Spectacle can't save 'Tron: Ares'

   

  Throughout the year, I have a fair number of movie conversations. I mention this because in more than 40 years of reviewing, no one in my admittedly limited circle has ever wondered why there weren't more sequels to Tron, the 1982 movie that was admired for its CGI innovation but fell short in most other ways. 

  Tron may have spawned its share of devotees. If so, I don't happen to know any of them.

   I begin my review of Tron: Ares, the third Tron installment, this way because I wondered why Disney had opted to give Tron another run. Had advances in CGI allowed for richer visual expression? Have current obsessions with AI spurred enthusiasm for a story in which virtual reality plays such a significant role?

    I don't know, but I do know how Tron: Ares, which I saw in IMAX, struck me. Mostly, it didn't. 

    Brimming with red-hued visuals and offering complex visualizations of The Grid (the movie's version of virtual reality), Tron: Ares builds a world that alternates between captivating and repetitive.

    As was the case with the first installment, story often feels less than compelling. Director Joachim Ronning sets up a simple conflict as two tech moguls (Greta Lee and Evan Peters) square off at a moment when science  has advanced to the point where virtual programs (seen in human form) can be transported into the real world. 

    A moral problem results. Lee's Eve Kim wants to use these AI creations to help humankind; Peters' Julian Dillinger aims to enhance the authoritarian power he craves by transporting state-of-the art warriors into his real-life world.

    Dillinger wins the race to bring virtual beings into reality, but with a catch. After 29 minutes, his creations collapse into piles of debris. Not to worry. Kim has an antidote. Using work initiated by her late sister, Kim discovers a code that can sustain the life of virtual beings indefinitely.

    The big twist, I suppose, involves a change of heart by Ares (Jared Leto), Dillinger's warrior in chief. Ares quickly (too quickly perhaps) begins to question his main directive, which requires him to capture Kim so that Dillinger can retrieve the desired code. Ares's unexpected flaw: benevolence.

      Lee gives Kim the requisite enthusiasm, but her performance is subordinated to the movie's ongoing light show. A mostly deadpan Leto adds flickers of wit to Ares's repertoire. At one point, Ares affirms his desire to become human by confessing that he prefers the synth-pop music of Depeche Mode to the classicism of Mozart.

      Action pounds and abounds. As the plot unfolds, spiffy light cycles race through city streets, trailing red beams that turn the movie into a showy spectacle, displays that seem more the point than the outcome of any of the movie's many chase sequences. A mood-setting Nine Inch Nails score pushes toward the final credits, which include a short epilogue.

      Among the supporting performances, Gillian Anderson registers as Elizabeth Dillinger, Julian's conscience-stricken mother.

     References to the first movie can be found, and, of course, Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, hero of the first edition. Bridges's late picture appearance made me wonder whether The Dude hadn't dropped in on a sci-fi epic. If only he had.

     Whether AI poses an imminent threat to humanity is a subject for others to consider. As for Tron: Ares: I seldom felt the one quality any movie, whether virtual or reality-based, should provide: involvement.

    

An odds-defying athlete gets her due

 Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, died in 2003 at the age of 98. Ederle's obituary in The New York Times included this defining sentence, "her feat, which she did only once and under horrendous conditions, made a memorable contribution in an age when many found it difficult to take female athletes seriously."

  After an initial flood of attention, Ederle failed to "sustain the lofty place in history of another hero of the 1920s, Charles A. Lindbergh," the Times article also noted.

   Put succinctly, Ederle did not become an enduring household name.

   A new movie, Young Woman and the Sea, tries to redress that slight with a biopic that underscores the difficulties Ederle faced because of prejudice against women athletes, in part due to backlash from the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920.

   Director Joachim Ronning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) brings a spirit of female empowerment to a conventionally told story that stars Daisy Ridley, best known for her Star Wars work, as "Trudy" Ederle,

  A childhood bout with measles impaired Ederle's hearing. Her mother (Jeanette Hain) had to overcome resistance to involve her daughter in organized swimming. After a steamboat accident claimed many lives, the elder Ederle insisted that her daughters learn to swim — or so the movie has it. An eager Trudy didn't take much convincing.

