Tag: James Mackay

True Life Twofer – ‘American Made’ and ‘Battle of the Sexes’ – Nothing Special

Nothing really connects these two films other than the old “based on a true story” moniker, but they did go wide the same day, so here we are.  I wanted to like them; I tried, but…

American Made

Directed by Doug Liman
Written by Gary Spinelli
Cast: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Jesse Plemons, Caleb Landry Jones, Lola Kirke, Jayma Mays, Alejandro Edda, Benito Martinez, E. Roger Mitchell, Jed Rees, Jayson Warner Smith, William Mark McCullough, Mickey Sumner
Soundtrack: Christophe Beck

The last time Tom Cruise and Doug Liman got together resulted in one of the best action movies of the new millennium, so I had reasonably high expectations going into this one.

Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed fairly quickly.

For one thing, somebody decided it would be a good idea to shoot American Made like a Duplass Brothers film (complete with annoying snap zooms), which, for the life of me, I cannot understand, anymore than I can understand all of the praise for Tom Cruise that I’ve been seeing.  I mean, I like Tom.  He still does great movies from time to time (mostly of the Mission: Impossible variety, but that’s fine), but boy oh boy can he not pull off even the slightest of accents.

Really though, these are just nitpicks compared to the bigger issues.

There are two fatal flaws with American Made.  One, despite the “based on a true story” label, the movie is severely lacking in verisimilitude, especially in the performances (and I mean across the board), and, two, we’ve seen this kind of story done better already, and in particular I mean Blow.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, I don’t mind if you play fast and loose with the truth, but the movie better be interesting and at least feel real within the world of the story, and American Made largely fails at both.

This is not to say it’s entirely bad.  There’s a fair amount of entertainment value from the flying scenes (which are sadly shrouded in deadly controversy), and a few moments of good humor, but other than that there’s not a whole lot to grab onto.

I wish I could rate it higher, but my heart tells me no.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

 

Battle of the Sexes

Directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris
Written by Simon Beaufoy
Cast: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman, Alan Cumming, Elisabeth Shue, Natalie Morales, Eric Christian Olsen, Fred Armisen, Martha MacIsaac, Mickey Sumner, Jessica McNamee, Austin Stowell, Wallace Langham, Bridey Elliott, Lewis Pullman, James Mackay, Enuka Okuma, Mark Harelik, Jamey Sheridan, Chip Chinery, Chris Parnell, John C. McGinley
Soundtrack: Nicholas Britell

Speaking of lack of verisimilitude, let’s talk Battle of the Sexes.

To be fair, this one doesn’t play with the truth nearly as much as American Made, but outside of Emma Stone as Billie Jean King, Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs, and the fantastic period costuming, this one fell rather flat as well, not to mention obsolete.

I say obsolete because ever since ESPN debuted its 30 for 30 series in 2009, and showed the world the depths to which sports documentaries could now reach, the idea of the classic “based on a true story” sports movie has become rather outmoded.  Not to say that any genre can’t still be done well, but I’m not sure Battle of the Sexes did justice to the story it attempted to tell, nor, frankly, did it do justice to being an entertaining film.  I tell you what though, if ESPN ever does a 30 for 30 on it, I’m all in.

One of the big problems is the pacing, due largely to the fact that the movie spends an inordinate amount of its two hour runtime tightly focused on the affair between Billie Jean King and her lover, Marilyn Barnett.  Undoubtedly, it was a crucial part of King’s life, and I’m not arguing it should go without any mention, but it doesn’t add much to the film other than to set up a moment that was obviously made up for dramatic purposes.

Beyond that though, there’s just a lot about this movie, performances especially, that feels one-dimensional.  Maybe much of the dialogue was inspired or directly quoted from real conversations, I don’t know, but most of the characters in Battle of the Sexes feel more like caricatures than real people, which would be fine if it was more of the comedy it was advertised as, but not in a film attempting to deal with real life drama.

Again, Stone and Carell are great, but they’re not enough to push this one into recommendation territory, which is sad.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

P.S.
No stingers of any kind on either film.

Movie Review – ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ – Do No Harm

Directed by Mel Gibson
Written by Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Hugo Weaving, Teresa Palmer, Luke Bracey, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Ben O’Toole, Richard Roxburgh, Helmut Bakaitis, Bill Young, James Mackay, Ori Pfeffer, Matt Nable
Soundtrack: Rupert Gregson-Williams

So much for a triumphant return for Mel Gibson the director.

I was rooting for this movie.  As a reviewer, anytime you come across a film that’s based on an amazing story like this one, you want to be able to enthusiastically recommend it, and it’s especially painful when you feel you can’t.

To be clear, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is not a bad movie.  It’s certainly miles ahead of ‘Unbroken’ (which was an utter debacle) as far as true life adaptations go, but I hesitate to call it great, and it’s a long, long way from being “the best war movie since ‘Saving Private Ryan'” (that title likely goes to ‘Fury‘).  In some ways, it’s fair to compare ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ to Gibson’s last directorial effort, ‘Apocalypto’, which is an incredible movie, but it’s so brutal that you only want to watch it once; the difference is that overall, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is a lesser film than ‘Apocalypto’, because all that really matters in ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is the last forty-five minutes.

That’s right; as expected, once the movie gets to Okinawa, it largely becomes the epic we expect, but there are a number of issues before we get there.

First of all, much of the movie suffers from a general lack of connective tissue from scene to scene, and I’m not just talking about establishing time and place (I had similar frustrations with ‘Bridge of Spies‘), but also establishment of characters and relationships.  Quite simply, there are times when the movie is like a book with random pages missing.

In addition, and this might sound slightly xenophobic, but I don’t really care, the movie was shot entirely in Australia, which is fine (Lord knows I have plenty of friends from down under), especially given that so much of the movie takes place in the Pacific theater of World War II, but, an Australian-shot movie like this means a lot of Australian actors, which is fine, except they’re all playing Americans (in fact, I think Vince Vaughn is the only real American in the whole cast), which sends us headlong into hazy accent territory.  Oftentimes when a non-American actor plays an American role, they’re given a specific American accent rather than a more neutral one in order to mitigate the differences (usually a Southern accent, e.g. ‘Black Hawk Down’).  Sometimes it works to the actors’ advantage, but in the case of ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ I felt like so many people were merely playing the accent rather than playing actual roles that I had a hard time connecting with the characters (and yes, this applies to Andrew Garfield as well, despite his talent).  I guess it goes to show that you can’t rely on “Based of a True Story” to make characters feel real by default; you have to put the same work in as any other kind of movie to bring these people to life.

Lastly, many of the non-battle scenes (especially basic training) feel sanitized in comparison to the second half of the movie.  To put it another way, compared to ‘The Pacific‘, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ often feels like a cartoon.

However, as I said, these deficiencies are largely made up for once the film at last gets to Okinawa, when we finally get to see the beautifully shot ballet of unfathomable brutality play out before us.

‘Hacksaw Ridge’ might not be a great film, but it’s worth seeing once simply based on the strength of the real-life story (although maybe don’t pay full price for it).

Rating: ★★★☆☆