Reel Entropy

Pictured: Discomfort. Photo courtesy Warner Bros.

Jason Bateman has a scraggly, patchy beard that really doesn’t work for him.

Presumably because of that, his character, Judd Altman, starts This is Where I Leave You by walking in on his wife (Abigail Spencer) doing it with his boss (Dax Shepard), as she has been for about a year. While dealing with this revelation, Altman learns that his father has died earlier than expected. The Altman family is Jewish the same way Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant, but its widowed matriarch, Hillary (Jane Fonda), insists that she and her four children sit Shiva, a Jewish tradition in which immediate family sits together for seven days in mourning. This thrusts Judd into a house with Hillary, elder brother Paul (Corey Stoll), sister Wendy (Tina Fey) and younger brother Phillip (Adam Driver). It’s funny, because Judd hasn’t told them about his divorce and they all hate each other because of Hillary ruining their childhood by publishing it in a best-selling book.

Writer Jonathan Tropper also wrote the book on which this movie is based, and it’s pretty easy to tell. This movie stinks of being adapted from a book that script writer liked too much for its own good. There are too many characters and it’s not always clear who everybody is in the scene. People arguing off-screen is an unusual motif this film features, but every time it happens, viewers will have to stop for a moment and count heads to figure out who’s arguing.

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I never would have guessed that Liam Neeson could make a mullet work like that, but he rocks it hard in the flashback sequence. Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.

A Walk Among the Tombstones, based on one of Lawrence Block’s novels about private detective Matthew Scudder, looks like it would have been a fantastic book.

The film stars Liam Neeson as the title character. An alcoholic eight years sober, Scudder works as an unlicensed private detective after accidentally killing a 7-year-old in an off-duty shootout while working as a cop. He takes the case of Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens), a drug dealer whose wife has been kidnapped and gruesomely murdered. Scudder uncovers a pair of vicious serial killers who the cops won’t touch. Along the way, he befriends TJ (Brian Bradley), a homeless black kid with sickle-cell anemia, and attends a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

The saying goes that the book is always better than the movie, but A Walk Among the Tombstones goes beyond that. The story was made for novelization. There are a ton of characters with important roles. There are high-arcing periodic and existential themes, the kind that you hear about in books but not in movies often because they’re relatively easy to capture with words but extremely difficult to shoot, so difficult that filmmakers often have to sacrifice some form of marketability to really do it right. There’s a negotiation later in the film in which Scudder establishes that a kidnapped girl is still alive by having the kidnapper relay information that she would have that is clever but not dramatic — it’s exactly the kind of thing that would play well in a book, but isn’t at all cinematic.

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Good lord, another one…

The Maze Runner is yet another young adult franchise start-up centering around a young protagonist trying to save the world from evil adults. This movie promised a few more twists, but it absolutely does not deliver.

The movie tries to add themes about post-pubescent tension and fear of leaving home, but it’s about as heavy-handed as Donkey Kong. At one point someone literally asks how girls work. Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox.

It follows Thomas (Dylan O’Brein) as he rises from The Box. The Box takes him to the center of The Glade, where he is greeted by The Gladers, who tell him nothing about where he is or how he got there. The audience already knows what they are refusing to explain — they have been trapped at the center of a shifting maze filled with Greavers, freak-tacular giant spider looking things that are fortunately nocturnal, by unknown watchers and none of them can remember anything — but the film spends a good hour-hour and 15 minutes before it gets to parts of the plot that aren’t necessarily known by every viewer who saw even one trailer.

While everything in the promotional material makes sense and is quite appealing when put together, the other plot details are completely nonsensical. The boys are some of the worst communicators ever filmed, there’s this whole weird thing that happens when someone gets Stung*, they’ve established a caste system to fit in with other young adult novels’ bizarre obsession with caste systems…

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It’s easy for bean-counters to ruin good ideas of movies, and it looks like that’s what happened with No Good Deed, but the good idea shines through brightly.

In the film, neglected housewife Terri Granger (Taraji P. Henson) is home alone for the night again with her two children when Colin Evans (the incomparable Idris Elba) comes calling. Evans is a particularly charismatic homicidal maniac stuck in the rain in need of a phone call, and Granger does her good deed by letting him in. After half an hour of sinisterly being a quiet, polite house guest, Evans begins to terrorize Granger and her children.

There are a few nice touches of symbolism in this. There are also a few nice touches of shirtless Idris Elba. Photo courtesy Screen Gems.

The movie’s light marketing effort has mostly been aimed toward its closing plot twist, and it is a very nice closing twist as long as the viewer understands what it means for the meta-story and is willing to forgive the poor premise execution for the film’s first hour.

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