Reel Entropy

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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As Above, So Below is a mess. A stinking mess.

Scarlet Marlowe (Perdita Weeks), a doctor in archaology, doctor in chemistry, speaker of six languages, master glassblower and journeyman gourmet pastry chef who works part time as a tech support engineer, is looking for the Philosopher’s Stone. She’s traced it to a hidden chamber in the clearly haunted catacombs beneath Paris. She gathers a reluctant crew to search through the graves, eventually discovering the Infernal Gate.

ROCK MONSTER!!! Note how blurry this still is. All of the scares in this movie are in sudden movements that spend a split second on some vaguely scary shape. Frankly, I’m surprised the rock monster has even this much detail. Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.

The film is nonsensical. There’s clearly a lot more to the plot than what is actually shot, and the audience can fill in some of the blanks, but it shouldn’t have to.

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Whose idea was it to release this movie in not November?

The November Man is Pierce Brosnan’s own project that he took up after retiring as James Bond. It was put on hold in 2007, and is only now hitting theaters almost 10 years later.

This shot, in which Devereaux waves at the camera he knows the CIA is looking for him through because he’s so cool and he knows everything, is exactly the kind of trite, boring nonsense that The November Man is made up of almost entirely. Photos courtesy Relativity Media.

In addition to co-producing, Brosnan stars as Peter Devereaux, a former CIA agent who returns to action when he learns an old lover, Natalia Ulanova (Mediha Musliovic) is seeking asylum from Russia and needs to be extracted. Ulanova knows how to find someone who can implicate new Russian president Arkady Fedorov (Lazar Ristovski) and CIA executives for several war crimes, and when she’s killed, Devereaux races against his old agency, the Russians and the New York Times to find refugee camp worker Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko), the only other person who can lead them to the witness.

All the circumstances of this movie — development for the film in which Brosnan would cast himself as a spy/hitman beginning just after he officially stepped away from the James Bond franchise, casting a recent Bond girl to play opposite him and his statement in an interview that “Daniel can’t have it all to himself” — point to Brosnan trying to be Bond again, which is sad, because he was never very good at it and it’s all anyone remembers him for.

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The Possession of Michael King follows its title character (Shane Johnson), a documentary filmmaker, after his wife dies in an accident early in the movie. King decides to search for proof of the divine or the infernal and becomes possessed.

The goal of found-footage haunting movies has always been to distill the experience of being haunted and shoot it directly into the audience through a first-person perspective. In these movies, scary things don’t happen to characters on a screen – they happen directly to you. The Possession of Michael King tries to take it a step further and give the audience a first-person perspective of being possessed. It fails miserably in this task.

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