"John Wick" Review

It's not often that you see stunt coordinators directing films - especially not ones that reach a wide release - but John Wick has two. Chad Stahelski was Keanu Reeves' stunt double in The Matrix trilogy, and teams up with fellow stuntman David Leitch for this film. Starring Keanu Reeves in the titular role, the story revolves around a legendary ex-hitman whose wife has just died. He starts to find solace in a dog that his now-deceased wife gave him, until some Russian gangsters kill it and steal his car. After seemingly losing everyone, he decides seek revenge and spends the rest of the movie killing everyone.

If the story sounds ridiculous or stupid, you can take solace in the fact that the film is self-aware of it's own insanity. John Wick embraces it's b-movie heritage and doesn't pretend to be anything more. In fact, the film amps up the craziness and even makes jokes at its own expense. The Russian villains are cartoonish, but the filmmakers recognize this and create overly-dramatic, metaphor-laced lines translated with action subtitles. So essentially this movie is what The Equalizer would have been if The Equalizer were good.

Thankfully, the actors are in tune to what the movie is going for. Keanu Reeves is absolutely fantastic, delivering his lines with the sort of monotonous intensity that made him an action star in the first place. Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist is the head of the Russian crime gang, and plays his role with such intensity that it borders on parody. That said, the movie never gets in your face about making fun of itself. The characters take themselves deadly seriously. Willem Dafoe essentially plays a Deus Ex Machina, saving John Wick whenever he needs it most. None of the characters have a lot of dimension, but they don't really need any.

The fight scenes are fabulous. They are meticulously choreographed and the camera stays in a place where all of the action in the scene is easily visible. The fighting is non-stop and high-intensity. The rest of the film is barely an excuse of a plot to cater to the fight scenes, so it's good that they are solid. The film feels kind of like watching a video game, but it feels like watching a guy who knows what he's doing play a video game. Even though it appears as though bad guys appear out of thin air, there's some genuine energy put into making sure the villains aren't one-punch kills.

The film doesn't make a lot of sense, but it creates its own little reality where all of these eventsare perfectly acceptable. It doesn't spend too much time trying to explain things or have things seem realistic, but this isn't the type of movie that you think too much about. I'm not sure how well it would hold up on a second viewing, but I definitely had a lot of fun watching this one. It's a fun action film. Nothing more. Nothing less. 7/10.

"Fury" Review

Written and directed by David Ayer, the writer of Training Day and writer/director of End of Watch, Fury is a movie about tank operators behind enemy lines in WW2. We open in the film with Don 'Wardaddy' Collier (Brad Pitt) jumping out of a tank and stabbing a lone Nazi soldier. But despite the similarity in Brad Pitt's characters, this isn't Inglorious Bastards. Fury attempts to take a more serious tone and show some of the difficulties of working in a tank during WW2, but the movie just ends up feeling like a cartoon.

After the tank crew gets back to the American camp, they are greeted with Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), the replacement for one of the members of the crew that has died. Ellison has been trained as a typing clerk and has no experience working in tanks. He is berated by Wardaddy for putting the tank's lives in danger, and later says he would rather die than kill a Nazi. Then, approximately 4 seconds later, he starts screaming about he wants to kill all of the Nazis. There's no justification for the character development, but it happens and you just need to assume that you get completely desensitized by the brutality of war on your first day. Although when going into a foreign environment it's good to have a character who is just as inexperienced as the audience, Norman Ellison is so poorly written that Logan Lerman's solid performance isn't enough to carry the movie.

The other performances are decent as well, but the characters are just as haphazardly written. Brad Pitt plays a hard-ridden tank commander. Jon Bernthal plays an uneducated, angry person. Shia LaBeouf, although giving one of the stronger performances here, is nothing more than a religious fanatic. And Michael Peña drives the tank. The film spends lots of time establishing and reestablishing these clichés, but never creating anything more. In one lengthy sequence, the film comes to a blinding halt and Wardaddy and Ellinson eat food with two German cousins. But then it's over and the characters haven't really been developed any further.

One of the stylistic choices the film makes is tinting the bullets to be either green or red. It’s massively distracting and makes you feel like you’re watching a sci-fi film. Although having visible tracers is historically accurate, I’m not sure that it was color-coded so that all of the Nazi’s ammunition was green and all of the American’s ammunition was red. While a vast majority of the film takes place in the tank, it never really feels claustrophobic. In fact, it almost seems as if the titular tank is more of a suite. You never even see anybody else other than the commanders in the other tanks; even when the tanks are destroyed there is no indication of death. Similarly, all of the Nazis are pawns. They aren’t different individuals, but rather a big collective evil that has no sense of real strategy. When one tank takes on a huge SS brigade, the Nazis drop like flies, and it feels like you’re watching video game characters die rather than real people.

