Lone Wolf and Stub: Thunderbolts*

“How was it?”

A question I was asked as I was leaving Marvel’s new movie, Thunderbolts*, which took me back.  Not only to a time when I was going to the theaters more often, but also to a time when movies were events; like waiting in line for the midnight showing of The Fellowship of the Ring or dinner with friends before heading to see The Dark Knight.  My response to the question was simple.  “Excellent,” I said, giving him a thumbs up. No spoilers ahead, so read with confidence.

There was so much more I wanted to say.  It was excellent; a throwback to the heyday of the MCU in such a good way, and if, like me, you saw the Super Bowl teaser and hit the eject button, it was a seriously pleasant surprise.  It had a level of depth that has been missing from MCU films in the past few years; the failure of the MCU to connect on an emotional level has hurt not just Marvel, but even secondary Marvel endeavors have suffered as a result.  LEGO, which has been making licensed Marvel sets for years, has reported a noticeable drop in sales partly due to the waning popularity of the MCU movies and Disney+ series.

I don’t want to be overly enthusiastic here, because expectation is the seed of disappointment, but Thunderbolts* is a movie that has moved on from the paint by numbers, pure setup for the next movie formula that has plagued Marvel since Endgame, and has returned to a focus on storytelling.  It’s not perfect, of course, no Marvel movie has been (since Winter Soldier, anyway), but it was emotionally engaging, well acted, and still fun to watch while feeling meaningful.  Most people have praised Florence Pugh’s performance and I will be no different, as it’s her heart that carries this movie on its shoulders (I’m not sure that’s anatomically correct, but there you have it), however that doesn’t mean that the rest of the cast isn’t excellent as well.  Sebastian Stan puts in a typically strong performance as Bucky, and perhaps the surprise of the movie is Wyatt Russell as John Walker. Russell is an actor I adore so much because of his role in Lodge 49 (the best show you’ve never seen), for him to make me dislike him as I did in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and this is seriously impressive.  Every time I saw him, I just thought “Oh, Dud, how did you turn into this?”  No one is surprised when Florence Pugh puts in a great performance, she’s a fantastic actress, but everyone here gave it their all and it came through in the final product.

Movies are terribly expensive these days, I know my ticket was almost $20, so taking a family or a date can definitely add up quickly.  But, if you’re a fan of superhero movies, this is one I definitely recommend you go see if you can.  Don’t watch any sneak previews, don’t dive into fan theories, don’t even look up the comic on which it’s based.  Just go see it; I went in cold, having only the slightest idea of what the Thunderbolts comic was about and having seen almost nothing about the movie.  And that made the experience so much better.

The larger picture here is that I’m beginning to feel like movies could be coming back.  In a time when streaming CEOs are claiming that streamers are the way we want to watch movies, I am personally dying for a reason to go back to the theaters.  I live in my home, it’s nice to leave it every once in a while for a reason other than I have to.  There’s still something to the magic of movie theaters; this was only the second time since the pandemic that I’ve been back (Sonic 3 over the holidays) and it was a delight to be back in those seats, in that dark room, with a handful of strangers all there for the same reason.  A solo trip to the movies is something most people avoid, but I absolutely love it.  It wasn’t a packed house, but I chose my showtime specifically to avoid one; there were still enough people there to have a shared experience, to have a moment in time when I could put my phone away and just do one thing.  And that one thing was watch a very good movie, one of the things I love to do most.   We’re inundated these days; yes, we have responsibilities—work, kids, etc.—but we also do it to ourselves, sometimes out of habit.  I can’t tell you how many times I pick up my phone to check something, get distracted by some alert or another, and forget why I picked it up in the first place.  Streaming services are convenient, but not my preferred way to watch a movie.  Yes, they’re very practical, but when was the last time you got excited by something practical?  I know it’s expensive, I know it’s inconvenient, I know it takes something special to get us back out to the theaters.  But if Thunderbolts* is any indication—along with the promising looking Fantastic Four trailer—Marvel might be back on track to giving us those special reasons to go back to the celluloid cathedrals.

I’m hoping to get out to the theaters more often and to give you more of these short, bonus impressions in this new “Lone Wolf and Stub” series.  Regular coverage will resume this week, as we continue our look into crime films.  As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll be back soon.

