once before and have been holding off on a rewatch until I had a chance to share it with you.  Memorial Day is the traditional curtain raiser for the summertime, so don’t worry, we’re going to get to light summer fun starting next week.  But before we get to the more family-friendly fare, the things to distract your kids with, and, well, probably some R-rated comedies for the grown ups, since we’re in the midst of another war, and Memorial Day is a day to honor those fallen in service, I think it’s time we talk about 2023 R-rated war movie Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.  Let’s get into it.

We start in Afghanistan in 2018.  Master Sergeant John Kinley, played by Jake Gyllenhaal (Prisoners, Nightcrawler), meets his new interpreter Ahmed Abdullah, played by Dar Salim (Game of Thrones).  Ahmed tells Kinley he’s doing the job for the money, but in reality, he has an axe to grind with the Taliban.  The job, by the way, entails being the person who takes point in every conversation with Afghani locals, which is something Kinley and his squad have to do a lot because they’re on the very dangerous hunt for Taliban munitions.  They’re looking for caches of weapons and explosives, and what they call IED factories.  Every encounter is tense, including ones between Kinley and Ahmed.  There isn’t a lot of trust between the two and it gets tested time and time again.   Ahmed is smart, intuitive, and deliberate, and above all else, he trusts his own judgment.  This causes the two of them to butt heads on more than one occasion; the chain of command isn’t something that the military takes lightly and when Ahmed challenges Kinley’s authority, it isn’t taken very well.  It’s hard to be frictionless in a military structure when you’re not so good at taking orders.  But they make a good team, despite the difficulties.  Kinley isn’t what I’d call by the book, but he seems to care about getting the mission done and getting dangerous explosives out of the hands of the Taliban.

Three minutes.  All it takes is three minutes.  It doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but in the span of three minutes, a successful mission turns into a hellish nightmare from which many of Kinley’s soldiers will never awake.  They call in for backup, but in the time it takes for the QRF to arrive at their location, 3 hours away by Humvee, it’s all over.  Dozens are left dead, Kinley and Ahmed are nowhere to be found.  In those three minutes from the moment a fuse is lit to the moment it goes off, Kinley and Ahmed end up desperately on the run from overwhelming Taliban forces.  Stranded, alone, and over 100 kilometers over rough terrain away from safety.  All while hundreds of armed men are hunting them down.  They are in extreme danger, suffice it to say.

There’s a moment when Ahmed has a chance to get away from everything.  They’re ambushed after trying to find some shelter for the night.  Kinley is gravely wounded and captured.  Surely better off on his own, in his own country, Ahmed could easily have shed his military uniform and tried to disappear.  But he doesn’t.  He doesn’t slip away.  He doesn’t try to disappear.  He doesn’t leave Kinley to the Taliban for a better chance of survival.  The thought doesn’t even cross his mind.  He rescues Kinley, tends to his wounds as best he can in the field, builds a stretcher, and starts on the arduous journey to Bagram Air Base, their only safe haven.  This is a journey fraught with enough dangers that you would expect some sort of Fellowship to undertake it, but instead it’s just one man, dragging behind him the barely living body of a man he doesn’t even seem to like.

In my notes, I usually mark when the acts end, but I found something strange about the narrative structure of this movie.  This might be my film nerd coming out, but there’s something about The Covenant that feels like it doesn’t follow a standard three act structure.  Rather, it feels like a movie of two halves.  The first half of The Covenant is in Afghanistan.  The second half takes place later, after Ahmed drags a barely alive Sgt. Kinley back to base and he recovers and goes home.  The US pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban took over almost immediately.  There’s something I neglected to mention at the top, which the movie illustrates through a series of chyrons at the beginning; interpreters for the US military were promised eligibility for special visas for them and their families to the US.  These are people who put their own lives and their families’ lives in danger to help the US fight the Taliban; even without the Taliban’s resurgence, staying in Afghanistan would be very dangerous for them, as the movie notes at the end.  When the movie was released, over 300 interpreters and their entire families have been murdered by the Taliban, with thousands more in hiding, waiting for their visas.  And news filters to Kinley that Ahmed and his family are one of them.  He spends weeks on the phone, running into wall after stonewall and it’s eating him alive.  Kinley got a medal.  Kinley went home to his family.  Kinley sleeps in a warm bed and kisses his children goodbye as he sends them to school in the morning.  He is safe.  His family is safe.  The man who brought him home is living in a hole somewhere, with his wife and infant child, not knowing if he’d see the sunset on any given day he’s lucky enough to wake up.

Kinley can’t take this.  Call it honor, call it duty, call it a good man doing the right thing, but he calls it a debt.  A debt that can only be paid one way.  After weeks of being stonewalled, Kinley decides the only thing he can do is go get Ahmed himself or wait for confirmation of his death.  He has no question about what needs to be done.  He will stop at nothing to get Ahmed and his family to safety.  Gyllenhaal gives a moving speech about what it means, about what is killing him day by day, and when push comes to shove, he can’t live without doing something about it.  So he goes.  He leans on his military contacts, they hire a PMC to support his operation (played by Antony Starr, whom you may recognize as Homelander from The Boys), but at the end of the day, he’s on his own.  He has to walk into enemy territory where he is a wanted man because Ahmed’s tale has turned them both into folk heroes for those who oppose the Taliban and a symbol of failure for those who support the Taliban.  A mistake.  An embarrassment.  What follows is a breathless race against time, against certain death that can come at any moment.  There is no time to waste, every single moment is borrowed and past due.

