BuyBust

 BuyBust is a Philippine movie about a police squad caught behind enemy lines clearly modelled after The Raid. It's a pretty impressive attempt, with a great tone, decent budget and a bunch of cool ideas, but it does stumble pretty badly.

 It takes its time to get to the fireworks factory. We're introduced to the squad mid-training exercise, and it does a good job of establishing the more memorable members: Nina Manigan (Anne Curtis), a loner cop who plays by her own rules, Rico Yatco (mixed martial artist Brandon Vera), an affable mountain of muscle, and Bernie Lacson (Victor Neri,) the rookie leader who's trying to do right by his crew. They're all part of a PDEA squad, a sort of heavy militarized, very heavily armed anti-drugs team.

 They're going after local kingpin Biggie Chen (Arjo Atayde) with the help of turncoat small-time dealer Teban (Alex Calleja). They need to draw Chen out with a fake drug deal so they can bust him (hence the title.) But things get complicated when the meeting ends up taking place at a local Manila slum, a multi-tier shantytown run by criminals.

 So in the squad goes, split into two teams: one of them posing as muscle accompanying Teban and obviously corrupt cop De LaCruz (Lao Rodriguez,) the other in full tactical gear, shadowing them. It's a manifestly ridiculous, poorly-planned operation: Because they are in a heavily-populated, effectively hostile territory, the cops in full tactical armor keep having to effectively kidnap and restrain the people they run across while they try to keep up with their teammates.

 Yes, it's kind of silly, and it doesn't show the PDEA or their methods in a particularly good light, but it's an effective, very tense series of scenes because of course shit is going to hit the fan, but there are so many ways things could go wrong you don't know where the shit is going to come from.

 When chaos inevitably erupts, it does so in a particularly horrifying way. One of the squad gets publicly executed, and then an innocent bystander gets executed as well, in an attempt to draw out the police. This understandably riles up the local populace, and things erupt into a full-on riot, with multiple bands of both criminals and civilians hunting down the police.
 So that's the rest of the movie: police people need to escape the shantytown while everyone is out for their blood. A huge chunk of the film is the fireworks factory.

 Director Erik Matty chooses to go with a horror-adjacent tone, which is absolutely the right call because it helps distinguish his movie from The Raid a little, but it also makes the just-ok action much more exciting. My main issue with the movie is in the way it chose to portray rioting civilians as basically the undead in a zombie movie, and have action scenes where dozens of them are massacred with abandon.
 This is not a situation where the criminals call a bounty on someone or whatever, these people are rightly pissed with a shitty situation. It's a script choice that took away any sympathy I might have had for the police protagonists, even if they're justifiably defending themselves, because it's still done within an action framework where the fights are supposed to be exciting. It's meant as subversion, I think, but as that's the meat of the movie, and we're stuck with these folks as the protagonists, it feels ill-conceived.
 It gives the film a queasy shock factor to, say, stage a fight where one of the mooks is a middle aged matronly type in a headscarf, but it sure as hell isn't very satisfying when she gets stabbed in the face with a broken bottle. Making you queasy is the point, but the movie is so gung-ho about supporting its police troops that it plays like a standard action movie scene. Maybe the subtleties were lost on me, but especially given the politics of the movie, it reeks of not thinking the script through. 

 The script tries to have it both ways. It features a couple of scenes showing how bad the residents have it, and at one point Manigan gets attacked by a little kid with a hammer and she stops her non-lethally. This is treated as a big inflection point that will have CONSEQUENCES, but... whoop-di-do, lady, you didn't kill a child. It's particularly funny because on the previous scene she killed a dozen of the girl's neighbours without batting an eye.
 It gets a little preachy by the end in its condemnations on the violent drug wars enacted by the Philippine authoritarian government (probably for the benefit of thick-headed idiots like myself), but while I may sympathize with the content and recognize how it helps contextualize what came before, it comes as a bit of an infodump close to the end that doesn't really gel with the rest of the movie, especially its monsterification of the poor.

