Review: Triple 9 (2016)

Director: John Hillcoat

**

This review was originally published on Scannain.com

Triple 9 opens on a meeting in a car in an underground location. The participants are a mix of shady cops and ex-marines, shrouded in darkness, the occasional facial feature barely illuminated by a red light outside. The three men in the car, Terrell (Chiwitel Ejiofor), Gabe (Aaron Paul) and Marcus (Anthony Mackie) are going over their planned bank heist. Their four man crew (the fourth being Norman Reedus’ getaway driver Russel) will enter the bank in central Atlanta, sweep through the place, get what they want and leave before the police can arrive. There’s just one problem: no-one’s told these guys there in a second-rate double-cross thriller with pretensions. Haven’t these guys watched Scorsese or Mann? If they did, they’d know this just can’t end well.

The oeuvres of Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann are just two figures in whose shadow Triple 9 skulks. The heists and police procedural aspects are steeped in a moral turpitude that’s nothing new to director John Hillcoat. Granted, Triple 9 doesn’t share or need the same level of bloody-minded decay and destruction as The Proposition or The Road, but it can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. The opening credits establish the cops and robbers in this narrative web; at one point we see mob boss Irina Vlaslov inspect a couple of bound soon-to-be corpses in a car boot. Irina is played by Kate Winslet, chewing the accent and clearly having a lot of fun. Her performance is one of two sources of relatively levity in Triple 9, the other being Woody Harrelson in a typically focused-yet-relaxed drawl as Detective Allen. He’s investigating how Terrell and his crew committed their broad-daylight heist, and for whom they committed it. Allen can’t see how they’re linked to Irina yet, but the film will go to great lengths to resolve itself, even if it takes all too quick a route to get there.

Triple 9 has ambition, but we’ve visited this territory before; there are Training Day-esque crooked cops (no-one plays these kinds of guys quite like Clifton Collins Jr.), a Russian mob straight out of Eastern Promises, and a surfeit of character arcs and plots to try to juggle. Writer Matt Cook is aiming for the grandeur of Heat, but Triple 9 has been compromised somewhere along the way. It clocks in at just under two hours, but there’s an inescapable feeling of lacking. When Irina sends Terrell and co. on another job, more personal stakes get involved. Irina blackmails Terrell into doing her bidding with their familial bond (Gal Gadot gets little to do as Terrell’s ex/Irina’s sister). Moreover, the team decide that they need to pull a ‘Triple 9’ in another part of town (shooting a cop in the line of duty) to distract from their heist elsewhere, and Marcus nominates his new partner Chris (Casey Affleck) as the target. It’s difficult to place whether the script or an overly-tightened edit is to blame, but as enemies turn on allies and vice versa, it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm. Too many characters are scrambling for oxygen, and while there are solid performances aplenty, there’s nothing in the screenplay to make most of them stand out. Hillcoat at least delivers crunchy action, with a midsection raid on a drug-dealer’s hideout making for riveting viewing. Still, something with this much talent and determination to punch above its weight should be more memorable. By ticking a few too many procedural boxes, Triple 9 sells itself too short.

Review: The Martian (2015)

Director: Ridley Scott

***

This review was originally published on Scannain.com.

For a man whose filmography has transcended space and time so often, Ridley Scott is clearly afraid of the future. If all manner of space beasties aren’t trying to impregnate and destroy us, then humanoids are malfunctioning and murdering. Granted, the past isn’t much better in the eyes of Sir Ridley, but there’s a positivity at the heart of The Martian that has been hitherto absent in his futuristic visions. How much of that can be attributed to Scott is debatable; the script is courtesy of the director/co-writer of The Cabin In The Woods, after all. In this case, science is not a manifestation of our arrogance, but the key to our survival and progress. Thematically we’re on terra firma, but at least this positivity is married to a healthy dose of fun, another concept that’s relatively alien to Scott.

The enjoyability of The Martian is the key to its success, and that’s due in large part to its leading man Matt Damon. He lends his easy everyman charm to the role of Mark Watney, one of a crew of six on a mission to Mars (Panic not; we’re far from De Palma’s nonsense here). A huge storm forces the crew to abandon their temporary base, but not before Watney is whisked away in the wind. Damon’s casting helps identify Watney as a likeable everyman better than the script does, as writer Drew Goddard (adapting Andy Reid’s bestseller) hits the ground running, affording little time to establish character at the start. Presumed dead, Watney is left behind; he awakes in the martian dust, alone and injured. He manages to get back to the base and perform a little DIY surgery (Always keep a stapler handy, kids!), but that’s merely the beginning of what is to be a prolonged ordeal.

At 141 minutes, The Martian is prolonged, but it’s also Scott’s most enjoyable film in eons, its sense of humour driving it along. As Watney is alone, he leaves video diary entries to chart his progress in creating a habitable living space for himself on the red planet. Watney’s ability to laugh at himself is matched only by his scientific prowess, and both are necessary to keep him alive. You’d find reasons to laugh too if you had to use your own body’s output as fertilizer. Damon is one of the few actors blessed with down-to-earth believability and inescapable movie star charm, and he puts this combination to good use here. For most of the film, Watney has no-one with whom he can interact, so his chipper demeanour keeps him sane and keeps the audience rooting for him.

