Heads of State: Way over the top

Heads of State (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, and quite generously, despite strong action violence and profanity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang 

This relentlessly silly movie will require a lot of patience, even from undemanding viewers inclined to be forgiving.

 

When Air Force One is blown out of the sky during a coordinated drone attack, U.S.
President Will Derringer (John Cena, left) and UK Prime Minister Sam Clarke
(Idris Elba) wonder if the next few minutes will be their last...

It’s basically a live-action cartoon, and the dog-nuts script — by Harrison Query, Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec — has plot holes large enough to swallow Air Force One. I frequently was reminded of Jackie Chan’s goofiest martial arts comedies, and the degree to which this flick succeeds, does so for the same reason: sheer star power.

Idris Elba and John Cena are a lot of fun together, and appear to have a great time in the midst of all the chaos ... so we do, as well. 

 

To a point.

 

Will Derringer (Cena) is the gung-ho President of the United States: a political neophyte after a successful career as an action movie star. Imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Governator as the President: Derringer constantly employs Cena’s wide smile as if he’s greeting folks on the Hollywood red carpet, as opposed to anything resembling a statesman.

 

Sam Clarke (Elba) is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a relentlessly serious man who grieves over the state of the world, and quietly despairs over his inability to make things better. He’s refined, well-educated and loathes Derringer’s glib, glad-handed egocentricity; Derringer, in turn, never has forgiven Clarke for a deliberate slight during the U.S. presidential campaign.

 

But we don’t meet them immediately. Director Ilya Naisheller opens with a prologue set amid Spain’s annual Tomatina, a tomato-throwing festival that takes place in the town of Buñol, and is famed as the world’s largest food fight. Senior MI6 agent Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) leads a surveillance team that hopes to capture notorious terrorist Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine), who has been spotted in the town square.

 

Alas, it turns out to be a trap; Bisset and her entire team are ambushed by thugs led by Viktor’s ruthless pet assassins, Sasha and Olga (Alexander Kuznetsov and Katrina Durden, both impressively nasty).

 

This sequence is typical of the frequent, brutal violence that often works against the story’s humor, and also stretches the generous PG-13 rating.

 

Much as Clarke and Derringer dislike each other, they’re forced to make a public show of togetherness and mutual respect — displaying the long-standing “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK — while attending a NATO meeting in Italy. It’s a crucial gathering, because membership is wavering, in the face of an increasingly hostile and unpredictable world.

The Friend: The best one imaginable

The Friend (2024) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.6.25

How do you explain death to a dog?

 

Writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have done a rare thing, in adapting Sigrid Nunez’s award-winning 2018 novel. They’ve retained the book’s heart, while making the story more accessible to a general audience.

 

Iris (Naomi Watts) reluctantly realizes that her massive canine companion likely won't
be able to handle a revolving door.

It’s immediately obvious that this film celebrates authors and the written word; the central character’s stream-of-consciousness narration is laden with epigrams, quotes from famous novels (and movies), philosophical musings and sardonic bon mots. All help paint an increasingly layered portrait of a soul in crisis.

Iris (Naomi Watts), a successful author, lives in a 500-square-foot, rent-controlled, upper-floor Manhattan apartment that she “inherited” when her father died. She teaches creative writing at a nearby college, silently enduring her students’ efforts to critique each others’ efforts; she seems not to pay attention, but misses nothing.

 

Her best friend and longtime mentor, Walter (Bill Murray), is an elder statesman in New York’s literary scene. We meet him during a lively dinner party, where he regales everybody with the saga of how — while jogging one morning — he glanced up a park hill and was transfixed by a “magnificent beast.”

 

Then, abruptly, he’s gone.

 

The subsequent funeral is well-attended by numerous friends, along with ex-wife No. 1 (Carla Gugino, as Elaine), ex-wife No. 2 (Constance Wu, as Tuesday) and his current widow (Noma Dumezweni, as Barbara). Elaine and Iris were college mates, back in the day, and Walter was their professor: an unapologetic, old-school womanizer.

