The Contractor (2022) Review

rating: ****

the story: A Green Beret is drummed out of the service, but ends up right back in the thick of it anyway.

review: Quite unexpectedly, a spiritual sequel to Hell or High Water.  Chris Pine stars as the Green Beret, who ends up drafted into a black ops outfit, although the results are less military maneuvering and more a spy game, in which Pine discovers he can't trust the outfit that recruited him.  Along the way, he's got to figure out if he can trust a colleague played by Ben Foster, his costar in High Water, which ought to be considered one of the key selling points of The Contractor.

Pine's charisma was a little long in coming to be recognized by filmmakers, but eventually, with his casting as Kirk in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, he at last became a movie star, and yet it ended up becoming a recurring problem: directors still had a hard time figuring out what to do with him.  Hell or High Water found a perfect fit, the rare antihero (a bank robber) who was actually sympathetic, a response to the Great Recession that cast the whole idea back to the feel of the Great Depression, or even Robin Hood.  Foster was the unambiguously less sympathetic cohort then, and he is again here, although he has a better shot at redeeming himself this time around.  Less so Kiefer Sutherland, in a rare bid to reclaim some of the shine he himself earned somewhat belatedly in the TV series 24, cast squarely as the villain.  Eddie Marsan, whose career often veers between such roles, has one of his welcome turns among the angels, although it's an unfortunately brief one, while Gillian Jacobs has a similarly thankless nod as Pine's wife.

But the compromise is worth it, as The Contractor works best as an atmospheric tour of Pine's troubles, spending little time worrying about things like dialogue, as he struggles along the labyrinth of doubt, accented frequently by the bum knee he needs to periodically inject just to keep functioning.  This is an aging action hero, after all, forced to control uncomfortable realities at every turn.

I think, given time, the results will garner greater interest, if only as a companion to Pine and Foster's previous work together.  At the moment it needs struggle against a shifting market, between a box office that is increasingly geared almost exclusively to big budget blockbusters and streaming services either desperately competing for the same aesthetic or proudly boasting the opposite, with everything else in between being ignored, such as the notion that movie stars exist and can carry their own material, same as they ever did.  

And Chris Pine, despite every adversity, is still standing, thank you.

WW84 (2020) Review

rating: *****

the story: Wonder Woman learns and helps others see the danger of wish fulfillment.

review: Sometimes, I admit, if a movie receives overly glowing praise I start to look for reasons other than the movie itself. It goes the same for negative reviews, of course. Generally I will outline all the reasons I did, or didn’t, like a movie in my reviews for this very reason, total transparency. Wonder Woman was a movie that received glowing reviews, in large part, I always suspected, because it was what people thought the DCEU should be like. I hate message reviews. If you like a movie, like it for its own merits. So I kind of put off watching it for a while, and maybe as a result of all this I wasn’t overly wowed by it. 

Well, I was certainly wowed by WW84. Absolutely. This is the kind of confident achievement I expected from the first one, a bold statement that also works as a full spotlight for Wonder Woman herself. So yes, it works on at least two levels.

I suspect part of why people in general aren’t wowed by it is because it hinges itself on a message that seems to fly in the face of all current logic. It seems to say that getting what you want, and perhaps even deserve, might inherently be a bad thing. Most of the people casting wishes in the movie are asking for seemingly good things. Well, as the old saying used to go, careful what you wish for. Funny enough, the movie even references the equally old curse of the monkey’s paw, a magical solution that comes with a terrible price. Genie magic traditionally comes with the same catch, which Disney’s two versions of Aladdin are careful to explain, too.

Yet when Wonder Woman does it, it might actually seem like a bad thing. We’re in a strange era of empowerment at the moment. Somehow in order to be seen as worthy, everyone has to fit into some sort of stereotype. Wonder Woman is of course a woman, and as such empowerment should simply mean she’s a powerful woman. I mean, right?

Except this is a woman who embodies truth, not power. She literally spends the whole movie fighting bad guys while simultaneously going well out of her way to rescue bystanders. Her idea of heroics isn’t to collect all the laurels (I’m almost sad that from the point we next see her she’ll have acquiesced to being a public figure) but merely to do the right thing.

Her rival in the movie has a similar attitude until jealousy leads her to forget it. That’s telling, too. The villain is motivated to make a success of himself. Both of them quickly lose sight of what they stand to lose well before they hold any real power as they pursue that “better version” of themselves.

