A loopy, discombobulated 'Kraven'

 

   I'd never heard of Sergei Kravinoff until I looked at the credits for Kraven the Hunter, the latest Sony Marvel movie to reach the screen.

  Still confused, I sought more information. Better known as Kraven the Hunter, Kravinoff, I read, is an arch-enemy of Spider-Man. That didn't help, either. Spider-Man didn't appear in the credits or, as I later found out, in the movie.

  Seeing this standalone helping of lethal action resulted in only mild clarification. Marked by R-rated violence, director J.C. Chandors's scattered origin story plays like a darkly-hued Russian thriller that occasionally stops to remember its comic-book origins.

    The story kicks off in earnest when Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) flees his corrupt father (Russell Crowe) and sensitive brother (Fred Hechinger). He’s off to the woods, where he builds a yurt-like home and communes with wildlife

   Sergei, who'll become Kraven, holds a grudge against Crowe's Nikolai Kravinoff, a big-time drug dealer who drove Sergei's mom to suicide. Dad divides the world's inhabitants into two categories: Weak and strong. Mom was weak. 

  Two villains appear. Alessandro Nivola plays Rhino, a psycho nut job whose skin can turn into rhino hide when he needs protection. The transformation is painful, requiring the insertion of a tube into a portal that links to Rhino's gut, pumping him full of whatever turns sadists into rhinos.

   Christopher Abbott plays Foreigner, a villain who can vanish in one place and reappear in another, although it's unclear how he manages this trick.

  Perhaps to keep Kraven from drowning in testosterone, the screenplay introduces Calypso (Ariana DeBose), a lawyer who allies herself with Kraven; she helps him locate the miscreants he pursues. He has a list.

   Kraven has an advantage over his foes. He possesses the keenly developed senses of a hunter who forms bonds with animals. You may not get him, but four-legged creatures view him as a friend.

   Employing a Russian accent, Crowe delivers his sparse lines with fortune cookie terseness. "Man who kill legend becomes legend,'' he tells his then teenage sons during a hunting trip to Ghana in the movie's early going.

   At one point, Demitri, Kraven's sensitive brother, opens a piano bar and lounge. Listening to his son sing, Dad delivers the movie's most unabashedly irrelevant line. He announces that he trusts no man who doesn't like Tony Bennett. 

   Enough. Chandor (Margin Call, All is Lost) tries to corral a heap of disparate characters and ingredients: a Russian drug lord who groves on Tony Bennett, a potion that brings Sergei back from the dead, action scenes in which Kraven climbs walls and scampers on all fours, and a thundering herds of CGI yaks among them.

  Oh well, as Crowe's character might describe the resulting discombobulation, "No sense in screenplay makes nonsense on screen."

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.

Ambition, morality -- and oil trucks

Well-acted and smart, A Most Violent Year tackles tough moral issues.

The year: 1981. New York City is in the middle of one of its worst periods for violent crime. Other changes are happening, as well. It's a time -- not entirely unlike our own -- when the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy seems to have blurred, and ethics appear to have become variable.

How bad would it really be if a burgeoning business fudged a bit on its taxes? How far should one go in an attempt to outdo one's competition?

And in the world of urban business, how do things begin to shake out when new ethnic groups start to assert their dominance? Can there be room for new kids on the block?

A Most Violent Year -- the drama that encompasses all these questions -- demonstrates how big issues can be found by narrowing and sharpening one's focus. Directed by J.C. Chandor, A Most Violent Year revolves around a business that delivers home heating oil in New York City.

Within this narrow gauge, Chandor -- aided by a terrific cast -- has made a rare and quietly compelling movie that's willing to examine how people try to reconcile ambition and morality.

Chandor (Margin Call and All Is Lost) focuses on Abel Morales, played by Oscar Isaac. Abel wants to expand his footprint in the heating oil business.

To accomplish his goal, he decides to buy several storage tanks owned by a Hasidic Jewish family that drives a hard bargain. Abel must make a large cash down payment and come up the rest of the money -- another $1.5 million -- within 30 days.

If he can't, he loses his down payment and his business along with it.

The scene in which Abel and his attorney make the deal is a rich one. The sellers are careful to point out that what they're asking could have devastating consequences for Abel. He's set his mind on the purchase, and won't be deterred. He likes to own the things he uses, he says.

As is the case with many scenes in A Most Violent Year, the drama is carefully developed, even understated, and unlike many movies I see, I believed every moment of it.

Chandor allows the tension in Abel's situation to emerge through the performances and through the establishment of a dreary slice of urban winter.

Last seen in Inside Llewyn Davis, Isaac proves masterful as a well-dressed businessman who says he's trying to operate in legitimate fashion. It's not always clear where Abel is willing to draw the line that will keep him from felonious behavior.

That's because Abel doesn't arrive on screen in prefabricated form; he's in the process of picking his way through a tough world while keeping as much of his integrity as possible.

A man of pride, composure and impeccable dress, Abel's a commanding figure in his camel-colored overcoat.