The Covenant is also a wonderful acting vehicle.  It’s true that some of the writing, especially in the first half is a little clunky.  It’s full of matter-of-fact toxic masculinity, with the soldiers getting into each other, but I would struggle to say it feels inauthentic.  Obviously, I’ve never been in the military, so I can only judge off the movies I’ve seen and veterans I’ve known, but this kind of banter among the men seems normal, even if it is a bit cliched.  And there were a couple of moments where I would’ve used a contraction to make it seem more natural, but Ritchie decided to go for impact instead.  But overall, the acting in this movie is top notch.  There isn’t much to do for the supporting cast; most of them die in the first half and you get to know little of them beyond their nicknames like “Chow Chow” and “Jizzy”.  But Jake Gyllenhaal continues to impress over and over again.  I mean, look at this guy’s CV and you’ve got great performance after great performance.  Nightcrawler, a movie I probably would never watch again because it’s just a little too honest about society, was made irrepressible by Gyllenhaal’s performance.  Brokeback Mountain, Prisoners, End of Watch, Zodiac, Donnie Darko, hell, even his role in Spider-Man: Go Home, You Can’t Go Home Again was acted very well.  So this this doesn’t come as a surprise if you’ve been paying attention to his career, but it’s so nice to see him pulling off a military role after the absolute snoozefest of Jarhead and being so good at it.

But the true hero of this film is Dar Salim.  In a way, being a relative unknown really helps you lose the actor in the character.  IMDB tells me that he was in Game of Thrones, but so many people were in Game of Thrones and didn’t make an impact because the cast was so big and many of the roles were so small, it’s impossible to remember him.  I might have been in Game of Thrones at some point and not even known it.  But whatever he’s worked on in the past, The Covenant makes me wish I could see more of him.  It also reminds me that in Hollywood, seeing an actor who looks like him in a starring role as a protagonist is exceedingly rare and I may never get to see him again in a role anything close to this quality in a world where billionaires melt down over the casting of non-white actors for mythological roles.  Case in point, he was in the spin-off of The Terminal List, a show that was so bad I gleefully took it down and offered alternatives way back in 2022.  Now, I haven’t seen Dark Wolf, but I’m wagering it’s not a series commensurate with his talent.  But fixing racial bias in Hollywood and the world at large is out of the purview of this particular blog post.  Maybe I’ll get to it after the summer, but for now I’ll just try to enjoy the fantastic performance of Dar Salim in this movie.

This is a surprisingly quiet film.  Even the action sequences are scored with operatic music that ratchets up the tension.  No silly, mismatched music to undercut the danger of the scene here.  It has great action, but it’s not about the action.  Even the explosions lack that bass punch you’d expect in a modern action film.  The sound of a crying baby pierces through the air more sharply than the crack of a gunshot.  And even though they do sneak in a few shots that look like that one Call of Duty mission where you’re in the AC-130 Spectre gunship, this movie couldn’t be any less interested in the ins and outs of the gunplay.  Rather, it wants you to feel the tension, the fear, the dread, the apprehension of these men.  It doesn’t care about blood and gore, even if there is brutality in survival.  All that matters is the debt; what is owed, who we owe, and what we are willing to do to pay what we owe.  The Covenant is Ritchie’s most ambitious and best project yet.  I grew up on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Shakespearean tragedies written as comedic films about modern day London gangsters.  I love those movies.  I endured the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films.  I watched him flounder trying to get his style back with The Gentlemen and its spin-off series.  I saw him experiment with bleakness with the well shot, but narratively unsatisfying Wrath of Man.  But this is new for him.  Depth.  Contemplation.  Hope.  And it’s a damn good look for Guy Ritchie.

So as the barbecues cool down and the cookouts come to an end, if you want to take 2 hours and 3 minutes to reflect on the meaning of this particular day off work and think about what it means in regards to the sacrifices soldiers have made, The Covenant is a fantastic movie to sit with.  We can disagree about war, we can hate that we go to war, we can hate the reasons we go to war, but we can still honor the sacrifices of those asked to give it all, whatever the reason.  I wanted The Punisher: One Last Kill to do this, but it ignored the deeper parts of that story in order to deliver hollow violence.  The Covenant does the opposite; its use of violence punctuates its message, it doesn’t replace it.  We are all connected and all life matters.  Not just these two.  Not just because Ahmed saved Kinley’s life.  When I was a boy, my mom would tell me that her mom said it was a sin to go to bed with a full stomach if your neighbor has an empty one.  And fundamentally, The Covenant is about that idea.  It’s about decency and humanity; about what it takes to be able to sleep at night when others are in peril and you can do something about it.  Especially if you contributed to the cause of it.  Society is a constant push-pull of the individual and the collective; the need for a single person to remain singular and still part of society is hard to reconcile not just in media, but in your own personal life.  The Covenant is a worthy film that looks at what we owe, not only to those who sacrifice, but to each other in general.

