Jojo Rabbit: A cheeky masterpiece

Jojo Rabbit (2019) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, disturbing images and violence
By Derrick Bang

You’re unlikely to see a more audacious film this year.

The slightest misstep — the most minute mistake in tone — and director/scripter Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Christine Leunens’ Jojo Rabbit would slide into puerile bathos or unforgivably heinous poor taste.

Having just discovered that a young woman (Thomasin McKenzie, as Elsa) has been
concealed behind the wall of an upstairs bedroom for an unknown length of time,
impassioned Hitler Youth acolyte Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is uncertain how to
handle this potentially dangerous situation.

Such a delicate tightrope walk … which Waititi maneuvers with impressive grace, skill and cunning.

Along with his unerring handling of a note-perfect cast.

Satires about Adolf Hitler are rare, and for obvious reasons; the very notion is an artistic mine field. Charlie Chaplin pulled it off, with 1940’s The Great Dictator; so did Mel Brooks, with his Oscar-winning script for 1967’sThe Producers. And now we have an even more daring and impudent skewering of the dread Teppichfresser.

Ten-and-a-half-year-old Jojo Betzler (precocious Roman Griffin Davis, in a stunning acting debut) is introduced as he stares at his reflection in a mirror, dressed in Nazi finery. “Today you join the ranks of the Jungvolk!” he proudly tells himself. “You are in peak mental and physical condition. You have the body of a panther, and the mind of … a brainy panther. You are a shiny example of shiny perfection!”

The setting is the quaint (fictitious) town of Falkenheim, Austria, years into the repressive Nazi rule. Although all signs point to the war’s imminent conclusion, the naïve and credulously gullible Jojo has waited to be old enough to embrace the pervasive propaganda against which he has grown up, by joining the Hitler Youth. He and best friend Yorki (Archie Yates, endearingly cherubic) are tremendously excited by the weekend of “training” that will transform them into hard-charging Nazi warriors.

Except that things don’t quite work out that way. 

The training camp is overseen by the wearily cynical Capt. Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), who’d prefer to lead men to “glorious death” at the front, rather than shepherd “a bunch of little titty-grabbers.” He’s assisted by loyal acolyte Freddie Finkel (Alfie Allen, late of Game of Thrones), far more faithful than intelligent; and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson, whose deadpan slow takes are to die for), ever-willing to accept and spread the most absurd Nazi myths.

Trouble is, Jojo’s inherently sensitive nature is completely at odds with the Nazi “Aryan ideal” he’s so desperate to mimic. The crunch comes when, as the youngest and clearly most intimidated boy in the group, he’s ordered to demonstrate his ferocity … by killing a rabbit.

The Predator: A bloody good time

The Predator (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for strong bloody violence, gore, relentless profanity and vulgar sexual references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.14.18

Revived sci-fi action franchises have done pretty well lately.

Chris Pratt and a fresh team breathed welcome new life into the Jurassic Park series, and now director/co-scripter Shane Black has done the same with an updated Predator. He and co-writer Fred Dekker acknowledge the 1987 original, while cleverly welding their story to a can’t-miss formula that hearkens back to 1967’s The Dirty Dozen.

When a captured Predator regains consciousness and realizes that it's about to become a
laboratory experiment, it reacts with understandable fury. (Unfortunately, our heroes
won't get their act together for several more scenes.)

The result is 107 minutes of skillfully paced suspense, divided into distinct “chapters” that involve audience-pleasing characters, all played well by an ensemble cast that blends familiar faces with several newcomers. The dialogue is sharp, the action frequently laden with droll banter: no surprise, coming from the guy (Black) who made his mark with 1987’s Lethal Weapon and, more recently, ensured that Iron Man 3 was far better than its sophomore-slump predecessor.

Too bad Black undercuts all this good stuff by making his new Predator so unrelentingly gory. 