Three to Five Bank Robberies Outside Dallas, Texas

If you read last week’s installment in this crime block, you know that I like to know how we got to a place before I talk about where we’re going or where we are.  And since we’re talking about crime films and protagonist criminals, I want to acknowledge the outlaw of the old west.  Sure, there were shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, about a federal marshal trying to keep Dodge City in line and a benevolent, well meaning, rich family just sort of doing their thing, but the gunslinger and the outlaw have been America’s samurai, its ronin, beholden to no one, but somehow, usually, still doing good along the way (The Magnificent Seven is a perfect example of this, adapting Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai directly and cementing this notion).  Not always, of course, there is also the depiction of the amoral west and the depraved outlaw, like Sam Peckinpagh’s The Wild Bunch, without which we wouldn’t have games like Red Dead Redemption, I’m sure.  But I don’t want to go back to the old west, I don’t want to talk about the amoral outlaw.  I want to talk about the thing that makes outlaws, thieves, and bank robbers easier to root for than those on the default side of right (the ones upholding the law, of course; our antagonists, the police).

Released in 2016, Hell or High Water (streaming on Paramount+) is as relevant now as it was then, unfortunately for us.  But fortunately for us, it is Taylor Sheridan’s brilliant shining gem as a writer.  One year after he wrote Sicario, which blew me away the first time I saw it, High Water came out with his byline again.  Now, instead of being in the hands of masterful auteur Denis Villenueve, the director is David Mackenzie, a name I’d not heard before and have not again since, but boy did he do an incredible job with this.  And yet, despite what Taylor Sheridan’s brand has come to mean, this combination was a surprising and incredible marriage of talent; not just these two, but everyone involved.

We open on a dusty old Camaro stalking the empty streets of a vacant desert town in the early morning.  Not a particularly menacing or worrying sight, I’m sure it happens everyday in almost every town across the world, but in this case, you’re immediately put on edge by the film’s score, written by Nick Cave’s red right hand, and we see what they’re up to.  They pull into the parking lot of a branch of Texas Midlands Bank before they open and ambush the first employee who shows up.  It’s a bank robbery, naturally.  It’s hardly a professional job that goes off without a hitch, but it’s successful nonetheless and no one got seriously hurt.  Our two robbers rush off to another Texas Midlands branch to hit it before it gets too busy.  They go for small bills only, nothing bigger than a $20, and only from the drawers.  It’s clear that they’re going for quick over a big payday.  These are not elaborate heists where they hold people hostage and drill the vault to fund a lavish lifestyle.  In fact, when we see them dump the getaway car in a large pit and cover it with dirt, you see that they’re not living it up, in fact they’re fairly poverty-stricken and the few thousand they’re pulling from cash drawers seems more likely to be spent on groceries than to be tucked into a g-string or turned into snortable powder.  We also learn that this pair is made up of two brothers—Tanner, the elder ex-con, played by Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma, Big Trouble) and Toby, played by Chris Pine (the second best Chris; Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons) the younger.  They’re reeling from their mother’s recent passing; well, at least Toby is.  We see the equipment in her bedroom and it’s a reminder that dying slowly in America is an expensive endeavor.  Tanner wasn’t around; his relationship with his mother strained, in his estimation, because he always stood up to his abusive father, which in turn made him more abusive to the entire family (which I’m sure he blamed on his victims, as is the way of abusers).  One “hunting accident” later and Tanner took the father out of the picture, but he and his mother never seemed to get on and Tanner led a troubled life, including a stint in prison for assault.  Toby, on the other hand, though he’s down on himself, kept his head down.  Divorced with two sons, Toby has at least kept his nose clean as far as the law is concerned, but his family is estranged from him and he is absent from their lives and delinquent in his child support payments.