The opening scene itself is edifying. The young Wonder Woman is so caught up with the idea of winning a competition that she overlooks both the fact that she is by far younger than her opponents and that her shot at victory only happens because she takes a shortcut, even if the opportunity presented itself by accident and not design. We never really see how she overcomes impatience except that in the present she has spent some sixty years leading a lonely life of little outward acclaim and convinced she’ll never love again. And maybe it’s the idea of patience itself that’s the point.

Patty Jenkins is a miracle of visual splendor in a movie that in a lot of respects looks like something we’ve seen as far back as Superman: The Movie. Yet she never once settles for something less than extraordinary. The whole movie pulses with vigor, packed with deliberate, calculated intention.

Gal Gadot and Chris Pine have even better chemistry this second time around, Gadot that incredibly rare idea of a humble superhero, Pine the movie star who never shies away from taking a backseat. Kristen Wiig, who never quite became a movie star despite killing it in Bridesmaids, pulls off her expected (and superhero movie trope) goofy origin mode into an increasingly credible threat. Pedro Pascal, who has become a geek darling thanks to The Mandalorian, is the best ‘80s throwback with his bad hair and cheap but flashy suits. Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen of course remain perfect elder Amazons.

Even the name of the movie was well-calculated. “WW84” can of course be extrapolated as “Wonder Woman [in] 1984,” but also “World War 1984,” or even simply “World War 84,” by which the movie acknowledges Wonder Woman’s WWI origins, and the wars that happened, and nearly happened, in the time between. It seems somehow forgotten that in 1984 the Cold War was in fact still happening. I don’t think that’s Reagan being depicted as president, meanwhile, or doesn’t have to be viewed as such. The nuclear race was raging long enough that just a few years later the most famous single comic book story (Watchmen) hinged itself on the apocalyptic outcome everyone had dreaded since at least the ‘50s.

It’s the kind of experience that isn’t about superheroes being cool. It isn’t a movie set in the ‘80s that tells you so by steeping itself in ‘80s music. It’s a movie set in the ‘80s, drawing on that time period for certain elements but is otherwise a movie about what makes Wonder Woman unique, what makes her special, what makes her, at last, worthy of starring in big budget movies. 

And you wonder what took so long. This isn’t an entry in the DCEU, this is its own experience, fitting in with things we’ve already seen, but most concerned with showcasing a vibrant new take on an increasingly well-worn genre, in which we think we’ve seen it all. If WW84 is any indication, we certainly have not. The best may in fact be yet to come. And WW84 is now in the conversation for the best we’ve yet seen.

Hell or High Water (2016)

rating: *****

the story: Brothers turn bank robber to pay off their mother's mortgage.

what it's all about: The year it was released I wrote up some thoughts about Hell or High Water here in which I probed its general morality.  Admittedly (and in the thoughts themselves I say so), I hadn't seen it yet.  Now I have seen it a few times, and so I can revisit and talk about the movie itself.

It's a modern classic.  It's a modern classic in much the way No Country for Old Men seemed to be.  I'm still mulling over No Country itself; a lot of what I like about that one is the iconic Javier Bardem performance, as close to a single great acting creation as anything outside of Heath Ledger's Joker we've had since Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter.  Hell or High Water doesn't have anything like that.  The closest it gets is Ben Foster's breakthrough as Chris Pine's hell-raising brother.  Foster has quietly been growing into a brilliant actor, and nobody seems to have noticed.  He's a lot like Pine, actually.  Where Pine has occasionally created full-on characters (Smokin' Aces, Stretch), Foster has merely inhabited fascinating roles.  Pine is most often in that mode, too, and he found his best to date in this film, so on that score alone Hell or High Water is watching.

