Furious 7: Impressively audacious

Furious 7 (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for intense action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.3.15

Somewhere along the way, a modest, inner-city street-racing flick morphed into a turbo-charged, gleefully preposterous Mission: Impossible wannabe.

But with results this entertaining, it’s hard to complain. Even when things get silly.

A shadowy U.S. government agent (Kurt Russell, right) makes Brian (Paul Walker, left) and
Dominic (Vin Diesel) an offer they can't refuse: Retrieve a kidnapped computer hacker, and
in return gain access to information that will allow them to target the vengeful maniac who
keeps trying to kill them.

And rest assured: Things get very, very silly. This is a movie for folks who found the action sequences in 2010’s big-screen version of The A-Team too restrained. (Steering and “flying” a parachuting tank by shooting the big gun, anyone?)

Rarely have I seen so many laws of physics ignored, circumvented and utterly ruptured.

Rarely have so many human bodies demonstrated Superman-level invulnerability.

Rarely has a bad guy taken such a lickin’, only to keep on tickin’.

Rarely have I been less bothered.

But let’s establish our parameters. Furious 7 — newest, biggest and baddest in the surprise franchise built from 2001’s The Fast and the Furious — is by no means classic filmmaking. It’s a live-action Warner Bros. cartoon, with heroes and villains alike remaining as unscathed as the Road Runner’s Coyote, after one of his plunges to a canyon floor, miles below.

We’re talking Guilty Pleasure here, with heavy emphasis on the guilty. But it’s also a pleasure, because there’s no denying director James Wan’s ability to deliver one helluva great ride.

Wan’s predecessor, Justin Lin, reinvigorated the franchise with 2009’s fourth entry, then blasted things into action-flick immortality with his next two chapters. But Wan deserves equal credit for maintaining the momentum and giving us exactly what is expected: audaciously giddy action sequences, ferocious mano a mano fight scenes, and plenty of time with the characters we’ve grown to know and love.

Because yes: This series’ cast is its primo selling point. The brotherly bond between Dominic “Dom” Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) remains paramount, their mutual respect oddly poignant even during circumstances as absurd as these. Dom’s puppy-dog devotion to tough-as-nails Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is equally touching, despite the soap-opera contrivance of the amnesia that has stricken her memory of their shared love.

Comparative newcomer Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs — who entered the franchise with installment five — grants the team a thin veneer of respectability, with his DDS credentials. On top of which, the oh-so-perfect pairing of Diesel and Johnson is irresistible; they must spend all their time, between scenes, comparing pecs and biceps.

Nor should we overlook the comedy tag-team pairing of Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson), both adept at the verbal comedy relief ... while also reminding us (as if that were necessary) that none of these events are to be taken too seriously.

42: You know the number

42 (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, profanity and unpalatable language
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.12.13

42 is an unabashed valentine to baseball great Jackie Robinson: an old-style film laden with the sort of calculated sentimentality that Frank Capra delivered back in the day.

Relying on the split-second timing and sprinting ability that have made him a
sensational — and crowd-pleasing — base-stealer, Jackie Robinson (Chadwick
Boseman, left) delights in messing with the minds of pitchers who, after a few rounds
of this, sometimes lose their cool completely.

The pacing is leisurely and graceful, with unhurried takes granting us time to absorb the story and appreciate the performances. Writer/director Brian Helgeland and editors Peter McNulty and Kevin Stitt avoid the staccato pacing and smash-cuts that have become a 21st century norm, preferring instead to let events unfold in a manner that reflects the poetry of baseball itself.

Honestly, I found it quite refreshing.

Although Helgeland has taken pains to be faithful to the firestorm that erupted in 1947, when Robinson became the first player to break Major League Baseball’s infamous color line, the approach here is — at the risk of unintended irony — acutely black and white. All the positive (i.e. progressive) historical figures are extraordinarily virtuous, their memories honored here by behavior that is, for the most part, nothing short of saintly.

The racist crackers, on the other hand, are one-dimensional and mostly anonymous: a redneck sheriff here, a small-town gaggle of thugs there. The one exception, almost startling in a film that until this point has (rather unrealistically) avoided much blatantly racist language, comes from Alan Tudyk’s portrayal of Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman. No doubt Helgeland felt safe with this choice of highly visible villain, since by all accounts the actual Chapman’s on-field behavior was even worse than what we witness here.

But that’s getting ahead of things.

Although characters too good to be true often don’t work in our increasingly cynical age, this film gets its crucial dramatic juice from the sublime lead performance by Chadwick Boseman, an actor, playwright and stage director whose screen work thus far has been confined mostly to TV shows such as Lincoln Heights and Persons Unknown. I suspect that’s about to change, because Boseman never puts a foot wrong here.

It’s difficult to convey the mesmerizing, deeply stirring lightning in a bottle that emanates from a genuinely inspirational person: the breathtaking whoosh that erupts when a truly electrifying individual strides through a door and sucks all the air out of a room. We feel it in the presence of a gifted politician or preacher, or when a commanding actor takes the stage during a live theatrical performance.

Boseman has that sort of presence, and Helgeland coaxes truly fine and sensitive work from this young actor. Boseman’s line readings are heartfelt and well timed, but that’s only part of it; he carries himself in a manner that suggests the brave self-assurance that Robinson himself must have displayed, every waking minute during this tempestuous point in his career.

In a nutshell, Boseman’s performance is inspirational in the same way that Robinson himself must have stirred so many people, back in 1947.