 

His only child is a twentysomething daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), fathered with yet another woman.

 

Despite the serial philandering, and a tendency toward condescension, Iris adored him. His absence worsens the writer’s block that has long delayed her next project: a collaborative effort with Val, to comb through Walter’s voluminous correspondence, in order to produce a book of essays. That project was suggested by Walter, as a means to take Iris’ mind off her long-unfinished next novel.

 

Iris goes through the motions, during the next few days, grief etched on her face. Then she’s summoned by Barbara, who has a “delicate matter” to deal with: getting rid of Walter’s dog, Apollo.

 

“You were his contingency plan,” she tells the genuinely surprised Iris, who knew nothing of this.

 

But the request is impossible. Iris has no pets, and if she did, it would be a cat. More crucially, her apartment building doesn’t allow dogs.

Gunpowder Milkshake: Gleefully explosive

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity and strong, bloody violence

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.23.21

A title such as this one practically screams “guilty pleasure.”

 

Indeed, it’s a pleasure.

 

Albeit extremely guilty.

 

With all manner of vicious thugs hot on their heels, Scarlet (Lena Heady, left) guides
Sam (Karen Gillan, right) and young Emily (Chloe Coleman) through a secret
escape route.

Director/co-scripter Navot Papushado’s opulently stylish revenge/survival thriller is a total kick: the sort of high-octane B-movie that’ll be adored by fans of Baby Driver and Guy Ritchie’s early-career crime flicks. Papushado, production designer David Scheunemann and cinematographer Michael Seresin give this violent romp all manner of atmosphere: way-cool settings, exaggerated and cleverly distinct color palettes, and a degree of intensity that threatens to burst from the screen.

These backdrops are populated by outré characters laden with ’tude: burlesques who couldn’t possibly exist in the real world (and thank God for that). Then there’s the most important element, which sets this film apart from grim, joyless cousins such as John Wick and its sequels: The script — by Papushado and Ehud Lavski — has heart.

 

The hyper-violence is mitigated by our lead character’s virtuous decision to Do The Right Thing.

 

Fifteen years ago, 12-year-old Sam (Freya Allan) learned — in the worst possible way — that her mother Scarlet (Lena Headey) worked as an assassin for a ruthless crime syndicate known as The Firm. That day also was the last time Sam saw Scarlet; the girl subsequently was raised by The Firm, and has followed in her mother’s lethal footsteps.

 

She has become coldly, mercilessly efficient: the go-to “handler” dispatched to clean up The Firm’s most dangerous messes.

 

As the film opens, Sam (now Karen Gillan) has been a little too thorough with her most recent assignment, much to the chagrin of Nathan (Paul Giamatti), her handler and surrogate parent figure. The blowback is likely to enrage the local Russian mob, with which The Firm has an uneasily cordial understanding.

 

While Nathan frets over how best to handle the repercussions, he sends Sam on an easier assignment: to kill a man (Samuel Anderson) and retrieve a bundle of cash that he stole from The Firm. During this confrontation, she learns that he took the money in order to ransom his 8-year-old daughter Emily (Chloe Coleman), who has been kidnapped by a quartet of mopes concealed behind monster masks.

 

This triggers Sam’s memory of her own younger self, orphaned under similarly dire circumstances. In the blink of an eye, Sam’s loyalty to The Firm evaporates; we see the shift in Gillan’s gaze. No matter the consequences, she intends to protect that little girl.

 

Consequences prove plentiful.

 

The Space Between Us: Keep it far, far away

The Space Between Us (2017) • View trailer 
One star. Rated PG-13, and needlessly, for minor sensuality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

This film isn’t merely bad; it’s impressively, defiantly awful.

The silliest TV soap operas aren’t this eye-rollingly overwrought.