    Ederle's father, a German-immigrant butcher played by Kim Bodnia upheld traditional Old-World values, hoping his daughters would agree to arranged marriages.

  Ederle's inauspicious beginnings built toward triumph with an appearance in the 1924 Olympics, where she won a gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle relay. She quickly decided to add the English Channel to her expanding resume.

   A by-the-numbers approach to Ederle's story is augmented by performances from Hain as Ederle's stern, determined mother, and Tina Cobham-Hervey, as Ederle's sister and confidant. 

   Additional cast includes Sian Clifford as Lottie Epstein, Ederle's first coach and swimming instructor, Christopher Eccleston as the bigoted coach who sabotaged her first attempt to swim the Channel, and Stephen Graham as the colorful male Channel swimmer who took charge of the boat that guided Ederle in her Channel swim.

    Ridley shows plenty of pluck, but the actors are all constrained by the point-blank quality of the writing, which focuses more on the inspirational qualities of Ederle's story than on any deep probing. 

   Some of the movie's details -- the invention of a two-piece bathing suit, for example -- add interest, as does a warm-up swim she made from New York to New Jersey. Ederle also seems to have been obsessed with the 1921 song, Ain't We Got Fun.

     Cinematographer Oscar Faura reportedly filmed in open Black Sea waters, a decision that enhances the swimming scenes. Anyone who has battled waves and undercurrents knows how arduous ocean swimming can be. 

     Ederle's plunge through a sea of jellyfish and the nighttime disorientation she felt while tackling shallows off the Dover coast create tension, but the movie mostly functions as a belated ticker-tape parade to a self-assured, odds-defying woman.

     Before the closing credits, you'll see poignant black-and-white footage of the real Ederle and the real New York City ticker-tape parade she received --reminders of a now-faded moment of national celebration and exuberance.

     Young Woman and the Sea blends old-fashioned style and inspirational ambition in ways that may connect with audiences or, at minimum, introduce them to a neglected bit of popular history. Maybe that's enough.

Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: a mixed and not entirely successful offering.

Let’s start at the end. Before it’s done, Disney’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil indulges itself in a mega-helping of Disney cuteness that’s designed to please those who love their movies served with heavy doses of syrup, the kind that leave audiences with a corn-fed glow.

In this sequel to the commercially successful first edition, Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent, the witch who detests humans -- aside from Aurora (Elle Fanning), the human daughter she raised. Maleficent has inviting ruby red lips, but you wouldn’t want to dance cheek-to-cheek with her lest you be impaled on cheekbones that jut outward like ski slopes.
In this edition, the creatures of the moors (fairies, mushrooms, and trees that spring to life) are threatened by the human kingdom where Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) is scheduled to marry Prince Philip (Harris Dickenson).

The early, amusing part of this second helping plays like a fairy tale version of Meet the Parents. Maleficent opposes the marriage but agrees to have dinner with the royal family: good King John (Robert Lindsey) and his not-so-good wife Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer).

With prodding from her faithful, shape-shifting companion Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent does her best to be civil. Jolie shines when Maleficent struggles to suppress her venomous impulses.

The original movie went big on revisionism. The sequel follows suit. Most of the time we find ourselves rooting against the humans, whose destructive ambitions reach full bloom in the person of Queen Ingrith. Pfeiffer delivers her lines with as much sarcasm as she can muster. But because the dialogue isn’t all that good, the impact of the Queen Ingrith's archness feels dulled.

En route to its happily-ever-after, the movie sets off a war. Wounded as she flees that early-picture dinner, Maleficent is rescued by another winged creature with horns. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Connal presides over a cave-dwelling civilization of creatures who look like Maleficent but don’t have her super-powers.

Some of these creatures -- notably the war-mongering Borra (Ed Skrein) -- are fed up with living in exile from treacherous humans. They want to make war on the residents of the palace. The pragmatic Conall opposes such engagement, acknowledging that humans severely outnumber the non-humans.