It's also well worth watching for Jeff Bridges.  Bridges has been around Hollywood for decades, but I think he's gotten far more interesting as he's aged.  He's certainly been a standout in recent years even among critics.  Crazy Heart earned him a Best Actor Oscar, which he followed with the Coens remake of True Grit.  He's fallen off the radar since then, as his present act has become more familiar, but for me he remains fascinating, and in Hell or High Water he is fascinating.  He's got the same sort of role Tommy Lee Jones had in No Country, but he plays it very differently.  He wouldn't at all be out of place in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 

Bridges plays an ornery FBI agent days away from retirement.  The role itself is a cliché, but screenwriter Taylor Sheridan writes it with a purpose; the constant offensive ribbing he aims at his partner is metaphorical.  They're in pursuit of Pine and Foster, whose goal is basically to stick it to the man.  They're reacting against a system that seems to have no place for them.  Bridges is trying to put things into perspective.  He tells his partner at one point that it's his teasing that's going to be missed.  His partner reflects about how the banks that are threatening to take away Pine and Foster's childhood home are just the latest in a long series of land seizures.  He would know, because he's part Indian.

The most telling scene, maybe, in the whole movie is inside a casino, where the brothers are laundering their stolen money.  Foster confronts a different Indian, whom Foster has been insulting (you can see the deliberate parallels here).  The Indian has just explained that being a Comanche means everyone's an enemy.  Foster's retort, why the Indian should leave him alone, is, "Because I'm a Comanche."  He sees everyone as his enemy.  That's the key to the whole character.  Years ago he defended his mother against an abusive father.  He ended up in jail because he later killed him (the trial bought it as a hunting accident, inside a barn).  He agrees to go along with his brother's bank robbing scheme mostly because, well, everyone's his enemy already anyway.  He's the crazy one; without him Pine couldn't have done any of it.

In framing it as being about the robberies themselves, that's the wrong interpretation.  The whole story is a metaphor, about how the system has slowly turned against individuals like Pine, like his mother, anyone who can be exploited by a system, really.  We've seen exploitation before, and in hindsight we always condemn it, but it's far harder to do in the present.  We see something like the Great Recession, and we mostly think in terms of economic recovery.  We don't particularly see or care about the lives being crushed because of it, or why.  To its credit, Hollywood hasn't ignored the idea.  Jim Carrey's Fun with Dick and Jane was pretty much the same story, and that was ten years earlier, when the CEO corruption scandals that eventually led to the Great Recession were first coming to light.  The problem is, these movies don't change anything, and they don't even lead to conversations.  This is an era about tough conversations, and yet we keep dodging the toughest ones. 

Pine fears that his actions will forever sully his name.  This fear is derived from the fact that he has growing boys who become the chief beneficiaries of his thefts.  The money for the mortgage is actually so he can reclaim the property and thus lay claim to the oil that's been found beneath it.  The same banks he robbed end up welcoming not only the stolen money, but the oil money, because in the end, money is money.  Bridges figures all of this out.  What he warns Pine is that it's not his reputation that he had to worry about, but his conscience.  Foster ends up killing a few people during the course of events, and Bridges says that's Pine's responsibility; the robberies were his idea, and anything that happened during them or because of them are his fault, too.  Pine will have to live with that. 

Hell or High Water, then, is a cautionary tale.  You can burn down paradise in order to do the right thing, but in the end, it's not satisfaction you've earned but a scorched earth, and that's what you're going to have to live with.  The ends don't always justify the means.  It's a fantasy Western, wish fulfillment in a time when injustice is insidious, systemic, and it doesn't care whether you're white or Indian or any other race.  Sheridan has become one of the hottest commodities in Hollywood, whether as screenwriter or director; David Mackenzie is another director who's gotten to benefit from collaborating with him.  Everything Sheridan creates adds to our understanding of how our world works, and where it needs improving.  But he also issues warnings, and we'd be wise to heed them.

Wonder Woman (2017)

rating: ****

the story: Diana enters Man's World during WWI and battles Ares in the hopes of determining its outcome.

what it's all about: I tend to be unsettled, these days, at a consensus of quality.  It's a peculiar predicament, for an amateur film fan, whose formative development was absorbing material with a consensus of quality.  The more experience, maybe, the greater the skepticism.  Or maybe it's just the times.  These days, films seem to be loved, even by critics, for reasons other than their actual worth.  Critics, for instance, love their superheroes if they're brainless.  Critics, in general, seem to love genre material if it doesn't take itself too seriously.  Of course the stuff they love always takes itself too seriously, otherwise.

