Play Dirty: Should be dirtier

Play Dirty (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong violence, relentless profanity and mild nudity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Although director/co-scripter Shane Black gets credit for momentum and audacity, this overcooked crime thriller frequently borders on ridiculous: not quite a cartoon, but darn close at times.

 

Ed (Keegan-Michael Key) pulls up a schematic, to explain a key part of the plan, while
his comrades — from left, Brenda (Claire Lovering), Zen (Rosa Salazar), Grofield
(LaKeith Stanfield) and Parker (Mark Wahlberg) — listen attentively.

A disciplinarian with a ruler also would have been handy, to cut back on the relentless barrage of F-bombs.

Given that this film’s script is based on the “Parker” book series by Donald E. Westlake, we can blame Black, along with co-writers Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, for the often silly results here. They’d have done much better by adapting a specific novel.

 

A bit of history:

 

Parker — we never learn his first name — starred in 24 novels by Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark: from 1962’s The Hunter to 2008’s Dirty Money. Parker is an amoral and coldly ruthless career criminal: fond of huge scores, and prone to being betrayed by a colleague, thereby setting up a vengeance sub-plot.

 

He has been a popular character in cinema practically from the beginning: played by Lee Marvin (1967’s weirdly existential Point Blank), Jim Brown (1968’s The Split), Robert Duvall (The Outfit), Peter Coyote (1983’s Slayground), Mel Gibson (1999’s Payback) and Jason Statham (2013’s Parker).

 

Now Mark Wahlberg has taken the mantle, and — in fairness — he makes a good Parker. Wahlberg displays the appropriate level of grim callousness, and is credibly physical during skirmishes. He also quotes a portion of Parker’s “code” at one point, elaborating that he prefers to avoid killing people: not out of morality, but because murder invites increased attention from the police.

 

The film opens midway through a heist of the vault at Meadowview Downs Racetrack: a caper that goes south due to an unexpected interruption. The subsequent eye-rolling vehicular chase along the track, amid a race, clearly didn’t involve actual horses, and is an early indication of Black’s tendency toward wretched excess.

 

The sequence also is rather tasteless.

 

Having recovered the score, Parker and his team return to their base, in order to split the proceeds ... at which point the sexy Zen (Rosa Salazar) abruptly pulls out a gun. Parker escapes, although badly wounded. After being nursed back to fighting health — apparently in no time at all! — he sets about finding Zen.

 

A Million Miles Away: Earthbound

A Million Miles Away (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG, for no particular reason

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.22.23

José Hernández’s remarkably impressive life and career definitely warrant a suitably exhilarating film.

 

Sadly, this one isn’t it.

 

José Hernández (Michael Peña, center), newly hired as an electrical and computer
engineer at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, finds that his input
is neither requested nor appreciated by his white colleagues. During meetings, he often
doesn't even get a seat at the table.

The script — by Bettina Gilois, Hernán Jiménez and director Alejandra Márquez Abella, based on Hernández’s 2012 autobiography — jarringly skips massive chunks of his early years, and is quite sloppy with respect to the passage of time. It’s also frequently hard to determine what year it is, and when various things take place.

Die-hard NASA fans will be able to fill in the gaps, but casual viewers will wonder if key scenes wound up on the cutting-room floor.

 

That’s a shame, because all the performances are strong and heartfelt, particularly Michael Peña’s starring role as Hernández. The film also excels at its depiction of family dynamics, and the strong ties binding him with his parents, his cousin Beto (Bobby Soto), and (eventually) his wife Adela (Rosa Salazar) and her family.

 

That said, it could be argued that Abella spends too much time on these relationships, at the expense of a more thorough depiction of how José gets from A to B, and then to C and D.

 

The story begins in the late 1960s, as the families of 7-year-old José (endearingly played in these early scenes by Juan Pablo Monterrubio) and Beto (Leonardo Granados) divide their lives between home in La Piedad, Michoacán, Mexico, and work each year as farmworkers, moving from one California town to another. Education is scattered and inconsistent, as the boys shuttle from one school to the next.

 

On top of which, they’re often both exhausted, sometimes — in a poignant scene — falling asleep on their school desks.

 

Even so, young José has a thirst for learning, and receives encouragement from a teacher (Michelle Krusiec) who sees a spark in his eager gaze. “You’re a force of nature,” she tells him. “Nothing will stop you.”

 

José’s father Salvador (Julio César Cedillo) also has a telling encounter with a guidance counselor. “A tree doesn’t like to be uprooted and planted somewhere else every few months,” she points out. “It will grow, but it won’t thrive.”

Alita: Battle Angel — Exciting futuristic thrills

Alita: Battle Angel (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and quite generously, despite relentless violence and gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.15.19

When we get sci-fi world-building on a scale this visually spectacular, there’s no doubt that James Cameron must be involved.

Hugo (Keean Johnson) rushes forward, hoping to prevent a catastrophe, when a
potentially violent encounter prompts Alita's (Rosa Salazar) battle instincts to kick in.

In fairness, director Robert Rodriguez deserves equal credit for this energetic, post-apocalyptic adventure. Where Cameron’s epics generally have a serious tone with underlying real-world political elements, Rodriguez is more willing to just have a good time. That’s certainly the case with Alita: Battle Angel, which sometimes displays the youthful, wide-eyed breathlessness that was typical of his Spy Kids series.

But we must remember that Rodriguez also is the gritty, down ’n’ dirty maestro behind From Dusk Till Dawn and the Sin City chillers, and he stretches this new film’s PG-13 rating waypast the breaking point.

Alita: Battle Angel is a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, which successfully blends elements from previous classics: a little bit of 1975’s Rollerball, a taste of 1982’s Blade Runner, a soupçon of 2013’s Elysium and a whole lotta 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Considerable credit also goes to Yukito Kishiro, creator of the 1990 cyberpunk manga series Gunnm(translated on these shores as Battle Angel Alita). Kishiro’s series ultimately went to nine volumes, after which Cameron optioned the property … way back in 2000.

Although originally intending to direct a big-screen adaptation, Cameron got distracted by Avatar; meanwhile, he “borrowed” some of Kishiro’s concepts for the 2000-02 TV series Dark Angel, which made a star of young Jessica Alba. Numerous twists and turns later — notably, after Rodriguez was brought in, initially just to trim Cameron’s overlong screenplay — all the elements fell into place, and here we are.

We should be grateful for this long gestation, because it allowed special effects technology to catch up with Kishiro’s wildly imaginative premise and setting. Senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri and production designers Caylah Eddleblute and Steve Joyner have delivered a jaw-dropping degree of futuristic wonder: a wholly immersive dystopian setting that feels persuasively authentic, down to the tiniest detail.

Rodriguez also makes excellent use of Bill Pope’s 3D cinematography. You’ll want to experience this film at least twice: once for its exciting, pell-mell storyline; the second time to better appreciate the meticulous effort that has gone into every frame.

Mind you, elements of the complex plot are insufficiently addressed by the script — credited to Cameron, Rodriguez and Laeta Kalogridis (the latter known as the creator of TV’s Altered Carbon) — but Rodriguez and editors Stephen E. Rivkin and Ian Silverstein maintain enough momentum to carry us past dangling questions.

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.