Silverado (1985)

The Old West, mythical version. Four men (Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner) meet, like each other’s compatible principles, ride together and eventually arrive with plans for various futures in the town of Silverado.

Alas, Silverado’s a place where dreams have gone sour, the sheriff's a former outlaw (Brian Dennehy) who is now the boot on the feet of the rich, and friendships and principles are put to the test.

I can’t say I really disagree with anyone calling Lawrence Kasdan’s not really revisionist western epic Silverado a bit – or a lot - self-indulgent. It does feel as if Kasdan wanted to cram all of the genre – apart from the “Evil Indian” tropes – into a single movie, having written it a maximalist love letter he’d then turn into a film.

However, I think there’s a joyfulness to the indulgence here, a genuine and very direct love for the genre, its look and feel and sound that’s utterly charming and that needs the scope of the kind of movie that’s close to the fifty minute mark when it actually arrives in the titular town. There’s space for characters and their relationships to breathe here, and while one could argue Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks could create comparable depth of relations in much less time, I certainly wouldn’t have complained spending more time with any Boetticher or Hawks character, the virtue of concision be damned.

Kasdan’s approach definitely leads to a film that can feel like a world more than it does like a narrative, but it’s a world full of fantastic actors being fantastic, a series of fun western set pieces, and quite a few moments where Kasdan adds a telling detail or two to a character – even the villains - to turn them from stock to person.

There are also joyful little twists to the formulas of the genre – a black man (Glover is fantastic and feels so very young) as an actual lead among four and not a sidekick or Linda Hunt straight-up doing the Angie Dickinson part. It does help that the cast is absolutely brilliant, Lynn Whitfield, Jeff Goldblum (as a totally, absolutely, completely trustworthy gambler named “Slick”), Jeff Fahey and on and on, and everyone here has something that suggests a past and a future instead of just a narrative function.

The only bit where things do get a bit indulgent for my tastes is in the double climax – there’s really no need for two big shoot-outs directly after each other, though both of them are great. Which might be the reason why both of them are in the movie.

Mr. Brooks (2007)

Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a beloved family man, a respected businessman, and also a feared serial killer. He’s not been killing anyone for two years now, thanks to the wonders of the twelve step program (I wonder how that making amends part worked in his case). However, his second personality, one Marshall (William Hurt), representing director Bruce A. Evans’s fear of letting Kevin Costner simply act a man with two very different sides to his personality, does talk him into beginning another murder spree. Alas, some idiot, let’s call him Mr Smith (Dane Cook), has photographed Earl doing the deed through a window and is now blackmailing the serial killer into killing a random person with him, for Mr Smith desperately wants to know how that feels. And that would probably be the plot for an at least half sane movie, but since this thing’s about as deranged as its protagonist, there are various sub- and side plots awaiting your pleasure, apart from the Dexter-style dubious joy of seeing how Earl’s going to get away with it all.

So, we also spend quite a bit of time with the Detective hunting Earl, one Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore); we spend even more time with the divorce troubles her greedy husband – she’s not just a cop, she’s also a rich heiress, you see – gets her into. And then there’s the killer couple who is trying to take vengeance on her. And her breaking all the rules. Earl is going to involve himself in all of this business, because why the hell not?

Because that’s clearly still not enough PLOT for a single movie, meet Earl’s daughter Jane (Danielle Panabaker). Jane has left college for reasons she isn’t willing to explain, and now wants to work for Daddy. Turns out she is pregnant (and we learn that serial killer Earl is against abortion). Then it turns out she has probably murdered someone at school with a hatchet, and Earl has to worry that she has inherited some of his little mental problems, and try to fix her little problem without her noticing.

Also also, Earl might want to commit suicide in the most complicated manner ever devised, or perhaps not. Who knows?

I believe these are more or less all of the sub and side plots Mr. Brooks throws at its audience. If all of this sounds like total nonsense to you, you’ve got the film right. Obviously, it’s trying to milk the automatic respect a lot of people have for actors like Costner playing a bad guy for all it is worth, but it is permanently undercutting this by having so much plot business to take care of, Costner has little time to do any actual character work. That’s certainly not helped by the idiotic decision to give him another half portrayed by a different actor, which turns what should be an internal struggle into lots of expository dialogue, or scenes of the film gloating at how people not Costner can’t see William Hurt!


The funniest thing about the whole affair is that director/co-writer Evans presents all this bullshit with the grand gesture of somebody making a deep and thoughtful film about a terrible human being, wilfully pretending that this is not a cartoon, and that we learn a lot about the human condition here. Of course, if you watch the film as the cartoon about a bedraggled serial killer haunted by the horrors of plotting it actually is, it becomes rather brilliant, with stupid twists and idiotic new sub-plots coming so fast and furious, it’s impossible for me to watch this (or just think about it), and not fall into rather regular fits of the giggles. The film’s educational, too, in so far as we learn that there’s no genre that can’t be made hilarious by the simple application of all the plots ever.

