Running a too-familiar race

 

  A quarter of the way through The Running Man, a remake of an action-stuffed 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, I had to pinch myself. "Wait," I thought, "Isn't this November, and if so, why am I watching a movie that looks as if it should have been part of the summer action sweepstakes.

  This second adaptation of a 1982 Stephen King novel -- published under the name of Richard Bachman -- moves quickly, but not quickly enough to make us forget we've already seen movies about deadly game shows run by authoritarians interested in controlling the masses and reaping profits. Need I mention The Hunger Games?

   Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Last Day in Soho) tells the story of a reality-based show broadcast by an evil corporation called The Network. If any of the movie's contestants survive the hunt, they win $1 billion, a sum purportedly worth risking one's life for in a society in which few are privileged.

    A buffed Glen Powell plays a husband and father with anger-management problems. Powell's Ben Richards keeps losing jobs because he flies off the handle while sticking up for underdogs at work. 

    Desperate to find care for his sick infant daughter and financial relief for his overworked wife (Jayme Lawson), Richards auditions for non-lethal TV game shows. He plans to avoid The Running Man, but Network head Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) talks him into competing in the deadly competition.

     From that point on, the movie is off and running, racing through one set piece after another while dragging along some overpacked thematic baggage behind it. 

     Let's get the message out of the way: All the Network cares about is ratings. If it needs killings to up the dramatic ante, it doesn't hesitate. The Network also uses doctored videos to turn the contestants into menaces who purportedly threaten the common good. The masses buy in.

      Set in a dystopian near future, The Running Man relies heavily on Powell, who may not have been the ideal choice for this kind of action movie. I don't mean that as insult. Powell was great in Top Gun: Maverick and in the dark comedy Hit Man, but a kick-ass star? I suppose the box-office will decide.

      In all, three contestants (Powell, Katy O'Brian and Martin Herlihy) compete, but it's hardly surprising that only the top-billed Powell remains standing through the escalating mayhem. McCone (Lee Pace), a masked Hunter, remains in dogged pursuit throughout.

    The move can feel pretty dogged itself. I'm talking structure, not pace. As he moves from New York to Boston, Richards receives help from friends and sympathizers. William H. Macy plays Molie, a guy who outfits Ben with armaments. Daniel Ezra portrays Bradley, a savvy guy who facilitates Richards' travels, and Michael Cera appears as a  well-equipped rebel with plans to fight the Hunters.

    Toward the end of the movie, Ben hijacks the car of a realtor (Emilia Jones), who believes he's the villainous fiend the Network claims him to be.

    It's tough to avoid cliches in this kind of movie. Colman Domingo portrays Bobby Thompson, the amped-up host of The Running Man, a showy role that doesn't offer much for Domingo to chew on.

      Aiming for the big finish, Wright concocts a dizzying  airborne showdown. By that time, I was wondering whether the movie hadn't fallen into a trap. If you don't have anything novel to say, try saying it louder.

      None of this is bad enough to condemn Running Man or good enough to praise it. The Running Man has the all-too-familiar markings of a movie that wants to be a summer blockbuster. But, as I said at the outset, this is November.

A wobbly mixture of horror and comedy

    If director Edgar Wright were a painter, his palette would be a riotous blur of colors, one bleeding into another.

     Just that kind of dizzying impact may have been what Wright was aiming for with Last Night in Soho, a mixture of horror and thriller tropes that alternates between contemporary Soho and the district during the 1960s.

   I called Last Night a horror film, but that’s not quite accurate. Although it spouts a fair share of blood, the movie also has a bouncy spirit that goes against the horror grain. It's upbeat horror.

   The story follows Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) from the country to London where she hopes to prepare herself for a career as a fashion designer.  Obsessed with the 1960s, Eloise enrolls in a school where the students seem to be moving at a faster social pace than the one to which she's accustomed.

   She should have known. Her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) already warned her about London's ability to swallow and destroy a naive young person.

