No hero worship in this 'Robin Hood'

 There's revisionism, and then there's revisionism writ so large that its undermining of expectation becomes a distraction. 

  That's how I felt about director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood, a movie that shreds the Robin Hood myth while asking us to acknowledge the gulf between reality and the stories we tell to mask its brutalities. Five minutes into the unrelieved grimness Sarnoski creates, and you may  find yourself hoping for a bit of illusion.

    Sarnoski, who directed Nicolas Cage as an isolated former chef in Pig, again takes us to a place where possibilities for redemption seem remote, perhaps impossible. This Robin Hood, played by a bearded, grizzled Hugh Jackman, insists that all the stories told about him are fabrications. He sees himself as a thief who terrorized people and killed for the fun of it, more criminal than lovable rogue.

    Sarnoski and cinematographer Pat Scola keep the movie's palette dark and grim, so much so that when sunlight appears, we realize we've lost touch with any form of warmth. Also missing is the verdant foliage of Sherwood Forest. Robin and the other characters are consigned to mud-caked struggles staged on rocky, forbidding landscapes. 

    A tone of brutal realism paves the way for a slender story that introduces us to Little John (Bill Skarsgard). A man devoted to Robin, John has been thwarted in his attempt to lead a normal life with a wife and kids. Margaret (Faith Delaney), one of John's children will figure in the plot when, late in the picture, she looks to Robin for help.

     To hide themselves from foes, Robin and Little John assume aliases. Robin becomes Randolph. Little John tried to lead a straight life as Edward.

    As it turns out, Robin's rampant carnage has left him with a string of revenge seekers, most of them relatives of those he viciously dispatched. In an early battle to recover John's home from invading outlaws,  Robin is badly wounded. 

    After the mayhem, Little John deposits Robin at an island priory and pretty much disappears from the movie.  Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a woman with healing powers, presides over the priory where displaced folks seem to have gathered. 

    The spiritual glow of Comer's character reinforces the notion that there's more at stake for Robin than flesh wounds.  He has so damaged his soul that cruelty no longer makes an impression on him. A damaged leg has left him a dead man limping.

      At the priory, Robin also meets a leper (Murray Bartlett), who seems to have a preternatural understanding of Robin's struggle. Struggle may be too strong a word because Jackman makes it seem as if Robin already knows that he's doomed himself. He has slaughtered his own humanity.

      Sarnoski, who also wrote the screenplay, can't embed all his themes in a dramatically evolving way. They sometimes protrude in dialogue like arrows fired by Robin into his victims' heads.  

     Of course, we know where the movie is headed. Sarnoski stages Robin's death scene with poetic gravity and hints of grace. No spoiler here. It would have been the ultimate cheat if Robin didn't die in a movie entitled The Death of Robin Hood.

     Late-picture attempts to show a growing attachment between Robin and Margaret arrive in a low-key fashion that dims optimism for any huge turnaround. As much as possible, Robin responds, helping to make a bow for the child and teaching her how to skin small animals. 

    He also makes an unexpected choice with regard to a  young man (Noah Jupe) who turns up at the priori, looking to avenge the killings inflicted by Robin and Little John on his family during another display of unholy wrath.

    The movie treats its cutthroat Robin with a bit of ambiguity at the end, but for most of the movie, a resigned Robin twists impassively on the spit on which his soul roasts.

    Robin's self-awareness precludes the kind of inner struggle that might have given the movie more spark.  Robin knows he's doomed from the start, a man consumed by a life without conscience, constraint, or compassion. 

     So rather than a drama about a man reckoning with his history, the movie becomes a lugubrious dirge for a man who never was a hero, as well as for the myths that we consume to dull the edges of our own troubling encounters with reality.

    That's a potentially rich idea, but there's monotony in Sarnoski's unrelenting bleakness. Sarnoski tries so hard to give the movie thematic depth that his characters are imprisoned by the concepts the movie considers. This Robin Hood is so defeated by the weight of his past, he might as well be wrapped in a shroud.

      

    

      

A tense look at one man's revenge

  Basing his movie on a true story, director Gus Van Sant returns to the 1970s with Dead Man's Wire, a movie about an aspiring entrepreneur who takes a mortgage company executive hostage. Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgard) blames the mortgage company for crushing his chance to grab the brass ring. He wanted to develop a shopping center but defaulted on his loan.

  Some have seen Dead Man’s Wire as Van Sant’s ode to ordinary men whose ambitions are thwarted by those who hold the purse strings. Kiristis accuses the mortgage company of preventing him from signing prospective tenants.

