'Thunderbolts*' stakes out its own turf

 

   An aggressively bountiful stream of Marvel movies has created a specialized kind of viewer. Loyal fans and aficionados have become astute at parsing the intricacies that connect the numerous characters that populate the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

   An essential question raised by every new Marvel movie, then, revolves around whether its appeal extends beyond those who have submitted Marvel dominance.

   Thunderbolts* leans toward the middle when considering its appeal for the uninitiated.  It's difficult for me to call it must viewing, but I enjoyed the movie more than most recent Marvel fare, primarily because of a solid ensemble, a few memorable comic moments, and a commitment to the idea that six misfits are equal to one superhero.

    Here's the deal: A dejected group of MCU characters has been exploited by CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). If the Congress learns about these assassins, de Fontaine won't survive an already contentious impeachment hearing. 

    Fearing exposure, de Fontaine contrives to gather these Marvel losers in one place and eliminate them.

    A freshman congressman named Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) wants to topple de Fontaine. In addition to his Congressional day job, Bucky is trying to forget his life as Winter Soldier, an assassin with a prosthetic arm that, at one point, he pulls out of his dishwasher. Nice touch.

    Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) becomes the standout character among those de Fontaine wants to terminate. Raised to be a deadly killer, Yelena, a.k.a. Black Widow, sees her life as empty, a meaningless blip in the encompassing void of an indifferent universe -- or some such.

    John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a bargain-basement Captain America, helps round out the group. Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and Ghost (Hanna John-Kamen) also join the gang.

     All of these characters have Marvel backgrounds but you don't need to know much more about them than you'll learn from watching Thunderbolts*. 

    Know, though, that each Thunderbolt acknowledges a personal history that includes many bad deeds and a fair measure of regret.

    It takes time for director Jake Schreier to distinguish between each of the movie's non-superheroes and, more importantly, to get them to function as a team.

    When the characters meet at the underground facility to which de Fontaine has directed them, the movie introduces an oddball character named Bob (Lewis Pullman). Bob doesn't know how he arrived in the high-tech bunker, but it soon becomes clear that he's been the subject of secret biological experiments arranged by de Fontaine.

      Pullman delivers the film's pivotal performance as a character for whom the internal battle between good and evil becomes literal. Bob, whose name becomes the subject of the movie's best joke, also must learn about the temptations of possessing extreme power. 

     Comic relief and bonhomie arrive courtesy of the bearish Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour); Alexei operates a limo service and refers to himself as Red Guardian. 

     Alexei, who once served as a father figure for Yelena, becomes a cheerleader for group activities. He likes the name, Thunderbolts, which was taken from Yelena's losing childhood soccer team. The others consider it "meh."

    Existential concerns aside, there's plenty of action, the best of it set in New York City, which at one point is shrouded in a creeping dark shadow that looks as if it might have been at home in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic. 

    It takes time for the movie to settle in and scenes in which the characters flashback to their formative days aren't always elegantly handled, but the actors -- especially Pugh and Pullman -- find some depth and a few scenes evoke real emotion.

    You'll note the movie's title contains an * (asterisk). You'll have to see Thunderbolts* to discover why, but as Marvel movies go this one entertains and isn't afraid to be corny when it needs to be.

     What do I mean? When was the last time a Marvel movie resolved a major problem with a group hug? It happens here.

   

      

Waves of confusion roil this 'Bay'

Director Paula Van Der Oest brings as much confusion as intrigue to a big-screen adaptation of a 1986 novel by Lisa St. Aubin De Teran. The story kicks off in Liguria, Italy, where Will (Claes Bang) proposes to Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko). After a romantic prologue, the story leaps ahead 11 months. Will and Rosalind have settled into their London home with a new baby and with Rosalind’s twin daughters from a previous marriage. Things should be going well, but Rosalind is slipping off the deep end, peeling wallpaper off the walls and vibing more and more craziness. Suddenly,  Rosalind and the nanny (Shalisha James-Davis) disappear, along with the children. Will tracks them down in Normandy — only to learn that the baby has died. From that point on, little about the way the characters behave makes sense. We also have a strong idea that Rosalind’s former stepfather (Brian Cox) might have something to do with what’s gone wrong. It’s obvious that a mysterious fellow (Assaad Bouab) who lives in Normandy will figure into the dimly lit proceedings. Alice Krige turns up as Rosalind’s mother, but despite a game cast, the movie induces more head-scratching than suspense or mystery.

