A wan drama fails to spark

 

    Set in post-Korean War America, On Swift Horses wrings much of the life out of a story about two characters trying to find their places during a sexually repressive American moment.

    The movie begins with Lee (Will Poulter) visiting his girlfriend (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Kansas while on leave from the Korean War. Lee hopes to return from the war before settling down with Edgar-Jones's Muriel, who agrees to marry him.

     Chances for a successful marriage seem doomed from the start, partly because Muriel ignites more sparks with Lee's brother Julius (Jacob Elordi), who also served in Korea but isn't returning to the Army.

    Director Daniel Minahan creates expectations for a tale about a love triangle but soon shifts gears, alternately following Julius and Muriel as a way of exploring gay issues against a 1950s backdrop.

    When the story moves to San Diego, Lee -- now home from battle -- tries to realize his middle-class dreams and Muriel begins suffocating under the strictures of a life she doesn't want.

    Sexual identity forms the basis of the connection between Julius and Muriel. Julius knows he's gay; he senses Muriel is attracted to women, even though she has yet to act on her desires. For a time, Muriel tries to maintain her image as a typical married woman but soon begins an affair with Sandra (Sasha Calle), a woman who lives nearby. 

    Sometimes playing hooky from her job as a waitress, Muriel also spends time at the track, socking away her winnings, presumably for the marital split she (and we) know will culminate when she begins dipping her toes into the gay world, circa 1950.

      For his part, Julius heads to Las Vegas instead of joining Lee and Muriel in San Diego as he initially had promised. Skilled at poker, he lands a job identifying cheats at a gambling joint. He also begins a romance with a co-worker (Diego Calva), a young Mexican man with more ambition than Lee and a willingness to cut corners. Danger lurks.

     Elordi doesn't seem to have shed the Elvis vibe he brought to Sofia Coppola's Priscilla (2023); his performance -- or so it struck me -- sometimes plays as if it were culled from poses of the 1950s. Edgar-Jones convinces as Muriel wobbles her way into a new life.

    Credit Poulter, whose character is stuck in a factory worker's life, for bringing depth to a role that plays second fiddle to the two main characters.

   Burdened by a structure that shifts between Muriel and Julius, a slow-moving story benefits from the supporting work of Calva and Calle. Either of their characters might have given the movie a more compelling center.

    Adapted from a novel by Shannon Pufahi, On Slow Horses struck me as a wan version of a Todd Haynes  journey into '50s sexuality (see Carol). Minahan pushes a big pile of dramatic chips onto the table but can't cash enough of them in. For a movie fueled by repression, social pressure, and awakening desire, it's a bit of a slog.

     

Monstrous unicorns seek vengeance

    Death of a Unicorn combines gore, comedy, satire and, mythology in ways that never feel novel enough to merit much attention. For a movie about supposedly unique creatures, this one feels awfully familiar.

  Director Alex Scharfman builds his story around a widowed father (Paul Rudd) and his balky college-age daughter (Jenna Ortega). 

  Early on, the two travel to the isolated home of Odell Leopold (Richard Grant), a dying pharmaceutical mogul who's considering whether Rudd's Elliot should head the company's operations. Dollar signs flash in Elliot's head. Ortega's Ridley couldn't care less. 

   En route to the Leopold mansion, a distracted Elliot runs over (wait for it) a unicorn. Afraid to offend fat-cat hosts who profess an interest in animal life, he beats the wounded unicorn to death with a tire iron and stuffs the body inside his rented van.

   But wait. The unicorn's horn contains curative powers that save Leopold from a certain cancer death; the powders also cure acne and allergies, and could bring a bright and profitable future to Leopold's company. 

   The supporting cast includes Anthony Carrigan as a servant and Will Poulter as Leopold's obnoxious, know-it-all son. Tia Leone plays Leopold's wife.

