'Rebel Moon' feels late to the party

 

 Poor farmers do their work by hand on Veldt, a moon that orbits the planet Maura in Rebel Moon -- Part One: A Child of Fire. The farmers battle resistant soil, and refer to themselves as humble. Their grimy clothes make it seem as if the word “laundry” has yet to enter their vocabulary. 

 Of course, these innocent agrarians are ripe for plucking. 

 The Motherworld, an evil empire that employs soldiers and robots, is eager to steal the villagers' crops, ravage their women, and lay claim to ... well ... everything. 

 After some haggling with a vicious Motherworld commander (Ed Skrein), the village's peaceful leader is murdered, and the desperate farmers decide to find their own warriors. 

 No one mentions Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, but you wonder whether the villagers might have seen it. Or if you prefer, maybe they immersed themselves in the StarWars saga.

   Anyway, what are desperate farmers supposed to do when facing a powerhouse force that knows no mercy?

  Director Zack Snyder follows a familiar arc in Rebel Moon -- Part One, a heavily reupholstered version of a narrative moviegoers know well. 

   In the movie universe, new stories are hard to find and familiarity needn't breed contempt, but Rebel Moon touches many of the usual bases without making a big-time score.

  The story centers on Kora (Sofia Boutella), a former member of the bad-guys team who reluctantly agrees to help the farmers. Kora sets out to gather a crew, a task that deposits the movie in various outposts of its fictional galaxy.

  A scene reminiscent of StarWars cantina? Yes, that, too, although with creatures of its own.

   Kora is accompanied on her recruiting journey by Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), a farmer who mostly watches the action, presented with the snippets of slow motion Snyder frequently employs. 

    Those who join Kora’s renegade band include characters played by Djimon Hounsou (as the fallen General Titus), Staz Nair (as the muscular Tarak), Bae Doona (as the sword-fighting Nemesis), and Ray Fisher as Bloodaxe, a character who demonstrates that names can tell us all we need to know.

    Charlie Hunnam signs on as Kai, a mercenary who joins with Kora and adds a bit of wise-guy flourish.

    Tolerable for about an hour, the movie eventually bogs down, trapped by its need to introduce more characters, tell Kora's backstory, create additional bizarre environments, and plod toward the inevitable showdown with Skrein's Admiral Atticus Noble, the sadistic chief solider in the Motherworld’s repressive empire. Another space Nazi.

    The movie’s creature-feature aspects can be imaginative, notably a large spider with a human female torso, but battle sequences break no new ground, hand-held weapons are more clunky than streamlined, and some of the space ships look like barges.

    Beyond all that, the movie could have benefited from more verve — not to mention a few more memorable characters.

   Snyder has a following and his Army of the Dead (2021) was fun, but Rebel Moon too often feels warmed over, more like leftovers than an appealingly fresh meal.

   Perhaps redemption awaits. Snyder has split his space opera into two parts with the second helping due next April. 

   For now, though, it's arguable that Rebel Moon stands as an overloaded space opera that offers too much, too late.

  Rebel Moon streams on Netflix beginning Dec. 21.

This gang battles long odds

The True History of the Kelly Gang is a bit of a jumble, but it's not easy to shake off.

A man-child sprung from an abusive boyhood, Ned Kelly became an outlaw legend in Australia. Kelly also became the subject of author Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The True History of the Kelly Gang, source of a wild-ass movie of the same name.

Working in an appropriately feverish style, director Justin Kurzel has made a movie that’s difficult to digest — and maybe that’s its greatest virtue. Kurzel's "true history" brims with stylistic embellishment, unvarnished brutality, and unfocused passion.

As the adult Kelly, George Mackay (1917) gives a scowling, fiery performance. Mackay's Kelly is pushed into violence through a mixture of what might be psychopathy, conviction, and horrible circumstances. Like many of the Irish in British-ruled Australia of the mid-19th century, Kelly was born into an oppressive, impoverished world.

Among his many peculiarities, Kelly wore a bulletproof helmet — inspired by pictures he’d seen of the USS Monitor. His gang sometimes dressed in … well … dresses. Like the western outlaws he resembled, Kelly thrilled and terrorized.

All of this can seem strange to American audiences who either haven’t read Kelly’s novel or are otherwise unfamiliar with Kelly whose life was a study in brutality — both of the rough terrain on which he lived and the violent behavior to which he was driven.

