Review: DUNKIRK

DUNKIRK 
(WAR/THRILLER) 
★★★★
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by Christopher Nolan
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy, Harry Styles, Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Kenneth Branagh, Barry Keoghan, James D'Arcy, Aneurin Barnard, Cillian Murphy
Rated PG-13 for intense war experience and some language.
106 minutes
Verdict: Christopher Nolan's best movie since INCEPTION strips away the political nuances of the war genre for an experience that is intensely bracing, visceral and remarkable. 
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN DUNKIRK IF YOU LIKED:
THE DARK KNIGHT  (2008)
INCEPTION  (2010)
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS  (1966)
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN  (1998)
DOWNFALL  (2004)
With the advantage of living a mostly rural 21st century American experience far from the realities of the wars here in the past and the wars very much in the present in other parts of the world like Syria, the very real concept of war is personally perplexing.  A couple weeks ago, I was in a museum looking at a few skulls and other bones dating back to medieval Scandinavia with evidence of devastating sword wounds, and it seemed so strange to think that these were the very authentic remains of human beings who were as real and living as I ever was, who breathed, thought, and felt things, and part of that experience included another very real human being cleaving their head or driving a sword through their leg.  Why?  That was so far back, and that kind of thing has happened and still happens on a far larger scale to this day.  Were these people considered significant beyond the average personal sphere of influence?  Did anyone care strongly about their pain and peril beyond themselves and maybe a few family members?  Maybe when death is so present and so random, the fear of death is numbed.  Maybe when it's so common, it doesn't matter as much emotionally.  But what compels so many people agree or just feel obligated on both sides that a war, small or large, is mounted with such surety?  In my day to day business, the choices that I face and the responsibilities that present themselves make a lot more sense than killing an "enemy", but they're also so inconsequential, and yet they matter to me personally.  What would matter to me personally about ending the life of a complete stranger, a stranger who is essentially the same as me except for a difference in home and creed?  The only reason that could possible matter is that the stranger wants to kill me, and even then, I couldn't be sure that was enough reason to compel me to act in self-defense that would kill him or her.  I'd hope to have enough of a sense of self-preservation, but whether as a matter of nerves, courage, self-preservation or personal hatred, the permanence of ending that other person's life would be a tremendous weight.  The reason he or she would want to kill me must come from a similar sense of obligation or self-preservation, and why should either side want to fight anyway if it was truly known that the fighting was unnecessary?  What does any of it matter?  War seems so pointless when you really dig down into the roots of it, where someone's pursuit of power from one or both sides is reckless enough to drag so many others into a conflict over big, broad ideas of freedom, pride and a way of life, and even in the case of World War II, probably our least morally ambiguous major war (and even there, we have horrible examples of atrocities committed in desperation by the "moral side" like the bombings of Dresden and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both of which destroyed the lives of so many civilians who had minimal personal motivation or investment about the wars waged by their nation's leaders and armies), the millions of lives lost, civilian or not, were lost for only a tiny fraction of the overall participants who were truly responsible for the fighting.  War is baffling, stupid and horrible, but when the negotiations have been negated and the soldiers have been forced to either face the bullets of the enemy or the bullets of their own nation's firing squad for desertion or cowardice, and the possible salvation from death or unrighteous subjugation, there may be no choice left to either flee or fight, and even if you flee, eventually you still have to fight.

