Dr. Heckle and Mr. Blindside

After the disappointment of Fountain of Youth, I thought it was time to brave the waters of streaming originals once again with Amazon Prime’s new R-rated comedy Deep Cover.  Before I tell you what the movie is about, I want to preface this by saying what I’m about to say isn’t a joke.  The London police draft in three improv comics for their ability to think on their feet and roll with the punches to go into a special undercover program.  One of said comedians is Bryce Dallas Howard (The Help, Jurassic World), taking a break from directing some of the best episodes of Star Wars television to play Kat, a directionless comedian teaching an improv class as she waits for her big break, which more and more seems like it’ll never come.  Rounding out her team is Orlando Bloom’s (The Lord of the Rings, The Outpost) Marlon, an out of work advertisement actor with aspirations for serious drama, and Nick Mohammed’s (Ted Lasso) Hugh, coming off a wonderful run on Taskmaster to play a socially awkward and isolated IT guy at a large London financial firm, desperate for a way to relate to people.

Of course, the idea that improv comics are the perfect choices for undercover operations is preposterous on the level of sending a Pontiac Fiero to space or recruiting a group of deep-sea oil drillers to become astronauts instead of having them teach astronauts how to turn on a drill, but since it’s a comedy, you sort of just roll with it the way they’re supposed to and let yourself become caught up in the shred of believability in the plot.  I mean, there is a tiniest bit of something there if you think about it just enough, but not too much.  Comedians can be quite quick thinkers—I mean, look at how well Ike Barinholtz does on quiz shows, for example—so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility, but it is mildly insane all the same.  The Armageddon problem still exists; why not put cops through improv classes rather than put improv comics in the field with little more than a briefing before giving them a good luck pep talk and placing them in harm’s way.  If you’re able to suspend your disbelief just enough to accept the premise though, you will be rewarded with a very funny comedy with more than enough heart to keep you invested in the characters.

As you can imagine, there are lots of hiccups along the way, and the impulse to “yes, and” their way through scenarios finds our lot of comedians quickly escalating their way along in a local gang run by a fellow called Fly, played by the always excellent and very versatile Paddy Considine (Hot Fuzz, The Outsider), who quickly takes a liking to them and gets them involved way, way over their heads.  To be honest, though, the lowest rung on a step stool is over their heads because they’re comedians and not trained investigators.  There’s a certain amount of danger that a normal person is subjected to on a daily basis that we sort of shrug off; driving a car, crossing the street, taking a shortcut through an alley, etc., and our plucky protagonists go far, far beyond that.  When faced with real danger, the comics act admirably, but there’s a realness to how they react to things once the scene is called.  They act heroically when the time comes, but it is just acting. But instead of just playing one on TV, these actors are doing it for real, even if they’re just pretending.

Comedy is often hard to write about—I can tell you that the comedic timing in the film is top, top notch, especially coming from two actors with whom I don’t usually associate comedy.  While it is an ensemble cast with three fully realized characters, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Kat is probably the star, and when you look back through her credits, you can’t find a lot of comedic roles (though it is fairly laughable just how bad the Jurassic World movies are, but I don’t think that was intended).  But here, she’s as natural as can be.  Kat is funny, she’s evenly toned throughout the film, even though she’s the only one who really has to balance her life outside of being an undercover comic/police consultant, she manages to play it without jarring the audience between undercover Kat and real life Kat.  I’ve always been a big Bryce Dallas Howard fan, perhaps even more as a director than as an actress now, but Deep Cover has me yearning to see her in more comedies.  Orlando Bloom’s washed up ultra-method commercial actor is a far cry from Legolas, and even a completely different kind of character than Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean, where he is kind of the straight man as Johnny Depp Johnny Depps all around him.  But he plays it with such an earnest bent that he sells it and you buy it hook, line, and sinker because he does such a good job.  It’s a feat to pull off this kind of smoldering intensity and over the top commitment for comedy and he just nails it.  Now, I can’t say the same about Nick Mohammed—his role here is quite similar to Nate in Ted Lasso, but I don’t mind that one bit when he does it so well.  Hugh is definitely cut from the Nate mould, but it doesn’t matter when it’s a role he’s born to play.  Not quite as timid or as nervously tight-lipped as Nate, Hugh still struggles to fit in as an IT guy at a high dollar finance firm where not only do the people there not like him, they clearly don’t respect him and barely acknowledge his existence unless they need something from him.  He’s so amazing in this role, it doesn’t matter that he’s not playing against type.  In fact, based on his Taskmaster appearance, I’m not even sure he’s doing that much acting.  But he absolutely kills every frame.

