Rifles, chainsaws & cleavers, oh my

 Judging by movies, it’s almost impossible to believe there’s anything left to blow up. 

 That didn't stop director Adam Wingard from finding plenty of targets in Onslaught, a thriller that not only relies on pumped-up gunfire but also makes room for horror-style killings, notably referencing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  A minimal plot turns three combat veterans into brain-altered, genetically engineered warriors the movie deems  as "the human equivalent of heat-seeking missiles."  

 These lethal automatons are part of a conspiracy concocted by Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), a German (make that holdover Nazi) scientist who’s introduced when he crawls across the floor of his sleek digs to lick the stiletto-heeled shoe of his equally evil wife (Rebecca Hall).

   Nothing like a little marital affection to warm things up.

   Dr. Kammler's happy degradation primes us to expect that a bit of additional kink will season this boldly presented but depthless hunk of blood-splattered mayhem. 

  And that’s the trouble: You can almost feel the movie straining to hit notes that will make an audience gasp at its audacity. 

    Although Onslaught can be viewed as an extended set piece, it tells a story of sorts. A battle-scarred former soldier -- Adria Arjona's Celeste -- presides over a rundown desert trailer park that's invaded by the movie's three super-warriors. 

  To augment the looming sense of threat, Celeste's  young daughter (Blake Kennedy) has been left with Mom when her ex-husband, also a former soldier, turns up with daughter in hand. It's Mom's turn to take care of the kid.

   Looking more like a junkyard than a place to live, the trailer park is occupied by a hand full of former soldiers, many suffering from their wartime experiences.

    Mom, for example, seems burdened by PTSD flashbacks. Her hand shakes when she tries to pull a  trigger, something revealed early on when she fires at carved pumpkin heads she's propped up on spikes. 

   Additional kink arrives when we meet Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a twisted government official assigned to clean up the messes left by the soldiers, who try their skills at a highway rest stop before heading for the trailer park.

     I’m not going to describe all the mayhem, but I will say that a sequence in which a cleaver-wielding soldier crawls under a truck as he chases Kennedy’s character struck me as a step too far. These soldiers are ruthless killing machines, and we already knew the kid was in danger.

      Not to worry, though. As Onslaught progresses,  Celeste becomes the ultimate protective mom, and a few additional  relationships temper the relentless action, notably Celeste's ties to Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), an older trailer park resident who adds his weapons stash to the fight.

     Continually abetted by Matthew Pusti’s industrial-strength score, Onslaught includes an opening montage that suggests thematic depth, but even a countdown clock warning of the impending invasion can’t convince us that the stakes involve more than demonstrating a dialed-in capability for delivering rock, shock, and carnage.

  

     

Fleeing Russia during the Cold War

 

   

In Mayday, Ryan Reynolds plays a Navy pilot shot down while flying a spy mission at the height of the Cold War. In Russia, Reynolds’ Troy is saved by Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB agent living as a backwood recluse in the Russian wilds. Ustinov regrets his KGB past, obsessively watches Top Gun, and wouldn’t mind moving to the US. After an opening full of swaggering top-gun bravado, the movie begins to temper its view of US-Soviet relations, adding a bit of nuance. All-American Troy seems shocked to learn that ordinary Russians are capable of kindness (big reveal, no?). Mayday quickly moves into hybrid territory: part action movie, part buddy comedy, and part road movie as Troy and Ustinov try to escape the Soviet Union. A KGB official (Marvin Dorocinski) doggedly follows in close pursuit, but  Nikolai is no pushover. His KGB fighting chops haven't entirely eroded. Maria Bakalova signs on as Nikolai's  daughter, and David Morse has a small role as Troy’s ailing father. Writer/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) give Mayday the kind of big-budget look we expect from such thrillers. Still, the mix of humor and action doesn’t quite click, and Troy’s penchant for wise-cracking hardly budges the needle on the wit meter. The story picks up for a big finish, having set itself apart by leaning on what looks like novelty casting. Branagh doesn’t seem the most likely choice for kick-ass action, but there he is, trying to inject a touch of Russian melancholy into Ustinov's dialogue. In sum: I won’t give this one a resounding “Nyet,” but I can’t give it an unqualified  “Dah!” either.

