Edge of Tomorrow: Sharp sci-fi thrills

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and violence, profanity and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.6.14

Think Groundhog Day on steroids.

This is slick and suspenseful action sci-fi, fueled by an intriguing premise and pulse-pounding momentum courtesy of director Doug Liman and editor James Herbert. Veteran scripter Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Jack Reacher) and colleagues Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth clearly have shaped their narrative to fit star Tom Cruise’s outsized presence, but not in the way that one might expect (at least, not until the final act).

As Cage (Tom Cruise, center) listens, his confusion mounting, Carter (Noah Taylor) and
Vrataski (Emily Blunt) explain that the thousands upon thousands of ferocious "Mimic"
warriors should be regarded as mere appendages of a single controlling hive-mind. Well
and good, but where does that leave our outnumbered and overwhelmed Earth forces?

Like many action stars before him, Cruise has been “handling” his advancing age — 52 and counting — by ignoring it completely. In fairness, he has done a pretty good job of that, relying on muscular feats such as scrambling up the side of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, with the élan of a stuntman half his age.

Cruise also has a couple of signature stunts that apparently get written into all of his scripts: You can always count on at least one scene where an explosion savagely hurls him from one end of the screen to the other; and another scene that involves surviving a lengthy fall and a bone-crunching thump as he lands on his back, his pain-contorted features conveniently facing the camera.

You’ll find both stunts in this film, as well.

But I come not to bury Cruise, but to praise him; the march of time notwithstanding, he makes such brawny hokum work. More to the point, Edge of Tomorrow plays against Cruise’s usual role as the smartest and most capable person in the room, in this case making the signature ear-splitting grin and Mr. Slick aura work against the character in question. That’s both unexpected and clever, not to mention rather savvy on Cruise’s part; it makes both him and the film that much more interesting.

Edge of Tomorrow started life as All You Need Is Kill, a 2004 sci-fi novel by Japanese author Hiroshi Sakurazaka and illustrator Yoshitoshi ABe. The futuristic setting finds Earth under siege by an invading alien armada of ferocious biomechanical “Mimics” that seem able to overcome anything we can throw at them (and, rather unfortunately for this big-screen adaptation, bear a striking resemblance to the nastier Decepticons in the Transformers movie franchise).

Sakurazaka’s protagonist is a ground-level grunt in the United Defense Force. Taking an entirely different approach, Cruise stars as Maj. William Cage, a smooth-talking military glad-hander who has called upon his previous experience as an advertising exec, to orchestrate the gung-ho PR campaign that has made so many young men and women eager to don battle armor and die for the global cause.

Cage has been careful, however, to ensure that dying is something for other people; he wants nothing to do with the front-line assault that has been mounted against the otherworldly invaders that have captured all of Western Europe. Unfortunately, Cage unwisely irritates a four-star general — Brendan Gleeson, perfectly cast as the dour Brigham — who has no patience for smug “bystanders.”

Million Dollar Arm: Bunt to shortshop

Million Dollar Arm (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang

Underdog sports stories are irresistible. Fish-out-of-water stories are irresistible.

You’d therefore think that a film combining both elements would be can’t-miss.

You’d think.

Newly arrived in the United States, Dinesh (Madhur Mittal, far left) and Rinku (Suraj
Sharma, center left) are delighted by their first visit to an American baseball field. The
event is recorded for posterity by Amit (Pitobash, far right), while J.B. (Jon Hamm)
looks on with pleasure. Unfortunately, and rather cruelly, he's about to abandon his
new charges, naively believing them capable of carrying on from this point forward.

In fairness, Million Dollar Arm has a lot going for it, starting with a fact-based premise that is buoyed further by several thoroughly charming performances. Unfortunately, these virtues are offset by director Craig Gillespie’s protracted approach — his film is both too slow and, at slightly more than two hours, too long — and a casting decision that doesn’t work as everybody undoubtedly hoped.

Thomas McCarthy’s screenplay takes a gentle, light-comedy approach to real-world sports agent J.B. Bernstein’s gimmick-laden visit to India in 2007, when he staged a reality show-type competition in order to uncover untapped baseball talent. J.B. felt, not unreasonably, that in a nation obsessed with cricket, surely a few “bowlers” could be groomed into Major League pitchers.

As shaped by McCarthy, J.B. (Jon Hamm) and his partner and best friend Aash (Aasif Mandvi) are treading dire financial waters. The dream of fronting their own agency is about to go under for the third and final time, salvation resting entirely on a potential deal with an extravagantly fickle football star (Rey Maualuga).

Things don’t work out, leaving J.B. to clutch at the flimsiest of straws, after some late-night TV flipping between a cricket match and Susan Boyle’s stunning performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” on Britain’s Got Talent (an event that took place in April 2009, but hey, who pays attention to such niggly little details?).

J.B. hatches an improbable scheme, manages to secure financial backing from a taciturn investor named Mr. Chang (Tzi Ma), and soon finds himself in India.

Gillespie is on firm ground during this sequence, evoking portraits of various Indian locales that are by turns exotic and amusing. J.B. liaises with a “fixer” (Darshan Jariwala) and quickly picks up a protégé of sorts: Amit (rising Indian film star Pitobash, in a thoroughly delightful American debut), an eager-beaver volunteer, gopher, translator, right-hand man and die-hard baseball fan.

