A new Captain America hits the screen

 

  I'd like to talk about the ending of Captain America: Brave New World. It's borderline crazy, gratuitously overblown, willfully preposterous, and, perhaps, the most enjoyable thing about this latest edition to the MCU canon. 

  I laughed a lot as the movie smashed its way toward a Washington D.C.-based conclusion. The late-picture bombast struck me as amusing, although I'm not sure that was the reaction the creators were hoping for.

   Only the fear of spoilers keeps me from saying more. So on with the review: 

    Captain America: Brave New World spends much of its 118-minute runtime watching Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) justify his ascendance to the role of Captain America, a job once filled by Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Although Mackie often appears in nicely tailored suits, he dons his uniform when it counts. Mackie earns his shield, which he tosses around like a lethal Frisbee.

   Director Julius Onah balances comic-book bravado and elements that sometimes resemble a conventional hunk of intrigue about how power should be wielded.

   In this outing, Harrison Ford takes over a role previously played by the late William Hurt. Ford portrays Thadeous Ross, a ruthless US president who wants to change his image from warrior to peacemaker. 

  To accomplish his lofty goal, Ross must arrange a treaty under which the world's powers will  agree to share adamantium, a much-desired substance that .... well ... who cares what it does?

   Looking older than he ever has on film, Ford appears throughout the movie; he seems committed to serving the story's serious side while not diminishing its comic-book clout.

    In the early going, President Ross invites Wilson to the White House in hopes that the new Captain America will bring the Avengers back to life. 

   Before an Avengers rebirth can occur, an aggrieved super soldier (Carl Lumbly) -- one of Wilson's warrior pals and a wrongly imprisoned victim of his own government -- takes a shot at the president. 

   The assassination attempt fails, but we're quickly assured that Lumbly's Isaiah Bradley is no revenge-seeking villain; mysteriously, he's being manipulated. Wilson pledges to clear his friend's name.

    Thematically, Brave New World touches on genetic engineering and mind control while making room for an aerial battle over the Indian Ocean when the US tries to prevent Japan from seizing control of the world's adamantium supply. 

    Plenty of well-played additional characters turn up. Shira Haas portrays a former Mossad agent who works as the president's top security aide. Giancarlo Esposito plays Sidewinder, a bad guy for hire. Danny Ramirez adds a welcome light touch as Falcon.

     Tim Blake Nelson does major bad-guy duty as Samuel Sterns, a biology genius with a grudge against the president and the need for a wig. Stern's hair has been replaced by the brain that grows outside his head. 

      The action sequences aren't exactly groundbreaking, and at times, the screenplay slows its roll so that various characters can deliver chunks of exposition.

      I have no idea how much of a splash Brave New World will make, but the movie flirts with topicality as it tries to keep the Marvel torch burning. Yes, the flame sometimes sputters, but like Mackie, Brave New World ultimately holds its own.

A western that stays close to the sod

 

   In Old Henry, Tim Blake Nelson plays a widowed farmer living with his son (Gavin Lewis) in the Oklahoma territory during the early days of the 20th Century. 

  Blake portrays Henry McCarty, a farmer whose few words are usually choice. Looking as if he hasn't bathed since the turn of the century, Henry is an odd duck, a man with a droopy right eye, stubble as thick as scrub brush, and a sour disposition.

   Despite Henry's dishevelment, there's something confident about the way he navigates his isolated world. On a ride around his property, Henry discovers a badly wounded man (Scott Haze) and a bag full of money. 

   Henry brings Haze's Curry to his rundown farm and tends to a bullet wound that has brought the unconscious Curry close to death. 

   When a saddle bag loaded with cash turns up, you can be sure that trouble won't be far behind. It arrives in the form of Ketchum (Stephen Dorff), a smooth talker who says that he's a lawman in search of Curry and some stolen money.

   Not a trusting soul by nature, Henry won't give Curry up and his interactions with Ketchum and his crew begin to surprise a son that sees his father as a mud-covered loser.

   Writer/director Potsy Ponciroli deftly builds the movie toward the confrontation we know is coming. 

   We've seen naturalistic westerns before, but Nelson gives Old Henry a convincingly raw feeling and the movie offers plenty of satisfying revisionism about the West and the characters who inhabited it. 

   There are surprises -- including a whopper at the end -- as the movie slowly reveals an old but reliable theme: The past has a way of catching up with folks and squaring off against them. 

When bigotry makes a mockery of truth

Just Mercy tells the real-life story of an Alabama black man who's wrongly sentenced to death.

If Just Mercy, director Destin Daniel Cretton>'s big-screen adaptation of Bryan Stevenson's book of the same name, doesn't move you, I'm not sure what could.

Just Mercy qualifies as the straightforward story about a persistent, Harvard educated attorney (Michael B. Jordan) who moves to Alabama in the 1980s to head a project devoted to representing inmates on death row, as well as others who can't afford legal help.

One of the attorney's clients (Jamie Foxx) has been sentenced to death despite a jury's determination that he deserved life in prison. A shoddy defense completed the frame-up. Foxx's Walter McMillan - a.k.a. Johnny D -- was accused of killing a teenage white girl and the white community in Monroeville — the town where Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird -- hungered for someone to punish.