Plenty of fun in ‘Coyote vs. Acme’

 Someone once told me that the two key questions  people most ask about movies are 1) Who’s in it? and 2) What’s it about?

  If that’s true, I offer the following:

  Who’s in Coyote vs. Acme, a mix of live action and animation that brings a rich trove of Looney Tunes characters back to the screen with a level of humor that’s difficult to resist?  

   Well, Wile E. Coyote and his nemesis, Road Runner, have major roles. But you’ll also find appearances by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety Bird, and John Cena.  

   Oh, wait. Cena is one of the movie’s  human characters. Displaying the right amount of cartoonish exaggeration, Cena plays the chief attorney of Acme Corp., a company that makes destructive devices for cartoons. If something blows up, you can be sure the blast arrives courtesy of Acme.

   Now, for part two: What's it about?

   Wile E. Coyote wants to file a suit against Acme for giving him a defective pair of rocket skates that went blooey while he was chasing the Road Runner down a desert highway.

    Coyote enlists Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a small-potatoes Albuquerque attorney, to battle a corporate titan. Think Better Call Saul without the larcenous streak. Ill-prepared for a high-profile case, Avery bungles his way toward the courtroom and eventually an appearance at a congressional hearing presided over by Elmer Fudd. 

    Lana Condor plays Kevin's niece, an intern at his firm, Avery, Jones & Maltese, a name derived from Looney Tunes icons Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese. Condor's Paige does most of the heavy lifting as Avery suffers through a perpetual crisis of confidence.

   Director Dave Green assembles this cartoon mashup in clever ways that make sense out of the outlandish, mixing cartoon and human characters with skillfully applied wit. Wisely, the animated and human characters live in the same world, which frees the story from having to alternate between realities.

   Better yet, the movie doesn’t feel as if it were concocted solely to ride a swelling wave of nostalgia.

   Screenwriter Sam Burch broadens the fun by adding a layer of satire about corporate greed that leads to negligence. Acme has an ulterior motive for exploiting cartoon characters. Applied with the same buoyantly cartoonish spirit that ripples throughout, the message adds a contemporary flourish.

    No need to oversell Coyote vs. Acme. For Looney Tunes fans, the movie provides an engaging helping of colorful fun. Besides, you won't want to miss Foghorn Leghorn’s courtroom oration about Acme’s devious Project Sisyphus.

    If you follow movie news, you know that Coyote vs. Acme had difficulty reaching the screen after Warner Bros. shelved it. It was eventually bought and released by Ketchup Entertainment. I won’t reiterate the whole story. Google away if you want to know more.

     Maybe it doesn't matter how Coyote vs. Acme reached the screen. I'll remind you, though, that the movie's message about refusing to accept defeat in the face of inevitable failure has existential relevance that still can strike home. These days, it might be the comic relief we desperately need.

    

Travelers on the road to nowhere

  In It Ends, director Alexander Ullom gives the road-movie genre a mind-bending twist.

  Ullom tells the story of four characters stuck on a road that never ends. They drive and drive, but can never find an exit from this road to nowhere.

  If they leave the car, they're quickly surrounded by hordes of people who seem intent on harming them, but whose motives aren't made clear. Eventually, the travelers determine that they can exit the car for about 90 seconds before an attack begins. That allows them (and the movie) to stretch a bit. 

   Then, as the Willie Nelson song goes, it's on the road again. No longer a symbol of mobility and freedom, the car becomes a cage.

   Ullom relies on his actors -- Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchel Cole, and Phineas Yoon -- to create characters who understandably are baffled by their situation. None of them knows why they've been assigned to a perpetual limbo in a car that never runs out of gas, always passing through the same wooded area.

   By refusing to dot every “i’ or cross every “t,” Ullom encourages us to wring some meaning from the ambiguous absurdity of the situation the movie depicts.

   Still, there's only so far Ullom can get with a movie that measures itself in miles, at one point showing us that these travelers have covered 186,000 miles. At another point, they discover an abandoned car with an odometer that's approaching one million miles. Others apparently have shared this horrific fate.

  Some see the movie as an expression of Gen Z frustration among recent college grads who are poised to enter a society that has rendered them pointless. 

