Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in Black Bag
“You know which reviews of yours I really like?” asked a friend not long ago. “The short ones.”
Taking that as a compliment for my more succinct pieces and not as the insult it almost certainly was, here are 300-word takes on the half-dozen movies I saw between Thursday and Sunday. They're presented in order of viewing, and preceded by five-word synopses that might, in effect, provide greater impetus to see or ignore said films than the subsequent wordage ever could.
BLACK BAG
The gist: Spy vs. Spy, London edition. The result: For all of his myriad other gifts, Steven Soderbergh has to be one of the least dawdling directors in Hollywood history. Within the first five minutes of his and screenwriter David Koepp's new espionage thriller, our protagonist George Woodhouse (a milquetoast hottie played by Michael Fassbender) is alerted to the film-sustaining conundrum: There's a mole lurking in England's Government Communications Headquarters, and one of the five potential traitors is George's fellow-spy wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). But Soderbergh proves time-conscious in other ways, too. Charged with ferreting out the guilty party, George's first act of sleuthing would be the climax of any other movie of this type: He arranges a dinner with his spouse and the four additional suspects (the uniformly superb Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page), and spikes one of the meal's courses with truth serum. This juicy, diabolically enjoyable free-for-all included, the entirety of Soderbergh's smart and speedy entertainment clocks in at a crisp 94 minutes. And in perhaps the most welcome example of the director's efficiency, his latest made its national debut a mere seven weeks after Soderbergh's and Koepp's clever ghost story Presence hit theaters; the pair must've sensed, correctly, that some of us were already getting antsy for another collaboration. Gratifyingly lean and admirably mean, Black Bag is full to bursting with sequences you'll want to watch a second and third time … preferably when it begins streaming, as the subtitles feature will come in handy during the more indecipherable British conversation. My only moderate complaint, meanwhile, is actually something of a compliment, because while the plot is dependent on our buying the long-term marital love between George and Kathryn, the leads seem less convincingly enamored than mutually starstruck. But this is Fassbender and Blanchett we're talking about. Who could blame them?
NOVOCAINE
The gist: Unwitting hero can't feel pain. The result: My primary fear entering directors Dan Berk's and Robert Olsen's violent action comedy was that it would be a one-joke affair, so I guess I'm relieved to be wrong. Unfortunately, the other jokes don't really play. Screenwriter Lars Jacobsen's central conceit finds a San Diego bank's nervous, timid assistant manager (Jack Quaid's Nathan Caine) becoming a proactive avenger after his new girlfriend Sherry (Amber Midthunder) is abducted during a bank heist. The comic twist finds Nathan suffering from the legitimate medical condition CIPA (“congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis”), which means that if attacked, like the Weebles of old, he'll wobble, but he won't fall down. This is a completely acceptable excuse for viscera-heavy cineplex nonsense, and in Quaid, Berk and Olsen have a thoroughly ingratiating lead. Effortlessly winning, Quaid provides just the right notes of panicked spontaneity, and he's very funny when required to fake the sensation of having his fingernails forcibly extracted. Yet despite the narrative's inherent silliness, it still doesn't make sense that the tumult Nathan's body suffers would leave him conscious; even if he can't feel it, wouldn't massive blood loss and visibly broken bones lead to a shut-down of some kind? I also didn't get the comedy behind Nathan's routine apologies to the goons he's hurting (isn't he supposed to be pissed at these guys?), nor, as ever, the hangdog moroseness of Matt Walsh, cast here as SDPD partner to the infinitely more welcome Batty Gabriel. And can something be done, in the future, to reign in Jack's grinning son Ray Nicholson? He was perfect in his mini-role in Smile 2, but a little of him is proving to go an awfully long way. Quaid aside, I didn't need Novocaine – but I did crave some kind of sedative to get through Nicholson's unconscionable mugging.
THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE
The gist: Zombie apocalypse meets sci-fi slapstick. The result: Because Novocaine so frequently goes for the obvious, it wasn't a surprise when the movie opened with R.E.M.'s “Everybody Hurts” on the soundtrack. It was a significant surprise, however, when one of the band's tunes found its way into the first-ever fully animated and theatrically released Looney Tunes feature … though given the movie's title, I probably should've predicted that one specific R.E.M. hit would turn up somewhere. As a lifelong fan of the cartoon franchise who hated the Space Jams and bristles at all attempts to modernize the LT format, I winced at the R.E.M., and the Bryan Adams needle drop, and Daffy Duck and Porky Pig acting as 21st-century influencers and TikTok stars. Yet thankfully, over the course of an hour-and-a-half, director Pete Browngardt and his 11 (!!!) credited screenwriters keep such irritants to a distinct minimum. All told, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is a topnotch celebration of the joys of 2D animation, and particularly the hyperactive delights of its proudly un-PC heroes. (Picture a modern-day pitch meeting – “So there's this stuttering pig and lisping duck ...” – that doesn't end with the filmmaker's immediate expulsion.) If they haven't been weaned on the classics, I'm not sure how much the yoots of today will enjoy watching manic besties, newly employed at a bubble-gum factory, save the world from zombified hordes and Peter MacNicol's persnickety alien interloper. We old folks, though, can soak in the oodles of charm, sensational callbacks – I adored hearing Daffy's panicked, plaintive “mother …!” again – and spectacular vocal work by Eric Bauza, whose cadences as Daffy and Porky sound uncannily similar to Mel Blanc's. While I didn't laugh a lot, I smiled consistently, and after LT's full-length big-screen debut, I'm certainly hoping th-th-th-th-that's not all, folks.