And this is where the movie really shines.  It’s not just that it’s funny, of course it is, but lots of movies are funny (well, fewer and fewer, it seems) and it’s the characters that elevate this beyond your average action-comedy.  As preposterous as this premise is, as fantastical the plot, the movie is so well grounded in real-life stuff.  Kat had a dream that isn’t working out and at 39, she’s desperately trying to figure out if there’s still time left for her to pursue that dream or whether she needs to drastically reconsider her life choices.  Marlon wants nothing more than to be taken seriously, but, like Hugh Grant’s character from Paddington 2, his iconic role in an ad has taken over his entire career (though unlike Grant’s has-been, Marlon is a never-was).  Hugh is struggling to find a way to exist in a social world where he’s at the bottom of the hierarchy and he wants to do more and be more than he is.  Who can’t relate to that?  I think one of the things that makes this movie work so well is that each of the protagonists is extremely relatable in one way or another and if you don’t see at least part of yourself in one of them, you’re sure to see it in one of the others.   And unlike some of the recent streamer original films, Deep Cover has a star-studded cast and uses them all very well—unfortunately, there’s no Stanley Tucci this time, but Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings, Ronin) doing his best Jackson Lamb impression as the cop who brings them into this program, Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina, Devs), and Ian McShane (John Wick, Deadwood) round out the very talented cast and give the shady underworld our protagonists are jumping into much more real feel than it has any right to be.  And, at just 1 hour and 39 minutes, the movie hovers around that near-perfect 90 minute mark for comedies, returning us back to form from the 2+ hour movies that marked the Judd Apatow comedy era of the mid-to-late 2000s.

What’s even more surprising about Deep Cover is that it focuses very heavily on friendship and the relationships between the characters as human beings and in a very rare move for an R-rated comedy, doesn’t go all-in on raunchy comedy, sex jokes, or otherwise easy comedic mechanics.  There’s barely even a romantic subplot, which again, feels nice after how often we see it shoehorned into movies (not to beat up again on Jurassic World, but it deserves it, it’s a perfect example of “Well, they’re both good looking and the stars of the movie, so they have to get together”). It’s not that it bothers me, but it is an easier route to getting laughs and doing it without that shows off the skill in the writing and acting that bit much more than a comedy like Let’s Be Cops, which I also really enjoyed (despite it dismal reviews, but I do have a fondness for Jake Johnson and not just because he liked one my tweets about an deep cut TV-friendly dubbing of a line in Die Hard 2) or 21 Jump Street.  This movie felt like an elevated version of Let’s Be Cops and 21 Jump Street in some ways, but done in a way that you could almost watch with your family, bar some bloody violence and swearing.  I’m not saying it’s a replacement for Bluey, but you could easily watch this with older kids.  I mean, if the family barbecue gets rained out, this is one you can put on and not worry too much if the kids walk in while the adults are watching.

Deep Cover proves that while dying is easy and comedy is hard, not dying can be pretty hard too.  And also very, very funny and satisfying to watch.  I highly recommend this one.  Great R-rated comedies that are grown-up and mature in the writing are rare in the time of major film franchises replacing both the action movie and the comedy, and this is a movie that deserves to not only be watched, but celebrated.  It’s such a refreshing experience after movies like Fountain of Youth, Electric State, and The Gorge, which did a great deal of damage to the reputation of straight-to-streaming films, nearly undoing the great work of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Glass Onion.  And in a world that can, at times, feel like it’s crumbling around us, it’s nice to be able to escape that for a just over an hour and a half, laugh for a bit, and remember that even while all this is going on, our smaller struggles are still our struggles and it’s okay if we need to focus on them—and on ourselves—for a little while.  Not every story has to be the biggest story in the world and if you need a break from the world, a movie like Deep Cover is a wonderful way to take that break.

Bland of the Lost

As the warm weather starts to roll in across the Northern Hemisphere, are you ready for a fun, lighthearted adventure?  Well, I was too, but then I watched Apple TV+’s new big budget action-adventure movie Fountain of Youth.  I remember when Guy Ritchie’s name on a film meant something—Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels were two formative movies for me, his recent war movie The Covenant felt like a turning point from big budget fluffy movies like Sherlock Holmes to serious filmmaking with impactful stories and great acting, even the humorless crime thriller Wrath of Man showed that he was capable of more serious storytelling.  But with Fountain of Youth, Guy Ritchie returns to the meaningless, nonsensical movies that have defined the last 20 years of his filmography.

So let’s get into it.  The movie opens on John Krasinski (The Office, A Quiet Place), playing Luke Purdue, on a scooter driving through the streets of Bangkok as a cover of “Bang Bang” plays (I didn’t recognize the language, but considering this scene is set in Thailand, Thai is probably a safe bet) with a painting tube on his back.  Cue the very polite henchmen/gangsters who roll up, threaten Luke, and then start shooting as a car and scooter chase ensues.  He escapes rather clumsily—which is honestly refreshing to see.  So many times we’re used to seeing protagonists be essentially superhuman even when they’re not playing superhumans, but here, Luke takes a tumble and actually has to limp away and is affected by it.  Unfortunately, that’s about the last good thing I have to say about the movie.