Kurzel doesn’t so much plumb psychological depths as he carries on a flirtation with the motivations of his characters. Kelly loved his mother (Essie Davis), but she had strange ways of returning his love. While still a boy (played by Orlando Schwerdt), Kelly was sold by his mother to an outlaw, Russell Crowe’s Harry Power. Power became a kind of surrogate father to Kelly, whose real father died after serving a prison sentence. Kelly was 12 at the time.

Power alternately introduces the boy to the high life (steak dinners) while encouraging his brutality. Power accepted no one who couldn’t, as he put it, “pull the trigger.”

Looking bearded, thick and unkempt, Crowe appears in an early chapter of the story. When Power vanishes from the screen, Crowe's absence is felt, but not before he reminds us of how good he can be.

The duplicities of the British are deeply ingrained in a British constable (Nicholas Hoult). Kelly's romantic life, such as it was, focuses on a prostitute portrayed by Thomasin McKenzie. Another British officer (Charlie Hunnam) sexually harasses Kelly’s mother in the movie’s early going, part of the movie's attempts to show the strange intimacies between oppressors and the oppressed.

To his credit, Kurzel likes to blur lines. We don’t always know whether to feel sorry for Kelly or be revolted by him. Crowe’s character is down-to-earth but homicidal, and Kelly’s mother proves a mass of contradictory impulses: Love and cruelty among them.

I wasn’t tempted to spend much time researching the real Kelly and the film begins with a wink that subverts any need for pinpoint accuracy. Nothing you’re about to see is true,” we’re informed by a title card.

Kurzel’s feverish approach often left me bleary-eyed, but the director and his cast have hold of something weird, raw, and gripping, a subject they either couldn’t or didn’t want to contain. But even when we don’t quite know what to make of The True History, it's difficult to turn away.

Warriors on a larcenous mission

Triple Frontier doesn't exactly freshen an old formula, but skillfully repeats it.

The story probably sounds familiar. A disgruntled ex-member of the special forces gathers a trusted group of fellow warriors in hopes of pulling off a job that will repay them for the work they did while in uniform.

The target: a South American drug lord, who also happens to be a vicious killer. No one among the righteous will mourn the drug czar's demise. The obvious question: What could go wrong. The obvious answer: Plenty.

Triple Frontier boasts heavy credentials. The movie was directed by J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, A Most Violent Year). Mark Boal (The Hurt Lucker and Zero Dark Thirty) earned co-writing credit, and high-tension maven Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) served as one of the movie's producers.

A couple of top-liners add additional appeal. Oscar Isaac and Ben Affleck head a cast that includes Garret Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, and Charlie Hunnam. <>
The movie signals its intentions in the names of its characters. Isaac plays Santiago 'Pope' Garcia, the mission's prime mover. Affleck portrays Tom 'Redfly' Davis, a logistical genious. My favorite: Hunnam's William 'Ironhead' Miller.

These hard-bitten but aging warriors know how to plan an operation, but -- as the saying goes -- the best-laid plans ... Well, you know the rest.

Chandor handles the action with aplomb, ensuring that it unfolds in coherent fashion. The big heist generates the requisite tension and the cast does as much as it can with material that won't evoke any comparisons with Chekov. Triple Frontier displays more interest in the ABCs of survival than in any deep exploration of character.

I'm a bit of sucker for this kind of material and Triple Frontier -- which wisely places its robbery about midway through -- earns passing grades with challenging locations (crossing the Andes on foot) and by emphasizing the sheer weight of the haul of cash the gang tries to bring back to the U.S.

I guess that's the point: Major money can weigh you down as much as it can open doors to liberation. Or maybe the point is something else: This kind of material remains irresistible for filmmakers.

A second helping of 'Papillon'

Gritty detail and grim realism may not be enough to justify another version of a familiar story.

The unavoidable question that haunts any viewing of the new movie Papillon falls squarely on the shoulders of the 1973 movie of the same name. That movie that told the gripping story of one man's attempts to escape the torment and terror of a penal colony located in French Guiana. Could anyone pull off a second helping?

The 1973 movie starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in what then seemed like odd-couple casting.

McQueen was a movie star with a well-defined big-screen persona; Hoffman was an actor with a capital “A.” We went to McQueen's movies to watch a cool, emotionally contained hero dominate the screen; we watched Hoffman's work to see an avid actor dig his way into the characters he played.

