‘Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard’ is a 100-minute blast of chaotic evil energy

Posted on June 22, 2021 by reelentropy
After a bit part in the prior film where her fame and sudden appearance was as big a part of her performance as the actual performance, Hayek is right in the middle of Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, often literally. Images courtesy Lionsgate.

8/10 Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a riot. It’s a trashy, meat-and-potatoes genre piece that’s light on the meat, but it’s got an avalanche of potatoes, and that’s just fine.  

The Italian Riviera- Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds), suffering post-traumatic nightmares after the previous film, takes sabbatical away from guns and all manner of violence while he waits for his bodyguarding license to be renewed. Sonia Kincaid (Salma Hayek), also on the riviera for her honeymoon, pulls Bryce out of his peace to help rescue her husband, Bryce’s archnemesis Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson). After a successful rescue, all three of them are blackbagged and blackmailed into working for Interpol in lieu of the critical mole they just killed to stop a plot to demolish the European power grid. They’ll intersect with this plot in a few different ways, but the Kincaids are mostly interested in returning to their honeymoon with Interpol’s money.

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‘In the Heights’ flat in every possible sense of the word

Posted on June 22, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

2/10 In the Heights is borderline unwatchable. Everything is bad. Alice Brooks’ cinematography is downright incompetent, and every decision by editor Myron Kerstein is questionable at best and obviously wrong at worst. Jon M. Chu is a weak director, befitting a project that seems to have been someone else’s afterthought from the first day of production to release. To make matters worse, writer/producer Quiara Alegría Huedes, who co-wrote the original musical with producer/actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, has made some baffling decisions in adaptation that beg serious questions about how well she understands her own work.

Washington Heights, Manhattan, summer- Usnavi de la Vega (Anthony Ramos) runs a corner bodega as the summer reaches its peak. He dreams both of getting back to his native Dominican Republic and of Vanessa Morales (Melissa Barrera), a salon worker who herself dreams of getting out to Lower Manhattan and opening her own business. Meanwhile, Nina Rosario (Leslie Grace) has returned from Stanford University, and struggles to tell her father Kevin (Jimmy Smits) that she doesn’t want to go back. Benny (Corey Hawkins), Kevin Rosario’s employee and Nina’s boyfriend before she went to Stanford, rekindles their romance. The story is told by de la Vega to his children at least a decade in hindsight from his father’s idyllic coastal bar El Suanito back in the Caribbean.

In the Heights is clearly not worthy of the show it was based on. There are constant, basic film language problems that call less for a review and more of a scene-by-scene breakdown of all its failures.

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‘The Conjuring’ and that long-fabled franchise fatigue

Posted on June 6, 2021 by reelentropy
I’m the cop in the back just wondering how far they’re going to push this weird charades act. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

3/10 The Satanic panic never really ended. The surge of news about “Satanism” that started as a religious offshoot of the rebellious ‘60s and consumed the suburbs of Reagan’s America with fears of pedophiles and kidnapped children being used for human sacrifice buried itself deep in the American psyche and has been catnip for related media ever since. The fact that it was the Catholics you had to watch out for all along remains painfully ironic, both because of how obviously it is preists’ real crimes that are projected onto “Satanists” and because of how Satanic panic media is constantly sending up Catholic mysticism.

Two of the biggest perpetrators and profiteers of this panic were known frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren, who traveled across New England in the ‘70s and ‘80s summoning media frenzies to everything they could get within shouting distance of that went bump in the night and then hawking books and lectures about demonology – Ed, apparently with a straight face, claimed to be a “self-taught demonologist.” Despite all of their most famous hoaxes being disclaimed by witnesses and collaborators alike, they and their higher-profile incidents have remained prominent in American culture, waxing and waning with the general fear of Satan. Recently, that’s come in the form of The Conjuring film series, a collection of terrible, boring haunted house movies based extremely loosely on the Warrens’ “case files,” which I strongly doubt are things that they kept.

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‘Cruella’ scorches screen in Sex Pistols reimagining

Posted on June 6, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 Cruella is a bold, fast, fun, intricately detailed and remarkably complex film about power, destiny, art and cruelty. In the past decade’s long and mostly painful parade of uncurious, unnecessary remakes of Disney classics, it immediately becomes the best and by a significant margin.  

London, 1970s- A little gay kid named Estella Miller (Emma Stone, who also produces executively) grows up orphaned on the streets of London as a petty thief who really wants to be a fashion designer. In her childhood, Miller was forced to hide her extreme gayness, stuffing her split black-and-white hair under a rust wig and suppressing her sadistic, borderline psychotic tendencies, which she externalizes as a separate personality called Cruella.

Miller lands a dream job with London fashion mogul Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), but soon realizes it was the baroness who killed her mother by siccing her attack dalmatians on her. Miller dusts off her suppressed gayness, using her natural hair as a disguise and adopting Cruella as an alter ego to wage what can only be described as guerilla fashion warfare on the baroness, sabotaging her new lines, ambushing and upstaging her at every event and sucking all the air out of the fashion media, bent on taking away the baroness’ identity – her professional stature, her confidence, her dogs and her possessions – before taking her life.

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‘Quiet Place’ sequel summons audiences back to the theater

Posted on June 4, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

8/10 A Quiet Place Part II isn’t the first blockbuster to release after the COVID-19 crisis really got underway, but it’s the first to perform more or less to expectation. It’s a uniquely cinematic experience and would be an intriguing editing experiment in any year.

Upstate New York, 474 days post-invasion- Earth is occupied by “dark angels,” blind predators with incredible strength and speed, a completely bulletproof exoskeleton and a sense of hearing so powerful and keen that they are summoned by the slightest noise, and they have wiped out most of the human race. After their farm is destroyed in the first film, what remains of the Abbott family, Evelyn and children Regan and Marcus (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe), with her new day-old son in tow, break to stay with Emmett (Cillian Murphy), a family friend from before the invasion and one of the community of survivors from their town. From there, the group splits. Marcus, who is caught in a bear trap and unable to walk, stays at the camp alone with the baby; Evelyn makes the dangerous journey into town for medical supplies; and Regan, who has discovered a way to use feedback from her hearing aid to make the creatures vulnerable, tracks a radio broadcast to what appears to be Chebeague Island in Maine, where she hopes to broadcast the feedback so the monsters can be destroyed en mass.

Also, A Quiet Place Part II begins with a long flashback sequence of the first day of the invasion, introducing Emmett and following the deceased Lee Abbott (John Krasinski, who also writes, directs and produces) through the chaos.

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