Well, anyway, in case you've been living under a rock, Wonder Woman has been a massive success, both in making money and making fans, even among critics.  The movie makes some dramatic departures from its DC predecessors, Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  I happened to like both of those quite a lot, so it was difficult to reconcile changing direction with the fear the end result was a sellout.  My first viewing of Wonder Woman was geared in that direction.  I saw things that I wanted to see, and thought the movie wasn't really worth the hype.  And I also wondered where Wonder Woman fit in with where the character was during Batman v Superman.

But I've turned the corner.  Diana, by the end of Wonder Woman, makes a defiant stand against the cynicism of Ares.  In Batman v Superman she's been operating in the shadows, keeping to herself.  Seemingly, not really be a hero anymore.  But Wonder Woman does explain this.  The death of Steve Trevor rattles her ability to work with others, which Batman assuages.  He gives her a cause again.  In Wonder Woman she opts against trying to actively shape the world in her image, which is the way of tyrants and villains like Ares.  But she is still a hero, and perhaps more a hero than just about any hero out there. 

It's true that Wonder Woman is a lot more lighthearted than Man of Steel or Batman v Superman.  It's also a different story, as Wonder Woman herself represents a different narrative.  Unlike Batman or Superman, Diana isn't a tragic orphan with a path toward the lives that make them heroes.  She's someone who actively yearns to be a hero, in a society full of heroes, whose mother seeks to shelter her from her destiny.  She's as traditional a hero as there's ever been.  Except, she then is thrust into a different world.  That's not a traditional DC narrative (unless you're Green Lantern).  It's a lot more like Marvel's, but Marvel is also more interested in monsters or self-made men, rather than someone merely making a transition. 

So she needs a guide, and Steve Trevor has always been that guide, the stranger totally unknown in her original society, where there are only women, and of course he's a man.  So there's a different element to play with right there, a natural romance, a classic romance archetype (boy meets girl), and humor complements that kind of material nicely. 

Gal Gadot, as Diana, is equally natural.  She's the classic Hollywood outsider, a foreigner with an accent.  Normally this will kind of be used against the actor, but Gadot's been lucky to find two big franchises where she can slide in easily, the Fast and the Furious series, which has always combined cultures, and Diana, who's a superhero.  Traditionally, Wonder Woman hasn't really been depicted as ethnic, even if she comes from a Greek context.  She's looked as American as Superman, and been treated as such.  So Gadot's casting was itself intriguing, and the fact that she hasn't been asked to hide her accent.  In fact, all the Amazons around her, including ones portrayed by Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen, adopt accents to match her (I've seen it before, with the Macedonians around Colin Farrell in Alexander syncing up with his Irish tendencies).  It adds authenticity to the role, really, and is one of the reasons why Wonder Woman proves so distinctive. 

As counterpoint, Chris Pine is All-American as Steve Trevor, and it's an ideal match-up.  His charm and her appeal don't compete, and they're able to draw out of each other all the nuances the movie needs to work.  If Pine can seem smug at times (Steve is "above average" for a man), it's all in selling the concept of the wider world being more complicated than superheroes tend to view it, how Diana needs to view it if she's to stand out among them.  And clearly she does.

It doesn't hurt to have an even more smug Danny Huston playing misdirection for David Thewlis, who ends up being the villain of the piece while playing most of it as a stereotypical British fop.  Director Patty Jenkins deserves a tremendous amount of credit for juggling everything in the movie.  She makes the cool action scenes and the goofy romantic scenes and the melodramatic villain scenes part of the same message, which is of course that Diana herself combines all of them.  The funny throwaway bit about how she discovers ice cream is from a 2011 Justice League comic, by the way, which is what these League movies are based on.

The end result is as unique a cinematic debut lead feature for a superhero as there's ever been.  The character debuted in another movie.  But everything's explained here quite nicely.  No wonder she's now being depended on to change the face of the franchise around her.  Diana has once again proven herself uniquely qualified for the job. 

Hell or High Water - a cultural inquiry

Hell or High Water has become one of the surprise hits of 2016 in limited release, one of the movies being touted as everything the year's big blockbusters have gotten completely wrong.  I knew the minute I saw the trailer the first time that I wanted to watch this movie.  I'm extremely glad that Chris Pine has finally managed to find something that has unabashedly pleased everyone.  Outside of Star Trek, he's continued to flounder despite natural talent and charisma, leaving many to wonder whatever happened to him.  Except he's kind of like Tom Hardy (whom he costarred with in This Means War) or Colin Farrell, a go-to talent no matter how big a box office draw he fails to be, or critics magnet.