 Besides any conceptual issues, the movie has a huge problem in that the action is well staged but not particularly visceral. There's some variation between gunfights and hand-to-hand, and scuffles are frequent and very bloody, but everything feels a bit stilted and unnatural. This is understandable in the film's undeniable centerpiece, an extended one-take scene that weaves its way across, above and below the slums as Manigan fights her way through a bunch of angry civilians, but most other scenes adopt a very jittery editing style that robs most punches of their power; the horror tone clashing with the movie's more straightforward action leanings.

 A lot of things, not the least a shitload of enthusiasm, do a lot to elevate the action, so I feel like a bit of an asshole when I can't get over the conceptual problems. On the plus side,  the slums are gorgeously shot, and surprisingly colorful. The movie paints horrifying squalor in a sort of John-Wick chic, full of lurid colors and bright neon lights. There are a lot of interesting backdrops to the action, from multi-levelled improvised housing to indoor gardens to flooded alleys.
 The music is great, too; it's not cohesive, but the individual scoring for the scenes is a lot of fun.

 One of the cool thing about genre work (and one of the things that makes it disreputable) is that execution is almost everything. In action, in particular, plots can be recycled, tropes are accepted and even celebrated. Implausibility is waved away and characters and acting can be wooden; It's all part of the fun, as long as the fights are engaging.
 BuyBust doesn't necessarily succeed with its action - if nothing else, it's too drawn out, quantity over quality - but it is a honest, ambitious and enthusiastic attempt to make a homebrewn balls-out action film. Despite the lingering bad taste, I can't help but to like it.

John Wick Chapter 4

 Despite some quibbles with Chapter 2, the sequels to John Wick only went from strength to strength, getting bigger, better, and more complex with each installment. Not bad when you consider that the first film corrected course for how action is portrayed in non-Asian films.

 I have to admit Chapter 4 did not make a great first impression. It starts, like the others, shortly after the events of the previous movie. A fun prologue sets the scene where we catch up with John Wick (Keanu Reeves,) who survived getting shot off a building in fine action movie sequel tradition. Doing martial arts training in front of a a burning triangle on the floor, as you do. Nonsensical but cool.
 That gives way to a horseback chase in the desert that... just consists of John shooting down the people he's chasing. Not an action scene, just a massacre. Turns out John's killing the head of the Table, the chief of Wickaverse's shadowy assassin organization, and that one-sidedness is very deliberate; But that doesn't make the scene any more engaging.

 Then we go for another deep dive into the silly, silly world of wizardry assassining, complete with a new functionary (Clancy Brown, who unfortunately doesn't do a lot more than lend the movie his massively entertaining brand of exasperated gravitas) with his own old-timey badge of office, oversized sand clocks, more official-sounding jargon...
 If I have to be honest, this is my least favorite aspect of the movies. It was great in the first one, where it was background color, but it got tiresome as it took on a lot more screentime, and kind of swallowed Chapter 2. 
 But it's fine! everything is fine. The series has learnt from its mistakes and managed to both embrace its ridiculousness and find a story worth telling set in this world. Just when I got a little bit worried about chapter 4, maybe fifteen minutes in, the movie turns the screws and holy shit I am so completely on board. And the movie just keeps getting better and better from there.

 Soon John Wick is once again going against the world as the Table give plenipotentiary powers and almost unlimited resources to one of its scions, the Marquis, (Bill Skarsgård) to kill the rogue assassin once and for all. The asshole forces one of Wick's old friends, Caine (played by absolute HK legend Donnie Yen) out of retirement, and pulls all sorts of dick moves. A very hissable villain of the worst sort - one who doesn't get his hands dirty.
 But there's a silver lining; As long as Wick meets some stringent conditions, he can challenge the Marquis to a duel, and if he wins, he's fully pardoned and can retire peacefully again. So that becomes the throughline for the movie: Wick needs to jump through some hoops for the duel, with the help of a few choice allies, and meanwhile everyone else tries to kill him. Lovely.