Written by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr. and directed by Franklin Schaffner, the 1973 movie created a commercial splash.

The 2018 version of Papillon doesn’t generate the same kind of excitement and probably couldn’t. When the first movie arrived, the wave of new technologies — from VCRs to streaming — was still waiting in the wings. Movies seemed bigger, less disposable.

So why, in a time of movie abundance (at least in terms of numbers of releases), remake a movie that already did the job of introducing American audiences to Henri Charriere; a.k.a., Papillon, and Louis Dega, two French criminals who served time in a sweltering prison hell in South America?

Danish director Michael Noer answers the question by amping up the movie's grit and cruelty, probably to heighten its raw authenticity. His movie sweats and brutalizes.

Charriere, the McQueen character now played by Charlie Hunnam, gives the movie its sinew and drive. Wrongly convicted of murder in 1931, Charriere receives a life sentence. En route to the prison, he meets Dega, the Hoffman role now played by Rami Malek. A forger by trade, Dega has enough money to ease some of Guiana's pain. Prisoners could buy their way onto better work details, for example.

Understanding this, Charriere, bereft of financial resources, offers to protect the weaker Dega from the prison’s many predators. The two develop an uneasy relationship.

The authenticity of Charriere’s account has been questioned, but his story stands as a tribute to the unbreakable will of a man who refuses to be crushed. Charriere, who wrote a best-selling book about his experiences, never relinquishes his hope for escape, to free himself from the choking burdens of stupid authority.

Hunnam, last seen in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and Malek, of TV’s Mr. Robot, may not generate the box-office heat once sparked by McQueen and Hoffman, but both are good. They fully embrace the movie's challenges: weight loss, punishing fights and sustained reaction to a fear-drenched climate.

The movie devotes much its time to depicting the sadism that prevailed in French Guiana, delivered at the hands of both prisoners and guards. Escapes were greeted with years in solitary. Those deemed murderers were executed by guillotine while the assembled prisoners were forced to watch.

Though more harrowingly detailed than the first installment, this new Papillon still tells the same basic story as the 1973 movie and, as a result, can’t help but surrender some of its power. Put another way: An inescapable aroma of redundancy limits this credible but exhausting edition.

Lock, stock and a smokin' hot sword

King Arthur gets the Guy Ritchie treatment -- and suffers for it.

In King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, director Guy Ritchie goes medieval on us, and the result is bleary-eyed, loud and full of summer-movie bluster.

Ritchie, who broke onto the international film scene with his kinetic gangster epic, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and who brought us a couple of big-ticket Sherlock Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr., goes further back in history, but, unfortunately, brings his adrenalized sensibilities along with him.

These emerging Knights of the Round Table talk with cockney-inflected accents as Ritchie tells an origins story about how King Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) came to lead his kingdom. In this version, a young Arthur escapes slaughter by an evil king wannabe named Vortigern (Jude Law). Vortigern robs Arthur of his throne by killing the boy's father (Eric Bana), an actor who amazingly manages to look composed in the midst of all the visual chaos.

Raised in a brothel as a child of the streets, Arthur's story begins in earnest when he pulls Excalibur, his father's sword, from the rock where it has been embedded for most of the young man's life. Arthur's feat is accompanied by an oops. Once Vortigern knows where the real heir to throne is, he sees only one option: Arthur must be killed.

Meanwhile, a multi-cultural band of comrades -- notably Djimon Hounsou's Bedivere and Tom Wu's George -- goad a reluctant Arthur toward his destiny.

Ritchie heaves shards of Arthur's story at us in ways that add confusion to a narrative that seems to have been invented to support a variety of booming set pieces. In one of them, Arthur visits the Dark Lands to fight bats and rats as part of his inner journey; i.e., before he can triumph, Arthur must remember the murder of his mother and father at the hands of Law's evil Vortigern.

In many respects, Ritchie's approach to the Arthurian legend owes more to Marvel Comics than it does to English mythology. One difference: It's not Arthur who has super powers, but his sword. Arthur must learn to wield this glowing weapon throughout the course of a cluttered, 126-minute running time.