   As it turns out, the stricken unicorn is a baby. Mom and dad soon will arrive to take vengeance on the greedy humans. These unicorns aren’t fanciful, hardly the sort of creatures you might find on whimsical wallpaper in a baby’s room. They’re large, monstrous, and boast teeth reminiscent of those bared in a variety of Alien movies.

   Fortunately for Ridley, the unicorns form a bond with her. She consults tapestries and learns that it's a bad idea to fool with unicorns, which we know to be true from the outset. 

  Death of a Unicorn ultimately sheds its horror aspirations and turns uni-corny, offering a supposedly emotional coda that, for some, may excuse an ample helping of gore, bodies flung this way or ripped apart.

  Rudd plays an ineffectual father who's blinded by ambition. Ortega does her best to be a "normal" college student, and the rest of the cast works at the edges of overstated parody.

   For me, Death of Unicorn had little appeal. This genre mashup struck me a series of hackneyed notes from a familiar song played out of tune. 

Guarding the Galaxy one more time

 

 Watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, I slouched in my seat, looking upward at the screen, wondering whether reality hadn’t played a trick on me. Had I regressed into an alternate reality that resembled a slightly demented version of Saturday morning TV?   

   As the characters in Vol. 3 appeared, I felt as if I were being reintroduced to a tired crew that needed a plot — or something resembling a plot — to jolt it back to life.

    Director James Gunn finds one — or more accurately several. 

     Gunn stitches a movie together from a variety of story threads, a principal one revolving around the need to battle a fiendish villain called The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). 

   An intergalactic criminal, The High Evolutionary wants to give the various creatures he cruelly imprisons genetic upgrades. He tries to create an environment in which perfect beings can live perfectly. 

  Of course, he’s the one who gets to define perfection, a power that turns him into a genocidal maniac. He tends to wipe out populations he regards as "mistakes."

  The screenplay, also by Gunn, ties the main battle into an origins story for Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the wise-cracking badger who keeps reminding everyone that he's not a raccoon. 

  Gravely wounded in an early-picture raid on Knowhere, the sadly depleted Guardian headquarters, Rocket spends most of the movie in a coma while Pratt’s Peter Quill races through episodes built around the search for a device that can save his friend.

  Time to wave a Guardians thematic flag: The Guardians may be disorganized and even dissolute but friendship still means something.

   Quill also pines for his girlfriend, Zoe Saldana's Gamora, who reappears but not as the green-skinned beauty of Quill's memory. She looks the same but her personality has been altered. I leave it to series aficionados to explain how this happened.*

   Despite his leadership role, Quinn doesn’t dominate the movie; he’s one more cog in the many-spoked Guardian wheel.

    Other familiar characters turn up, notably Vin Diesel's Groot, who wears out a joke in which he repeatedly announces, "I am Groot." Pom Klementieff reprises her role as Mantis, the sweet Guardian with antennae springing from her forehead.

     New characters include Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a warrior who flies through action sequences like a guided missile.

      A surfeit of characters fosters confusion, but, hey, simplicity never has been a Marvel virtue.

     At times, Guardians functions as a parade of creatures -- Cosmo, the Talking Dog included -- that are spun from the narrative, sort of in the way Marvel spawns movie after movie from its own DNA. 

   Watch for bulbous creatures with teeth who, at one point, reconsider their destructive nature. 

    Gunn summons the movie’s better angels whenever he can. One such moment finds expression in a conflict between lovable strong man Drax (Dave Bautista) and Nebula (Karen Gillan).

   Does Drax's capacity for empathy outrank Nebula's warrior intelligence? Take a guess.

   Despite splashes of profanity, a PG-13 rating, and a fair measure of destruction, Vol. 3 seems intent on taking a sentimental journey that synchs with the idea that some of these characters are taking their leave. 

   At two hours and 29 minutes,  Guardians can be accused of bloat. But Rocket’s origin story settles the movie down, building toward what many will regard as an emotionally satisfying conclusion.