In come the literal white hats, in the form of past it veteran Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton, played by Jeff Bridges (Tron: Legacy, The Big Lebowski), and his partner Alberto Parker, played by Sheridanverse regular Gil Birmingham (Wind River, Yellowstone).  Hamilton clocks it as a well thought out robbery and figures that they’re building up to a specific amount for a purpose.  At first blush, it seems almost too much for one guy to figure out at one crime scene, but as an audience, we’re led to understand that Marcus, on the verge of retirement, is a talented and experienced investigator with strong instincts for this sort of thing.  Something that I think is important to note is that even though the Rangers here are the antagonists and that the film is very clear that we’re not meant to root for the “good guys” to get their man in the end, but rather that the bank robbers are our heroes, they are not the villains.  Indeed, in a way, none of the characters on screen, the walking, talking people who make up the film are the villains.  It’s not that there isn’t a villain, because there most certainly is, and it’s not an atmospheric, nebulous villain either.  Though the times are hard for everyone, it’s not just the economic situation as a whole that’s the problem.  It is something specific.  It’s concrete, it’s bricks and mortar, it has a website.

I love this script.  I’m a writer, so obviously I’m biased towards the written and spoken word, and there is something special about the writing here.  This is when Taylor Sheridan was at his very best—it’s honestly hard to believe that the same person who wrote Hell or High Water is actually the same person who would go on to subject us to the wildly popular dumpster fire of boomer-fodder that is Yellowstone; unlike that show, which feels mostly made for white dads who miss when phones were just phones and plugged into the wall, High Water has a social conscientious to it that is informed by its western roots.  There are moments that if they were in lesser movies would feel like they were hitting you over the head with the point, but with this direction, this level of acting, and this sharp a script, it feels like natural conversations people have about the world around them.  There are moments that are laugh out loud funny, there are moments that are poignant and cutting, there are lines that feel lifted from the days of Sergio Leone spaghetti western, but they always feel good and right in the moment.  As Alberto and Marcus stake out a bank, they muse about the prospects of the people living in that particular dusty, dying rural town.  Alberto, who is half Mexican and half Native American, says to Marcus “[a] long time ago, your ancestors was [sic] the Indians, until someone came along and killed them, broke them down, and made you into one of them.  150 years ago, all this was my ancestors’ land”, but then the white people came and took it by force.  And now those people’s descendants are having their land taken from them, but not by force.  By banks and corporations, just like the one they’re staked out in front of, trying to protect them and their federally insured money.  Katy Mixon (American Housewife) has a small role as a waitress who receives a $200 tip from Toby and refuses to give it up as evidence—it’s half her mortgage, she says, it’s the roof over her daughter’s head.  There is nothing glamorous about this film and the words people speak tell that to you strongly and convincingly.

But the script isn’t the only piece of the pie here.  Put your phone away when you watch this and keep your eyes on the screen, because the visual storytelling is top notch.  It’s slightly subtle, but when you see those atmospheric shots as the brothers or the Rangers are driving along, your eyes can drink in the troubles of the people there.  The foreclosure signs, the debt consolidation billboards, the cash for gold advertisements; the movie quietly shows you what people are going through, and as they drive from dying town to dying town, you see the lengths that some people go to make money off that suffering.  At the diner where Katy Mixon works, there is a group of men sitting in a booth who have been there all day—and the impression that I get is that they sit there all day, everyday, because they don’t have anywhere else to be.  Everywhere you go, in just about every shot of the movie, you can see that people are struggling to make ends meet.  Which makes bank robbery seem like a viable career choice, even if the point here isn’t to get rich, at least not directly.  There’s something very poetic about what Toby and Tanner are doing.

