'The Cut' fails to fulfill its promise

 Boxing movies are a Hollywood mainstay. They can include underdog hits such as Rocky or they might be classified as redemptive character studies a la Raging Bull. 

 In my view, the best boxing movies sweat with seedy atmosphere, exposing the boxing world as one full of traps. Fighters often become victims of their egos, scrappers making last-ditch attempts to preserve what's left of their self-respect. (Body and Soul, 1947).

  Don't take the above as anything more than an outline of my preferences re: boxing movies, but know that The Cut tends toward the latter category. Although far from a classic, the movie gives Orlando Bloom an opportunity for a deep immersion performance that pushes him past his work in movies such as Lord of the Rings or Pirates of the Caribbean.

    Aided by a hefty make-up job, Bloom sheds the trappings of big-screen fantasy, playing an Irish pug who blew his chance for ring glory, perhaps because he couldn't muster the will to win.  Bloom's emotionally damaged character wants to challenge fate, reclaiming his shot at a life-changing moment he failed to meet.

    When we meet The Boxer (that's how he's listed in the credits), he's working at a gym with the woman who once trained him (Caitriona Balfe). They teach kids to box and live modestly until a slick promoter (Gary Beadle) offers The Boxer a chance to substitute for a fighter in a Vegas match. He's flown to the US and begins his short-notice preparation for the bout.

    For most of the movie, The Boxer battles his own body. He arrives in Vegas weighing more than 180 pounds. To compete as a lightweight, he must hit 154 pounds. He has a week to make weight, to make himself lean.

    Enter Boz (John Turturro), a maniacal specialist in helping fighters shed pounds. Boz's arrival sets up a conflict between the unethical Boz and Caitlin, whose love for The Boxer means she'd rather not see him endanger his life with insane workouts, rigorous dieting, sweat sessions,  drugs, and other forms of bodily torment.

     Bloom tries to wring every ounce of determination, doubt, and persistence from a role that's probably his grittiest to date.

     Grabs for atmospheric authenticity only carry the movie so far, and the narrative is disrupted by quick flashbacks to the boxer's childhood relationship with his prostitute mother. 

    Director Sean Ellis avoids showing us the climactic battle for which The Boxer has been preparing.  Ellis may have wanted to keep his movie from being decked by genre cliches. Instead, he relies on a disturbing bit of weight reduction that underscores The Boxer's already established mania. 

    The Cut carefully details The Boxer's bodily tortures, but scenes of his punishing physical regimen also tend to wear the movie out, like a boxer with a limited repertoire  of punches. Considering all the food deprivation The Boxer experiences, the whole thing could have been called  "Starving Bull."

      

A 'nerdy' spy goes rogue

 

  Watching Rami Malek play Charlie Heller, a grieving CIA intelligence expert in The Amateur, it's easy to forget that the actor won an Oscar for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2019). 

   Malek sometimes seems to be a different movie than the rest of the cast. That could have been a calculated choice because Heller's CIA colleagues consistently underestimate his abilities. We're repeatedly told that Heller, who everyone refers to with the diminutive 'Charlie,' lacks a killer instinct. 

   Maybe Malek's performance seldom clicked for me, but that's not the only problem with director James Hawes's revenge saga. The Amateur strings a series of improbable events together as it hopscotches the world in search of excitement.

     The event that triggers all the commotion occurs when terrorists murder Charlie's wife (Rachel Brosnahan) while she's attending a work-related conference in London. Guilty about having declined an invitation to accompany his wife abroad, Charlie expects a full-throttle reaction from his CIA employer. 

  When his boss (Holt McCallany) dithers about why such a response won't be forthcoming, nerdy Charlie shocks his superiors by asking if he can be the one to kill his wife's murderers. He requests some hardcore training so he can hunt the antagonists responsible for his wife's death.

  The CIA grudgingly agrees, hoping Charlie's inadequacies will help quench his thirst for revenge. Enter Laurence Fishburne as the officer assigned to train Charlie in the agency's darker arts.

  As expected, Charlie proves ill-suited for a killer's role, but that doesn’t stop him from going rogue and taking off on his own. No longer willing to humor Charlie, the CIA sets out to stop him.

  A low-credibility affair, The Amateur might have saved itself had it been able to wink at its intermittent preposterousness while jumping to London, Paris, Marseilles, Istanbul, and Russia. 

  In adapting a 1981 novel by Robert Littell, the screenplay takes too little time establishing Charlie's technical brilliance, giving him too few opportunities to win the audience over. And for a movie that feels longer than its two-hour and three-minute run time, the story often feels more sketched than developed.

  Though undernourished, some of the supporting performances provide colorful touches. Jon Bernthal has a nice turn as a scruffy CIA agent who knows the ropes; Caitriona Balfe portrays the widow of a Russian KGB agent who helps Charlie; Julianne Nicholson signs on as head of the CIA, and Michael Stuhlbarg gives the finale some life as Charlie's chief adversary.

     And, yes, some of the action clicks, notably Charlie's confrontation with one of his targets in a glass-bottomed hotel swimming pool constructed between two skyscrapers.

   Overall, though, The Amateur unfolds like a potentially intriguing conversation to which you listen but don't fully connect. I half wondered whether the movie was leaping from one location to another in hopes of finding a much-needed spark.

A boy's life during "The Troubles"

 

   In 1969, Protestants and Catholics were at one another's throats in the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Bombs ripped through urban neighborhoods, people were beaten, and an atmosphere of fear and rage prevailed. 