With plans A, B, and C pretty much all blown, Luke gets on the earpiece to talk to his support, who directs him to a train.  On the train, he falls asleep and we get the first of many intercalary chapters where he dreams of finding something far off, but with serious consequences.  Once he wakes up from this bit of foreshadowing, he’s confronted by Esme, played by Eiza Gonzales (Baby Driver, 3 Body Problem), who describes herself as the “hand of mercy” and her associates as the “hand of judgment” before demanding the painting that Luke has.  He immediately starts flirting with the amount of charm and charisma that should make anyone feel more confident in their own flirting skills, because it sounded like being hit on by a cardboard box.  Esme’s not going for any of it, and then, well, there’s another fight and another escape.  It’s all meant to be very funny and very exciting and almost none of it works.   In fact, that’s kind of how much of the movie goes.  It’s trying very hard to be funny and exciting and more often than not, it fails.  It’s one of those times where you’re aware that they’re making a joke or trying to make to you laugh in some way and it just pretty much never lands, save for one legitimately funny scene that probably would have worked better as a YouTube Short than a movie.

After his escape, Luke goes to the museum where his sister Charlotte, played by Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta, Black Swan), works and pulls off the most incredible art heist I’ve ever seen.  And by incredible, I mean in the literal sense of the word, because it lacks any credibility as a scene.  Luke distracts Charlotte, walks up to a painting, lifts it off the wall, and then jogs out to a perfectly parked AC Cobra because apparently in this museum all the security guards take their coffee break at the same time, convinces her to get in with him and they go through a fairly leisurely car chase where you never believe anyone is in actual danger and nothing feels exciting despite the fact the AC/Shelby Cobra is one of the most stunning cars of all time and it’s always a treat to see one in action (even one that is most definitely a number of different replicas).  Eventually, he reveals that he’s working with his father’s old team, played by Laz Alonso (The Boys) and Carmen Ejogo (True Detective, Selma).  I didn’t bother learning their characters’ names or looking them up for you because despite the fact that Alonso and Ejogo are both talented actors, they’re essentially set dressing and diversity checklist casting in the film, their characters each amounting to roughly half of a “man in the chair” archetype.  They then reveal that their quest for the Fountain of Youth is being bankrolled by dying billionaire Owen Carver, played by the usually excellent Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina, Brooklyn).  Yeah, shady billionaire funding, what could go wrong that they couldn’t painfully telegraph?

There are a lot of problems with this movie and most of it has to do with how it’s written, directed, and acted.  I know this is a talented cast.  Even Stanley Tucci (Conclave, Big Night) shows up, and between this and Electric State, it makes me wonder just how many vacation homes he’s paying off with these movies.  The scenes are written like a video game, specifically an Uncharted game.  As soon as our “heroes” get to their next objective and solve the puzzles to reach their goal the right way, the “bad guys” burst through the door or wall and start shooting.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Uncharted games, they’re some of my favorite games I’ve ever played, but a movie has to have a narrative structure and not an objective based structure.  Movies aren’t the same as games, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t get through 15 minutes of the Uncharted movie before shutting it off.  It’s very unsatisfying to watch your main characters go through a bunch of disjointed fetch quests—it’s not that it can’t be done, but Fountain of Youth isn’t pulling it off.  More than that, there are nonsensical decisions abound here, relating to Charlotte’s shoehorned custody battle for her only son because of course the best way to not only demonstrate that you’re the more responsible parent, but also keep your child safe is to take them with you on a globetrotting graverobbing tour where not just one, but two shadowy organizations are trying to gun you down and so is Interpol.  Nothing like dodging a hail of bullets at every turn to earn your “World’s Best Mom” mug the right way and not just get it from the Hallmark store like everyone else.

It’s also incredibly unoriginal.  Like Electric State, I walked away with the sense that the overall feeling in the writers’ room is that if they copy enough movies, it’ll feel like an original film, and it just doesn’t.  Like I said before, the similarities to Uncharted were impossible to miss, but everything from Luke’s Indiana Jones wardrobe and their dead father being named Harrison as an homage—if that’s the right word when dealing with a piece of media as bad as this—to Harrison Ford, to Luke’s charmless Star-Lord energy that made him incredibly annoying instead of endearing.  And there’s a whiff of The Da Vinci Code, which is either a piece of memetic pulp fiction or a very bad movie, depending on whether you read it or watched it.  The whole movie felt familiar in a bad way, the way a store brand soda kind of tastes like a Coke or Pepsi, but not quite and in a way that you can’t put your finger on, but is off-putting.  The knowledge they have feels unearned—unlike something like Uncharted or Indiana Jones, where the characters draw on a deep well of knowledge and ingenuity gained from years and years of study and experience, everything here is at their fingertips.  It’s all too easy.  The extensive use of technology to find the answers to their problems make them feel more like an IT department than a group of archaeologists or specialists with arcane knowledge of the past.  Every time they figure something out, it’s because a computer program did it, not because they knew or deduced something.

