Out here, there is no good and there is no bad. To survive out here, you've got to out-monster the monster. Can you do that?

Triple 9

(2016)

(SPOILERS) John Hillcoat comes something of a cropper with this contribution to the heist genre, although not nearly as much as some of the reviews suggest. Triple 9 is a mess, but it’s a mess populated by a selection of strong (and some not so strong) performances and impressively energetic direction. This may be very much a Heat-wannabe, and suffers from the comparison, but ultimately I was more engaged by its ambition than put off by its shortcomings.

Probably the biggest of which is that it simply lacks sufficiently strong characterisation to justify its spinning wheels of dodgy cops, good cops and malicious mobsters. One wonders if great chunks of Triple 9 were left on the cutting room floor. Certainly, it had its release date pushed back six months. On the one side we have a couple of ex-SEALs (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Norman Reedus) and their co-conspirators Aaron Paul (as Reedus’ brother, an ex-cop) and bent coppers Anthony Mackie and Clifton Collins, Jr. On the other, there’s Casey Affleck as Mackie’s new partner and Woody Harrelson as Casey’s detective sergeant uncle, investigating the robbers’ case. Then there’s Kate Winslet supporting some impressively sculpted BIG hair as the wife of an imprisoned Russian-Jewish mafia boss and Gal Gadot as her sister (and Ejiofor’s wife).

So there’s a plethora of heads to keep a count of. Unfortunately, Hillcoat and writer Matt Cook (the upcoming Patriots Day) have difficulty keeping tabs on any of them. When it comes to the heists, or a particularly standout sequence where Mackie and Affleck enter an apartment building and give chase to a suspect, the picture becomes enervating and pulse-pounding. It’s in the whys and wherefores of what they do that Hillcoat and Cook let things slide.

While it isn’t as if Heat needed to go to great pains to underline the motivations of its characters – so it was certainly within Triple 9’s grasp – the thieves here remain less than slender of purpose. Ejiofor appears to be the ostensible leader and the character with the clearest discipline and code, yet his under-duress jobs for Winslet aren’t entirely convincing; he just wants to see his son, the stuff of crude melodrama, which doesn’t really explain his fellows’ motivation, given the high stakes involved and Kate’s rather reckless willingness to dispose of team members as a showing of meaning business (thus limit the chances of her getting her prize).

The Triple 9 (an office down) is suggested as a means to create confusion, so facilitating their second job (retrieving vital evidence from police custody); Affleck is to be the recipient, since Mackie objects to his encroaching on his territory (but then has second thoughts). If there’s little sympathy for the gang – Paul is even playing another of his hopeless junkie type parts, the perquisite unstable gang member – then Affleck’s performance appears to be entirely predicated on how much gum he can chew in any given scene.

I’m not Affleck’s biggest fan, partly because he has a habit of showing up in roles for which he’s entirely unsuited (Gone Baby Gone), and his alternately savvy and rather slow cop (depending on where he needs to be for third act developments) is definitely not one of his more believable roles; it’s almost as if, with every chew of that gum, he’s thinking “I can play a convincing cop. I can play a convincing cop”. At least Harrelson is a welcome antidote to this, wholeheartedly embracing his livewire old pro and thus distracting from how thin the proceedings are.

When Ejiofor eventually decides to blow Winslet up, you wonder why he didn’t do it in the first place (anyone could see she was never going to give him what he wanted, particularly after she starts demanding more for less), compounding a persistent feeling throughout of characters having insufficiently clear reasons for doing what they’re doing, not through intentional ambiguity but as a result of unclear plotting. Nevertheless, this is neither vastly better or inferior to some recent entries in the genre, such as The Town (overrated) and Takers (underrated). I tend to be an easy sell for this kind of crime flick, and Triple 9 kept me distracted but didn’t ultimately persuade me to invest in anyone in it, while the plot itself failed to take up the slack.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
When your hero(es) ride off into the sunset at the end of a film, it’s usually a pretty clear indication that a line is being drawn under their adventures. Sure, rumours surfaced during the ‘90s of various prospective screenplays for a fourth outing for the whip-cracking archeologist. But I’m dubious anyone really expected it to happen. There seemed to be a natural finality to Last Crusade that made the announcement of his 2007 return nostalgically welcome but otherwise unwarranted. That it turned out so tepid merely seemed like confirmation of what we already knew; Indy’s time was past.

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A Few Good Men (1992)
(SPOILERS) Aaron Sorkin has penned a few good manuscripts in his time, but A Few Good Men, despite being inspired by an actual incident (one related to him by his sister, an army lawyer on a case at the time), falls squarely into the realm of watchable but formulaic. I’m not sure I’d revisited the entire movie since seeing it at the cinema, but my reaction is largely the same: that it’s about as impressively mounted and star-studded as Hollywood gets, but it’s ultimately a rather empty courtroom drama.

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In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
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An Education (2009)
Carey Mulligan deserves all the attention she received for her central performance, and the depiction of the ‘60s is commendably subdued. I worried there was going to be a full-blown music montage sequence at the climax that undid all the good work, but thankfully it was fairly low key.

Alfred Molina and Olivia Williams are especially strong in the supporting roles, and it's fortunate for credibility’s sake that that Orlando Bloom had to drop out and Dominic Cooper replaced him.
***1/2

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Midsommar (2019)
(SPOILERS) Ari Aster, by rights, ought already to be buckling under the weight of all those accolades amassing around him, pronouncing him a horror wunderkind a mere two films in. But while both Midsommar and Hereditary have both received broadly similar critical acclaim, his second feature will lag behind the first by some distance in box office, unless something significant happens in a hitherto neglected territory. That isn’t such a surprise on seeing it. While Hereditary keeps its hand firmly on the tiller of shock value and incident, so as to sustain it’s already more than adequate running time, Midsommar runs a full twenty minutes longer, which is positively – or rather, negatively – over-indulgent for what we have here, content-wise, and suggests a director whose crowned auteurishness has instantly gone to his head.

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X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)
(SPOILERS) To credit its Rotten Tomatoes score (22%), you’d think X-Men: Dark Phoenix was a travesty that besmirched the name of all good and decent (read: MCU proper) superhero movies, or even last week’s underwhelming creature feature (Godzilla: King of Monsters has somehow reached 40%, despite being a lesser beast in every respect). Is the movie’s fate a self-fulfilling prophecy, what with delayed release dates and extensively reported reshoots? Were critics castigating a fait accompli turkey without giving it a chance? That would be presupposing they’re all sheep, though, and in fairness, other supposed write-offs havecome back from such a brink in the past (World War Z). Whatever the feelings of the majority, Dark Phoenix is actually a mostly okay (twelfth) instalment in the X-franchise – it’s exactly what you’d expect from an X-Men movie at this point, one without any real mojo left and a variable cast struggling to pull its weight. The third act is a bi…

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Captain Marvel (2019)
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Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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