 As an exercise in low-budget, indie creativity, It Ends earns a high score, but the movie continues to the point where we, like the characters, begin to feel beaten down. That takes some of the edge off what has been a canny little slice of contemporary horror, a foray into a world in which no option seems to make much sense. 

  Happy travels.

 

'Marching Band' sounds the right notes

Not every formula movie can be counted a failure. Consider The Marching Band, an amiable French offering that tells the story of two men who learn they are brothers when it becomes necessary for one of them to locate the other for medical reasons involving a bone marrow transplant. Both were adopted by different parents as young children. Neither knew of the other until the medical crisis that brought them together. A successful conductor, Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) benefited from a privileged upbringing, but is shaken when he learns he has leukemia. Brother Jimmy (Pierre Lottin) lives in a small town where life revolves around a factory; he plays trombone in the town’s marching band. The movie flirts with becoming a familiar tribute to small-town pluck as the band prepares to enter a contest. Additionally, though, the story deals with the relationship between brothers who contemplate what their lives might have been given different rolls of the dice. Director Emmanuel Courcol contrasts the town band’s amateurish efforts with Thibaut’s accomplished work as a classical musician, and the movie builds toward an ending centering on Ravel’s Bolero and sounding the right chord for a small-scale crowd-pleasing effort.

An uneven post-apocalyptic thriller

   We’ve had so much post-apocalyptic “entertainment" that it now qualifies as a pop-cultural obsession, if not an addiction. Still, dystopian overload didn’t stop director Ridley Scott from taking us to a time when life as we know it once again has come to an end.

 That said, The Dog Stars, which is based on a 2012 novel by Peter Heller and leans heavily on stars Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce, includes what might be the year’s wackiest sequence.

  I won’t make you wait for it. 

  The sequence to which I’m referring features a commanding Allison Janey as leader of a post-apocalyptic cult headquartered in an airport in Grand Junction, Co. 

  Janey's Darlene dresses like an airline stewardess (don’t call her a flight attendant) and flashes a smile that could chill a martini. She and her cohorts have created a throwback world that evokes the '50s and '60s and stands in absurd contrast to the movie's rugged frontier terrain.

  Perhaps as a bow to movie lore, Scott also unleashes a frenzied raid that resembles something from a bygone western. Raging barbarians attack an outpost where Elodri’s Hig has taken refuge with a grizzled father (Pearce) and his daughter, Cima (Qualley in what might be the movie's best performance).

 A word about the movie's western settings: Shortly after the story begins, Hig flies his dilapidated Cessna to Denver. He plans to stock up on supplies before returning to the remote settlement he shares with Bailey, a highly focused former marine played by Brolin. 

  The Denver scenes include a trip to City Hall and to something called The Denver Athletic Center. Neither of these facilities resembles anything you’ll find in Denver, and Scott's sweeping aerial views of mountain landscapes don't look much like the Rockies either. The movie, I've read, was shot in Italy.

 Look, I know movies require generous suspensions of disbelief, but for those of us who call Colorado home, some of the movie’s geographic references waver between disorienting and amusing. 

  But back to the review….

  It’s hardly surprising that Scott, an acknowledged master, deftly handles action sequences that prove exciting, even embellishing the Grand Junction episode with a pyromaniacal scorching that looks as though it might have been lifted from a horror film.

  Too often, though, the movie sags, and the relationship between Hig and Bangley, who lives by a rudimentary code emphasizing raw survival, relies on dialogue that could have used a touch of finesse.

  The two share living arrangements at an abandoned airfield near Erie, Co.  Hig still has some human impulses. All-business Bangley climbs a wooden tower to pick off unwanted visitors with a high-powered rifle.

  Elordi opts for quiet reserve with hints of grief and remorse. Hig lost his wife to the virus that caused this massive global retrogression. At one point, Hig and Cima become nostalgic about pleasures they've almost forgotten: She misses driving while listening to music on the radio; he wouldn't mind if the traffic jams he once hated broke up the movie's empty landscapes.

  Perhaps as an alternative to the hard-boiled survivalist ethos of most of the characters, the movie adds a brood of farmers and kids led by a character played by an underutilized Benedict Wong. Bangley refers to them as Mormons but seems to be using the term sarcastically for a group of decent folks that dress like Mennonites.