A Murder Most Growl

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

Content Warning: Contains depictions of self harm, sexual assault, and animal cruelty.

Meet Frank.  Frank’s having a rough day.  Rough couple of years, really.  You see his whole family was murdered by his best friend and a syndicate of crime families so he used his skills he learned as a Marine to hunt them down and kill them.  But now Frank has a problem.  No, not his rapidly decreasing mental health and the talking apparitions that plague him paired with his access to firearms.  It’s that there’s no one left to kill because he’s killed them all.  Let’s get into The Punisher: One Last Kill.  I’d say there will be spoilers ahead, but there isn’t much to spoil.

Grrrr….in a hoodie

Okay, so I’m sure you’ve caught on that I’m talking about Disney+’s new Punisher special, a continuation of The Punisher Netflix series, with Jon Bernthal (We Own This City, The Bear) returning as the titular vigilante.  The Punisher was underrated and I’ll get to why you were wrong to listen to people telling you that it was slow, but not just yet.  The stat sheet on this one is confusing.  Yes, it’s a one-off special like the excellent Werewolf by Night, but that was self-contained.  It was a story the MCU hadn’t touched before and haven’t touched since.  The Punisher is ongoing and there was a two season series about him and he’s spent plenty of time in the Netflix Daredevil series and Daredevil: Born Again.  So, what exactly is this special meant to be?

Grrr….with hallucinations

It seems the writers were as confused as I am.  It retreads Frank’s origin story enough to act as a standalone, giving newcomers a crash course on his tragically murdered family and the ghosts and demons that haunt him to this day.  I wouldn’t say he looked particularly well-adjusted in Born Again, but he’s spiraling and the ghosts seem to be winning.  Frank’s not in a good place right now and I don’t just mean the neighborhood that’s under siege from a criminal power vacuum that he caused with his revenge campaign.  Random violence abound, the streets are incredibly unsafe.  There’s no rhyme or reason to it either, which is demonstrated from the opening scene of the special.  It looks practically post-apocalyptic and most certainly dystopian (and unfortunately far too close to our reality for comfort).  And Frank, The Punisher, does nothing.  It’s truly upsetting to see a hero ignore innocent people getting seriously hurt right in front of his face.

Grr….with a hoodie again. What can I say? A lot of this is him walking around in a hoodie

But then again, Punisher isn’t a hero, really, is he?  At least that’s the push-pull of his treatment in the MCU era.  It’s been a hard balancing act. It’s not that Punisher kills that’s the problem.  I mean, Iron Man kills.  Captain America kills Nazis, like any good hero.  Squirrel Girl…I don’t really know what she does, to be honest, but she’s fun as heck in Marvel Rivals.  No, it’s the manner in which he kills.  Nearly indiscriminately, passing the same judgement on the smallest of infractions as the most unforgivable.  The Netflix series changed that.  He was still brutal, killing not with glee, but with single-minded purpose.  He never meant to be a hero, but he was still generally doing good, for the most part at least (and I think Born Again especially went into the ramifications of such exacting vigilantism).  This special doesn’t walk it back, but it puts him in a position where extreme violence is his only option and doesn’t have any room for questions of morality.  And this is where this special fails.  It’s the first act of a movie that’s trying to be a whole movie, and a series recap, a standalone special, and set up a sequel.  They jammed so much of so little into it that they forgot to leave room for a story.

Glad she checked the exact time on the clock of her Maybach otherwise she’d never be able to choose when to try to have Frank killed

Remember how I said there was no one left to kill?  Well, it turns out he missed one.  The Gnucci family’s matriarch, the elderly and disabled Ma Gnucci, played by Judith Light (Transparent, Who’s the Boss?).  She does the most comic book villain thing ever and shows up to Frank’s apartment, accounts in painstaking detail and slow motion flashback the killing of her family members by Frank and then tells him that he has until a time that evening before she calls a John Wick-style open season on him and lets everyone know where he is.  Instead of pulling the gun he had in his belt and killing her and her bodyguard right then and there he decides to go up to his apartment, hallucinate again, and then watch and wait as random thugs break down the door across the hall and assault a young mother.  He does nothing until one of them pours gasoline on his door and sets fire to it and him.  This finally gets him into the fight and he proceeds to kill his way through a combination of a reverse Dredd (instead of one protagonist going into an apartment building full of killers, it’s a bunch of killers descending on an apartment building with the protagonist in it) and a zombie movie.  I’m not exaggerating; the men who come after him run at him with reckless abandon and inhuman drive.  They have no fear, they attack everything in their way, and they don’t stop until they’re killed, generally by headshot.  They are mindless; they are essentially zombies.  They come in endless waves as if appearing out of thin air and they disappear for no discernible reason other than it was time for the special to end.   