Vipers in the Soviet hierarchy

Laughs, terror, and dramatic punch mingle in The Death of Stalin.

I can’t think of another movie exactly like The Death of Stalin, which is part of the reason this movie feels so unsettlingly original. Best known for creating HBO’s Veep, director Armando Iannucci gives us a movie in which farcical, dramatic, and satirical elements bump into one another with collision force. If The Death of Stalin ultimately qualifies as a comedy, it's one that refuses to allow us to drop our guards.

If you want an indication of just how daring Iannucci has been, consider this: He has cast Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev. Now, if you were to make a list of actors who might play the table-pounding former head of the Soviet Union, I doubt whether Buscemi’s name would have crossed your mind.

As it turns out, Buscemi does an impressive job portraying an aide to Stalin who eventually rose to a top position in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Buscemi's wily Khrushchev has a sardonic streak that makes it clear that he's not about to be out-maneuvered.

The movie begins when Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) dies at the age of 74, after an evening of gathering his top staff to watch an American western, a ritual they've endured many times before. After his evening with cronies and alone in his room, Stalin drops to the floor. He has just read a note wishing him dead that was sent by a favored Soviet concert pianist (Olga Kurylenko).

Before Stalin expires, we learn that he keeps a list of those he plans to kill — usually for capricious reasons or perhaps for no reason at all. The head of Stalin’s secret police Lavrenti Beria (a frightening Simon Russell Beale) executed (pun intended) Stalin’s orders with a particularly perverse relish. Beria was feared — not only by ordinary folks but by those in Stalin’s inner circle.

Iannucci obtains fine work from the actors who play members of Stalin’s coterie, a group that has been cowed into ceaseless expressions of admiration.

Michael Palin appears as Vyacheslav Molotov, a major Bolshevik figure who unwittingly managed to find his way onto Stalin’s feared hit list. Jason Isaacs has a wonderfully robust turn as Georgy Zhukov, a swaggering Red Army officer with a major World War II record. Jeffrey Tambor appears as Georgy Malenkov, an indecisive “yes” man who succeeds Stalin and who, like a frightened dog, keeps sniffing the air to see if something dangerous might be approaching.

Based on graphic novels by Fabien Nury and Theirry Robin, the movie brims with scorching dialog as the vipers try to navigate the choppy waters of intrigue that begin to roil after Stalin’s death.

It’s never certain which of these men will emerge from the conspiratorial muck. Gradually, it becomes clear that Khrushchev might out-maneuver the rest of the group. He reacts against the worst of Stalin’s excesses, favoring a modicum of reform by freeing political prisoners and putting an end to the hated hit list.

The clash between Khrushchev and Beria takes the form of an epic piece of internecine warfare; Khrushchev's no saint, but Beria's barbarous cruelty and child molestation stand as the corrupted core of Stalin’s insidious regime.

At one point, Stalin’s flustered daughter (Andrea Riseborough) arrives to add an element of hysteria. She’s followed by the entry of Stalin’s massively deluded son (Rupert Friend).

I’ve seen quotes describing The Death of Stalin as hilarious. I didn’t find it hilarious, although much of it is funny.

More importantly, The Death of Stalin is marked by an acute trenchancy, a look at men attempting to fill a sudden power vacuum in ways that illustrate the darker side of their ambitions. It makes us laugh, yes, but this is one comedy that's deadly serious.

'Water Diviner' dilutes its power

Russell Crowe moves behind the camera for his first directorial effort.

World War I cost Australian farmer Joshua Connor everything he held dear. Three of his sons were killed in the Battle of Gallipoli. His beloved wife was so crippled by grief and shock that she took her own life.