  In the early part of the movie, Hig’s dog Jasper serves as his main companion. The dog follows Hig everywhere,  even flying in the passenger seat of his Cessna. Much is made of Jasper’s spirit and in a tender moment, Hig — who always sleeps outside —shares a gooey-eyed moment of stargazing with the dog he calls his partner.

  I hope it’s clear by now that the wildly uneven Dog Stars has its moments. I laughed at some of it, although I'm not sure that's the response Scott meant to elicit. 

  For the record: Dog Stars doesn’t rival Scott’s best work (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, or, for some, The Martian). 

  Oddly, the parts that don’t really mesh with the movie's pervasive dystopian gloom save Dog Stars from wallowing in a mood of total defeat. They may not be enough to make the movie a success, but they at least jar it awake. 

An oddly structured Kafka biopic

 

  Director Agnieszka Holland subverts traditional biopic structure in Franz, a fragmented look at the life of Franz Kafka, the Czech author who died in 1924.

  Holland (Green Border) blends Kafka’s personal and aesthetic sensibilities with the quotidian aspects of a life that included a domineering father, loving relationships with his mother and one of his three sisters, and nondescript employment at an insurance company.

 Disregarding chronological order, Holland leaps about in time, offering ample references to Kafka's work. At various points, Holland shows Kafka imagining that his hands are webbed, a conceit he used in his fiction.

 These references sometimes feel forced, and it helps to be familiar with Kafka’s work if you want to catch them all.

   In one such unmistakable effort, Kafka’s father crushes a cockroach that has wandered onto the dining room table, a brash joke that points to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a novel in which a man becomes a giant insect. 

   Raised in a German-Jewish family, Kafka’s imagination far surpassed the measured quality of his life.  Kafka's relationship with his father becomes important but isn't offered as the sole explanation for his inward-looking personality.

   In a sequence involving the young Kafka (Daniel Dongres), his beefy father (Peter Kurth) tosses his son into a river, a move designed to teach the boy to swim. Was Kafka scarred for life? Evidently not. We later learn that Kafka enjoyed swimming and swam throughout his life.

   German-Israeli actor Idan Weiss plays the adult Kafka as a strange man who inspired a wave of kitsch in contemporary Prague. Holland shows us burger joints with Kafka's name. A kaleidoscope is one thing, but Holland’s present-day scenes, which include a guided tour of Kafka-related sights, are more disruptive than illuminating, self-conscious attempts to let us know that the misfit has been mainstreamed.

    Kafka’s love life isn’t exactly scintillating, either. At one point, Kafka becomes engaged to Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), a woman in whom he shows little romantic interest. After falling for Bauer's best friend, the lively Greta Bloch (Gesa Schermuly), Kafka broke off his engagement to Bauer in embarrassing fashion.

    Writing evidently didn't come easily for Kafka. Holland creates early scenes in which Kafka, while still living at home, tried to write amid household bustle and intrusions by a father who wanted his son to pay more attention to the family business. Kafka longs for silence.

     Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924. He was 40, and his death preceded the Third Reich, which Holland points to in a late scene in which Kafka's confidant 

Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz) and his wife nervously deal with a Nazi soldier as they flee Prague. Brod had all of Kafka’s work with him. Without Brod, Kafka’s writing might never have been discovered.

     Holland’s approach puts a considerable burden on Weis, who sometimes has the sly look of someone who’s protecting secrets no one else knows. Thin and prone to engaging in strange physical exercises, Kafka is tender with a prostitute but abandons the pursuit of pleasure when his attention suddenly shifts.

   It’s possible to take this sudden shift as a metaphor for a movie that frequently shifts its attentions, sometimes in scenes in which characters -- notably one of Kafka's sisters -- break the fourth wall and speak directly to the camera.

     Working from a screenplay by Marek Epstein, Holland conveys the contradictions between Kafka’s interior life and bourgeois life in Prague, making  room for information that can seem almost incidental.

      We learn that Kafka wrote only in German and had no use for typewriters. He wrote by hand. At one point, Kafka checks into a sanitarium where the men march around nude and play games of tug of war in the nude. He seems to be having a good time.

