See How They Run: A whimsical delight

See How They Run (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for mild violence and fleeting sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

This is way too much fun.

 

Director Tom George’s mischievous period “whodunit within a whodunit” is a valentine to Agatha Christie — and her fans — and a cheeky send-up of theatrical storytelling conventions.

 

Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his fresh-faced associate, Constable Stalker
(Saoirse Ronan), are surprised by the care with which a murder victim has been
placed on a theater stage couch.

Mark Chappell’s tongue-firmly-in-cheek script misses no targets. This is the sort of romp where, if a character laments the “awkwardness” of flashbacks as a plot contrivance, you can bet that the next scene will be a flashback.

Most of the humor is slow-burn: witty, not farcical, in the manner that is uniquely British.

 

Chappell also did his homework. A surprising amount of his narrative’s core details are based on historical fact (and I’ve no doubt viewers will rush to the Internet to determine fact from fiction, after watching this retro charmer).

 

The setting is early 1953, at West End London’s Theatre Royal, as the cast and crew of Christie’s new murder mystery play, The Mousetrap, celebrates its 100th performance. Essential details are supplied by an unseen narrator who, in a nod to 1950’s Sunset Blvd., speaks from beyond the grave.

 

The festivities are cut short both by the drunken antics of boorish, blacklisted American screenwriter Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), and — a bit later — the distressing discovery that one of these folks has been murdered. For real.

 

Cue the arrival of world-weary Scotland Yard Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his eager-beaver rookie, Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan). They find the body propped on the couch of the play’s single-room theater setting.

 

“Staged, so to speak,” Stalker impishly observes.

 

Chappell’s script is full of similarly playful one-liners.

 

The corpus delicti is none other than Köpernick, who — as flashbacks reveal — managed to irritate, annoy, belittle or blackmail just about everybody else. In true Agatha Christie fashion, there’s no shortage of suspects.

The King's Man: A royal good time!

The King's Man (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong, bloody violence, profanity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.24.21

Fans of this series are apt to be mighty surprised — happily, one hopes — by this third entry’s unexpected shift in tone and style.

 

En route to Russia in a private train, Orlando (Ralph Fiennes, far left) shares what he
knows about Grigori Rasputin, while, from left, Shola (Djimon Hounsou),
Conrad (Harris Dickinson) and Polly (Gemma Arterton) listen attentively.

Whereas 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and 2017’s Kingsman: Golden Circle are deranged, profane and gleefully over-the-top comic book burlesques, this new entry is only mildly naughty. It’s more accurately a sly bit of alternate history, with director/co-scripter Matthew Vaughn — and co-writer Karl Gajdusek — setting their cheeky Kingsman origin story against the very real horrors of World War I.

The tone is more akin to a Golden Age classic such as 1939’s Gunga Din … albeit with dollops of 21st century hyper-violence.

 

Key events are rigorously accurate: from the triggering assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which set the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) against the Triple Entente (France, Russia and Britain); to the ghastly horrors of trench warfare that claimed the lives of an estimated 9 million soldiers.

 

Other films have depicted the latter more authentically — director Sam Mendes’ 1917 immediately comes to mind — but Vaughn, Gajdusek and production designer Darren Gilford convincingly establish a similarly grim tableau. One sequence, achieved with some clever CGI, is particularly effective: a bit of time-lapse legerdemain that reveals the impact of two years’ of war, as a pastoral Western European landscape transforms into a barren wasteland laden with mutilated corpses.

 

But this comes a bit later. The conceit of Vaughn and Gajdusek’s script is that this nation-shattering abattoir was orchestrated clandestinely, behind the scenes, by a nefarious cabal whose many members include Russia’s mad monk, Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans). Their leader, known only as The Shepherd — he remains unseen, as with the early 1960s machinations of James Bond’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld — is motivated by an enraged hatred of England, for its centuries-old repression of Scotland.

 

Meanwhile…

 

Following a brief 1902 prologue set during South Africa’s Boer War, during which we meet Orlando, the Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), and his young son Conrad (Alexander Shaw), the story flashes forward a dozen years. Fiennes excels at this sort of refined, crisply authoritative figure; Orlando is unapologetically aristocratic but also mindful of his station, and the need to behave honorably for the common good.

 

As a result of events during that prologue, he’s also a devoted pacifist: a philosophy that increasingly puts him at odds with the impetuous Conrad (now played by Harris Dickinson), who — like so many young men of his era — wishes to prove his bravery in “glorious battle.”

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil — Maladroit

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) • View trailer 
1.5 stars. Rated PG, despite considerable violence and heartbreaking content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.18.19

Wow. Genocide, in a (supposedly) family-friendly Disney fantasy?

What’s next? Gang rape? Child mutilation?

Uncle Walt must be spinning in his grave.

En route to a lavish dinner designed to acquaint Maleficent (Angelina Jolie, center) with
her future in-laws, Aurora (Elle Fanning) and Diaval (Sam Riley) can't help thinking that
this might be a very, very bad idea.

What were these people thinking?

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is a tasteless, mean-spirited, Frankenstein’s monster of a movie: a textbook example of what happens when art is sacrificed on the altar of crass corporate commercialism. It follows 2014’s Maleficent, Disney’s response to Wicked, the stage play with its then-novel origin story of Dorothy Gale’s Wicked Witch of the West. Maleficent, in turn, was the origin story of the evil sorceress who bedeviled Aurora (aka Briar Rose) in Sleeping Beauty.

Which was a reasonable concept, the first time. But scripters Linda Woolverton, Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster have broken faith with the original fairy tale here — indeed, the entire genre — by blending cutesy-poo creatures with horrific violence, in service of a thoroughly unsubtle refrain of “We’ve got to overlook our differences, in order to get along.”

Real-world resonance notwithstanding, that lecture is getting very tiresome.

On top of which, the writers have blatantly borrowed (read: stolen) concepts from all manner of other, far superior fantasy sagas. The result is kitchen-sink overkill, as if dazzling us with a cornucopia of cheerful, colorful beasties will compensate for a story that becomes increasingly grim, depressing and sadistic.

And this is supposed to be for children? The PG rating is reprehensible, and a total lie. Disney should be ashamed.

Perhaps recognizing the folly of the entire production, most of the featured performers don’t bother acting. Angelina Jolie’s line readings are atrocious. Her Maleficent, intended to be intimidating, never rises above the smirking insolence of a star who recognizes that she’s wasting her time (and ours). Elle Fanning goes too far in the other direction; her Aurora is breathlessly melodramatic, her eyes forever wide with overwrought angst.

Harris Dickinson’s Prince Philip is no more than a stalwart hunk; his wooden insincerity is laughably inept. And the three actresses playing the colorful good fairies — transformed here into pixies dubbed Knotgrass (Imelda Staunton), Flittle (Lesley Manville) and Thistlewit (Juno Temple) — are just plain annoying.

Given that most of these actors have done superior work elsewhere, director Joachim Rønning deserves the blame for their poor performances here. He has no feeling for this material, having previously helmed only grim historical sagas — Max Manus: Man of War and Kon-Tiki — and 2017’s ill-advised Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, a similar big-budget franchise flop.