In the Land of Saints and Sinners

 A solid action/thriller set in Ireland at the height of The Troubles, In the Land of Saints and Sinners is an old-fashioned yarn that patiently positions Finbar, a recently retired contract killer (Liam Neeson, playing an Irish variation of his usual melancholy badass widower) in a collision course with a cell of IRA terrorists.

 Finbar is based off the sleepy town of Glencolmcille, where he takes orders from a local handler (Colm Meaney) and when he's not off killing people, he spends his days palling around with the local Garda (Ciarán Hinds) and his neighbour (Niamh Cusack).

 Early on he takes a contract where his 'customer' waxes philosophical in the face of death. Finbar goes through with the hit, but when he gets back he hands in his resignation and retires to do gardening and, he hopes, some good for the community.

 But you know how retirement usually goes for hitmen. Here it's not the criminal underworld that reaches back for him - instead, he notices that a little girl in the community is being abused. He quickly figures out that the culprit is one Curtis (Desmond Eastwood), and he resolves to come out of retirement temporarily to rid the world of the one asshole.

 It doesn't go smoothly, and Finbar has to be rescued by another hitman (Jack Gleeson, very funny and perfectly cast as a the very image of a 70's sociopath) who was keeping an eye on him. Even worse, the target happens to be the brother of one Doireann (Kerry Condon), the leader of an IRA cell that's gone to ground after a bombing that had a lot of collateral damage back in Dublin.

 Doireann starts shaking heaven and earth to find out what happened to her brother, and it doesn't take her long to find a trail that leads back to Finbar. So it's down to him to resolve the situation while keeping the damage contained. Not an easy ask when dealing with a bunch of terrorists with access to explosives.

 It's a simple story, well crafted, and magnificently acted. Condon makes for a fierce, unpredictable villain, and Neeson... well, it's easy to make fun of him for playing to type, but there's a reason he's allowed to do it time and time again. He's particularly soulful here, and there's something incredibly appealing to how he's trying to stave off his crushing world-weariness by trying to do some good, and his disappointment when it leads to more violence. The script (by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane) has a lot of Western overtones (Finbar literally hangs up his rifle!) which are underlined by a lovely soundtrack by the Baldenweg siblings. The dialog is excellent all around, with a couple of nice literary references and a surprising amount of pretty affecting grace notes towards the end.

 The action is good, but very straightforward and over with quickly - these are categorically not John-Wick-style assassins. Director Robert Lorenz focuses instead on the escalating tension and small character moments, with precious few stylistic flourishes, but he and cinematographer Tom Stern still manage to capture some very cool images.

 It's not, by design, the sort of movie that'll set the world on fire. But it is very, very satisfying.

Night Swim

 For all the Insidiouses and Get Outs and whatnot, Blumhouse are proud purveyors of schlock - it's right there in the tacky ghost tunnel of a vanity logo they put in front of all their movies. They might do some good every now and then, but their meat and potatoes are basic, gimmicky horror movies that pack in a bunch of jump scares and not much else. Grist for teens and unpicky horror fans.

 That's Night Swim in a nutshell: a tired budget horror offering that's bad enough to be funny a couple of times, but mostly it's just aggressively mediocre. Writer/Director Bryce McGuire expands on his 2014 3-minute short with an admirably weird evil-wishing-well-type narrative thread, but he struggles with plotting and characters, and with the Blumhouse mandate to keep the jump scares coming.

  We first meet the people-eating pool in a cold open set in the 90s where it kills a little girl. This establishes a few of its tricks; it can beckon you with stuff (in this case, a motorboat toy), make you think you see people while you're underwater, and materialize ghouls to keep you underwater.
  Fast forward a few decades, and the Wallers move into the same house. The father, Ray (Wyatt Russell), is a former pro baseball player who had to quit due to a degenerative illness; His depression casts a pall over his family (Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle and Gavin Warren), everything they do (there's a very funny scene where they wistfully watch happy suburban families as they drive by), and even the movie's color palette.

 As it turns out, the pool has healing properties, and Ray's illness goes into remission. Happy days. Except for the rest of the family, who start getting pool-related scares. Little Eliot gets the lion's share of the scares, with tossed coins leading  him into the deep end and an encounter with the ghost of the little girl in the gutter (a scene that would be a creepy highlight if they didn't ruin it with yet another fucking jump scare); Izzy gets a silly Marco/Polo horror scene which leads into a run-in with a ridiculous-looking (I think they were going for grotesque) blobby ghost who reminded me of Slimer. As for mom... mom just thinks she sees someone standing outside the pool and then it turns out there was no one there. You got off easy, mom.

 The pool possesses Ray and turns him mildly evil, causing him to almost drown a kid at a pool party. Meanwhile mom handles the standard haunting/occult investigation duties to discover that yep, the pool's got quite a body count, and her husband's healing demands a sacrifice in turn. No explanation about why the pool needs to scare the bejeezus out of everyone in the process - seems counterproductive. It's probably just a dick by nature and can't help itself.

 Everything about the movie seemed mishandled to me. The drama is corny and the characters pretty flat; The horror elements, meanwhile, are all gimmicky and miscalculated- old ladies with creepy smiles are scary, right? Let's add some black goo and make her extra scary!
 It's all cynical, and tacky - but not enough for the movie to actually be fun. Any attempts to build an atmosphere are ruined both by that and by massive pacing issues; It's a problem the movie seems to recognize... but its solution is to fix it with jump scares. Deeply shitty jump scares.

 At one point there's an establishing shot of a sign pointing to a pool party, festooned with balloons. As the shot ends, suddenly one of the balloons pops loudly. Horror! I like to think that came from a production note from Jason Blum: 'needs moar jump scares'

 It's not all bad. I liked the way reality is bent underwater a couple of times, and there's a scene with a coin I really enjoyed. And it's a good-looking film, aside from the ghouls. None of that brings the film even to the just OK status; Just more lazy, dumb, cynical Blumhouse filler.

 By the way, I hope you appreciate my restraint in avoiding any pool-related jokes; I even deleted a (not intended as a pun) instance of 'shallow'. Treading water, off the deep end, floaters, chlorine and so many other shitty puns and metaphors were floating right there on the surface, beckoning like the stupid motorboat in the prologue.