Despite its faults, Fury is still bearable to sit through. There are a couple action scenes that end up being pretty fun, and the actors are all pretty charismatic. I never felt bored, just underwhelmed. Any real emotion was simply replaced by blatant manipulation. The film seems to lack focus. 4/10.

"Gone Girl" Review

Getting a new David Fincher movie is like getting a present: they’re both very exciting despite the hype, and it’s fun to scream “WHAT’S IN THE BOX?” when receiving both. Gone Girl is the latest film from Fincher, and I would argue that it’s one of his strongest. Adapted from the popular Gillian Flynn novel, Gone Girl tells the story of Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a man who encounters extreme media attention after his wife disappears. Gillian Flynn writes the screenplay as well.

To be totally honest, I wasn’t fully on board with the film at first. There were some stylistic choices with the pacing and editing that caught me off guard. However, as the film went on, I thought the style was endearing. I also had some problems with the audio in the beginning. When characters were in a loud club, they were talking at a normal volume and we were able to hear them perfectly because of the magic of mics. This is a small issue, but it creates a fantastical environment and takes you out of the film a bit. That said, I’ll be paying close attention to these scenes on my second viewing, because there’s a chance that this was a stylistic choice.

The performances in this film are top-notch. Ben Affleck is great, but Rosamund Pike steals the show as the titular Gone Girl. Tyler Perry is very charismatic, Neil Patrick Harris is incredibly creepy, and Casey Wilson is perfectly uncomfortable. Carrie Coon brings a touch of humanity to the story as Nick Dunne’s twin sister, Margo. The characters can at times be one-note, but they all serve their purpose and they’re performed with a sense of impossible realism.

The script is also fantastic. This movie is definitely a movie where it’s best to walk in with a blank slate. It’s a lot of fun to let the film take you on the journey. It’s not very predictable and keeps a good pace throughout. The dialogue is fantastic and really engrosses you in the film. The cinematography is gorgeous and creates a sort of creepy, melancholy tone. And the score by Trent Raznor and Atticus Ross is absolutely haunting.

Gone Girl is really intense. And really screwed up. There’s a lot of emotional traumatization in the climax of the movie. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it kept me engaged and excited, and I’ll be thinking about this movie for a long time. 9/10.

"Annabelle" Review

A prequel to last summers The Conjuring, Annabelle is directed by John R. Leonetti. Leonetti was the cinematographer of The Conjuring, and seems to have a habit of making awful sequels to mediocre movies. He was the cinematographer for Mortal Kombat, and directed Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, which was subsequently annihilated by critics. He also directed The Butterfly Effect 2, a direct-to-DVD sequel to The Butterfly Effect - where John's brother, Matthew F. Leonetti, was the cinematographer. The writer of Annabelle, Gary Dauberman, is known for such classics as Blood Monkey, In the Spider's Web, and Swamp Devil. Knowing all of this, things make much more sense, because this movie was a complete mess.

You know when you watch a movie and the movie has a flashback and the actors in the flashback are pretty and mostly inadequate but serve their purpose for the five minutes that they’re on screen? That’s what this movie felt like. This movie felt like a short flashback that accidentally got extended to 100 minutes. I kept waiting for it to end and get to the real story, but there was no real story. It just kept going. And then it ended. But the whole movie was filler so it felt like I wasted 100 minutes on a boring and tedious movie trailer.

Saying that the actors are one-dimensional is giving them too much credit. I’m not sure the characters had a single character trait other than their occupation. Annabelle Wallis plays a pregnant woman whose character development is that she gives birth and becomes a housewife. Ward Horton plays a doctor who is married to the pregnant woman. They both like super creepy dolls yet act like these dolls are really pretty. The supporting cast includes Tony Amendola as a priest and Alfre Woodard as a person who believes in the supernatural. There is no character motivation to any decisions that are made. Things just kind of happen and you’re supposed to accept it.

This movie is not scary. The horror tactics used here include jump scares and moving a doll to different parts of the room. When a jump scare isn’t prepped correctly, you’re left with two possible outcomes - being funny or being obnoxious. Annabelle does both of these things. The demon that haunts the family in this film is a ram demon. And if that sounds funny or stupid I can assure you that it is. I’ve yet to be impressed by a supernatural horror film that has been released in the past couple of years, yet Annabelle manages to be one of the worst offenders.

I wish I could say that the ending was anticlimactic, but to receive that title it needs to build towards something in the first place. You could have placed the ending almost anywhere in the film and it would have felt just as haphazard. Much of the conflict is stolen from the Insidious franchise, but it doesn’t feel like it’s paying tribute. It just feels like a plagiarized concept that wasn’t even all that good in the first place.

Please don’t see this movie. 2/10.