   Whatever happened, one thing is clear: Dead Man’s Wire owes its success to the tension created by a device the kidnapper employs. 

  Kiritsis strings a wire around his captive’s neck, connecting it to the trigger of a 12-gauge shotgun. Errant movements or sudden jerks of the head will lead to the hostage’s death. For those moments when he can't keep his finger on the trigger, Kiritsis rigs a system that will do the job for him.

   Skarsgard plays the aggrieved Kiritsis as a “justice” seeker who's sometimes at war with his own decency. Kiritsis winds up taking his hostage to his apartment, where he treats him like a guest — albeit one who might not survive his visit. Kiritsis doesn’t seem to know whether to act like a host or a kidnapper.

    Early on, Kiritsis spells out his demands. He wants a public apology from the head of Indianapolis-based Meridian Mortgage (Al Pacino employing a Southern accent in a small role), $5 million in compensation for the profits he could have reaped, and immunity from any charges stemming from the kidnapping.

   For all his careful planning, Kiristis makes a major mistake at the outset. He didn't know Pacino's character, his original target, was vacationing in Florida. Kiristis had to settle for taking the man's son (an effective Dacre Montgomery).

    Pacino’s presence and the movie's premise have spawned comparisons to another hostage drama, Sidney Lumet’s brilliant Dog Day Afternoon (1977). For me, that's a stretch because Dog Day reflected a feverish cultural moment, revolving around a confused character whose motives were deeply personal. 

   Dead Man's Wire doesn't quite work as a broadside against capitalist greed or as a portrayal of a signature 70s moment . Kiristis didn't want to topple the system; he was keen to join it. Absent that, he wanted a payoff.

    A small supporting cast rounds out the tale. Colman Domingo serves up a sampling of '70s cool as a local DJ to whom Kiritsis looks for wisdom. Cary Elwes plays a local detective who tries to reason with Kiristis. The two have crossed paths before.

    Taken as a small, tautly strung story built around Skarsgard’s jittery performance, Dead Man’s Wire catches you up. Let’s call it a footnote of a movie that keeps you watching -- even if it doesn't prompt much by way of further consideration.

    

   

Beautifully dark 'Nosferatu' goes on too long

 

   Nosferatu has acquired a considerable amount of baggage since F.W. Murnau’s creepy classic debuted in 1922, establishing its bona fides as a German Expressionist take on a vampire tale that evoked memories of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In 1979, Werner Herzog took a bite out of the vampire apple with a much-admired remake of Murnau’s movie, Nosferatu the Vampyre.

  Beyond all that, recent years have seen the emergence of a vampiric bull market as various directors tried to infuse fresh blood into the genre with entries ranging from swooning teen romance (Twilight) to Renfield, a comedy starring Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage.

  Now comes Nosferatu from director Robert Eggers (The Northman, The Witch, and The Lighthouse). A specialist in  eerie atmospherics, Eggers works in collaboration with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who knows how to evoke a silent-era feel that pays homage to the original.

   Eggers's Nosferatu exudes dark beauty. When the ambitious realtor Thomas Hutter (Hoult in his second vampire movie) approaches the Transylvanian castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), Eggers's images become ominously suggestive. When we finally encounter Orlok, we hear his thick, stilted accent but shadows all but conceal his hideous countenance.

  Mood and a knowing sense of humor underscored by inflated melodrama make it clear that Eggers is swinging for the fences, which — I suppose — is the only way to approach material so steeped in cinematic history. 

   A few words about the cast: Lily-Rose Depp portrays Hutter’s bride, Ellen, the woman brought to Orlok’s attention by fate and primal yearning. 

   Willem Dafoe turns up as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a rogue scientist who accepts the possibility that paranormal forces may be at work. Simon McBurney goes way over the top (who would want it otherwise?) as Orlok’s devoted servant Knock. Among other disgusting proclivities, Knock enjoys biting the heads off live birds.

   Hutter visits Orlok to close a deal for an estate in Wisborg, Germany, where Hutter and his bride live.  Disenchanted with Transylvania and sick of the brooding locals, Orlok aims to consummate his fated longing for Ellen on fresh turf.

   Eggers deftly mixes operatic flourishes and thunderous portents, and, yes, lots of rats, creatures that are blamed for the plague Orlok brings to Wisborg, where the movie concludes with a crescendo of sex, death, and sacrifice.