The movie's editing style seems to have been inspired by the desire to inflict a thousand cuts on any given moment. Accompanied by Daniel Pemberton's pounding score, the movie barrels its way through action sequences that produce more frenzy than coherence.

When Arthur swings his sword, the movie slows down as if it's showing us the way an athlete enters what some call "the zone." Arthur perceives everything in slow motion, vanquishing foe after foe with an ease he barely remembers when the carnage stops, and the movie renews its double-time pacing.

Arthur's attempts to impress with scale are obvious from the outset: The movie's opening -- a prolog, really -- offers displays of carnage featuring mammoth creatures that resemble the kind of elephants that might appear as floats if a Thanksgiving parade were run by Satanists.

Hunnam takes a step back after his work in The Lost of City Z, which made room for subtlety. Think Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim, in which Hunnam also appeared. But in fairness to Hunnam, a set of leather pants, a buffed torso, and a street-wise attitude do not a character make.

Looking as if he's reprising the most malicious moments of the character he played in HBO's The Young Pope, Law supplies the expected hiss/boo helping of murderous villainy.

Astrid Berges-Frisbey adds a feminine touch as The Mage, some sort of magical character who helps Arthur realize his role this teeming fantasy world.

I suppose Ritchie deserves some credit for trying not to genuflect at the feet of a well-worn legend, but he drags the story of Arthur into the dirt and never allows it to shake off the mud.

Ritchie batters an estimable story, and, I'm afraid, it winds up beating him to a pulp.

When a search becomes a destiny

The Lost City of Z brings a real sense of adventure to the screen.

These days, the movies give us lots of synthetic adventure, including gargantuan comic-book creations for a generation of couch potatoes. It's been a while since anyone tried to serve up any real adventure. Credit director James Gray with doing just that in The Lost City of Z, the amazing story of a 20th Century explorer who journeyed deep into the Amazon jungle in search of an ancient city he dubbed "Z" and which others called El Dorado.

Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) was a British army officer who was sent to Latin America to help chart the border between Brazil and Peru. During his mapping expedition, Fawcett became convinced that he had found archeological evidence of a lost civilization that was far more advanced than anyone believed possible. European prejudice against Latin America's non-white indigenous populations preferred to see savages, not innovators.

Basing his movie on David Grann's 2009 non-fiction bestseller, Gray tells a story that shifts between England and the Amazon -- with a brief stop for some compelling war footage. Fawcett served as an officer in World War I; he was wounded during a vicious trench battle.

Populated with stuffed-shirt Brits, Amazonian tribesman, and Fawcett's loyal crew, the movie proves a stirring adventure that opts for credible realism rather than over-inflated drama.

Joining Hunnam -- quietly fierce in his commitment to finding the lost city -- is a nearly unrecognizable Robert Pattinson, who plays Henry Costin, one of Fawcett's crew. On his last expedition to the jungle, Fawcett also was accompanied by his son Jack (Tom Holland). A fine Sienna Miller portrays Fawcett's wife, a woman who wanted to participate in an Amazonian mission but wound up staying home. She cared for the couple's three children and endured a life of committed loneliness. She supported her husband's dreams.

At one point, tension erupts between Fawcett and arctic explorer James Murray (Angus Macfadyen), a man who initially supports the search for the lost city but who becomes a liability when he faces the jungle's heat and hardships.

Gray (We Own the Night, Two Lovers and The Immigrant) never before has worked on such a large scale. With support from cinematographer Darius Khondji, Gray gives the jungle sequences vigor and excitement that surpasses the scenes in England, a location to which the movie periodically returns.

I have to admit, though, at times I found myself yearning for a more rapturous approach to the movie's imagery. Maybe that's more my problem than the movie's. The British interludes tend to disrupt the adventure but that may be the point. We share Fawcett's impatience about returning to the jungle.

When Fawcett encounters an opera company in the middle of the jungle, viewers may be reminded of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, another Amazon-based movie about doomed obsession.

But Hunnam (Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak) makes an interesting choice: His Fawcett is not a man of febrile passions; he's a man of mettle, and he approaches adventure as a kind of solemn duty. It's his reason for being.

Fawcett eventually loses his heart to the jungle. The jungle, however, isn't the most accommodating of lovers, a reality that underlies the movie's best sequences: Arrows of tribesman raining down on the explorers' raft, an encounter with head hunters and the crew caught in torrents of onrushing water.