In short: Molly’s Game (2017)

Failed freestyle ski Olympic skier Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) finds her true profession when she first helps a vile Hollywood producer run a high-stakes poker game just this side of being illegal gambling, and then turns it into her own. Apparently, the FBI has some problems with this sort of thing, particular when organized crime sits at the table.

The directorial debut of – much beloved though not necessarily by me – screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is an interesting example of the dangers of basing your film not just on “a true story” but on an actual memoir about said “true story”. So if that memoir/”true story” has an incredibly obnoxious Frank Capra ending, your film is going to get one too, even if it tonally doesn’t fit what came before at all. Though, to be fair, I can’t imagine many films this particular ending would fit with.

Other problems are that Jessica Chastain’s Molly Bloom is just a bit too perfect, too nice for what she’s actually doing and a bit too likeable for the film ever to sell her tale as anything but a cinematic fairy-tale about a woman who is done wrong despite her being super-awesome. Even when she steals the producer’s game she’s in the right, the way the film tells it. I could have gone without the Freudian bullshit between her and her psychoanalyst Dad (Kevin Costner!), and the film’s dubious general ideas about psychology too.

There’s quite a bit to like here, though. More often than not, Sorkin does a pretty decent visual Scorsese – circa Goodfellas – imitation. The film’s certainly not boring to look at, and keeps moving along at a merry pace, despite a two hour plus running time.

The dialogue is fun and clever - if, in typical Sorkin style, bereft of any concept of different people having different patterns of speech - while the cast doesn’t just include the always excellent Chastain (who by the way off-screen-monologues with the best of ‘em) and Costner in a good mood, but also Idris Elba (getting some quality expressive shouting time in), Michael Cera (finding his inner creep), and a horde of other good people doing good work.


All this adds up to a film that’s neither as good in the mildly horrifying “quality cinema” kind of way it is clearly aiming for, nor actually saying terribly much about the state of America as it seems to think it does, but that is certainly worth spending an evening with, even if it is only to enjoy the actors strutting their stuff and looking at the pretty pictures.

Criminal (2016)

Coming from the minds responsible (I choose that word carefully) for the script to The Rock and directed by one Ariel Vromen, this bizarre mess of a would-be Taken movie “with a twist” sees low functioning sociopath with brain damage Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner) abducted by the CIA and imprinted – in a highly illegal human experiment but don’t tell that to the film – by kindly scientist Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones) via what I can only assume to be brain laser printing with parts of the brain of heroic, totally morally upright yet alas rather dead CIA agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds). CIA bigwig Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) needs Pope’s brain, because he is the only one who knows how and where to contact a hacker generally known as The Dutchman (Michael Pitt) who has managed to install “a wormhole” in the US rocket system. Since crazy Spanish anarchist Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Mollà) as well as “The Russians” are after The Dutchman too, the matter is somewhat pressing.

So pressing indeed that Wells is throwing a patented Gary Oldman hissy fit when Jericho can’t deliver the information he wants about thirty seconds after he comes to from anaesthesia; a minute and some hilarious business about pain killers later, Wells already has Jericho carted off to be murdered somewhere else while Franks looks on with the same mildly embarrassed facial expression Tommy Lee Wallace most probably held on his face ever since he read the script. Of course, Jericho escapes, and of course he starts to hover around Pope’s family, beginning to develop curious stuff he never had before like “feelings”, and involves himself in the hunt for the Dutchman thanks to his newly developed conscience courtesy of a CIA agent. And nope, I don’t think the film actually sees the irony in that.

Obviously, Criminal is a wild concoction of stupid nonsense full of people with hilarious names (there’s also Scott Adkins wasted in a minor non-fighting role as one “Pete Greensleeves”) - at times hilarious, at times more than just a little annoying, stupid throughout. The older actors understandably go for all sorts of scenery-chewing, Costner perhaps hoping for an Oscar as some sort of ultra-violent Rain Man, Wallace looking as if he would really rather like to be elsewhere, and Oldman and Mollà just going all out crazy. It is, after all, pretty difficult to be subtle when your character is called Quaker Wells, and the narrative takes place in a world where everyone is really good at murdering people yet also monumentally stupid. Things are made even more hilarious by the script’s very earnest attempts at that human emotion stuff Jericho as well as his writers don’t get, with many a scene that thinks it does some “Flowers for Algernon” kind of clever tear-jerking when all it actually does is spit out clichés without ever earning any emotional involvement from the audience. It’s pretty funny, really, and made even more so by the writers’ obvious difficulty to understand the differences between various kinds of brain damage, sociopathy and the autistic spectrum. If only Pete Greensleeves had been there to explain.