You can never find enough bandages in this game. And it annoys me that the lead pipes break after like 3 hits. That doesn’t seem right

This is a 50 minute TV-MA special, with the credits rolling at 44 minutes and nothing really happening for the first 26 minutes.  The last 18 minutes or so are a video game mission where the player character has to survive waves of zombies until the timer runs out and it’s time for the MCU to move on to the next project.  And yes, there is a scene where he falls off a roof and the CGI makes him look exactly like Joel from The Last of Us (the game, not the series), but one instance of bad CG isn’t this special’s biggest problem.  Not even close.  If this is a feeler for a full Punisher series, as much as I would love to see that return because I was a big fan of the Netflix series, this does not leave me with much confidence for the direction they want to take him.  If all you wanted was to watch Jon Bernthal grunt, grumble, and growl his way through dozens of mindless enemies with no real story, no emotional connections to just about any of the characters, and no discernible direction or character development, then this is certainly for you.  Do your Wordle or your Duolingo or fold your laundry during the first 26 minutes and then watch the last 20 minutes.  It really does feel like you’re watching a video game instead of a movie/TV episode/TV special/pilot episode/whatever this is meant to be.  Which does an incredible disservice to the foundation laid by the Netflix series.

Grrr…..Frank politely asks for directions

The Punisher was a surprisingly contemplative series.  The first season wasn’t slow, it was deliberate.  It had a point to make.  The Punisher took its time to show you the effects of PTSD, not just on Frank but on other veterans who are struggling to return to life after being asked to do violence on behalf of the country.  It shows how these young men and women are sent overseas to take part in the worst thing that humanity does to each other and come home to a government that wants to forget them and a society that doesn’t feel safe for them anymore and doesn’t offer them a way forward.  The Punisher wanted us to look at how we treat our veterans; we can have parades, we can have holidays, but if we don’t take care of them when they come home, what are we even doing?  What’s the point of the lip service and the bumper magnets if no one cares when a veteran comes home to the country they were ostensibly sent to protect and they need help and can’t get it?  That’s what The Punisher asked you to think about.  The first season was a tale of two ghosts, each living half a life, both trying to find a way to make themselves whole.  And beyond that very personal, meaningful story, the series brought attention to these much bigger issues.  The second season gave Frank someone to protect, a surrogate for his own daughter.  And yes, I have a soft spot for stories about gruff men protecting innocent people who can’t protect themselves (The Mandalorian, Logan, the list goes on), but I think that’s when Frank is truly at his best.  Not roaming the streets with a skull painted on his t-shirt shooting everyone with a dime bag, but as a self-sacrificing guardian of those who desperately need it.

Grrr……Frank even yawns intensely. Also, he’s on fire

I wanted so badly for this to be good.  I know Punisher is finally making his big screen debut in the next Spider-Man movie, No Way Far from Brand New Homecoming, or whatever it’s going to called, so I was hoping this would be a way for those who might have missed The Punisher series the first time around to get a glimpse of what this version of the Punisher could be.  Smartly written, deeply emotional, with something to say about our society.  Instead, we got a 44 minute video game mission that doesn’t get going for 26 minutes.  I would say this special is all action and no story, but it’s not even half action.  And with characters with names like “Old Vet”, “Ma”, and “Isaiah’s Mother”, it doesn’t even take its downtime to give us something on an emotional level.  And as a side note, how is Punisher even on the run?  He goes to his family’s gravestones twice in 40 minutes.  If you really wanted to capture or kill the Punisher, stake out the cemetery for an hour, he’s bound to show up at least once.  How has he not been found yet?

What a waste of time, effort, and a great character redeemed by the Netflix era of the MCU and brought back in glorious fashion in Born Again.  Skip One Last Kill unless you really just want to see 18 minutes of Jon Bernthal shooting people in the face.  But if you want to watch the Punisher at his very best, stick to the Netflix series and Daredevil.  Disney committed to the violence, but ignored everything else.  The worst punishment of this special was watching what they did with this character.

Yeah, I kind of felt that way at the end of this

Beach Please

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

In recent weeks, we’ve tackled religion, misogyny, death, systemic racism, and more.  Keep it light, right?  So this week, I want to discuss ego death and the loss of self.  I’m kidding, let’s have a little fun.  With the summer months closing in, I’m sure if you’re like me, you’re dreading the extra daylight hours and intense heat that makes even thinking about going outside a dehydrating prospect and actually going outside leaving you feeling like a desiccated corpse.  But if you’re normal, then your head will probably fill with ideas of sun and the beach and vacation.  We’ve all been on vacation before, I hope, and sometimes you meet people.  We’ll talk about our vacation selves when I get to The One I Love, but right now I actually do want to keep it light.  So let’s get into the underrated comedy from 2021, Vacation Friends.