Christopher Nolan's latest film, which he's written, directed and produced, tells the story of the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940, a year and half before the entry of the United States in World War II, when Allied troops were defeated by Nazi Germany in the Battle of France, and hundreds of thousands of British and French soldiers were cut off and surrounded only 39 to 87 miles from their native England with death on all sides.  A triptych, the movie is intercut between three separate threads that drop things right into the middle of the event; the first is "The Mole", where Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), Alex (Harry Styles, of One Direction fame) and Gibson (Aneurnin Barnard) are low-priority army privates struggling to get off the beach and onto one of the evacuation crafts, but the boats are constantly subjected to attack by planes overhead or submarines underneath.  The scenes of boat decks packed tight with soldiers who have nowhere to go but crouch down in terror as bombs are dropped on them are particularly terrifying, and the sound in the IMAX theater rattles through the seats like an earthquake that really puts you in the action, but not an escapism sort of action; it's a bracing experience.  The second thread is "The Sea", where Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance, best known as the titular character of Steven Spielberg's THE BFG and for his Oscar-winning turn as Rudolf Abel in Spielberg's BRIDGE OF SPIES) pilots his own personal boat, the Moonstone, into the war zone to assist in the evacuation in his own small way (as many smaller personal and commercial vessels did in the historical evacuation) along with son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Peter's friend George (Barry Keoghan), and along the way they pick up a shell-shocked officer (Cillian Murphy) who's the only survivor of a U-Boat attack.  Thirdly is "The Air", where Spitfire pilots of the Royal Air Force Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) pursue and engage with the German Luftwaffe planes that are dropping their bombs on every craft attempting to evacuate soldiers from the beach.

The characters of DUNKIRK are secondary to the in-the-moment experience, and their dialogue is kept to a minimum, while a great deal of it is indiscernible anyway (particularly Hardy's, whose lower face is usually covered by a flight mask), but most of the particulars in what they're saying doesn't matter as much as what you're seeing.  I wasn't a big fan of Nolan's last two movies, INTERSTELLAR and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, movies which strove for big emotions and big ideas, but emotions, at least the emotions Nolan was dealing with in those movies, are not his strong suit.  He thrives in spectacle, scale and tension, which is all cranked up to an 11 in DUNKIRK, and the effect of working so well in those areas that are so pertinent to this particular story is unexpected visceral emotion.  The desperation, admiration and relief are all very potent throughout, and the movie opens so strongly and so intensely, it's practically exhausting near the halfway point, but he deftly eases the tension without ever relieving the threat, so he can ratchet up yet again for another quick burst ahead of the largely uplifting but emotionally mixed conclusion.  It also certainly helps that after a run of bloated two-and-a-half to three-hour long epics, Nolan brings DUNKIRK in at less than two hours.  It sucked me in from beginning to end and wore me out, but it felt like really going through something powerful.  My only particular reservation is that in order to do practically any kind of movie with this kind of budget, even the ultra-marketable Nolan has to bring a story of World War II in with a marketable PG-13 rating, and while the results of violence in most of Nolan's movies often seem weirdly sterile regardless of the rating, it seems weirder in the case of this kind of movie that the violence is so visibly bloodless.  It isn't the kind of movie that would make sense to have SAVING PRIVATE RYAN levels of gore, but having more of the horrors of war on the periphery of things would obviously make sense.  Either way, the tension is so potent and the threat of death is present that the depiction of war is still largely effective.

Obviously, most of us don't have a personal way to understand how real or not the depiction of war in any movie is, thank goodness, and even those of us who think we have a pretty good understanding of war and sacrifice don't really unless we've actually lived it.  I imagine no movie can really impress upon us the sense of terror and loss that real, actual war is to those who have been in one, and even then, there's no universal experience of war.  Maybe in some alternate universe or some alternate course of historical events there's a movie of the German perspective on this "glorious" victory, of how many abstract "others" of France and England tried to fight good German values of national pride and strength, and how Germany's brave young men prevailed.  Maybe there's a movie about a great German soldier who had more confirmed kills than any other sniper in German history, then sort of dealt with PTSD before being killed offscreen by a fellow German veteran with PTSD, thus completely ignoring the purported issue the movie is supposedly addressing, but the movie made a crap-load of money anyway and an assclown becomes president.  It doesn't matter.  DUNKIRK is a movie that isn't about the moral complexities of history and war.  It isn't about sides.  It's about survival.  It's an aggressive visceral experience about the in-the-moment immediacy of a turning point in England and the world's history, an Alamo moment of World War II that became a rallying cry.  It's bracing, and it's incredible.

