Apex: Fails to summit

Apex (2026) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five); rated R, for strong violence, grisly images, nudity and profanity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Richard Connell has a lot to answer for.

 

Variations of his iconic 1924 Colliers magazine short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” have littered television and movie screens ever since the first official Hollywood adaptation in 1932, which featured Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks and Fay Wray.

 

Ben (Taron Egerton) cheerfully shows Sasha (Charlize Theron) the best way to begin
her kayaking journey, offering two possible starting points on her map.

Director Baltasar Kormákur’s newest spin offers little, aside from 50-year-old Charlize Theron’s undeniably impressive physical prowess. Jeremy Robbins’ script begins reasonably well, but then turns gruesomely tasteless and grisly in the second act, and spins off into Cloud Cuckoo Land during the ludicrous climax.

We meet Sasha (Theron) and longtime companion Tommy (Eric Bana) toward the end of their ascent up the steep face of Norway’s imposing Troll Wall, rising above the Romsdalen Valley: a defying-the-elements challenge they’ve obviously done often, on this natural wonder and many others. Their characters are sketched economically but sufficiently; she’s headstrong and impatient, while he’s the voice of reason.

 

A final overhang repeatedly defeats her — as Lawrence Sher’s cinematography induces extreme vertigo — and then the weather turns against them. 

 

“Luck is like anything else you take up a mountain,” Tommy sagely comments. “Eventually, it’ll run out.”

 

They accept defeat and begin to descend; the subsequent crisis is inevitable.

 

Five months later, Sasha travels to Australia’s (fictitious) Wandarra National Park. Her goal: a head-clearing, soul-cleansing whitewater kayaking journey down a lengthy, tempestuous river laden with rapids and falls (most scenes filmed along New South Wales’ majestic Woronora River).

 

Leonard Cohen’s “Boogie Street” plays behind this montage, up to the point Sasha checks in with an affable park ranger (Aaron Pedersen). He cautions that it’s rough country; quite a few people have disappeared, evidenced by a bulletin board laden with dozens of “Missing” notices and photos.

 

She next stops for supplies at a convenience store, where two loutish, good-’ol-boy hunters (Matt Whelan and Rob Carlton) get in her face. She calmly ignores their boorish behavior. The more genial Ben (Taron Egerton), dropping off some of his homemade meat jerky, apologizes for his gender. She insists that isn’t necessary, but nonetheless thanks him for the kindness.

 

They chat a bit; she asks for map directions to her destination. He offers a choice: the “easy way,” or the “hard way.” Naturally, the latter intrigues her more.

 

The first day passes without incident, as Sasha deftly kayaks down the often raging river. The location is wild, awesome and exhilarating; Sher’s camera work and Sigurður Eyþórsson’s rat-a-tat editing enhance the thrills. As the sun drops, exhausted but obviously happy, Sasha sets up camp and sleeps well.

 

The next morning, some of her stuff is missing.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword — A cut below

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG-13, for fantasy action and violence, and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.12.17

British director Guy Ritchie has spent the last decade putting his breakneck, heavily stylized spin on pop-culture icons, with diminishing results.

His two takes on Sherlock Holmes were mostly fun, thanks to the sassy pairing of Robert Downey Jr. (Holmes) and Jude Law (Watson); the re-boot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ... less so.

The mysterious Mage (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) watches as Arthur (Charlie Hunnam)
contemplates the powerful sword Excalibur, which unleashes ghastly memories every
time he places both hands on its hilt.

Which brings us to this re-imagined Arthur Pendragon, Camelot and Excalibur: pretty much the only elements of traditional Arthurian legend that have survived in this senses-assaulting treatment by Ritchie and co-scripters David Dobkin, Joby Harold and Lionel Wigram. Their medieval adventure kicks off with a reasonably compelling first act, as the saga’s major players are introduced, but soon goes off the rails and ultimately succumbs to wretched excess during the overwrought finale.

This is King Arthur by way of Lord of the Rings: a magic-laden fantasy that ultimately overpowers its puny mortal characters. When opponents can send mountain-size elephants and coliseum-size serpents against each other, it’s impossible to establish an emotional connection with anything or anybody; Ritchie and his fellow scribes don’t exercise enough care to give us reasonable rules or consistency.

It’s all stuff and nonsense ... and, in Ritchie’s hands, hyper-accelerated and very loud stuff and nonsense.