Promised Land: Rock-solid advocacy cinema

Promised Land (2012) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.9.13


Matt Damon hasn’t written many scripts since 1997’s Good Will Hunting, his Academy Award-winning debut effort with Ben Affleck. His prudence is understandable; where does one go, from up?

Hoping to undo the doubts raised by a local farmer who warns that fracking is anything
but a safe means of obtaining "clean" natural gas, Steve Butler (Matt Damon) takes
the microphone during a McKinley town meeting. Unfortunately, his usual smooth
patter will fail him a bit here, leading to a divided community ... and displeasure on the
part of Steve's corporate bosses.

Good Will Hunting was directed by Gus Van Sant; no surprise, then, that they collaborated on Damon’s next script, 2002’s little-seen (with good cause) Gerry.

Perhaps chastened by that experience, Damon put his word processor in the closet for a decade, while crafting an impressive acting career as both action hero — the Bourne series — and overall international film star.

But writers never quit; telling stories is in their blood. No doubt Damon was waiting for just the right property, and he certainly got it with Promised Land. Once again under Van Sant’s capable guidance, this captivating drama gets its juice from well-crafted characters, tart dialogue, a solid ensemble cast and a hot-button scenario ripped from real-world headlines.

Damon shares scripting duties with John Krasinski, a rising film star making good on the promise he has shown for so many years, on television’s The Office. Krasinski isn’t known as a writer — unless once includes 2009’s best-forgotten Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — but he certainly rises to the occasion here. He and Damon have deftly adapted a story by Dave Eggers, who burst on the scene a few years ago, with scripts for Away We Go and Where the Wild Things Are.

Good screenplays get their power from many elements. It’s not enough to craft piquant one-liners; they must be true to a well constructed plot. (They also must be delivered well by actors who understand how to maximize the impact of crisply timed dialogue, and that’s where we credit Van Sant.) The characters themselves must be interesting, efficiently sketched and cleverly integrated with all the other players on stage. We must care about them, either as good guys or bad guys.

Most of all, they must change — mature, regress, whatever — as a result of what happens to them.

A tall order all around.

Factor in a desire to be relevant — to indict a topic of the day — and most writers fail to juggle all those fragile eggs.

Damon and Krasinski, in welcome contrast, never err. Even casual exchanges of dialogue have consequences; watch for the payoff on a passing reference to a little girl selling lemonade outside a high school gymnasium. Goodness, it could be argued that she carries the moral weight of the entire film. That is sharp scripting.

Seven Days in Utopia: In the rough

Seven Days in Utopia (2011) • View trailer for Seven Days in Utopia
Three stars. Rating: G, and suitable for all ages
By Derrick Bang


Although cleverly marketed to resemble a "spirit of the game" golf drama — such as, say, The Legend of Bagger Vance or The Greatest Game Ever Played — Seven Days in Utopia actually is concerned with an entirely different sort of spirit.

The heavenly spirit, to be precise.

Figuring that he has nothing to lose, disenchanted golfer Luke Chisolm (Lucas
Black, left) agrees to a rather unorthodox, weeklong "program" suggested by
one-time pro Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall). The apparent goal: to help Luke
find his game. The actual goal: to help Luke find something much deeper.

Director Matt Russell's earnest little film is a Christian drama, which is to be distinguished from a drama with Christian characters. Christian dramas have only one purpose: not to entertain, but to proselytize. In fairness, Russell's film does this better — by which I mean, less stridently — than most, but that's not saying much.

Although faith-based movies have been a cinematic subgenre pretty much from day one, they've rarely played in mainstream theaters, and with good reason; while usually well-meaning, most have been contrived, poorly scripted and badly acted. As a result, they've remained a mostly fringe experience, much the way exploitative 1960s "drive-in movies" rarely escaped their rural origins.

But faith-based movies have been on the rise during the past decade, driven in part by a quite reasonable desire to provide a family-friendly alternative to Hollywood's increasingly vulgar, violent fare. Writer/director Alex Kendrick, a steady player in the Christian cinema market, has improved his game since debuting with 2003's Flywheel; he scored some respectable mainstream attention with 2008's Fireproof ... in part because of star Kirk Cameron's name visibility. (The film itself, sadly, was simply too shamelessly solemn and sincere to be taken seriously.)

Kendrick's next entry, Courageous, is scheduled to debut Sept. 30; perhaps it, too, will be an improvement on its predecessors.

Meanwhile, we have Seven Days in Utopia, the study of young golfer Luke Chisolm (Lucas Black), who is at an emotional crossroads after having choked during his debut on the pro circuit. The result: a very public meltdown and an angry drive through the wide open spaces of Texas, until Luke is faced with two road signs at a T-intersection. He makes the seemingly random choice to head into the tiny town of Utopia, population 373, and his life changes forever.

Ah, but is the choice random? Subtlety isn't one of this film's strong suits, and the script — adapted from David L. Cook's clandestinely evangelical Golf's Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia — certainly wears its virtuous heart on its sleeve. Even at his most frustrated, Luke never loses his good manners; he's unfailingly polite to all the kind folks he meets in Utopia, as they are to him.

Luke is immediately embraced by weather-beaten Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall), a retired pro golfer who quit "the circuit" but couldn't give up the game itself; he therefore built his own driving range in the middle of a cattle field. Crawford can tell that Luke's got game; the younger man simply can't find it.

Give me seven days, the ol' coot tells our young protagonist, and I'll get you turned around.