The problem I now face, however, is how much I want to support something that may be succeeding mostly because it continues a disturbing trend from the turn of the millennium of popular culture unabashedly embracing antiheroes, most of whom are far less redeemable than Pine and Ben Foster's characters in Hell or High Water happen to be (a couple of Merry Men).  I know Americans tend to have sympathy for this type, from Depression-era gangsters to their post-Civil War hellion predecessors, and maybe it's just shocking to see first-hand just how much they really are embraced in the culture.  The thing is, these are fictional characters this time.  Walter White never existed.  The heroes of this era are actively flouting the laws of society, actively trying to reshape it.  I mean, I know Prohibition proved to be a horrible idea, but there's no reason we should hero-worship the folks who kept serving up alcohol anyway, much less their descendants. 

Pine and Foster seem to be a sort of Jesse James gang.  One of my favorite movies is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which kind of takes for granted Jesse's mystique and inherent worth to the culture.  Among everything else it most certainly is hero-worship.  Hell or High Water is also kind of like No Country for Old Men, with Jeff Bridges taking over for Tommy Lee Jones, and Pine and Foster being less hapless than Josh Brolin.  Because Pine and Foster are easier to root for, there will probably be few comparisons between them, but the idea is basically the same.  Both are about moral ambiguity, new-style Westerns, and the shifting landscape of the country.

I love that Pine went minimalist for the movie, which is what he did in Star Trek Beyond, too, although fewer people noticed because of all the action happening around him.  His versatility has always been considerable (just watch him in Smokin' Aces...if you can spot him!), and thanks to his breakthrough in Hell or High Water, other people are noticing him, too.  It only figures that he finally had to play an antihero to prove it, because he's so consistently played heroes over the past few years, it's no wonder he was considered one-note.

Maybe I don't have to worry too much about it.  I mean, I love Batman, too, don't I?  The Dark Knight was basically one long argument for finally seeing him for the lawbreaker he is, and why that may not be as bad a thing as it might seem.  When done right, antiheroes are heroes.  When done wrong, they're not nearly as worth supporting as it can sometimes seem.  But Hell or High Water seems to have done its job in finding the distinction.  It just might be one of the most important movies of the year.

Just My Luck

**

directed by: Donald Petrie
starring: Lindsay Lohan, Chris Pine

Released in 2006.

This is a movie that you probably won't know off the bat.  It's Lindsay Lohan at the start of her fall from grace, though at no fault on the part of Just My Luck, and Chris Pine at the start of his ascent.

Lohan was a darling as a child actor, whether in The Parent Trap or Mean Girls.  When she grew up, like all child actors she suddenly realized that she wasn't a kid anymore, and that all the fame she'd had was based on very innocent roles, so she started to become that much less innocent in her real life.  Luck, however, is still very much an innocent kind of movie, not a Disney movie like so many of her previous projects but it might as well have been.  It's also one of her first roles where she was asked to carry the movie on her own merits, rather than depending on a studio or gimmick to do it for her.  Except it's very much a gimmick movie, too, as the title helps explain.

Lohan's character has all the luck in the world.  Pine's has none.  Through a movie magic fluke, they exchange luck, and the results for Lohan are supposed to be charmingly hilarious.  Except they end up being more embarrassing than charming, at least as anyone who expected something a little more adult from here at this point would have wanted.  Like I said, it's not Disney but it's very much Disney, and Lohan hasn't figured out what kind of actor she is outside of the Disney formula that to this point in her career has completely defined her.  This is not to say she's untalented, as people tended to start believing once she started asserting herself (the same thing that happened to Jennifer Lopez once she started a pop music career and dared to continue acting).  It's just, Luck may have been a poor choice.

For Pine, it's much the same kind of performance he had in Princess Diaries 2, the romantic lead who plays second fiddle to his more famous costar.  If people had cared about him at this point in his career, he might have gotten stuck in these roles, and not begun to explore his more edgy side, evidenced in Smokin' Aces and Star Trek (with a transition between the two in Bottle Shock).  So it's almost a good thing, as far as Pine's career goes, that Luck was luckless.

Just My Luck is not a bad film, but it's also not highly recommended, except to see Lohan and Pine in transition.