And that brings me to what makes this movie so head and shoulders above many modern westerns, beyond the script or the visual storytelling—the characters.  Toby is relatively clear-headed and moral, despite the choices he makes.  He’s also self aware, something that a lot of people could stand to learn to be.  When he sits with his 14 year old son, after offering him a beer that he refuses, he gives him some life advice.  He tells him that people are going to say things about him, and when his son protests that he won’t believe what they say, he cuts him off.  He says to believe it all, because it’s probably true, and that his son shouldn’t be like him.  Toby wants his son to use him as an example of what not to do, something his father would never have said to him.  Toby is a highly sympathetic character, someone who wants to accomplish simply what he set out to do, and even though it’s a dangerous plan, he’s determined to ensure that no one gets hurt.  Tanner, on the other hand, is impulsive, violent, and hot-headed.  He’s got a record, he fancies himself as a modern day Comanche, enemy of everyone, lord of the plains, a man yearning to be free in a society that wants to and has incarcerated him for not following their rules.  He’s calm until he’s not, sitting in a gas station and responding to threats in the coolest and most quotable fashion I’ve ever seen, and then moments later, he’s pistol-whipping bank tellers for no good reason.  But he still finds a way to endear himself to you, despite his cynicism and pessimism.  As he talks to Toby about the plan, it becomes clear that he thinks they’ll fail; that they’ll either not get the money they need or more likely, in a West Texas where just about everyone has a gun and fantasizes about stopping an outlaw like John Wayne, die in the process.  When Toby pushes him on why he agreed to go along with the plan, he simply says “because you asked, little brother”—with every trouble he’s seen, with every trouble he’s caused, when his brother needed him, there was nothing he would let get in the way.  Before they gear up for the final push, the brothers share a very brotherly moment, drinking a beer and roughhousing together, the way they probably did as kids.  It’s a tender moment that sticks with you, with barely a word said.  Even Marcus, with his casual racism and Rooster Cogburn drawl, and Alberto, with his constant teasing of over-the-hill Marcus are likable characters.  You watch it hoping that Toby and Tanner win, but not necessarily hoping that Marcus and Alberto will lose.

Hell or High Water is a special kind of movie; it’s not just a crime film, it’s not just a modern western, it’s a picture of the end of things.  The end of a time, the end of the small town, maybe even the end of the idea of attainable American prosperity.  Taylor Sheridan may be a name that now leaves a bad taste in my mouth because of his problematic succeeding works that dominate my Paramount+ home screen, but he certainly wrote some fantastic movies prior to that and Hell or High Water is one of them, alongside Sicario and Wind River.  There’s so much in this movie that I want to talk about, but I don’t want to ruin any of the moments that you deserve to experience for yourself.   The movie is smartly written, well shot, and well paced; at 1 hour, 42 minutes, it’s almost breathless in its execution, taking only the necessary breaks and wasting none of them.  It’s a movie that reminds us of the power of film to tell stories and it shows how, when faced with a broken system, one where the odds are stacked against you, where playing by the rules can leave you and your family destitute for generations, an outlaw can be the protagonist you need to see.

True Finance

Moving along in our crime block makes me want to go back first, to get a look at sort of how this all began.  After all, I’d wager that most filmmakers owe a lot to those who came before them, and in the case of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), it’s owed quite a bill by many celebrated directors who can draw their stylistic lineage back to Breathless and the French New Wave rebellion against traditional cinema.  For better or for worse, we probably wouldn’t have the likes of Martin Scorsese (a quick examination of Mean Streets will show you Breathless fingerprints all over it), Quentin Tarantino, or Jim Jarmusch, even Steven Soderbergh and brilliant Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai have made films that were clearly influenced by Godard.  And I think that’s wonderful; it gives film a living history, a DNA that we can trace back to its origins.  One of the best ways to know where we are and where we’re going is to know where we’ve come from, right?

Anyway, Breathless (streaming on HBO/Max), other than its pioneering film techniques, like using handheld cameras and low angles to get in and amongst the scenes, or filming in real world locations instead of studio backlots, or frequent jump cuts to add to the frenetic nature of desperation in the characters, is a good movie, but not one that will stick with me for the rest of my life for its narrative.  It’s incredible visual storytelling and such an important part of film history, of course.  As a story though, to the modern eye, it’s not that special.  A two-bit criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) makes a rash decision and shoots a cop dead and then tries to hide out in Paris with a girl (Jean Seberg) until he can collect enough money to escape to Italy.  The two-bit is a womanizer and what passes for romantic banter in 1960 is borderline horrifying at times; he’s thoroughly unlikable and you will find yourself rooting for his demise almost instantly.  Seberg’s character though, is an American in Paris, a pixie cut and a dream away from a career in journalism, and a very charming character.  And the film focuses much more on the romantic aspects of their relationship (such that it was) than any crime or anything else.  Anyway, it’s in French, so I don’t have extensive notes for you because my French is not nearly good enough for me to watch and take notes without needing the subtitles, malheureusement; je suis désolé.  But, if you weren’t feeling super excited about reading 2,000 words on a 65 year old black and white French new wave film, you’re in luck.  Because I’ve got a hidden gem for you that’s in English—another COVID film that would be a shame to forget because it’s so damn good.