   In an effort to escape the hard-partying atmosphere of her dormitory, Eloise rents a room in a house run by a landlady (Diana Rigg) who may be up to more than we expect. 

   Once ensconced in her new digs, Eloise begins to dream of life in Soho during the swinging Sixties. 

   If this is a dream, it vividly transports Eloise back to the time that long has fascinated her and gives the movie one more twist, this one involving time travel. 

   In its '60s segments, Eloise begins to follow the life of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a young woman who hopes to establish herself as a singer in London's fabled West End.

   The line between Eloise and Sandie begins to blur and the movie then contrives to teach Eloise that there’s more to the ‘60s than music and fashion. The ‘60s devoured dreams and dreamers, even slashed them to death.

   To achieve its cautionary goals, the story introduces a slick Londoner (Matt Smith) who promises to help Sandie achieve stardom. Let's just say he's not true to his word.

  Meanwhile back in the present, a fellow student (Michael Ajao) sees that Eloise is troubled. He tries his best to help but has no real grasp of the fact that Eloise's life includes increasingly harrowing trips to the 1960s.

  Terence Stamp drifts through the proceedings, a brooding threatening presence.

  A slick stylist, Wright (Baby Driver) has made a movie that eventually fails to be either amusing or frightening enough to save itself from being a muddled mashup that doesn't always track.

   And exactly what's at the heart of Wright's metaphorical assault on the '60s? Most likely it's youthful naïveté, low-hanging fruit that's too ripe for the picking.

   If you lived through the ‘60s, you may want to push aside the horror and attempted social commentary and simply enjoy the memories evoked by the movie’s soundtrack.

  Although there’s another danger here, as well. You may find Peter and Gordon’s A World Without Love running uncontrollably through your head. 

   Peter and Gordon? If you don't already know, don't ask.

They've lit many musical 'Sparks'

 

In the obscenely profuse world of pop culture, keeping up has become a virtual impossibility. So, it's without shame that I admit to never having heard of Sparks, an art rock-duo created  by two brothers, Ron and Russell Mael. 

   Sparks, it turns out is hardly a newcomer on the rock scene: The brothers have been making music since the 1960s, usually with the support of other musicians assembled for bands that have morphed through a variety of incarnations. 

    Lead singer Russell serves as frontman. But the most compelling figure is keyboardist Ron, who sports a razor-thin mustache and approaches his work with a deadpan gaze that deflects interpretation.

    Perhaps because he knows that many of his viewers won’t be familiar with Sparks, director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) allows The Sparks Brothers to run for two hours and 15 minutes. The length should prove educational for tyros and satisfyingly abundant for aficionados. 

     Though it became big in Britain, Sparks never cracked the ceiling that leads to megastardom. The group more than makes up for its lack of mega-aura with durability. Sparks continually adapts and recreates itself -- not to keep pace with any trend, but to vent the group's considerable creativity. 

    The brothers' interests have taken them from serious but non-reverential interest in French New Wave cinema to albums with titles such as Kimono My House, Whomp that Sucker, and Lil' Beethoven. 

    Sparks manages a neat trick: The band delivers the rock goods while also keeping a tongue firmly planted in cheek, particularly when it comes to the businesses of rock.  When a producer suggested they do an album to which people could dance, the brothers wryly named their record Music That You Can Dance To. 

    Wright includes interviews (ranging from fan Patton Oswalt to Todd Rundgren to Flea to Mike Myers), all laudatory.

     It's probably a good idea to get ready for more Sparks to fly.

     Along with director Leos Carax, the brothers wrote the script for Annette, a Carax-directed movie starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard that will premiere at Cannes in July.  The story reportedly is told almost entirely through song and if The Sparks Brothers is any indication, the movie won't lack for invention, wit, and perhaps even a danceable beat.

A baby-faced getaway driver

Baby Driver wants to be hard-bitten, but seems trapped by its sleek style.