The film opens with an explosive prologue, the malevolent wizard Mordred having lain waste to nearly all of England. Only well-fortified Camelot remains, but 300-foot siege elephants are poised to make short work of its walls. It’s an awesome sequence, orchestrated with breathtaking verisimilitude by visual effects supervisor Nick Davis, and ferociously paced by Ritchie and editor James Herbert.

All seems lost, but wait! The honorable King Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana) wields the mighty sword Excalibur, which instantaneously turns the tide. (Handy, that.)

Alas, in the aftermath, Uther fails to perceive the perfidy within; his brother Vortigern (Jude Law), secretly coveting the crown, unleashes his own vile magic. (Really, you’d think that Uther would have known that a brother given the name Vortigern couldn’t be anything but evil.)

The king and his wife perish, but not before sending their young son Arthur to safety in a boat: an oft-employed plot point that dates from Moses to Luke Skywalker, by way of Krypton’s Kal-El.

The Finest Hours: Waterlogged

The Finest Hours (2016) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

I’ll never understand Hollywood.

The actual account of one brave Coast Guard crew’s mission to rescue survivors of the maimed T2 oil tanker SS Pendleton, undertaken during a raging nor’easter off the New England coast on Feb. 18, 1952, is the stuff of unbelievable legend: a saga of bravery, luck and utterly amazing persistence.

With Seaman Richard Livesey (Ben Foster, left) scanning into the darkness, Coast Guard
Boatswain's Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) struggles to control their small
rescue vessel amid a raging nor'easter, as they try to find the remnants of a
shattered tanker.

Give it to Disney, and it turns into an overcooked, eye-rolling, melodramatic mess.

Granted, the ocean-bound storm sequences are awesome and persuasive, the depiction of the crippled SS Pendleton — literally torn in half by the storm — grimly unsettling on all sorts of levels.

The problem is with character behavior and interpersonal dynamics, as concocted by scripters Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson. Rarely have so many people behaved so childishly, so stupidly, so TV soap opera-ishly.

And so bewilderingly.

For starters, it’s impossible to get a bead on our primary hero, Coast Guard Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine), who overplays a blend of shyness, uncertainty and self-censure to the point that he seems incapable of completing a sentence, let alone piloting a vessel. A failed previous mission apparently has left him riddled with guilt, but that scarcely explains the degree to which he’s belittled, teased and dismissed by both the local veteran fishermen, and his Coast Guard colleagues at the Chatham, Mass., Lifeboat Station.

Then there’s his feckless boss, Daniel Cuff (Eric Bana), assumed to be incompetent because his accent brands him as having come from “somewhere else.” The accusation likely has merit, because Bana plays the role with utter bewilderment, as if Cuff doesn’t even understand how to use the station equipment. We’re supposed to believe this?

But nobody can top the childish histrionics of Holliday Grainger’s Miriam, who frequently behaves like a 5-year-old having a temper tantrum. A confrontation between Miriam and Cuff is so howlingly awful, orchestrated so poorly by director Craig Gillespie, that it must be seen to be disbelieved.

We can’t really fault Grainger, who’s obviously limited to her scripted lines, and the “guidance” from Gillespie. Miriam nonetheless remains the worst “devoted gal left behind” that I’ve seen in many, many years.

Lone Survivor: Heartbreak ridge

Lone Survivor (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: R, for strong war violence and pervasive profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.10.14

Color me surprised: Peter Berg finally made another decent movie.

The actor-turned-writer/director scored an indisputable hit with 2004’s warm-hearted Friday Night Lights, a character-driven study of small-town Texas high school football; the film led to an equally well-received TV series that kept fans happy for three well-scripted seasons (with Berg supervising the entire run).

Having trekked to a vantage point where they can see their targeted enemy combatant,
the covert SEAL team — from left, Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Marcus (Mark Wahlberg),
Axe (Ben Foster) and Dietz (Emile Hirsch) — contemplate their next move. Sadly,
that decision is about to be taken out of their hands.

On the big screen, though, Berg’s résumé didn’t merely stall; it nose-dived into overwrought wretched excess. The Kingdom (2007) was marred by unpleasantly vicious racism; Hancock (2008) did little but embarrass star Will Smith; and the less said about 2012’s laughably atrocious Battleship, the better.

That’s a rather sad and pathetic downward spiral.