      Perhaps to give the uninitiated a sense of Kafka’s work, Holland presents a scene in which Kafka does a public reading of In the Penal Colony. Holland presents a bizarre reenactment of the story, which centers on a brutal but meaningless punishment.

    At its best, Franz gives us a feeling for this odd, elusive fellow who saw the absurdity of institutions in a world of ungraspable rules.

   The word "Kafkaesque" has become an overused cliche for anything that appears to be off-kilter. Holland works more slyly, but if Kafka’s life was a riddle, Holland’s movie, though sometimes vividly realized, doesn't solve it.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 'The Rivals of Amziah King' and 'Learning to Fly'

The Rivals of Amziah King

 The Rivals of Amziah King stars Matthew McConaughey as a country singer and beekeeper who turns a Native American woman into a devoted protege. As a foster child, Kateri (Angelina Looking Glass) shared a home with Amziah. When she re-enters his life as an adult, she's exposed to a beekeeping world she learns to love. 

  In an overextended dramatic section, Kateri tries to save Amziah’s business after his hives are stolen.

 The movie emerges as a bit of a hodgepodge: a celebration of down-home virtues (the kind you’d find at a weekly potluck at the local church), a lively music film, and a labored drama in which Kateri searches for Amziah’s bees.  

  Too long at 130 minutes, Amziah King gets only so far with applications of rural Oklahoma color. I enjoyed director Andrew Patterson's presentation of toe-tapping music, and McConaughey seems to be having fun, but this foray into country virtues can’t sustain the infectious rhythms of its early going. Perhaps because of a surfeit of plot, what begins promisingly loses its way.

Learning to Fly

Scattered and teetering on the edge of becoming an advertisement for HOKA running shoes, the documentary Learning to Fly tells a story about ultra-distance running. The movie introduces Aisha McAdams, a photographer who made her mark chronicling the efforts of long-distant competitors. The movie includes a variety of runners, principally Jim Walmsley, a top runner whom McAdams follows to several races. 

   A runner herself, McAdams reveals details of her difficult upbringing as she tries to understand why people participate in such a grueling sport. 

    Torn between McAdams and the depiction of various races, the movie could have done more to develop both.

  You may not realize that MacAdams, who offers narration throughout the film, isn't the movie's director. That job falls to Max Lowe, who skillfully shows the teamwork required to support a 100-mile run. Race scenes can be impressive, although the athletes are more defined by the intensity of their efforts than by anything revealed in interviews. 

 So, a mixed review of Learning to Fly, a less-than-triumphant documentary that earns points for opening a world that may be unfamiliar to many viewers.

A shipping magnate throws a party

   Willem Dafoe plays a Greek shipping magnate in The Birthday Party, another barbed critique of life among the obscenely rich.

   Basing his movie on a 2007 novel by Panos Karnezis, writer/director Miguel Angel Jimenez creates a fictionalized view of a character who resembles Aristotle Onassis. 

   Aways adventurous, Dafoe plays Marcos Timoleon, a calculating boss who’s accustomed to controlling everything but who has difficulty corralling his strong-willed daughter, Sofia (Vic Carmen Sonne). 

   Sofia’s latest challenge to her father centers on her plan to marry Ian Forster (Joe Cole), a writer who's working on a biography of Marcos.  

   To further complicate matters, Sofia is pregnant with a child Marcos insists she'll never have. The movie eventually shows the twisted lengths to which Marcos will go to ensure that he prevails.

     The story begins with a more conventional attempt at persuasion. Marcos arranges an elaborate 25th for Sofia that’s designed to coax her back into the family fold.

   Hangers-on and those wishing to curry favor with Marcos have gathered for the event. To him, they’re like extras in a show meant to protect his legacy.

    The cast includes Emma Suarez as Olivia, the wife Marcos is divorcing. Estrangement aside, he wants her help with wild-child Sofia. Sofia’s fate became even more important to Marcos after his beloved son died in a seaplane crash.

    A steady Christos Stergioglou plays Patrikios, a doctor who’s also Marcos's closest friend and confidant. The movie could have used more of him.

   We’ve already seen too much wealth porn to be overwhelmed by the luxe surroundings of Marcos’ private island, and the drama that unfolds proves more dispiriting than illuminating, a dip into a toxic pool full of characters, none especially admirable.