                                                                                                                                                         Images via Warner Brothers

Review: WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES 
(SCI-FI/ACTION-THRILLER) 
★★★1/2
Directed by Matt Reeves
Screenplay by Mark Bomback & Matt Reeves
Starring: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Karin Konoval, Amiah Miller, Terry Notary, Ty Olsson, Michael Adamthwaite, Gabriel Chavarria, Judy Greer, Sara Canning, Devyn Dalton, Max Lloyd-Jones, Aleks Paunovic, Alessandro Juliani, Chad Rook
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, thematic elements, and some disturbing images.
140 minutes
Verdict: The best installment of the rebooted series is emotionally devastating, suitably thought-provoking and features stunning action.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES IF YOU LIKED:
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES  (2014)
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES  (2011) 
THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE  (2013)
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI  (1957)
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD  (2003)

The Planet of the Apes series is that other franchise.  It's an improbable candidate for multi-hundred-million dollar budgets or the blockbuster grosses needed to sustain those costs, but DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES pulled over $700 million in 2014 against an approximately $200 million budget.  They're marketed sort of like action-fantasy blockbusters, but they're more in the area of brooding, philosophical science fiction, like Star Trek without the optimism.  They aren't crowd-pleasing, but when they work, it's one of the most thought-provoking and ambitious film franchises around.  It's been around longer than Star Wars, and in some cases paved the way for Lucas and Spielberg with its imaginative high concepts, sophisticated fantasies and sequel storytelling, but even when they've succeeded with blockbuster profits, most of them are not blockbuster movies in style or essence.  They're often thrilling, but they aren't the kind of movies you'd describe as a "thrill ride."  They have wide enough appeal that Fox has kept making them for half a century as of next year, but they aren't quite in the same category of wide appeal as the likes of most major film franchises.  They're right on the cusp of that, big enough to demand big budgets, but also a bold option that flies in the face of conventional franchise filmmaking as it has existed in all the series' 49 years, taking on the human propensity for conflict, darkness, oppression, destruction and hope.  They're not all good, from the limply misshapen BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES to the thoroughly misguided mayhem of Tim Burton's 2001 "re-imagining," but on occasion, they're tremendous, and WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is such an occasion.

RISE... was a movie that significantly exceeded expectations, coming 10 years after the much-loathed Burton failed reboot and without the budget to fully render its CGI ape characters to a sufficient realism, but also with a story and characters that elevated the rebooted franchise to a lofty standard.  I was personally was so excited for DAWN... that I wasn't prepared for what it turned out to be and caught me off guard.  DAWN... had an awesome poster of Caesar mounted atop a horse and wielding a machine gun, but it all turned out to be a bait-and-switch with a thoughtful and carefully crafted story about a struggle to prevent conflict and a war that comes about in spite.  I think I gave DAWN... four stars after seeing it a second time and trying to wrap my head around it, trying to reconcile what it was with my unfair expectations.  In retrospect, I would definitely give it a lower rating, maybe three stars.  It was an interesting and unexpected story, one that you wouldn't expect to get told and in such detail, but in the end, it felt strangely and ironically mitigated.  DAWN... benefits, however, from seeing WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES.