If a fairy tale movie threatens a great battle, it surely must deliver one. Mistress of Evil whips up a CGI-fueled spectacle in which the fairy tale creatures are attacked with a concoction made from flowers that ...

Never mind. Nothing here makes a great deal of sense, but director Joachim Ronning mounts the final assault on a large scale as the humans threaten to pull off a fairy genocide.

So, to what does all this amount?

Another mash-up. Part cartoon, part action movie, part romance, and part fairy tale, Maleficent doesn't quite stake out enough turf in any of those categories totally to succeed. But it's been tailored to please its audience and probably will.

You either can view that as an accomplishment or a capitulation or (as I do) a mixture of both.

Still, when you get right down to it there’s this: Pfeiffer’s Ingrith is no match for Jolie’s Maleficent. That means every moment Jolie's off-screen (and there are too many of them) leaves us eager for her return.

Do we really care whether Aurora and Philip are able to marry or would we rather look at Maleficent with her majestic wings, flowing horns and towering cheekbones? You know how I’m voting.

This 'Pirates' tells a cluttered tale

The approach in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales: Load up on effects.

Nobody has directed better Pirates of the Caribbean movies than Gore Verbinski. Verbinski, who took charge of three Pirate voyages beginning in 2003, has a flair for visual comedy that enlivened the Pirates movies he brought to the screen.

But we're now on the fifth Pirates movie and directing chores for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales have been assumed by Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, the duo that directed Kon-Tiki, the story of Thor Heyerdahl, the explorer who made a 4,300-mile crossing of the Pacific on a raft.

In this mega-production, Ronning and Sandberg succumb to the temptation to pump up the volume as they showcase Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush's Captain Hector Barbossa, two portraits that show their wear.

The directors bolster familiar performances with a new crew that includes a ghastly looking villain who has lost an ample portion of his head, Javier Bardem's Captain Salazar. We also meet two new young actors (Brenton Thwaites and Kaya Scodelario).

Before I tell you anything else, let me confess that if I never saw Jack Sparrow again my life would in no way feel depleted, and even the movie's addition of a father/son and father/daughter dynamic didn't do much to enrich a summer entertainment that overdoses on effects. These include a rickety ship with a hull that opens to swallow its victims whole, ghost sharks, ghost pirates and a parting of the sea that might make Moses do a double take.

A plot that has been stuffed like a Thanksgiving Turkey finds British naval officers chasing young Thwaites's Henry, who is searching for Jack Sparrow and trying to lift the curse that separated him from his father. The Brits also pursue Scodelario's character, an astronomer who believes she knows how to locate Poseidon's much-sought-after Trident.

Thwaites Henry and Scodelario's Carina are the movie's love interests, but their romance hardly makes the pulse beat faster. She resists; he persists. We've seen it all before.

And yes, that's Paul McCartney who appears behind a great, bushy beard in a fleeting cameo.

Bardem's Salazar circles the movie in search of revenge against Jack Sparrow, the pirate responsible for sinking Salazar's ship when he was a respectable Spanish sea captain -- or some such. Salazar winds up as captain of a ghost ship.

Ronning and Sandberg tend to flood the plot with waves of effects, gliding camera moves and lots of shtick from Depp.

Nearly every moment of this edition is served to the accompaniment of Geoff Zanelli's unavoidable score, which struck me as an attempt to add momentum and meaning to events that might not carry much weight on their own.

Having said all that, it also should be noted that Dead Men Tell No Tales probably manufactures enough verve to satisfy audiences that can't get enough of this stuff.

If you've managed to set sail without these Pirates until now, Ronning and Sandberg provide little reason to change your behavior. But fans will turn out -- if only to continue the game of ranking the Pirates movies from best to worst. And, no, I doubt whether the game is over.*
*Thanks to the reader who pointed out a stupid mistake, which I've fixed. Would have published comment, but it arrived anonymously and I try not to publish anonymous comments.