   So to get back to the Saturday morning TV experience of it all; I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I wasn't sometimes tempted to change the channel, but I felt a jolt of mood improvement as the movie worked its way toward a feel-good finale that helps conquer resistance.

     I guess this could be described as the third-act redemption that makes Guardians 3 tolerable. 

*Sure enough, one such aficionado provided an explanation:

"Gamora was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and brought back to life in Avengers: Endgame in the form of an alternate universe version of herself who has no memory of their relationship."

As for me, I've always found it a bit of a burden to try to keep track of all the connections among characters in the MCU movies. 

A haunted study of ambition and class

The Little Stranger proves absorbing yet the movie ultimately fails to satisfy.

In reviewing Sarah Walters' novel, The Little Stranger, the British newspaper The Guardian noted that the author "operates in the queasy borderlands between the supernatural and the psychological" and that Waters navigates this territory with "supreme ease." The same could be said of the big-screen adaptation of Waters' 2009 novel -- at least for a while.

Director Lenny Abrahamson (Room) delivers a carefully constructed, meticulously acted and deliberately paced movie that ultimately fails to sharpen any of its potentially resonant themes. Both a ghost story and a view of a crumbling British class structure after World War II, Little Stranger creates significant interest but fails to build toward a totally rewarding payoff.

Domhnall Gleeson portrays Dr. Faraday, a physician who's summoned to a dilapidated country estate to look into the illness of 14-year-old Betty (Liv Hill), a teenager who serves the once wealthy Ayres family. Turns out Faraday had been to the estate as a boy in 1902; i.e. before its glory had begun to fade.

Slowly, Faraday's fascination with the decaying estate emerges; to him, the place, though rundown, still represents ascendance into a class that he has been forced to observe only from the outside and to which he very much aspires.

As the movie develops, Faraday immerses himself in the lives of the Ayres family. Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter) has returned from the war, his body badly burned and his spirit scarred; Mrs. Ayes (Charlotte Rampling) does her best to maintain the appearances of the family's former stature; and Caroline Ayres (Ruth Wilson) attempts to run the place.

Perhaps seeing her as a gateway to this aristocratic paradise, Dr. Faraday pursues Caroline in what surely qualifies as one of the screen's least romantic love stories.

All the while, paranormal occurrences (banging, clattering and strange scrawl on walls) appear, suggesting that the house is occupied by a malevolent presence that's intent on destroying the family. As the purported rationalist in the crowd, Gleeson portrays Faraday with an expressionless, steady hand that's a trifle boring. Wilson, who knows how to create interest and ambiguity, portrays a woman with an odd, lumbering walk and a fondness for corduroy pants.

Abrahamson presents the story in a quiet way that some viewers (myself included) may find absorbing. But roughly three-quarters of the way through The Little Stranger, it's difficult not to begin hoping that a narrative kick in the pants will provide something resembling satisfaction.

Unfortunately, the movie drifts away, creating anticipation that remains mostly unfulfilled.

When the police become torturers

Detroit immerses us in a brutal racist incident that took place during the city's 1967 riot.

I found it impossible to watch Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit and not be flooded by a complex torrent of reactions to the movie's undeniable visceral power. Bigelow takes an unflinching look at a little known racist incident that took place during the Detroit riots of 1967. Police brutality and racism are awful, of course, but how much of it do we need to see before that point effectively has been made?

That's a question that every moviegoer will have to answer for his or herself, but -- I wondered, if in trying for unblinking honesty, Bigelow hadn't sometimes mistake intensity for insight.

Bigelow divides her movie into three unequal parts. She begins with an appropriately frenzied approach to the Detroit riots, settles into a disturbing and violent example of racist brutality, and then -- as if to temper the horror of what we've been watching -- spins out a courtroom finale in which the offending police officers are brought to trial.