  I’ve waited until now to venture a judgment about Eggers's enterprise. I was with the movie for a long time, even noting that, at times, that Eggers approaches masterpiece levels. 

  But somewhere along the line -- I’m guessing around the three-quarter mark — I felt as if the bottom had dropped out; the movie’s two hour and 13 minute length began to work against it. The story felt drawn out, as it inched toward is inevitable climax. 

   The longer Nosferatu went on, the more its creepiness felt self-consciously expressed. By the time it ended, I was ready to bid farewell to Wisborg and its terrified inhabitants. 

   Skarsgard's Orlok qualifies as memorable and Eggers's locations, sets and atmospherics represent a top-rank achievement. Vision aside, I eventually found myself wishing Eggers would just get on with the story and let it speak for itself.

 

‘Wick’ as crazy as ever. No, crazier

   

      John Wick: Chapter 4 is one wild movie, a two-hour and 49-minute stream of action that makes a virtue of excess.

     If you’re familiar with WickWorld, you know that action means violence, executed with guns, knives, nunchucks and anything else that can be weaponized — cars and motorcycles included.

     Director Chad Stahelski ably threads a plot through the real draw, a slew of action set pieces.

     You either like this sort or thing or you don’t. If you do, Chapter 4 delivers. Sure, Stahelski pushes the violence to the point at which logic evaporates. But style, invention and skill keep the bloody bounty from curdling into exploitation. 

     Considering how much physical effort Reeves expends during Wick's globe-hopping endeavors, it’s a wonder the actor still is able to walk —much less ignite the engine that drives Wick's fighting fury.

      About those set pieces:

      A dizzyingly impressive battle sprawls its way through a Berlin nightclub where Wick confronts Killa (Scott Adkins), a hulk of a man with golden teeth who looks as if he might have been resurrected from an early Bond movie. 

       In another set piece, drivers race against the flow of traffic at an Arc de Triomphe roundabout. It’s funny and, yes, crazy,  a near-cartoonish blur of motion punctuated by staccato bursts of gun fire

       A climactic sequence takes on Sisyphean dimensions as antagonists fight on the steps leading to Paris's Sacre Coeur.

       The story? Oh yeah, that.

       A fiendish villain called the Marquis (Bill Skarsgard) hires hitmen to put Wick out of commission. 

       These include Tracker (Shamier Anderson),  an assassin who travels with his beloved but brutal German shepherd, and Caine (Donny Yen),  a blind warrior brought into the game when the Marquis threatens his daughter.

       Hiroyuki Sanada operates a swank Osaka hotel that provides safe-house refuge for assassins who serve a mysterious organization known as The Table.

       The cast roster also includes  returnees Laurence Fishburne, as the Bowery king, and Ian McShane, as the sly operator of New York City's safe house. 

      Is the movie too long? Of course it is,  but then again it’s too much of everything. 

       That's the Wick way. Again evoking memories of bygone Hong Kong action movies, Chapter 4 brings commitment to its ceaseless battling and avoids the worst label you can apply to any sequel. This is no pandering cash grab.  

       Stahelski ups the ante with each successive set piece, thus proving you can give audiences what they want without cheating or insulting them in the bargain.

Maybe the devil made them do it

     Judging by the characters in The Devil All the Time, some of the folks in West Virginia and parts of southern Ohio are mighty weird, screwed-up in ways once taken for common coin in Southern Gothic literary circles.

    Foremost, there’s religion: Faith has made some the characters in this episodic sprawl of a movie crazy to the point where a self-proclaimed preacher believes he can resurrect the wife he has just murdered and a father, believing that a sacrifice will save his cancer-riddled wife, kills the family dog.
     These are just a couple of the more lurid examples from director Antonio Campos’ cinematic take on a novel by Donald Ray Pollock, who narrates a taxing two-and-a-half hour Appalachian journey that sometimes feels like a near-parodic take on one of Flannery O’Connor’s novels.
      Campos doesn’t skimp on the number of characters who populate his movie, some arriving and disappearing before the story settles on Arvin (Tom Holland), a young man struggling to find his place in this strange, violent world.