 And all that killing... it's a thing of beauty. The action scenes in previous John Wicks have a deserved place of honour among the best ever, and 3 in particular took such a maximalist, over-the-top approach that any follow up was going to face an uphill battle. But holy fuck does Chapter 4 ever deliver. The action is varied, frequent, hilarious, impeccably performed, and... well, awesome. It's absolutely essential if you even marginally enjoy this sort of thing.

 Just the thought of the stuff the stuntmen were put through makes me wince in sympathy.

 Each and every technical aspect of this movie is carefully crafted. The cinematography is gorgeous (and no wonder; DP is Dan Laustsen, who besides the previous Wicks, has become Guillermo del Toro's go-to DP, and had been the cinematographer in interesting-looking movies including Brotherhood of the Wolf and Mimic.) The music blends with the editing to give the film a slinky, nervous energy, and is full of neat little touches like a music box melding into some diegetic violin playing, and then swelling into the soundtrack.

 And the plot... well, it's more John Wick, just done uncommonly well, with a ton of outlandish characters and weird little touches. The series has accrued some cruft over the years, but mostly it's gained narrative weight, turning a pretty standard revenge/man against the world yarn into this fable of someone who dug himself into a hole, and decided to get out of it by digging deeper into it because it's the only thing he knows how to do. There's all sorts of lovely themes there - brotherhood in arms, honour, and those fucking institutions, man. It's also knowingly ridiculous, and this final installment leans hard on that; it's (intentionally) funny while keeping a mostly straight face, and there are some very, very good jokes here. Chapter 3 should have silenced those people complaining this series takes itself too seriously, but if anyone says that after watching this one... I don't know, man.

 And even when it's being serious... well, these are movies that bluntly state their themes by having characters just blurting them out to each other with maximum gravitas. CONSEQUENCES.
 An acquired taste, for sure. The kind of smartly-made dumb I can completely get behind.

 I could keep on gushing - I left the theater annoyed no one applauds at the cinema any longer; I near floated out, humming with energy.

Much effort is expended in making Donnie Yen look as awesome as possible. I approve.

 There's so much more! The series continues to provide a showcase for action stars from all over the world; Chapter 4, besides giving Donnie Motherfucking Yen almost-coprotagonist status, very generously makes Chilean martial artist Marco Zaror the head henchman, and gives absolute legend Scott Adkins a very juicy, extremely fun character as Killa, possibly the freakiest invention this series has unleashed yet. Joining them and making a huge impression are Shamier Anderson and Rina Sawayama; I was surprised that she's a pop singer with no movie credits- She has great presence and some great action moves.

 It also has one scene which rivals *that* bit in Hard Boiled, a ridiculously awesome, video-game influenced sequence that literally had me slack-jawed for its entire duration. It only took thirty years, folks!

 Ridiculously awesome is about right; Doubt we'll be seeing its like for a while.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

 

 Dreamworks’ take on Puss in Boots was introduced to the world in 2004’s Shrek 2. He was born fully formed – all his trademarks were right there, in his first movie: Antonio Bandera’s raspy, honeyed Pepé-le-Pew-but-Spanish voiceover work, the rampant narcissism, the fluid swashbuckling and stiff cartwheels, and that puppy-eyes scene. Like Shrek himself, he’s a fun creation that has long outstayed his welcome, always trotting out the same tricks in increasingly tired stories and working up a flopsweat while trying make it look effortless.

 He’s been around just about twenty years now, enough to feature in three sequels, one movie of his own, and six seasons of Dreamwork’s traditionally crummy tv series. He’s earned a quieter, more contemplative movie.

 Puss in Boots – The Last Wish… is kind of what that is. As much as its studio will allow, at least. Dreamworks have always chased Pixar’s cred with parents, that elusive quality of being equally entertaining and engaging for kids and adults; But they have also always been terrified of losing the children on the way. The result is almost always a (varyingly) mature plot delivered while all the characters over-emote and manically mug at the audience in panto performances that heavily feature the “Dreamworks face” (which this movie is chock-full of) and deploy jokes and action setpieces where quantity, not quality, is prioritized.