Uptight Marcus, played by Lil Rel Howery (Get Out, Free Guy), and his girlfriend Emily, played by Yvonne Orji (The Blackening, Insecure) arrive on holiday in Mexico.  Marcus is nervous; he’s planning to propose.  He’s set it all up ahead of time: rose petals, champagne, the works.  But when they get to their suite, they find that the Presidential Suite above them had a serious hot tub malfunction and flooded their room.  While trying to find alternate accommodations, they bump into the cause of the hot tub malfunction.  And that cause comes in the form of Ron and Kyla.  Ron is played by John Cena (Heads of State, Peacemaker), for whom I have expressed great admiration before.  He’s such a great actor in this kind of role, where he gets to play this insanely jacked, scary looking, but ultimately kind, open, empathetic, and slightly goofy guy.  He’s the king of this archetype and his charm is a big, big part of the appeal of this movie.  I don’t know why he got into acting so late in life.  I don’t know what he did before acting, but in doing some research, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to see him.  Kyla is played by Meredith Hagner and I continue to think that she is one of the most underrated comic actresses in the industry.  She blew me away in Search Party and was great in Bad Monkey and again has this archetype that she plays so well.  She’s got this lovable, somewhat ditzy, free-spirited character in the bag.  I’m sure she has range, judging by some more of the dramatic parts of Search Party, but when she’s this likable playing to type, I can’t be mad at it.  Even when she’s cheating on Andy Samberg in Palm Springs, you just can’t help but like her.

Now these two, Ron and Kyla, couldn’t be more different from Marcus and Emily.  In addition to being white, they’re completely free with themselves.  Wanderlusters.  Travelers.  Borderline vagabonds.  Absolute free spirits.  I’m talking to the point that I cannot, with all of what’s left of my inner child and all my mind combined, even begin to imagine what that feels like.  I have never been that free at all; to be completely honest, it’s aspirational.  But then again, I’m someone who doesn’t even wear shorts in public, so maybe being that free with myself isn’t in the cards.  I’m a lot more like Marcus, buttoned down, planning for every possibility, never leaping before I look (and usually not after looking either, if I’m being completely honest).  Emily comes from money, Marcus started and runs his own construction company (which his soon-to-be father-in-law looks down on, more on that later).  Marcus is a park ranger who spends his days finding people lost in caves and Kyla works for a doctor who has to change addresses often because the feds keep coming after him.  But that’s the beauty of vacation.  Sand in your shoes is the ultimate equalizer.  Despite initial (and understandable) apprehension, the four become fast friends, with Marcus and Emily trying their best to keep up; accidentally doing cocaine, getting obliterated at bar after bar, being chased by some very angry locals.  You know, normal vacation stuff that any of us do on any of our holiday trips.  Unrelated, I’m told they still have my photo up at Magic Kingdom.  But I say don’t make drinks look that fun if you don’t want 8-year-olds to drink them and then yell “I’m king of the world” on the Jungle Cruise.

From there, the vacation gets out of hand in the absolute best of ways.  They become not only inseparable, but also a montage filled with great visual comedy.  But all vacations must come to an end, and Marcus and Emily bury their Island Niles versions of themselves in the sand to return to normal life.  But Ron and Kyla do the dreaded thing of wanting to keep in touch.  Time passes and the vacation fades to memory, as they all do, and with a wedding on the horizon, they have more things to think about than a magical week in Mexico.  That is what the real world is really great at, isn’t it?  Sucking the magic out of life.  Until Ron and Kyla show up, causing all sorts of chaos.

I’ve watched Vacation Friends four or five times now and each time there’s a level of unease.  First of all, comedies are never as funny the second time around.  Comedy is an equation that relies on a subversion of expectations, so if you know the punchline, it’s hard to be surprised by it.  I also worry that, like I did with Palm Springs, it’s a movie that connected with me so much because it was a pandemic watch originally.  Who wouldn’t want to go to Mexico to party with John Cena and Meredith Hagner instead of sitting at home worrying about your friends and family?  But those worries were again unfounded and with each rewatch, I’m surprised at just how funny it remains to be.  Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the normal, pretentious comedy that I usually go for.  It’s crude at times, it’s stupid at times, it flirts with crossing a line here and there (which, thankfully, it never really does), but the delivery is so top notch, it sells the rapid fire jokes that keep coming at you.  The comic timing here is excellent.  No one misses a trick, no one delivers a punchline poorly, not even put upon Maurillio, who works the front desk at the hotel.  If all you’re looking for is a good time and great laughs, Vacation Friends and the cleverly named sequel, Vacation Friends 2 deliver that.  You can stop here if you want and go watch it and you’ll have a great time.  But you know me.  I’ve got to keep going.