No Sudden Move (2021, streaming on HBO/Max) boasts a star-studded cast and a resurgent Brendan Fraser—before he was in the Oscar-nominated The Whale, he was in this movie.  And starring alongside him are the immense talents of Don Cheadle (Traffic, the MCU), Benicio Del Toro (The Usual Suspects, Sicario), and Kieran Culkin (Succession, A Real Pain), as well as supporting roles from David Harbour (Stranger Things), Amy Seimetz (Family Tree), Frankie Shaw (Mr. Robot), Julia Fox (after Uncut Gems, but before Kanye), Jon Hamm (30 Rock), and Ray Liotta (Narc, Goodfellas) in one of his final roles.  It’s lovely see a movie with so many great actors that uses them well and tells a good story, unlike so many star-studded films we have become accustomed to seeing that just feels like them paying off their vacation homes.  The talent on display here is staggering and it’s helmed by the aforementioned Steven Soderbergh.  See what I mean about knowing where we came from?

We open on Don Cheadle’s character Curtis Goynes being recruited for a job.  It’s a simple one, they say.  Go “babysit” a family to use as hostages while the husband retrieves an important document from his boss’s office.  Curtis is reluctant to do it, not knowing who he’ll be working for, as he has just been released from prison after another job went wrong, causing him to lose $25,000 that he was staked by his boss and now he’s desperate to get some cash and get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak.  Fresh out of prison and persona non grata with some very dangerous people, once his quote is met—$5,000—he has no choice but to agree.  He’s paired Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), an Italian mobster who is desperate, but for different reasons.  We meet him when he’s saying goodbye to his mistress, a married woman with a rich husband (whose identity we will learn later in the film).  Wanting a payday, he agrees once Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) informs him that they’ll meet his quote—$7,500.  Even in crime, the pay disparity is apparent and racial tensions underpin so many interactions in this film.  I should, at this point, mention that No Sudden Move is set in Detroit in 1954; so you’re in for some period costumes and a lot of old cars.  This is not the Detroit we know now, this was kind of the heyday.  The American auto industry over time turned Detroit into a boomtown and the blood of the city was almost inseparable from the gasoline pumping through its engines.  Curtis and Ronald don’t know each other by anything but their reputation and they don’t trust each other.  Unsurprisingly, Ronald is a bit racist, as was the custom of the time, and Curtis is distrustful of Ronald because he has a reputation for not thinking things through and acting rashly.  Now, I’ve never done any real crime before, maybe some light speeding here and there, a touch of reckless driving, and I fully admit to jaywalking on occasion (I’m kind of a rebel), so nothing serious, but my logical brain here thinks that if I’m going to be holding a family hostage very quietly in their upper middle class suburban neighborhood home, that I’d want to work with someone who isn’t likely to pop off and do something stupid at any moment.  So though I lack experience in this particular field, I understand Curtis’s hesitation.  The distrust is so thick in the air that you can practically breathe it in.