 The Last Wish succeeds in telling a coherent story with well-integrated themes, which is great. Unfortunately it does so while doing all the things described in the paragraph above. More damningly, it’s also, to put it bluntly, pretty fucking unfunny: the ratio of gags that land is shockingly low, and there’s a heavy whiff of formula to the proceeds. Everything is played safe, with a ton of zany hijinks to help parents babysit their toddlers.

 (It's not all bad, though; a death montage is mined for easy but genuine laughs, and there's a delightful running gag with a Jiminy Cricket spoof voiced by Kevin McCann.)

 Also good: the premise. Puss has recklessly endangered himself to become a larger-than-life adventurer, but now he’s on his last life… and he’s been targeted by a seemingly invincible, unstoppable, and very effectively scary wolf (voice of Wagner Moura from the Tropa de Elite films).
 Defeated and disheartened, Puss gives up and retires to live with a cat lady.

Elite wolf

 While there, he’s embroiled in the search for a wishing star he realizes can give him back all of his spent lives and recover his mojo. So he joins up with old Flame Kitty Softpaws (ugh, that name! Voiced by Salma Hayek) and a pathologically perky mutt (Harvey Guillén) in a race against other parties out to get the star for themselves. Arrayed against team Puss: Goldilocks (Florence Pugh), the three bears (Ray Winstone! And also Olivia Colman and Samson Kayo) and the film's heavy, amoral pie entrepreneur Jack Horner (John Mulaney, the movie's most overtly Shrek-like  conceit).

 Perrito, Harvey Guillen’s character, is a good stand-in for the movie itself. On the one hand he seems algorithmically generated, the sort of character hacky movies cynically deploy to inject ‘feels’ to the proceeds. And most of his attempts at humour are pretty lame. On the other hand… well, it’s hard to deny the power of a scene where Perrito finally fulfils his goal to be a comfort dog, or when he jokes about his horrific backstory. He’s there to hit specific formula bits, but it’s done with enough skill and feeling that, depending on how much you buy into the movie, it’s forgivable.

Big Monkey Island energy here

 Predictable but enjoyable, in other words... depending on your tolerance for this sort of thing. Well crafted, even if it relies heavily on pre-fab script formulas.
 And it has a secret weapon in its art style, which is often drop-dead gorgeous. Working within the framework set out by 2018’s Spiderman: Into the Multiverse, it uses variable framerates and rendering styles -often mixed within the same scene- to generate some beautiful and visually striking setpieces. The art direction is top-notch, with some beautiful painterly backdrops and action.
 If nothing else, that alone makes it worth a watch.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

 There was a tiny window a few years back where WB seemed to give up with its DC cinematic universe.

 Having put out the most joyless crap possible with the movies leading up to (and possibly including, I never bothered to watch it) The Justice League, the next few that trickled out were a lot more interesting than most cogs set to fill out a function in a five-year phase or whatever usually are.

 I may not be a huge fan of either of the Wonder Women, but they do what they want to successfully - and in the case of the second one, it sets the movie in the eighties not just as a gimmick, but in an attempt to say something meaningful (if a bit shallow); That's worthy of respect. Aquaman is the most joyful, exuberant superhero movie this side of Into The Multiverse. Suicide Squad showed what James Gunn could do if given freedom to follow his batshit muse. The Joker is an uninspired mishmash of stolen stuff, and The Batman (2022) is a terrible, terrible movie, but they both at least have the grace not to give a single fuck about any continuity concerns. And Shazam!... You know how Superhero movies will often position themselves as belonging to a different genre? Like Antman being a heist movie, Multiverse of Madness being a Sam Raimi movie, etc. etc.?

 Shazam! is one of the very few of those that actually does justice to its adopted genre. It splits the difference between your standard superheroics and a teen comedy, and it does it with aplomb and plenty of great jokes.

 In any case, that period of the DC history is drawing into a close. No way to know how its new incarnation will go, but I doubt that we'll get a slate of movies with so much personality and that are allowed to... be themselves to this degree. It's a shame this 'no adult supervision' period had to close out with two of the most bog-standard superhero movies imaginable - first Black Adam, and now the Shazam sequel, which unfortunately loses most of what made the first one unique.

