Operation Mincemeat: Very well done

Operation Mincemeat (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for brief war violence, disturbing images and brief profanity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.20.22

World War II has long gifted cinema with a wealth of heroic, unusual and downright astonishing stories … but none is more bizarre or audacious than this one.

 

Having been fully briefed about the necessary parameters, North London coroner
Bentley Purchase (Paul Ritter, center) pulls out a cadaver that might suit the requirements
of Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth, far right) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen).

In early 1943, the Allies desperately sought a means to break the Nazi stranglehold on mainland Europe, but the only feasible route appeared to be invading Sicily and then pushing northward. Unfortunately, this lone option was tooobvious; Hitler also recognized it as the likely approach, and was fully prepared to thwart such an effort with the full might of the German army. The loss of Allied lives would have been incalculable.

 

A few years earlier, Lt. Cmdr. Ian Fleming — then assigned to Rear Adm. James Godfrey, head of British naval intelligence — had drafted what came to be known as the “Trout Memo.” (Yes, that Ian Fleming. Seriously.)

 

The memo — “Trout,” as in hoping to fool the Nazis hook, line and sinker — contained 54 suggested schemes designed to deceive the Axis Powers. Item 28 was a macabre ploy that Fleming lifted from 1937’s The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, one of several Inspector Richardson mysteries by British author Basil Thomson.

 

So, consider: A now-obscure novelist gives British naval intelligence the idea for a daring act of real-world espionage duplicity, as proposed by an officer — Fleming — who would go on to create the world’s best-known fictitious secret agent.

 

No surprise, then, that this legendary bit of WWII lore would appeal to director John Madden, who similarly played with the historical line between real and make-believe, in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love. Michelle Ashford’s engaging script is adapted from Ben Macintyre’s meticulously researched 2010 nonfiction bestseller of the same title.

 

The resulting film is fascinating. Ashford has done an impressive job of condensing the many key details, without losing track of the saga’s complexity … and while adding a few fictitious embellishments for dramatic intensity. (I’d argue they were unnecessary, but opinions might differ.)

 

The key players here are barrister-turned-naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth); Royal Air Force flight lieutenant-turned-MI5 counter-intelligence agent Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen); Godfrey (Jason Isaacs), who oversaw what eventually developed into “Operation Mincemeat”; MI5 clerk Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), who played a key role in the scheme; and MI5 head secretary Hester Leggett (Penelope Wilton), whose talent for credible love letters also proved crucial.

 

Scoob: A doggone hoot

Scoob (2020) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for mild suggestive humor and fantasy peril
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.10.20

Scooby-Doo, the nervous Great Dane with a nose for supernatural-style trouble — and a manner of “speaking” borrowed from Astro, on The Jetsons — has covered an amazing amount of territory since solving his first cast back on Sept. 13, 1969.

Our young heroes — from left, Velma, Fred, Shaggy, Daphne and Scooby-Doo — don't
know it yet, but they're about to solve their first mystery.

The character and his human sidekicks have never notbeen ubiquitous on television, thanks to well over a dozen variations on their initial 17-episode run … not to mention numerous direct-to-video films and several (mostly) live-action entries.

It’s safe to say that Scooby-Doo has eclipsed Rin Tin Tin and Lassie as the world’s most famous canine screen hero. (No accident, these days, that we refer to a crime-solving detective’s posse as a “Scooby gang.”)

Director Tony Cervone’s Scoob, debuting on HBO Max and other video-on-demand platforms, is guaranteed to keep the lovable pooch vibrant for additional years to come.

Cervone’s pacing frequently has the frantic intensity of classic Warner Bros. cartoons, and the script — credited to no fewer than six hands — definitely captures the original Scooby vibe, while inserting snarky asides and droll one-liners that’ll keep adults equally entertained. The voice talent is solid, and longtime Saturday morning cartoon fans will have fun spotting all the supporting characters borrowed from other Hanna-Barbera shows.

The film is littered with additional Hanna-Barbera “Easter eggs”; you’ll want to pay careful attention to billboards and street signs.