As with DAWN..., writer/director Matt Reeves and co-screenwriter Mark Bomback subvert expectations and pass over most of the titular war, opening the story of WAR... two years later during which the war between Caesar's apes and the remnants of an American military has been raging.  Caesar (Andy Serkis, continuing another career-defining performance) leads his clan from a hidden base in the mountainous woodlands, but the human military called Alpha-Omega is closing in on them.  The movie opens with a stunning, electrifying battle between their forces, with long aerial shots showing the bloody chaos in wide view while Michael Giacchino's score wails ominously.  It's thrilling, but also frightening, with the adrenaline rush of combat but also the horror while humans are skewered by spears and flaming apes are hurled in fiery explosions.  Alpha-Omega is made up of human forces but also includes low-ranking apes which they dub "donkeys" (either in reference to their 'beast of burden' role or 'Donkey Kong', if not both, but it isn't made clear), those that followed Caesar's hate-filled rival Koba to war in the previous film and defected to the human army for protection or other self-serving purposes after losing faith in Caesar.  After winning the battle, Caesar sets his prisoners free as a sign of good faith to the human leader in hopes of ending the war, but later that night, the apes are ambushed and Caesar's family is murdered by Alpha-Omega's merciless leader, Colonel McCullough (Woody Harrelson, channeling more than a little of Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz from APOCALYPSE NOW).  Caesar sends his clan to relocate to a faraway safe location that has been scouted out, but having now been pushed over the edge himself, he resolves to extract payback from the humans, specifically the Colonel, and seeks out Alpha-Omega's base.  Accompanied by his oldest allies, Maurice (an orangutan, played by Karin Konoval), Rocket (a fellow chimpanzee, played by Terry Notary) and Luca (a gorilla, played by Michael Adamthwaite), Caesar embarks on a journey that begins the reveal the inevitable fate of the apes and humans and who will claim control of the planet.  Along the way they are joined by Nova (Amiah Miller), a sympathetic human war orphan, and Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), a former zoo chimpanzee who learned to speak independently of Caesar's tribe when the virus that killed most of the human and enhanced simian intelligence.  When they find the Alpha-Omega camp, Caesar finds the humans have been imprisoning apes, including his own clan who were on their way to a new home when they were captured, and forcing them to work, so Caesar must once again assert his role as leader and savior of the apes to free them from their servitude.

It seems strange to place so much of the plot of a movie called WAR OF THE PLANET OF THE APES within a prison escape story, but it's an echo of the ape enclosure and lab escape plots of RISE..., with which this movie forms a trilogy.  RISE... also briefly referenced an astronaut mission that suggested the series would eventually swing around to the plot of the 1968 original in which Charlton Heston discovered a planet ruled by an ape civilization, but for the time being, that appears to be little more than an Easter egg one-off.  While the series could still continue if WAR... is successful enough, the trilogy centered around Andy Serkis's Caesar character is remarkable in any case and handsomely fulfilled by its third chapter, which may very well be its best.  Within the prison escape story are moments of vicious, stunning brutality (certainly for a big budget summer movie) contrasted with emotionally stirring moments of grace, and while Reeves typically keeps things grounded, he occasionally injects a sense of scale comparable to THE DARK KNIGHT in the grim parable of human folly.  In fact, in some ways, WAR... is doing the same things as Christopher Nolan attempted in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES but with significantly greater success.

The characters may be apes, but the Planet of the Apes movies have always been about humanity, and not necessarily about parts of humanity that are pleasant to deal with, but made more palatable through the warped lens of a topsy-turvy world order.  The metaphors of WAR... are not as broad as those of the 1968 original or even its more immediate predecessors, but the ugliness and ferociousness of war, fear and displacement are presented in a real and unsettling way that mirrors the real world.  Men are building a wall in futility and desperation while a similarly desperate demagogue watches from overhead; they are desperate to maintain that which makes them human, and they're willing to do terrible things to do so, things terrible enough that they may have already lost the sense of humanity they're trying to preserve.  The apes reflect another side of humanity, also susceptible to hate and fear, empathy and apathy, but it's empathy that will save them.  It's a story without easy answers and with devastating, bittersweet consequences.  It's not really an action movie.  There's action, and some of it is stunning (that opening battle sequence, though), but it's overshadowed by the tragic drama of it all.  The dynamic between Harrelson's Colonel and Serkis's Caesar is terrific, the two of them intertwined in a doomed collision course, and newcomer Amiah Miller is wonderful as the mute little girl who represents something pure and hopeful in humanity even as they face destruction from nature and of their own design.