I therefore held out very little hope for Lone Survivor, upon learning that Berg was directing and scripting from Marcus Luttrell’s gripping 2007 memoir ... which just goes to prove, once again, the folly of rash assumptions. This film deserves place of pride alongside A Bridge Too Far, Gallipoli, Black Hawk Down and other war dramas that honor the grit, bravery, indomitable will and almost superhuman resilience of overwhelmed, ground-based soldiers betrayed by circumstances beyond their control.

Lone Survivor isn’t merely stirring; it’s nail-bitingly tense and, ultimately, heartbreaking.

The story details a SEAL operation code-named Operation Red Wings, which in June 2005 sent four men into a mountainous region of Afghanistan; they were tasked with locating and killing Ahmad Shah, a Taliban sympathizer who had orchestrated the ambush of 20 Marines the previous week.

To say that everything went wrong would be an understatement. Radio communications were spotty at best, absent entirely when the subsequent crisis erupted. Worse yet, American intel seriously underestimated the size of Shah’s resident militia. When the dust had settled, as this film’s title warns us, only one man had survived ... and the fatalities had expanded to include far more than the initial SEAL team.

Berg, long a gung-ho champion of American warrior spirit, unveils this film’s credits against actual footage of formidable SEAL training sessions; our immediate takeaway is that these men will endure anything, battling far beyond “normal” levels of pain and punishment, in the pursuit of successfully completing a mission and returning home with their comrades.

It’s an impressive montage, and it certainly sets the mood for what is to come.

We meet our protagonists immediately prior to their mission, during a typical “waiting” period at Camp Ouellette, at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield. They cheerfully compete with each other, send e-mails to loved ones back home, make plans for the future. The day’s most significant event involves the “induction” of newbie SEAL Shane Patton (Alexander Ludwig, appropriately enthusiastic), a process that involves some mild hazing and considerable hoo-rah bonding.

Closed Circuit: They're watching us!

Closed Circuit (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity and brief violence
By Derrick Bang

Nobody does an edgy, paranoid espionage thriller better than the British.

No doubt it comes from living under the unblinking eyes of all those surveillance cameras. (Big Brother, indeed!)

With their supposedly slam-dunk case having gone increasingly pear-shaped, Martin
(Eric Bana) and Claudia (Rebecca Hall) wonder about their next step. Trouble is,
they shouldn't even be a "they"; because of the nature of this terrorism trial, Martin
and Claudia aren't supposed to communicate ... even when each begins to worry
about pernicious surveillance.

Way back in the day, Closed Circuit would have been a tidy little B-entry, designated as the bottom-of-the-bill companion to some prestige A production. The irony is that many of those so-called B-films were far more entertaining than their big-budget cousins.

The same can be said for Closed Circuit, which outshines several of this summer’s disappointing blockbusters: better acting and directing, and a vastly superior script.

And yet, sadly, it probably won’t make a dime. Getting released immediately prior to the Labor Day weekend is akin to television’s Saturday evening kiss-of-death timeslot: Nobody will notice.

That’s a shame, because scripter Steven Knight definitely knows his way around this genre, having previously dazzled us with his twisty plots for 2002’s Dirty Pretty Things and 2007’s Eastern Promises. This guy can write; he has a gift for putting ordinary people into extraordinary situations, while avoiding the burst of brilliant resourcefulness that turn American action stars into invulnerable, lone wolf superheroes.

When the two protagonists in this narrative eye each other bleakly, during a calm between storms, and acknowledge that there’s no way to put this particular Humpty Dumpty together again — no successful exit to the catastrophe — we know they’re right. The situation is beyond salvation, beyond their control.

And, maddeningly, it always has been.

Closed Circuit — marvelous triple-entendre title, by the way — opens its ripped-from-the-headlines story with a terrorist attack at a busy London market. With 120 civilians dead and the British public screaming for justice, an anonymous tip leads police to one surviving member of the suspected terrorist cell: Farroukh Erdogan (Denis Moschitto).

Preparations begin for what promises to be the trial of the century.

Hanna: Revenge served hot

Hanna (2011) • View trailer for Hanna
2.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and much too generously, for profanity, sensuality and relentless (often grim) violence
By Derrick Bang


Goodness, what a bizarre, unpalatable and clumsy mess.

I cannot imagine what drew director Joe Wright to this project.

On the run from yet another collection of vicious thugs, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan)
leads them on a merry chase through a dock yard filled with stacked containers.
It's a well-executed sequence, delivered with slick cinematography and clever
editing, but the flash merely serves to conceal this film's bankrupt script.