Just like a vacation, a movie like this can be a real escape from everything going on.  Five minutes on Twitter or watching the news and I’m more than ready to deal with the Babadook instead.  The thing that follows you in It Follows is a breeze compared to the real world right now.  So being able to jump into a comedy is really a wonderful feeling.  But you know that’s not enough for me and luckily Vacation Friends isn’t just stupid comedy.  Oh, there’s plenty of that as well, but there’s also a lot of heart to this.  Ron and Kyla may be wacky, cocaine-smuggling wildcards, but they only ever approach people with kindness.  They don’t judge, but they are judged a lot.  And so are Marcus and Emily.  Like I said, Emily’s father looks down on Marcus for being a “just a construction worker”, as if that were something to be ashamed of in the first place, and is incredibly harsh on everything he does.  Put simply, he hates Marcus.  Never gave him a chance.  Just like the way Marcus and Emily judged Ron and Kyla initially.  So it’s not like this movie is all just empty calories, there is some substance to it.  Learning not to judge others until you get to know them, approaching people with kindness, treating people with dignity.  For a crude, silly comedy that has a lot of sex and drugs, it’s a shockingly wholesome movie.  Now, I wouldn’t pull it up on a family holiday and sit grandma and the kids in front of it; it is R-rated, after all.  It doesn’t smack you in the face with a message either; it doesn’t take this turn where it drops comedy for melodrama, rather it’s in stride.  The movie messages by example; the kind and empathetic people who take the time to bond with each other and get to know each other are the clear protagonists.  The ones who judge others by what they have or how cultured they seem to be are the clear antagonists.  Sure, there’s a little bit of debauchery along the way, but I say again, Mr. Disney, don’t put a castle in your park if you don’t want an 8-year-old to challenge the king to single combat for the crown.  Vacation Friends is kind of a feel good movie.  And not in that sappy, saccharine kind of way; it’s not a movie that takes aim at tugging on your heartrstings, but I nonetheless found myself in a better, more hopeful mood after watching it.  And it lasted all the way until the next time I opened up Twitter. I really need to stop doing that to myself.

Vacation Friends is a really, really fun comedy that is full of laughs, likable characters, and John Cena’s rippling, sinewy charisma that carries it through most of its faults, which are minor.  This isn’t a life-changing comedy by any means, but I think it’s far better than its 59% RT score would suggest.  It’s not ambitious, it’s not trying to change anything or do anything groundbreaking.  But it’s just such a genuinely pleasant film about a bunch of people who seem so different and in the end just aren’t.  Or at the very least, their differences don’t outweigh the things about them that bring them together.  The sequel is even worth a look too.  I’ve only seen it once and I remember it being quite a drop in quality from this one; but sequels are hard and comedy sequels are even harder.  It still has its moments, though far more over the top with needlessly higher stakes, but I had so much affection for these characters that I was mainly happy just to be spending time with them again.  If you’re looking for a good comedy that delivers on laughs this weekend, you could do worse than firing up Vacation Friends and spending 1 hour and 43 minutes just laughing, smiling, chuckling, and chortling.  Vacation Friends streams on Hulu.

Lock, Defrock, and a Few Broken Morals

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

Rian Johnson is back with Benoit Blanc and he’s here to ruin your childhood specifically

Going from talking about one hard genre to discuss with comedy a couple of weeks ago, I’m back with another hard one.  Mystery.  It’s not useful for me to tell you that the butler did it or that I was surprised that the butler did it.  For one, I’m rarely surprised at the end of a whodunnit, but that’s mostly my fault.  Obviously I pay attention to this sort of movie thing, if you haven’t noticed, so once you read narrative structure, a lot of things become predictable.  But growing up, mysteries were all I cared about.  I had at least 50 Hardy Boys books as a kid, as well as several of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew crossover books, which were some of my favorites because they were longer, and I read each of them at least five times.  I wanted to be a detective when I was a kid.  You got to wear a cool hat and talk like Humphrey Bogart and dames were always coming by your office in need of help before betraying you.  Surprise!  The kid who grew up to write this blog was a nerd.  So I love mysteries and always have and over the years, I’ve developed an eye for how these things play out.  And even if I’m surprised at the end, that’s not enough either.  A surprise has to be earned and too few mysteries earn their reveals, instead opting for a cheap twist that no one saw coming because it doesn’t make any sense.

But when there’s a good one, oh, I am thrilled.  I’ve talked about my love of whodunnits before, so for longtime readers, this isn’t news.  And much like Rian Johnson’s modern day Poirot, Benoit Blanc, I’ve given myself a problem to solve.  How do I talk about a mystery without talking about a mystery?  Let’s get into Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

I’m not as worried about getting older if looking this cool remains an option

In case you haven’t seen Knives Out or Glass Onion, Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig (Logan Lucky, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), is one of those world famous detectives.  This is one of the things we accept in fiction, that there are world famous detectives.  I’ve been part of the world for a while now and I’ve never heard of even a locally famous detective.  But, like I said, he’s in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mold; a quirky, reclusive detective who is the very best at what he does, trading Poirot’s signature moustache for a charming Foghorn Leghorn southern drawl.  For being so blatantly a Poirot archetype, Blanc never manages to feel like a ripoff, even though it seems like Poirot was a huge influence; Craig’s charm and charisma paper over any concerns I could have with the character.  Blanc is instantly endearing.  But he’s not really in this one for the first 40 minutes or so.