 It's a More-is-More-minded sequel, and it suffers for it. Overstuffed to the gills, it doesn't have space for nuance or character moments. Much like on those Marvel movies that mash together a dozen superheroes, everyone pretty much shouts out their character motivations and things happen because the plot dictates they must instead of any organic buildup.

 We begin where Shazam! ended, with Billy Batson (Asher Angel) now trying to lead a whole family of superheroes who are the laughing stock of his native Philadelphia. He's struggling with impostor syndrome (we know this because a pediatrician tells him, point blank, 'you suffer from impostor's syndrome!' and with getting his superpowered siblings to work as a team.

 Meanwhile, a trio of demigoddesses (played by Lucy Liu, Helen Mirren, and another one that's kept secret for a little bit) recover a mcguffin and start wreaking havoc, and Billy's brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) has the most unconvincing possible meet cute with a stunningly beautiful new student Ann (Rachel Zegler). Will a bundle of loose plot elements connect in the dumbest, most contrived way possible? Well, yes; this is a movie where an emotional beat is set early on when Mom (Marta Milans) makes a sadface when Billy calls her by her name instead of calling her mom. All T's are crossed, all I's are dotted in the hackiest way possible.

 Not that it's a complete loss. The villains turn out to be the Hesperides, and their motivation is a rather clever play on the Shazam origin story. This also gives the film license to pepper the film with mythological beasties; shame the one with the most screentime is a pretty generic-looking dragon.

 The humor is also a mixed bag, but hits enough of its marks that it doesn't leave a horrible taste behind. Shazam is played by Zachary Levi with a teen-like complete lack of filters, and is a pretty hilarious creation even when going for low-hanging fruit.

 As busy as the movie gets, it always remembers to be a comedy first, which might be its one saving grace. Loud, dumb, funny is one adjective better than how these things tend to go.

Jurassic World: Dominion

  The second Jurassic World movie was an unexpected amount of (extremely dumb) fun, and it made me kind of wonder if the third one in this new trilogy might be any good, especially since there were some good bits in the trailers for it.

 No, it is not good. It is bad. It is fucking bad. It is the worst thing I've seen since Glass, and honestly I'm pretty confident in saying this is way worse than that. It is a cynical, hacky piece of shit where you can feel the contempt the writers have for the audience in every beat of it's cockamamie plot or every worthless utterance of its shitty characters.

 Either the strains of directing and writing were too much for Colin Trevorrow to apply the modicum of fun he applied to Fallen Kingdom's script, or maybe I forgave it too much because that was directed by J. A. Bayona, who is that much better at infusing the inane story with an energy and beauty undeserved by the material... I don't know, and at this point I don't care. This is pure shit, and some cool dinosaur bits can only mitigate that to a small degree.

This guy (or gal). This is one of the folks that slightly mitigate the overwhelming turdosity.

 So yeah, I guess it's safe to say I didn't like it! And I really don't feel like giving a movie I've wasted two and a half hours of my life to more time, so this will be quick and hastily written because this deserves much, much less than that.

 Here, let me illustrate just how bad this is. The two non-entities played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (imagine two decent genre actors getting to inhabit two characters as the protagonists for three whole movies - eight or so hour's worth of material! and not making the least impression other than an annoyed 'ugh, these guys again?' whenever they appear...) Anyhow, they've recently arrived at Malta looking for their daughter. Malta has, Wikipedia informs me, just over half a million inhabitants, and they home in on an illegal underground dinosaur market because that's a thing now, which, ok, that's cool.
 So Pratt and Howard are looking for their daughter, who for blah blah shit plot reasons was abducted by a big company. Bryce Dallas Howard literally goes up to a random stranger - literally no reason to chose her over the other hundred or so people in the market - and it turns out... it's a smuggler with a heart of gold that happened to see her daughter mid-abduction and feels guilty about it. One of the maybe dozen people who know anything about her on the whole island.