Feeling that his existence had lost all purpose, Connor decided to travel to Gallipoli to search for the bodies of his sons. He had promised is late wife, he would bring the boys -- or at least their bodies -- home.

Russell Crowe found Connor's story interesting enough to move behind the camera and direct his first movie, The Water Diviner.

Perhaps knowing that Water Diviner would be a hard sell without a star, Crowe also plays the lead role. He's Connor, a character who appears in nearly every frame of a film that's trying to be ... well ... many things: a robust adventure, a grim story about the horrors of war, an encouraging look at friendship across a cultural divide, as well as a romance.

That's a bit much for any movie. The overload may explain why The Water Diviner turns into a mixed bag of movie that works better in some parts than in others.

Connor, by the way, gives the movie its title. He's unusually adept at discovering water, using divining rods to show him where to dig wells.

The story gets rolling when Connor reaches Turkey. The British army (hated in Turkey) doesn't want Connor to travel to the ravaged battlefield of Gallipoli to search for his sons' bodies. He must fight the military bureaucracy while dealing with the culture shock of being in a country that's entirely foreign to him.

Upon arrival in Turkey, Connor finds a hotel where he's befriended by the son (Dylan Georgiades) of the hotel's owner (Olga Kurylenko). Crowe keeps the romance between Connor and Kurylenko's Ayshe at subdued levels, but it's still a pro forma affair and not nearly as interesting as the brutal war footage (shown in flashback) or the adventure that ensues when Connor hooks up with a Turkish officer (Yilmaz Erdogan) to travel deep into Turkey.

This Turkish officer helps Connor, and paves the way for the movie's big twist, which is both horrific and heartbreaking.

If you know nothing about the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915-16, you may find the movie's politics a bit confusing. British and French troops fought at Gallipoli along with Australian divisions and the New Zealand Army Corps. The Ottoman Empire was allied with the Germans.

Whatever you know, you certainly can follow Connor on an adventure that's layered with grief over a war's massive casualties.

Crowe's well-crafted period piece would have done well to dispense with elements that feel as if they've been added to make the movie more user friendly: The romance between Connor and Ayshe and the surrogate father/son relationship between Connor and Ayshe's son deplete the movie's power rather than adding to its richness.

Crowe isn't afraid to temper his portrait of Connor with bitterness, but as I watched The Water Diviner, I couldn't help wondering whether he too often flinches from the story's hardest truths with the introduction of obvious movie ploys.

It's spy vs. spy in 'November Man'

Pierce Brosnan returns to espionage in a low-grade thriller.

Pierce Brosnan is beginning to look a bit long in the tooth for action-oriented spy antics. After all, it's been 12 years since Die Another Day, Brosnan's last run as the fabled 007.

Undeterred by passing time, Brosnan dives into a pit full of Eastern Europen mayhem to play CIA agent Peter Devereaux in The November Man, a loose adaptation of a 1986 novel by Bill Granger.

After a short prologue set in Montenegro in 2008, the movie leaps forward to a time when a retired Devereaux is called back into service by a tough-talking CIA boss (Bill Smitrovich), a guy who prides himself on his grasp of the world's brutal realities.

Devereaux's assignment: To travel to Moscow to help with the escape of a Russian woman (Mediha Musliovic) who supposedly has the goods on a Putin-like Russian (Lazar Ristovski') who's about to take over the country.

In the process, Devereaux gets crosswise with the agency, and finds himself burdened by a far-fetched plot and overly busy plot.

During the next 108 minutes, Devereaux must battle treachery within the CIA, take down an aspiring Russian baddie, save the life of a younger woman (Olga Kurylenko) and remind his former protege (Luke Bracey) that the old man still has it.

That's a big agenda, and director Roger Donaldson (The World's Fastest Indian (2005), Dante's Peak (1997) and No Way Out (1987) shuffles through it without making us care about much of the resultant intrigues.

Donaldson whips up tension here and there, but doesn't have much going for him other than the icy gravitas and sudden angry outbursts Brosnan brings to a role that strands him somewhere between hard-core action and worldly savvy -- with a trace of sadism thrown in for seasoning.

