An FBI agent and his informant

 

     Drugs. Impoverished living. A rundown town where the coal mine has gone dead. FBI corruption. Infidelity. And, of course, murder.

     These days chances are good that we're talking about a movie set in the American South.

    Above Suspicion, from director Phillip Noyce, tells the real-life story of how, in 1989, a rising FBI star formed a relationship with the seductive informant who helped him build an ascending career. 

     A spoiler? Not entirely. The movie's ending is revealed in the opening scene, a nod to William Holden's narration in Sunset Boulevard. The narrator of the story, it seems, already is dead.

    "You know what's the worst thing about being dead?''the late  Susan Smith asks. "You get too much time to think."

     Starting the movie at the end leaves us with one major question: How did Susan wind up dead?

     Emilia Clarke, familiar from Game of Thrones, portrays the movie's narrator, Susan, a woman living in Pikeville, Ky. Susan has the profile you’d expect in a movie such as this. She lives with but is estranged from her drug-dealing husband (Johnny Knoxville). She's also in the midst of a welfare scam.

    Desperate for a change, Susan reads a lot into the sudden arrival in town of FBI agent Mark Putnam (Jack Huston). Susan spots the agent getting out of a car looking sharp and healthy. She's overpowered by a desire to connect, seeing Putnam as a way out of town.

    From the start, Susan knows that Putnam is married. Putnam's wife (Sophie Lowe) supports her husband and, for much of the movie, has no idea that he might have a dark side.

   Stuck in a town that's portrayed as dirtbag hell,  the ambitious Putnam thinks he might impress his superiors by solving a string of bank robberies. En route, he leads a drug bust at Susan's home, opening the door for him to enlist her as a snitch. 

   Susan has more on her mind than helping Putnam advance his career. She tries to seduce him. After some half-hearted  resistance, Putnam takes the bait.

   Clarke mostly brings Susan to life, allowing her looks to be defaced to depict Susan's slide into terrible drug abuse.

   Huston, who played a man who had half his face blown off in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, can't quite locate a core for a character who perhaps doesn't have one. Putnam is self-absorbed and ultimately dangerous.

   Thora Birch doesn't get a chance to do much as Susan's sister, a hairdresser. Among the supporting cast, Knoxville lands the hardest hit.

    Noyce's varied resume includes movies such as Patriot Games, The Bone Collector, and Rabbit Proof Fence. He's a good director but he’s working with a story that follows a downbeat arc based on a real-crime book written by Joe Sharkey.

    Sharkey’s observant, detailed prose did more to create involvement than Susan's forlorn narration. 

    On screen, Above Suspicion has its moments, but it never feels as if we're discovering anything revelatory as we follow these characters on their predictably doomed journeys.

'Solo' proves Han can fly alone

Old-school names and fresh faces combine in the latest Star Wars movie.

Director Ron Howard took over Solo: A Star Wars Story after the film already was five months into a production that, at the time, was being directed by Chris Lord and Phil Miller. Working from a script by the father/son team of Lawrence Kasdan and Jonathan Kasdan, Howard has given the resultant movie a bit of old pro feel -- albeit with a lot of fresh young faces.

Solo tired me out with a lengthy action sequence about three-quarters of the way through, but overall the origins story of Han Solo proves an entertaining enough addition to the Star Wars galaxy to drown out quibbles.

As the movie’s title promises, Solo tells the story of Han Solo and answers questions that, frankly, I’ve never spent a minute thinking about: How did Han get his name? When did he team up with Chewbacca? Was Han always a roguish, wisecracking space jockey?

The movie begins with Han (Alden Ehrenreich) scuffling to flee a harsh life on the oppressively trashy Planet Corellia, which he tries to escape with girlfriend Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke). Han makes it out. Qi'ra doesn’t.