Scoob also serves as an origin story, of sorts, with a lengthy prolog that shows how a clumsy puppy with hilariously oversized paws chances to meet 10-year-old Shaggy Rogers at California’s Venice Beach. Of course, they bond over a shared sandwich, and thereafter become inseparable best buds.

Halloween arrives shortly thereafter, at which point Shaggy and Scoob meet up with Daphne, Velma and Fred. During a pell-mell attempt to retrieve Shaggy’s bag of Halloween candy from a supposedly haunted house — with Scoob hindering as much as helping — the quintet exposes the actual culprit behind these faux scary doings.

(That’s key; classic Scooby-Doo adventures always seemed to involve dire supernatural events, ultimately revealed — after all manner of pratfalls and red herrings — to be the work of decidedly Earthbound human baddies.)

A Cure for Wellness: Worse than any disease

A Cure for Wellness (2017) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for graphic nudity, rape, profanity, violence and highly disturbing images
By Derrick Bang

File this one under You’ve Got To Be Kidding.

Successful directors with runaway egos are to be feared. Sooner or later, many of them succumb to self-indulgent, often “long-nurtured” vanity projects that defy reason and emerge as ludicrously bloated and self-indulgent. Some badly dent or even ruin careers; others bankrupt studios.

Having been injured under suspicious circumstances, Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) decides
to explore the mysterious sanitarium where none of the resident clients show any
desire to leave.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas stumbled badly, respectively, with 1941 and Howard the Duck. Andy and Lana Wachowski blew their Matrix profits on Speed Racer. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman still get taunted for Ishtar. Eddie Murphy simply didn’t survive the fallout from The Adventures of Pluto Nash; director Renny Harlan suffered the same fate, after Cutthroat Island. Joseph L. Mankiewicz nearly took down Fox, with Cleopatra. Michael Cimino did destroy United Artists, with Heaven’s Gate.

There are many, many more ... and to their company we now can add Gore Verbinski, the arrogant driving force behind A Cure for Wellness.

Savvier Hollywood types should have known better, given that Verbinski already demonstrated his tendency toward wretched excess, with his recent update of The Lone Ranger. But the fact that he also helmed the first three wildly successful Pirates of the Caribbean installments apparently blinded Those In Charge to all the red flags that should have been waving, from their first glimpse of this new project’s misbegotten script.

I’ve a theory that “high-class horror” is an oxymoron. Successfully scary movies, by their very nature, seem to demand modest (even microscopic) budgets and the exhilarating momentum that results from ground-level, guerrilla-style filmmaking; this has been true ever since producer Val Lewton chaperoned his B-unit shockers for RKO Pictures, back in the 1940s.

Commercial success for such endeavors often is a happy surprise, rather than a specific goal.

But the moment an A-list director, armed with a prestige budget, tries to make a “serious” fright flick ... the resulting flop almost is inevitable. See Exhibit A: Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. Oh, it’s beautiful to look at, and Kubrick gets points for instilling a creepy atmosphere ... but scary? Hardly. Unintentionally funny, perhaps, but not terrifying; it’s too antiseptic and soulless to induce nightmares.

Which brings us to A Cure for Wellness, and its ponderous, insufferably calculated pretense of horror. Verbinski didn’t merely direct this bloated travesty; he also co-wrote the original script with Justin Haythe, who also collaborated on The Lone Ranger. (Ahem.) The result gets off to a reasonably promising start — to be fair — but quickly succumbs to laborious, overwrought theatrics and self-indulgently arty tableaus.

The Infiltrator: One of the greatest roles ever played

The Infiltrator (2016) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for strong violence, profanity, sexual candor and drug content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.15.16

Truth isn’t merely stranger than fiction; it’s also a lot scarier.

When the undercover Bob Mazur (Bryan Cranston, right) finally gains an audience with
Colombian drug cartel overlords, he's surprised to discover that he first must pass some
sort of dangerous "initiation" overseen by Rudy Ambrecht (Carsten Hayes, left).

U.S. Customs operative Robert “Bob” Mazur spent years as a deep undercover agent in the 1980s, climactically building an identity as a high-level money launderer for senior members of several Colombian drug cartels. The operation ultimately led to one of the largest busts in U.S. history: 100 drug traffickers and money launderers arrested, along with the seizure of 3,200 pounds of cocaine and roughly $100 million in cash and assets.

