REVIEW: Rush (2013)

By Chris Luckett

4½ stars out of 5

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Sports movies have a tricky line to walk. They have to satisfy fans of the sports who will scrutinize them for any errors, while remaining easy enough to understand for casual moviegoers who aren’t invested in the sports. As movies like The Pride of the Yankees, Raging Bull, and Rudy have proven, the trick is to make the movie more about the characters than the game itself. Rush knows this very well.

Athletes of single-player sports always give their best performances in the midst of a rivalry. (Think of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, or even Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire.) Formula One racers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) had one of the best.

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Hunt is a cocksure playboy who drives by the seat of his pants and survives through instinct and adrenaline. Lauda, on the other hand, is meticulous, ill-tempered, and spends every minute not racing preparing for his next race. As they compete for the F1 World Driver Championship, Hunt and Lauda become locked in a bitter battle that is both tragic and inspirational.

Hemsworth does a wonderful job hinting at the sadness and loneliness lurking just below Hunt’s surface and giving us glimpses of why he lives for the danger of dying. (One of the best lines of the movie is his: “Don’t go to men who are willing to kill themselves driving in circles, looking for normality.”)

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The real star of Rush, though, is Daniel Brühl, who steals every minute of the movie he’s in. His fascinating portrayal of the impossibly difficult but irritatingly superior Lauda is revelatory and on the same level as Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network or Hugh Laurie in House. Brühl may as well start looking for a tux for Oscar night, because his performance is all but guaranteed a nomination.

Rush’s racing scenes are thrilling in a way too few movies have been this year, with director Ron Howard using his masterful skill to keep you pinned in your seat. Combined with the outstanding acting and Peter Morgan’s smart screenplay, it’s a nearly perfect package. Best of all, it works just as well if you’re a racing expert or if you don’t know your NASCAR from your F1. Rush is the rare sports movie that everyone can appreciate.

REVIEW: Don Jon

By Chris Luckett

3½ stars out of 5

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Generally, first-time writer-directors who began as actors fall into two categories: ones that seem accomplished from the get-go and ones that truly feel like first-time writer-directors. Ben Affleck, Zach Braff, and Robert Redford all managed to dazzle with their very first efforts, for example. Unfortunately, Don Jon is no Gone Baby Gone, Garden State, or Ordinary People.

The star of the movie, both in front of and behind the camera, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the former child star who’s now one of the hottest stars in Hollywood. After giving truly rich performances in movies like Brick, 500 Days of Summer, Inception, and 50/50, it’s unfortunate that his character in Don Jon just feels like a Jersey Shore parody – especially considering Gordon-Levitt was also Jon’s creator.

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Jon is a caricature of an actual person, as are all of the movie’s two-dimensional characters. Everyone here exists merely to examine a different modern addiction. Jon’s girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson) is addicted to unrealistic romantic-comedies, for example. His father (Tony Danza) is addicted to watching sports. His sister (an criminally unused Brie Larson) is addicted to texting.

Jon himself is addicted to Internet porn. Physical relations with women don’t satisfy him as purely as staring at virtual women does, where he has no expectations to meet and no one to think about except himself. It’s meant to be a provocative examination of modern males and an addiction previous generations never had to deal with. Instead, messages are bluntly beaten into the audience and the comedic levity never quite gels with the sad characters.

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Don Jon is a good movie, but too often the plot, characters, editing, and dialogue just take the easy road. It’s reminiscent of George Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which wasn’t bad but was really just a warm-up for Good Night, and Good Luck and The Ides of March. More than anything, Don Jon is a simply good movie that really just gets you excited about what Joseph Gordon-Levitt will direct next.

REVIEW: Prisoners

By Chris Luckett

4 stars out of 5

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There is a great movie hidden in Prisoners. Unfortunately, it’s smothered by an overabundance of red herrings and a running time nearly 45 minutes too long.

The cast boasts four Oscar nominees, one Oscar winner, one Golden Globe nominee, and an actor who co-starred in two Best Picture nominees. The movie certainly can’t be accused of lousy casting. With the pedigree onscreen in Prisoners, hardly a scene fails to grip. Sadly, the movie also makes a great example of “too much of a good thing.”

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Maria Bello and Hugh Jackman play Grace and Keller, the parents of a Pennsylvanian family who are spending this particular Thanksgiving evening with their friends (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and children. The evening takes a sudden and dark turn when the youngest daughters of both families go missing while walking outside.

Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal, in one of his most layered performances) takes on the case to locate the missing daughters and spends the first third of the movie investigating a creepy man in an RV (Paul Dano) who had been lurking in the neighbourhood around the time of the abduction.

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The movie really starts moving when Keller, irate at the lack of progress in locating his daughter, takes a pivotal action in vigilante justice that dims Prisoners even darker. (If neither Jackman nor Gyllenhaal receive an Oscar nomination, it’ll be very surprising.) The movie gets continuously darker as it marches to its final frames, at which point the bleakness completely swallows the movie up, leaving just the closing credits.

Ultimately, what starts as a tense ride to the climax slows to a crawl as Prisoners takes countless dead-end turns following red herrings and keeps continuing past the natural end points of the movie. It’s a real shame, because with a few thorough edits, Prisoners could have been one of the best movies of the year.

REVIEW: Nothing Left to Fear

By Chris Luckett

2½ stars out of 5

The 1973 film The Wicker Man was quite a revolutionary horror movie in its day, up until its reputation was largely sullied by the 2005 remake starring Nicolas Cage. It’s a shame, because the original had a powerful and shocking ending that knocked people sideways. The remake, meanwhile, messed up the end so badly that the film become a lightning rod of mockery and animated gifs.

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The oddest thing about the new horror film Nothing Left to Fear is that it has essentially the same plot as The Wicker Man. Quality-wise, it lies somewhere between the original and the remake.

Rebekah Brandes plays Rebecca, the elder daughter of a pastor father. Father Dan (James Tupper) has been hired as the new pastor for the small, isolated town of Stull, Kansas and brings his wife (Anne Heche) and three children (Brandes, Jennifer Stone, and Carter Cabassa) with him. While Stull seems idyllic, though, suspicious things slowly begin happening to the family and the townspeople seem to be hiding something from them.

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Most of the movie is nothing special. The story is stale, the ending’s predictable, the directing’s adequate, and most of the acting is wooden. The large exception is Brandes, who makes her two-dimensional character seem real and gives a riveting performance that holds even the slowest scenes. Clancy Brown, a character actor with credits in everything from Lost to The Shawshank Redemption, is also quite good as the previous pastor of Stull.

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Borrowing its central plot from The Wicker Man isn’t enough for Nothing Left to Fear, either. Various parts of the movie also recall scenes and plotlines from The Grudge, Scream, The Ring, Phantoms, The Strangers, The Village, Halloween, and Silent Hill. Even the scenes that aren’t largely stolen seem vaguely familiar.

Brandes’s performance goes a long way to making the movie work, as does the effective camerawork, but Nothing Left to Fear is not a great movie. Considering its reheated plot and budgetary restraints, though, it’s a better movie than it really has any right to be.

REVIEW: Insidious, Chapter 2

By Chris Luckett

4 stars out of 5

Horror sequels are rarely ever very good. Great horror movies are pretty rare to begin with, and when you consider how inferior sequels generally are to their originals, it’s remarkable when any horror sequel isn’t simply terrible. Insidious, Chapter 2 is one of the best of the last decade or so.

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The first Insidious was the best horror movie of 2011. It was essentially just a haunted-house movie, but it was so good at earning legitimate scares, it rose high above its standard plot and borrowed ideas. The original movie ended with a cliffhanger that could have easily remained an open ending to a single story, but it is now continued in Insidious, Chapter 2.

The story, involving married couple Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) and the hauntings that surround their family, picks up right where the original left off. Josh, having ventured into “The Further,” has rescued his lost son. Unfortunately, Josh wasn’t able to return to his body before something else did.

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The sequel’s plot splits in two early on. One half of the movie involves Renai and her slow realization that the changes in her husband since his return may signify something horrific. The other half involves Josh’s mother (Barbara Hershey) and three paranormal investigators (Steve Coulter, Leigh Whannell, and Angus Sampson) looking into psychic Elise’s death at the end of Insidious.

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The threads find their way together again by the end but along the way, the screenplay (by Whannell himself) takes a number of incredibly unpredictable and remarkably clever turns. Without revealing too much, it should be said that the more recently you’ve seen Insidious, the more you’ll appreciate parts of the sequel. In the same way that Back to the Future, Part II revisits scenes of the original from a different perspective, Insidious, Chapter 2 changes much of what you thought you knew.

The sequel’s ending strongly hints that a third entry in the series will be on its way. With how often this movie returns to the original’s bag of tricks, they’d better wait until they have a great idea for a third one. Until then, perhaps it would be best to simply be grateful that Insidious, Chapter 2 managed to be pretty good.