Don't Make Me Go: Revelatory road trip

Don't Make Me Go (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for graphic nudity, profanity, teen drinking and vulgar sexual candor

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

It’s every parent’s dilemma: How candid should one be with children, as they progress through the teenage years?

 

And does — should — that paradigm shift, if the stakes unexpectedly turn dire?

 

It's bad enough that Max (John Cho) bears the weight of two heavy secrets; attempting
to remain calm while his daughter Wally (Mia Isaac) is behind the wheel, is almost
more than he can stand.

Writer Vera Herbert has long demonstrated a superbly nuanced sense of relationship dynamics: most notably as a prime mover on the TV series This Is Us, which garnered well-deserved Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series during four of its six seasons. Her scripts speak from the heart, and this new film is particularly personal — and likely cathartic — because it was inspired by the bond with her father, who died unexpectedly when she was 18.

Coupled with Hannah Marks’ equally sensitive direction, the result is a warm, touching father/daughter drama that is by turns funny, frustrating, maddening, poignant and heartwarming.

 

And often messy, just like real life.

 

Max Park (John Cho) long ago gave up his dream of a career in music, when his wife abandoned him shortly after the birth of their daughter, Wally. He settled for a drone-like office job, in order to have the financial security necessary to create the life he thought was appropriate for a child.

 

But at 16, Wally (Mia Isaac) is no longer a child, and Max is finding it more difficult to handle the impetuous recklessness and unfiltered emotional outbursts of these teenage years. He worries that they’re drifting apart, and this makes him nervous and uneasy … which, because she’s so well tuned to her father’s moods, increases her anxiety.

 

Max also has been suffering from increasingly severe headaches. Visits to a doctor produce a shattering result: a malignant tumor at the base of his brain. Although surgical intervention could save his life, his chances of surviving the procedure are extremely low. Without the surgery, he can expect to live for about a year.

 

Max therefore opts to forgo the operation, and instead spend the year preparing Wally for his eventual absence.

 

He doesn’t tell her any of this. He confides only in his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Annie, whose subsequent reaction — once she has a chance to process the news — is agonizingly uncomfortable (and very well played, by Kaya Scodelario).

 

Not everybody has the emotional bandwidth to watch somebody slowly die.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales — Droll skullduggery

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for considerable fantasy violence and mild suggestive content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.26.17

Assuming Disney is telling the truth — that this truly is the final Pirates of the Caribbean entry — the franchise is leaving the stage on a strong note. 

Carina (Kaya Scodelario) tries to maintain her composure, as Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny
Depp, far left) hints at dire results if she refuses to answer his questions, while Marty
(Martin Klebba, center left) and Scrum (Stephen Graham) eagerly anticipate whatever
comes next.

Dead Men Tell No Tales suffers from a bit of bloat, but it’s by no means a showpiece of wretched excess akin to the previous two installments. Scripters Jeff Nathanson and Terry Rossio return to the better balanced blend of humor, chills and excitement that characterized the first film, way back in 2003. More crucially, co-directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg — who collaborated on 2012’s ocean-bound Kon-Tiki — maintain a brisk pace while (very important) keeping Johnny Depp’s self-indulgent mugging to a manageable degree.

This new film references earlier chapters while delivering a satisfying sense of closure, and — best of all — a well-conceived and truly terrifying villain, given a significant fright-factor by co-star Javier Bardem. Having set his own standard for disturbing evil in No Country for Old Men, Skyfall and The Counselor, here Bardem oozes wrathful malevolence at a level likely to terrify some of the younger viewers certain to drag their parents into the theater.

Although this film is laden with violence, Rønning and Sandberg (mostly) keep the carnage to a family-friendly level; there’s no gore and very little blood, with the slicing and dicing limited to quick sword thrusts. Plenty of nameless sailors, soldiers and pirates meet unhappy ends, but somehow the core characters — and the half dozen or so supporting players who’ve become familiar — always seem to duck at the right moment.