KISS! Although they probably won’t

Instead we get to spend that time with Jud Duplenticy.  Father Jud Duplenticy.  Father Jud, played by Josh O’Connor (The Crown), is a young Catholic priest, new to the cloth, and after the red mist descended during a heated debate in which the recipient of his right cross was dropping some old school bigoted views, he’s being punished.  They’re sending him to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a one priest church in Chimney Rock, New York.  Normally I’d say something sarcastic about bigoted views in the Catholic Church, but this new guy from Chicago they have in charge seems pretty alright, so I’m going to let them slide on this one.  But just this one.  Jud, you see, was a boxer in his previous life, pre-cloth, and sometimes his fighting side comes through.  But in his heart, he’s an Anthony Norman-level good guy; all he wants to do is help to heal the world through the word of Christ.  Another priest tells him that they need fighters because the Church is under attack.  “A priest is a shepherd,” he says, and “the world is a wolf”.  The Church against the world.  Doesn’t leave a lot of room for the people, whom so often can forget that they’re a part of the world as well, same as the Church.  But Jud disagrees and expresses concern that treating those who disagree with them as a wolf would lead them to seeing everyone as a wolf.  He seeks unity instead of division, understanding instead of ostracizing.  Which to me seems like it’s something that should be pretty standard for someone in his profession, but the idea of helping people can be pretty foreign some of the more fire and brimstone types.

Wicks’s pulpit looks like the bow of a ship, but he never seems as jazzed as Luffy does when he’s at the front of the Going Merry

Those fundamentalists include Dr. Nat Sharp, played by Jeremy Renner (The Avengers, The Town), a doctor left reeling after his wife left him; Lee Ross, played by Andrew Scott (Fleabag, His Dark Materials), a science fiction writer who fled the “liberal hive mind” of New York City to write in small town America for right wing white men; lawyer Vera Draven, played by Kerry Washington (Scandal and the underrated Unprisoned) and her illegitimate brother/adopted son Cy, played by Daryl McCormack (Bad Sisters), a failed right wing politician and aspiring grifter social media star, whom she was forced to raise as her own from a young age by her father; and world class cellist Simone Vivane, played by Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus, Devs), a young woman in the grips of a debilitating, progressive disease that doctors don’t understand and that ruined her career.  Rounding out the church is Martha Delacroix, played by Glenn Close (The Shield, 102 Dalmatians), the religious zealot and Wicks-devotee who runs all the church admin; and recovering alcoholic groundskeeper Samson Holt, played by Thomas Haden Church (Wings, Sideways).  The cast is completed by Mila Kunis as Police Chief Geraldine Scott.  Hopefully she shows better judgment as a police officer than she does in the friends she chooses to support.

You can see why this is the flock.  Why these hardened few became Wicks’s army is easy to see.  They all have something that he can manipulate, that he can control.  Nat wants his wife back and blames everything but his own behavior for her leaving.  He’s not good looking enough, doesn’t make enough money, etc; all the excuses men love to make instead of looking internally.  Lee Ross wants to find inspiration again and perhaps his respectability, which he lost with his turn to extreme right wing views.  Vera wants her life back; it was completely hijacked by her father when he brought Cy home for to take care of.  She wanted to be a lawyer who makes a difference and then circumstances beyond her control forced her into this life instead of the one she was working towards (I know that feeling).  And now she’s stuck in a perpetual sunk cost fallacy of faith.  Cy is power hungry and lacks any level of self awareness or integrity.  And poor Simone, a world class talent struck down by a disease medical science can’t figure out.  Desperate and hopeless, she’s willing to throw her money and support behind anyone who will promise her a solution to her problem; or at the very least, enough false hope to stay on the line.  Easy prey for a wolf.

The most intense book club you’re ever likely to see

If you look at the names in the cast, you’ll know to expect great acting performances all around.  Glenn Close is great here, playing up the sort of Helen Lovejoy, pearl-clutching church lady stereotype with a more vindictive edge.  Nothing about how she’s written is subtle and that’s intentional.  Her last name is Delacroix; French for “of the cross”.  Cailee Spaeny adds another feather into the cap of her short and already impressive career with her smaller, but genuinely played role.  Josh Brolin leverages everything about his age, appearance, and manner of speech as the Monsignor to make him properly intimidating.  Frankly, Brolin is more imposing and threatening and, frankly, scary, than Thanos ever was.  Part of it is the source material; I’m not really worried that a giant purple alien will snap his fingers and erase half the world, but I do worry about religious fanaticism doing that (or worse).  And if I ever come across a performance by Daniel Craig that I didn’t think was good, I’ll let you know.  But it won’t be this one.  And yet, for all the notable names in the cast, it’s Josh O’Connor as Father Jud who really impressed me the most.  There isn’t a moment where his acting isn’t completely believable, where he isn’t sympathetic, where you don’t want to root for him.  His acting is subtle at times, headstrong at others, and impressive at every turn.  I’ve never seen him in anything else, but after this, I hope to see him a whole hell of a lot more.