I wish that was where the problems with this movie ends, but it goes far deeper than that.  It shows off some of the most Eurocentric thinking I’ve seen in a modern movie.  In practically the same breath, Luke, when convincing Charlotte that there’s enough truth in the myth of the Fountain to warrant trying to find it, he states that dozens of cultures over centuries all have the same myth, but then goes on to say that the path to the Fountain is hidden in six paintings of Jesus Christ.  That’s right, it goes from every culture to the only one that matters in the eyes of this movie, white European Christianity; even a special Bible is part of the path.  Now, I understand that European art is something people learn about in school and a name like Rembrandt is one that people will recognize moreso than artists like Katsushika Hokusai or Amrita Sher-Gil, but if you’re putting together a continent-spanning adventure taking you from places like Thailand to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, you can do a little more research than just grabbing the names you remember from your grade school history textbook and Googling what paintings of Christ they did.  So while every culture has the Fountain of Youth myth, it’s the white Christian ones that count.  Although they’re happy to plunder other cultures to get to the Fountain, those cultures are not the ones that have any clues or knowledge that helps them find the Fountain itself.  It’s just these six paintings of Jesus that hold the truth.  Now, I hesitate to call this racist, because I don’t think it is, not at its core or intentionally; but it is incredibly lazy writing.  Just like all the writing in Fountain of Youth is incredibly lazy.  How does Eiza Gonzalez and her crew of faceless red shirts keep showing up just after Luke and Charlotte?  And then how does Interpol keep showing up just after they do?  How are they being tracked?  How are they finding them?  If Luke and his team are the only ones with the clues, how does everyone keep catching up to them 15 minutes after they break the cryptic codes that have sat in plain sight and gone unfound by everyone else for hundreds of years?  What it comes right down to is that it doesn’t matter to the film how this is happening, it’s only concerned with the fact that it’s happening, whether or not it makes sense.

Another problem with the film is how much of the violence is sanitized in order to give it a family-friendly vibe.  People die, they die violently, and none of that is ever mentioned.  Sure, it’s pretty much always Interpol agents in tactical gear or Esme’s merry band of baddies, but not a single character ever mentions the human cost this quest is taking.  Not even the Interpol inspector, Jamal Abbas, played by Arian Moayed (Succession) in charge of the investigation seems to notice or care that his team are the ones being killed.  Nor are the possible effects of seeing this violence and being the target of it as well on a 12 year old child ever explored.  The aim of this is likely to keep violence from bothering people who would be watching this with their children—the PG-13 rating and inclusion of a child character really show that it’s written with family viewership in mind—but the effects of it are to make Luke, Charlotte, and their team seem incredibly callous to the loss of life.  There is never a moment where anyone cares about anything that happens to anyone outside of their little circle; even Luke’s moments of introspection, those foreshadowing dreams, only exhibit fears about the possible consequences for his family, whom he had no qualms about putting in danger in the first place.  People are dying and they’re right at the center of it and because they don’t care, they feel like highly unsympathetic characters and bad people.  No amount of awkward flirting or Ryan Reynolds-style quips can endear someone to me if they don’t ever take a moment to reflect on the deaths happening around them.  They appear to lack humanity, which for villains is a bit boring, but okay, but for protagonists, it’s unforgivable.  It makes them all seem like awful people and by the end of it, I was waiting for one of these ancient spaces they were going in to collapse on them and put me out of my suffering by burying them all alive.

The movie also showcases the problem with adventure movies.  I have a hard time looking back and trying to remember the last time we had a good one.  And now that so much is mapped out by satellites and the answer to almost every question is available at our fingertips, it feels like mystery and adventure have disappeared from the world (although thanks to AI-powered search engines, we now have a little mystery restored, because you never know if they’re being truthful or not) and it would be really nice to see some convincing adventure in our films.  Movies like National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code are B-movie schlock at best and calling Fountain of Youth that would be an insult to B-movie schlock.  Even the Indiana Jones movies don’t feel as good to watch as they did in my youth, although The Mummy remains a largely fun Sunday afternoon film to watch.  If we count the Jumanji reboot films and their virtual world, then they’re probably the last bit of adventure films that was enjoyable to watch.  And in some ways, divorcing the the cultural plunder from the real world into a virtual one removes the icky feeling that comes with some of these movies and thinking just a little bit too long about how some exhibits got to the museums in which they now live.  Maybe that is the way forward for adventure films.  Ironically, as more of these movies begin to feel like video games, which themselves learned from movies to become more cinematic, it’s the ones about a video game world that feel more organic.