Ford was 34 when the first Star Wars movie was released. Ehrenreich is 28. He seems to have mastered some of Ford’s attitude, occasionally revealing trace elements of Ford’s jaundiced ways in an expression or a look, but it's best to accept Ehrenreich as Solo and let go of comparisons.

The same goes for Donald Glover who plays Lando Calrissian. Solo and Lando meet at a card game that Howard handles crisply and with winking humor.

Although I tried not to nitpick my way through Solo, I will say that I had more trouble imagining that Glover, entertaining in his own right, grew into a character who looks like Billy Dee Williams, the original Lando.

All of this seems part of the now familiar Hollywood dictum that well-enough never should be left alone. And at some point, you have to wonder whether criticizing certain kinds of movies makes about as much sense as complaining about the local Walmart for not carrying Gucci or Versace.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no skill or quality in franchise filmmaking and it certainly doesn’t occur at bargain prices, but one presumes that the real reason that Solo exists is because, as the subtitle suggests, it’s part of the Star Wars brand.

And as you might speculate after perusing Ben Fritz’s new book, The Big Picture: The Fight for Hollywood’s Future, Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams are expendable. Han and Lando, not so much.

But I digress.

Howard tries and often maintains the cliff-hanger spirit that Lucas tried to infuse into all the Star Wars movies, and he includes an exciting sequence atop a speeding train that amps up the tension and action.

The train sequence takes place after Solo joins a band of thieves led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and the no-nonsense woman Beckett apparently loves (Thandie Newton).

Paul Bettany provides one of the movie’s best characters. Bettany plays Dreyden Vos, a cruel crime lord who presides over a nightclub. Thanks to unseen plot developments, Vos turns Qi'ra into a kind of personal consort.

Creatures abound with Phoebe Waller-Bridge doing a nice job voicing a droid that results in one of the movie's emotional high points. I also liked Rio Durant, a four-armed pilot who flies with Beckett, but don't take that as a suggestion that I'd like to see a movie based on Rio's backstory.

Of course, rebellion and the evil Empire create thematic winds -- maybe breezes in this case -- that blow through the movie as reminders of the large stakes that animate the main-event Star Wars movies.

Every now and again, the classic Star Wars musical theme turns up, a reminder that we're still in the teeming Star Wars universe. I wouldn’t have objected to hearing more of that theme, but Howard seems intent on striking a balance so that the movie is recognizably Star Wars while standing on its own. For the most part, he succeeds.

Love in the time of paralysis

A British weepy that tries to get serious.

The title -- Me Before You -- sounds like it might be describing a self-help book for the terminally selfish.

But Me Before You has nothing to do with getting ahead in a ruthless, Trumpian world where deal-makers think of themselves as killers, and turn their adversaries into prey.

Actually, I'd like to see that movie, but Me Before You comes from a polar opposite direction. It's a bona fide weepy, so intent on wringing tears from its audience that complimentary boxes of tissues -- in a promotional wrapping, of course -- were handed out prior to a recent preview screening.

This adaptation of a popular 2012 novel by Jojo Moyes might have gotten somewhere if it hadn't starred an unbearably cute Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin, a guy who looks like a young Hugh Grant in a wheelchair. The story involves quadriplegia.

But that's just me. Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Claflin (The Hunger Games) are precisely the reason that the movie will work for those who are able to buy into it.

A glossy romance with a morbid twist, director Thea Sharrock's movie purports to deal with a few serious issues. Really, though, it's all about those tissues.

To prime the pump for a flow of tears, we're supposed to fall under the spell of the irrepressible Lou, a lower-class woman with a spiffed-up thrift store wardrobe and an unwillingness to appear in any two scenes wearing the same pair of shoes.

Lou's village also is home to a castle occupied by a wealthy family. Enter Will Traynor (Claflin), a hot shot investment guy who became a quadriplegic after being hit by a motorcycle while crossing a London Street.

Miserable that he no longer can be the dashing young man he once was, Will has sunk into a depression.

But wait ...