“It’s a 3 hour science lesson that ends in a magical love closet, we need to be honest about it”

We’ve gotten this far into this murder mystery without talking about a murder yet, so this is where I tell you that a murder happens.  It’s an impossible murder.  Someone dies and someone else made it happen, and on the face of it, it couldn’t have happened.  And yet, it did.  And that’s why Blanc is there.  You don’t call Benoit Blanc for the kind of mystery any old tin star can solve, after all.  And that’s all you’re going to get on the murder.  Blanc is the detective, I’ll let him solve it.  He’s brilliant and unorthodox and funny, and I absolutely cannot get enough of Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc.  I can watch these movies over and over again.  This is a crafted mystery, and it comes together so amazingly, you really have to hop on Netflix and watch it for yourself.  Normally I advise to avoid trailers in general, but when it comes to a Rian Johnson mystery, it doesn’t really matter.  He’s that good at this.

And I thought my apartment was small

There are some observations that I made when watching this, though.  As much as this is a takedown of a certain kind of religious person who uses religion not as a faith and a guide of how to live their life, but as a means of judging others and forcing them to live by their standards, it’s also a strong defense of good people of faith.  This movie isn’t about Benoit Blanc coming in and dismantling religion and taking down the Catholic Church brick by brick, but rather it’s a tug-of-war between the two schools of thought within religious institutions.  It shows that some people are willing to look the other way when it comes to heinous acts that harm and harm again as long as the person doing the harm continues to benefit them in some way.  That any transgression is forgivable as long as it’s the right person is committing them because the benefit of the hypocrisy outweighs the shame being a hypocrite brings.  But it also shows the softer side of Catholicism.  It shows people who genuinely want to make the world a better place and to do it through kindness and empathy, albeit faith-based.  Dead Man doesn’t judge the religious; it judges harshly those who put on the veil of religiosity to hurt other people and impose their views.  And much like Glass Onion dismantled the cult of personality around so-called geniuses and Knives Out before it took on immigration, race, and the ownership of stolen land, Dead Man looks at the two faces of modern religion; taking down those who use it as a weapon and bolstering those whose faith is a sustaining force that isn’t used against others.  In an era where I of all people follow the Pope on Twitter, it’s an extremely relevant film for right now.

She takes the church fantasy football draft too seriously

I don’t know how Rian Johnson keeps doing it.  Crafting a film that’s both universally true and also right on the pulse of the moment.  Perhaps it’s a sad commentary on how little changes.  60 years on from the inciting incident, the original sin of Our Lady of Ceaseless Suffering, women are still being blamed for the ill deeds of men.  The original sin isn’t what the “harlot whore” did to the church, it’s what her father the priest did to her.  And yet she’s the one who’s been scorned and shamed and spoken ill of for six decades.  Women are still judged harshly and constantly while men are given pass after pass.  Religion is still being used as a weapon to divide while the heart of its message is drowned out by the volume of those who seek to twist it.  The truth still gets buried for a comforting or sensational story.  Lies told first are still hard to disprove with truths told later.  I love Knives Out and Glass Onion.  I think they’re two of the most brilliant mysteries made this century.  They showcase Johnson’s fantastic writing, casting, and directing.  Wake Up Dead Man might be his most brilliant one yet.

See what I was saying about the hat thing?

He does this thing, this magical thing where he never hides the ball.  Johnson can show a murder, put it right in front of your face, and it isn’t until Poirot—I mean Blanc—gathers suspects in the parlor to deliver his sermon on guilt that all the puzzle pieces fall into place and you say to yourself “How did I not see that?”  Which is the best feeling at the end of a whodunnit.  Being surprised is not enough; throwing a character on it who was barely in the entire thing and then hanging it on them as a shock reveal is cheap and it happens too often.  It’s a punchline to different joke.  That’s not what Rian Johnson does.  I admit to being closer to the mark on this one than the previous Blanc mysteries, but that takes nothing away from it.  If anything, it makes it even more engaging that I was so close to getting the whole picture.  He has this way of making you forget that the tangerine was never there (now, if you’ve never seen the movie Burning, that won’t make sense to you, but trust me when I say I’ve been wanting to use that reference for years). 

I think this cements him in the upper echelons of auteurs right now.  Of course, auteur theory is up for debate and no film is one person’s singular work, but I can’t think of a name other than Ryan Coogler that makes me so excited to see as a director credit.  Nolan’s disappointed me with both Oppenheimer and Interstellar; I know I’m in the minority about them, but I found them overly long and self indulgent.  Villeneuve is on his Dune detour, who knows how long it’ll be before he starts making serious movies again (yeah, I didn’t like Dune either).  Even the setup of Dead Man is riveting.  It’s told in such an engaging way that the 40 minutes in the first act go by with barely a blink when all it is just talking.  There are no car chases, no explosions, but it’s so captivating.  And a large part of that is the writing and acting.  O’Connor makes you forget for the better part of an hour that this is even a Benoit Blanc movie.  Smart, funny, and poignant, Wake Up Dead Man is 2 hours and 24 minutes well spent.  It’s rated PG-13 and streams exclusively on Netflix.

"Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”

#thelastjedidefensesquad