While this is all really funny in a way that must make Luc Besson quite grumpy he didn’t have the idea, the film really lets its audience down with the action scenes. Vromen’s staging here is barely coherent, not terribly competent and lacking in all sorts of impact, making the action look not like the too-stylized nonsense someone like Olivier Megaton had delivered, nor like something a competent director had down, but rather like random jittery shots strung vaguely together after what someone in the editing room must have heard action scenes are supposed to look like years ago.

But hey, we’ll always have Quaker Wells.

In short: Open Range (2003)

There’s always a risk with a film as deeply informed by the traditions of the genre it is working in as Kevin Costner’s Open Range is it will become a mere nostalgia fest. And indeed, the film is full of dozens of little nods to classic (and not so classic) Westerns but these nods aren’t there as the film’s only reason for being, but rather as a way to position the film in the history of its genre.

There is, too, actual nostalgia in the film, yet it’s one broken by a script honest enough to know that the real places and times we are nostalgic for never were what our dreams – and particularly the shared dreams of cinema – pretend they were. So, for every moment of sheer beauty, of the wry smile about a simpler past, there’s knowledge about violence and its cost – and how big in a place and time where violence was omnipresent that cost is – as well as the understanding that the simpler past always was as complicated as the present, if probably complicated in different ways.

Another huge achievement of the film is its ability to tell a story that is actually very small scale and personal, meaning the world to just the people of one little town and four herders riding through it, in a grand and sweeping tone without losing its human core. The way Open Range treats them, historically small lives mean the world.

From time to time, Costner with his director’s hat on may go for a bit too much Hollywood pathos here, yet the film also finds more than enough room for treating middle-age love story between Costner’s Charley and Annette Bening’s Sue Barlow with a more truthful kind of tenderness, and contains many a moment that prefers honesty to pathos.

While handling all this rather beautifully for the most part, Open Range also likes to reverse, perhaps even subvert, all kinds of little genre expectations; this is the kind of film where the big climactic showdown takes place after the big storm, and where the part of the central shoot-out that had an emphatic build-up is finished the fastest. Speaking of the climactic showdown, it’s long, and complex, and interesting, again slightly subverting genre expectations, and putting the emphasis on the chaos of large scale violence, particularly in a time and place where everyone and his mother owned a gun, which still made most of them amateurs and chaotic actors in a situation that could only be ordered and controlled to a small degree anyhow.

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3 Days to Kill (2014)

Retired by the CIA – with cheap watch and pension and little else -because of his terminal cancer, killer Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) goes to Paris to attempt to reconnect with his wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and his teenage daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld) before he dies; a purple bicycle will be involved.

As luck will have it, oversexed CIA gal Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) decides that Ethan might have seen the mysterious evil international arms dealer only known as The Wolf (Richard Sammel) in his final mission, and now wants Ethan to find and eliminate said The Wolf (his main henchman is a guy called The Albino who doesn’t actually seem to be an Albino, by the way, and rather looks more as if he were called The Hairless Guy). Ethan’s prize would be an experimental drug that just might cure his cancer if it doesn’t kill him. Consequently, Ethan is back killing and torturing people again, while at the same time trying to juggle fatherly responsibilities and an attempt to get back in his wife’s good graces.

As frequent readers know, I have a conflicted relationship with the films made by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp. As much as I like their project of making European-based mid-budget genre movies with as many international actors in a career low as they can hire, as little do I enjoy many of Besson’s scripting tendencies, particularly the often needless stupidity, and the unhappy feeling Besson is proud of the general dumbness of what he writes.

It doesn’t help that some of EuropaCorp’s directors are guys like Olivier Megaton, who never saw an action sequence he wanted to film in a comprehensible way, and never encountered an annoying editing tic he didn’t want to repeat again and again. As luck will have it, somebody involved in EuropaCorp seems to have realized that there are quite a few Hollywood directors in a career low too, so they can actually hire someone who knows how to direct a movie instead of Megaton. In a curious turn of events, that special someone in this friendlier variation on Taken is McG, not a director I usually connect with things like “competence” or movies I actually want to see.

McG does good work here, though, connecting the script’s curious mixture of broad comedy (there are torture jokes), kitschy family drama, the slightly more down to Earth version of EuropaCorp action that leaves Besson’s oldest enemy – gravity – untouched, and Besson’s infatuation with bizarre and puzzling ideas (not that I blame him for that), in a way that results in a highly entertaining film, if one with a script that only tenuously, and for the most part without seeming to try very hard, connects its disparate part. The script even needs to use pure chance to throw together the film’s grand finale.