Sometimes movies are frustrating when you see the potential to be better go terribly unrealized, but unlike those movies, Fountain of Youth is frustrating because of how mind-numbing it is.  This is the kind of movie I want to be made; not attached to a major IP, not part of a cinematic universe, something meant to be fun.  But I want it to be made better.  I mean, there’s so much wrong with this movie, I couldn’t even mention it all, like when they float the wreck of the RMS Lusitania to find a painting while continually insisting that they’re not graverobbers.  I wanted to bring this movie to you because in the midst of the anxiety and fear gripping many in the world, a plucky adventure films that brings a smile to your face can be worth a hell of a lot.  But this isn’t that film.  I felt like my time was wasted; at 2 hours and 5 minutes, it’s not the longest movie, and it is action-packed, but it has nothing going on.  The screen is always flashing something at you, but devoid of any meaning or any affection for the characters or any stakes, because no one ever feels like they’re ever in danger (with Luke even dismissing his sister being held hostage at gunpoint in a scene using slow-motion to play it for comedy that, surprise, surprise, also misses), it feels like nothing of any importance ever happens in the film.  I’ve said before that I don’t give letter grades in this blog, but if I were to, this elementary grade level movie wouldn’t be passing on to middle school.

The Vault in Our Stars

As we come to the close of our crime block, examining the criminal protagonist and what makes them so appealing, I want to come back to what may be a forgotten gem (albeit, not quite hidden) about the perfect bank heist for just about the perfect reason—Spike Lee’s Inside Man.  That’s right, we’re going to rob a bank again, but this time, it’s not just for poetic justice.  The movie opens with an establishing montage over “Chaiyya Chaiyya”, from the well-known and well-loved Bollywood hit, Dil Se, reminding me of the time when the culture was obsessed with Indian music and you couldn’t go more than five minutes without hearing Jay-Z and Punjabi MC over a Bollywood beat.  It also has Clive Owen (Children of Men, Gosford Park) explaining to you, the viewer, how he’s about to pull off the perfect robbery.  Pretty bold stuff, he even tells you his name, Dalton Russell.  I always thought you’re supposed to hide your identity when committing crimes, but what do I know?

We then move to a serene and ornate bank, back in the time when people still had to go to banks, just sitting there, like low-hanging fruit, just ready to be picked.  The robbers, dressed as painters, come in, disable the cameras, and proceed to do the bank robber thing.  Fire the gun in the air, tell everyone to get down, give up their phones, don’t look at their faces, and then, uncharacteristically of many a bank robbery (at least in movies), strip and put on a bunch of matching jumpsuits and masks.  The plan is brilliant—obfuscate everyone’s identity, so that not just the cops, but even the hostages themselves are unable to tell who is who.  What becomes a merry-go-round of confusion is a cover for a brilliant, meticulously planned heist, while a troubled detective and a SWAT team with itchy trigger fingers sit outside, trying to figure out what to do.  While Dalton plays a hostage shell game, the police are forced to sit outside and twiddle their thumbs, waiting for Dalton to make a wrong move.  And as the film progresses, you get the feeling that Dalton isn’t the kind of guy who makes wrong moves.

And here lies the absolute brilliance of Inside Man.  It’s not that the heist is brilliant, even though it is, it’s not that the perpetrator is charismatic and likable, even though he is, it’s that Spike Lee turns the whole thing on its head.  Normally, you wouldn’t side with hostage takers.  Normally, you wouldn’t want the people robbing the bank to win.  Normally, you’d root for the de facto heroes to be the ones who swoop in to save the day.  But in this world, the de facto heroes are cops and anything but and Spike Lee is keen to point that out with just enough subtlety so as not to beat you over the head with it.  This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen the movie, but like the man who is changed the next time he walks into a river, every time you rewatch a movie, you approach it as a different person, with different experiences, and different perspectives.  And I’ve noticed that since I started watching movies with pen in hand for this blog, I see so much more that I’m able to analyze (and sometimes overanalyze, I’m sure).  And Inside Man is no different; Lee makes sure that even though the detectives we’re inclined to side with—Keith Frazier, played by Denzel Washington (Training Day, Fences), and Bill Mitchell, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men, Dr. Strange)—are the more honest type, they have allegations hanging over them, particularly Frazier.  Someone claims he’s responsible for $140,000 going missing from a bust and, while he proclaims his innocence and we’re inclined to believe him, he has no better explanation than the criminal accusing him is a liar—a refrain we’ve heard all too often about those attempting to expose the crimes of those in power (even if the power they wield is as little as an NYPD detective third grade).