In one of her best performances yet, Jessica Chastain plays Abel's wife Anna, the daughter of a Mafia don. Anna wonders whether her husband -- for all his attempts to control everything -- has the right stuff to make his way in a business environment in which someone is hijacking his trucks and stealing his oil.

She wants Abel to bring her family into the mix. Abel refuses.

Abel's nothing if not determined, but Anna seems the tougher of the two. Everything about her suggests that she understands more about the way the world works than her husband. He doesn't want to be defined as a gangster. That's less of a problem for Anna.

The supporting players are all in fine form. Two are especially noteworthy: Albert Brooks plays Abel's morally dubious attorney, a man whose face shows the wear of a career spent making deals that probably were ethically challenged.

David Oyelowo -- currently on views as Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma -- portrays a district attorney who's investigating the heating oil business, using Abel's company as a target.

When you're expecting to borrow big money from a bank -- as Abel is -- a criminal investigation isn't exactly what you want on your resume.

As the story develops, Abel's forced to juggle any number of balls. Drop even one and he could be ruined.

Working with cinematographer Bradford Young, Chandor creates an urban environment that gives A Most Violent Year the feel and texture of a crime drama. Some reviewers have likened A Most Violent Year to a Sidney Lumet movie.

It's an apt enough comparison, although Chandor's style tends to be less teeming and comprehensive than the approach the late Lumet took in movies such as Serpico, Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon and Q & A.

Still, the fact that Chandor is continuing this tradition at all strikes me as worthy, honorable and important.

There's nothing mythic about A Most violent Year. The movie takes us into a world populated by strivers, thieves and wannabes, and it sets out an ethic that -- for better or worse -- may be the only one that works in a time of compromised morality:

In the end, the honorable man does what's most right. Maybe that's all he can do.

At sea with Robert Redford

Can resourcefulness conquer bad luck in All Is Lost?

After this year's festival season kicked off over Labor Day weekend in Telluride, it became increasingly apparent that Robert Redford was en route to a praise-filled fall. Redford, an actor who hardly needs a career boost, stars in director J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost, the story of a self-sufficient man who runs out of resources when the hull of his sailboat is punctured by a stray cargo container loaded with sneakers, trivial cast-offs from a voracious commercial society.

All Is Lost -- a film featuring almost no dialogue -- showcases Redford's ability to play a character who's forced to determine how to deal with impending disaster. The character -- unnamed in the movie and known in the credits only as Our Man -- improvises a series of life-saving tasks that begin with patching the hole in his yacht.

Ultimately, he must determine how (without a radio, cell phone or other equipment that has been wiped out by flooding) he's going to make his way toward a shipping lane where he might be sighted by a passing vessel.

The movie's brief prologue establishes enough of a backstory to give All Is Lost an allegorical aftertaste. We hear our man reading a note that no one else may ever see. He apologizes -- presumably to his family -- for badly over-estimating how much of the Indian Ocean he could navigate by himself. He's failed, and, this time, his failure might be irredeemable.

Our Man is an independent fellow of obvious means (who else has a sailboat and the time to sail it?), and, if there's a larger thematic point to this seaborne fable, it probably revolves around the ways in which the screenplay methodically deprives Our Man -- perhaps he should be seen as a floating ego -- of every possible support. When there's nothing material left to keep him afloat does anything else remain? Is this the story of an adventure gone wrong or a chronicle about the death knell of male movie stars?

Credibility is mildly disturbed by the fact that Our Man seems to find time to shave everyday, although we only see him shaving once. It also seemed to me that even the most self-possessed of men eventually would start talking to themselves, a la Tom Hanks in Cast Away or Piscine Patel in Life of Pi.

Worse yet, Alex Ebert's distracting score should have been scrapped; the movie is most effective when it's making use of the natural sounds created by the ocean, the foundering ship and the occasional storms that beset it.

Although it never comes up in the film, I wondered about calling the main character "Our Man." Unless there's irony intended, the guy we meet in this voyage isn't a character easily linked to everyone's delusions about self-sufficiency in the face of mortality.

We all may be victims of the kind of self-deception that tells us that we know how to make our way through the perilous storms and yawning vastness each of us eventually confronts. But the guy in this film isn't Our Man. He's a member of a privileged class in which few of us claim membership.

You might argue that this makes his plight (and the movie's point) all the more poignant. Even the most skilled and most affluent among us can't protect themselves from the vicissitudes of fate and from the potentially lethal flotsam of a supremely careless society.

But I watched Redford's character from the outside. All Is Lost isn't a movie of high identification, but of studied observation.

Still, it takes plenty of directorial and acting skill to keep us involved in a one-character drama -- especially if that drama is taking place on a 39-foot yacht, where a lone man faces extinction.

For his part, Chandor has taken a totally opposite direction from his talky but effective debut, Margin Call. And you have to credit both Chandor and Redford with doing what we critics always seem to be insisting on: Trying something new and a little daring.

I leave it to you to decide whether All Is Lost should be seen as a stripped-down story with universal applications or a cinematic curiosity that's notable mostly for bobbing bravely on a sea that's otherwise cluttered with escapist junk.