A prologue finds young Henry Turner (Lewis McGowan) rowing out to a certain spot in the moonlit ocean, where he times the reappearance of the ill-fated Flying Dutchman, the legendary ghost ship doomed to sail the seas forever. Unhappily, its crew includes Henry’s father, Will: a sad fate for the stalwart character Orlando Bloom played so well in the first three films.

Fear not, Henry tells his father; I’ll find Poseidon’s fabled magical trident, rumored to have the power to eradicate all ocean-bound curses.

Flash-forward a number of years, and Henry (now played by Brenton Thwaites) has become a ship’s mate with the British Royal Navy, stationed in the Caribbean colonial town of St. Martin. Despite his warning — Henry having read up on such things — his ship’s captain ventures into the dread Devil’s Triangle, and a fateful encounter with the imposing Silent Mary, the ghostly galleon commanded by the terrifying Capt. Salazar (Bardem) and his cadaverous crew.

Henry is the only survivor, having been spared by Salazar in order to “tell the tale.” Alas, back in St. Martin, Henry is branded a mutinous coward and scheduled to hang.

Maze Runner — The Scorch Trials: A barren wasteland

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for profanity and relentless action violence
By Derrick Bang 

As was the case with last year’s opening entry in this big-screen franchise, this sequel looks great — the special effects are quite impressive — and the acting is solid.

But the storyline remains bonkers-stupid and utterly impenetrable. If last year’s cliff-hanging Maze Runner left us with far more questions than answers, this second installment doesn’t even try to make sense. It’s as if scripter T.S. Nowlin abandoned any effort to parse James Dasher’s complicated source novel, and chose instead to fabricate one superficial chase sequence after another.

Things seem mighty bad, folks ... then again, maybe our heroes should simply stop looking
over the next ridge. Try as he might, Thomas (Dylan O'Briend, second from left) can't stop
leading his friends ‚ from left, Minho (Ki Hong Lee), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster),
Frypan (Dexter Darden) and Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) from one crisis to another.

When our primary protagonist Thomas insists, at one point, that he’s tired of running, I cheerfully agreed: I’m tired of watching him run.

Him and everybody else in this preposterous, kitchen-sink excuse for a sci-fi thriller.

We’d ordinarily be inclined to blame Dasher, since his book logically serves as the source material. But Nowlin’s screenplay bears scant resemblance to Dasher’s novel, perhaps because the filmmakers are trying to condense a five-book (thus far) series into a more compact trilogy. Which would have been a reasonable idea, if Nowlin had the slightest talent for narrative, plot structure or dialogue.

Yep: This is one of those movies with eye-rolling, melodramatically laughable one-liners, invariably delivered with utter sincerity. The cast isn’t at fault; everybody does their best ... but not even seasoned Shakespeareans could wring emotional honesty from these verbal clunkers.

Such dialogue also frequently anticipates moronic behavior. “They’re never gonna stop chasing us,” our heroes lament, having narrowly escaped a massive land- and air-based search party. So what do they do next? They take a long walk across a wholly exposed desert landscape, where — based on what happened just a few scenes earlier — they’d clearly be spotted and captured.

But no: Apparently the bad guys decided not to look that day.

On top of which — and this is Dasher’s fault — I still can’t get beyond his internal technological inconsistencies. Consider the engineering ingenuity and sheer brute manpower that would have been required to build, maintain and operate the massive maze that initially trapped our young heroes. Now ask yourself whether such structures could have been fabricated so quickly — because we now know there were numerous mazes — given the timeline of events as established via maddeningly brief flashbacks.

And, more crucially, to what purpose, precisely? Two films in, and we’ve still no clue as to the original maze’s intent.

On top of which, we’re once again forced to accept a truly dismal picture of human nature under stress: a degree of “civilized” behavior so barbaric, so abhorrent, that it frankly defies description. That’s not merely sad; it’s also loathsome.