And despite both Frazier and Mitchell being Black, the rest of the cops are just racist enough so as to make it obvious, but not so obvious that you can’t miss it if you’re not paying attention.  Maybe you’re just used to it and jaded or you’ve simply come to expect it, but it’s there for a reason.  People are referred to using derogatory racial epithets, one beat cop catches himself about to describe a suspect with the N-word to Frazier, they rough up a Sikh and treat him like a terrorist, even taking his turban, which is a very important part of his religion.  All this is in pursuit of showing you, the audience, that the police here are not the protagonists—not the main ones, anyway.  Dalton and his merry band of bank robbers are indeed the protagonists of the film, and they’re not altruists either.  But in an imperfect world, demanding perfection from your heroes is the path to ruin and disappointment every time.  As Dalton explains, he’s definitely in it for the money, but that the money isn’t worth much if he can’t face himself in the mirror.  If only more people had that level of integrity and self awareness.  Yes, I’m aware I’m saying this about a man who walked into a bank, fired a revolver in the air, and forced people to experience the scariest day of their lives.  He also resorts to violence on more than one occasion.  So, maybe don’t put a poster of him on your wall, but it’s still okay to root for him.  The police, even our secondary protagonists Frazier and Mitchell, lack this self awareness to varying degrees, and this is what makes the movie work so well.  SWAT captain John Darius, played by the always fantastic Willem Dafoe (John Wick, Platoon) definitely lacks this, just waiting for a reason to send his men in and settle the issue with extreme finality.  Everyone has a trigger and someone is always ready to pull it at a moment’s notice for their own benefit.

Enter power broker Madeleine White, played by Jodie Foster (The Silence of the Lambs), who is called in by the bank owner Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer, Knives Out) who wants her to come in and settle the issue her way—quickly and quietly, by wielding power and influence with some of New York’s most powerful and influential.  Oh, the back room deals she’s been involved with, that would be quite a story indeed.  Of course, you don’t get to the position she’s in without being incredibly intelligent and a keen reader of people, so she intuits immediately that the reason she’s being asked to take care of this is because there’s something either so incredibly embarrassing or so incredibly sensitive that Case doesn’t want it getting into anyone’s hands, whether they be the criminals’ hands—or the cops’.  After all, a bank robbery in the news deosn’t usually turn people against the bank; they look at the bank and its employees and the hostages as victims, garnering sympathy and thoughts and prayers.  Suffice it to say, the thing he’s hiding is beyond incriminating (in the world of 2006, anyway; now, I’m not so sure) and he’s keen to never let it see the light of day.  It’s at this point that White starts working her magic behind the scenes, even getting a face to masked face with Dalton after leaning on the mayor to get her in.  It’s quite the scene.

What Spike Lee pulls off with Inside Man is similar to what Rian Johnson pulls off with Knives Out and Glass Onion.  He doesn’t play hide the ball, he puts it all up front, cards on the table, face up, and still somehow you’re surprised when it plays out exactly the way he tells you it’s going to play out.  It’s a hell of a feat as a director and very impressive by all involved.  In an age where movies are increasingly reliant on CGI, big set pieces, and wild, unearned plot twists in an attempt to engage and/or fool the audience, it’s so refreshing just to see good, strong narrative storytelling that tracks from start to finish and still keeps you guessing without ever feeling cheap or manipulative.  Dalton is completely upfront with the viewer—and even the police—about his plans and yet he’s still able to pull them off in the most satisfying way.

And like I said earlier, it’s not his brilliance that makes you like him and root for him.  It’s the motivation behind the crime.  I won’t tell you what it is, of course, because that’s something you should see for the first time on screen and experience it for yourself.  Of course, banks have a lot of money and that’s not a bad reason for someone to rob them—after all, in Hell or High Water, the motives were straightforward and the method simple, but you still rooted for them, and that’s because of the why.  Dalton shows you who he is time and time again—for example, when taking phones from everyone, he lets the one child in the bank keep his handheld gaming system, a Sony PSP (perhaps dating the film even more than the prevalence of flip phones), and when he sees the game the kid is playing, he says he’s going to have a word with his father.  Not being awful to kids is a low bar, but these days, so many people fail to make it over it and stumble, at best, that seeing this violent criminal show kindness and concern for his child hostage is immediately endearing.  And when you finally learn the true motivation behind the bank robbery, you are completely on his side.  Even if the cops weren’t awful and trying so very hard to hide their racist and authoritative ways, you’d still be on Dalton’s side.  That is how noble his cause is.  Yes, he will make a lot of money doing this, but in doing so, he will also further the cause of justice.  In some ways, that doesn’t make him too different from our blind lawyer in Hell’s Kitchen, but not quite the same. All evil deeds are found out, after all, because they stink—as much as you try to cover them up, the smell never truly goes away.  I do so hope that’s true.