 You hear that? That, my friend, is the sound of the writers not giving a fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

 And that's what we're dealing with here. Shitty basic contrivances like this are basically what drive the plot forward. The action is deeply mediocre, there are no stakes because this movie is terrified of killing even tertiary sympathetic characters (guess Trevorrow misinterpreted why people disliked the childminder's death on part one). So the dinosaurs are as a result not scary, because they can't kill anyone unless they're evil.

 Yes, they bring back the characters from the one movie in the franchise everyone likes, except well, now they have to work with Trevorrow's lines and the b-plot of a movie that doesn't have much of a main plot in the first place. Goldblum is just let loose and allowed to be Goldblum, which in another movie would be lazy and distracting, but here at least his (what I'm guessing are) ad libs are kind of better (not by much) than any of the material anyone else gets. Poor Sam Neill is absolutely terrible, overemoting and mugging like an idiot, and given the general downturn in everyone else's acting quality, I'm sure as hell not blaming him.

 There are some bright spots. The movie is bookended by some neat vignettes of dinosaurs not-so-gracefully integrating with our modern ecosystems, and that's by far the best part of the movie, all ten minutes of it. There's a really good scene where Dallas-Howard is slow-chased by a hairy, fingernaily dinosaur that was really well done, I guess Trevorrow expended most of his talent in composing that scene. The Malta bit, which I was looking forward to was a major disappointment, an extended action scene that tries to crib Mission Impossible and has some cool concepts but fails because, well, to be kind, it's not directed by someone as capable as Christopher McQuarrie, and the way it develops is stupid as the rest of this turgid mess.
 Oh, I did like when the shaggy/fingernaily dinosaur teams up with a T-Rex at the end to take out a bigger dinosaur [umm... spoilers!] That's the type of stupid, stupid shit I can get behind. And also, because the budget for this is around a cubic shit-ton of dollars, there's a bunch of really nice shots, both CGI and some good photography.

 But seriously? Just avoid this shit. Avoid it like the fucking plague. I believe in redemption, but I'm sure as hell not giving this motherfucker Colin Trevorrow another chance to waste my money and time unless the waters have been well and truly tested by viewers braver than me.

Jung_e

  We're zero out of two on our success rate for Netflix Asian Sci-Fi extravaganzas. Jung_e is a very different proposition from Warrior of Future, though- it's meant to be a classier, more cerebral take on some pretty thorny issues, skimming a bit from a relatively new subgenre of sci-fi that mines horror from the subjective experiences of conscience uploads.

 It unfortunately fails spectacularly at grounding any of its ideas or assembling any sort of interesting argument. This is not decent sci fi, in other words, but it also fails at a more fundamental level - it's not even a compelling or interesting story. Writer/director Yeon Sang-ho (he of the really fun Train to Busan) has the bones of something worthwhile, but he seems more interested in mining cheap sentiment out the elements in play than in exploring them in any worthwhile way.

 So- what is it about? Well, it's the future, and everything's gone to shit because climate change. Humanity spread out to a space stations that immediately decided to go to space war with each other. At one point early in the war, lone mercenary/superhero soldier Captain Yun (Kim Hyun-joo) had the chance to end the war but she fucked up, so as the movie starts the war's been going on for decades.

My screencap plugin crapped out, so here's a promotional still.

 Captain Yun survived that mission, but was left in a coma. Some time later a corporation called Kronoid approached her family and got them to sign a contract for the rights to upload her brain and effectively 'own' that copy. A couple of decades later they decide to clone her conscience and have her run simulations of that final mission on her because apparently if she finishes it... something? (This is a deeply stupid movie that not only paints everything with the broadest of strokes, it also makes several YA-fiction-level conceptual leaps, so bear with me).

 They assign her daughter Seo-Hyun (Park So-yi) to run the project. Because there's no way that could cause any problems, right? In any case, Seo-Hyun is determined to restore her mother's honor in the eyes of her people, so at least there's a motivation there.
 But Kronoid is a private corporation, and they're driven by the bottom line. Also, they treat Captain Yun's cloned consciences as an object they can torture or do whatever they want to at will. So we get treated to a lot of instances of "Hey, look how horrible this obviously horrible thing is!". And the science of it... ah, hell. You get colour-coded emotions taking over percentages of the brain, it's that level of talking down to the audience. Basic; really fucking basic bullshit.