With Genesis corporate guards and lackeys hot on their heels, Gardner (Asa Butterfield)
manages an improbable escape in a rickety crop-duster piloted by his newly introduced
best friend, Tulsa (Britt Robertson). One has to wonder why an ancient biplane still would
be used for such agricultural work, at a point in the future when space missions are
hopping back and forth to Mars.

The acting is wildly uneven. The writing is dreadful. The direction is beyond clumsy. The use of music — and the score itself — are thunderously flamboyant. The applications of science — this is, after all, a futuristic adventure — are repeatedly, recognizably faulty.

I’ve never seen a film with such a brazen display of grandiosity, as if every artificially portentous, laughably embroidered line of dialog deserved to be chiseled as the 11th Commandment.

My mental warning klaxon began shrieking 30 seconds into the very first scene: a press conference led by Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman), founder of Genesis Space Technologies, who intends to solve Earth’s many geological, climate-induced and socio-political crises by establishing a human settlement on Mars. (As if spending gazillions to eventually put a few dozen people on Mars would mitigate such issues?)

Oldman, in by far the worst performance of his lengthy career, puts such pompous weight onto each syllable, that I’d not have been surprised if a celestial choir had descended from the heavens.

Shepherd introduces the six-person crew, led by mission head Sarah Elliot (Janet Montgomery); they field a few questions and then board the rocket that whisks them to the orbiting Genesis Magellan-61 spacecraft, for their months-long journey to the Red Planet.

Shortly into this trip, Sarah is discovered to be pregnant.

We pause, for the first of many reality checks:

Head of the mission, the public-relations fate of an entire corporation on her shoulders, and Sarah imprudently has unprotected sex shortly before she departs for Mars? Given that she’s the only woman in the crew, that’s not merely narratively stupid; it’s a grossly insulting and sexist contrivance on the part of scripters Allan Loeb, Stewart Schill and Richard Barton Lewis. And it’s merely the first of countless, groaningly awful plot hiccups.

Please, somebody: Take away their keyboards before they commit writing again.

San Andreas: No major faults here

San Andreas (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, constant mayhem and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.29.15

I had my doubts, but director Brad Peyton pulled it off: San Andreas deserves to become summer’s second surprise movie hit (following the utterly delightful Pitch Perfect 2).

The earthquakes and aftershocks are bad enough, but nobody is ready for the subsequent
tsunami. All the trouble our protagonists — from left, Ollie (Art Parkinson), Blake (Alexandra
Daddario) and Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) — have taken, to avoid tall buildings ... and now
they must try to seek higher ground.

Peyton had help, starting with a reasonably intelligent script from Carlton Cuse, Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore — which, thankfully, eschews sudsy melodrama — along with a solid cast toplined by Dwayne Johnson.

Absolutely the guy I’d want by my side, during any sort of crisis.

But this isn’t a one-man show. Peyton draws equally persuasive performances from co-stars Paul Giamatti, Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario, and (slightly) lesser players Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson comport themselves equally well.

More crucially, Peyton is to be congratulated for successfully walking the razor’s-edge fine line of tone: a very difficult task in this particular genre.

The original Airport and Poseidon Adventure may have played their crisis-laden dramas straight, when they kick-started the whole “disasterpiece” franchise four decades ago, but things had turned eye-rollingly silly by the time Rollercoaster, The Swarm and When Time Ran Out came along. Fred MacMurray and Olivia de Havilland fleeing killer bees? Puh-leaze. Rarely have so many former A-list stars been subjected to so much puerile nonsense.

But the genre’s more recent revival, with a greater reliance on computer-generated calamity, offered an entirely different set of pitfalls. With soulless filmmakers eager to showcase all the catastrophe that money could throw onto a screen, the human element became second to gleefully orchestrated death and destruction ... much as slasher films earned their rep not for how plucky heroes survived, but instead for the way helpless victims got snuffed.

This tasteless sensibility reached its nadir a few years ago with director Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which played the end of the world as a spectator sport that invited giggles, as viewers watched untold millions perish in (sometimes) deliberately amusing ways. Truly reprehensible.