I wanted to end the crime block with this movie because of Dalton Russell—because he’s such an easy protagonist to get behind.  He exemplifies why criminal protagonists are so compelling; arrogant, but with cause, charismatic and likable, and doing it for the right reasons.  He’s motivated by money, sure, but not by greed, unlike some of the other characters in the movie who would be victims or protagonists in another film.  It is a fine line to toe and here Spike Lee has Clive Owen not just toeing it, but dancing on it, doing the full plié.  At 2 hours and 9 minutes, it’s not exactly a breezy film, but it’s not bloated.  It’s another movie where just about every scene serves a purpose.  It’s not the perfectly crafted Late Night with the Devil, where every minute detail is there for a reason, but it is very well done, managing an 86% RT score with an 85% audience score as well.  I hope this look at criminal protagonists has been interesting and, above all else, fun for you.  I will be returning to the regularly scheduled eclectic programming from here, at least for the time being, and to a weekly release.  I’m sorry for the unplanned hiatus, I was dealing with some illness in the family; not to worry, we’re all fine now and thank you to everyone who reached out to me over the last three weeks, I really appreciate it.  And more than anything, I appreciate all of you who read this plucky little one man show. More to come!

Also, I would like to take a moment to wish all in the LGBTQ+ community a safe and happy Pride Month! The world is a better place with you in it and I strive to make this blog a place where people of all genders and all orientations are and feel welcome. Art is for everyone and discussions about art should include everyone as well.

Con Baby Con

One of the things I really love about this blog is bringing hidden gems to people that they might not have heard of before or that maybe didn’t have mass appeal, but might resonate with certain audiences.  And here, in the middle of my crime block, I get to do just that with 2008’s The Brothers Bloom.  Rian Johnson’s follow-up to his excellent debut film Brick, a neo-noir mystery set in a high school, Johnson again plays with genre and setting in this underrated con man flick.

Starring the always likable Adrien Brody as Bloom and always angry Mark Ruffalo as Stephen, they play orphaned brothers who developed confidence schemes after bouncing around from foster home to foster home.  Stephen is the mastermind, writing richly detailed stories and characters for them to act out, so that by the end of it the people they conned not only don’t know they’ve been conned, they walk away happy, feeling like they got what they wanted the whole time, never even questioning the outcome.  Along for the ride is the mysterious Bang Bang, played by Rinko Kikuchi, in a nearly silent role, but one pivotal to the story as Stephen’s right hand, the quiet glue that keeps everything together (and occasionally blows it apart using high explosives).

Growing disillusioned with the lifestyle, Bloom tells Stephen that he wants out—a conversation they’ve had many times before, so much so that Stephen knows it word for word, but Stephen works very hard to keep him in the game.  Resentment grows in Bloom, he wants a life where he is himself; he’s become tired of living a life written by Stephen, constantly playing his characters.  Bloom wants an unwritten life, and who can’t identify with that?

Normally, Stephen is able to talk Bloom down, but this time, Bloom says he’s walking away for real and he does just that.  Some time passes, but Stephen and Bang Bang track him down and, with how these things go, they convince him to head to New Jersey for one last score.  They scope out the mark, to use the parlance, a reclusive heiress.  Not quite a shut-in, but also not what I’d call socially adept, she lives on her own in a mansion and constantly drives her Lamborghini into things.  Penelope, played by the immensely talented Rachel Weisz, shows off so much charm and quirkiness that you instantly like her; despite the attention-grabbing bright yellow supercar, she is essentially solitary.  She doesn’t appear to have any friends, no job or need for a job—no one in her life at all.  The perfect person to set up, really.  And that they do, using the tried-and-true method of getting them to hit you with their car so they are sympathetic to you.  As always, it’s Bloom who takes the hit while Stephen orchestrates the whole scheme in the background.

Now, as you can imagine, things don’t go exactly as planned—if they do, there’s no movie, so such is the way of any confidence scheme movie (or indeed, most crime films), a thing or series of things go wrong and forces our protagonists to improvise.  In any case, they whisk Penelope off on a luxurious steamboat trip around the world, but only after planting the seed that it’s something she wants to do, long con style.  She’s basically led the life of a monk (minus the asceticism; her money precludes her from ever suffering from need, so instead of having a quiet life of reflection, she “collects hobbies” instead of participating in life the way most people do), so the prospect of going on a globetrotting adventure is too much temptation for her to bear and she shows up at the dock with her luggage ready to go.  And an adventure she has, meticulously written and constructed by Stephen.  To complicate things, though, Bloom starts to develop feelings for Penelope and Penelope for Bloom in return.  Falling for the mark is the conman version of getting high on your own supply, I suppose; the cardinal sin, the ultimate faux pas, the major bummer of the profession.