There are a few little things that could be better.  It's never boring, but it could be a little tighter, and for as many emotional gut-punches as it has already, a little more development of Caesar's family in either this installment or DAWN... would make his sense of loss hit harder.  As it is, you kind of just accept that the murder of his family is obviously a tremendous loss, but you don't feel it very strongly.  Bad Ape isn't a bad character, but it isn't clear why he's particularly necessary (Reeves has suggested that if the series continues beyond WAR... it will focus on Bad Ape, but the reasoning behind that is not apparent).  These are mostly nitpicks; it's a fantastic movie, one that remains engaging from start to finish, full of beauty and brutality, and finally leaves you with a lot to think about.

                                                                                                                                                        Images via 20th Century Fox

Review: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING
(ACTION-COMEDY/SCI-FI)
★★★
Directed by Jon Watts
Screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley, Jon Watts & Christopher Ford, and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
Screen Story by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley
Starring: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Laura Harrier, Zendaya, Tony Revolori, Bokeem Woodbine, Martin Starr, Logan Marshall-Green, Angourie Rice, Hannibal Buress
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, some language and brief suggestive comments.
133 minutes
Verdict: Effervescent and diverse, SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING gives both the Spider-Man and MCU franchises a good hard shakeup.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING IF YOU LIKED:
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR  (2016)
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2  (2017)
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN  (2012)
SPIDER-MAN  (2002)
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE  (2009)

Kevin Feige, the producer and mastermind behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) named the movies of John Hughes as a major influence on SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING, but John Hughes never made a movie featuring so many brown people.  Diversity is a good thing folks, and in any case, HOMECOMING is a bit more of a Hughes-style high school teen soap opera within a superhero movie than ANT-MAN was any real sort of heist movie or THE WINTER SOLDIER was a political thriller.  While many new installments of the MCU are now attempting to stand on their own, and the Guardians of the Galaxy movies have been particularly hailed for defying the formulas and television-style "interconnectedness" of the franchise, HOMECOMING couldn't be prouder of Spider-Man's new MCU credentials now that Marvel Studios and Sony, owner of Spider-Man's film rights since 1999 (about seven years before Marvel Studios began work on their first independently-produced feature film), managed to work out a co-production deal putting Spidey back under the creative control of Feige and the MCU.  This film iteration of the character (the third since 2002, when Tobey Maguire first donned the suit) was introduced in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR last year, as part of a team of superheroes led by Iron Man (aka Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey, Jr.) in a fight with Captain America and his allies.  HOMECOMING begins with that standout airport action sequence from CIVIL WAR, shown from the perspective of Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland) as he receives his souped-up new suit from Stark, has his first exciting encounter with the world-famous Avengers, and then is bummed to learn that he's going right back to his semi-ordinary high school life in Queens rather than pursuing any further adventures with the Avengers anytime soon.
While Stark tries to keep him in check via the occasional visit and the close eye of his liaison/driver/bodyguard Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), Peter is intent on proving his abilities and worth as a superhero, and the opportunity presents itself in the form of Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), an arms dealer trafficking ultra-powerful weaponry salvaged from the Avengers' battles and wielding his own high-tech flying suit as "the Vulture".  While investigating the goings-on of Toomes's weapons trafficking, Peter is also trying to balance his secret superhero activities with high school to little effect, between working up the nerve to ask his crush Liz (Laura Harrier) to the homecoming dance and taking part in the science decathlon tournament.