Luckily, tying them all together is Doug Jones’s handpicked man, Charley (Kieran Culkin), who explains the nature of the job to them.  Matt Wertz (David Harbour) has access to a code book full of sensitive information that whoever is hiring them wants.  Curtis clocks this immediately as a lie, but the conversation doesn’t go much further than that.  Charley clearly has the leg up on the information here and is more than happy to keep Curtis and Ronald in the dark.  Cut to Matt getting ready for work in the morning when our trio of masked criminals show up and hold Mary Wertz (Amy Seimetz) and her kids at gunpoint while they explain the situation to Matt and less than subtly drop that his affair with his boss’s secretary should get him into the safe.  Charley gets in the back of Matt’s Chevrolet and they drive to the office.  Once he gets there, Matt tries to retrieve the documents from his boss’s safe, only to find (after a slight kerfuffle with girlfriend/secretary Paula, played by Frankie Shaw) that the safe is empty and his boss took it with him when he went on vacation.  He fakes the documents, figuring a few low level goons wouldn’t know what they’re looking at, and Charley delivers them to Doug Jones.  But Jones does figure out what they are, and let’s just say, things go from bad to worse for everyone involved.  What follows is a twisty ride where deceptions and double crosses fly as fast and as plentifully as bullets in a gunfight, of which there are a few.  Loyalties aren’t tested, they aren’t stressed, they aren’t broken; they are simply nonexistent.  In this world, there are two states of being—scheming and dead.  If you’re not one, you’re the other.  In the midst of all this, Curtis and Ronald manage to get their hands on the real documents that are very much not the code book that Charley said it was, but rather something with serious national ramifications regarding Detroit’s biggest industry.  And I’m not talking Motown Records here (only partly because at this point, Motown Records hadn’t been founded yet).  And as much as cash is king in the hypercapitalist world of crime, it’s nothing compared to money in the corporate world.  The lines between crime syndicate and corporation are very blurred here (my how things have…not…changed in 70 years) and that complicates the situation more and more.  As Curtis and Ronald peel leaf after leaf to get to the artichoke heart of corruption, violence, and greed, they get in deeper over their heads with every move they make.

This is the second time I’ve seen this movie and it was even more impactful this time around because it was a little easier to follow the twists even though I didn’t remember most of them.  But the composition of this movie is so good; it gets the tonal balance just right.  There is comedy, there is tension, there is violence, but it works because it’s done incredibly well, by excellent actors, a writer in top form (Ed Solomon, from whom I would not have expected this, because while he wrote Men in Black and Bill and Ted, he also wrote Charlie’s Angels), and a veteran director with lots of good films under his belt—from weightier stuff like Side Effects and Traffic to the lighter fare of the Ocean’s capers or Logan Lucky’s heartfelt heist, it’s clear that Soderbergh knows what he’s doing and makes sure that he doesn’t lose the fun in this serious movie.  Because it is heavy in some ways—beyond just the life and death of people and innocents, the larger story here is integral to our lives still and has consequences that we’re still feeling in the real world today (there is a direct through line from this film to The Last Stop in Yuma County, believe it or not, a movie set some 20 years later).

I’m going to take a moment to talk about the visual quirks of this film.  My blog is not about cinematography, it’s not purely about the art of directing (frankly, I’m not qualified to talk about either of those things anyway), but sometimes a director does something so out of the norm that I have to mention it.  Much like Godard used jump cuts, even mid-sentence, partly to create a sense of disjointedness in Breathless (and partly because of the improvised nature of the script), Soderbergh uses incredibly wide, warped, and vintage lenses here, which give a sense of surreal dreaminess to many of the shots.  I thought he was using a fisheye lens at first because of the edge distortion on the screen, but in my research I found it was just old, wide angle lenses that were probably not actually up to snuff for commercial sale.  What this does to the viewer is help keep you in the same state of confusion as our protagonists are.  We learn as they learn, just about the entire movie is shot from their perspective, we rarely get glimpses of information that they don’t get.  We never walk into a room knowing a double cross is imminent because we had a scene with the other party telling us what they’re going to do.  The viewer has to sit with the same tension as they do and this fisheye effect helps add to that state of confusion.  A really interesting technique that adds to the visual storytelling in the movie, I love the choice Soderbergh made here.  There’s a strong minimalist aesthetic through the film that accentuates this choice; normally we’re used to seeing period pieces in very fancy costumes, often Victorian-era fripperies or glamorous wardrobes, but this is very pared down. It’s just so well put together.

Much like Dungeons & Dragons, No Sudden Move is a hidden gem that shouldn’t be because of the unfortunate time it was released.  This movie, despite its R rating, should have been huge, it should have sparked conversation, it should have been in Oscar discussions, but instead, I don’t think I know anyone who has even heard of it, let alone seen it.  It is smartly written, well acted, well shot, and a strong commentary on the real world and the cost of unchecked greed and what we decide is progress.  I didn’t even talk about the Black neighborhood facing displacement due to urban renewal or the hints that Matt’s wife Mary is hiding in the closet and has possibly reciprocated feelings for her neighbor at a time when being gay could get you killed.  There’s so much here in this film’s 1 hour 55 minute runtime that it could have felt overstuffed, but everything sticks around for the right length of time and doesn’t ever overstay its welcome.  A smart, thoughtful crime film is something relatively rare and should be celebrated.  If you have two free hours and a Max subscription, I highly recommend this one.