We've seen so many of these kinds of movies that just about everything in Novembmer Man feels second-hand.

The movie does accomplish one thing, though: It makes us long for the end of summer, and the start of a new movie season.

Repeat after me: We're almost there. We're almost there.

'Oblivion' has an intriguing look

But Tom Cruise's latest doesn't have a plot to match ...
I saw Oblivion at a preview screening at an IMAX theater. I'd have to say that seeing the movie that way made for a heightened viewing experience. Even at that, I can't say that I'd ever had any desire to see a three-story projection of Tom Cruise's face, particularly in a role in which an awful lot of Cruise's acting consists of open-mouthed staring at special effects.

Maybe Cruise shouldn't be blamed. The effects in Oblivion -- directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron Legacy fame -- offer a lot to tempt wandering eyes. Here's one post-apocalyptic thriller that doesn't look like every other sci-fi movie you've ever seen.

Set on Earth in 2077, Oblivion revolves around a future in which civilization mostly has been destroyed. The planet's population used nuclear weapons to annihilate an invading army of interplanetary thugs, achieving what may be the ultimate in pyrrhic victories. When the movie opens we meet a two-person mop-up crew that has been left to patrol the war-ravaged Earth before they join the rest of the survivors on Titan, a distant moon of Saturn. The team consists of Jack Harper (Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). The duo periodically checks in with a mission controller (Melissa Leo) who speaks with a folksy southern accent.

Jack and Victoria occupy a home above the clouds that has a spare, ultra-modern look, sort of what you might imagine the creators of the Jetsons would have come up with had they taken themselves seriously.

You'll just about have settled into your seat when Kosinski has Cruise flying around Earth in Top Gun-style, only this time his airborne vehicle looks like a cross between a helicopter, a jet and a drone. Not content with one toy for Cruise, the movie quickly provides Jack with another, a motorcycle that detaches from the body of Harper's aircraft.

And speaking of drones ...

It's just here that Oblivion finds a small measure of topical relevance. Jack's job involves servicing flying weapons the movie calls ... well ... drones. Harper's job: Refuel the drones, which are used to wipe out lingering marauders known as Scavengers or, more familiarly, "Scavs."

The movie's early scenes are devoted to action set pieces, including one that takes place in an abandoned library. Another scene takes us to the top of the Empire State Building, which now sits at ground level. Jack's haunted by memories of pre-war New York City, but doesn't know what to make of them. He knows every detail of the last Super Bowl, which he tells us was played in 2017. He wears a Yankee baseball cap, and evidently has given up shaving on a regular basis.

The plot -- which can be confusing -- takes a strange turn when Harper discovers a crashed ship during one of his Earth patrols. The crew has been scattered about in coffin-like containers where they've been "sleeping" for an extended period, presumably because they were supposed to make a lengthy space flight. Harper is able to rescue one member of the crew.

I guess if you had to pick one crew member to save, you could do worse than the beautiful Olga Kurylenko, last seen in Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. Kurylenko's Julia seems to have some sort of connection with Jack.

Jack, of course, must be portrayed as having a few special traits. Perhaps that's why he savors a book that he finds on one of his missions, a copy of Thomas Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. Jack's particularly drawn to line about how to die a noble death.

If you've seen the trailer for Oblivion, you know that a cigar-chomping Morgan Freeman appears in the movie. Best not to explain Freeman's role in the story, but his character eventually helps drive the plot toward its muddled and disappointing destination.

Because the movie's primary pleasures are visual, it's worth mentioning that cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who also did Life of Pi, contributes to the movie's allure -- although Oblivion's considerable visual pleasures become somewhat repetitive as the action unfolds.

So what goes wrong? The troubles seem to have started at the typewriter; i.e., with the screenplay by Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn, who based their work on a graphic novel and original story by Kosinski. The various plot machinations often defy logic, and the movie includes an epilogue that struck me as a cheat.