 On one hand Jung_e is trying (and failing) to juggle these high-level ideas, but it's also an action movie, so we're treated to many replays of Catain Yun's botched mission, and everything gets wrapped up in a big, explosive finale. There are a lot of fun action beats - I like the quadruped tank with wheels, or the many fun uses of a grappling hook (games have known grappling hooks are awesome since at least Bionic Commando, why's it taking movies so long to recognize this?)
 Unfortunately the action scenes, while plentiful, are not enough to save the movie. I didn't find them particularly compelling: the camera moves are energetic, but the editing is a bit choppy and everything ends up feeling a bit disjointed and drained of momentum. The budget is also not quite up to what it's trying to do- This is clear early on, whenever you get any exterior shots of a flooded city, and doubly so by the end, where the all-action climax features more CGI than anything solid. (The budget is about a third of Warrior of Future's, for reference.) 

 Don't even get me started on the deeply manipulative maudlin streak running through this thing, which is so ridiculously contrived it had me laughing out loud several times. 
 I tried to like this, I really did, but... well, there's not much here to like. Bits and pieces, like how they portray androids being shut down or how a suave dipshit talks a big game and then breaks down when he has to give a presentation. The rest is a very disappointing, boring mess.

Cocaine Bear

 So: back in the 80s a plane had to jettison a bunch of plastic containers of cocaine over the Georgia wilderness. A bear got its paws on it and consumed a hell of a lot, and soon died of overdose. It was dubbed Pablo Escobear and Cokey the Bear by the media, which was in fine punning form those days.

  And... that's it, that's the whole story. 'Based on true events' is maybe a stretch, then, for a movie that chronicles Cokie's fictional drug-fuelled rampage across the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. But that's fine; one of the movie's considerable charms is that it doesn't give a fuck about propriety; it's a gleefully amoral tale that manages to clear the (very low) bar set by gimmick movies by nailing the gimmick, with some bonus points for displaying a very enjoyable mean streak. Yes, it's a lot better than Snakes on a Plane. Not that that's saying much, but still.

 It's not all smooth sailing. A lot of the film's humor is character based, with such gems as sensitive man that keeps crying all the time (Alden Ehrenreich) or unattractive older people flirting and trying to get it on (Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Margo Martindale; Martindale, always a welcome presence, is so good that she almost pulls it off.)

 And so on. Some of these are fun - like when two middle schoolers dare each other to try the cocaine and end up eating it as if it was sugar, or when a bunch of yokel petty criminals pick a fight with someone they really shouldn't; But the script keeps throwing 'wacky' traits and situations at the characters with no real payoff. It's all a bit too broad, too precious and... well, mostly not funny at all.

 So all these characters converge on the park for different reasons: the two kids are there because one of them wants to paint a waterfall (it's explained, a little, but seriously... this script!) A young nurse (Keri Russell) is there because she's one of the kids' mom, and she enlists Martindale's ranger and her crush to help on the search. Then you get a couple of mobsters sent to recover the drugs (Ehrenreich and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) by their boss (Ray Liotta, in one of his last completed roles) who's too hands-on to stay away from the action, a couple police officers, some paramedics, the trio of yokel teen delinquents, and some hitchhikers to bulk up the body count.

 There's not much of a plot here: the nurse is looking for her kid, the mobsters are looking for the drugs, a cop is looking for the mobsters, and all the while the C-bear is going around killing everyone as she hunts for more coke. That's it. Everyone gets given a reason to be there, but incident does not necessarily equal either story or drama, or in this case, comedy. Luckily for us, while the script mostly fails in making these assorted goofballs funny it does succeed in giving the bear a lot of screentime, and that's where the movie shines.

 You can tell they spent a sizeable part of their budget on Bear-dward SNOW-den, and rightly so; She's a brilliant WETA creation that's both scary and pretty damn funny. And the script lives up to its brilliant/dumbass premise whenever she's on, having her [SPOILERS!] do a line of coke off a severed limb or be resurrected, Popeye-like, when a cocaine packet shatters and sprinkles her with magic dust. Or just by having her zip around like greased lightning whenever she detects cocaine anywhere.