Wright is the talented filmmaker who delivered such sumptuous, intelligent and inventively photographed adaptations of the books Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and The Soloist. All three are engaging dramas, impeccably acted by superb ensemble casts; all three stir our emotions and showcase a craftsman who understands how best to use every nuanced element of the collaborative motion picture art form.

Hanna, in great, staggering contrast, is a nasty, lumbering oaf of a project: a misbegotten collection of scattered, individual scenes that barely count as a “plot” at all. Seth Lochhead’s story — given additional espionage-style juice by David Farr, a veteran of the British TV series MI5 — couldn’t ever have looked good: not on paper, and certainly not once the damage was up on the screen. It’s as if Wright suddenly forgot everything he ever knew about constructing a coherent film.

Bad scripts can be awful for all sorts of reasons, but one of the greatest sins is a failure to remain true to the rules established from the beginning. If we’re to be a real-world thriller, that demands certain levels of consistency; we don’t suddenly detour into sequences that would have felt more at home in Tim Burton’s handling of Alice in Wonderland.

I’m not certain it’s possible to describe enough of this chaotic, scattershot story in order to properly illustrate its many flaws, but here goes:

We open in a barren, snowbound forest, where Erik Heller (Eric Bana) apparently has been teaching survival skills to his teenage daughter, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan, who earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Atonement), ever since she was a little girl. As a result, Hanna has become a lean, mean fighting machine: an ambulatory weapon trained for some dire mission.

These early sequences, and the mysterious build-up behind them, feel like a real-world spin on the character of Hit-Girl in Kick Ass, who similarly was transformed into a slicing, dicing assassin by her father. Fair enough; it’s an intriguing concept.

Believing herself ready, Hanna insists that it’s time she return to civilization, in order to fulfill her mission. Thanks to a homing beacon that Erik allows the girl to trigger, they don’t need to wait long; their isolated cabin soon is surrounded by gun-toting paramilitary types. Erik already has vanished, promising to re-unite with the girl in Berlin; Hanna, meanwhile, demonstrates her skills by taking out a few soldiers before quietly allowing the rest to bring her ... elsewhere.

The Time Traveler's Wife: It flies

The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) • View trailer for The Time Traveler's Wife
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for profanity, fleeting nudity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.14.09
Buy DVD: The Time Traveler's Wife• Buy Blu-Ray: The Time Traveler's Wife [Blu-ray]


Many patrons will start bawling 15 minutes into director Robert Schwentke's swooningly romantic adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, and they probably won't stop until the lights come up.

If then.

Even though she understands -- has always understood -- the severe problems
resulting from her decision to fall in love with Henry (Eric Bana), sometimes
Clare (Rachel McAdams) finds the situation more than she can endure. Briefly
walking out of a room, to return and find him vanished, is bad enough; having
no idea how long he'll be gone ... ah, that's the crippling part.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin's understated, impressively compact handling of Niffenegger's popular novel is further buoyed by quietly layered performances from stars Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, who credibly sell their characters' highly irregular relationship. The gimmick is presented in such a refreshingly matter-of-fact manner — this is the situation; deal with it — that we can't help embracing it, just as these two tragic protagonists live for the moments when they can embrace each other.

The Time Traveler's Wife is an unapologetic romantic fantasy, very much in the mold of 1943's A Guy Named Joe, remade in 1989 as Always, or 1998's Meet Joe Black. As with those earlier films, this one must be accepted on the story's own terms: If you can't get beyond the premise, then don't bother; audience members who whole-heartedly fall under this film's spell will look unfavorably upon anybody snickering on the sidelines.

Things begin quietly enough, as young Henry enjoys a late-night car ride with his mother. Although seemingly innocuous, Schwentke and cinematographer Florian Ballhaus frame the scene in such a manner that we quickly sense impending disaster. Indeed, the inevitable accident is horrific, but for more than one reason: Henry's mother's last sight is that of her son, inexplicably vanishing — being wiped away from reality, much like sand dissolving through an hourglass — seconds before the crash.

The boy pops back into existence just as unexpectedly, close enough to witness the crash, and tightly hugged by a man who also appears out of nowhere ... and explains that he's Henry's older self. The older man lingers just long enough to assure the boy that everything will work out; he then vanishes as quickly as he materialized.

Leaving his clothes behind.

Young Henry has, for the first time, manifested the ability that will haunt him from this day forward: an uncontrollable "gift" for jumping forward or backward in time. We never see the adolescent Henry again, Rubin's script instead focusing on the man (now Bana) who has come to terms with his "talent" as best he can.