The script, credited to no less than six different writers, thickly lays on the MCU references and universe-building, which will likely keep devotees of the multi-series franchise well-engaged but could be alienating to viewers who aren't fully up to date on the MCU so far.  On the other hand, there are enough of them that you might not even notice.  There are plenty of deviations from what previous film versions of Spider-Man have done (there's notably little of the high-altitude web-slinging among skyscrapers that has been prominently featured before), not to mention the significant changes to characters from the comics, which could also confuse some fans, but it's easy enough to fall into its groove and the willingness to depart from less integral parts of the source material is welcome, especially when the character has already been reinvented so frequently.  Peter's best friend is Ned (Jacob Batalon), an original character who (as you know if you've seen the previews) knows Peter's secret identity as Spider-Man and frequently acts as the comic relief in a movie that's already pretty light, but he's a fairly endearing presence.  Angourie Rice (who played Ryan Gosling's character's daughter in THE NICE GUYS) has a minor role as Betty Brant, a classmate of Peter's who was played in the Raimi films by Elizabeth Banks, and Disney Channel star Zendaya plays Michelle, another classmate of Peter's who walks a very fine line between suitably awkward but amusing and "too cool for school" in that annoying, "aren't I weird?" way as she attempts to channel Ally Sheedy in THE BREAKFAST CLUB.  In this version, the jock bully who antagonized Peter in the comics and both the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield movies (played by Joe Manganiello and Chris Zylka in those version, respectively), Flash Thompson, is played by Tony Revolori as a decidedly non-jock fellow student who is essentially an obnoxious and self-serving rival nerd in Peter's school, Midtown School of Science and Technology.

While the 133-minute runtime is par for the course in the realm of Spider-Man movies, it is one of the movie's modest weaknesses that it drags occasionally, mostly in the first half, as Peter faces off with the Vulture's henchmen a set-piece or two more than is useful, and while it pays off in at least one particularly amusing moment, having two iterations of "the Shocker" in the movie does little else but prolong the runtime.  The movie is littered throughout with numerous MCU Easter eggs, to the point that it may overwhelm or at least confuse viewers who skipped a crucial installment or two in the franchise, but for as prominently featured as he's been in the marketing, Tony Stark thankfully never overtakes the story from Spidey.  In fact, for as much as it's a blatant marketing ploy that Sony gets to plaster Marvel Studios' most popular character all over their movie's posters and cut their previews together from all his relatively few scenes, the Stark character is surprisingly well-integrated to the overall story in a way that ties in thematically to both the villain and the hero.

It's not the best Spider-Man movie, a title which still belongs to Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN 2 (not only the best Spider-Man movie but one of the best superhero movies overall), a movie with very different and weightier aspirations, but SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING's buoyant, effervescent style gives the character and the Spider-Man franchise a much-needed good shakeup in his sixth "solo" outing.  And the action scene at the Washington Monument is spectacular.

                                                                                                                                                               Images via Sony/Marvel

Review: BABY DRIVER

BABY DRIVER
(ACTION-THRILLER/COMEDY)
★★★★
Directed by Edgar Wright
Screenplay by Edgar Wright
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, CJ Jones, Jon Bernthal, Flea, Lanny Joon, Sky Ferreira, Big Boi, Killer Mike, Paul Williams, Jon Spencer
Rated R for violence and language throughout.
113 minutes
Verdict: Believe the hype, because BABY DRIVER is best movie of the summer so far.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN BABY DRIVER IF YOU ENJOYED:
THE WORLD'S END  (2013)
SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD  (2010)
DRIVE  (2011)
THE NICE GUYS  (2016)
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY  (2014)

A lot of people have been creaming in their jeans lately over a little movie called BABY DRIVER, but to be fair, it is pretty darn cream-worthy.  It's a blast.  Written and directed by Edgar Wright, who hasn't made a bad movie yet, it's an original movie with his distinct style, but more accessible to the casual moviegoer than some his weirder but no less wonderful fare.  If people just know about it, it has all the makings of being a big hit.  It has exciting, kinetic and pristine action sequences between amazing car chases, at least one wild chase on foot, and gunfights that made me deliriously happy as the pyrotechnics line up with the rhythm of a thumping soundtrack.  It's frequently very funny and weaves its way through genre in a way that Wright has shown time and again to have an incredible aptitude for in the genre-bending Cornetto trilogy (SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ and THE WORLD'S END) and his weakest but still very good video game-themed romantic-action-comedy SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD.  BABY DRIVER has action, comedy, romance, thrills and a whole lot of great music, all running together in symphonic fluidity as not only the best but also the most cohesive movie of the summer so far.