Thanks to an error in judgment, Baby (the main character in the new thriller Baby Driver) drives getaway cars for a soft-spoken but ruthless Atlanta crime boss who's skilled at staging robberies. When I saw the trailer for director Edgar Wright's movie, I got excited. Maybe we could add something with real kick to the summer slag heap.

But Wright (Shaun of the Dead) has made a movie that's mostly froth, a crime fantasy posing as a thriller with hard-boiled performances from a cast that includes Kevin Spacey (as a no-nonsense criminal mastermind); Jamie Foxx (as a psychopathic thief); John Hamm (as an exiled Wall Street wheeler-dealer); and Eliza Gonzalez (as the girlfriend of Hamm's character).

None of these characters show much by way of originality; Spacey's performance feels like a bit of a reiteration. As is often the case, he's playing the smartest, meanest guy in the room. Hamm actually was scarier as a ruthless ad man in Mad Men. Here, you get the feeling that he's trying too hard to pull out all the stops.

If Wright wanted a baby-faced character to play Baby, he could have done no better than Ansel Elgort, who has the kind of face that registers boyish innocence. Elgort never loses our sympathy.

So here's the gimmick: Elgort's Baby carries multiple iPods, each loaded with music to fit whatever mood or pursuit in which he happens to find himself. Music also drowns out the hum of tinnitus from which he suffers, a malady acquired in a car accident in which, as a child, he lost his parents.

Baby is devoted to the memory of his late mother, a singer by trade. He's been raised by a foster parent (CJ Jones), an aging deaf man for whom the adult Baby has become chief caretaker.

A ton of music turns Baby Driver into a juke box of a movie featuring tunes from a variety of artists, spanning numerous pop styles. We're talking Blur, R.E.M, Barry White, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Queen and more. Baby lives behind a set of earphones.

Wright leavens the proceedings with romance. Baby falls for a waitress (Lily James). Baby indulges a cornball dream in which the two of them will hit the open road with nothing but music, each other and an endless horizon of new possibilities.

Naturally, Doc opposes Baby's departure from the group of rotating felons who carry out his intricate plans. Doc sees Baby as his good-luck charm. He won't let him go.

If you like car chases, you'll get your fill, but for me, even creatively handled car chases have diminishing returns. Here's another movie in which shifting gears becomes a metaphor for assertive expression.

Of all the performances, Foxx's proves the most unsettling. His character -- named Bats -- suggests real danger, as opposed to the kind of faux, pulpy menace everyone else exudes.

If you've seen movies by Quentin Tarantino or Nicolas Winding (Drive), you may find a glib familiarity in Wright's movie, a sense of amoral hipness that, like one of the tires in this film, seems to be losing tread from wear.

For all its attempts at juxtaposing Baby's sweet dreams with the hard-core aspirations of the movie's band of miscreants, Baby Driver has no more staying power than an air kiss. The longer it goes on, the more fleeting its fleetness becomes.

A comedy about a wild pub crawl

The World's End scores in unexpected ways.

One shudders to think what The World's End might have been. Had the movie been made by anyone other than Edgar Wright -- the director of a trilogy of movies that began with Shaun of the Dead (2004) and continued with Hot Fuzz (2007) -- it probably would have been a kind of British knock-off of the Hangover movies, a comedy that attempted to max-out on sleaze and grossness.

Consider the plot: Wildly irresponsible Gary King (Simon Pegg) encourages five reluctant buddies to reunite to finish a pub crawl they began when they were young men eager to escape the confines of their hometown of Newton Haven, a northern English town with a generic look and no discernible distinctions.

For a time, it does seem as if Wright and his cohorts (a list that includes Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) plan to follow a fairly standard comedy map.

We know, for example, that Frost's Andy, who seems to have buttoned-down his life, will eventually loosen up and abandon his teetotalling ways. But Wright, who wrote the screenplay for The World's End with Pegg, has a stranger, sillier and much more creative movie in mind.

Suffice it to say that the screenplay adds a wild sci-fi twist when the former high-school buddies discover that their hometown has been invaded by aliens who have turned most of the population into robots.