      It's possible to regard everything before Holland's arrival as prologue. Arvin’s dad (Bill Skarsgard) returns from World War II emotionally bruised, his faith shaken. He recovers his belief when he marries a waitress (Haley Bennett) and they move into a ramshackle  house on the outskirts of Mead, West Virginia.
    The death of his mother and the resultant suicide of his father put young Arvin in the care of his grandmother (Kristin Griffin). As Arvin grows into manhood, the story also tracks the twisted progress of a serial killer (Jason Clarke) and his wife (Riley Keough). 
        Their MO: He takes photos of his victims having sex with his wife before slaughtering them. She goes along with his twisted plans, although she eventually tires of their murderous travels. 
         A frighteningly intense Harry Melling plays the preacher who believes the Lord will help him resurrect the dead. Mia Wasikowska portrays his hapless wife. 
      Arvin's grandmother adopts Leonora, the daughter of this less-than-happy couple. Eliza Scanlen plays Leonora as an adolescent.

      Sorry to bombard you with so much plot and so many characters, but that's a bit what it's like watching this twisted soap-opera.

      Anyway, it doesn't take long for the reverend Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson)  to show up. Not surprisingly, Teagardin has pervert written all over him: His idea of doing the Lord’s work involves seducing and then abandoning teenagers.  

    Let's just say that The Devil All the Time, isn’t the best advertisement for church-going.

    There's no faulting the performances. Skarsgard proves unnerving as a father of steely, war-scarred temperament. Holland brings humanity to Arvin, who — despite some violent episodes — self-describes as “not a bad person.” We more or less believe him. 

     Clark and Keough make an appropriately appalling murderous duo. 
      To further complicate matters, Keough’s character is the sister of a corrupt local sheriff (Sebastian Stan).
     I haven’t read Pollock’s novel, but in his review in The New York Times, Josh Ritter wrote, “Pollock’s prose is as sickly beautiful as it is hard-boiled.”
     I can’t say the same for the filmmaking here; sans Pollock’s prose, the movie strips the characters to their bare-bones lunacy and becomes a bit of an endurance test, making us wonder just how much of this ruthlessly unpleasant crowd we can take.

     By the end, Campos ties the story’s many threads together,  but to what purpose? In this predator-or-prey environment, it struck me that all of these small-town characters should have reached one inescapable conclusion: Move elsewhere.
    

More 'It' proves less than rewarding

The second chapter of Stephen King's massive novel has high points, but, overall, qualifies as a miss.

It Chapter Two, the eagerly awaited second half of the big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s 1,000-page novel, feels more like a hundred chapters than the single, concluding act of a drama based on teen bonding and supernatural terror.

Not surprisingly, given the movie's nearly three-hour length and King’s pedigree, Chapter Two has high points (the psychology that brings adults in touch with their worst childhood memories) and low points (a bloated finale that’s so effects-oriented, it puts one in mind of second-rate sci-fi.

Normally, I don’t care about a movie’s length, but in the case of Chapter Two, length fatigue sets in, overwhelming the movie’s virtues. Moreover, last-minute attempts to add sentiment and uplifting instruction doesn’t connect emotionally.

The first movie, popular but very much over-rated, created enough of a fan base to ensure that this second helping will succeed at the box office. Moreover, a cast that includes Bill Hader, James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Isaiah Mustafa, and James Ransone) adds to the movie’s appeal, suggesting that this is no cynically motivated knockoff.

The story takes place 27 years after the first installment. As it turns out, Pennywise -- the lethal clown played by Bill Skarsgard -- returns in 27-year intervals, which means he's again ready to terrorize the idyllic town of Derry, Me.

Director Andy Muschietti, who also directed the first installment, skillfully uses the original’s young cast in flashbacks that help enrich the darkly hued adventures experienced by the now-adult characters of the first installment. Most of these adults don't want to travel to their hometown and only one of them (Mustafa's Mike) remembers exactly what happened 27 years ago.

Not a bad set-up, but Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman can't solve structural problems inherent in a story that doesn't flow smoothly through its various episodes. Instead, Muschietti lays out chapter after chapter, as each of the returnees confronts an individual horror before the group can unite for a meaningful stand against Pennywise.

I suppose one major question emerges: Is the movie scary?

The answer depends on what you consider frightening. For me, the scares arrive in the form of fun-house attractions augmented by lots of high-end CGI. Muschietti takes full advantage of Pennywise’s shape-shifting abilities, sometimes to comic effect, as the clown transforms into a variety of bizarre creatures and desiccated demons with skin problems.

There are jump scares, to be sure, but it almost feels as if Chapter Two has been designed around the “horror” sequences rather than allowing the horror to emerge naturally (or supernaturally, if you will) from the story.

No faulting the performances, I suppose. Some care has been taken to ensure that the young actors evoke their adult counterparts (except possibly for McAvoy). Among the adults, Hader makes the strongest impression as a stand-up comic in the midst of a mid-level career.