Peyton & Co. wisely avoided that blunder. While the earthquake-generated events here are undeniably grim — and rather close to home for those of us living in California, particularly in the wake of the recent tragedy in Nepal — cinematographer Steve Yedlin never lingers on the untold loss of life, nor does the film pander to baser instincts. Peyton and his writers simply concentrate on telling a saga of crisis, and the resourceful individuals who overcome one setback after another.

Besides which, you’ve gotta love a story that treats engineers with such respect, and makes champions of humble Caltech undergraduates. Not to mention getting not just one, but two impressively capable female characters in the bargain.

And hey ... if the heroics eventually become improbable, that’s the nature of the game. This film earns plenty of good will before unleashing its physics-defying stunts. So yes ... we’re treated to the world’s most resilient helicopter, quickly followed by the world’s sturdiest truck, and — without question — the world’s most amazing speedboat.

Go with it.

Race to Witch Mountain: Failed spell

Race to Witch Mountain (2009) • View trailer for Race to Witch Mountain
2.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG, and quite generously, for constant violence and gunfire
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.13.09
Buy DVD: Race to Witch Mountain • Buy Blu-Ray: Race to Witch Mountain (Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy)

You can't merely suspend disbelief while watching Race to Witch Mountain; you have to flush disbelief out the airlock.

Director Andy Fickman's noisy remake of the amiable 1975 Disney fantasy certainly isn't an improvement, which is ironic, considering the enhanced state of special effects in the 21st century. Fickman obviously belongs to the kitchen-sink school of filmmaking: When in doubt, throw in more bullets, more explosions and more car chases.

Having found their way to the super-super-secret military base at the oddly
named Witch Mountain, our heroes — from left, Alex (Carla Gugino), Sara
(AnnaSophia Robb), Seth (Alexander Ludwig) and Jack (Dwayne Johnson) —
stare skyward, as if hoping for inspiration to strike. More likely, they're hoping
for fresh, more intelligent script pages, as this flick doesn't allow them to do
more than run, duck and cover.

Maybe, that way, the audience won't notice the lapses of continuity in Matt Lopez and Mark Bomback's clumsy screenplay ... or the plot holes that are large enough to pilot a flying saucer through.

I've long been annoyed by lazy writers who, having accepted a commission to script a family-friendly (read: children's) film, apparently believe that they can be sloppy because kids won't notice. Well, I beg to differ. It's insulting, and kids do notice ... particularly today's kids, who are much more savvy about movie logic.

As competent writers such as Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling would be the first to point out, children's fantasy should be every bit as carefully conceived and meticulously plotted as that for adults. After all, some of the best kid-lit remains an engaging read no matter what our ages, and the best youth-oriented movie fantasies — the adaptation of Gaiman's Coraline immediately comes to mind — are designed to satisfy everybody from young-'uns to their grandparents.

That's the way it should be.

But that certainly isn't the way Lopez and Bomback handled their update/remake of Disney's "Witch Mountain" franchise.

In fairness, yes, Dwayne Johnson is quite engaging as long-suffering Las Vegas cab driver Jack Bruno, who is trying to put his larcenous past behind him. Johnson's action hero persona has a natural flair for light comedy that Arnold Schwarzenegger never quite managed, while at the same time remaining credibly able to beat up on routine bad guys.

Anyway, Jack's life gets more complicated when he unwisely agrees to drive two somewhat unusual kids — Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig) — to a remote location in the Nevada desert. Aside from speaking an oddly stilted English and behaving strangely, Sara and Seth have no concept of the wad of money they use to engage Jack's services.

Turns out, the kids are being pursued by a veritable army of gun-toting black-ops types led by the determinedly nasty Burke — Ciaran Hinds, at his most malevolent — a vicious swine who gives the U.S. government a truly bad name. (Didn't Disney get the memo? We have a kinder, gentler, science-friendly administration in Washington now!)