Just Mercy may not brim with groundbreaking insights about racism but it makes us feel the sting of injustice with performances that embody so much determination, pain and emotional truth that the movie rises above anything that might be deemed routine.

Cretton (Short Term 12) charts a course that explores the deep humanity of black Americans who have been wronged by a system that's rigged against them. As Foxx's character says at one point, he was born into a society that regarded him as guilty at birth.

Jordan (of Creed and Black Panther fame) can dominate a scene if he chooses. Here, he avoids any pyrotechnics in playing a young Harvard Law grad who isn't entirely sure of himself but who has decided that there's little point in being a lawyer if the fight for justice isn't at the heart of his practice.

Jordan's Bryan Stevenson can't always approach his work dispassionately. As a young black man, he not only wants to fight injustice; he feels the weight of it. He arrives in Monroe County where Eva Ansley (Brie Larson) has been working as operations director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Although she's not a lawyer, Ansley devotes herself to doing everything in her power to facilitate Stevenson's work.

The movie's themes are embodied in a cast that revolves around Jordan. As a death-row inmate, Foxx can be imposing in his mistrust of the system and tender in the way he helps to calm a fellow inmate (a terrific Rob Morgan) on the eve of his execution.

In some ways, Richardson's story resonates more powerfully than Johnny D's. A Vietnam veteran, Richardson was responsible for a woman's death. He can't escape the burden of his guilt. At the same time, it's clear that this victim of war-related post-traumatic stress doesn't belong on death row. As one inmate puts it, he should be hospitalized.

It's heartbreaking to hear Richardson say that the way people treat him on the day of his execution -- asking if there's anything they can do to help -- is the nicest anyone's been to him in his entire life. When the guards lead him out of his cell, he politely asks permission to say goodbye to his friends, fellow inmates on death row.

It's difficult to imagine a more convincing portrait of a man who has been battered and beaten by the world and by the torment of knowing that he veered out of control.

For his part, Foxx completely inhabits the role of a man who knows he's innocent but who also understands that no one cares. When truth doesn’t matter, cynicism is the inevitable result. Tough and guarded, Walter has adjusted to death row in the only way possible: He expects nothing from anyone.

It falls to Tim Blake Nelson to give a key performance as the convict whose false testimony condemned Johnny D. His face contorted from burns experienced as a kid in foster care, Nelson's account of how he was coerced into lying in court proves chilling.

Cretton chronicles the legal maneuvering required to try to win a new trial for Johnny D. But it's the clearly expressed human toll taken by a corrupted system that creates the movie’s emotional engagement. Cretton allows the movie's ending to go on too long, but even that can't dull the heartbreak of a story about bonds formed by people -- who in a more just world -- never would have met.

'Angel Has Fallen' so far, it touches bottom

Gerard Butler reprises his role as a Secret Service agent, this time one who falls under suspicion.

Looking heavier and a good deal more shopworn, Gerard Butler returns to the big screen as Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, a character he has played two times before -- once in Olympus Has Fallen (2003) and again in London Has Fallen (2016). Mention Butler's name and something is bound to fall.

As his job description makes clear, Banning must protect the president of the United States, played initially by Aaron Eckhart and in this latest edition by Morgan Freeman, whose job descriptions have grown more exalted as the series progressed. Freeman began as speaker of the house, graduated to vice president, and this time emerges in the nation's top job.

Hold the congratulations. For Freeman's Allan Trumbull, the steady rise to power has not been entirely beneficial. In Angel Has Fallen, the president spends much of the movie in a comatose state after being severely wounded in a wild assassination attempt that takes place during a fishing trip.

Perhaps to freshen the proceedings, Butler's Banning has begun to suffer a crisis of confidence. He experiences the lingering effects of concussions and wonders whether it might not be time to abandon his action-packed life. I'd just have soon followed Banning's retirement than the ridiculous journey on which Angel Has Fallen takes him.

Blamed for the assassination attempt, Banning becomes a hunted man with an FBI agent (Jada Pinkett Smith) trying to bring him to justice. As a fugitive, Banning seeks refuge with the father (Nick Nolte) from whom he's long been estranged. Nolte arrives in the movie as a growling recluse who acts as if he's been politicized by survivalists: His character natters on about the way governments get their hooks into people and won't let go. His foul temperament evidently resulted from his service in Vietnam, where he also learned a lot about planting mines and blowing things up.

Freeman and Nolte are both wonderful actors and it pains me to watch them ply their skills in a meat-grinder affair with an idiotic plot in which the villains are easily spotted.

The rest of the cast doesn't add a lot. Danny Huston joins the proceedings as one of Banning's former military pals; Tim Blake Nelson appears as the nation's vice president, the man who must take over while an unconscious Trumball teeters on death's doorstep. Piper Perabo plays Butler's loyal wife; she sticks by him even when he falls under suspicion.

Director Ric Roman Waugh earns his action bones with a massive drone attack that occurs early in the movie, a kind of prologue to the more mundane grunts and groans of subsequent fights. A late-picture battle in Washington, D.C. makes you wonder how it escapes the prying eye of local TV stations.

No point belaboring this one; Angel Has Fallen is a bit of late-summer B-movie junk; i.e., a movie of low-level smarts and high body counts. You won't need a high-level security clearance to figure this one out long before it crosses the finish line.