Rat-a-tat-touille

Sometimes movies can be a lot like jigsaw puzzles.  You dump everything out on the table, you start sorting your pieces, and as they fall into place, the bigger picture becomes clear (or, if you’re like me, you give up after half an hour, put all the pieces back in the box, and wonder why you didn’t just buy a picture of the thing in the first place).  And I’m not talking just mysteries either; sure, there is almost always a “pieces in place” moment in a good whodunnit, but it doesn’t always have to be one for the same sort of mechanic to apply.

The Last Stop in Yuma County (streaming on Paramount+) is kind of like that jigsaw puzzle.  A late fuel truck to a dry gas station on a deserted highway.  The waitress opening the adjacent diner and running the place on her own.  Stranded travelers heading in one by one and waiting for the truck to arrive because the next gas station is a hundred miles away and they won’t make it.  The kitchen knife salesman on the way to see his estranged daughter.  The road tripping elderly couple whose gauge is on E.  The local stopping into the diner for a quick bite to eat.  The young, naive deputy picking up coffees for the sheriff, who happens to be the waitress’s husband.  A pair of Bonnie and Clyde wannabes aimlessly wandering.  And the bank robbers, escaping from hot pursuit with their ill-gotten gains in tow.  Don’t want to forget them.  Quite the important puzzle piece they’ll turn out to be.

So, all for the want of a horseshoe nail, these folks are stranded in a diner, next to a gas station that has no gas, drinking coffee in the presence of two criminals, one hardened and one jumpy, but both violent and both armed.  Nowhere to go, no reasonable way to stay.  It’s more than a jigsaw puzzle, it’s more than bowling pins that need to be knocked down, it’s a powder keg waiting for a spark.  It’s funny, though.  And I don’t mean funny odd, I mean funny ha-ha.  I mean I laughed out loud a few times during the movie, which was surprisingly uncomfortable, but in a way that I felt lacked purpose.  It’s one part comedy and one part Shakespearean tragedy, with violence erupting suddenly and unexpectedly, leading to tonal inconsistencies that left me feeling pretty cold towards the movie.  There’s something to be said about a mix of comedy and violence, just as there is comedy and horror, but it has to be balanced right and I didn’t feel that Last Stop got the balance quite right.

As the stage is littered Hamlet-style with the bodies of the innocent and guilty alike, I found myself wondering what the point of it all was.  Is Last Stop a poignant portrait of the cost of ceaseless violence?  Is it a criticism of the passionate and compassionless pursuit of ultracapitalistic gains?  Is it just a snapshot of the very worst day in the lives of random people, where the pointless toiling of everyday existence is punctuated with irreversible tragedy?  Normally, I praise movies that don’t waste your time with bloated lengths, but in this instance the 90 minutes felt sparse and lacking context.  Character motivations are thin, characterizations lack depth, and many of the characters felt a little off the rack.  I want to tell you more about them, I want to tell you who I connected with, who made me feel something, who made angry, who made me hopeful; but I didn’t get any of that.  Characters barely have names, let alone personalities (the arguable main character, played by Simon Tam lookalike Jim Cummings (The Wolf of Snow Hollow) is simply credited as “Knife Salesman”.  None of the names of the characters stuck with me, leading me to refer to them only with shorthand signifiers in my notes.  “Salesman”, “waitress”, “Guy from Reservation Dogs”, “Joe Chill” (from Batman Begins), “Sierra McCormick” (that’s her actual name; underutilized here, but excellent in the Prime original film Vast of the Night), Faizon Love (Elf, The Parent ‘Hood), “probably racist couple”, etc.  The film is set vaguely in the 1970s, which I know was a tumultuous time as so many times are, just like ours is now, but not even lip service is paid to the hardship of the era.  I know there was an oil crisis in the 1970s and the missing gas is probably meant to refer to that.  But when we had a radio report about the dented green Ford Pinto used by the bank robbers, the opportunity arose to give some context to the general strife of the time, but if you, for example, don’t know about the energy crisis of the 1970s or can’t place the time period of the film by the cars or the technology, you might not connect the dots—despite the fact there’s a news bulletin on the radio and a newspaper that features prominently, the date is never shown or told. And that’s not good storytelling; it comes across as lazy.