   Despite the turmoil, normal life never entirely disappeared. Kids played on their blocks, and not every Belfast Protestant spewed hatred for Catholics who wanted Northern Ireland to sever ties with Great Britain.

    Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed Belfast, a movie that captures a slice of life during the terrible times when Branagh was a kid. Branagh, who also wrote the screenplay, shows us Belfast through the eyes of nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill), a boy whose dad (Jamie Dornan) commutes to construction jobs in England. Buddy's mom (Caitriona Balfe) holds things together in Belfast, the city the family regards as home.

   Grandma (Judi Dench) and Grandpa (Ciaran Hinds) are close at hand and Buddy movies easily between both households. His older brother (Lewis McAskie) isn't seen quite as much. 

    Branagh makes some interesting stylistic decisions, the most important being to film mostly in black-and-white, interrupting with color for scenes in which the family attends movies. 

    In the theater, a world of color opens for the family as they watch films such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and One Million Years BC, not exactly high art but welcome escapes from daily tensions. 

    High Noon plays on TV, a moral drama that mirrors some of the struggles faced by Dornan's Pa.

    Van Morrison, who hails from Northern Ireland, provides a score that fits the proceedings and, although the movie doesn't shrink from violence, it often adopts the dreamy tone of events seen through a filter of memory and longing. 

   Street violence juxtaposes with the tenderness of family life and Buddy’s youthful innocence. He has a crush on a fellow student, for example, presenting her with flowers, a touching gesture of unashamed love.

    It's not surprising that Buddy has no idea how to react to the events around him. When rioters crash into a local supermarket, he grabs a box of detergent and takes it home to his mother. 

    As someone who regards Protestants and Catholics as equals, Dornan's Pa faces pressure from local toughs who want him to join a neighborhood gang that's taking up arms against Catholics. Pa knows that it won't be long before the violent Protestant partisans take revenge on him for refusing to fight.

     He’s involved in a tug of war with his wife, who’s reluctant to leave the only home she has known. 

    The episodic nature of the movie wears a bit thin, but overall, Belfast paints a telling picture of a family forced to decide whether to endure devastating turmoil or pull up roots.

     In a better world, they never would have had to make such a choice.

    

An exiting movie about a Le Mans race

Matt Damon and Christian Bale rev up their performances in an entertaining Ford v Ferrari.

As a person who doesn't know much about auto racing, I can't say I approached Ford v Ferrari with any kind of rooting interest. But good movies about specialized areas draw us into their worlds so that we don't mind listening to the characters when they discuss the technical aspects of building a better race car, in this case, Ford's GT 40 MK II.

Besides, we need no instruction to know that driving at speeds exceeding 150 miles per hour, sometimes in the rain, puts life and limb at risk, particularly in a grueling 24-hour race such as Le Mans.

Director James Mangold's movie succeeds, at least in part, because he puts a strong cast behind the story's wheel. Matt Damon portrays Carroll Shelby, a Le Mans winner, who reluctantly retired from racing (health issues) and later was invited by Ford to help develop a car that could win Le Mans, something Ford hadn't been able to do on its own.

Damon's Shelby turns to Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a skilled British driver with a knack for engineering. As it turns out, Miles and Ford are not an ideal fit. Independent and headstrong, Miles has no interest in team play. As a result, Shelby finds himself forced into the role of mediator, trying to placate image-conscious Ford executives while preserving Miles' involvement in the Le Mans project.

Bumps in the road are hit as the movie showcases its various personalities.

Notable among these is the prime mover behind Ford's build-up to the 1966 Le Mans race. Looking as if he's channeling Bale's performance as Dick Cheney in Vice, Tracy Letts creates a Henry Ford II who has little interest in Le Mans until Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) humiliates him. Ford approached Ferrari about a merger. Not only does Ferrari snub Ford, but he also belittles the American motor czar.

At the time, Ferrari had become a habitual winner at Le Mans; Ferrari couldn't believe that Ford, which (ugh!) mass-produced cars, could mount worthy competition.

Mangold, (Logan, The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line) knows how to keep a movie moving, which is good because Ford v Ferrari runs for two and a half hours. And, no, I didn't think the movie needed to be that long.

Still, the two main performances are never less than watchable. Damon plays a confident, savvy Texan who specializes in boldness. As Miles, Bales knows when to rev his motor to the right degrees of intensity.

Miles' supportive wife (Caitriona Balfe) never stands in the way of her husband's passions. When Shelby and Miles fight outside of the Miles' home, Mrs. Miles pulls up a lawn chair and watches with amusement. Miles' son Peter (Noah Jupe) follows his dad's races with the kind of admiration an adoring son has for a heroic father.

Mangold makes sure that the race footage hums with excitement. He also sustains backstory tension, keeping just enough off-track focus on the rivalry between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari when the story arrives at Le Mans. Ferrari disdains the American who sometimes allows his marketing guy (Josh Lucas) to gum up the works, as marketing guys are wont to do in movies about men for whom racing isn't a promotional activity but a way of life.

For those unfamiliar with this true-life story, the movie may seem to cross the finish line in a way that's more downbeat than you'd expect, a slight veering from the formula line that Mangold deftly toes.

To its credit, though, Ford v Ferrari seems to know exactly what kind of movie it wants to be; that makes it an entertainment that should deliver for both racing and non-racing fans.