It's a sure bet that Lou, desperately in need of a job after losing employment at a local cafe, will try to reinvigorate Will's spirit when she's hired as his caretaker.

For his part, Will claims he'll never accept his new lot. If he can't be the man he was, he'd rather not be at all. He'll choose assisted suicide.

Will's parents -- Janet McTeer and Charles Dance -- give the movie gravitas. They're understandably concerned about their son.

McTeer and Dance also resemble drop-ins from another movie, reminders that this isn't a traditional rom-com, but a movie that wants to appeal to the same crowd that wept at The Fault in Our Stars.

Disability isn't the only obstacle to burgeoning love. Class issues intrude, as well. Will works to educate Lou, exposing her to subtitled films, books and Mozart. This isn't exactly Pygmalion, but you get the idea.

Clarke and Claflin develop some chemistry, but Clarke's Lou is bubbly to the point of overflow. She works overtime trying to persuade Will that he shouldn't travel to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal. She's a cheerleader for Team Life.

No self-respecting romance can proceed without glamor. Me Before You pours it on when Lou and Will visit Mauritius. He wants to give her a dream vacation, and she hopes that the trip will take his mind off any end-of-life plans.

To which I say: Assisted suicide should be a lot more than a plot device. It should be fully engaged as a subject.

A final fillip of encouragement turns the story into a tale of self-actualization for Lou; her relationship with Will may be just what she needs to leave the constricted confines of her village and make her way in the larger world.

Call me callous, but the little box of promotional tissues still sits on a forsaken corner of my desk. It remains unopened.

It's possible to argue that Me Before You is well done, but well done teary-eyed schlock is still teary-eyed schlock.

Jude Law goes gangster

He's brutal and vulgar, but he fills the film.

In playing a low-level thug desperately trying to find his footing after a 12-year-stint in prison, Jude Law pulls out every stop he can find.

Law's Dom Hemingway -- the title character of director Richard Shepard's foray into the world of cockney criminals -- gives us a main character who's mesmerizingly vulgar.

Dom's a brutal man without impulse control, a stocky, angry mess of a fellow who refused to rat out his partners in crime while in prison.

For that, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir) -- the crime czar who profited from Dom's silence -- has a debt to pay. So Dom and his buddy Dickie (Richard E. Grant) travel to the south of France to visit Mr. Fontaine's estate and collect Dom's reward.

One assumes that Shepard, who splashes title cards over bright red screens and adds other pop-oriented flourishes, gave Law all the room he needed to find his inner beast.

Law obliged by putting as much physicality into the role as possible. When Dom gets out of prison, he looks as if he's going to burst the seams of his dated double-breasted blue suit.

Dom's post-prison life isn't easy. He runs into a problem with Mr. Fontaine's larcenous lover (Madalina Diana Ghenea).

When he returns to London, a thug threatens to slice off his ... well ... you know. I suppose it's appropriate since the priapic Dom opens the movie with a soaring, ferocious monologue proclaiming the glories of his penis.

For all his bravado, Dom's a magnate for bad luck. He probably doesn't expect to be greeted warmly when he tries to reunite with the daughter (Emilia Clarke) who grew up without him. Clarke's Evelyn resents Dom deeply -- and probably justifiably.

By the time, Dom locates Evelyn, she's living with a Senegalese musician with whom she's had a son.

In trying for too much (the movie's episodic story elements create a cascading slice of contemporary British life), Shepard may have achieved too little. Dom Hemingway becomes the movie's story, a pretty big burden for any character -- even one as out-sized as Dom.

A scattershot collection of low-life bits and pieces, Dom Hemingway mellows with the unfortunate emergence of some late-picture sentimentality.

Still, Law's performance has too much raw energy to ignore: He's playing a man who doesn't know whether there's anything about himself that's worth salvaging. Dom rails at others, at an uncaring universe and perhaps at himself.

If Dom has any charm, it derives from his naive determination not to let the universe win.