There’s not a lot new here; as much as I enjoyed this movie, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel.  One of Rian Johnson’s strengths, however, is his iteration on genre tropes—that is, his execution of the film can be more important than the kernel idea from which the film grew.  In that way, he builds a better wheel.  He’s an expert at subverting expectations and while The Brothers Bloom could be knocked for being overly complicated, I think it fits Stephen’s character to write incredibly elaborate cons in order to not just successfully get away with it, but also to satisfy his own desires for adventure, control, and perhaps even a sort god complex.  Growing up the way he did, I can understand why he feels the need to not just control the circumstances surrounding him, but to create them.  Conman movies tend to go one of just a handful of ways and The Brothers Bloom is no different in that regard.  But it is how well it’s executed that sets it apart from movies that could feel trite in the hands of a less talented director.  The visuals of this movie, much like Stephen’s cons, are very thoughtfully and elaborately constructed as well.  There were so many times when I found the composition of the shots stunning, and maybe it’s partly because I’m a big Rian Johnson fan (he’s never let me down as a director, which I can’t say about even my other favorite auteurs like Denis Villenueve and Christopher Nolan), but when he helms a movie, I can feel it.  Even here, where he’s still young in his career and feeling out his own style, you can see how he sculpted his influences and became the filmmaker he is today.

We don’t have movies like Knives Out and The Glass Onion without Brick and The Brothers Bloom, and that would be a damn shame.  The DNA of Rian Johnson’s later films is all here, just not as refined and perhaps not as confident to take big swings, but it’s all there.  Brick relied on noir detective conventions for its adolescent private detective and The Brothers Bloom shows Johnson’s admiration for Wes Anderson’s style.  Indeed, on first blush, you’d be excused for thinking you were watching a Wes Anderson movie—the costuming is not exactly contemporary, they go on a steamer ship instead of taking a plane, they’re in rustic and idyllic European towns for the majority of the film, and there’s plenty of quirkiness on display.  In fact, I wasn’t sure that the movie wasn’t intended to be a period piece until Penelope showed up in her Lamborghini Murciélago, definitely contemporary to the time the movie was made.  The inclusion of Wes Anderson mainstay Adrien Brody felt almost like an intentional homage to the distinct director, as Brody shows up in just about every Wes Anderson movie I’ve seen.  But I don’t take this as a weakness of the film; I know as a writer, when I go back to my early works, I see the influences of the authors I was obsessed with at the time, namely Vonnegut and a little Hemingway, as I slowly developed my own style that owes something to my influences without feeling like a copy of them.  And this is what I see in The Brothers Bloom; a young filmmaker making a movie that honors the directors he admires while doing his own thing with the way they influenced him.

As great as Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz are here, it really is Adrien Brody that makes this film.  His performance is a true standout in a movie where the other actors are the ones dropping the more poignant and memorable lines (particularly Rachel Weisz), but his talent to be convincingly exasperated, bemused, and relatable all at the same time is on full display.  The movie—and Brody’s performance as Bloom in particular—speaks strongly to the fear that we don’t really know who we are, that we are just pretending to be who we think we’re supposed to be.  That we’re all just playing a part written for us by someone else and our place in the world is prescribed by others.  It makes us wonder what it would mean to step out of the role that society, our families, and other outside forces have coerced us into playing.  In a world where so many of our virtual interactions are fake—bots on Twitter, propaganda and disinformation on TV, social media influencers showing us carefully curated stills from an existence as manufactured as one of Stephen’s cons, do we even know how to be real anymore?  Do we even know what’s real anymore?  Of course, the movie couldn’t have been written with that in mind—in 2008, Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy and Instagram was still just an idea.  But Bloom’s situation feels more relevant now than it was when the movie came out.  It’s not just our personal insecurities now, it’s our entire world that’s in question.

Bloom shows us that sometimes learning to be yourself is an act of courage.  And sometimes an act of courage, even in a fake world, can be very real.

Like every great comedy, like every great piece of literature, really, there is a stream of sadness that runs through it.  The best comedies give us laughs through the sadness and that’s what makes them great instead of just silly fun—not that silly fun is bad, you need that too, but it’s sadness that elevates a comedy.  Fleabag, Lodge 49, Safety Not Guaranteed, etc. are all comedies that really prove that and while The Brothers Bloom may not hit that upper echelon of comedic cinematic literature the way those do, it’s not too far off, and it’s Bloom’s sadness and malaise that push it so close.  Because life is full of sadness, it’s full of loneliness, it’s full of disappointment, but it’s through all that where we find joy—it’s why every laugh means so much, why a genuine smile feels so good, why finding a connection with another person is so meaningful.  The Brothers Bloom is a wonderful movie where nothing is real but the stories we tell and the beauty we find in the world between endings.  Streaming on Peacock, Prime Video, Tubi, and Pluto TV, The Brothers Bloom is 1 hour and 54 minutes well spent.  Like the uplifting Be Kind Rewind, don’t let the 68% RT score keep you away; it may not be for everyone, but this is one hidden gem that deserves a chance to con its way into your heart.