Perhaps more dramatically, it brought about the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, at the time the world’s seventh largest privately held financial institution, with assets of $20 billion. It also was one of the world’s largest money-laundering banks.

Remember BCCI? Anybody involved with the banking industry recalls full well how transaction reporting regulations changed, almost overnight, in the wake of this scandal.

Mazur detailed his experiences in a riveting 2009 memoir, The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel. That book, in turn, has been transformed into an equally compelling film by director Brad Furman. Screenwriter Ellen Sue Brown’s adaptation is by turns fascinating, suspenseful, terrifying and even mordantly amusing.

The film gets additional dramatic heft from star Bryan Cranston’s impressively nuanced portrayal of Mazur: a performance of delicate subtlety that becomes more persuasive as the narrative moves from one jaw-dropping incident to the next.

And while it’s true that Cranston commands the screen, he has equally superb support from all of the impeccably selected co-stars. This is another film that lends weight to the call for giving casting directors their own Academy Award category, because Gail Stevens found just the right individual for every part.

Perhaps more than anything else, this is a very nervous film. Despite knowing full well that Mazur will survive these events, the suspense is no less intense; plenty of sidebar individuals are vulnerable at every turn, and we’ve ample evidence throughout, of the cold-blooded ferocity of cartel shot-callers.

Fury: Much too angry

Fury (2014) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity and relentless battlefield violence and gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.17.14

Classic World War II movies, absent the cynicism and despair that later infected so many big-screen depictions of the Vietnam quagmire, laced their stories with honor, chivalry, moral fortitude and an absolute respect for the chain of command.

Frightened and badly out of his depth, Norman (Logan Lerman, left) can't imagine that he'd
be of any use to the Sherman tank team led by Wardaddy (Brad Pitt). But this battle-weary
sergeant knows how to inspire his men, even a callow newcomer like Norman, and soon
the kid is executing Nazi scum with the enthusiasm of a seasoned warrior.

The Nazi enemy may have behaved like vicious, amoral swine, but our stalwart boys worked together with courage and righteousness, guided by the innovative strategies of battlefield stalwarts whose ingenuity helped trump sometimes superior forces.

This classic archetype continued for decades thereafter, building to modern classics such as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and HBO’s lavish miniseries, Band of Brothers, both of which gained their power from a rich tapestry of characters about whom we cared very, very deeply.

It would appear that this cinematic model has fallen out of favor.

Writer/director David Ayer’s Fury presents the latter days of the European campaign as the equivalent of an inner-city street fight between drug gangs, with the grunts on our side no better than the animals wearing the Nazi cross. The so-called “good guys” in this unpalatable story seem modeled on the thugs who tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib; early on, in fact, we’re granted a sequence of American GIs behaving just that badly with a captured German soldier.

It’s interesting — carrying this observation even further — that this story’s sole act of genuine kindness, of benevolent altruism, is offered by one of those aforementioned Nazi monsters. We could call it dramatic irony, but I’m not willing to give Ayer that much credit.

Three of the five primary characters in this film are one-dimensional brutes granted only a hiccup of actual characterization: superficial affectations implied solely by nicknames such as Gordo, Bible and Coon-Ass.

(Just in passing, I’d love to declare a moratorium on movies with characters who never seem to have real names, but instead are granted stupid monikers better suited to comic book villains. It has become a tiresome and frankly irritating cliché.)

Our other two protagonists, while graced with a bit more presence and personality, aren’t that much more likable ... but we eventually bond with them, to a degree, solely because we’ve gotta care about somebody in this mean-spirited mess.

And “mean-spirited” is this film’s prevailing tone: no surprise, since Ayer is the enraged scripter of nihilistic cop dramas such as Training Day and End of Watch, and earlier this year wrote and directed the offensively deplorable Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Sabotage. Ayer clearly doesn’t think much of his fellow man, and a little of that contemptuous vitriol goes a long way.

Given this new film’s 134-minute length, that’s a very long way.