Three Films Make a Post: Turning eighteen is going to be hell.

Book of Monsters (2018): Calling a horror comedy inoffensive is not exactly the highest praise, but then, Stewart Sparke’s female-centric film is one of those horror comedies that seems terribly nice and friendly even though quite a few people get ripped to shreds in it. It’s just that the characters we are supposed to like all make it, so there’s a certain lack of tension running through the whole affair. The jokes are all over the place, some are exactly the ones you’ll expect going in, some are not quite as obvious. Generally, this is a likeable film though, using its clearly not terribly high budget as well as possible to provide its audience with a good time, and while I never got terribly excited watching this, I did enjoy myself with it more than I didn’t.

Bumblebee (2018): Given that it is comedic, YA-ish, likeable and female-centric, Travis Knight’s entry into the Michael-Bay-haunted Transformers franchise feels a bit like the big sister of Book of Monsters. Just that big sis has all the money in the world to make things as slick and streamlined as possible, where its low budget sibling has to fight for every scene to come together on a simple technical level.

While it isn’t exactly deep, unlike the other Transformers films, this one actually understands little things like character arcs, human feelings, and even has thoughts about what growing up means for a young woman still mourning the loss of her father. Knight is able to put all this into a slick and mainstream compatible movie featuring a very charming Hailee Steinfeld that also includes fun robot fights, explosions and some really rather cool chase sequences. Basically, this is the first Transformers movie that actually seems to be made by people with a degree of respect for their audience and their characters, who also happen to be really good craftsmen. It’s not a deep exploration of grief and loss, obviously, but it is a really entertaining film that’s not utterly brain dead in a franchise known for the exact opposite. Also, the robots have different colours.

Cold Skin (2017): Xavier Gens’s adaptation of Albert Sánchez Piñol’s novel must be an excellent one, seeing as it left me with pretty much the same feelings as the book did, the impression of having watched/read a very competently and eloquently realized story that never quite gets around to saying as much of interest about the human condition, colonialism or just the human heart as it seems to set out to. Curiously enough, for something taking place in 1914, the film (as the book) seems to be held back by too great a love for the narrative and philosophical habits of 19th (instead of 20th) century fiction, never really reaching the point where it should take a good long look at its own assumptions about how to speak about the things it is clearly most interested in.


As a horror adventure story, it is rather convincing, though, even though its fish people design is disappointingly derivative and conservative. It mostly disappoints because it seems so desperate to be something more.

Term Life (2016)

Nick Barrow (Vince Vaughan) works as a planner for all sorts of heists, though he doesn’t involve himself in crimes where people get killed or actually hurt. His last plan for stealing quite a bit of money being held as evidence doesn’t work out terribly well, though. Someone murders the group that were his clients, which makes the father of their leader rather unhappy. Unfortunately, Viktor (Jordi Mollà), as the man is called, is a big Mexican cartel boss, so he’s bound to seek someone – like a certain planner he just might suspect to have sold his plan to two groups at the same time – to blame for the death of his son and do nasty things to him.

The first little talk between Viktor and Nick ends with the cartel boss leaving Nick in the hands of his goons to go and fetch Nick’s estranged teenage daughter Cate (Hailee Steinfeld) as a tool of persuasion. Fortunately, Nick escapes and grabs a rather unwilling Cate before Viktor can get his hands on her and goes on the lam with her. It’s really a rather awkward way for a father and a daughter to reconnect, particularly since Nick’s actual plan right now isn’t to find a way to get Viktor off his back so much than it is to keep Cate and himself alive until a freshly signed life insurance policy comes into effect and Nick can die with a good conscience.

Exacerbating the problem of survival is the fact that the people who actually killed Viktor’s son and his gang, a group of corrupt policemen lead by Joe Keenan (Bill Paxton), are on Nick’s and Cate’s trail too; and let’s not even speak of the father-daughter trouble ahead.

Peter Billingsley’s crime thriller and father-daughter (sort of) road movie Term Life certainly is not an original film: it’s full of well-worn character types going through well-worn plot points until things finish on a bit too much of a happy end. It is, however, also a well-directed film chock full of fine actors breathing life into their stock characters. There are not just Vince Vaughn and professional teenager (who is actually really good at playing this sort of role while feeling real and not becoming annoying) Hailee Steinfeld. This is the sort of film that can cast Annabeth Gish for what amounts to a single shot of a telephone conversation with Steinfeld, just happens to include guys like Shea Whigham or Mike Epps among Bill Paxton’s gang, and adds Jonathan Banks and Terrence Howard for supporting roles. Basically, it’s a bit of a dream cast for this sort of thing, and elevates what could be a film going through the motions into something at least much more lively.

When there’s action, Billingsley does stage it well, if not spectacularly; I couldn’t shake the feeling spectacle wasn’t really in the budget.

Billingsley does have a nice, straightforward directing style that works well when it comes to supporting actors doing their thing, and isn’t interesting in wowing the audience with style. Rather, it’s the kind of direction that puts itself in the service of characters and plot and prepares room for them to breathe. Which is just the right sort of approach for this sort of film, if you ask me.


The script might not be original but it features quite a few good scenes and no bad ones (which makes it a good film in a Howard Hawks sense as well as in my book) with particularly the father-daughter conflict feeling believable enough to make me root for the two to patch things up and survive. In general, most scenes here have a moment, a line or a dialogue exchange that feel more real, more interesting, or just more alive than usual in this particular sub-genre. It’s not enough to start mumbling about this being a future classic but most certainly enough to turn Term Life into a satisfying genre film that puts more effort in than it strictly needs to.

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?

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,reviews,mcg,kevin costner,amber heard,hailee steinfeld,connie nielsen,action,comedy,drama