Also fighting for Watney are the ground control team at NASA and his martian teammates, still in orbit aboard a space station. Scott has filled his film with reliable character actors, each leading gravitas to their roles. Again, this is necessary for the characters, as the plot mechanics are given priority. Jeff Daniels and Chiwitel Ejiofor are solid as yin and yang NASA head honchos, as are the crew aboard the orbiting space station, led by Jessica Chastain’s commander. From Michael Peña’s laid-back astronaut to Kristen Wiig’s pleasantly uncomedic turn as a NASA PR guru, there isn’t a bad turn among the cast. This is remarkable given how little they have to work with. For example, Chastain’s commander Lewis’ main character trait is a love of disco. Each actor gets about as much to work with (which feels wasted on the fine likes of Peña, Kate Mara or Sean Bean), though the disco thing does at least provide a few laughs, as Watney finds Lewis’ music collection among the abandoned effects in the Mars base. Despite ABBA’s insistence, Watney is determined not to meet his Waterloo.

Indeed, the use of disco music throughout The Martian says a lot about the register at which the film operates. Visually and narratively, it has a lot in common with the likes of Gravity and Interstellar (DoP Dariusz Wolski is the one person to come out of Scott’s last three films unscathed), but it doesn’t feel the need to be as self-important as either. It often refuses to get bleak, almost at the cost of real tension. It hops along at a giddy pace, with weeks, and months zipping by. Will the likeable Watney’s chipper demeanour and newfound acceptance of the wisdom of Benny and Bjorn be enough to save him? Everyone in The Martian is determined to get him home, and they’ll be damned if they don’t! For all the scientific know-how on display, and the cinematography and effects emphasizing the gravity of the situation, this is an (overly?) triumphant picture about people overcoming their limitations. Short of a character bellowing ‘Hooray for everything’, It’s a resolutely uncynical shout of defiant joy; naysayers need not apply.

Review: 12 Years A Slave (2013)

Director: Steve McQueen

*****

12 Years A Slave opens with the dreaded words ‘based on a true story’. This critic has lamented the tidal wave of biopics that has swamped the cineplexes this year, but this is something altogether more urgent, more draining, more worthy of the ‘for your consideration’ notices for which these films seem perfectly calibrated. Whip crack; let’s get to it.

Hunger and Shame provided Steve McQueen with a fine calling card for an all-but-inevitable move to filmmaking Stateside, but on paper 12 Years A Slave would appear to be a departure for this enviably talented filmmaker. From hunger strikers and sex addicts to an epic prestige picture about slavery? True, but all provide harsh depictions of abuses afflicted on the body, and the cruelties of which we are truly capable. Backs are lashed and bodies are hung as submission is wrung from souls that, if not already broken, are on the cusp of breaking. Be assured; McQueen knows what he’s getting into.

Solomon Northup (Chiwitel Ejiofor) lived a free and relatively well-to-do life in Saratoga, New York, making a living as a talented fiddler, amongst other roles. Our story begins one fateful day in 1841, when Northup met some travelling performers who duped him with a promise of a job and a payday. He falls asleep drunk and awakens in shackles. It all happens at a pace Northup and we the audience can scarcely comprehend. He was born a freeman, and that freedom has been taken away from him in the blink of an eye. As a slave trader brutally brings several welts of a thick board across Solomon’s back, Ejiofor’s eyes are wide open in fear and confusion.

12 Years A Slave sidesteps any biopic pigeonholes by simple virtue of the fact that Northup’s journey into slavery and his years therein offer little respite. There are no ups and downs to break an overbearing mood or to offer respite to an attention-deficient audience. Northup is transported south, and injustices are heaped upon him and his cohorts with no hesitation or compunction. In adapting Northup’s book, screenwriter John Ripley captures the perverted mindset of the slave-trading South. They are viewed as property, and little more, a belief justified by a manipulated Christian doctrine. At one point, slaveowner Epps (Michael Fassbender) dictates his rules to his slaves and holding a Bible aloft. He quotes the Old Testament and states “That’s scripture.” If one man should stray from the path, he dies.

Initially sold by Paul Giamatti’s slave-trader, Northup arrives at the plantation belonging to Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). Here, whatever pride and indignant queries Northup still has are beaten out by enforcers Chapin (J.D. Evermore) and Tibeats (Paul Dano). Eventually, Northup’s clear talents and rebellious spirit force Ford to sell him on to Epps, a cruel taskmaster. Few white people in this film are portrayed sympathetically, but there was no sympathy for these slaves in the South. Emancipation was two decades away and cotton needed picking. The cruel truth always wins out and McQueen never shies away from that reality. In that sense, 12 Years A Slave shares its overawing atmos of despair with the similarly-themed Mississippi Burning, as well as the broken passivity of the downtrodden African-Americans. DP Sean Bobbitt ensures the cruelty basks in clammy Louisiana sunshine, whilst sound design makes every whip crack sting and every blow land with a sickening thud.

The faces of the slaves convey so much. Ejiofor’s initial shock masterfully hardens to a passivity hiding a plan for survival. A game of bingo could be played with all the fine character actors filling in the world around Ejiofor. Fassbender proves a cruel standout, and Lupita Nyong’o shines as Patsy, Northup’s energetic fellow slave and centre of one of the film’s vital scenes, in which a perceived wrongdoing receives a disproportionate punishment. The arrival of Brad Pitt late in proceedings could distract from Northup’s plight, but this story is greater than anyone making this film The weight of history is a heavy burden, but McQueen bears it with dignity and a necessary does of brutality. Forgetting the mistakes of the past is not an option; 12 Years A Slave, without preaching or placating, won’t allow itself to be forgotten.