Many twists, not much credibility

Those who've seen It Ends With Us, the big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover's 2016 novel about domestic abuse, may be looking forward to Regretting You, another movie based on a Hoover novel, this one published in 2019. Director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) finds little credible drama in a movie that wraps itself in enough contrivance to squeeze most of the life out of it. The movie begins by introducing four characters who've known each other since high school. Morgan (Allison Williams) seems happily married to Chris (Scott Eastwood). Meanwhile, Morgan's sister (Willa Fitzgerald) is about to marry the father of her baby (Dave Franco). Like most teenagers Clara -- Morgan and Chris's 17-year-old daughter -- is starting to chart her own course. A big-time tragedy upsets everyone's apple cart, setting off a cascading series of events that can't be revealed without spoilers. Clara's story, which feels like it belongs in another movie, charts her relationship with Miller (Mason Thames), a kid who's more mature emotionally than she is. Despite dropping a tragic bomb into the story, the movie scatters little emotional shrapnel. AMC Theaters receives a major product placement in a film that comes up short on interesting characters and credible behavior. 

'Pacific Rim' sequel fails to rise

A new group battles to save the Earth, but this sequel offers little reason to cheer.

In the summer of 2013, director Guillermo del Toro scored at the box office with Pacific Rim, a movie that introduced audiences to Jaegers, gigantic robot-like creations that stomped through the nation's multiplexes. Jaegers were deployed against the Kaiju. In case you need reminding, the Kaiju were genetically engineered amphibious monsters that arrived on Earth through a portal in the Pacific Ocean — or something like that.

What proved winning about Pacific Rim had less to do with plot or even with its high-stakes battles than with the sheer scale at which Del Toro allowed his imagination to take over the screen.

As just about everyone knows by now, del Toro reigned in the scope of his imagination to make The Shape of Water, a smaller movie but a wise career choice. The Shape of Water won a best-picture Oscar and Del Toro took home the Oscar for best director.

Now comes Pacific Rim Uprising, the inevitable sequel to the first installment. Del Toro remains as one of the film’s gaggle of producers (14 in all) but directing chores have been taken over by Steven S. DeKnight, whose previous directing experience mostly involves TV work.

In DeKnight’s hands, the franchise becomes little more than a collection of cacophonous battle sequences that already have evoked apt comparisons with the Transformer movies. A preview audience seemed to include more kids than I expected. It's possible that 12-year-olds will be Uprising's bread and butter.

A short reaction: Enormous Jaegers guided by pilots who operate inside the robots' heads, giant sea monsters that make a late-picture appearance and a cast that’s subordinated to a flood of effects mark a movie that stomps hard but can't shake loose from the deadening bonds of repetition.

That's not to say that the cast doesn’t work hard. John Boyega, familiar from the latest round of Star Wars movies, appears as Jake Pentecost, the son of the Idris Elba character from the first edition. A renegade from the Pan Pacific Defense Corps that a decade ago fought the Kaiju, Jake makes his living salvaging parts from Jaegers that were discarded after the war that shook the first movie.

Jake is joined by a sidekick, Amara (Cailee Spaeny), an orphaned teenager who has built her own Jaeger and who is recruited to train as a Defense Corps pilot. Naturally, Jake is coaxed back into the Defense Corps where he engages in manly banter with his former co-pilot (Scott Eastwood) as they fulfill their assignment, training a new generation of Jaeger pilots.

Never mind the Chinese corporation that wants to create automated Jaegers that don't need pilots.

Spaeny conveys the required spunk. Boyega projects plenty of gruff magnetism. But there's more smash-and-crash than acting as the movie moves toward a climax in which a crew of teenage Defense Corps recruits must save the world, a task that can’t be accomplished without destroying large parts of Tokyo.

It's possible that Pacific Rim will click with audiences impatient for an early helping of summer, and, of course, it's set up for another sequel. Maybe Boyega and company can find a more engagingly novel third helping.