We’re talking splatter-porn levels of abattoir grue more appropriate to trashy zombie flicks. Black signals such sensitivities right out of the gate, when an early human victim — suspended upside-down from a tall tree limb, as befits Predator custom — is sliced in half, after which the camera lingers needlessly on his entrails, as they slowly drip and slide to the ground below.

Seriously?

That’s merely the beginning. Black and Dekker gleefully succumb to all manner of slicing, dicing, severed limbs, eviscerations, disembowelments, decapitations and more, often depicted via grody-to-the-max close-ups. I fully appreciate that a Predator entry must be violent, but there’s such a thing as too much … particularly when such excess damages an otherwise shrewdly assembled thrill ride.

That aside, there’s no denying that Black hits the sweet spot that blends macabre humor, fast-paced thrills and edge-of-the-seat suspense.

The film opens with a space battle between two small fighters; the targeted ship escapes and crash-lands on Earth, right where retired Special Forces army ranger-turned-mercenary Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is leading a clandestine op against some Mexican drug cartel baddies. He alone survives the subsequent assault by the ferocious whatzit that emerges from the craft; better yet, McKenna escapes with the alien’s helmet and weapon-laden armband.

Suspecting a potentially hostile de-briefing back in the States, McKenna ships the alien tech home, where it unintentionally winds up in the hands of his adolescent son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay, well remembered from Room). He’s a spectrum child, on the border of autistic, and also — thanks to Tremblay’s gifted performance — one of the film’s strongest assets.

Due to Rory’s insatiable curiosity and savant-like talent for pattern recognition and puzzle-solving, he begins to figure out how this strange stuff functions.

John Wick: Should be snuffed out

John Wick (2014) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rated R, for relentlessly strong, bloody and gory violence, profanity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang

Vile, reprehensible trash.

Ineptly scripted, badly directed and atrociously acted by the name “star” — Keanu Reeves — who, as one of this tawdry turkey’s executive producers, likely is the only reason it got made in the first place.

Having reached this point in his vengeance-fueled crusade, Wick (Keanu Reeves) hasn't
killed anybody for at least 5 seconds ... so it must be time to shoot another nameless
thug in the face. Wick does that a lot, to rapidly diminishing returns.

The fact that Reeves keeps getting assignments remains a source of amazement; he can’t emote a lick. Indeed, he makes Clint Eastwood look like Laurence Olivier. Reeves lucked into two popular genre franchises awhile back, Speed and the Matrix trilogy, which granted the illusion of A-list credibility.

But everything else he has touched in the past 20 years has bombed, in most cases with ample cause. Really, now ... have you even heard of Hard Ball, Ellie Parker, Thumbsucker, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Generation Um... or Man of Tai Chi, let alone had the opportunity to actually watch them? Could anything have been worse that his laughably pathetic efforts at romantic leads, in A Walk in the Clouds or the ill-advised remake of Sweet November?

Is it perhaps time to wonder how much better both Speed and the Matrix movies might have been, with a better lead actor?

Reeves never offers anything beyond a grim scowl apparently intended to convey a wealth of emotion. Far from it; he simply seems smug and contemptuous ... and not necessarily within the parameters of the part he’s playing. It looks, sounds and feels more like a deliberate absence of acting: a smirky sense of superiority, as if he’s delighted to once again make a pot of money for doing no work whatsoever.

I’m not sure which would be worse: that Reeves knows he has scant talent, and keeps trying to fool us into believing otherwise ... or that he truly has no talent at all, but has failed to recognize as much. Still. All these years later.

He also needs to wash his hair more often. And get a better style to begin with.

Sadly, when it comes to no-talent behavior, Reeves has plenty of company in this revolting excuse for a revenge thriller. John Wick is “directed” — and I employ the term in the loosest possible sense — by David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, both of whom have impressively long Hollywood résumés ... as stunt and action coordinators.

Leitch and Stahelski apparently believed that they had learned something, operating under the guidance of other directors for the past two decades.

They believed incorrectly.