Fortunately, when taken separately, the film’s single parts are done with professionalism and often charm, and while they only make a successful whole if you’re willing to suspend quite a few more things than mere disbelief, 3 Days to Kill works hard to convince a viewer to like it enough to suspend whatever the film asks her to. I, at least, found myself disarmed early on (perhaps only by the shock of actually getting to see what happens in the action sequences instead of guessing at it), laughing about my share of the film’s jokes, raising my eyebrow happily at the film’s more outré or just unexplained ideas, raising my other eyebrow less happily about stuff like the squatters from Mali who have moved into Ethan’s apartment and teach him a valuable lesson by virtue of their “authenticity”, and not feeling too offended by the family drama stuff. The last is made a bit easier by the happy fact that Ethan’s teenage daughter is actually played by a teenager, isn’t annoying, doesn’t get kidnapped, and is even allowed to have sex without getting punished for it (spoiler), which makes the whole “bringing the family back together” thing less unpleasantly reactionary as it could be, particularly since Ethan’s fathering style – while still pretty violent – doesn’t seem as outright insane as is par for the course in these films.

It also helps the film that the cast is pretty fun to watch too. Costner (of whom I’ve never been much of a fan) seems to have slightly puzzled fun with the film’s weirder aspects and is generally really funny when he’s supposed to, teary when he’s supposed to, and off-handedly violent when it’s time for that, while Steinfeld and Nielsen have the family drama down pat, and Heard works her modern low budget movie queen magic with just the right degree of self-irony and some interesting costuming decisions.

So, as the man (right, me) said more than once about other films already goes here too: what’s not to like?

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The New Daughter (2009)

After an unpleasant divorce, writer John James (Kevin Costner) moves with his teenage daughter Louisa (Ivana Baquero) and younger son Sam (Gattlin Griffith) to Mercy, South Dakota, or rather, a lonely house in the woods near Mercy, South Dakota.

Not surprisingly, the children aren't exactly happy about the move. Sam's a bit too young to actually understand what's going on, and seems mostly afraid and confused, while Louisa - in the throes of puberty and now half a country away from all her friends - blames herself, her father and her mother in turn.

The family's situation doesn't improve when Louisa discovers the burial mound in the woods behind the house. The male members of the family seem somewhat repelled by the place, but for Louisa, it fastly becomes a retreat from everything that ails her. However, contact with the place begins to change her: she starts sleepwalking, gets a curious rash on her neck and upper back, and all of a sudden acts much rougher than the rather timid girl she was before. She's not just getting more assertive against bullies than is generally considered correct, but also begins to experiment with (slightly) shorter skirts and make-up. And that really is just the beginning.

At first, John thinks Louisa's changed behaviour is another consequence of the divorce and the move, but the longer things go on, and the more like a stranger his daughter becomes, the more his conviction grows that there's some outside force changing Louisa. Being a writer and therefore knowledgeable in the ways of the search engine, he begins to research and stumbles upon the sad story of the former owners of his home that includes a changed teenage girl, a run-away mother and a death. Below that, though, lies something more ancient.

In theory, Luiso Berdejo's (whom you may know as the co-writer of the [Rec] movies) The New Daughter should be a film right up my alley: an Americanization of a short story by John Connolly from the author's excellent collection Nocturnes with clear nods in the direction of Arthur Machen, shot atmospherically and with obvious love for detail, well-acted (even Kevin Costner is perfectly alright when he for once doesn't salute flags or explain the sanctity of baseball or said flags), and all-around solidly made.

Alas, in practice, the film turns out to be rather limp and ineffectual. It is one of those films that clearly prides itself on following modern Hollywood's beloved three act structure as closely as if scriptwriter John Travis had written the handbook on it, leaving us with a film that might as well have ended after thirty minutes, for everything that's going to happen after the set-up is going to happen exactly by the book. It's the sort of film where you can be sure that a gun that was buried early on in the proceedings will be dug out again and used later on, for what is good writing if not following rules Anton Chekhov set up once that never were meant to be strict rules every writer has to follow in the future? As it turns out, slavishly following the rules and regulations of the craft isn't good writing, but riskless writing.

As if that weren't bland enough, the film also spends too much of its running time spelling out its metaphors and themes (adolescent female sexuality is so frightening for dads, don't you know? also, it's icky) so clearly that even the idea of ambiguity or (oh noes!) openness to diverging interpretations of what's going on seems preposterous. The audience, after all, should never have to think for itself. We are dumb and need to be told.

Having said that, I also have to make it clear that The New Daughter isn't a bad movie at all, it's just a movie so aggressively lacking in life and actual imagination that it made me wish for an actual bad movie. Those films do at least know how to surprise.

 

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