Once this twist has been revealed, the movie becomes increasingly crazier and a lot more inventive, employing some witty and well-executed special effects and adding an appearance by Rosamund Pike, as the sister of one of the men and a love interest for two of them. A game Pierce Brosnan appears in an extended cameo as one of the boys' former teachers.

The World's End, by the way, is the entirely appropriate name of the bar where the pup crawl is supposed to conclude.

As chief instigator, Pegg provides the movie with its centerpiece, sustaining a performance that's at once crazed, gleeful and desperate: The rest of the crew keeps pace.

No point revealing the jokes, but they are plentiful and mostly funny. Wright also manages to infuse the comedy with a sense of abandon without losing control of his movie.

Neat trick: The World's End has just enough trenchancy to keep it from being lost in its own silliness and just enough silliness to keep us from having to take any of it too seriously.

Michael Cera in a wild new context

Scott pursues the apparently unobtainable Ramona.
We’ve seen too many graphic novels brought to the screen, and we’ve experienced more than enough movies that strain to replicate the dizzying buzz of video games. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World fits into this over-stuffed category, but still manages to distinguish itself from the pack. The movie is a boldly conceived and wildly creative mash-up of graphic novel tropes and just about anything else director Edgar Wright seems to have thought of while adapting a half dozen of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels for the screen.

More than a recreation of graphic novels, Scott Pilgrim is a heady celebration of the form, and if you have any tolerance for this kind of youthful filmmaking, you should have a good time.

Once you know that the movie stars Michael Cera, you also know a lot about its main character. Cera plays the title character, brainy young Scott, a guy who can be funny in a self-deprecating sort of way. It’s hardly surprising that resembles most of the other characters Cera has played in movies from Juno to Superbad to Youth In Revolt. Cera may be a one-trick pony, but he performs the trick with skill.

A small confession: I keep looking for signs of Cera’s maturation. Is this guy doomed to perpetual big-screen adolescence or some reasonable facsimile? Will Cera ever have an AARP card or will he remain in this bizarre ageless state forever?

Like some of Cera’s other characters, Scott Pilgrim is entirely of the moment. He lives with his gay roommate (Kieran Culkin) and has only one real aspiration: to win the heart of Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams. Scott’s also being pursued by the ultra-determined Knives Chu (Ellen Wong).

When the movie opens, Scott’s dating Knives; he’s 22; she’s still in high school. His friends think he should be embarrassed about the gap in their ages.

Scott also plays in (what else?) a garage band. That adds another up-to-the-minute character to the movie’s mix, Alison Pill’s surly, cynical Kim Pine, drummer of The Sex Bob-omb, a band that sounds a little better than its name might lead you to believe.

A plot of sort drives the pyrotechnics, which are served with numerous comic-book exclamations splashed across the screen.

But about that plot: To win her, Scott must fight seven of Ramona's former boyfriends. This daunting task leads to a series of vividly depicted battles with rivals that include a rock impresario portrayed by Jason Schwartzman.

Familiar to American audiences from two more traditional comedies – Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz – Wright handles the mayhem well, although it must be said that the movie’s rampant creativity seldom abates. So, yes, all the amped-up, exaggerated energy can cause you to burn out on Scott Pilgrim before the movie races across its finish line.

Maybe that was inevitable: Scott Pilgrim’s meaning resides in the many gimmicks over which Wright presides. The movie doesn’t have a style; it’s nothing but style, and it thrives on merging various forms of entertainment and popular culture.

I happened to see Scott Pilgrim the same week I saw Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a documentary about the New York artist who died in 1988 of a heroin overdose at the age of 28. Basquiat’s art – much praised and highly priced – set a standard for energetic fragmentation that I thought about while watching Scott Pilgrim.

For the most part, the movie’s jazzed up, juiced up images amuse, but they also vanish from memory as quickly as spent fireworks fading from a night sky. Put another way: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World can be fun while it lasts. Quite considerately, I think, it doesn't leave much in its giddy, frenzied wake.