Baby (Ansel Elgort, previously the leading man of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS) is a mysterious but seemingly happy-go-lucky young man who uses his love for music to constantly drown out the ringing in his ears, the result of a childhood incident.  He lives with his foster father (CJ Jones) in Atlanta and enjoys hanging out at the nostalgic diner where his mom used to work as a waitress.  He's also a getaway driver, and he's the best that there is.  Jamming out to the music in his earphones, attached to whichever of his multiple iPods fit his mood on a given day, Baby uses his unparalleled evasive driving skills to get bank robbers off clean from the scene of the crime before splitting off to get everyone coffee and meet back up again to divvy up the loot.  He's not a bad guy, but he owes a debt to a crime boss called Doc (Kevin Spacey), and Doc has the dirt on him, so he drives Doc's robbers around.  Baby meets a nice young waitress named Debora (Lily James, from Disney's 2015 live-action remake CINDERELLA and Downton Abbey) who has similar dreams of one day leaving all her worries behind and driving off into the distance in a car they can't afford, and as Baby nears that "one last job", it looks like it could all work out, but naturally, between the eclectic crew of robbers that include the unpredictable Bats (Jamie Foxx), the charming but dangerous Buddy (Jon Hamm) and Buddy's sassy wife Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), and Doc not ready to see his best getaway driver retire, driving off into the sunset proves to be a deadlier ordeal than expected.

Unfortunately, I've only seen BABY DRIVER once so far, and while I've liked each of Wright's movies from their respective first viewing, they've all revealed much more of themselves on repeat viewings, and are far better appreciated that way.  They're full of clever foreshadowing, subtle visual gags, and other ideas that can be picked up on once the plot is already known.  His are some of the more rewarding movies around in terms of repeated viewing.  So while there's a running theme tying together first impressions and true identities, I feel like there's more to glean from that.  As purely visceral escapism, it delivers in full.  You know how some cool trailers for action movies will cut together a few seconds of rapid-fire action with a few hard-hitting percussion beats?  The action in BABY DRIVER is kind of like that, but better.  It's slick stuff.  More than all its style, it also a sweet, good-natured movie with an abundance of rich characters with fitting, fun performances.  Spacey is his sardonic best, blending menace and humor, and Hamm is a sleazy, laid-back sort of cool, while James is all sugar with a little bit of spice.  Elgort, who's been a weird sort of teenage heartthrob with cancer in THE FAULT IN OUR STARS and Shailene Woodley's soft-soap brother in the Divergent series, is unexpectedly charismatic and interesting in this role, which I was skeptical about, considering how purely "serviceable" he'd been in anything else I'd seen him in.  Wright's script meanders a bit in a way that could be a real pace-killer in a less skillfully directed movie, but the movie never lets up on its electric energy, even when shifting into more relaxed gears.  It weaves through a few red herrings and some anticlimactic twists, but zips along casually, so these twists barely occur in the moment, still having an anticipatory and switch effect without jarring the viewer out of the flow.

BABY DRIVER occupies a weird middle ground where maybe it isn't for everyone, but it should be.  Did you like those billion-dollar-grossing Fast and Furious movies?  Okay, good; BABY DRIVER has wild car chases, absurdity and a diverse cast, but it's even better.  Did you like those Guardians of the Galaxy movies?  Okay, good; BABY DRIVER has an awesome jukebox soundtrack and an eclectic cast of colorful characters, but it's still even better.  Did you like THE FAULT IN OUR STARS?  Okay, good; BABY DRIVER has Ansel Elgort in a heartfelt romance but it's even better.  It doesn't have an established brand name or franchise to market on beyond Edgar Wright's name, and while he's a darling of the more hardcore crowd of moviegoers , he hasn't yet earned the box office recognition that he deserves.  It's fair to say I might be overselling the movie a bit (it isn't going to reinvent the state of filmmaking anytime soon), but it's really fun, and it's as solidly well-made a movie as you're likely to find currently playing in theaters.

