The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: adapted from the TV series created by Sam Rolfe by Guy Ritchie, Lionel Wigram, Jeff Kleeman, and David C. Wilson; directed by Guy Ritchie; starring Henry Cavill (Napoleon Solo), Armie Hammer (Illya Kuriakin), Alicia Vikander (Gaby), Hugh Grant (Waverly), and Jared Harris (Sanders) (2015): Enjoyable spy romp set in the early 1960's would probably have been better served had the producers gone with another title. Not many people remember the TV series from the 1960's. Heck, the movie itself doesn't bother explaining the title until the last five minutes.
Nonetheless, Guy Ritchie seems to have a lot of fun with period detail and European settings -- it's more like a James Bond movie from the 1960's than any Bond film has been since that time. Henry Cavill as American spy/super-thief Napoleon Solo plays suave/smarmy very well, and Armie Hammer is surprisingly good playing stolid, occasionally psychotic KGB strongman Illya Kuriakin. The plot involves a nuclear threat to both the Soviet Union and the United States, so the spies have to team up. Yes, it's a origin story for a TV series almost no one remembers. The eternal quest for a tent-pole series based on a property a studio already owns continues. I'm pretty sure tepid box office ensures this series won't continue, but it's far from being a disaster. Recommended.
Captain America: Civil War: based on characters and situations created by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Mark Millar, Stan Lee, and others; written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; directed by Anthony and Joe Russo (2016): Fast-moving, crowded film pits lots of Marvel super-heroes against lots of other Marvel super-heroes. The movie stays moderately zippy as it leaps from location to location. It also manages to bring Spider-man into the main Marvel Cinematic Universe in fairly rousing fashion.
Things go on about one super-hero battle too long, in part because the best part of the whole movie occurs during that second-to-last battle as the movie goes all-out comic book. Boy, though, the Vision's costume is terrible. If nothing else, the film suggests that Marvel's Damage Control comic, in which super-powered cleaners clean up the aftermaths of super-battles, should be turned into a movie franchise. Stat. Recommended.
The Lone Ranger: written by Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio; based on the character created by Fran Striker; directed by Gore Verbinski; starring Johnny Depp (Tonto), Armie Hammer (John Reid/Lone Ranger), William Fichtner (Butch Cavendish), Tom Wilkinson (Latham Cole), Ruth Wilson (Rebecca Reid), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Harrington) and James Badge Dale (Dan Reid) (2013): Based on an 80-year-old character originally created for radio, The Lone Ranger was last year's much-ridiculed mega-bomb. Like another recent mega-bomb, John Carter, it came from Walt Disney Studios.
The two movies share another affinity, insofar as neither movie is really terrible -- indeed, The Lone Ranger is fairly entertaining despite its ridiculously protracted length. As well, both movies have an overly long framing story that does nothing to improve the viewing experience. But when a movie has the backing of the people who brought Disney the hugely profitable Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and is a labour of love for Johnny Depp, certain things will remain in the picture.
Per: star power, Depp's Tonto is the comic-grotesque centre of the film, the Lone Ranger (gamely played by Armie Hammer in a role that's mostly thankless until the last half-hour) a gormless, even-more-comic sidekick. William Fichtner's outlaw Butch Cavendish is a monstrous cannibal, he and his band of outlaws seeming to have sprung out of a spaghetti Western by way of a Rob Zombie movie. It's like the movie is a crossover among several different movies. Or a teleporter accident.
Unevenness of tone also does some very odd things to the narrative. One minute the movie's making grade-school poop jokes, the next it's asking us to seriously contemplate the aftermath of a massacre of Native Americans. Then it actually shows us a lengthy massacre of another group of Native Americans. Mmm, genocide! A nice light snack!
Some of the action set-pieces are spectacular, though so far divorced from the laws of physics that they exist in their own cartoon world. It's not that more successful blockbusters aren't equally divorced -- it's that The Lone Ranger seems almost giddy at times with the prospect of highlighting its own artificiality. This may be a bad thing for the box office, but it gives the action scenes a charm lacking from the usual sturm-und-drang summer explosion-fest, especially the ones in which Silver the horse repeatedly demonstrates that it's a spirit horse by running around on roofs or on the tops of speeding trains.
Thematically, the movie also moves itself out of lock-step with contemporary mores by depicting the U.S. military as genocidal boobs. Which, of course, they were during the time in question. There's no supporting the troops here -- they're in bed with corrupt governmental officials, corrupt businessmen, and cannibal outlaws. It's very much a 1970's touch. All in all, an odd, frustrating, but occasionally rewarding movie best not watched in one sitting. Lightly recommended.
Mirror Mirror: written by Marc Klein, Jason Keller, and Melisa Wallack; directed by Tarsem Singh; starring Julia Roberts (The Queen), Lily Collins (Snow White), Armie Hammer (Prince Alcott), Nathan Lane (Brighton), and Sean Bean (The King) (2012): Mostly diverting action-comedy based on the Snow White story. Lily Collins (daughter of Phil) has some Abe Vigoda-esque eyebrows as Snow White, though.
The set design and costuming are pretty, and pretty impressive: Tarsem Singh loves making things look baroque. If the script were wittier, the whole thing might actually be a minor classic. It's certainly much lighter on its feet than the same year's other Snow White movie, the more epic Snow White and the Huntsman, and Collins is a much more charming presence than the other movie's Kristen Stewart. The movie's tone takes its cues from The Princess Bride, not Lord of the Rings.
Julia Roberts seems to be having fun being bad and doing a bad English accent. No one else even tries to do an accent. Unlike Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror uses actual dwarves and not CGI-squashed actors. Armie Hammer is actually pretty funny as the Prince, and Nathan Lane gets about all the laughs out of his lines that he can.
Singh's visual inventiveness is mostly kept under control, though there's a fascinating sequence involving giant, homicidal marionettes that really is quite magical and odd. It's like something from a Guillermo del Toro movie. Lightly recommended.
J. Edgar: written by Dustin Lance Black; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Leonardo Di Caprio (J. Edgar Hoover), Armie Hammer (Clyde Tolson), Judi Dench (Annie Hoover) and Naomi Watts (Helen Gandy) (2011): There's a good movie locked up inside this movie. That movie would be a period piece about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and its status as the first great event of the Celebrity Age. When J. Edgar focuses on that story, as told by J. Edgar Hoover, things are good, albeit historically inaccurate.
Unfortunately, we're also stuck with the increasingly exhausting frame tale, in which Hoover recounts the early history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to a succession of FBI agents over the course of a decade. Leonardo Di Caprio is fine as Hoover, but the longer we stay in the frame tale, the more we see how astonishingly lousy is the age make-up on Di Caprio and Armie Hammer (The Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, and Hoover's longtime companion Clyde Tolson here).
Seriously. This movie has the most jarringly bad age make-up I've seen in years. That the movie apparently takes place in an alternate universe in which men and women age at vastly different rates doesn't help things -- Naomi Watts gets a few wrinkles added over the course of 30 years while Hoover turns into the Grinch.
But it's Hammer's make-up that steals the show. Because the Hammer of the late 1960's doesn't really look human -- he looks like one of the alien lizard people from Alien Nation. It's ridiculous. The tedium of the frame tale (which really takes up half the movie and thus doesn't really constitute a frame) gets force-multiplied by the inaccuracies that even a cursory glance through Wikepedia (or a passing knowledge of American history) will reveal.
In the end, this is something of a disappointment, especially after the excellence of Eastwood's last period drama, The Changeling. As if to hide as much of the awful make-up as possible, Eastwood keeps the lights low for long stretches of the movie. It's a game try. Not recommended.
