Three Films Make A Post: Nobody Runs Forever

Wrath of Man (2021): What do you do if you somehow end up with a plot and characters that’ll at most give you an hour of movie, even though you really need to make one that at least scratches at the two hour door? Guy Ritchie apparently decided to go for a structure full of time jumps and perspective changes, like a cut rate Tarantino without brains or taste. Not that surprisingly, instead of solving the problem of too little plot and flat characters, this exacerbates it by rubbing (really, pressing) the audience’s noses in it, going out of its way to not just show but repeat over and over that there’s nothing at all going on here you haven’t seen before or these actors haven’t done before – often in much better movies that actually had something you’d call pacing, or a script. The film also suffers from some of the worst tough guy dialogue I’ve encountered in a long time (perhaps because Ritchie’s struggling with the LA surroundings?). Particularly the first act is chock full of some of the most idiotic macho dialogue you’ll ever have the misfortune to hear.

Séance (2021): Keeping with films that seem to wildly overestimate their intelligence, how about this pseudo neo giallo by Simon Barrett (co-writer of most of the films of Adam Green). It’s one of those films that seem inexplicably smug about their own intelligence while never actually bothering to put the work into showing said intelligence, pretending stuff that’s obvious from the beginning is a last act surprise, and apparently believing that even the tiniest change in a cliché is something to be praised by an adoring audience.

Worse for a film that so obviously wants to be a giallo is the mediocre sense of style. It’s a professionally made film, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re looking for style as substance (or even just style interesting enough to be worth mentioning), or an ability to create moods via visual storytelling, you’re out of luck. But hey, at least Barrett manages to show us all of Suki Waterhouse’s facial expressions quite extensively – or rather her one facial expression.

The Mule (2018): Leave it to this piece of what at first looks like oldmansploitation with and by the one and only Clint Eastwood to save my mood. It’s a leisurely paced peace of work, pretty episodically structured, yet it is that way because it wants to do a bit more than give Clint a final outing, in the process waving in the direction not only of his serious classics but also of the film star phase of his career when he was perfectly willing to share the stage with an ape. So there’s the expected amount of tear-jerking old age business (the film works for ever single one of your tears, though) about a guy who only learns what’s most important in life when he’s at the end of it, but also a lot of old man swagger, curious humour that charms the way Eastwood’s character is supposed to charm, encounters with the modern world that leave our protagonist bemused, amused and a bit wiser, a tiny bit of action, and a tendency to treat every single character as a complicated human being, be they cops, Mexican cartel soldiers or migrant workers.