At one point, Miller delivers the line that underscores Fawcett's ambition and perhaps the movie's, as well. She cites Robert Browning's poem, Andrea del Sarto, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?"

Despite references to Britain's imperial racism and slavery, I'm not sure that Gray attains the thematic heights that a film such as this could have reached. But his grasp proves strong: As the story of a man who consistently risked his life in search of a city only he believes existed, Lost City serves up more genuine excitement than most of its artificially inflated competitors.

More monsters from the deep

Giant robots, ugly sea monsters and a robust comic-book spirit stave off disaster for Pacific Rim.

In what has been a largely disappointing summer -- at least in the blockbuster department -- director Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim comes as a refreshing surprise -- at least for a while. Taking his cue from classic Japanese horror movies such as Godzilla, del Toro imagines a time when hideous sea monsters called Kaiju are terrorizing the planet.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear, humanity has decided to battle these monstrous creatures with giant robots called Jaegers (German for hunters). It's also not clear why these 25-story tall behemoths need to be operated by two humans who work inside the machines and who must coordinate their movements through a symbiotic mind melding technique called "drifting." Wouldn't batteries have been just as good? Hasn't anyone heard of remotes?

If you haven't gotten the idea by now, let me make it clearer: Pacific Rim isn't about real-world logic; it's about putting a big-money charge into monster-movie tropes that once were considered indispensable components of second-tier entertainments.

Del Toro's movie is also about actors delivering uninspired dialogue with a straight face, about the wanton proliferation of special effects (some very good) and about a fair amount of well-conceived dystopian set design.

Put another way: The impressively scaled world del Toro creates is probably more interesting than what takes place in it: At its best, Pacific Rim brims with the kind of comic-book monumentalism that the lingering adolescent in me still finds impressive, epic-proportioned battles staged in a virtually created vastness.

I don't think del Toro, who has directed Hollywood movies such as Hellboy and more idiosyncratic fare such as Pan's Labyrinth, would object to anyone saying that he has tried to play with every toy he can find in hopes of creating a movie that will boom and bash its way through a couple of hours of clangorous action, semi-interesting exposition and unadulterated genre kicks.

I saw Pacific Rim in IMAX and 3-D, and the experience was overwhelming, particularly in the noise department. There's enough metal-on-metal clanging to stock a couple of Transformer movies. Moreover, some of the action seemed repetitive, particularly as seen in cinematographer Guillermo Navarro's darkly hued images.

You won't find much by way of stand-out acting here, but Pacific Rim is the kind of movie that can get by on performances that are servicable. British actor Charlie Hunnam portrays Raleigh Beckett, an ace figther who -- along with his brother (Diego Klattenhoff) -- has earned a reputation as a premier Kaiju killer.

But when Raleigh's brother dies (in the movie's gripping prologue), a dispirited Raleigh quits fighting and takes a job building walls to keep out the sea monsters. You needn't have seen a ton of movies to know that the commander of the Jaeger force (Idris Elba) will summon Raleigh back for one last battle against the rapidly proliferating Kaiju.

This task acquires increased urgency because the Kaiju invasion is about to intensify and because the Jaeger force, which thus far hasn't succeeded, is about to be disbanded.

When Raleigh rejoins the Jaeger fighters in Hong Kong, it's clear that he's going to need a new partner with whom he can "drift." Enter Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel), a serious fighter who wants to battle monsters. Elba's character doesn't want Mako to fight for reasons that are revealed during a preparatory drifting exericse.

The screenplay by Travis Beacham raises and drops issues at speeds that rival the movie's action set pieces. It's not the most elegantly conceived piece of work, although it makes room for a few complications about the Kaiju and for a couple of dueling scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) who provide comic relief.

There's also a cameo from Hellboy stalwart Ron Perlman, who plays a character with the strangely evocative name of Hannibal Chau, a Hong Kong criminal who lives in a Blade Runner-like portion of the city, where he sells the body parts of slain Kaijus.

I wish I could say that the movie -- entertaining for roughly three quarters of its length -- hadn't worn out for me, but the combination of noise and action eventually took its toll on both my ear drums and nervous system.

That's not to say that Pacific Rim isn't fully loaded for summer. Del Toro knows how to make a comic book movie, and -- even when the material lets him down -- he does his best to keep the movie's dark world spinning as furiously as possible.