Bigelow bases her movie on a true story, chronicled in a 1968 book by John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident. Events at the Algiers were a kind of adjunct to the Detroit riots that began when the police raided an after-hours bar frequented by black patrons.

No matter what side of the political divide on which you fall, it's nearly impossible to watch Detroit without making references to the climate between black communities and police forces that have been infected by institutional racism -- not only in 1967, but in 2017.

At the Algiers Motel, several young black men, two white women, several police officers and a black security guard are thrown together during the heat of the riot. The police officers -- led by a racist cop (Will Poulter) -- terrorize their captives in ways that result in psychological trauma and, ultimately, killing. By the end of the night, three young black men are dead.

From the outset, we've tagged Poulter's Krauss as an undisguised racist. Even before the incident at the Algiers, he goes unpunished for shooting an unarmed black man in the back.

The movie's segments in the Algiers Motel are on a par with the kind of sustained cruelty we sometimes see in horror films. Of course, torture is precisely what the police are doing to their innocent victims, perpetrating an invisible slice of horror during the intensely pressurized atmosphere of a violent outburst that made Detroit resemble a war zone.

During this portion of the film, the police line their victims against the wall, singling them out for humiliation, along with two white women (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) who were partying at the Algiers. The cops accuse the women of being prostitutes, an opinion they seem to justify only because the women have been hanging around black men.

Three figures stand out among the black men, the lead singer of a group called The Dramatics (Algee Smith), a military veteran recently returned from Vietnam (Anthony Mackie) and a friend of Smith's character (Nathan Davis Jr.).

No one is more conflicted about what's happening at the Algiers than John Boyega's Dismukes, a security guard sent by his employer to protect a store from looting. Dismukes becomes caught up in the Algiers' drama. He's a law-and-order guy, but he's not blind to the racism that's being displayed by out-of-control cops.

All of this begins because the cops believe that someone in the motel fired a gun at them. As it turns out, the gun was a starter pistol fired by a young man (Jason Mitchell) who had been trying to frighten a small gathering at the Algiers by mimicking the way white policemen treat blacks. To make his act more convincing, Mitchell's character draws the fake gun, eventually firing it out a window.

I don't want to leave the impression that Detroit proceeds entirely without nuance. In the movie's later going, we meet cops who are appalled by what happened at the Algiers. We sometimes see the movie's brutal but self-serving cops trying to find a way out of the situation they've created. Not every black character is willing to stand up for truth when it comes to exposing the viciousness to which they've been subjected.

Bigelow may want us to understand that the cops have deluded themselves into believing that abuse is not only justifiable but a privilege of their positions of authority. Once the firebombs start flying, these policemen seem to think they've been granted license to do anything.

All of this unfolds after a prologue featuring paintings by Jacob Lawrence that try to provide some context for the riots: northward migration by blacks devolved into segregated housing projects and high unemployment. That's the gist.

Later, we'll see news clips of George W. Romney and President Lyndon Johnson, political leaders who remind us that what we're witnessing springs from a reality; the government apparatus geared up to meet what it saw as the challenge of unleashed fury and wanton destruction.

Written by Mark Boal, who also wrote Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit might have been even more daring had it taken some time to show us the pre-riot atmosphere in the Detroit police department, the conditions that presumably made Poulter's character possible.

As the movie unfolded, I found myself wondering how a director as meticulous as Sidney Lumet (Prince of the City) would have handled such a volatile story.

It's also worth remembering that Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing already made a statement about the ways in which racial violence can be kindled.

So a confession: At various points during events at the Algiers Motel, I wondered what Bigelow was trying to accomplish by allowing them to drag on so long.

Other points are more economically made. Mackie portrays a Marine who recently returned from Vietnam. Having served his country offers him no protection from the wrath of the police.
That's a powerful observation.

It also helps to remember that many of the current and well-publicized incidents of questionable police conduct did not take place under violent duress; racism hardly needs riots as an excuse to express itself. Sometimes, all it takes is a traffic stop.