Ocean's 8: Larkish ladies of larceny

Ocean's 8 (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for brief profanity, fleeting drug use and mild suggestive content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.8.18

As long as reasonable care is taken — sharp script, skilled direction, a competent cast — light-hearted caper thrillers can’t miss.

That’s definitely the case with Ocean’s 8.

With their compatriots "on assignment" at Cartier headquarters, the bulk of the team —
from left, Debbie (Sandra Bullock), Tammy (Sarah Paulson), Nine Ball (Rihanna),
Lou (Cate Blancett) and Constance (Awkwafina) — tracks progress via a computer monitor.

If this new film pales slightly when compared to 2001’s sparkling remake of Ocean’s Eleven, it’s mostly because the formula has lost some luster via repetition. Still, the well-designed gender switch compensates for such familiarity, and there’s no question that director Gary Ross — who also scripted this re-boot, with Olivia Milch — assembles the pieces with élan, and then guides them through a devious chess game laden with twists ... at least one of which likely will be a surprise.

Mostly, Ross delivers the necessary level of fun, which was so crucial to the 2001 predecessor’s success. We always had a sense that George Clooney & Co. were playing themselves, as much as their characters — which was absolutely true of the 1960 Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin original — and that added effervescent bonhomie to the action. These were guys with whom we wanted to share war stories over cocktails; the same is true of this Girls Just Want To Have Fun reworking.

And yes — just to be clear — this gender switch is far better, in every possible way, than 2016’s conceptually similar but otherwise misguided remake of Ghostbusters.

We meet Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) — the equally larcenous sister of Clooney’s Danny Ocean — immediately following a prison stretch of five years, eight months and 12 days. Rather than accept this sentence as a lesson learned, Debbie spent the entire time devising, refining and perfecting what she now believes will be the perfect crime: the theft of the Toussaint, a unique diamond necklace valued at $150 million, which stays locked in an impenetrable vault in the bowels of the Cartier mansion.

All she needs is a crew.

Bullock’s Debbie is perky, poised and polished: utterly unflappable, and generally sporting a mildly self-confident smirk that potential marks immediately find disarming. This contrasts nicely with the wary and somewhat hardened Lou (Cate Blanchett), Debbie’s former partner in crime, who is less than enthusiastic when given the opportunity to resume their illicit ways.

Debbie mocks; Lou challenges. Bullock and Blanchett make an excellent team, and the script teases us with the possibility that their relationship might run deeper than mere professional camaraderie.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: Sci-fi twaddle

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for sci-fi action/violence and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang

Anybody in doubt about the crucial important of acting chops, need look no further than this misfired spectacular.

Despite having completed their assignment on the desert planet Kirian, Valerian (Dane
DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) aren't safe yet; the criminal marketeer they
robbed has just sent a giant beastie after them, propelled by the command "Fetch!"

Director/scripter Luc Besson has helmed a visually opulent adaptation of the famed French sci-fi comic book series by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières, which enjoyed a stunning run from 1967 through 2010 (and has been collected in 21 graphic novels and a short story collection, for anybody wishing to catch up). The narrative is based mostly on the sixth book, Ambassadors of the Shadows.

The film certainly looks fabulous, thanks to a worlds-building blend of Hugues Tissandier’s production design, Scott Stokdyk’s visual effects team, and Avatar-style motion capture creatures. The core plot is solid, with thoughtful messages about inclusiveness, environmental concerns, forgiveness and the unintended consequences of war.

Casting the heroic spatio-temporal agent Valerian, and his plucky, quick-witted companion Laureline, should have been a sacred mission on par with the careful selection of each new James Bond. The title role demands somebody with the grit, smug charm and hard-charging recklessness of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo or — to borrow from Besson’s own oeuvre — Bruce Willis’ Korben Dallas, in 1997’s The Fifth Element.

Besson didn’t even get close this time.

I’m sure Dane DeHaan is a nice fellow: kind to animals and dutiful about texting his mother at least once a day. But he’s no actor. He’s stiff as a board throughout this lengthy disappointment, has no facility with dialog, and couldn’t deliver a quip if his life depended on it. He’s a veritable black hole, sucking all life from the film.

Most damning, because he is so clumsy with the flirty banter that typifies the relationship between Valerian and Laureline, DeHaan turns his character into an obnoxious pain in the ass. He doesn’t merely drag the film down; he brings it to a grinding halt. I kept hoping that one of the oversize beasties in this colorful saga would swallow him whole.

DeHaan may be remembered as the beleaguered young protagonist in the loathsome A Cure for Wellness, unleashed earlier this year. He was quite bad in that as well, but it mattered less, because the film — as a whole — was such an unmitigated disaster.

Valerian had the potential for greatness. Several problems prevented that, and DeHaan’s laughably awful performance tops the list.

Battleship: Deserves to be sunk

Battleship (2012) • View trailer
One star. Rating: PG-13, for intense action violence, mayhem and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.18.12

Battleship is a movie for folks who found the Transformers flicks too intellectually challenging.

Alex (Taylor Kitsch), hurled into command when every other senior officer gets
blown up, shredded or otherwise sliced 'n' diced by nasty alien weapons, seeks
inspiration from the screen monitored by Petty Officer Second Class Cora
Raikes (Rihanna). Now, if she'd burst into song, that might improve this dud.

Erich and Jon Hoeber’s laughably moronic plot would make a great discussion topic in a fifth-grade science class, where 10-year-olds would gleefully pick it to shreds. Let’s start with preposterous coincidence, total ignorance of physical reality, and an invading alien force bearing nasty weaponry clearly capable of wiping us off the planet ... except when the script says no, we can’t let that happen in this scene. Just because.

No lie: At times, for absolutely no reason, the massively armed alien warrior ships simply don’t fire upon our sitting-duck ocean vessels. Beats the hell out of me.

I’d call this flick a cartoon, but that’s an insult to animators. And it’s not even a decent comic book movie, because that genre’s writers have been operating at a much higher level of intelligence since, oh, the early 1960s.

But, then, what should we expect from a film based on a board game?

The one-dimensional characters here, so insubstantial that I’d expect them to blow away in a stiff breeze, speak in clipped grunts that would have been retro in the Cro-Magnon age. I truly worry that if one of these folks attempted a three-syllable word, he’d forget the first by the time he reached the third.

Except for the token Scientific Geek, of course, who’s both a technobabble motormouth and a clichéd liberal wimp: We can’t have those pussies getting in the way of real soldiers determined to wipe this alien scum off the face of the Earth. John Wayne — who you’ll recall turned 1968’s The Green Berets into a notoriously pro-Vietnam War screed — would have loved this flick.

Actually, that’s always been one of my many objections to actor-turned-director Peter Berg. Bad enough that he makes dumbed-down nonsense apparently aimed toward trailer-trash intellectuals; he’s also jingoistic and frequently racist. His 2007 take on our American presence in the Middle East, The Kingdom, traded on wincingly offensive stereotypes, while suggesting that the whole problem could be solved if good ol’ American men and women simply shot every “towelhead” in sight.