 I was a little worried about the gore, as the first few deaths are pretty tame, with maybe the oddly bloodless severed limb (I hate that!) But pretty soon there's a very chunky headsplosion, and most deaths after that are a lot better. Director Elizabeth Banks (a well-known actress who's been on a shit-ton of movies in the last twenty years) does great by the material, injecting a lot of energy into the proceeds even when the script hangs her out to dry.

 Most of the movie's missteps (IE, the non-ursine comedy bits) are front-loaded; It gets a whole lot better as soon as the bear is given more to do. It's not going to blow (ha!) anyone's mind, but god knows they could have half-assed it and they didn't. It does exactly what it says in the tin, and thankfully it doesn't just call it a day there.

Knock at the cabin

 A little girl (Kristen Cui) is catching grasshoppers in the woods* when she notices a huge man nearby (Dave Bautista). The man introduces himself as Leonard, and after some tense awkwardness, he manages to ingratiate himself enough to gain the girl's trust. Then he starts asking pointed questions about what the girl is doing, about her parents, about the cabin they're in... and then his friends arrive: three more adults, wielding hand-made weapons (Rupert Grint, Abby Quinn and Nikki Amuka-Bird.)

 It's a very tense scene. Director M. Night Shyamalan adds some unnecessary Dutch angles, a rare bad decision from someone known for his formal mastery, but thankfully they're an anomaly - the rest of the movie is beautifully shot. Most of the dialog comes almost verbatim from the novel the movie is based on (Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the Woods,) so that's another hurdle out of the way. It's some of the most effective filmmaking Shyamalan has done in ages, and I'm happy to say he mostly keeps up the good job. And while he takes his liberties with the source material, he manages to wrangle a good story out of it.

 That's sadly not been a given for a very long time. I love the guy - he's made my all-time favorite superhero movie, and a couple other films that I rate pretty highly. (Also: the very worst superhero movie.) And seriously, even at his worst the dude can still direct beautifully. His stuff will always be at least interesting.

 But it's not really a hot take that he's not always great at the whole storytelling side of things.

 Back to the movie: young Mei runs back to the cabin, which was rented by her dads, Eric (Johnathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and quickly convinces them that they're in danger. Then Leonard and friends attack, staging what's possibly the most apologetic home invasion ever. You see, they're normal people too and don't have anything against Eric, Andrew and Mei. But a higher power has contacted them and given them a very important mission: the end of days is coming, and unless the family does something horrible of their own free will, the world is going to end.

 It's a weird, but compelling premise - most of the movie (and the book) is basically a discussion between these two groups of seemingly reasonable people, each trying to get the other to see what they consider a basic, self-evident truth.

 Because Mei's family is being held against their will, you get a lot of tension, escape attempts, and maybe a side of what seems like Stockholm syndrome. And because this is a horror movie, there are some gruesome twists and a possible metaphysical turn.

 The acting is mostly superb, especially Dave Bautista as someone who's trying to do his utmost to be the voice of reason in very unreasonable circumstances, and his co-home invader Nikki Amuka-Bird who seems just as terrified as the people she's terrorizing. Shyamalan and co-writer Steve Desmond have pivoted a very bleak and unsparingly brutal book into a 15-rating thriller that keeps the violence short and mostly off-screen, which is probably the right call to make the movie commercially viable (though I can still dream about the Pascal Laughier adaptation).

 It's a very faithful adaptation, too, at least until it diverges for the ending. Can't say I found it wholly satisfying, and it was a bit of a letdown after an almost stellar, suspenseful first hour. But it's an interesting take on the material, and it works: it's fair to say Shyamalan has made the material his, seeing how his ending ties into preoccupations he's grappled with in his movies as far back as my beloved Unbreakable. Honestly, I'd rather have that than an uninspired faithful-to-the-letter approach.

 It also plays a neat trick on people who know the novel, mining a ridiculous amount of tension out of an impending event that never happens. Well played.