OPUS
The gist: Malkovich as deranged pop-star eccentric. The result: In A24's latest slow-burn freakout, a professionally stunted journalist travels to an expansive Utah compound, where she'll hear the first recording in 27 years by a reclusive music icon and cult leader played by John Malkovich. What about that sentence is our chief hint that good times won't be in store? “Compound”? “Cult leader”? “Utah”? Obviously, it's “John Malkovich,” and in writer/director Mark Anthony Green's feature debut, the actor appears to be having the time of his life. He floats about in shimmering caftans and tells charmingly rambling stories (the one involving Muhammad Ali and Chuck Norris is priceless) and sings dreamy pop-synth tunes – really well, actually! – and never stops being enticingly creepy and hypnotically repellent; his Alfred Moretti might be the most ideal John Malkovich role since the guy played John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich. If only the rest of Opus were similarly inspired. It's by no means bad. As in Midsommar, The Menu, Blink Twice, and other recent examples of its type, the send-an-innocent-to-a-debaucherous-playground format works effectively during the film's increasingly unsettling first hour, and thanks to Ayo Edeberi's remarkable naturalism, we're given a funny, relatable, empathetic heroine to rally behind. (Murray Bartlett, Juliette Lewis, Novocaine girlfriend Amber Midthunder, and others give us figures to steadfastly root against.) Yet I would've enjoyed Green's off-putting chiller more if it boasted any genuine mystery – if, as seems entirely plausible for a while, Moretti and his vacantly smiling followers really were just cloistered weirdos whose malevolent intent was merely a figment of the writer's overactive imagination. Now that would be novel. Instead, it all leads to the expected grimness, none of it inventively staged, and the hoped-for climactic bite, while thematically on-point, leaves little mark. This isn't an opus so much as a hook. Banger songs, though.
OMNI LOOP
The gist: Groundhog Day, but way sadder. The result: Even seeing the performer in her most recent major role wasn't quite as much Ayo Edebiri as I'd prefer in my entertainment diet. So after viewing Opus, I sought her out in writer/director Bernardo Britto's sci-fi drama that, following last fall's blink-and-you'll-miss-it Moline engagement, recently began streaming on Hulu. Because Edebiri is the secondary lead, I'm embarrassed it took me so long. Because my unreciprocated soulmate Mary-Louise Parker is the principal lead, I'm mortified it took me so long. In Britto's film, Parker plays Zoya Lowe, a quantum physicist diagnosed with a black hole in her chest. To keep from vanishing into nothingness, she routinely ingests a time-travel pill enabling her to go back five days, always in the hopes of finding a cure. To call this situation contrived, even as speculative science fiction goes, would be a gross understatement. Yet this Groundhog Day for depressives is, in its low-key way, actually rather stunning. Early on, Britto doesn't avoid the inherent comedy, with Parker's glorious deadpan expressing the fundamental ridiculousness of experiencing the same day after day searching for a life-saving solution while convincing Edeberi's research assistant Paula that yes, they have met before. It's when, long before the movie ends, Zoya ultimately accepts the futility of her quest that Omni Loop emerges as truly devastating. Unlike lucky New Yorkers, I wasn't privileged to see Parker in her Tony-winning Proof and The Sound Inside roles. But Zoya feels like the perfect mesh of her brilliant, broken characters in those plays, and in delineating Zoya's impossible journey, Parker is flabbergastingly good: forceful, radiant, complex, and breathtakingly alive. I cried several times simply through the emotional power of her acting. If my own five-day omni loop included a viewing of Parker's work here, I'd likely be on-board with a few thousand cycles.
THE ELECTRIC STATE
The gist: Retro 'bots fight for survival. The result: It would take more words than my self-mandated 300 to adequately detail the plot, let alone the experience, of directors Anthony and Joe Russo's sci-fi action adventure that premiered on Netflix this past weekend and was reportedly budgeted at $320 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever made. I was consequently tempted to avoid all discussion of the particulars and simply type “Why?!” 300 times in a row. Because honestly: Why?! Why is this 1990s-set, vaguely post-apocalyptic human-v.-robots saga – one loosely based on Simon Stålenhag's 2018 graphic novel – so ungainly and ugly-looking given its price tag? Why are we meant to care for our heroes when Millie Bobby Brown is merely dour and unpleasant and Chris Pratt is playing Star-Lord (in knockoff Han Solo attire) for the zillionth time? Why are we asked to shed tears over its manipulative, cornball tale of sibling love when neither the filmmakers nor the actors seem invested in the outcome? Why are we expected to trust a movie that doesn't acknowledge “You broke the treaty, Mr. Peanut!” as a laugh line? Why is that ambulatory Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson, no less) expected to be taken seriously? Why was Anthony Mackie recruited when he was only being employed for a secondhand Kevin Hart impression that sounds more like a third-hand approximation of the Transformer Jazz? Why escalate the already-obscene cost by hiring Stanley Tucci, Ke Huy Quan, Giancarlo Esposito, Brian Cox, Colman Domingo, Alan Tudyk, and Hank Azaria when none of them look or sound happy to be there? And why oh why $320 million?! How could this pathetically dull, visually indistinct time-waster possibly be profitable for Netflix? I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but after seeing The Electric State, those money-laundering hypotheses suddenly don't sound quite so far-fetched.