Stuck in the mud of war

Brad Pitt leads a tank crew in a movie full of harrowing war imagery.

By April of 1945, U.S. troops had advanced deep into German territory. For Germany, the war already was lost. Humiliation and surrender loomed.

Despite being set on the eve of the impending Allied triumph, the mood of director David Ayer's Fury remains forbidding and dark. Seldom has victory looked quite this grim.

If there's freshness in Ayer's approach, it's found just here: It doesn't really matter whether soldiers are fighting on the first or last day of a war: Many will die. Brutality doesn't stop just because the end is near.

The opening image of Ayer's movie has a haunting, nearly surreal quality. A German soldier rides a white horse onto an open field. We don't know where the soldier's headed or why he's on horse back.

Seconds later, a lone figure springs from a U.S. tank. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) leaps on the German officer, pulls him off his horse and stabs him to death.

In one image, Ayer vanquishes any thoughts we might have had about the romance of war.

Fury offers lots more unsettling imagery, sights presumably intended to make us see the war with fresh eyes, to absorb its intensity and fear in ways that we haven't yet experienced. To say Fury has a kind of bleak power may sound like a turn-off, but that's precisely what we're supposed to feel with a movie such as this.

Pitt's performance as an Army sergeant in charge of a war-weary tank crew inevitably will remind audiences of the character he played in Inglourious Basterds, but Pitt's Collier is more complex than Lt. Aldo Raine.

A hardened veteran, Collier parcels out his human impulses sparingly, almost as if he's afraid of tapping out an already depleted supply.

The rest of Collier's crew consists of Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Pena) and Grady "Coon Ass" Travis (John Bernthal). Scott Eastwood portrays Sergeant Miles, another member of the crew.

The plot -- hardly a groundbreaker -- begins when a newbie (Logan Lerman) joins Collier's tank crew in what seems a desperate or possibly haphazard move by the Army.

Lerman's Norman Ellison has spent most of the war as a clerk typist. He has no tank training, and makes a reluctant warrior, someone whose unwillingness to kill is seen as a threat by his comrades in arms.

Much of the story involves the ways in which Lerman's character is toughened -- at first against his will and later with vengeful relish.

In Ayer's world, the members of the tank crew are bonded, but they're not always admirable. Bernthal's Travis can seem like a borderline sadist. So does Collier, at times.

The point, of course, is that the savagery of war tends to turn men into brutes regardless of what uniform they happen to be wearing.

The actors all mold their performances to fit the dreary, mud-soaked landscapes that become another character in the hands of cinematographer Roman Vasyanov.

The movie offers up equal amounts of combat and desperation, although there's an interlude in which Collier and Ellison enter the apartment of a couple of German women (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg). The soldiers are in a town that just has been taken. Some of them are looking for sex and spoils.

At first, the scene humanizes Collier, but there's a terrible, growing tension when the rest of the tank crew shows up, wondering why they've been excluded from what appears to be a moment's pleasure and respite.

Ayer made his cinematic bones with viscerally charged movies such as End of Watch, which focused on cops in South Central Los Angeles. He makes full use of his talent for violent immediacy here, bringing it to scene-after-scene.

Fury also reminds us that shocking sights can become routine if seen in abundance: Dead bodies are flatted by tank treads, and the ugliness of war unfolds under dark, apprehensive skies.

The movie's finale involves a terrible battle in which Collier's crew (unbelievably, I think) decides to face an entire SS battalion, a decision that's tantamount to a death sentence. Is it courage or a death wish from soldiers who know they'll never again adjust to normal life? Will anyone survive?

When stripped of all its grim atmospherics, Fury may not seem radically different from lots of other war movies that follow small groups of men into the teeth of war.

But story arc may not be the point here: Ayer seems to be trying to give us a more vividly disturbing picture than the one sometimes associated with the so-called Greatest Generation.

With hindsight, idealism may be possible. On the battlefield, it's a forgotten luxury.