I also wish that Cruise would find something else to do aside from big-budget extravaganzas that can undermine their intelligence with dumb dialogue (Oblivion has its share) and obligatory action. But that, I'm afraid, takes us out of the realm of science fiction and into the realm of hopeless fantasy.

'To the Wonder:' A master mumbles

From its intriguing title to its trancelike beauty to the half-mumbled thoughts of its characters, everything about Terrence Malick's To the Wonder suggests that the director wanted to follow his masterful Tree of Life with something equally meaningful.

This time, though, Malick -- whose visual skills are never in question -- seems to be looking for deep meanings within a thin, schematically presented story that may have had little chance of taking him where he probably wanted to go.

The story, which whispers its way through the movie, involves a romance between an American engineer (Ben Affleck) and a woman living in France (Olga Kurylenko). Affleck's Neil makes an apparent move toward commitment when he brings Kurylenko's Marina to Oklahoma, along with her 10-year-old daughter (Tatiana Chiline).

"If you love me, there's nothing else I need,'' Marina says, perhaps to herself. Malick's characters are locked inside lives in which disappointment and yearning echo like cries in a lonely canyon. Who's listening? Maybe no one.

Marina better be right about not needing anything more than love because what we see of Oklahoma doesn't offer much to sustain interest, and it should go without saying that the ache of poetic romance is better felt in France than in the bleak Oklahoma subdivision where the story settles.

Malick presents Marina as a nymph-like creature who spins and dances around Neil's sparsely furnished house. She says she's happy, but it doesn't take long for her isolated daughter to begin longing for home. Who could blame her? I, too, was yearning for Paris the moment Malick set his cameras onto the desolate Oklahoma plains.

Malick eventually introduces another major character into this quietly desperate mix. Javier Bardem portrays the troubled Father Quintana, a priest who wanders around visiting the poor and talking to God, who (sad to say) isn't talking back. Father Quintana hasn't exactly lost his faith, but he's mired in some sort of spiritual fatigue. He's doing what's expected of him, but he's not feeling the priestly vibe.

At one point, a dispirited Marina returns to Paris with her daughter. While she's away, Neil strikes up a relationship with an old friend (Rachel McAdams), a practical westerner who seems well-suited to an Oklahoma-based lifestyle. Later, Marina returns to the U.S. in hopes of obtaining a green card. Her relationship with Neil resumes.

During one of her Oklahoma visits, Marina meets Anna (Romina Mondello), an Italian woman who tells her to get out of Oklahoma and seek a better life. Good advice.

To the Wonder is not plot-driven. It's not character-driven, either. It's driven by some nearly ineffable yearning that always seems to find its way into Malick's work -- for love, for spiritual renewal, for finding meaning in a world that can be beautiful photographed and still feel deeply alien.

Kurylenko and McAdams both play characters who, in this muted endeavor, surpass Affleck's Neil by a mile -- at least when it comes to interest. The deadpan and empty nature of Affleck's character make it difficult not to wonder what either woman sees in him.

At first I wondered whether Affleck had the resources to fill out this kind of vaguely defined character -- and then I began to wonder whether any actor could have brought Neil fully to life. As the cliche goes, there's no there there.

To describe To the Wonder as uneventful seems as superfluous as saying Hip-Hop music has a beat. We spend most of our time watching Malick exercise his cinematic chops, often to a heavy-duty musical sampler that includes work by Wagner, Berlioz, Hayden, Respighi, Tchaikovsky, and Gorecki.

Look, I have admired much of Malick's small but powerful body of work. And I gave To the Wonder the benefit of as much doubt as possible -- right up until the moment when my desire for anything resembling drama no longer could be suppressed. I wanted Malick to stop poeticizing and start dramatizing.

Granted, Malick always seems to be looking for something deep, and it's possible that the sadness in Malick's work stems from the somber realization that the world never fulfills our deepest longings. Few filmmakers are able to make boredom feel quite so exquisite; vacancy, quite so suggestive.

But To the Wonder may disappoint even Malick's more ardent fans. It does more to make us wonder what Malick's after than to help us experience the somber mystery of a world that seldom -- if ever -- wants to requite our love.