                                                                                                                                                                               Sony/Columbia

Review: DESPICABLE ME 3

DESPICABLE ME 3
(FAMILY-COMEDY/ANIMATION)
★
Directed by Kyle Balda & Pierre Coffin
Screenplay by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio
Featuring the Voices of: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Trey Parker, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Nev Scharrel, Steve Coogan, Julie Andrews, Jenny Slate, Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud
Rated PG for action and rude humor.
90 minutes
Verdict: Well, it isn't good.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN DESPICABLE ME 3 IF YOU LIKED:
MINIONS  (2015)
DESPICABLE ME 2  (2013)
DESPICABLE ME  (2010)
THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS  (2016)
SING  (2016)

Do you love familiar sitcom plots and cheap animation?  How '80s references?  Do you love '80s references?  Are you a fan of those shitty yellow jelly beans from your awkward aunt's memes?  Slapstick?  Recycled jokes?  Celebrity voices?  Lazy writing?  Butts?  Lots of butts?  Like, seriously, why so many butts?  Nothing against jokes about butts, but for goodness' sake, what's going on numbers of butts?  One can feel the smug, cynical self-satisfaction of the minds at Illumination Entertainment, where animation costs are kept low, marketing campaign costs are high, and a lot of branding and spastic, low-rent humor suck children and their parents' dollars in like a black hole of depressing consumerism thinly disguised as entertainment.  Sure, your kids will eat it up, but most kids will eat dirt from time to time if you're not watching.  It's just so uninspired and lacking in good will, and it's only more frustrating that it doesn't matter, and the suits at Illumination know it, so they can put less than half the time and money into a movie than more sincere filmmakers do and still make a load anyway by taking advantage of impressionable children with the same ruthlessness of a cigarette advertisement billboard next to an elementary school.

They're really stretching to justify another chapter in Gru's story this time, too.  After a botched mission results in his being fired from the Anti-Villain League, Gru (voiced by Steve Carell, with a noted decrease in enthusiasm) learns that he has a twin brother who he's never met named Dru (also voiced by Carell, with surprisingly little variation).  Gru travels to Dru's wealthy estate and they immediately hit it off, deciding to plot the heist of a recently stolen giant diamond from Balthazar Bratt (voiced by South Park co-creator and voice Trey Wilson), a villain built up around an array of gimmicks related to the 1980s.  Meanwhile, in a couple of B plots (though, to be fair, they all feel like B plots), Gru's new wife Lucy (voiced by Kristen Wiig) tries to settle into her role as a mother to their daughters Margo (the snooty, bitchy one with glasses; voiced by Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (the "butch" one; voiced by Dana Gaier), and Agnes (the cute card; voiced by Nev Scharrel), while Agnes tries to catch a unicorn in the woods.  That's pretty much it.  Nothing else to see here.  If any one of these plots were a short film or a TV special, that might make more sense, but here, in a feature film, they're just disparate elements that never come together in any meaningful way, without payoff.

If it weren't for the branding, this would easily be bargain basement material, and even compared to the previous movies in the series, the third is a step down.  It probably won't make a difference though, because MINIONS was bargain basement material and grossed more than any of Pixar's masterpieces, because we live in a fallen world.  I get it, kids need to be entertained.  When your little tyke looks up at you with their big ol' eyes and says, "I wanna go to the popcorn show," you can't just not take them!  Even if the movie is a spray of cold diarrhea, it's so fun to see how excited the little ones become over it (I mean, if they're little ones that you have a personal connection to, as opposed to other people's annoying and over-excitable children whose enthusiasm you'd just like to crush sometimes), but there are better kids movies than this.  Disney make better kids movies than this.  Pixar makes better kids movies than this.  Laika, although for slightly older kids, makes better kids movies than this.  Even DreamWorks Animation makes better kids movies than this.  But kids know what a stupid Minion is, so they have to go see this one, and your lonely aunt thinks those little girls are so cute, and this is why we can't have nice things.

                                                                                                                                                                   Images via Universal