If you’re a regular reader of mine, you might be thinking to yourself “But you’re always railing against movies that don’t trust their audience” and yes, that’s true.  We’re in another fine line situation here where if there isn’t enough set dressing, if there isn’t enough context, if there isn’t enough characterization then the movie feels like a collection of loosely connected events rather than a narrative.  “What’s my motivation?” isn’t just a joke at the expense of actors, it’s a necessary part of narrative storytelling.  Understanding why a character is doing something is just as important or even more so than the fact that they’re doing that thing.  There’s an internal dialogue that goes on in each of us that that only we’re privy to and, sure, maybe we go on autopilot sometimes as we roll out of bed and pour ourselves a cup of coffee and get ready for the day, but there’s generally a thought process behind our actions.  And as a viewer or a reader of a story, we need to be ushered in past that velvet rope into a person’s mind so we can understand and identify with them.  I don’t mind filling in the blanks, but as a narrative, this diner film felt a little undercooked.  I know, a restaurant pun.  That’s where it left me.  With puns.

Although, it’s not all bad news.  There were genuinely surprising moments, there were some situations of great tension, but all in all, it leans a little too heavily on the Tarantino-esque influences that make it sometimes feel more like a wave in the ocean than a diamond in the rough.  But this is also writer-director Francis Galluppi’s first feature film, and as much as I’ve been down on it, Last Stop still shows promise and marks Galluppi as one to watch.  Now, this has a 97% RT score, so I’m well aware that I’m in the minority when it comes to a critical voice and I’m usually in line with critic scores.  This one really surprised me because I was very much looking forward to it and it seems right up my alley.  However, as much as Bad Times at the El Royale received criticism for being too heavily influenced by Tarantino (and, again, if you know me, you know my opinion of Tarantino is pretty low, so calling something Tarantino-esque is not a compliment from me), I think it was a better movie, with more impactful characters, a meatier story, showstopping performances by both Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Bridges, and a little more to say than Last Stop.  The Last Stop in Yuma County reminds me of the Blaise Pascal quote often attributed to Mark Twain, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter”; it takes a level of mastery to tell an effective, impactful, and memorable story in about an hour and a half, like Late Night with the Devil does.  But instead of economizing to achieve such a short runtime, it felt like just a little too much was left on the cutting room floor that should have been in the movie.

There’s a kernel here, though, and I do think that Francis Galluppi has the potential to deliver some really good movies in the future and I think Last Stop is a pretty decent start to a feature length career and it’s one that I want to watch.  After all, a rookie’s first game is rarely their best, but it shows promise.  And it’s fair to say that what did show up on the screen was competently done and well acted; it just wasn’t the complete package. I always like to make sure that I separate liking something or not and thinking something was bad or good.  It’s why I bring up 2 Fast 2 Furious so often; you can like something that isn’t good and you can also dislike something that is good (for example, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nightcrawler was an unlikable film about an utterly despicable character, but it was very good; I just didn’t like it).  I don’t want you to leave here thinking this was a bad movie and that you shouldn’t watch if you like a crime thriller; you may just as well find something in it that I didn’t, as 97% of critics did.  To me, it was just…middling.  And, while that’s not a crime, it would have felt dishonest on my part not to mention the things I felt didn’t work.

But what this movies does do is kick off a crime block, where over the next few weeks I’m going to visit or revisit some crime films; let’s get into the nitty gritty over our beloved outlaws, movies where our protagonists are often on the wrong side of the law.  Because in a world where the rule of law is in tatters and the cops can’t be trusted, who else can you turn to for heroics but the outlaw?  Modern day gunslingers, baby faced bank robbers, those who operate outside of the law, but not for altruistic purposes like our beloved vigilantes; they can be so damn interesting sometimes.  And I’m looking forward to getting into that with you.