They’re also joined by Ray Poitevint (Alan Arkin), a cantankerous retired baseball scout who doesn’t need to watch for potential; he can hear the sound of a proper fastball. (Didn’t Clint Eastwood’s Gus Lobel rely on that skill, in 2012’s Trouble with the Curve? And does Arkin ever play anything but cantankerous?)

2 Guns: 2 droll 2 be taken seriously

2 Guns (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for violence, profanity and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.2.13

This summer could be subtitled The Revenge of the Comic Book.

Or, perhaps, yet another reminder that imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery.

Bobby (Denzel Washington, left) and Stig (Mark Wahlberg) eye each other warily,
navigating serious trust issues, while they wonder what to do with the drug kingpin
they've trapped in the trunk of their vehicle. As it turns out, that guy's gonna be the
least of their worries...

I don’t refer merely to obvious candidates such as Iron Man 3, Wolverine or Man of Steel. RED 2 and R.I.P.D. also are based on graphic novels, and the latter demonstrates the folly of believing that folks will queue up simply because something IS a big-screen adaptation of such a property.

Clever ideas are a great start, but they’re no substitute for a sharp screenplay that understands the need to sustain our involvement for the next few hours. Many of today’s one-shot graphic novels suffer from the same malady that infects numerous movies: a slick one-sentence concept that doesn’t know where to go from Page 3.

Happily, 2 Guns — derived from Steven Grant’s five-issue miniseries of the same title — rises above that level of mediocrity. Blake Masters’ screenplay is quite witty, and stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg get plenty of mileage from their snarky frenemy dynamic. If the core plot doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny, that probably wasn’t high on director Baltasar Kormákur’s goals anyway; he obviously set out to make a pleasurable popcorn flick, with enjoyable results. He achieves a tone that evokes pleasant memories of 1987’s Lethal Weapon.

As was true with RED 2, we’re not that bothered by whatever propels our central characters, as long as they keep entertaining us.

And, credit where due, this film’s twisty first act definitely keeps us guessing. If my next few paragraphs seem unduly vague or misleading, blame a desire to preserve at least some of the early surprises.

We meet Bobby Trench (Washington) and Michael “Stig” Stigman (Wahlberg) as they case the Tres Cruces Savings & Loan from a diner across the street in a small Texas border town. Their goal seems decidedly larcenous, but they can’t really be bad guys, because they flirt so coyly with the waitress, and because they’re our stars, fercryinoutloud.

One flashback later, it appears that Stig and Bobby are trying to set up Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos), a drug kingpin who does his dirty work in Mexico, while leading what seems an ordinary life as husband and father in an upscale Texas community. At least, it seems like this is what’s going down, but the edges quickly get fuzzy; far too many additional players pop up at the fringes of this undercover sting ... if indeed that’s the game in the first place.

Haywire: Trust nobody

Haywire (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, and needlessly, for action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.20.12


Movies are all about make-believe: our willing suspension of skepticism in exchange for a good time. We tolerate the impossible — varying degrees of the impossible, depending on the genre — because it’s part of the fantasy.

Although her team's human target has been rescued and safely stowed away,
Mallory (Gina Carano) is a consummate professional who hates loose ends. She
therefore pursues the one antagonist who dashes off, even though his escape can't
compromise her efforts. Cue an energetic foot chase with lots of running.

Unfortunately, like a drug addiction that requires an ever-increasing dosage, filmmakers are forever seeking new ways to up the ante and further impress us: to once again deliver a fresh jolt of eyebrow-raising amazement.

Consider the action hero. Back in 1963, the climactic fist-fight between James Bond and Red Grant, in the close confines of a train compartment in From Russia with Love, set a new standard for brutal, claustrophobic mano a mano combat. For the next several decades, film fans and movie stuntmen alike cited that scene as one of the finest ever caught on camera. Indeed, director Terence Young’s work was potent enough to bother British film censors.

Flash-forward to 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, when director Paul Greengrass and editor Christopher Rouse staged an even more jaw-dropping skirmish in London’s Waterloo Station: a melee involving Jason Bourne and several antagonists that was so ferociously intense, viewers actually applauded as the scene concluded. It, too, felt real.

That’s the key: credibility.

Trouble is, many directors push the envelope too far, particularly in the action thriller genre. Escalate the violence too much — turn the obligatory fight scenes into cartoons, with heroes and villains somehow enduring bone-crushing punishment — and we simply scoff and roll our eyes over the sheer stupidity of the whole thing. (Exhibit A, with a bullet: last year’s laughably idiotic Sucker Punch.)

Director Steven Soderbergh understands this: recognizes how “inflated thrills” have ruined many otherwise decent pictures. Haywire is his captivating, energized response: a spy drama with action scenes — very much in the mold of From Russia with Love, which he cites in his film’s press notes — rather than a wall-to-wall action flick with minimal story and progressively sillier fight scenes.

Soderbergh wants us to believe that the action elements in this film are punishing but reasonable: not so acrobatic or dangerous that a human being couldn’t possibly handle them.

His secret weapon: mixed martial arts champion Gina Carano, whose fighting styles include Muay Thai, karate, jiu jitsu, judo, wrestling, boxing, sambo, kick-boxing and kung fu ... all in a taut and unexpectedly hot bod. At first glance, during deceptively calm moments, she’s precisely the sort of individual who’d be underestimated right up to the moment she’d flip across the room, slam you to the floor and crush the air out of you — permanently — with a vicious, leg-twisting headlock.