I could go on and talk about the insight (yes, there is some) exhibited in Chapter Two, particularly in the way it understands the humiliations, fears, abuses, missed opportunities and embarrassments of childhood. I also could mention a gratuitous and very cruel prologue in which town bullies attack two gay men at a carnival.

I suppose you'll also want to know that Stephen King and director Peter Bogdanovich make cameo appearances.

But I’m going to put Chapter Two to rest by saying that the movie might have been more entertaining at two hours. Put another way, I’ll ask this question: Does anyone really want to take a three-hour theme-park ride? If you do, you’ll probably be happy with Chapter Two.

Otherwise, you may find a movie that wears you out before it has the sense to conclude.

'It' sends in the clown -- and he's a killer

Latest Stephen King adaptation likely to score with audiences. To me? A yawn.

The working-class adults in It, an adaptation of a 1,000-plus page 1986 Stephen King novel, are abusive, cruel and, in some cases, detestable. Whether this arises from economic pressures or stands as some sort of class bias isn't entirely clear. Maybe it doesn't matter because the adults aren't the obvious focal point of director Andy Muschietti's adaptation; it's their kids.

To explore the fears of adolescent life, It follows -- if distantly -- a 1990 TV adaptation in which Tim Curry distinguished himself as Pennywise, the clown who terrorizes the children of Derry, Maine.

Muschietti and a trio of writers (Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman) shift the time frame of King's novel from the 1950s to the 1980s and deal only with the first half of King's opus. A sequel is set to follow in which the teens of this edition return as adults.

Arriving more than 30 years after the novel's publication, this big screen version suffers from inevitable comparisons with a rash of other horror movies in which teens are terrorized by evil forces and by memories of another King-inspired movie, Stand By Me (1986).

By now, gory horror (icky streams of blood, razor-sharp teeth and other foul manifestations of malignant forces) make it seem as if we've seen It before and deprive the movie of some of the resonance that King must have intended.

Full of familiar King tropes, It tries to follow King's lead, allowing evil figures to provoke familiar fears of childhood. Who, at one time or another, hasn't trembled at the thought of entering a dank basement? That sort of thing.

In what can be viewed as thematic piling on, the teens of Derry not only must confront the buck-toothed Pennywise but are also taunted by the town bully (Nicholas Hamilton). Anyone who remembers his or her teen years may find Hamilton's character a good deal more frightening than any of the movie's booming effects, delivered with considerable verve and polish but too easily left behind in the theater, along with kernels of spilled popcorn.

The teens in the movie have named themselves the Losers Club. Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) leads the group. Bill's younger brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) is taken by Pennywise in the movie's swiftly stated prologue.

The rest of the club members mostly are distinguished by single traits. One kid (Wyatt Oleff) is Jewish; another kid (Chosen Jacobs) is black; still another (Jeremy Ray Taylor) is overweight.

Every group of screen kids needs a wise-ass. In this case, the job falls to Finn Wolfhard. Jack Dylan Grazer portrays a kid dominated by his mother.

As the story develops, a girl (Sophia Lillis) joins the pack. Lillis' Beverly has a sexually abusive father and, unfairly, has been branded as "a slut" by her classmates.

Among the movie's problems: Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), the scary clown whose makeup and goofy affect conceal his true nature, hovers near cliche, even with his ability to transform from a clown into his horrific real self.

Having pretty much found It to be a yawn, I should hasten to say that the movie likely will add some spin to the multiplex turnstiles after a lackluster couple of late-summer weeks.

Before a preview screening of It, King appeared in a short clip addressed to the audience. He said he was happy with the adaptation and praised the movie's young cast, all of whom do fine work as they spout profanities, shriek and behave as credibly as the story allows; they also discover that their hometown is targeted by waves of violence that appear in 27-year intervals.

Sometimes, it feels as if It lumbers from one set piece to another, giving each of the teens a scene that plays to his or her major fear. Each eruption of shock creates the aura of a super-charged fun house -- vivid but depthless. And at 135 minutes, the film begins to feel as lengthy as the book.

The movie teaches the members of the Losers Club a lesson that might have been culled from Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan: "Stronger together." The monster can't win if the kids unite to overcome their fears.

Although It takes full advantage of current technology in producing its many effects, the movie nonetheless feels trapped by the well-worn demands of a genre in which nearly every move feels too ingrained to break the bounds of the screen and take up residence deep inside our worst nightmares.